Mystics #1: The Seventh Sense (15 page)

Once he stopped coughing Simon cradled the cramp in his side. “I
don’t know—and I don’t care. I thought we were dead. I looked forward to
graduating.”

“I know why they stopped coming after us.” Tristan ducked under a
large tree root and came out on the other side. “Because there’s a wall here.
We can’t get through. I think we may have to go back.”

Zoey slipped under the tree root and came over beside Tristan. A row
of giant, black, leafless trees was an ominous mountain in front of them. Although
their bark glistened in the sun like precious jewels, their trunks were twisted
together in a giant mass that blocked the path for miles.

Zoey could glimpse a clearing through the small gaps between the
stumps of the gleaming wall—Troll City—it had to be. A flutter of excitement
passed through her. Her mother could be somewhere beyond those trees.

“We’re going to get through.”

Zoey fastened her boomerang onto her bracelet, and then sprinted
towards the giant tree wall.

 
“Zoey! Wait!” yelled Tristan.
“Zoey, stop!”

But Zoey ignored him and ran. She reached the edged of the trees and
started to climb. But her fingers lost their grip, and she fell back down. The
bark was as slippery and cold as ice. She yelled out in frustration and tried
to pull herself up again. But she lost her footing and fell.

“It’s useless. We’ll never be able to climb those trees,” said Simon.

He rubbed the tree with his hand. “It’s almost like the top part of
it is made of oil or something. It’s too bad I didn’t bring my axe. I could
have cut it down.”

“You don’t own an axe,” muttered Tristan.

Zoey got up and kicked the tree. “Stupid tree!”

Tristan looked around. “We’ll have to go around it. We don’t have
the tools to climb it.”

“And how long is that going to take? It goes on for miles,” said
Zoey, exasperated. “I bet the agency already suspects we’re gone—we left hours ago.
They’ll figure out I’ve disobeyed them when we miss class.”

“We could go back?” suggested Simon. “If we sneak back now, they
might not even notice that we were gone.”

“No,” said Zoey shortly. “I’ve come all this way. You guys can go
back if you want.”

“We’re coming with you,” said Tristan. He turned to Simon who was
strolling back down the path. “Right, Simon.”

Simon turned around and came walking back with a look of guilt on
his face. “Uh—yeah. Sure—right.”

Zoey turned around and peered through a break between the trees. “I’m
not giving up, not now. My mother may be here somewhere—I have to find her.
She’s there—somewhere down there in
Troll
City
.”

A loud screeching noise came from the wall of trees. Zoey and the
others jumped back. The massive tree wall moved. Its trunks drew apart slowly, like
tall drapes, until a section began to open up. It stopped moving with a final
crack
, and Zoey could see that a refrigerator-sized
gap had formed in the colossal tree barrier.

“I guess that was the magic word,” said Simon, looking amazed.

Zoey marveled at the beauty and magic of the trees, she had never
seen anything so marvelous and eerie at the same. She wished she could stay a
while and examine it, but she pulled herself away and said, “Come on, before it
decides to close us off again.”

Zoey stepped through the gap between the trunks and popped out to
the other side.

She stopped dead in her tracks.

“Guys, where’s the town?”

Simon and Tristan came up behind her. They looked out over a vast
landscape of swampland, hills, and meadows that stretched out to the horizon—but
no town.

“There has to be some mistake. It has to be here somewhere.”

Zoey circled around, looking for a clue of some kind. Finally something
caught her eye. An old wooden sign was nailed crookedly onto the back of one of
the trees. The sign read Troll City, with a badly painted black arrow pointing
down.

Zoey sighed deeply. “Now what’s that supposed to mean? We don’t have
time for games!” She was starting to think that this trip might have been a grave
mistake, and that there really was no Troll City. The sign was someone’s idea
of a joke.

Simon tried to twist the sign. “Trolls aren’t known for their large
brains, you know. I bet they wrote it wrong. Maybe we should keep going
straight?”

Zoey yelled out in frustration. She paced around and kicked the
ground. Her foot hit something hard. She parted the overgrown bush with her
shoe and revealed a piece of flat metal. She fell to her knees and pulled at
the weeds that covered it. When she was done, she stood up and stepped back—it
was a door.

