Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware Read online

Lily looked straight down the barrel of Bntno’s gun.

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  And then there was a crackle in the bushes. And another voice with a Doverian accent said, “Puts gun down! Puts gun down!”

  Lily was confused. It was as if a prompter for a play was calling out the stage directions. She felt like she was hallucinating. But the voice came again. “All of you! No gun! Stand up! Hand up!”

  A man stepped out of the bushes. He had a gun, too. He was wearing camouflage clothing.

  “You’ve been following us!” cried Jasper.

  “Puts gun down!” said the man.

  Bntno slowly crouched and lay his pistol on the grass. He stood back up, his hands raised above his head.

  “Thank you!” said Katie. “We were just thinking that he was going to—”

  “Quiet silence!” cried the new gunman.

  Katie and Lily had no idea what was going on.

  Jasper, I’m afraid, did.

  “Sir,” he said, “I know what this is about.”

  “You!” said the man. “Yes, you!”

  “Who is this person?” asked Katie.

  “Fifteen cent!” said the man. “Fifteen cent!”

  “Ah,” said Jasper Dash. “Yes, I owe you fifteen cents. I deeply apologize. You very generously let me use your commuter vaultapult to chase—”

  “I follow you days! I get that fifteen cent!”

  Jasper smiled. “Indeed. And you’ve saved us again. We are very grateful to you. Of course, I shall pay what I owe you down to the last penny. May I put down my hands and get the change for you?”

  The man nodded angrily.

  Jasper reached down and felt in his pockets.

  While he searched, Lily asked quietly, “Why didn’t you just stop us early on? Why did you follow us?”

  “Whenever I find you, you is always sleeped.”

  “You could have woken us up,” said Katie.

  “Very rude! No. I will not wake up the peoples. I not rude. This sir, he is rude.” The man gestured at Jasper.

  “But you were fine with putting sugar in our gas tank,” said Katie.

  “To stop you! But you are not stop! So next night, I catch up, I finds you, I come to speak to you, and you are snoozed again! I do not want to be rude man. So I try to write message to you: ‘Remember you owe me fifteen cent—’”

  “But your Magic Marker ran out of ink,” said Lily.

  “Yes! Bad for write on metal door.”

  The Boy Technonaut was searching the pockets of his rucksack. He said, “I’m glad that this is all that the following business was about. It was getting quite worrying. Anyway, ha. Swell. Let me just…” His hands came up empty. Nothing. “Chums,” he said, “perhaps you have the fifteen cents?”

  Lily started to check her jeans.

  “Don’t,” said Katie. “Bother. Don’t bother.” She sounded kind of miserable.

  “Why?” said Jasper. “Surely one of us has…” And then he realized.

  “Nope,” said Katie. “I…um…I used all of our change to try to buy a Dr Pepper back at that base.”

  “Every…penny…,” Jasper realized.

  “Yeah,” said Katie. “Every last little penny.”

  “Then,” said their stalker, “then thing end very badly right now. Very badly, yes. I take one of you with me as hostage. And now I get very rude, too.”

  He raised his gun.

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  “You,” he said to Bntno. “Man with gun. You come with me as hostage.”

  Bntno pointed to himself.

  “Yes. Man with gun. Now. I pick up you gun. And you walk with me. We walk back to Dover. And you find me change, fifteen cent.”

  “But I—”

  “The gun speak louder than the talk!” screamed the vaultapult attendant. “I have walk three day to come here. Make good speed!”

  Bntno slowly and sadly gathered up his sleeping bag and his backpack. The man kept the gun on him. The man told Jasper and Lily how to tie Bntno’s hands.

  Then the man led Bntno away into the jungle, Bntno complaining, in Doverian, that the Ministry of Silence would be peeved.

  Soon they were gone.

  For a while, the three friends stood where they were, kind of shocked. So much had changed so quickly.

  The birds tootled and sang.

  “Great Scott,” said Jasper. “I think we just had two problems solved at once.”

  “Yeah…,” said Katie. “I…guess.”

