Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware Read online

  The door briefly unlocked. Two men stood there. They shoved a bowl at him and slammed the door. He heard them turning the key in the lock.

  He put the bowl on his lap. He reached in. Something smooshy… Some kind of thick paste. Wet.

  He picked up a handful. He held it up near his nose.

  It was raw hamburger.

  He dropped it back in the bowl.

  “I shall not eat this,” he announced through the door. “I do not believe in eating the flesh of animals.”

  “You hear that?” said one of the gangsters. “Kid in a dress don’t believe in eating the flesh of animals.”

  “Okay. Okay. Kid in a dress: You want we should take it away?” asked the other.

  “Take it if you want,” said Drgnan Pghlik darkly. “You shall never make me eat it.”

  “Hokey-dokey, girly blokey.” The keys rattled.

  Something dimly registered in the back of Drgnan’s brain.

  The door opened again—the gangster stooped down, grabbed the bowl, and slammed the door shut.

  This time Drgnan heard that not all of the shuffling motion was on the other side of the door.

  Something was in the closet with him.

  “Hello?” he said again, quietly.

  There was a deep, bass growl. A growl so slow, so low, he could hear the spaces between its R s.

  And then he realized: He knew where he was. He knew what was in the dark with him.

  He was in the closet where they stored the board games and the monastery tiger.

  That raw hamburger meat hadn’t been for him.

  “It’s a real shame,” said the gangster, “that the tiger’s food is outside of the closet. See, ’cause the tiger, he’s in the closet, and he ain’t eaten in a few days.”

  Awful. Drgnan Pghlik slapped his hand to his forehead.

  His sticky hand.

  “And it’s even more of a shame,” said the gangster, “that you handled his grub. Because now you probably smell like fresh meat.”

  Drgnan Pghlik had romped with the tiger when he was a small tot. He had fed him, on occasion, in the years since. He knew that when the tiger was hungry, nothing would stop him from pouncing. The tiger was dangerous. He called softly, “Nrrrgarha? Nrrrgarha, boy?”

  There was an answering growl. The tiger shifted in the shadows.

  “You won’t eat me, boy, will you?”

  The tiger stood. The tiger paced to Drgnan’s side. The tiger sniffed at Drgnan’s wet palm and wet forehead.

  The tiger growled again.

  “Naw, he won’t eat you,” said the gangster. “Not today. You know, he might even cuddle up to you. For old time’s sake. Auld lang syne.”

  “Tomorrow,” said the other gangster. “Now tomorrow is a whole different story.”

  “Tomorrow he might commence to getting a little peckish. He might commence to getting a little bite-y. In fact, I won’t be any surprised if the claws come out tomorrow.”

  The tiger sniffed at Drgnan’s hand. The tiger growled louder.

  Jasper, thought Drgnan Pghlik. Jasper Dash, I hope you’re on your way.

  Nrrrgarha drew long breaths and pictured corned beef.

  27

  It turned out that Lisa Buldene was staying at the same hotel as our heroes. They met her at the rooftop restaurant that evening when they sat in plastic garden chairs, watching people get flung through the sky from vaultapults as the clouds turned red with sunset. The tiny little bodies hurtled, catching the light for a few instants before the arc of their motion brought them back down upon another rooftop. Slowly, wearily, people migrated home from their jobs, briefcases flapping, to make dinner over their gas rings or cook-fires.

  “What are you drinking?” Lisa Buldene asked Katie, sitting down beside her.

  Katie looked at the label. “The state-sponsored cola. Yum. ‘Tyrant Splash.’” She took a big swig.

  “Sure,” said Lisa Buldene, smiling. “I tried it earlier. But it’s actually not a cola. It’s the Delaware government’s brand of bottled water. Straight from the St. Jones River.”

  “What do you mean?” said Katie. “It sure tastes like a cola. And it’s brown and bubbly. And fizzes. And… um… So it’s really…? ”

  Lisa Buldene nodded.

  Katie’s face kind of dropped. She ran for the railing of the balcony and began spitting up.

  “So did you catch your van today?” Lisa Buldene asked Lily and Jasper. “I looked it up in my There and Back Again, and the only vanlike thing they had was a cart that carries the god of traffic through the major intersections of the city at noon on Fridays to pray for no gridlock.”

