The Merchant of Death

by D. J. MacHale

  Courtney walked past Mark and gave him a simple, quick, “Let’s go.”

  Courtney was now on a mission. She wanted to talk to Bobby. If she had to go to his house to find him, so be it. Mark was relieved that he now had an ally, but he had no idea how to tell Courtney what he knew, or if she’d believe him. For now though, he was happy just to have someone to talk to.

  The Pendragons lived on a quiet cul-de-sac not far from school. It was lunchtime, so Courtney and Mark figured they could reach Bobby’s house, get to the bottom of what was going on, and be back at school before anyone missed them. As they hurried up the sidewalk, Mark had to walk quickly to keep up with Courtney’s long, purposeful strides. He wanted to tell her about the visitor he had had the night before, and the ring, and the parchment with Bobby’s story, but he was afraid she’d dismiss him as a mental case. He had to choose his words carefully.

  “Do you know Bobby’s Uncle Press?” he asked cautiously.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did, uh, did you see him last night?”

  “Unfortunately. He’s the guy who caught us making out.”

  Mark’s heart sank. Not that it mattered if Bobby and Courtney made out, or that they were caught by Bobby’s uncle. The problem was, Courtney’s answer confirmed more of the story contained on the parchment papers. Mark feared that if some of the story were true, then maybe all of it was true. The thought made him sick.

  They were nearly at Bobby’s house now. Mark hoped that Bobby would be there to settle everything. He imagined walking up to Bobby, holding out the parchment paper, and seeing Bobby bust out laughing. Bobby would say it was all a goof and that he never expected them to think it was real. It was a prank, like Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast that made everybody think the Earth was being invaded by Martians. That’s what Mark was hoping for, but what they both saw in the next instant dashed that hope entirely.

  Two Linden Place. That was the address. Mark had been there a thousand times. Ever since kindergarten they’d trade off playing at each other’s house. Bobby’s house was like his second home. Mrs. Pendragon called Mark her second son. That’s why nothing could prepare him for what he was about to see. Courtney and Mark walked up the sidewalk that led to the split-rail fence that surrounded Bobby’s front yard, and stopped cold. They both looked at 2 Linden Place, stunned.

  “Oh my god,” was all Courtney could whisper.

  Mark couldn’t even get that much out.

  Two Linden Place was gone. The two of them stood together, wide-eyed, looking at a vacant lot. There were no signs that a house hadever been there. Not a single piece of wood, brick, stone, or blade of grass existed in the space. The ground was nothing but dirt. Mark looked to the huge maple tree where years before Mr. Pendragon had hung a tire swing for the boys. The tree was there, but there was no swing. Even the branch that had been rope-scarred by years of swinging was clean. No marks. Nothing.

  Courtney broke first. “It’s the wrong address.”

  Mark said softly, “It’s not the wrong address.”

  Courtney wouldn’t accept it. She stormed onto the empty lot. “But I was here last night! There was a sidewalk to the house right here! And the front door was here! And Bobby and I were standing…” Her voice trailed off. She looked to Mark with dread. “Mark, what happened?”

  Now was as good a time as any. Even though he had no idea what had happened, seeing the empty lot confirmed his worst fears. Everything he had read on the pages from Bobby was true. He had more questions than he had answers, but he did have some answers, as strange as they were. He wanted to share them with Courtney. Knowing all this by himself was too tough. So he reached for his backpack and took out the yellow parchment papers.

  “I want you to read something,” he said. “It’s from Bobby.” He held out the pages to Courtney, who looked at them, then back to Mark. Reluctantly, she took the pages from him and sat down. Right there. Right in the middle of the empty lot at Two Linden Place, not far from the spot where she and Bobby shared their first kiss.

  She looked down at the pages and started to read.

  Journal #1

  (continued)

  Denduron

  Ithought my life was over. All that was left was to wait for the pain. Would it come fast and hit me hard? Or would it start at my feet and gradually work its way up my legs, over my body, and zero in right on my head in a brilliant, searing flash of agony before everything went dark?

  I was voting for fast. But it didn’t come fast. In fact it didn’t come at all. There was no pain. I didn’t die. Instead I found myself falling through this snaking tunnel. It was like sailing down one of those water-park rides. But the water-park rides are actually more violent than this. Now that it’s over, I can look back on it and actually say it was kind of fun. But that’s now. At the time, I was freaking out.

  Once I realized I wasn’t being sucked into some giant garbage disposal, I opened my eyes and looked around. It felt like I was moving fast.

  Like I wrote before, the walls of the tunnel were craggy, like rocks. But they were translucent, too, as if they were crystal. The strange thing was, it wasn’t a bumpy ride. I was flying along, feet first like on a playground slide, but it felt like I was floating. I couldn’t feel the walls of the tunnel. There were many twists and turns, but I didn’t get slammed against the walls or anything, like you do when you hit the turns on a water slide. It felt like I was floating on a magic carpet that knew exactly where it was taking me.

