The Lost Journals: An Official Minecraft Novel

by Mur Lafferty

  The problem was, they had gotten quite good at helping Max’s mom. Now she was using their assistance more for the actual benefit rather than as a punishment. And when she wasn’t super angry with them, Max’s mom was actually okay to be around. Alison still wanted to go and see the cabin where Max had found the journal, but the heavy work they were doing was wearing her out.

  “You two have done a good job,” Max’s mom said over dinner one night. “I’m lifting the ban on going outside. But don’t mess up again.”

  Alison nodded gratefully. But she remembered her promise, and when she and Max were back in their room, she put her face up to the hole between them and said, “She’s not going to give us any free time during the day. Let’s go tonight.”

  Surprisingly, Max was too tired. He was still grubby from all the work he’d done in the garden and was lying on his back, nearly asleep.

  “Already? I thought you’d want to wait a few days,” he moaned.

  “Are you kidding me?” she asked. “You’re the one who was in such a hurry earlier—”

  He laughed and sat up, his eager energy showing again. “Completely kidding,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Max said he’d found the journal in an abandoned cabin in the woods a ways from his house. They needed to go back there, because he hadn’t explored half of the secrets it held. Luckily, Max’s mom had sent Alison to the shed to fetch a tool earlier that day, and Alison had used the crafting table within to make a quick, basic pickaxe.

  She quietly broke through the bedroom wall separating them, and they were both able to leave by Max’s door.

  They carried torches as they walked through the woods. The only weapons they had were a stick and the wooden pickaxe, and Alison asked if they should find some sort of real weapon or armor.

  “We’ll be fine with the torches. I know this area pretty well, I mapped it before the accident, when I had free time. The path is fairly safe, and the cabin’s safe too.”

  Alison still looked around, eyes wide as she tried to spot any mobs lurking in the trees. But the path to the cabin was clear, and their torches kept any interested creatures away.

  The cabin itself was in a shambles. The breath caught in Alison’s throat as she realized what it looked like: a creeper attack. She did not like creepers. She took a step back, thought she heard a hissing in the woods, and whirled around—

  Nothing there. Her breath was coming fast, and she became light-headed. Max wasn’t there. Had he left her like everyone else had? Was she alone? She took in a deep breath and tried to still the panic.

  A hand grasped her elbow, and she jerked away violently. It was Max, looking calm and concerned. “I went to put torches everywhere so we’re less likely to get bothered,” he said, gesturing to the house. It was now lit on all sides by torches. “Are you okay?”

  Her eyes felt opened too wide, and she nodded mutely. He turned and walked toward the cabin. “I didn’t warn you that it was a mess, sorry about that.” He led her to the eastern side, which was completely gone. “I’ve salvaged and stacked most of the stuff I found here so Mom couldn’t confiscate it from me,” he said, pointing to blocks of wood and stone. “It’s safe to go inside.”

  More torches glowed from inside, beckoning them with their warmth. Since Max had cleaned up, instead of a wall of rubble there was just a hole. They climbed inside to find some furniture, a bed, a stove, and other simple things one needed to live.

  “Wait till you see the basement,” he said, noticing her facial expression. Had she looked disappointed?

  She didn’t know what to think; she was still thinking about her family.

  “Whose cabin is this?” Alison finally asked, trying to dampen the fear in her voice.

  “It’s abandoned, don’t worry,” he said. “Let me show you downstairs.”

  He lit a few torches and put them in sconces, starting with the stairway. The basement’s full sprawl revealed itself slowly. Alison sucked in a sharp breath as she took in the bookcases, the enchanting tables, the workbenches, crafting tables, furnaces, and chests. The walls featured art of all kinds, both good and terrible (the flower still-life and the landscape with the cove were good; the worst one looked like a close-up painting of an enderman, which seemed like a weird thing to paint). On the end of the basement that had stretched beyond the cabin above, moonlight filtered down from a hidden skylight Max had found in the forest floor and cleaned.

  “This has to belong to someone,” Alison whispered. “No one would leave all this just lying around.”

  “Well, someone did,” Max said, “And I have—” He stopped speaking when Alison rushed past him to the crates and opened one.

  “It’s full of metal!” she cried. “Iron and gold and even a little bit of diamond!”

  Another chest held tools, picks and shovels and axes of quality materials Max knew that Alison had never seen before. Many of them were poorly treated and needed fixing, but they were still nicer than most.

  She finally found what she was looking for in the third chest. She opened it up and gasped. “Whoever lived here was a crafter.” Alison pulled out a sword and held it up to Max. It was gold, and well made.

  “Wait, don’t just go running around grabbing stuff—” he began, but she kept searching.

  “And obviously a crafter lived here,” he added, indicating all of the crafting benches. “I figured we would need a safe place for you to make things and me to”—he lowered his voice even though they were underground and far from any other living being—“run some experiments.”

  Alison’s emotions ran from hopeful to skeptical. “Thanks, but I still don’t understand who would leave all this stuff. Even if they moved because their cabin blew up.”

