By then the enchantments were ready, the weapons were made, and everyone was set to go. This time we suited up Lonnie in the diamond armor, while the rest of us stayed in iron with the enchantments Esme had put on them: Fire and Projectile Protection.
It was time to find the stronghold that would lead us to the End.
Anton walked out ahead and took out an eye of ender, throwing it up into the air, and letting it lead us out of the house. We walked under the spatter of purple that dripped from the eye, and followed it out into the open. We moved beyond the trees with Anton continuing to send up eyes in the air, hoping we would find the stronghold quickly. We moved toward the water, and then back inland again, up and over the same small hill I’d navigated earlier, through mobs of mooshrooms, pigs, and chickens. Anton kept throwing and we kept following, but the eye never went into the ground, no matter where we followed it.
“Maybe there isn’t one near here,” Esme suggested.
“It has to be somewhere,” Anton said. “We’ve barely started to look.” He threw an eye up again, and it came down, breaking apart. I was getting frustrated.
“We’re pretty far from the house,” I said. “Maybe we should build a mini shelter just in case we don’t find it before nightfall.”
“That’s actually a good idea,” Esme said, sounding genuinely impressed.
“Hold on, hold on,” Anton said. “I just know it’s here somewhere. I know it.”
Esme and I waited as Anton threw up a fresh eye of ender, and it came down and went straight into the grass just ahead of us. Anton turned back and grinned at us.
“All right,” Esme said. “Start digging.”
We dug at an angle around where the eye was, so that we weren’t going straight down. This was my idea. I’d fallen into holes like that before, and I didn’t want to risk it. We moved in something of a spiral, finding a cave a couple of levels down, but no stronghold. Anton threw the eye again, and it went farther down into the stone and dirt. We followed again and broke through onto a set of stone steps.
“You did it,” I said to Anton.
He held his hand up for high-fives, which both Esme and I gave. Then I held up Lonnie’s hand and slapped him a high-five too.
“All right, all right, can we get through this stronghold now?” Esme said.
Anton snickered. “Come on, Esme. Sometimes being nice isn’t the worst thing in the world.”
“Don’t get used to it,” Esme warned, suppressing her smile.
“Noted,” said Anton. Then he bowed a little and gestured forward with his hand. “Shall we?”
“Let’s,” I said, slapping his hand as I walked past.
Esme flipped out the compass. “I’ll lead,” she said. “You two can hang back and high-five until the mooshrooms come home if you want.”
The stronghold was a maze of stone stairs leading to various open rooms. In a couple of them we found chests with loot that we took into our inventories, each of us taking a turn so we could evenly share what we found. There were a couple of swords, apples, bread, and even meat. At first the stronghold seemed to be empty, and then a pair of skeletons passed by. We dodged them by falling back into a small, empty room that looked like a cell, and they went straight past us. After that, we kept the weapons out, just in case.
We went deeper and deeper into the stronghold, checking doors, and taking care not to double back on ourselves. Each of us took a turn leading with the compass, and each of us took a turn making sure Lonnie came along, though we didn’t really need to. He was following closely, ducking when we ducked, running when we ran, hiding when we hid.
At the side of what seemed to be the deepest room so far, there was a crawlspace tunnel about midway up one of the walls. The room was just large enough for all four of us to fit inside, with no doors and only two torches, one on each side wall.
“Either we go through it, or we go back the way we came,” I said. I held the compass up, squinting at it as if that would tell me more about the crawlspace in front of my face.
“I say we go through,” Esme said. “We’ve done a pretty thorough job looking through each floor already. This is the only path left.”
“This is how the monsters typically get you,” Anton said. “Cornered in a dark, tiny room.”
“Or this is how we get out,” I suggested.
“Fine,” he agreed. He knelt, providing a boost that I’d need to be able to get into the crawlspace, and I climbed up into it, then clambered through. Lonnie followed right behind me, and then I heard the other two get in.