  There were sounds, too. They were soft notes, like from a tuning fork. All different notes. Pretty notes. They were the same kind of notes I heard when the tunnel came to life, but much further apart. That’s one of the reasons I could tell I was going so fast, because I was sailing past the notes. The sound would come up fast from up ahead, and then flash past me and disappear behind. It was a strange sensation.

  I looked back the way I came and there was nothing but crystal tunnel for as far as I could see. I looked down between my feet and it was the same thing. Snaking tunnel. Infinity.

  After a while I got used to it, sort of. There was nothing I could do to stop anyway, so I figured why fight it? Now, here’s the freaky thing (as if everything up to this point wasn’t freaky enough). I could look out beyond the crystal walls to see that it was dark out there. I figured that made sense, I was underground, after all. But when I looked harder, it seemed as if the blackness was broken up by thousands and thousands of stars.

  I know, screwy, right? I had started in an underground subway and was going deeper underground from there, so how could I be looking at stars? But that’s what it looked like. Why should this make any more sense than anything else?

  I don’t know how long I was flying. Three minutes? Three months? My normal sense of relativity had long since gone bye-bye. I’d given myself over to the experience and wherever it took me, and for how long, it just didn’t matter.

  And then I heard something different. It wasn’t one of the soft notes that had been my guides on this bizarro journey. This sounded, well, solid. It sounded craggy. It sounded like I was coming to the end of the line. I looked down between my feet and saw it. The end. The twisting, bright tunnel ended in darkness, and I was headed for it, fast. All around me the walls of the tunnel started to change. They were transforming from the translucent crystal back to the slate gray craggy rocks that I had seen at their start near the subway.

  The panic returned. Was I about to hit the center of the Earth? Wasn’t there supposed to be a core of molten magma there? Was this magical flight just a prelude to a fiery death? Whatever was going to happen, it was going to happen now. So I did the one and only thing I could think of to prepare myself for the end. I closed my eyes.

  But the end wasn’t a fiery crash at all. I got the same tingling feeling that I had felt at the mouth of the tunnel. Then there was a shower of sound. All the sweet notes I had been hearing gathered together the way they did at the beginning of my journe
y. I felt as if a heavy weight were pressing against my chest. The next thing I knew, I was standing up. The musical notes faded away. I had been gently deposited somewhere by the magic carpet.

  It was strange having to support my own weight after having been weightless for the journey. I was like an astronaut returning from space who needed to get used to gravity again. I opened my eyes, looked back, and saw the tunnel. It looked exactly like the mouth I had entered back at the subway. It was gray and dark and stretched out to nowhere.

  I had arrived safely. But where was I? Another subway station? In China maybe? I turned around to know where the tunnel had deposited me and saw that I was at the entrance to some sort of cave. Now that I had my wits back, I realized that I was cold. The sharp sound I had heard during the last stretch of my journey was a howling wind. Wherever I was, I wasn’t underground anymore.

  I took a few shaky steps away from the mouth of the tunnel and entered the cave. As I walked into this larger space, I noticed that the cave was marked by the same star symbol that was on the door in the subway. It was carved into the rock at about eye level. Weird.

  I then saw light pouring in from an opening on the far side of the cavern. It was so bright that it made the rest of the cave seem pitch black. I was suddenly overcome by the feeling that I had been in the dark way too long. I wanted out, and that light showed me the way, so I stumbled along to reach it. When I got there, I knew that it was indeed the way out of the cave. The light also told me that it was daytime. How long had I been in that tunnel? All night? Or was it daytime in China? My eyes weren’t accustomed to the light, so I had to cover them and squint. I stepped outside and immediately realized it was even colder out here. All I had on was my Stony Brook warm-up top over a T-shirt, so the wind cut through me instantly. Man, it was freezing! I took a few steps and looked down to see—snow! The ground was covered with snow! That’s another reason it was so bright. The sun reflected off the snow and blinded me. I knew it wouldn’t take long for my eyes to adjust, so rather than duck back into the cave to get warm, I waited till I could see. I wanted to know where I was.

  After a few seconds, I gingerly took my hands away from my eyes. My pupils had finally contracted enough to let me see, and what was there waiting for me nearly knocked me off my feet.

  I was standing on top of a mountain! And this was no small ski mountain like we go to in Vermont. This was like Everest! Okay, maybe not that big, but I felt like I was on top of the world. Craggy snow fields stretched for as far as I could see. In the far distance, way down below, I could see that the snow gave way to a green, lush valley, but it was a long, steep trip between here and there.

  One question kept running through my head. “Where in heck am I?” Good question, but I had no one to ask. So I turned to go back into the safety of the cave to get my act together and figure out some kind of plan. Just before I turned back I saw, scattered several yards away from the mouth of the cave, these yellowish, kind of smooth, pointed rocks about two feet high. They jutted up out of the snow like stalagmites. Or stalactites. I can never remember which is which. They stuck up and came to a sharp point. I had no idea what they could be, but the word “tombstones” kept creeping into my head. I shook that particularly morbid thought out of my brain and trudged through the snow back to the cave.

