Bently McQuinn Saves Literature

When everything had stopped spinning and Bently was firmly on his feet, he found himself on the grounds of an old mansion. The trees and bushes were overgrown, creating almost a swamp-like effect. The house itself was of aging brick, with ivy climbing up one section of the front. The only lights that were on were in a big window on the first floor, and all Bently could see inside it were shelves and shelves of books. Before Bently could ask where they were, King was already ringing the doorbell.

“Who in the world is calling at this time of night?” asked a voice, irritated, and the front door opened to reveal an older woman in a nightgown and slippers. She gave quite a start when she saw King, Pansy, and Bently on her doorstep.

“Stephen! Finally you’re here!” she said, looking both relieved and displeased. “I see you’ve brought company. Who are they?”

“Hello Eleanor, short on the fuse as always… this is Pansy Parkinson, a sort of guard, and Bently McQuinn, the new master.”

Bently tried not to look confused. Master? Him? Master of what?

Eleanor looked him over, a stingant look on her face. “It’s this boy? Really? Well, I trust your judgment, Stephen, but he doesn’t look like much.”

“No, he doesn’t, but Neville said he was he one they called last time, and that he cleaned house.”

Eleanor sighed, and let them in. “Well, I hope he’s right.”

She led them down a cramped hall and left into a huge library. It was dimly lit, and there were books on every surface imaginable. In the shelves, on the shelves, on other books on the shelves, the tables, most the chairs, on the floor… there was even a stack of books supporting a lamp. It seemed to be an organized mess. And among the mess sat a girl and a man, each with a stack of books next to them and reading one. The man looked up, and his expression brightened.

“Stephen! You’ve finally made it!” he said, getting up and going to shake King’s hand.

King gave him a small half-smile. “They had a bit of trouble finding him, but he’s here now. It’s been years, hasn’t it, Mo?”

“Yes, it has.”

The girl now stood too. She was a few years younger than Bently, probably around fourteen, and had light brown, curly hair. Her eyes were brown as well, and she came up to about Bently’s nose. It was then that Mo noticed her.

“Oh yes! You never got a chance to meet my daughter, Meggie. Meggie, this is Stephen King, the writer I’ve told you about. The one who saved everything last time.”

Meggie’s eyes went wide with delight. “Really? Wow, it’s great to meet you, Mr. King. Mo talks about you a lot.”

King smiled again. “Do you know, Mo?”

Mo nodded. “Of course. Without you, most of these books probably wouldn’t be here.” He gestured to the piles next to his and Meggie’s chairs.

Pansy cleared her throat loudly. “Yeah, we’re still here,” she said rudely.

Mo blinked. “My apologies, who are you?”

“Pansy Parkinson, from Harry Potter. I’m supposed to be protecting King and Bently.”

Mo nodded, but Bently had caught his eye. He gazed at Bently, a bit wondrous. “So you’re the boy who’s supposed to be the new master?”

Bently shifted uncomfortably. “I guess, but master of what? No one’s told me.”

Mo looked shocked. “The master of writing, of course!”

Bently gave a start. Him, the master of writing? Wasn’t that reserved for people like Shakespeare, Dante, and the man in the room, Stephen King? He had gotten good grades in English, but he had supposed that was because he liked reading and actually read all the books.

“Me? What? That’s not possible!”

“You aren’t yet, let me assure you,” said King. “You’ll need to be trained, of course. But if you’re ever going to defeat Meyer, you’re going to need something more powerful than that wand and sword.”

“The pen is mightier than the sword,” quoted Mo.

“So… that’s why you’re here? To teach me how to write?” Bently asked King, who nodded.

“Yes. That and I know what to do. I was the one who was the writing master, last time.” There was a moment of silence, and then King continued. “Bently, do you know how I got to be such a good author? How I got so famous?”

“Uh, yeah, you’re a damn good writer.”

“But I used to be just like you; average. That is, until I was called upon by the great literary characters of my time to defeat Harrison Dent. I had no idea how to properly put a sentence together, how to pick the right words, how to convey the deepest emotions. But they saw my potential. I was taught by the previous master of writing, Edgar Allan Poe.”

“Edgar Allan Poe taught you to write?”

“Yes. Well, himself in ghost form. Obviously, he was dead long before my time, but there hadn’t been any need for a master in between our times. The one before him was Shakespeare.”

Bently’s head was spinning again. This was completely crazy.

“But you see, last time, I only had a few stories to clean up. But afterwards, I could do it. Words flowed freely for me, and in abundance. I published soon afterwards, and it’s been nothing but success. I’m afraid, however, that it’ll be a bit trickier for you.”

“Why?”

“Because Dent was a poet, not an author. He didn’t exactly have any solid characters to kill, meaning he was rather easy to defeat. Meyer has an entire army of not only sparkling vampires, but a huge fan base of horny thirteen-year-old girls. She literally has thousands of people under her command. That’s how she opened the portals between our world and the books in the first place; she got all of her fans to write lots and lots of horrid fanfiction. Not only did it mess up the worlds, but it allowed her characters to take over the worlds and begin destroying them. If we don’t stop her soon, kill off her characters, and close the portals, then…”

“Then what?” Bently asked when King didn’t finish.

