Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware

by M. T. Anderson

  And so our three heroes found themselves in the ruined, monster-haunted city of Greylag.

  41

  No one knows who built Greylag; none can say if they were of the race of men or some older, forgotten race that walked upon the earth when the brachiosaurus still made his home in the swamps and the allosaur still gazed out from the hills at dusk, razor teeth glinting in the sunset, and called her hideous children home.

  Lily, Katie, and Jasper walked down a flight of steps inhumanly large and found themselves in a ruined square. The statue of the skeleton kept watch, much of his legs chipped off when the temple by which he had stood had been smashed some hundreds of years before.

  Vines hung all around them. They gazed up and saw a green sky full of bright birds.

  A whisper of a shoe on sand—they jumped—and saw Bntno seated on a fallen pillar, eating a roast beef sandwich with horseradish.

  “Hello, little guests!” he said, smiling.

  “Ah,” said Jasper, a little nettled. “Bntno.”

  “You all is looking well—but not well-done. Still rare. Ha? Yes? This just being a joke. This just being a thing I say.” He laughed and took a bite of his sandwich.

  “You cleared out pretty quickly,” said Katie. “When the going got tough.”

  “Oh, indeed. I am the very fast runner.”

  “You set a record,” said Katie. “You beat us all.”

  “I fold up sandwich, and we walk through city. Now very quiet. Very quiet. Shush, shush! This is, generally, place of doom.” He wrapped up the sandwich in a piece of tinfoil, running his tongue around his teeth. He stuck the sandwich back in his backpack. He gestured, and they followed him into the ruined city of monsters.

  The stones of that place were massive. It was built of granite, yes, but also of black basalt and slabs of crystal. Its towers were in ruin; most of the walls were fallen, and upon them grew the banyan tree and vine. Wild orchids bobbed in the ancient alleyways. Huge faces were cracked apart by roots.

  Bntno walked, keeping his body low, stepping carefully to avoid scraping his rubber soles along the gritty flagstones. The others followed his lead. They paused before each ancient avenue to make sure that nothing terrible scuttled along it seeking food.

  “We must leave city before night,” whispered Bntno at one point, shifting his eyes from side to side, spidering his fingers around. “We stay in night, then very, very bad chomping.”

  Lily felt like she couldn’t breathe.

  It didn’t help that Bntno almost immediately got them lost.

  Jasper pointed out, “We’ve passed that statue seven times in the last hour.”

  “Very popular,” said Bntno. “Who don’t like that statue?”

  “We’re going in circles,” said Jasper.

  “Not circles,” said Bntno. “Irregular polygons.”

  “Oh, come on!” complained Katie.

  “No,” said Jasper ruefully, “he’s right. Maybe a trapezoid.”

  They wandered through squares and past palaces. Temples lay slumped over in the streets. They passed courtyards and brackish pools.

  Once, they saw a tiny dinosaur head on a long, serpentine neck crane itself above a pyramid. They jumped, startled, but the creature just browsed on vines.

  They crept away as quickly as they could.

  “It getting dark,” said Bntno. He told them sadly, “I would run away now and leave my jolly friends behind if I could find quick exit.”

  The jungle quieted around them. Monkeys stopped howling. The weird rose of dying light fell on the ancient walls. It hung in the steamy atmosphere so the air itself looked golden and perfumed.

  And then evening fell. Everything was gray and unclear. Each black entrance to a house, each pit leading to unimaginable caverns, sent little chills of panic through Lily’s limbs. Danger could be anywhere.

  Jasper whispered, “At least the cannibals and the monsters will stop whoever’s been following us.”

  “Great,” said Katie. “Thanks for this whole adventure. I’m really enjoying it.”

  They passed by a huge dome inscribed with ancient words.

  Just at bloody sunset, they saw a procession of ghosts. It was on one of the main avenues. They were of a tall race dressed in robes, with faces like twisted and fingered clay. They walked sorrowfully through the city and disappeared.

  Somewhere, in the ruined plazas, a bell tolled.

  Bntno fell to his knees, touched his hands to his forehead in a prayer, and moaned.

  “I guess this isn’t good,” said Katie.

