The Merchant of Death by D.J. MacHale Read Free Book Online Page B

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 stretchof 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