King sighed. “The texts themselves will change. Across our world, the text of every copy of that book will reflect the destroyed world within. Every person who tries to read a copy will be disgusted, and resort to reading the books of whoever started everything, in this case, Meyer, and books like hers.”

“So basically… it’s like Super Paper Mario. The different worlds are getting engulfed in a void that is Meyer’s characters, and if we don’t stop it, everyone in the world will end up reading books like the ones in the teen section; trashy vampire romance novels,” Bently concluded. He doubted anyone would get the video game reference, but everything was now starting to more-or-less make sense to him at least.

“If that analogy suits you,” King agreed.

“So how do we take them down?” Bently asked, determined now.

“That’s where Mo and Meggie come in,” said King, beginning to un-bury a few chairs from under the piles of books.

“Meggie and I have a special ability,” Mo said, sitting down in his chair. “We’re Portal Jumpers, or rather, people who can read people and objects in and out of books.”

Bently’s jaw dropped. “Really? You can do that?”

“Yes. I was Stephen’s Jumper when he had to take on Dent. And now, I think… it’s Meggie’s turn.”

Meggie’s eyes show again, and whether it was out of anxiety or excitement, Bently didn’t know. “Really Mo? Will you let me go with them?”

Mo nodded. “Well, I’ve let you go on crazy adventures yourself, and they need you. Plus, I’m too old.”

“Mortimer, you are not, I am,” Eleanor chimed in, looking ruffled. She looked displeased to have so many people in the library. She sat herself down in a chair King had recently cleaned off and crossed her arms.

“Thank you Eleanor, but I am for this sort of adventure,” Mo said kindly.

“Well, what else do I need to know? It seems like there a million things I don’t know,” Bently asked, eager to learn more.

“Well… you know about Jumpers… oh, the writing law,” said Mo, looking expectantly at King.

“Fine, I’ll tell him.”

“Well, you’re the one who knows best.”

“I suppose… you see, Jumpers can not only go between books, but change what happens in the world itself. When a master writes something exceptionally well, the Jumper can read it and change the world. This will be how we’ll close the portals and defeat Meyer in the end; you’ll have to write her out.”

“Can’t you just do it?” Bently asked.

King shook his head. “No. You’ve been chosen, and now only you can make any major changes. I can now only create new worlds, not change existing new ones.”

Bently sighed. “Alright, fine… anything else?”

“The magic rule,” Pansy said pointedly. “You’ve forgotten about that.”

“What’s that?” Bently asked.

Pansy rolled her eyes. “Alright, since you obviously don’t know… the magic rule is a law about how magic is used in different worlds. Each world has a different amount of magic in it, and that’s related to how much and what kinds of magic you can do. In my world and a few others, like Narnia, there is a lot of magic, so you and I can use magic fairly easily. But, if I were to use magic in Narnia, it wouldn’t be as easy as using magic at Hogwarts. Your magic within yourself has to match up to the magic in the world to be able to use it easily. And then, if there’s no magic in the world, like this one and your world, you can’t use it. That’s why it’s important for you to be able to write well, because not all the books we have to save have magic in them. Luckily, Meyer is in a world where there is some magic, but that will benefit her just as much as it will us.”

“So, I can use magic?”

“Yes, you proved that when you killed the Fairy Lord.”

“Awesome,” Bently said to himself, his hand clenching around his wand in his pocket. He couldn’t, but could at the same time, believe that this was happening. He was going to go into books. He could use magic. He was going to defeat more pansy vampires. He was going to be a writing master. Stephen freaking King was going to teach him.

“Where are we going first?” he asked, anxious to get started.

“I think we should start somewhere that’ll be, well, easy,” said Pansy. “Someplace we can still use magic. I won’t be much use after we’ve got the books with magic taken care of.”

“Yes… Lord of the Rings should do,” said King, picking the book off of Meggie’s stack and handing it to her.

“You sure you can do this, Meggie?” Mo asked.

“Yes Mo, I can.”

“And you have all the books you need to save with you?”

Meggie patted a large shoulder bag on the floor next to her.

“Alright, be careful. Stephen, make sure nothing bad happens to my daughter.”

“Of course, Mo. Meggie?”

Meggie nodded, grabbed the bag, started flipping through the book, and found a passage. Then she began to read.

“Away in the distance eastward they could now see a line of hills. The highest of them was at the right of the line and a little separated from the others. It had a conical top, slightly flattened at the summit.

‘That is Weathertop,’ said Strider. ‘The Old Road, which we have left far away on our right, runs to the south of it and passes not far from its foot...’”

Bently felt a sort of sucking sensation, and the world around him except for himself, Pansy, King, and Meggie began to fade away, and everything was going fuzzy…