  Max took a deep breath. He looked strangely nervous, but forged on with his next comment. “I know why the Enchanter isn’t here. Let me show you.”

  * * *

  —

  Alison couldn’t speak.

  Max bounced slightly beside her, eager for her response, but she couldn’t come up with any words at all.

  A clearing lay a ways behind the cabin, the perimeter lit by Max’s torches. While the house was a shambles, the clearing was pristine, with the trees trimmed back, torches casting gentle light on the grass, and everything drawing the eye to the object in the center. A large black rectangle stood there, obsidian gleaming in the torchlight. She paused for a moment, and Max wondered if she would yell at him, but then she stepped forward and inspected the area. Sitting on the edge of the clearing was a neat stack of more obsidian, just in case the Enchanter had wanted to make the doorway even bigger.

  Because that’s what it was. A doorway. And Max wanted to go through.

  On top of the stack of obsidian, Alison fingered the flint, steel, and shiny pickaxe sitting there.

  She gazed up at the structure. It was at least eight blocks high and four wide. “This used so much obsidian,” she whispered. “Where did it all come from?”

  Max glanced around. There was no obvious source of lava or water within sight, so someone had to have mined pretty deep to get the obsidian—or they’d created it and carted it here.

  “That’s not—that isn’t what I think it is, is it?” she said.

  “It’s a real portal to the Nether! It exists! And I think the author of the journal is there!” Max said, unable to contain his glee any longer.

  “You took the obsidian from the Enchanter’s stash and used it to fix the sheep pen.” It wasn’t a question. She sounded baffled, like she had to say the words out loud to make sure they were real.

  He shrugged, annoyed she hadn’t taken his conversational lead to the next logical thought. “I figured it would work. And get you interested. But Ali, you know what this means.”

  She looked sideways at him. “No,” she said, as if she knew what he was getting at,
but refused to say it.

  “Yeah, you do,” he said. “We have the journal and the supplies, everything we need. We can go through the portal!”

  “Are you insane?” she yelled. “We’re kids! We can’t even handle rampaging sheep! What makes you think that we could, first, find the Enchanter, and second, survive whatever is on the other side?”

  Max pointed back toward the cabin. “Because you’re going to craft us some weapons and armor, and I’m going to enchant them. Then we’re going to the Nether to rescue the Enchanter.”

  THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LIGHTNING AND LIGHTENING

  Alison demanded time to think about it. They returned to Max’s house, sneaking in and rebuilding the wall in the bedroom so Max’s mom would be none the wiser. Alison spent a distracted day doing odd jobs around the house and garden, and then a sleepless night watching the moon wander the sky while she thought, listening to Max’s slow breathing through the window in the wall.

  All she’d wanted to do was become a better crafter and make Max’s mom some armor to protect her. And then some for his dad, too, even though he currently lived in the village. And sure, she didn’t know how she would present the armor to them without admitting she and Max had been crafting a lot more than his parents knew about, but that was a problem for another sleepless night. The issue keeping her up now was how she would give armor to Max, because Alison wanted to protect him, too.

  But I want to make armor for him so he’ll be safe, not so he can do something as absurd as go through the nether portal, she thought. How can I protect him if he’s just going to use the armor to go after the Enchanter?

  She frowned, feeling stuck, before she was hit by the thought that Max would go no matter what. She’d recognized that determined look in his eyes when he said they were going to the Nether; it meant he’d already decided to throw caution to the wind.

  Alison had spent her life being careful. What’s more careful than tending sheep and making clothes out of their garish wool? She had never mined before coming to live with Max, never fought skeletons, never entered abandoned cabins in the woods.

  She could continue being careful. Safe. She could refuse Max’s request to go to the Nether, and return to helping Max’s mom. Maybe she could teach Alison architecture. She might even be allowed to craft another workbench eventually, provided she and Max didn’t immediately start using the tools for wild and exciting purposes.

  They could cut down trees, for example. There was nothing more exciting than cutting down trees…

  She rolled over, going over the recipes she knew for armor and weapons. She fell asleep dreaming of diamond equipment and glimmering portals.

  * * *

  —

  “If we’re doing this, we’re going to make sure we know what we’re getting into,” Alison said, after her ears stopped ringing from Max’s whoop of joy. His mom had left them alone for a short trip to Mr. Hatch’s ranch to check on his sheep—Belle was still limping, last they’d heard—and Alison was very aware that this was a test of their obedience. Max dragged out the old journal and they started going through it.

  The first several pages held food recipes. Some of them had the standard recipes for mutton and pork chops, but others had recipes using mushrooms and flowers, or bat meat scorched by lava.

  “Have you tried this one?” she asked, pointing to a recipe for candied mushrooms.

  “No, I can’t cook,” he said.

  “And you want to be an enchanter,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “All right, has your mom tried to make them?”

  “No, I can’t let her see the journal. She’d take it away from me!” he said.

  “There are a lot of things in here I don’t remember seeing in school,” she said, flipping another page. “I don’t know if we should trust this ‘Enchanter,’ as you call them.”

