D. MacHale - The Merchant of Death

“Who are you? How do you know Bobby?”

She gently picked up Mark’s right hand and slipped the ring onto his finger. It fit perfectly. Mark looked at the strange ring, then back at the woman.

“Why? What’s this?” he asked.

The woman touched a gentle finger to Mark’s lips to quiet him. Mark immediately felt his eyes grow heavy. A second before he had been about as wide awake as anyone can be, but now he felt weary enough to fall asleep on the spot. He felt the world slipping away. In an instant, he was out.

The next morning Mark woke up at the usual 6:15 with the alarm clock blaring. His first thought was that he hated alarm clocks. His second thought was that he had had the strangest dream. He chuckled to himself, thinking he should cut down on the raw vegetables before bedtime. He then reached over to hit the snooze button…and saw it.

There, on his finger was the ring the woman had given him. Mark sat up in bed quickly and stared at it with its gray stone and strange inscriptions. It was real. He could feel it. It had weight. It wasn’t a dream. What was going on?

He dressed quickly and left the house without telling his parents what had happened. There was only one person who could explain this to him. Bobby Pendragon. But something had already happened with Bobby that gave him a queasy feeling. Last night was the county semifinal basketball game…and Bobby hadn’t shown up. His parents were there, his sister was there, but not Bobby. After the first half he went over to ask the Pendragons where Bobby was, but they had already left. Very strange.

And Stony Brook lost. Bad. Everybody at the game was buzzing, wanting to know what happened to their star. Nobody knew. When Mark got home he called Bobby’s house, but there was no answer. He figured he’d see him in school the next day and get the story. Then he went to sleep and had his strange night visitor. Now Mark wanted to know a lot more from Bobby than why he hadn’t shown for a basketball game.

When Mark got into the school building, the number one topic of conversation was The Game.

“Hey Dimond? Where’s your superstar pal?”

“He blew it!”

“This better be good, Dimond!”

“What’s the story?”

Everyone was yelling at him about Bobby. That could only mean one thing. Bobby hadn’t gotten there yet. Of course, Mark didn’t have any answers, so he shrugged and kept walking. He went to Bobby’s locker, but Bobby wasn’t there. Instead there were more angry kids waiting to ambush him.

“He chickened out, didn’t he?”

“Couldn’t take the heat!”

Mark dodged them and went to Bobby’s homeroom. Bobby wasn’t there, either. Where was he? Something was definitely wrong.

And then it happened. It started as a twitch at first, but quickly grew. It was the ring. It was moving. It felt like it was squeezing and releasing, squeezing and releasing.

“Dimond! Hey, Dimond! Where is he?” More kids were closing in. This was not a good time. Mark didn’t know what to do, so he grabbed the ring with his other hand and ran. He blasted through kids, bumping into more than he dodged. A couple of older guys pushed him back, nearly sending him sprawling, but Mark somehow stayed on his feet. The bell rang and everyone headed for homeroom, but Mark didn’t stop until he reached his own personal Fortress of Solitude-the boys’ bathroom on the third floor.

He ran to the center of the room and held his hand out as if it didn’t belong to him. The ring was still moving, squeezing and releasing like a heartbeat. Then the gray stone started to sparkle. An instant before it had been a solid gray mass; now it sprang to life like a brilliant diamond. Beams of light shot from the ring and filled the room.

Mark couldn’t take it anymore. He yanked off the strange ring and threw it. It hit the tiled wall and bounced to a stop in the center of the bathroom. The beams of light continued to shoot from the stone and dance across the ceiling and the walls, making the room look as if it were alive with beautiful, dazzling stars.

Then Mark watched in awe as the circular band started to grow larger. It slowly got bigger and bigger until it was about the size of a Frisbee, and in the center of the now impossibly large band was a black hole where the floor should have been. The ring had opened up a dark portal to…somewhere. From deep within this portal, Mark could hear the faint sound of musical notes. It wasn’t a melody; it was a jumble of sweet sounding tones that grew louder and louder.

Mark backed away from the strange ring, not sure if he should turn and run or stay and watch the show. He was fascinated and terrified at the same time. The musical notes coming from the portal got so loud that Mark had to cover his ears. Whatever was happening, he didn’t want any part of it anymore. So he turned and ran for the door. He was just about to throw it open when…

Everything stopped. The musical notes ended so abruptly it was like somebody threw a switch to cut the power. The dazzling light show ended also. The only thing that didn’t stop was Mark’s pounding heart. Whatever had just happened, it was over now and Mark tried to calm down. He took his hand away from the door and looked back into the bathroom. What he saw was the ring on the floor, right where he had thrown it. It was back to its normal size and the stone had returned to its original solid gray color.

But something else was there too. Lying on the floor next to the ring was a scroll of paper. It was yellow parchment that had been tightly rolled and tied with a thin leather strap. Whatever the event had been with the ring, the result was that it had deposited this scroll here on the bathroom floor.

Mark approached the scroll cautiously, bent down, and picked it up with a sweaty hand. It was indeed rolled paper. Nothing scary about it. Just odd. Mark tugged on the leather cord that kept it together and gently unrolled the paper. There were four sheets, all filled with writing. Mark looked at the first line of the first page, and what he read hit him like an electric charge. He couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t think. This strange parchment was a letter…to him.

It began: I hope you’re reading this, Mark.

Denduron

There wasn’t much I could ask Uncle Press from the back of a speeding motorcycle. Between the whine of the engine, the blast of wind rushing by and the fact that both of us were wearing these high-tech helmets, conversation was impossible. So I was left with my own imagination to try and figure out where we were going and why.

One thing was clear though. We were leaving town. I lived in a quiet, peaceful, okaydull suburb of New York City. I’d been into the city a few times with my parents, mostly to go to events like the holiday spectacular at Radio City or the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Then there was that one time you and I, Mark, hopped the commuter train to catch that James Bond flick. Remember? Other than that, the city was pretty much a mystery to me.

On the other hand, it didn’t take a New York cabbie to realize Uncle Press was steering us into a section of the city that by anybody’s standards would be defined as…bad. This was not the New York I’d ever seen, except maybe on a TV news report about some nasty crime that had just gone down. Once we shot off the Cross Bronx Expressway we were smack in the middle of the badlands. Burned-out buildings were everywhere. Nobody walked on the streets. It all looked empty and desolate, yet I had the eerie feeling that many sets of eyes were locked on us from the dark windows of the derelict buildings as we cruised by. And of course, it was nighttime dark.

Was I scared? Well, judging by the fact that I wanted to puke and I held on to Uncle Press so hard I expected to hear one of his ribs crack, I’d say yeah, I was scared. Uncle Press guided the motorcycle toward one of those old-fashioned kiosks that marked the stairs leading down to the subway. We bounced up onto the curb and he killed the engine. As we glided to a stop, suddenly everything became quiet. Granted, I’d been riding on the back of a motorcycle for the past half hour and after thatanything would seem quiet. But this wasreally quiet, like a ghost town. Or a ghost city.