  “So you know which mountain the monastery is on?”

  “Sure,” said Katie. “That one.” She pointed at the mountain with the pine forest.

  “Oh,” said Jasper. He clapped his hands together briskly. “Well,” he said, “it’s an excellent day for a walk, we have miles to go, and a friend awaits us at the end of the road. Have I mentioned that I feel like a redwood about to spread its limbs toward the sun?”

  “And say to the morning, ‘Hello,’” said Lily.

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  Later that afternoon, the three friends reached the great pine forests of Tlmp. Though the day was still warm, a chill wind beat at them as they climbed up through its heights. The boughs of the pines swayed, sending deep shadows skating across their faces.

  “Who would have thought this weekend, when we were at the big game, that a few days later we’d be climbing a mountain looking for a monastery?” said Lily.

  “Yeah,” grumbled Katie. “Who would’ve thought.” She sighed and spread out her steps to crunch a pinecone at each footfall. “At least,” she said, “I haven’t thought about Choate Brinsley all day.”

  “Choate?” said Jasper. “Why are you trying not to think about Choate?”

  “Jasper,” said Katie pityingly. “You really don’t understand, do you?” She hopped to crush a cone.

  He furrowed his brow. “You puzzle me, Katie.”

  “You know, sometimes, there’s this attraction that can’t be explained?”

  “Are you speaking of gluons and quarks? Certainly they can’t be explained entirely by current physics, but I hope that through the application of my antimatter accelerator—”

  “That’s not what I mean,” said Katie.

  “An antimatter accelerator sounds a little dangerous,” said Lily.

  “Yeah,” said Katie. “Who ever needed fast antimatter?”

  “You are speaking,” Jasper intuited, “of the tender sentiments.”

  Katie said, “Whoo-boy.”

  “Yes, Jasper,” said Lily. “That’s kind of what she’s talking about.”

  “You have a pash for Choate Brinsley?”

  “A what?”

  “A crush?”

  “I did. He’s always mean to me.”

  “So you’ve stopped having a crush on him?”

  “It’s not really that simple.”

  Jasper said, “Surely you can’t want to spend time with someone who is mean to you.”

  “Well, he wouldn’t be mean to me if we were going out.”

  Lily said, “You don’t know that.”

  “We could ride a tandem bicycle,” said Katie. “And go for canoe rides in the summer.”

  “Katie,” said Jasper, “you’re too good a person for Choate Brinsley. The girls he likes…They can’t hold a candle to you. They’re not funny like you are. They’re not plucky like you are. They’re not wonderful like you are. They have never stopped the hungry hauntings of zombies. They have never defeated a single toad god or had the pleasure of repelling gunplay with a trash-can lid.”

  Katie felt her throat getting all wobbly. “Thank you, Jas,” she said. After a minute of walking in silence, with Katie crunching on the pinecones, she said, “But you know, sometimes I kind of feel like I’d like to be normal. Maybe all three of us would be happier if we were more normal.”

  “No one’s normal,” said Lily quietly. “For people to be normal, there would have to be an average person. But people are too different. Look at all the people in Dover and then think about p
eople back in Pelt. What’s normal?”

  “Exactly,” Jasper said.

  “Normal,” said Katie, “means when you go out with your friends, you know you won’t end the evening jumping over pits of talking carpenter ants.”

  “I apologize for that,” said Jasper soberly. “But that was three weeks ago, and I wish we would all put it behind us.”

  “Do you think Choate would ever—”

  I am very glad that the conversation was interrupted at this moment by a long tentacle coming down out of the trees, because I have to say I do not like emotional conversations.

  The Cutesy Dell Twins’ books are filled with talk about who likes who and whether people are “right” for each other. In each and every book of that series, one or the other of them falls in love with somebody and spends the whole time thinking about him in a T-shirt, riding a horse—but nothing ever really works out for them. The guy’s cuter jerky cousin comes to town, or it turns out he’s really someone’s brother in disguise, or he moves to Cincinnati, or they have a disagreement about how to take care of dogs. Talk, talk, talk. No one stumbles on any ancient devices, the stars in the night sky are pretty and not filled with alien menace, and there is never a single circular saw—let alone a circular saw with a conveyor belt.