  “But the portal is real!” he protested. “We know that’s right.”

  “You want to risk our lives based on that?” she asked, glaring at him. She flipped another page. There were some empty pages, possibly leaving room to put more recipes, and then there was a section seemingly dedicated to structures.

  The drawings here were lovingly detailed, shaded, and contained block-by-block measurements.

  Why didn’t Max call this author “the Builder”? Whoever had written this was clearly a master of architecture. The first page of the section had plans for a complicated mining system with conveyor belts and steps and ladders. Another detailed a tunnel system with reinforced walls, for delving deep in a safer manner than Alison and Max had done. Then they got more fantastic: a floating, flaming beacon high in the sky above the tree line. An underwater mansion (with a note that, before construction, the builder should check the underwater breathing recipes and plans on a later page), complete with pens to hold squid. It left out the fact that squid could just swim up and over the fences, but the drawing was nice, with obedient squid sitting placidly in their pens. A great structure that had mining rails that rose and fell like hills, and small mining cars linked together to zip around the tracks. It didn’t look like it had much of a purpose, but it did look like fun.

  Once she got out of the construction section, the handwriting changed back to scrawling writing, the author getting frustrated at times, with angry cross-outs of whole sections. Alison noticed Max’s handwriting in the margins, sometimes trying to puzzle out what had been originally written there, sometimes actually offering encouragement, as if his words could go back in time and support the frustrated author.

  She wondered about Max’s investment in this. He’d always shown a passing interest in enchanting; at school he thought it was neat, but not neat enough to study.

  Then again, it was hard being excited about a subject with a teacher who demanded their students be cautious at every turn, and who focused only on minor enchantments, and even then only after several hours on the history of enchanting, and doing it after lunch when everyone was sleepy. Now they had a mysterious, handwritten journal, an abandoned cabin, and all the tools they needed to basically try anything they wanted. Who wouldn’t want to explore enchanting?

  Alison, for one. She was much more interested in the proper construction of a shiny golden helmet than in magicking it up to handle underwater breathing. She thought about how much gold she had seen in the chests at the cabin, and her hands started clenching and unclenching, eager to start working.

  She took a deep breath and patiently started reading the journal again. Nearer to the end, she found more and more heavily scratched-out recipes and methods, many with the word FAILURE scrawled over the pages. Some were ripped. Alison thought for a moment and decided she had a little work to do.

  * * *

  —

  Max’s mom was hesitant to let them do anything together, but she had relaxed her rules to allow them to do things alone, and she always had sympathy whenever Alison wanted to go home to retrieve something or check on her sheep. For now, due to Max’s mom’s insistence, Mr. Hatch was taking care of Alison’s sheep since she had been grounded.

  Alison felt Mr. Hatch had gotten the bad end of the deal: she and Max had made a hole in the man’s farm, made his sheep fall into the hole, and he’d had to work hard to get the sheep out of the hole—and Mr. Hatch’s reward for this suffering was to add Alison’s brightly colored, garish sheep to his own proper black-and-white flock. But he had agreed, because he’d taken pity on Alison since the accident.

  But Alison still wanted to check on the sheep, even though they had moved to Mr. Hatch’s ranch. They were happily milling around with the black-and-white sheep, but she could tell Apple and Lil’ Prince were itching to get out and find some water and possibly a squid to befriend.

  She scratched Apple behind her ears. “Someday you’ll get back out there. But I can’t take you today.” The sheep looked at her as if she didn’t trust Alison, but she coul
dn’t do anything more to convince the animal, so she just shrugged.

  She went on to the ruin that was her house, her heart growing heavy as she approached it. No one had been by to clear the land of the great hole, and the tree was still a wreck. She felt even worse when she realized that cleaning it up was her job, as the only person left in her family. Whom was she expecting to take care of things?

  The one change she had made was adding a new ladder so she could get to the few rooms that remained intact, and she climbed that and entered her mother’s study.

  The desk still stood there, alongside a painting of poppies and a chest. Alison hadn’t gone through things since leaving, and she knew she didn’t have time now, but she figured she would take back everything she could carry in addition to what she was there for.

  She searched her mother’s desk and found what she needed quickly: a mostly blank book. Her mother had used it much like the Enchanter had done, writing down various patterns for different color combinations and styles of banners, followed by an animal husbandry page listing the sheep that had been bred together to maximize color purity and minimize inbreeding. But apart from those ten pages, the book was completely blank.

  She took a couple of her mother’s other books, some family pictures, and as much of her mother’s stash of wool as she could carry. She climbed down the ladder and saw Mr. Hatch with the sheep. She waved at him, but was too embarrassed to say hello and make small talk. But at least she was on the right side of his ranch this time.

  * * *

  —

  Max was downright offended that she wanted to rewrite the journal in a clean book. “I’ve already puzzled out most of the things. My notes are right,” he said, crossing his arms.

  “I didn’t say they weren’t,” Alison said. “It’s simply neater to get it rewritten. I’m willing to write down your added notes, but the journal is torn, water-stained, burned, with a lot crossed out.”