“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 journey. 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.