Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware (12 page)

“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.

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.

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.

Jasper darted toward them, hoping to stop the attendant from firing.

Jasper leaped from the one roof to the other just as #4 was fired in the other direction. They passed in midair, arms spinning. The stem of the
vaultapult was still
wocka-wocka-wocka
when Jasper landed.

“I want to follow that boy!” Jasper demanded to the attendant. “Make speed!”

“Fifteen cents for trip,” said the attendant.

Jasper spluttered and looked down at his nightgown.

He slapped theatrically at his hips, where there were no pockets. “Can I pay you later?” he asked.

“Sorry, sir.”

“Saturn's rings, man! Please?”

“This is impossible, sir. Fifteen cents.”

“I beg of you.”

“Eh, sir. Old saying: No dough, no throw.”

Jasper scowled. “While I usually deplore this sort of tactic,” he said, “I would like to point out that I am the one with the gun.”

The attendant thought this over. Finally, he nodded. “You pay tomorrow?”

“I pay tomorrow. Send me where that boy went.”

“Step in, sir.”

Jasper clambered into the bowl of the vaultapult. The attendant cranked back the arm. Jasper had only done this a couple of times before, and that was during the day. Now he felt a tingly hysteria. A roller-coaster terror. Height was all around him. He was curled up, about to be thrown through the air over chasmlike streets and concrete walls. He held his breath. He jolted backward by degrees. He held on to his legs and tried to remember not to tense. He took three deep breaths and told himself that soon, he would—

WHAM!
He'd been hucked.

Lights—impossible lights—moving impossibly quickly. He blinked rapidly. The city was spread beneath him—the domes lit by searchlights—the candles in homes—the torches carried in procession—the hotel signs half lit and half broken.