  “Let’s keep going,” said Lily, gripping her own fingers. “We have to find that bridge.”

  Bntno got up and started scuttling forward. The others rushed to follow him.

  They no longer worried about making noise. They were too panicked, all of them. Jasper had his atomic torch in one hand and his ray gun clutched in the other. They scampered through the empty squares.

  Then Bntno held out his hand—they skated to a stop.

  There, in the lee of an ancient drive-thru restaurant, was the nest of some carnivorous dinosaur, lying like a snoring, saw-jawed minivan among tamped-down grasses and a clutch of huge eggs. The monster was maybe thirty feet long from its head to the tip of its tail, which was wrapped around the beast like a feather boa on a sleeping starlet. The meat-eater stirred in her sleep and gently licked her eggs.

  “A Tyrannosaurus rex, ” gasped Jasper.

  “An allosaurus,” said Katie. “If we’re quiet, maybe we can sneak past.”

  “Is it an allosaurus? It does look like a T. rex.”

  “Yeah. The short horns near the eyes mean it’s an allosaurus.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. But I believe it is a T. rex based on its size. It seems to me much larger than an allosaurus.”

  “Okay, you may have a Ph.D. in archeology or whatever. But I redid that dinosaur report. It’s a—”

  “Um,” said Lily urgently, and they saw the monster stirred in her sleep.

  They shut up and crept around the sweet-scented nest.

  Maybe they would have made it if, when they had passed it, Jasper, who was in a very unfortunately strained mood, had not said, “I believe the Tyrannosaurus rex has fallen back asleep.”

  “Jasper,” Katie protested, “look at the horned ridges by—”

  “The forearms are—”

  The massive head swiveled up.

  They all saw it lurch in the gloom.

  Lily grabbed their hands and pulled them forward.

  And then, terrible to hear, came the sound of stomping.

  They didn’t turn to look. They didn’t turn to see that massive gut, those terrible claws springing along the empty avenue—those awful, ancient features twisted in an hideous, toothy grin, because they didn’t want to know that something so massive might seek their flesh, snatch them up, tear them to pieces.

  They ran.

  42

  Through the dark, falling over one another, the light from Jasper’s atomic torch wheeling across the battered walls, they fled. They felt the earth shake beneath them. Bntno let out a continual whine.

  Their guide led them through the maze of streets and through the nightmare eve, where things slithered in the catacombs and chuckled in old windows. The dinosaur stomped behind them.

  “Maybe if we dodged into a building, the T. rex couldn’t follow us!” Jasper shouted.

  “But then we’d still be followed,” Katie called back, “by the allosaurus that’s chasing us!”

  “While I respect your hypothesis—”

  “La la la la la! Not listening!”

  “The therapod’s two, rather than three fingers, on the anterior claws suggest to me—”

  Katie sang brashly, “It was an A! It was an L! It was an A. L. L.-o-saurus! That’s what’s about to gore us! I wish it would—”

  “T. rex!”

  “…ignore us!”

  “Um, guys?” said Lily. “Maybe we should—”
/>   They stopped arguing. The crashing footsteps were getting closer. The four ran down a wide street, jolting at each footfall of the colossus.

  Suddenly, Bntno skidded in his tracks. “No!” he said. “You sing so much my brain is scramble! This way!”

  Katie, Lily, and Jasper turned in horror to look at him. He was pointing back toward the dimly seen bulk of the giant dino.

  “I see the door to bridge!” he said. He gestured again back the way they had come. “We pass! There!” he said, and pointed at a door.

  And so they ran right toward the dinosaur.

  “Shortcut,” said Bntno. “No problem.”

  They shifted their bags on their shoulders and began to cross.

  “Under us, Drawyer River,” said Bntno.

  Lily looked down over the edge of the railing of the bridge. She could not see the river.

  Instead, she saw something looking back up.

  It had a thousand eyes. It was crawling up the wall. Mouths flapped open and shut, and chipped, yellow teeth clacked closed, gulping air.

  Lily yelled a warning to the others, and they began to run—but the creature pulled itself up, towering like a column right next to the end of the bridge.