  “That is not the van in question,” said Jasper. “This is a different van.”

  “We have our own private van situation,” said Katie from the railing.

  “Where are you off to next?” Lisa Buldene asked. “You decided?”

  “Vbngoom, the Platter of Heaven,” said Katie. Jasper hissed in warning.

  Lisa Buldene gasped. “Oh, break my heart! You’re not! You’re going to Vbngoom? I thought no one could find it! I haven’t even been able to find a postcard of it! My There and Back Again says it moves all the time.”

  “It’s in the guidebook?” said Jasper.

  “Yeah, sure. Everything’s in my There and Back Again. ” She opened her bag, ducked her head inside, and reemerged with a guidebook. She handed it to Jasper, who began flipping through it.

  The New Yorker watched him, slouched in her seat. “Do you think you’ve seen the real Delaware yet?” she asked. “I mean, we all hear the stories—you know, the camels, the temples, the jewels, the snakes with women’s heads, the women with snakes’ heads, that whole thing—but I’m saying, sometimes I go to all the places it says to go in my There and Back Again, all the places where it says you can see the real, authentic Delaware, and then I get there, and there are just these fifteen other tourists standing there in the courtyard of that castle or that particular volcanic crater, looking around with their fingers stuck in their own copies of There and Back Again. ” Lisa Buldene looked very tense. “Then I get really worried I’m not actually seeing the real Delaware at all, and that maybe there isn’t a real Delaware anymore, because it’s all just set up for tourists now. We can’t see it because we know too much what to expect from the There and Back Again. No place is real anymore.”

  Jasper read aloud, with interest—and then increasing disgust, “‘Vbngoom has been the most secret of the hidden mountain monasteries for centuries. Currently located on top of scenic Mount Tlmp, it offers great views, cheap meals, comfy lodging’—comfy lodging? —‘private bathrooms, and eternal life. When you’ve made it to Vbngoom, you know you’ve made it to someplace unique.’”

  “See?” said Lisa Buldene. “That’s why I want to get to Vbngoom. Not because they have eternal life. But because I know it’s still real and untouched. Hardly any other tourists have been there. If I got there, I would know I was really living—you know, living. Myself.”

  “But Vbngoom is in the guidebook too,” said Lily.

  Lisa Buldene wasn’t listening. “A real place is the thing everyone searches for,” she continued, her voice full of yearning. “You can’t know yourself until you go someplace unknown. And what if there’s no place unknown left?” She stood up, clearly unhappy. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go,” she said, close to tears. “My chakras are twingeing.”

  “Are you okay?” asked Lily.

  Lisa Buldene picked up Katie’s bottle of Tyrant Splash from the little glass-topped table. “You going to drink the rest of this?” she asked Katie. “Because if you aren’t, I am.” She declared tearfully, “This is the only way I can really get the state of Delaware inside of me.” She drank a big gulp of the fizzy waters of the St. Jones. “Delaware!” she whispered. “You’re on my tongue now!” With that, she walked off.

  Jasper called after her, “Ma’am, your guidebook!” but she was gone.

  Soon after dinner,
the three went to their room to go to bed, since they had to get up early. They brushed their teeth and Katie washed out her mouth with every liquid they had brought with them: water, ginger ale, toothpaste, peroxide, and Jasper’s foot ointment. Then they got into their beds and lay there in the dark, waiting for sleep.

  “Lisa Buldene is weird,” said Katie. “Of course stuff is real. You can knock it.” She knocked on the wall.

  “I cannot believe,” Jasper complained bitterly, “that this guidebook just straight-up tells you the name of the mountain. Mount Tlmp. Like that!”

  “I kind of know what Lisa Buldene is talking about, though,” said Lily quietly. “Once, when I was a little kid, I really wanted to go to Sloth Dent National Park. You know, out west. It’s that place where a giant sloth that lived in the Pleistocene era stopped moving for about three months. It, you know, fell asleep. So it left an impression in the mud. You can still see it today, one million years later. I really, really wanted to go. I looked at books about it and postcards, and I dreamed of lying there at night in the park, seeing this ancient sloth print under the stars. I thought all about fast-moving time and slow-moving sloths… and finally one year we went…”

  “And what happened?” Katie asked.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t really care once we got there. The park didn’t look surprising. It just looked like all the photos I’d seen a million times.”

