Beneath the Mall of Madness (A Jaspar Windisle Mystery Book 1) (23 page)

“If you’re sure,” I said. “You should get some more rest. You still look exhausted.” She smiled at me, but it didn’t reach her eyes.

“I’ll go to sleep soon, don’t worry,” she said. “I’ve learned my lesson about overworking.”

The Whateleys couldn’t fix up my room before nightfall, so they upgraded me to a suite. In addition to being roomier and more luxurious it had a hidden staircase leading down to the Whateley’s rooms.

“Most people would consider that a negative,” Jeremiah told me, “so I rarely rent these rooms. I’ll leave our side unlocked so if someone breaks into your room again you can get out.” I thanked him and hoped I wouldn’t need the escape route.

I try to be tidy, so none of my things had been lying out to get covered in slime. Just in case Dr. Finch tried to visit me again I stayed up until midnight, packing whatever I might need for a night in a cave and checking the locks on the door. Judging by the lights I could see in the opposite wing, I wasn’t the only person staying up.

***

That night I dreamt that I was standing at the top of the hill, staring down into Bishop’s Corner. The trees seemed darker than before and swayed in a breeze I couldn’t feel. As I looked at them more closely, I realized that they were made of smoke. They began to break up and drift into the sky, revealing a bronze gate surrounded by turkeys. Fire began blasting out of the gate and when it died down the turkeys had been replaced with thousands of Jell-O salads. I couldn’t decide if the dreams I was having in this hotel were amusing or disturbing. One thing was for sure; they were making me hungry. 

The next morning the lobby was crowded again. I guess I wasn’t the only person who’d trusted the sleep spell surrounding the hotel to protect me.

Zebulon met me in the lobby with a backpack.

“Are you going somewhere?” Agent Starr asked.

“Just a hike,” I said as I collected water and food from the buffet.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? There’s a monster looking for you, you know.”

“Where we’re going he won’t be able to find me,” I said.

“What about your boss?” Agent Steiner asked.

“He’ll be able to do without me for a day or two.”

“Isn’t he waiting on surveyors again?” Zebulon asked.

“I hope not,” I said. “The last expert he hired got eaten, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” Agent Starr said. “Didn’t this all start because of some rumors about a chupacabra?”

“And some very convincing video,” I said. “Come on; let’s get this filled so we can go.”

“The video looked like cheap special effects to me,” Agent Starr said.

“Doesn’t it always?” Zebulon said.

When we got out to the smoldering wall, he stretched.

“The ground is still shifting, but we’re going anyway,” he told me. “Our magic experts all agree that the tremors are magical in nature and not warning signs of The Big One, so we’re trusting to luck. I’m glad we’re starting out this morning. It gave us a chance to get Fiona’s wheelchair down last night while she was busy.”

“Right,” I said. “Who’s going to guard her portal while she’s gone?”

“Earl and your boss volunteered to try.” Since Steve had admitted he wasn’t in Fiona’s league magically speaking, I didn’t find that comforting.

Fiona’s chair may have been in the position, but Fiona was still at the top of the hill and not looking happy about it when we arrived. Mordecai turned to us with a look of relief on his face.

“Can you give me a hand?” He asked Zebulon. “I can’t get her down on my own.” Fiona’s expression would have frozen lava at that moment. She still greeted me politely.

“Can I help?” I asked.

“How about you help Fiona from above and I’ll stand guard?” Zebulon suggested.

***

While Fiona’s bad leg gave her a slight limp on level ground, it was useless as we tried to get her down the hill. She didn’t have enough range of motion with her leg brace on to climb down the hill and when she took it off her leg wouldn’t support her. In the end, she slid down with me steadying her from the side and Mordecai pulling on her feet from below. We were all muddy and out of sorts by the time we got to the base of the hill.

The bottom of the hill had changed. We had to duck under crime scene tape to get into the tunnel, and most of the brush had been cut down. The entrance to the tunnel was still hidden. As far as I could tell no efforts had been made to force it open. With so much of the surrounding area searched by experts and a clear line of pristine grass showing where the aura of the forest became impenetrable the space the cultists had to search had shrunk. I was surprised they hadn’t been able to find the entrance yet. If the threat of being caught by the police was enough to keep them away maybe they weren’t as tough as I’d thought.