It was made of brass and looked as though it belonged at the front
of some medieval castle—except that it lay flat on the ground in the middle of
the swamp. Symbols and runes were etched around the door in a language Zoey
didn’t recognize. Spikes and evil looking knobs and hooks decorated most of the
front. The most disturbing part of all was the handle—it was a brass hand.

“Guess the sign was right after all,” said Simon as he stood next to
Zoey. “Maybe trolls are not as stupid as we think they are.”

Zoey eyed the hand suspiciously.

“It’s a door—a door in the ground in the middle of nowhere with a
really creepy handle. Do you think it actually
leads
to somewhere? Have you guys ever heard of something like
this? A door in the ground—can this be real?”

Tristan shook his head and frowned. “I never did. It’s by far the
strangest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Same here,” answered Simon. “I feel like I’m in an old black-and-white
version of
The
Twilight Zone
. But they did a good job at hiding it, in case some
Mutes came along.”

“Or agents,” said Zoey. “Well,
we
almost missed it, didn’t we? I guess they didn’t want anyone finding it. So if
that’s true, then this
door
probably
does lead to Troll City. This must be it—I’m sure of it.”

Zoey figured
she
should be
the one to pull open the creepy door. That way, if something bad were to
happen, then it would happen to her and not her friends.

“I’m going first,” said Zoey. She lifted her hand at Tristan who was
about to protest. “This is my plan—my problem—and if something goes wrong,
it’ll be on me.”

Tristan looked alarmed but didn’t say anything.

Zoey turned her attention back to the handle. “Okay, creepy mannequin’s
hand—here goes nothing.”

She wrapped her hand around the brass-hand handle. The hairs on the
back of her neck stood up—the hand was
warm
.
Faster than a blink of an eye, the brass fingers grasped her hand tightly.

“
Ahh
!” screamed Zoey. “Get it off me! Get
it off!”

She pulled and pulled, trying to yank her hand free of the metal
hand, but it wouldn’t move. Panic gripped at her throat like giant hands
squeezing the breath out of her. She was in shock.

Tristan and Simon jumped to her aid and tried to pry the fingers
from her hand.

“They’re not coming off!” said Tristan, his face red. “Can’t. Lift.
Them,” he said breathlessly.

“Oh, this is really bad,” said Simon wiping the sweat from his brow.
“She’s stuck! The stupid handle’s locked! It won’t move!”

“I know she’s stuck,” yelled Tristan. “Maybe we can put some mud around
her hand, and it’ll help to slip it out.”

“Yeah, good idea,” agreed Simon. “Mud is good.”

But Zoey wasn’t listening. She just wanted the creepy hand off of her.
In her panic she started to hyperventilate. She yanked and pulled, kicked, and
finally slipped and fell to the side.

 
The door swung open, and the
hand released its grip. Zoey watched the heavy door crash open beside her, lifted
herself up on her elbows, and stole a peek inside.

A stone staircase disappeared into the shadows below.

But then a series of lights flicked on, and soon the staircase was
illuminated in the gold flames of wall torches.

Zoey started to breathe normally again. She swung her legs down into
the doorway.

“Zoey, be careful.” Tristan leaned over her. “We don’t know what’s
down there.”

“I will.” Carefully, Zoey climbed down to the first step.

The stairs were carved from rock and were steady enough to climb
down. She could see the staircase winding down into shadow below her.

Tristan and Simon climbed down after her.

After a ten-minute walk, they came to a platform and another set of
stairs going up. They climbed the long, winding staircase for more than half an
hour. Zoey’s thighs burned from the uphill climb. And just when she thought she
couldn’t lift another leg, they finally arrived at the end of the staircase. Another
door with another eerie hand handle stood before them, except this time the
door was black and twice as large.

“These doors are disturbing on purpose,” said Zoey, eyeing the thick
fingers from the handle. “I don’t think anyone in their right mind would try to
open
another
one.”

“Yes, but we’re all
crazy
,”
said Simon. “Crazy to have come here in the first place.”

Zoey paused for a second, catching her breath.

“Troll City, here we come.” She wrapped her fingers around the hand —trying
not to wince), turned the handle, and pushed through. The door fell back at
once. As she climbed through the door, she was half-blinded by the sudden,
bright light.

