Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware Read online

  The man shrugged, pointed to his mouth and his ear, and said apologetically, “Has no English. No English.”

  Lisa Buldene whispered to the kids, “I love how they talk here. It’s so quaint and darling. You can tell they’re a very simple, basic people.”

  She shouted a few words in broken Doverian that, translated into English, would be something like, Me want to has the thicken.

  The sausage salesman’s eyes winced with uncertainty. The thicken? he asked.

  She jabbed a finger at the chicken. Thicken! Thicken! she demanded.

  The man smiled and responded in Doverian, Ah, madam, indeed, I see! You mean one of my fine chicken-dogs. Superlative. I believe you will find it to your taste, zesty with spices culled in the hanging gardens of Eberton. The meat is rich with drippings. He served her a sausage wrapped in flatbread. You speak Doverian? he asked her.

  Me sauce, she answered, pointing. He gave her some ketchup. She handed him a big, messy wad of cash. He looked at it in surprise. Then he tipped his cap, looked at her like she was crazy, and strolled away with his cart, shaking his head.

  “Wasn’t he a cute old guy? They’re all so beautiful. They have such lovely souls.” Lisa Buldene held the sausage up to her nose to breathe in its steam. She exclaimed, “What do you think this sauce is? I’ve had so many exotic things to eat here in the last few days, I’m kind of in this great foodie haze. Everything I’ve been served is just fab. I cannot even tell you. Yesterday I had these disks of meat that had been frozen, you know, to lock in all their ancient goodness, and then thrown on a grill and fried, and … Wow. Wow, this sauce smells heavenly. I wonder what it is! Just imagine the little girls in their hats and bells mashing it up in some village courtyard and singing to their donkey!”

  “Um,” said Lily, “I think it might be regular ketch—”

  “I am completely filled up to here with glory,” sighed Lisa Buldene. “The people here are just so authentic, so spiritual. I’ve gotten to know so many new people…. Like you, for example. At home, in New York, I wouldn’t have even talked to you, but here we are, exchanging opinions and—”

  “Saturn’s moons!” cried Jasper. “There’s the van!”

  “That’s not really an opinion,” said Lisa. “It’s more like an exclamation, but I feel that way the whole time here, too, like exclaiming, like crying out to the world that—”

  Jasper had stood, dropped his margarine bowl and tongs, and set off running.

  Because he had just seen a white van drive past—filled with the fake Delaware Stare-Eyes champions!

  21

  “What van?” asked Lisa Buldene. She saw the three kids had scampered away: Jasper first, Katie close behind, and then Lily running as fast as she could. “What van?” the New Yorker called after them. “Is this something I should see? Is it in your guidebook?” She rummaged in her big bag and pulled out her There and Back Again™ Guide to Greater Delaware and began flipping through its index wildly.

  The van rattled down the rutted street. Chickens scurried out of its way. Women with baskets on their heads leaped onto stoops.

  The three friends charged after it. They followed it around a corner—and found themselves in a little cobbled square where a work crew of spavined centaurs was dragging stone blocks. The square was crowded with the half-human, half-horse construction workers; the kids couldn’t see the van at all in the crowd of horse legs and granite. But they heard the van’s engine rev.

  “There!” shouted Katie, and began dodging her way through the centaurs.

  Jasper watched her with wide eyes. He saw something she didn’t see. “NO, KATIE!” he screamed. “NOOOO!”

  But Katie didn’t hear him.

  22

  “NO, KATIE!”

  This time, Katie heard his yell—stopped in her tracks—and looked back, tottering. Jasper was racing toward her.

  “You almost jaywalked!” he called. “Don’t worry! I see a designated crosswalk just ahead of you!”

  “Jasper!” she snarled, and took off again.

  He puffed up along beside her. “If we become like our enemies, then we have lost!”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yeah. And if we lose our enemies, what then?” They barreled down a street and leaped over a stream.