Sparks shared some more images to disabuse me of that notion. Dr. Finch had kept his human form when dealing with the tourists and still none of them had escaped. I stood at the edge of the trampled area and stared into the forest. It made my skin crawl just standing there. There was still something mesmerizing about it. Sparks’ chatter faded away as I tried to see into the darkness beneath the trees. When Zebulon shouted that the tunnel was open, I felt like I’d been jolted out of a trance. I rejoined the others after one last look.

“You shouldn’t do that,” Fiona scolded me. “It’s tempting fate.” I looked back at the forest and shrugged.

“If you say so.”

I felt an extra chill creeping along my spine. I turned back to the forest. There
was
something out there. I had to remind myself that whatever it was was staying in the forest. I turned my back on it again and tried to put it out of my mind.

***

Since I didn’t have much else to do, I took the first turn pushing the wheelchair. Mordecai made sure the tunnel was sealed behind us.

We made much slower progress than the last time, mainly because of the wheelchair. There were places where the floor wasn’t even and Fiona had to get up and walk while we carried the chair. Then Mordecai and Fiona would argue with each other until she sat back down.

“It isn’t an endurance test!” He told her. “You won’t get a gold star for walking the whole way, so just sit!”

After a mile or so this sort of thing became tedious. It took all day to get to the cave. When we stopped at the entrance, Fiona insisted on getting out of the wheel chair again.

“What are we going to do if there’s a chupacabra waiting for us?” I asked. “They’ve had weeks to figure out how to get through that gap and we still aren’t sure how to kill one.”

“I’m going to try fire,” Zebulon said. “We’ve got no reason to believe they aren’t flammable.”

“You should stay out here,” Mordecai said to him. “We’ll let you know if we need you for anything.”

Fiona, with Gregory perched on her shoulder, limped into the cave. Nothing attacked her. After looking at the ceiling for what seemed like forever, Mordecai followed her.

“I think I
will
stay back here,” Zebulon said. “I don’t really want to watch them do wizard stuff anyway.” He turned to me. “So if this all goes wrong, do you think you can run three miles?”

“No. Can you?”

“Sure. While my cousins were all learning to do magic, I was playing outside.”

“I’ve never been physically fit,” I confessed. “No matter what I try I never get stronger. I’ve tried endurance training, and I don’t improve, I just collapse.”

“I guess that’s how it is for some people,” Zebulon said. “Although in your case it would help if you could put on some weight. You can’t build muscle if you’re starving yourself.” I glared at him.

“I have a very fast metabolism,” I told him.

“Sorry,” he said. He didn’t look sorry at all.

The ground shook again.

“Shit! I hope this stops soon!” Zebulon braced himself against the tunnel wall, but he didn’t look nearly as spooked as I felt. Forget getting crushed by debris, what if the tunnel had collapsed between us and the exit? I’d rather be eaten by radish monsters than be trapped underground again.

“Do you think it’s related to this portal?” I asked, looking for a distraction. He shrugged.

“Like I said, I didn’t study magic like the rest of my family. I wouldn’t be surprised, though.”

“Okay,” Fiona called from the cave. “Jaspar, would you come here, please?” I looked at Zebulon.

“Good luck,” he said, holding up his giant handgun. “I’ve got you covered.” His idea of covering me would do me as much damage as any chupacabra, but I just nodded.

Nothing happened when I went through the entrance. Fiona was wearing her colorful robe from earlier. In the middle of the cavern, she had drawn something on the ground and had Gregory sprawled in the middle of it.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Sympathetic magic,” she said. “It’s the easiest kind. Since Gregory isn’t from this world, I can use him to recalibrate the portal. And since he’s such a staunch vegan a connection to his world should be an improvement over what we’ve got now.”

“If you can force a portal to connect to Gregory’s home, why haven’t you done it before?”

“I told you, the portal in my attic doesn’t have any location keys in it, it’s entirely random. It’s much easier to switch from one fixed location to another than to regulate a portal from scratch.” I looked down at Gregory. I wasn’t an expert on land squid, but he didn’t look happy. He was light beige, and his color barely changed when he saw me.

“I thought the plan was to turn this thing off. What made you decide to send Gregory home instead?”