  That’s when I saw the strangest thing of all. The sun was just rising up over the rocks that formed the cave. But I had just been shielding my eyes against the sun that was shining from the other direction! How could that be? I looked behind me to see that there wasn’t just one sun. There were three! I swear, Mark, there were three suns in opposite corners of the sky! I blinked, thinking my vision was just screwed up or something, but it didn’t help. They were still there. My mind locked up. I didn’t know what to think, but there was one thing I knew for sure—I wasn’t in China.

  I stood there on top of this mountain, all alone, sneakers getting wet in the snow, staring up at three blazing suns. I’m not ashamed to admit this, I wanted my mom. I wanted to be sitting in front of the TV fighting for the remote with Shannon. I wanted to be washing the car with Dad. I wanted to be shooting hoops with you. Suddenly the things I had taken for granted in life felt very far away. I wanted to go home, but all I could do was stand there and cry. I really did. I cried.

  Then the sound came again, from inside the cave—the same jumble of musical notes that had sucked me into the tunnel and dumped me here. Someone else was coming. Uncle Press! It had to be! I ran back into the cave, overjoyed that I wasn’t going to be alone anymore. But then another thought hit me. What if it wasn’t Uncle Press? What if it was that Saint Dane guy? The last time I had the pleasure of hanging with that dude, he was shooting at us. And I gotta tell you, getting shot at isn’t like what you see in the movies, or with Nintendo. It’s real and it’s terrifying. I could still feel the sting on the back of my neck where I got hit by the shattered pieces of tile.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I stopped in the middle of the big cave and waited. Whoever it was would be coming out of the tunnel. Would it be Uncle Press or Saint Dane? Or maybe those freakin’ dogs that wanted to eat me. Wouldn’t that be just perfect? Who was it going to be? Friend or foe?

  “Bobby?”

  It was Uncle Press! He walked out of the tunnel with his long leather coat flapping against his legs. I could have hugged him. In fact, I did. I ran over to him like a little kid. If this were a movie, I’d have been running in slow motion. I threw my arms around him with the feeling of pure joy and gratitude that I wasn’t alone anymore, and that my favorite guy in the world wasn’t shot dead by that Saint Dane guy. He was safe.

  This feeling lasted for about, oh, three seconds. Now that my fear of impending doom was gone, reality came flooding back. And there was only one person responsible for my being here. Uncle Press. Someone I trusted. Someone I loved. Someone who yanked me from home and nearly got me killed about eight times over.

  I pushed away from him with a shove that was hard enough to knock him off his feet, because that’s what I wanted to do. I wanted him to feel how angry I was. But as I saw before, Uncle Press was strong. It was like trying to push over a wall. All I managed to do was knock myself off balance and fall on my butt.

  “What the hell is going on!” I shouted as I scrambled back to my feet, trying not to look like an idiot.

  “Bobby, I know you’re confused about—”

  “Confused? Confused doesn’t begin to cover it!” I stormed over to the mouth of the tunnel and screamed, “Denduron.Denduron! ” I’d sayanything to get out of there. But nothing happened.

  “This is Denduron. We’re already here,” he said as if that were supposed to make sense.

  “Okay then,” I looked into the tunnel and screamed, “Earth! New York! The subway! There’s no place like home!” I ran into the tunnel, hoping the magical notes would pick me up and fly me home. But nothing happened. I came back out and got right in Uncle Press’s face.

  “I don’t care what this is about,” I said with as much authority as I could generate. “I don’t even care where we are. I care about going home and going home now! Take…me…home!”

  Uncle Press just looked at me. He had to know how angry and scared I was, so I think he was trying to choose his next words carefully. Unfortunately no matter how carefully he chose his next words, there was no good way of saying what he then told me.

  “Bobby, you can’t go home. You belong here right now.”

  Boom. Just like that. I backed away from him, stunned. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think. I wanted to cry. I wanted to hit him. I wanted to reason with him. I wanted to wake up and find this was all just a horrible nightmare.

  Uncle Press didn’t say anything. He just watched me and waited for me to get my act together. But with all the confusing information that had been so rudely input into my poor little skull, all I could squeak out was a single, simple question. “Why?”

  “I told you. There are
people here on Denduron who need our help,” he said slowly, as if to a little kid, which made me even more angry.

  “But I don’t know these people!” I shouted. “I don’t care about them. I care about me. I care about getting me home. What is it about that, you don’t understand?”

  “I understand perfectly. But that can’t happen,” he said firmly.

  “Why? What’s so important about these people? And where is here anyway? Where is this…Denduron?”

  “That’s hard to explain.”

  “Try,” I said. I was getting fed up with all the mystery.

  Uncle Press sat down on a rock. I took that as a sign that he was ready to start helping me understand things.

  “We are far from Earth, but this isn’t a different planet in the sense you’re thinking. It’s a territory. Like Earth is a territory.”

  “Territory, planet, what’s the difference? It’s just words.”

  “No, it’s not. If we had a spaceship and blasted off from here and went to the place where Earth is, it wouldn’t be there. At least not the way you know it. When you travel through the flumes—”