As her vision adjusted, her senses were on overdrive. Her skin tingled,
and she shivered with the presence of mystics. It was like when she’d first come
to the hive and sensed the mystics who were stepping in and out of the mirror-ports
in the main hall. Only this time, there were a lot more. She could feel them.

Simon stumbled out after her. “Oh my God, I’m blind! I can’t see!
Zoey? Tristan? My friends? Is this heaven?”

“Oh shut up—it’ll go away in a minute.” Tristan stepped out, rubbing
his eyes.

Once the black spots had disappeared from her eyes, Zoey looked
around, and her heart stopped. They stood in the middle of the most
extraordinary town she had ever seen. Rows of wooden tree houses lined the
streets. Other homes and shops were carved into the side of a great hill, like
a giant wall of Swiss cheese. The city looked as though a madman had designed
it.

A series of doors like the ones they had just climbed through wrapped
the edges of the town like a sidewalk. With a bang, one of the doors swung open,
and a long-haired mystic with striped white and black skin like a zebra climbed
out of the door.

Mystics were everywhere. There were tall mystics with red, scaly
skin and necks like giraffes. Others were short and round with brilliant orange
fur and long, bushy tails.

Zoey heard the beat of a wing and turned to see a creature with the
head and wings of an eagle, but with the body of a lion. It landed in a small
courtyard behind them. It took a sudden leap, and there was a flash or orange
fur. Zoey was horrified as she watched one of the small orange mystics
disappear down the griffin’s throat. Around the corner, a stout mystic in a
light blue suit carried a briefcase and conversed loudly with a young mystic
who scribbled furiously in a notepad.

And then, as if they were in a movie in slow motion, all the mystics
in the town stopped what they were doing and stared at them. Zoey looked to
Tristan and Simon, and waited for an attack. But instead, the mystics screamed,
flailed their arms in the air, and dashed for cover. It was as though the three
of them were a savage army or a nuclear bomb that was about to fall. With ear
piercing screams the mystics rushed into their homes and shops, slammed their
doors behind them, and pulled the curtains shut.

Soon the town was deserted except for a few evil-looking mystics who
hung back in the shadows.

“So much for the warm welcome I was hoping for,” said Simon
sarcastically.

Zoey looked around. “I thought you said this place was supposed to be
dangerous? By the looks of things, I’d say that the mystics are more afraid of
us than we are of them. What gives?”

“I don’t know—but not all of them are afraid.”

Tristan gestured towards the five, giant humanoids with thick, gray,
leathery skin and bulging muscles who had stood their ground. Their metal armor
gleamed in the sun, and they brandished axes, clubs, and sharp swords. Although
they looked ready to do battle, they simply stood still and watched.

“Trolls,” said Tristan. “The trolls of Troll City. Man, they’re
really
big
. I never thought they’d be
this big.”

“I don’t like the way they’re looking at us,” said Simon in a small
voice. “They look hungry. Don’t you think they look hungry?”

“But why are they just standing there and staring?” asked Zoey.
“It’s like they’re waiting for something.”

As if on cue,
the ground trembled,
and
twenty low-riding
motorcycles came roaring into the town
with a
thunderous rumble
.
They were green and glistened in the sun like emeralds. Astride the motorcycles
were small, tattooed men dressed in leather.
They
circled, and the gasoline fumes and heat made Zoey cough. The motorcycles
circled them one last time and then stopped. They were surrounded.

“What is this? A munchkin invasion?” laughed Simon. Zoey elbowed him
in the ribs.

The bikers were small, but heavily muscled. Their stone-cold
expressions meant business. Unlike Simon, Zoey didn’t underestimate their size.

A man in a green top hat got off his motorcycle. He was about four
feet tall, and his orange hair stuck out at odd angles from under his hat. He
looked like the largest of his crew. His long, green, leather coat billowed
around him as he stepped forward, and his black motorcycle boots made puffs of
dust as he walked. He looked to be about forty, but Zoey couldn’t really tell
how old he was because of all the tattoos of black runes on his skin. He had ten
skull-like earrings dangling from his large ears, and a single ring, like a
bull’s, in the middle of his nose. He smiled with the stained yellow teeth of
someone who had never brushed his teeth.