“I don’t think I
can
shut it down,” Fiona said. “It’s more powerful in person than it looked in the photos. My original idea isn’t going to work at all. At least Vegan Land Squid are an improvement over entrails-eating radish monsters.”

That was hard to argue with. At the same time . . .

“What are you going to do if giant land squid start wriggling around your town? Or the interstate?” I asked. “What if someone tries to eat one?”

“I doubt it will come to that,” Fiona said. “According to my grandfather’s journal Gregory headed straight back to the portal as soon as he hatched, it was just too late. I don’t think the squid want to come through.”

“Fine. So what am I here for?”

“If things start to go bad it will take the two of us to shut down the process,” she said. “If it looks like things are going wrong I want you to grab Gregory and get out of here.”

“That’s your plan if something goes wrong? Run?”

“When you get to the exit you can seal the door,” Mordecai said. “If we’re all right we can open it from this side, but the chupacabras probably can’t.”

Have I mentioned that I’m not a prize physical specimen? Any plan that depends on me running for my life is a bad plan. Unfortunately, we were already here, and I was outnumbered.

“Okay,” I said. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a strawberry. “This is for the road, I guess,” I said to Gregory. He grabbed it and changed colors rapidly. I crouched down just outside the portal.

“By the way, why am I doing this instead of Zebulon?”

“He doesn’t have the sense to run,” Mordecai said. “And you seem to have some resistance to magic.” As a school of goldfish swam over Gregory’s head, I considered arguing with that. I’m no wizard, though. Maybe portal magic and necromancy had even less in common than I thought.

I don’t know about creating one, but changing the destination of a portal involves a lot of chanting and drawing on the ground. By the time they were done, I wasn’t sure I could reach Gregory without stepping on their drawing. It was a scale model of the portal floating above us at about a fifth the size.

“If anything feels wrong, head towards me,” I told Gregory.

“Shh,” Mordecai said. “We have to concentrate.” He started reading from a scroll while Fiona gestured in the air. So much for him being normal. I assumed it was wizardly gesturing, but she looked like she was reporting on the weather, and the portal was her green screen. Sparks didn’t like any of this and hovered under my chin the entire time.

After more chanting than I was comfortable with, I started to smell something sharp and metallic. I realized I had no idea what this exercise ‘going wrong’ would look like. It was too late to ask now.

The drawings on the floor were glowing and shifting. I looked up, and the patterns in the portal were shifting as well. There was a deep groaning sound similar to the earthquake from earlier, and the portal changed color. The noises stopped, and our lights dimmed. The portal was still a barrier between us and the roof of the cave. Gregory was still in the middle of the circle.

“What was supposed to happen?” I asked. There was a high whistling sound, and I was knocked off my feet by thirty pounds of warm, feathery portal penguin.

As I shouted and tried to shove it off me, Fiona cheered.

“It worked!” She said. “We’ve changed the location. Now we just have to figure out where it changed to.”

“It changed to wherever these things come from!” I said. “Now help me get them off!” Mordecai made some clicking noises and clapped his hands, but the portal penguin wasn’t a dog, and it wasn’t distracted. I’d managed to keep it from standing on me. Every time I shoved it away it tried to climb back on. When I got to my knees, it hopped onto my back and started barking in my ear. Its flapping almost knocked me over again, so I grabbed a stalagmite and pulled myself upright. With my back to the stalagmite and Fiona laughing in the background, I considered my opponent. It had backed off and was flapping its wings and wagging its tail. As I stood there, another one fell from the portal. And another.

“I don’t see how this is an improvement,” I remarked.

“They’re a side effect of adjusting the portal,” Fiona said. “Sorry, I should have warned you. They’re why portals are almost always on the floor. These creatures are always searching for a way in, and they can come through the underside. So whatever we did, the portal should still be facing the other way.”

“That would have been good to know earlier,” I said. The three portal penguins were looking up now, barking and whistling. I looked up and saw that the portal was covered in chupacabras.

“They aren’t going through,” I observed. “Why not?”

“We may have been wrong about their nature. Perhaps they’re a sort of portal guard, or some other type of interdimensional creature that has a resistance to portal magic.”

“If that’s true then how did they get here in the first place?”