D. MacHale - The Merchant of Death

They arrived at Courtney’s house, which was very much like Mark’s. They both lived in a quiet, suburban neighborhood. But rather than go to Courtney’s room, Courtney took Mark down to the basement where her father had a workshop. Mark had a fleeting moment of disappointment that he wouldn’t get to see the inner sanctum of the glorious Courtney Chetwynde, but there were larger problems to deal with.

The two sat down on an old, dusty couch and Mark opened his pack. He laid the precious pages out on a coffee table in front of them. The two hesitated a moment. As much as they were dying with curiosity about what happened next to Bobby, they were also a little bit frightened about what the pages contained and what new and disturbing wonders they would reveal. They each took a breath.

Then Courtney looked to Mark and said, “You ready?”

“Yeah.”

They looked down at the pages and picked up where they had left off.

I was going to get myself out of here and kiss this place good-bye-with or without Uncle Press.

Denduron

My plan was to climb back to the top of the mountain, get past those cannibal quig beasts, find the gate that leads to the flume, and get the hell out of here. Simple, right? Yeah, sure. I’m not even sure I couldfind that stupid cave again, let alone survive the climb through the snow and the quigs. Still, my mind was made up. It was better than staying here.

But it wasn’t going to happen today. The suns were going down and it was getting dark. Yeah, that’s right. Suns. Plural. Remember I told you there were three suns? Well, they all set at the same time, but in opposite parts of the sky. North, south and east…or whatever they use for directions around here. I figured I had to spend the night and sneak away once it got light. Besides, I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten anything since I had a banana and some raspberry Pop-Tarts before the basketball game I never made it to.

Loor brought me to a hut that was like the one I woke up in, only smaller. In one corner was a pile of furry animal skins.

Loor pointed to them and gave me a simple command. “Sit.”

I did. It was smelly, but comfortable. There was a small stone fireplace where Loor quickly and expertly made a fire that gave us light and took the chill off. Osa arrived soon after with a cloth sack that I quickly found out was full of food. Yes! We all sat around the fire and shared loaves of crunchy bread; some weird fruit that looked like an orange but you ate like an apple; and some soft nutlike things that tasted like licorice. Maybe it was because I was so hungry, but this odd meal was delicious. I would have preferred some fries from Garden Poultry Deli on the Ave, but this did just fine. While we ate, Osa gave me some strange instructions.

“Is there someone back on Second Earth whom you trust above all others?” she asked.

It didn’t take me long to come up with the answer. I told her it was you, Mark. Sure my family’s cool, and of course I trust them, but a friend is someone who gives you trust because they want to, not because they have to.

Osa handed me a stack of blank parchment paper that was all yellowed and crunchy. She also gave me a crude pen that looked like it was carved from a tree branch, along with a small bowl of black ink.

“It is important that you write down all that is happening to you,” explained Osa. “Every chance you get, write your thoughts, your feelings, and describe the things that you see. Think of it as a journal.”

“Why?” was my obvious question.

“Because you will send them to your friend for safekeeping,” she answered. “I will not lie to you, Pendragon. This is a dangerous journey. If anything should happen to you, this journal will be the only record of what you have done.”

Yikes, that sounded grim. It was like she was asking me to write out my last will and testament. Part of me wanted to refuse because doing what she asked made me feel like I was going along with the program. And I definitely was not. On the other hand, what she said made sense. If anything happened to me, nobody would know the real story. I didn’t like that. If I was going to go down, I wanted everybody to know why.

“How are we going to get it to Mark?” I asked.

“Write first,” she said. “When you are ready, I will show you.”

That was interesting. If she could get these pages to you, that meant she knew how to use the flume in the other direction. Maybe this would be my chance to find a way home. So with that in mind, I took the pen and went to work. I set myself up next to the fire, using a piece of wood on my lap as a desk. It took a while to get the knack of using the pen because it wasn’t exactly a Bic Rollerball. I had to dip the pointy end in the ink and scratch the words out on the paper. It was a pain, but after a while I got to where I could write a whole sentence without having to re-dip.

Across from me, Loor was doing the same thing. It felt like we were doing homework together. As she scratched out her thoughts on the same kind of parchment paper, I couldn’t help but wonder what she was writing about me. I knew she thought I was a toady boy, but maybe having survived a brush with Saint Dane gave me a little more credibility. On the other hand, who cares? Tomorrow, I was out of here.

That’s how I spent the rest of the night. I wrote for a while and when my eyes got heavy I sacked out on the animal skins. I’d sleep for a little bit, then wake up and write some more. Loor did the same thing. Osa was in and out of the hut. She’d come in to put some wood on the fire, then leave again. I wondered if she was getting any sleep at all. I got as far as writing about Uncle Press being captured by Kagan’s knights, and then I crashed for good. The next thing I knew, Osa was gently shaking me to wake up.

“It is morning, Pendragon,” she said softly.

I was sleeping deeply and had to force my eyes open. There was light in the hut, but I could tell it was early because there were no shadows and the birds were singing. I looked around to see that the fire had gone out and Loor was gone.

“Give me your journal,” she commanded.

I sat up and gathered the pages I had written. She took them, rolled them up, and tied them with a leather cord. She then walked to the center of the hut, sat down cross-legged and placed something on the floor. It was a big old clunky silver ring with a gray stone mounted in the center. From where I was sitting I could see there was some kind of inscription engraved around the stone, but I had no idea what it meant. Osa looked to make sure I was watching, then reached down to the ring, touched her finger to the stone and said, “Second Earth.”

What I saw next sent a bolt of adrenaline through me so quickly that I was shocked out of any last remnant of sleep. The gray stone in the ring started to glow. It acted like the flume had when it brought me here. The flume was made of gray rock, just like the ring. When I said, “Denduron,” the gray rock of the flume had started to glow, just like the ring. Bright light shot from the facets of the stone and washed the walls of the hut, just like the lights in the flume. And like the flume, I started to hear the strange musical notes.

Then the ring started to twitch…and grow! The band actually stretched out and got bigger until it was about the size of a Frisbee. But inside the circle, where the floor should have been, was a hole. It was like this ring opened up a miniflume to…where? Osa took the rolled-up parchment pages and dropped them into the ring. The pages disappeared as if they had been dropped into a hole in the floor. Then the ring snapped back to normal size and everything ended. No lights, no sound, no hole. Just the ring. Osa picked it up and put it into a leather pouch that hung from around her neck.