The tunnel was long, and even though I had a torch in my hand, it was still eerily dark. I couldn’t see very far in front of me, which made for a more anxious crawl, not knowing how much farther we had to go. Every few seconds, Anton called out, “Anything yet?”
I kept having to say no, until that got really annoying and I stopped answering, and eventually he stopped calling out.
Then, suddenly, the torchlight showed a wide opening ahead that might have been another room.
“I think we found something,” I yelled back to the others.
“Faster, then,” Anton said. “I’m suffocating back here.”
I moved quickly toward the opening, and dropped immediately into a large room. I fell on my shoulder and rolled, rubbing it to stop the pain.
Lonnie fell down after me, but he got immediately to his feet as if he felt nothing at all. Anton fell through the hole next, and finally Esme’s head peeked out of the tunnel. She didn’t fall, of course. That would have been very un-Esme-like. She gripped the sides of the tunnel opening and swung her legs and body out, hanging from the wall for just a moment before letting go and landing gracefully on the floor next to the rest of us klutzes.
The room we were in was wide and long, with several door openings all the way around, and evenly spaced torches between the doors that lit up the room. Everything was a dull gray-brown. It also seemed to be an indoor courtyard, of sorts, with two more levels above us, all with doors and balconies facing down onto the floor where we had ended up.
“It’s like an auditorium,” Esme said.
“Or like an indoor stadium,” Anton said. “You know, with the bottom for the main attraction in the center, and several floors up so that people can see the action.”
“What action?” I asked.
Anton shrugged. “I’m just saying, it reminds me of a soccer stadium, or the place where Jabba the Hutt dropped creatures that he wanted to see do battle.”
“You mean like an arena,” I said. “Only what’s the main attraction? We’re the only ones standing in the middle.”
Anton stepped back toward the side of the room. “I’m not sticking around to find out,” he said. “Let’s start trying some of the doors. Maybe one of them leads someplace useful.”
We walked around the perimeter of the room to try each of the doors, but they all seemed to lead to upper floors from which the only openings faced the floor of the arena. The next level up looked like a latticework of iron bars. I thought they were jail cells, but there were passageways between them, so they couldn’t have been.
“This can’t be it,” Esme said, sounding defeated.
“No,” I agreed. “It can’t.”
“Maybe it’s a test,” Anton suggested.
I began to walk around again, this time running my hands up and down the walls and along the frame of each doorway. Then I found a pressure plate. I barely touched it and it gave way a little. I looked around the room to see what it corresponded to, but nothing had happened. Yet.
“I found something,” I said.
Lonnie was the first to come over, then Esme and Anton. I showed them the pressure plate and pressed it again. There was an audible click, but still nothing happened.
“Do you think there are others?” I asked.
&n
bsp; Esme immediately started to walk around to see if she could find something similar. She found one a couple of doors down, not in an open archway as I had, but on the wall beneath one of the torches.
Anton found one on the floor toward the other side of the room. He was walking across and felt the ground click beneath his feet, and stepped back instead of putting his full weight on it. “It’s weird that there’s no pattern to where they were put,” he said.
“They’re easier to hide that way, and for someone to accidentally trigger,” I said. “It’s pretty smart.”
“Of course you think haphazard is smart,” Esme said.
“But it’s not haphazard to the person who put them here,” I said.
“Is this the last room, though?” Anton asked. “Because if it is, and there’s nothing here, we’re going to have to find another stronghold to get what we need.”
“I think so,” Esme said. “There’s nothing leading out of this arena. Everything heads back in, to look down on this floor.”
“Then maybe this is where we need to look.”
“Where? On a bare empty floor?” Esme asked.
“No, I mean maybe it’s time to trip the triggers,” I said.
“Bianca, we have no idea what that’s going to do,” she said.
“I know. But what are the options? This is the last room and we haven’t found anything yet. Maybe there’s something that we can find if we just push all of the buttons at once. Hard.”