  My friends, where’s the zest in that?

  No, give me a slice of the life adventurous. Show me something unusual. Give me the stuff of dreams and nightmares!

  For example, this gigantic, many-eyed beast currently warping its way between the trees, grabbing at Katie with its tentacles. Now that is something to talk about. Would you rather we talked about the beast, with its thousand eyes and sloppy mouths and carking cries of hunger, or go back to “Is he right for me?” and “Oh, it’s just like there’s this fence between us and I can see between the pickets, but some are overgrown with this…” etc. etc.?

  I know my answer. And I’ll give it quick, because Katie might only have a few seconds left with her current arms and face.

  Excuse me.

  Okay: Roll the beast!

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  The beast swayed above them, its drooling mouths smacking, its tentacles snaking between the pine boughs. Its cries echoed over the crags and cliffs.

  “Run!” said Jasper. “It’s the Thing from the bridge in Greylag!”

  They ran, bounding through spruce.

  “I think,” Lily said, puffing, “I think…this one’s smaller.”

  “Or a child,” said Jasper. “Of the same species.”

  The three swerved around bushes. The awful kraken levered itself over branches, chuckling in the firs.

  “I have…a horrible thought…,” said Lily.

  Katie asked, “What’s that?” as the beast roared.

  “The tentacles…,” said Lily. “Katie… Jasper…Maybe these are mountain squids. I…thought they…lived in the water…but…”

  “But maybe they don’t,” said Katie. “Maybe they live in trees and chasms.”

  “And…,” Lily panted, “that means…that we might be going up the wrong mountain…Maybe Tlmp…is the one with the lake…”

  “We can’t think about that just now,” said Jasper.

  “It’s no good running!” said Katie, looking backward. “It’s faster than we are!”

  The squid came hurtling down at them. Lily ducked—Jasper yelped—

  The monster threw itself through the treetops—chose Katie—snaked out a feeler.

  Katie shrieked—then shouted in defiant surprise, “What is it”—swatting at the tentacle—“with me and tentacles these days?”*

  The squid lifted her from the ground. She half turned—as much as she could—feeling the muscle ripple around her, and saw the huge, chip-toothed mouth, the pulsing coils—

  She screamed.

  And out of the air, a curious beast flew.

  It was a dinosaur—green—with a gentle face—four stumpy legs—two graceful, feathered wings—and a sparkly, soft mane of purple and pink. It descended from the sky to face the squid.

  Katie looked up at it in wonder.

  It roared fearsomely at the mountain squid. The squid, aghast, dropped Katie to the ground. It started whipping tentacles at the sky, flailing the tops of the trees. The dinosaur roared, reared.

  Battle was joined. The giant drool-mouths of the squid chomped away at the air as feelers slapped the beating wings of the sky-saur. Gilt feathers wafted through the air.

  Katie stood by her friends, mouth open, watching the battle.

  “It’s…it’s my dinosaur,” she said. “That I made out of my Star-Wonder Glitter-Pony. They…they really exist.”

  “Incredible!” said Jasper.

  “We’d better run,” said Lily. “While we can.”

  “Hey!” said Katie. “Where is that stupid teacher? He should not have made me redo that dinosaur project! I want an appeal to a higher court!”

  They had started walking away from the fight. Katie’s dinosaur had lifted up the mountain squid, pulling its suckers out of the treetops, and was carrying it off somewhere for dinner.

  “Um, we have another problem,” said Lily. “If that’s a mountain squid, then we don’t know that we’re even on the right mountain.”

  Katie asked, “Do you think that dinosaur could become my own special dinosaur? And always protect me from tentacles?”