  “Which is like what?”

  Lily shrugged. “A big sloth print.”

  “Just a footprint?”

  “Well, no, the sloth was hanging upside down from a tree the whole time. So it’s a back print.”

  “A back print.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A big, really hairy sloth back print?”

  “Yeah. That was all.”

  Katie nodded. “Huh,” she said. She sucked in her lips. She kept nodding. “Yeah, I can see why that would be kind of a disappointment.”

  “Not as much of a disappointment,” said Jasper, “as seeing that a secret monastery is listed in a travel guide as having ‘comfy lodging.’” He lay the guidebook beside him on the nightstand. “Well, good night, fellows.”

  “Good night,” said Lily.

  “Good night, Jasper,” said Katie.

  “Good night, Katie,” said Jasper. “Good night, Lily.”

  “Good night, Lily,” said Katie.

  “Jasper,” said Lily, “did you just put that book down on the nightstand?”

  “Yes, Lily. Do you want it?”

  “No, Jasper. Um, I was just thinking: There isn’t any nightstand in this room.”

  She was right. There was no nightstand.

  Suddenly everyone’s feet got very cold.

  28

  Jasper reached over and switched on the light.

  “Mrglik!” he cried to the nightstand. “You’re supposed to be gone!”

  “Oh, yes?” said the spy. “Oh, forgot! Forgot! I am so sorry. I am so sorry, little man. Heh. Heh. Will instantly vamoose.” He stood and began to shuffle sideways toward the door.

  “Leave the lamp and the book!” Jasper ordered.

  Shamefaced, Mrglik removed the lamp and the book from his head and handed them to Katie. He bowed awkwardly, straightened his black tie, and walked to the door. “Good night, peoples,” he said. He opened the door, excused himself to step by a muscley kid in a tracksuit with a gun whose hand was on the doorknob, and walked away down the hall.

  Mrglik walked down the three flights of concrete stairs while, from above, came the sounds of shots, screams, and the shattering of glass.

  When Mrglik got to the lobby, he bowed to the proprietor, who was sitting on the rim of the broken fountain, cracking cashews with his teeth. The proprietor said good night to him and said he’d see him in the morning, ha ha, unless Mrglik’s disguise was too devilishly clever. Mrglik always appreciated a compliment, and smiled widely, walking onward with a little spring in his step.

  He left the hotel and climbed over the huge heap of rubble and the broken Sky Suite, continuing down past the public fountain and the dark, marble temple of Yyuhoo,* lit with flaring torches. Eventually he reached the Ministry of Silence’s secret underground lair. It was in an old bowling alley with a very nice painted sign that said, ministry of silence, underground lair division. They did not have enough money to actually put the division underground.

  He knocked, called out, “It is Mrglik!” and his friend Lknosz opened the door.

  Inside there were desks set up on the bowling lanes, lit by whatever lamps people could bring from home. Mrglik went over to his boss’s desk. His boss had brought in his daughter’s Winnie the Pooh lamp. Pooh was holding on to a bunch of balloons and his feet were in the air. In an effort to make the lamp a little more menacing, Mrglik’s boss had written a word bubble in Doverian, coming out of Pooh’s mouth, that said, “Aha, enemies of the state! From this height I have perfect view of your illegal activities!”

  “Report?” said Mrglik’s boss, not looking up, turning over carbon pages in a file folder.

  “They are going to Vbngoom, the Platter of Heaven.”

  “Excellent,” said Mrglik’s boss. He tried saying it again, this time more evil. “Exxxcellent.”

  “I should mention, Impressive Superior, that they are most likely dead. As I left the room, there appeared to be an athlete with a gun.”

  “He wished to kill them?”

  “So it appeared, Dazzling Mentor.”

  “Hmm,” mused Mrglik’s boss, rattling his fingers on his desk. He asked sharply, “JV or varsity?”

  “Sir?”

  “The athlete.”

  “The light was dim, sir.”

  “Sit,” said Mrglik’s boss. “We shall discuss a strategy.”