  The eldritch demon-spawn yawned and smacked over the pit, hungering for sacrifice. It swayed and waited and unfurled its tentacles to pluck at prey. Flights of black and orange butterflies flittered before it, rising past the tiger lilies on the cliffs.

  Everything was confusion. Bntno, rubber heels slapping at the stone, bolted right past to the other side and kept on going. Lily had made it too and lingered by the stairs. Jasper pointed his gun, shouted for Katie to just run past the thing—and he began to fire.

  Jasper’s gun was still out of juice, but he jiggled it, and he got a few darts of blue light to shoot out at the beast. The monster screamed from several mouths, bellowing like a pipe organ—waved its tentacles—and shot forward to grab Katie.

  She battered the spongy arms with one of her bags.

  Jasper shot another ray into the monster, its flesh sizzling. It sent a tentacle reeling at him, and he danced away, firing. The cavern flickered with hot, blue light.

  The monster had tangled its grapplers in the straps of Katie’s two packs. One of them—her own—was still on her shoulders, yanked by the monster. The other—which she’d been carrying for Jasper—was hurled into one of the monster’s maws.

  Katie struggled, she kicked, but she was being dragged toward the chasm—and toward the beast itself.

  43

  “Release the backpack straps!” Jasper yelled. “Katie! Katie!”

  She ducked—she twisted—she turned. She fell. The wicked Thing hauled her toward its mouths. Black butterflies wobbled through the air before her face. She scraped over dirt and baby tears, wrestling with her own arms.

  Jasper shot the Thing again. “Too weak!” he muttered, rattling his ray gun. Now the batteries were truly gone. The laser was just a feeble beam of light.

  So, raising it once more, he aimed it directly at the Thing’s eye. He fired. The gun flashed.

  The Thing blinked. It twitched, then growled—but in the moment of that twitch,

  Katie had hunched her back. She threw her arms above her.

  She was free of her pack.

  It slid toward the monster without her.

  The Thing tossed the backpack in its mouth while Katie, half crawling, scrambled for the stairs.

  Now they all started clattering upward, away from the pit and the eldritch Thing.

  “Sorry, Jasper,” said Katie, “I lost your extra supplies.”

  He looked a little guilty. He didn’t say anything.

  Lily glanced back down toward the Thing. It had pulled itself up and was starting to galumph after them, heavy blue-veined lips smearing against the rock.

  “My ray-gun batteries are now entirely dead,” said Jasper. “Do we have any other plans, chums?”

  “Running,” said Katie. “That seems like a plan.”

  There was a ferocious cry behind them. Stunned, they couldn’t help but look back.

  The ancient demon-spawn, child of a lost and awful world, was clutching its stomach. It was balled up and woozy.

  “It must have eaten some…” Katie stopped herself. “Jasper,” she said, “what was in that extra backpack? That backpack I’ve been carrying for two days now?”

  He said, in a very small voice, “Why, supplies, Katie.”

  “Jasper?” she said. “What kind of supplies have I been carrying in that extra backpack for two days now, while being chased by cannibals, creatures from pits—and allosauruses ?”

  “Well, Katie, when your pluck is unplucked and your pep is—”

  “Jasperrrrr!”

  “Why, there’s nothing that zaps up your zip like—”

  “Jasper Dash, have I been carrying sixteen twelve-ounce jars of Gargletine Instant Breakfast Drink through twenty-five miles of tropical rain forest?”

  “Yes, Katie.”

  “And why didn’t you just tell me that I was carrying—”

  “I was ashamed,” said Jasper, “because you always make fun of Gargletine, and recently you haven’t been doing anything but arguing with me about Delaware and laughing at me. You’ve been— Anyway…So I didn’t want to show the jars to you. Because a fellow gets tired of being ha-ha ’ed to death. To absolute death, Katie. Now argue with me about that. ”

  “Um, Jas,” said Katie, pointing down the stairs at the monster. “Maybe it’s good I didn’t drink any of that Gargletine.”

  The Thing writhed on the bottom steps. It held its stomach and groaned out of twelve mouths in uneasy, passing harmony. It shlupped itself toward its home pit like a daddy longlegs crawling off the windshield of a speeding car.

  “Let’s go,” said Lily. “While it’s slowed down.”