  Jasper took his brass telescope out of his bag and trained it on the other peaks. “I am searching…,” he said, “searching for other monsters like that one. Ah. Yes. There’s one crawling on the rocks near the giant pillar. And one in the grass near the lake. This is a dismal sight, chaps. The mountains appear to be fairly lousy with squid.”

  “So we don’t know we’re going the right way,” said Lily. “I led us into a wild goose chase.”

  “No,” said Jasper, snapping the spyglass shut. “I led us into a wild goose chase.”

  But it was Lily who felt awful. She had been proud of her solution—she felt like she had really contributed something—and she’d been proved wrong.

  I know exactly how she feels. Because you and I were proved wrong too. We did the same puzzle and came up with the same solution. It could be that if we’d figured out that grid correctly, right now you’d be reading a book about someone on a different mountain, striding up to the mysterious, aeon-blasted pillar, say, and reaching out a hand to touch its pitted surface, when suddenly we hear, through the howling wind on the high heath, a sound like something moving right underground, under our feet, and realize that this mountain is actually the fabled location of—

  But no. All of us—you, me, and Lily—have ended up here on the mountain with the pine forest, and our choice wasn’t illogical. We did a good job. We just didn’t know an important fact about mountain squids.

  But still, Lily felt terrible. She scraped at the bangs that kept blowing in her eyes, and squinted bleakly around at the peaks and the jungles.

  “What are we going to do?” said Katie.

  “Let’s keep going up,” said Jasper. “When we have a better vantage point, maybe we’ll be able to see the tops of the other mountains.”

  They walked through steep valleys of rock. They scrambled over bracken. There were, eventually, blueberry bushes.

  Each time they thought they were almost at the peak of the mountain, they discovered that they were just on the lip of another hillock—and still the mountain towered higher.

  Round about evening, they broke out of the tree line for good.

  Below them, stretching as far as they could see, were the jungles of Delaware: the gorges and hills. Very far away they saw the grasslands, the rice paddies through which they had driven with Bntno. Out there lights were sparkling in distant villages and farmsteads.

  The cold evening wind blew over them.

  “We don’t even know that this is the right mountain anymore,” said Lily.

  “We need to sleep,” said Katie. “I’m tired.”

  “It’s not safe,” said Jas
per.

  “So what are we going to do?” Katie demanded. “We can’t just walk until we fall over!”

  “We need to keep walking,” said Jasper.

  “Says who?” Katie demanded. “This isn’t a walk-ocracy.”

  “I’d really like to stop,” said Lily. “I mean, I could go on, but…”

  Katie repeated, “What are we going to do?”

  And just at that moment, nearby, there was a soft green glow.

  They turned and looked across the barren mountainside. Boulders and crevasses caught the light of the dying sun. The sky was red. One blasted, crooked little tree was red.

  And beside it was the ghostly figure of a boy. He did not seem to see them but stood upon the mountainside as if keeping watch. He was green and translucent, and his robes rippled in the wind.

  It looked as if he had been standing there playing sentinel since the ancient times. He looked out over the crimson horizon.

  “Drgnan!” exclaimed Jasper. “Drgnan Pghlik!”

  He ran toward his old friend.

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  “Drgnan!” Jasper said. “It is wonderful to see you! Even translucently!”

  But the ghostly Drgnan Pghlik did not seem aware of Jasper. It simply turned and started pacing away up the mountain.

  “It’s his astral form!” said Jasper, delighted. “He sent his astral form to guide us the last few miles.”

  They scurried after the specter.

  “Lily,” whispered Katie. “Do you realize what this means? You were right all along! Tlmp is the mountain with the pine forest—and we’re on it!”

  Lily nodded. “Yeah,” she said, feeling a little better.*

  “She’s right, Lily,” said Jasper, scrambling over a boulder. “If it hadn’t been for you, we’d be hours away. He never would have found us.”

  “Can we throw stuff through him?” asked Katie. “I mean, safely?”

  No one answered her; and soon, they were all too exhausted with the climb to speak. The ghostly figure led them along paths through the night. In some places, there were secret stairs that had been carved into the rock. He drifted forward on narrow rims of stone.