  They talked about how they might proceed. How they might find out from the kids where the secret monastery lay, and take it over for the good of His Most Terrifying Majesty the Autarch, so His Majesty might use its powers to crush all enemies of the state. Those three kids were the key. If, indeed, the three kids were still alive after their encounter with that armed athlete.

  Having met for a while with his boss, Mrglik went home to relax. There was nothing Mrglik liked more than a quiet night in. While the bustle and excitement of spying were enjoyable, as far as they—

  I’m sorry, you seem to be impatient. Is there something you want to know about?

  Let me look around the room. Oh, I’m the one telling the story. So sit tight, Bucky Jones, and see what comes your way.

  After meeting for a while with his boss, Mrg-lik went home to relax. He took off his black shoes and flexed his stocking feet on his glass table. He turned on the television. There was only one station, the official government station, and tonight was The Adorable Autarch’s Hit Parade. It was a popular program, but that was just because it was the only program on television. It was His Terrifying Majesty, the Awful and Adorable Autarch of Dagsboro, singing pop songs of the 1990s, live. When Mrglik turned on the set, His Majesty was finishing a high-pitched cover of “Dreamlover.” Then followed “My Heart Will Go On” and “(I’m Missing You Like) Candy.”

  Mrglik eventually had to go to the toilet, but he could not get up because the Awful and Adorable Autarch was still singing, and Mrglik knew his spy friend Ttfrumpt was behind a two-way mirror, watching to see if Mrglik missed one exciting moment of the Autarch’s performance. If Mrglik left the room, Ttfrumpt would report it. So Mrglik crossed his legs, and behind the mirror, Ttfrumpt, who also had to go to the toilet but couldn’t because he had to stay and watch Mrglik, crossed his legs too, and in the security room in the basement of the building, the spy watching Ttfrumpt on the security cam, who also had to keep watching, crossed his legs, and so, with crossed pair of legs after crossed pair of legs, and pee suspended in a chain of bladders like the stained and tainted clouds that hovered above the city, another quiet night fell in imperial Dover.

  29

  When Mrglik ran past, Delaware�
��s Stare-Eyes #4, startled, fired into the dark room—at just the same time that Katie yelped, hurled the lamp, and struck his hand. The shots went wild—the window blew out—and Jasper threw off the bedclothes to do vengeance in his nightgown.

  #4 raised his gun to fire again, his comic eyebrows twitching.

  Jasper threw himself through the air and grabbed the boy’s wrists, wrestling for the pistol. #4 dragged the muzzle toward Jasper’s head; Jasper shoved the muzzle away. Wincing, the Boy Technonaut strained at #4’s grip on the gun. The two stumbled back into the hall.

  Katie and Lily rushed to Jasper’s side. #4’s hand was loosening. Lily tugged at the gun—and it went off again. The bullet buried itself in the plaster of the wall.

  With a cry of success, Jasper wrested the pistol free.

  Now #4 was on the defensive, surrounded by three enemies, one of them armed. He scampered down the hallway.

  Jasper ordered, “Halt! HALT!”

  But to no avail. #4 knew Jasper, ever a gentleman, would not shoot at him—and he darted up a staircase toward the roof.

  Jasper, grimacing, gave chase. The door at the top of the stairs was just sliding to a comfortable pneumatic close when the Boy Technonaut hurled it open and, back to the wall, gun close to his chest, stepped out onto the roof.

  The roof deck was dark. The plastic chairs were tipped up against their tables for the night. The umbrellas were furled.

  There! Jasper spied the boy in the tracksuit leaping from the parapet onto the next roof. Jasper followed and leaped after him. #4 sprinted past coiled tubing and pigeon roosts. They ran a crazy race, zigzagging past air shafts and blimp moorings. #4 had a strong lead and made good use of it. He swerved and ducked, and finally Jasper lost track of him.

  The Boy Technonaut paused, glancing around wildly. City sounds filled the night: the honking of horns, the cries of street vendors. Blue diesel fumes shouldered their way up from below, gentle and watchful as hunched crones. Jasper stepped first one way, then another, peering through the greasy smoke.

  Then he spied #4. The boy was on the next roof, cupped in a vaultapult, about to be launched by an attendant into who-knew-where.