  “Yes,” said Jasper, with dignity. “Because once the Gargletine takes effect, the Thing will be…much…stronger…and peppy…All Saturday long.”

  They climbed the stairs to freedom.

  “I’m sorry, Jasper,” said Katie. “It’s just that right now—okay—I am a little sick of boys and their pride. It always seems like boys have got to be right about, you know, tyrannosauruses.”

  “Why, gee, no, Katie. I am sorry. Here I—”

  “Moody guests,” said Bntno, “perhaps we walk on upstairs and speak of tyrannosauruses when we don’t have so many monster right behind us. Then heartwarming talk of friends and oh sorry and clasp hands, tada.”

  So they kept toiling up the steps leading out of the overgrown kingdom of Greylag.

  And when they got to the top and stepped out of an old stone cupola, they found themselves on a beautiful plateau. The fronds and petals whispered in the breeze. The eyes of birds shone bright. The air was warm and friendly, curling on their arms and hair.

  And over the peaceful scene, blocking out the thousand jillion stars and the Milky Way, dashed across this American landscape, were the shadows of four mountains rising from the hills. Bdreth, Minndfl, Tlmp, and Drgsl. They hunched like cowled monks surveying the world.

  Katie, Jasper, and Lily looked in awe around them. On one of those mountains stood Vbngoom, the Platter of Heaven. Whichever one of them was Tlmp.

  “They’re beautiful,” said Lily.

  “Indeed,” said Jasper. His voice full of awe, he said, “On one of those mountains, Drgnan Phglik waits for us. We are coming, my friend. We will soon be there.” He asked Bntno, “Which one of them is Tlmp?”

  Bntno was rooting around in his sack for his roast beef sandwich.

  “Bntno?” said Lily.

  “Yes, lovely guests?”

  “Which one is Tlmp?” Jasper repeated.

  “Yes?”

  “Which mountain is Tlmp?”

  “Which I-not-know is what?” said Bntno. He took a bite out of his sandwich. “I am not very good with whichways.”

  “But we need to know which mountain to go up,” said Ka
tie. “There are four of them.”

  “Yes, you choose. I do not know where monastery is. I get you here, but you take me to Vbngoom.”

  “It’s on Mount Tlmp,” said Jasper. “So which one is Tlmp?”

  “One with Vbngoom on it.”

  “Thank you,” said Jasper. “Swell. Tell me which of those four. The one farthest to the east? To the west? One of the ones in the middle?”

  “Rocket-youngster does not see what is said to him. I am not know which mountain has which name. The story say that these mountains, they are dance when it cloudy. All…” He slapped his hands around next to each other to suggest the mountains changing places.

  “Will we be able to see Vbngoom in the morning?” asked Katie. “On top of one of them?”

  “Oh no,” said Bntno. “Oh no. Can’t see no tops because of rumples. Vbngoom, it is very great secret of Delaware state.” He finished with his sandwich, balled up the aluminum foil, and shoved it into a convenient blossom. “Time for sleep now. In morning, you will find monastery for us.”

  “Um,” said Katie, “aren’t you supposed to be our guide?”

  “Shh! I am to be sleeping,” said Bntno, shaking out his bedding and laying it on the ground.

  And so, exhausted, not knowing where they’d be headed the next day, they unrolled their sleeping bags and fell asleep in the vale between the four great star-shadows of the four greatest peaks in the greatest mountain range in the state of Delaware.

  44

  Up on one of those mountaintops, locked in the board game and tiger closet of Vbngoom, Platter of Heaven, young Drgnan Pghlik crouched next to Nrrrgarha, monastery pet, waiting to be eaten.

  So far, Drgnan had not been clawed. He had not been mauled or bitten.

  The tiger knew him. They had lived together for years. Still, this was a tiger, not a calico cat with a love of sunbeams and people smooshing their face in his fur singing about bouncy mice and shnuggles. Nrrrgarha was a beast of the wild. He hunted the slopes in lean times.

  Drgnan talked to the tiger as he had been taught, speaking gently, compassionately, and evenly, freeing them both from all desires. He asked the tiger to look within. He told the tiger to forget worldly hungers, for worldly hungers are the crooked stick with which wickedness thwacks us.