“That’s a bad plan,” Esme said, although there was an audible click that said she’d pressed hers.
“But it’s a plan,” I said, depressing my button.
Anton walked across the floor. As he reached the middle, we all heard the click beneath his feet, but this one sounded more solid. His face registered surprise and fear at the same time. He hesitated a moment as if he wasn’t sure what to do, then ran forward toward the rest of us.
Immediately, a part of the floor opened up, and a few silverfish flew out and straight for us.
Esme pulled out her sword and ran out to meet them in the middle of the arena floor.
“No!” I called out, but it was too late. She stepped on another pressure plate and a different part of the floor opened up, with more enemies pouring out.
The silverfish looked vicious, and they came straight toward us with their jaws unhinged, as if they meant to take a bite out of anyone who got close enough.
My sword was already out, so I waited where I was, hoping the fish would come straight to me. But instead, they circled Esme and attacked her. I looked at Anton. We had no choice. We would have to go in. I left Lonnie where he was, leaning against the open doorframe, and ran into the middle of the arena, slashing silverfish with my sword as I went. I triggered a third trapdoor, and more mobs poured out for us to fight. They swarmed around us, unrelenting and hideous, but our armor kept us relatively safe. When we’d gotten through about half of them, I noticed that even more were coming out of the holes we’d made.
“We have to be close to the end portal room,” I said. “There are too many of these. They have to be pushing us back for some reason.”
“Agreed,” Anton said. He dug into two silverfish like a shish kebab with his sword, which by the look of shock on his face I suspected was a lucky shot rather than a deliberate one. Then he tried to do it again and was unsuccessful.
The silverfish corralled us into a tight trio. We stood back to back to back, facing them down.
“We have to find a way to break out of this,” I said unhelpfully.
“Unless you have a specific solution in mind,” Esme said, “I think all we can do is fight.”
“I think we should go down one of the trapdoors that they came out of,” I said.
“Are you joking?” Esme said.
“Actually, it makes sense,” Anton said. “The silverfish always guard the end portal room, so it stands to reason that if we follow where they came from, we’ll find it.”
I didn’t wait for Esme to get on board. I pushed my way through clouds of silverfish, back to the archway where I had left Lonnie. He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t. I started to run up the stairs to the next level to see if he had wandered that way. From an upper balcony, I could see my friends still fighting off the mob. It was mesmerizing how the silverfish moved like ocean fish—as one organism.
“They’re moving in a pattern, you guys. Look carefully.”
Anton lowered his sword temporarily and watched the fish swirl around him. Then he began to move in rhythm with their pattern, dipping when they dipped, zigging left and zagging right in perfect synchronous time. Esme watched him, and copied, but was at first a couple of seconds behind him, so not fast enough to stay out of the way. A particularly hungry-looking silverfish caught her in the shoulder, and she screamed and fell to the floor. Anton dove forward and smacked the silverfish away.
I ran through the upper rooms looking for Lonnie, calling out to him, even though I knew he wouldn’t respond. I found him finally against a wall, far away from the balcony that looked down over the arena floor. He was curled up with his arms around his knees and his head down, as if he wanted to be as far away from this place as he could get. I understood it. I wished I had time to curl up into a ball myself, but I didn’t. I needed to get us out of here. We needed to get to the End.
“Lonnie!” I yelled. I pulled him to his feet. “We have to go!” He followed reluctantly until we got downstairs and I tried to take him into the silverfish mob. Then, he came to a dead stop and resisted when I tried to pull him along. “I know, I know, Lonnie,” I said. “But you’ve got to trust me. This is the only way.”
But he wasn’t budging.
“This is the End.” It was Lonnie’s voice floating through my mind.
“Move! You have to move! For me!”
He leaped forward into the stream of silverfish, and down into the hole from the trapdoor. He landed in the next room, and rolled away from the entrance.