  The van disappeared around a bend near a lopsided old brick building with ancient heroes carved on its doorway. By the time Jasper and Katie got there, they couldn’t tell which way it had gone.

  “Great,” said Katie. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll go this way; you and Lily go that,” said Jasper, hurtling off down the road.

  Katie waved back to Lily and took off in the other direction.

  She ran out into a square with some kind of lumpy monument in the center surrounded by sick grass. The van was on the other side, trundling away down the street. Katie looked back quickly to make sure that Lily had seen her. Lily, puffing along behind, was waving her hands and looked like she was trying to say something. Lily wasn’t a very fast runner. Katie didn’t have time to stop; the van was already a couple of blocks away. She plunged onward.

  They were passing down a row of cloth shops with samples in bright colors hung up for sale on the street. Merchants sat on wide beds and drank tea. When the van roared past, the cloth samples rose up and flapped as if scolding.

  Katie slipped in a mud hole and fell—hit her knee—got back up and kept running. The van was just a little farther away now. She could see one of the kids from the team looking out of the back window at her.

  “Katie!” Lily’s voice came from far behind her. Katie barreled forward.

  The van slid along the row of shops—turned to the left—leaving behind clouds of gray smoke.

  Katie followed.

  The van turned right—passed over a bridge. Katie, her breath heaving, her heart pounding, followed—just in time to see the van screech to a halt at a crossroad. A procession of the city’s Investment Bankers’ Guild was marching to their temple with money-green banners and

  fanfares from bugle and drum.

  There were a lot of them.

  Ha, thought Katie. The van couldn’t move an inch.

  She walked up slowly toward it. She felt triumphant. They weren’t going to escape now. She crossed her arms, smiled an arch smile, and strolled right behind the Stare-Eyes team.

  But now something occurred to her. Maybe it was the thing Lily had been shouting about.

  She didn’t really know what to do, now that she had caught the van. She realized suddenly that she was supposed to follow it secretly. Instead of walking right up behind it. And watching its door slide open. And having about eight heads poke out and look right at her.

  Whoops, thought Katie, stopping in her tracks. I really should have thought this through earlier.

  Eight boys stared back at her. And they were really good at staring.

  23

  “It’s that girl, ” said one of the boys. “The one from Pelt.”

  Team Mom stuck her head out the door. “Katie Mulligan,” she said. “From Horror Hollow. We’ve been introduced.”

  “Oh,” said Katie weakly. “Hi.”

  In front of the van, the procession of investment bankers continued, bearing ornate piggy banks that sloshed with spare change at every step.

  One of the boys gestured to Katie. “You wanted to catch us,” he said through his toothy mouth. “Here we are.”

  “Get in,” another invited.

  “Yeah,” said Team Mom. “Get in, Katie M. We’re all waiting.”

  “There’s room in the back,” a boy said.

  “Could I… could I just get your auto-graphs?”

  “This isn’t about autographs,” said Team Mom. “This is about guts. Guts and glory.”

  “Ummmm,” said Katie. “Could I just get a double order of glory?”

  The procession in front of the van had passed. The music was already fading.

  “We’ll meet again, Katie,” said Team Mom. “Believe m
e. And I’ll fork out for a double order of guts. Yours.”

  The van rolled forward through the intersection.

  Soon it was gone.

  24

  Katie and Lily trudged back along the street of silk merchants. On the crumbling brick walls, pasted up next to ancient carved window frames, were posters of the Awful and Adorable Autarch of Dagsboro. He had huge, piratical mustaches that pointed up at each end. He wore big, square plastic glasses that would have looked dumb even back in the eighties, when they were from, and an ugly necktie. The poster was covered with slogans in Doverian. To deface one of the posters—by removing the ridiculous mustaches, for example, rubbing out the goatee, erasing the stupid glasses, or whiting out the missing tooth—was punishable by death. Katie and Lily strolled right by his idiotic gaze.

  Katie said, “You were telling me not to let them see me, weren’t you?”

  Lily shrugged.

  “Okay, I get it,” said Katie. “Next time, I’ll listen. I’m sorry. It’s just that Jasper stopped me in the middle of the chase to yell about crosswalks or buckle up for safety or something. So you yelled and I wasn’t into the halt.”

  When they found Jasper, he was walking toward them with a young man in a T-shirt and rubber shoes.

  “No luck, chums?” asked Jasper.

  Katie told him what had happened. Jasper listened attentively.

  “No matter, Katie. More important: I have located a guide. This is Bntno.”

  Bntno put his hands over his eyes in a traditional Delawarian sign of respect. He said, “I shall lead the dandy children to the mountains.”

  “I have to follow the same route I went last time,” Jasper explained to him. “We must seek four mountains. One with a lake on it, one with a glacier on it, one with a pine forest on it, and one with a pillar of stone on it. The monastery is on one of those four peaks.”

  “I know this mountains. I love this glacier. I have spoked with this pillar for days. These places, they are to me as familiar as my own back.”

  “Super,” said Jasper.

  “You don’t know your own back at all,” said Katie. “No one sees their own back.”

  “Maybe I have seen it in the mirror. Just as we see all things in a mirror.”

  “Maybe,” said Katie.

  “Maybe when I go to the shop and try on shirts.”

  “Okay,” said Katie.

  “It is very dangerous journey,” said Bntno.

  “We are determined as steel,” said Jasper.

  “Very good,” said Bntno. “Then tomorrow I come to your hotel at six. We leaves early.”

  “Early,” agreed Jasper.

  The young man once again put his hands over his eyes in the gesture of respect and then backed away. He slammed into a dentist.

  “Do you think he really knows what he’s talking about?” said Katie. “I don’t want us to get lost.”

  “He will get us as far as those mountains,” said Jasper. “It’s important to have faith in people, Katie.”

  “Hmm,” said Katie.

  Bntno had just run into a telephone pole.

  25

  They ate dinner at a restaurant where the six-armed tribesmen of the north performed acrobatic dances and traditional wailing-songs until you paid them to go away. For a dollar and fifty-five cents each, Lily, Jasper, and Katie got rice, vegetable medley, and a meat puck. A sign on the wall said in English, ASK ABOUT OUR DELICHIOUS DEEP-FRIED DRGSL MOUNTAIN SQUID! ONE TENTACLE, IT SERVE YOU AND YOUR HONEY-BUNNEY SWEETHEAT!

  No one was asking about the deep-fried Drgsl mountain squid. For one thing, they were too busy ducking while the six-armed, tusked dancing girls did high kicks for small change.

  At a quiet moment, when Lily could be heard over the nose-harps and tusk-plucked goo-tars, she asked Jasper, “What, um, what are we going to be looking for with Bntno?”

  “Vbngoom lies hidden in a mountain range in northern Delaware, where the cruel ice still clings to the slopes. There are four mountains in this hidden range. It was at the base of these four mountains that I, stung by the killer bees and hunted by the counterfeiting ring, passed out beneath a banyan tree. When I woke up, I had been spirited away to Vbngoom, which lies on the top of one of these mountains.”

  “Can’t you remember which mountain?” asked Katie.

  “No. I was unconscious, Katie, and all I know is that the temple lies atop one of the four peaks. No mortal knows which. And it is said that these mountains, in deep mist, switch places to keep their secret hidden, so that no prying eyes can view the monastery.”

  “Well, clearly,” said Katie, “some mortals know about it now.”

  “Yes,” said Jasper. “Unfortunately so.”

  “The Stare-Eyes team.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And Bntno. If he really knows anything.”

  “Indeed.”

  Now village dancers of the six-armed race of the north were performing complicated hurls and spins, all their arms wheeling. Jasper and Katie were seated with their backs to them, but Lily could see their incredible bounding, the swivel of their tusked heads, the clapping and twirling. She was dazzled. She could feel the rhythm in her ankles.

  “Hello,” said Katie. “Earth to Lily. Come in, Lills.”