“We have to hurry,” I said.
“You think?” Anton snarked as he swiped at another silverfish. He jumped in after me, and Esme came in last, grumbling.
We were in another room, the same size as the one above, but only one level deep. Just as in the other one, there were torches lighting up the entire perimeter. Luckily, it looked like all the silverfish were on the floor above us. And at the other end of the room we were in was the end portal.
“Whoa, it looks way cooler than the photos on the Internet,” Anton said.
We all stared straight ahead at a large and elaborate end portal, with all twelve eyes of ender fit into the frame. They shifted and blinked like real eyes that were peering at us, which made my stomach curdle. The activated portal was a mesmerizing deep black. I felt it was sucking me in, like a vortex.
“Something’s not right,” Esme said. “We’re supposed to finish building the portal. Only the luckiest of the lucky get an already active portal.”
I felt nervous. I looked around the room, expecting to find someone else in there with us. But it was empty. I moved forward cautiously.
“Maybe we should wait?” I said. “It could be a trap and we’ll be mobbed by monsters as soon as we step through.” I glanced at Lonnie.
“We have to face our monsters no matter where we go,” Anton said. He moved up to the portal, and walked all the way around it. “This seems legit, though. We could try the portal and see.”
“I don’t trust it,” I said. Now that we were here, steps away from finishing the goal Lonnie and I had set out to complete so long ago, I felt unsure. I continued to look around, checking the ceiling and behind a pillar. I felt the cold dampness of the brick under my palms.
“We can’t stall forever,” Anton said. “If we want to progress through the game, we have to go. But it’s your choice, Bianca.”
“What do you think?” Esme asked me.
I looked at my friends, waiting patiently for me to decide. For my answer, I grabbed Lonnie’s right hand and jerked my head toward Anton so he’d hold on to Lonnie’s left, and I held out my right hand to Esme. Together, we stepped into the portal that would take us to the End.
I knew something was wrong as soon as I’d stepped through. I tried my best to hang on to Esme and Lonnie as we hurtled through space. But my grip slipped. Suddenly, I was spiraling out of control, whirling through the pitch-black nothing.
In that long silent moment, the truths that I’d been holding at bay reappeared full-force. Nobody knew about Lonnie because he was never checked into the children’s ward or the trauma ward.
“He didn’t come into the hospital with me,” I whispered into the darkness. “He never regained consciousness after the accident.” A thin prick of light opened at the limits of my vision. It grew wider, showing a pale green landscape against a starless sky.
Lonnie.
The driver with the scar.
Me holding up the phone to Lonnie’s face while he was driving.
It was all me.
It was my fault.
As I pitched forward toward the light, a new shadow took form, blocking out the light I was reaching for. A long-armed enderman came into view, and it had the same thin, diagonal white scar across its face. I screamed. The enderman extended its arms toward me.
I tried to turn and somehow propel my way back to the Overworld. But before I could try, the enderman grabbed me by the hand, pulled me backward, and threw me down on the ground. It kneeled over me, wrapped its hands around my neck, and squeezed.
I choked for air. My legs and arms flailed as I tried to dislodge myself from the enderman’s grasp. But there was no escaping it. Its grip was like a vise. No sound came when I tried to call out. I wasn’t even sure anyone would hear me anyway.
I changed tactics, reaching up and scraping its face with the tips of my fingers, and kept trying to grasp it. Finally I found an edge that my finger fit into and I scratched at it hard. The enderman didn’t let up. I tried again. This time, I caught it at the bottom edge of the raggedy white scar that went across its face. My finger went in, too far. It was like I had found the crack in an empty bottle. There was nothing behind it. No flesh. No bone. No person. I dug my fingers in farther and pulled as hard as I could. The enderman’s face cracked open like the mouth of a beast, but it let go. The struggle sent me wheeling on my way toward the End.
The Crash: An Official Minecraft Novel Page 20