  Lily didn’t want to tear her eyes away from all the eight-limbed whirling. “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  Katie turned around and looked for a second. She shook her head. “I get motion sickness too easy.”

  Pulling herself back from the dance, Lily

  asked Jasper, “What can you remember about the mountains?”

  “Only what I told you before. That there were four of them: one with a lake, one with a pine forest, one with a huge stone pillar covered in ancient writing, and one with a glacier that never melted.”

  “What are they called?” asked Katie. “We can get a map.”

  “They have names not pronounceable by mortals.”

  “That’s really inconvenient,” said Katie. She took a bite and wiggled her fork around. “Oh, and hey. Explain to us about these secret powers that the Stare-Eyes team got.”

  “At the center of Vbngoom are pits where sacred flames burn. No one without special training and great humility is allowed to go near them. Monks who have meditated by these flames acquire special powers. They can levitate and speak with their minds. I fear the boys from the Stare-Eyes team have been exposed illegally to these flames.”

  “So they’re kind of becoming a powerful force of supernatural evil?”

  “I am afraid so, Katie.”

  “That would explain why the bugs in Pelt went crazy when they appeared.”

  “I fear for the Stare-Eyes players themselves, as well as for us. It is dangerous to get close to those flames without years of training. I worry they are being pushed by Team Mom and their coach to acquire powers that might destroy them.”

  “So why don’t the monks stop them from going to the sacred flames?”

  “Most of the monks of Vbngoom have taken an oath of nonviolence. Only a few, like my friend Drgnan Pghlik, have learned the ways of martial arts so that they can protect the monastery. I suspect the art-thieving gang has complete control of Vbngoom at this point.”

  Lily heard the discussion, but she was looking past them. She watched the six-armed men and women weave patterns in the air, tapestries of muscle and sinew that had been braided on the looms of ten centuries, and she imagined herself as a little six-armed goat-girl, high in the steppes of the Newark Mountains, playing her Pan-flutes, and her fiddle, and her drum, and her finger-cymbals, all at once. She imagined herself learning these ancient dances, wearing rough clothes of yak’s wool and ogre skin—and maybe there would be a six-armed boy with a knowledge of all the old epics of their kind who would look shyly at her, and she would see him from the hilltop, and wave, and wave, and wave, and wave, and wave, and—

  The waiter appeared at their side. “Everything good?” he asked. “Let me to fix th
e reception.” He adjusted the knife and fork on the fourth placemat. “We can’t hear good what you are saying.” He looked toward the kitchen.

  A man in a black suit gave him a thumbs-up.

  The waiter nodded and said, “Much better, friends. Speak loud and not too near ashtray. You would like more mixed veg?”

  26

  Drgnan Pghlik awoke from his heavy slumber. He opened his eyes, and found that there was nothing to see. Everything was dark.

  At first, he thought he was still asleep. His head was filled with outlines and blurs. He moved his hand across his face. He felt his nose, his mouth. He held his hand an inch from his eyes. Nothing. Absolutely black.

  Carefully he swiped his hands through the air. He reached for the floor beneath him. It was made of stone. It was dusty. He ran the heel of his hand along through the grit. He found the bottom of a wooden door.

  He walked his fingers up the slats until he found the handle. He rattled it.

  Locked. He was locked in. “Hello?” he called. “Hello?”

  There was no answer.

  He reached out in the other direction. Fumbling in the air, he felt a wide, empty space… then… cardboard. He felt a stack of thin, cardboard boxes.

  Slowly light dawned in his woozy, confused brain. He realized that he was locked in the closet where they stored board games. Board games and… He couldn’t remember what else. Board games and…

  “Hello?” he called, even louder this time.

  Things shifted in the darkness around him. He pulled himself up against the door.

  A light went on in the next room. There was a line of light under the door. Drgnan bobbed his head down and pressed it against the cool floor, trying to see what was in the next room.

  Shoes. The soles of black shoes.

  “The kid’s awake,” said a gangster in the next room.