Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware

by M. T. Anderson

  It grew colder. Very cold. Incredibly cold. Their breath came out in puffs.

  Drgnan Pghlik walked without turning, seemingly without ever noticing their presence.

  He led them through hollows of granite. They walked past cairns—piles of stones heaped on the top of cliffs. They passed old carvings: fanged faces, dancing gods.

  A mist closed thickly around them. They were in the clouds. All they could see was Drgnan’s glow. They shined their flashlights up and down the narrow path. Though they could not see the impossible drop to one side of them, they could hear it. They could feel it in the booming wind.

  Lily thought she had never been so tired. She tried to concentrate on every step—not on how far they had left to go or how far they had come. One foot in front of another.

  Her back hurt. Her head was sore. She was getting a throat-ache. Her hands were numb.

  Jasper skipped along as if nothing was difficult for him, as if the air weren’t condensing on them all as frost.

  Through the night they climbed. It was a dark night, a night of haze and cold.

  At around four o’clock, the mists began to clear.

  They were climbing a long ridge of stone on all fours. Lily did not want the light to rise too quickly. She knew that she would see sheer drop-offs on either side of them. She didn’t want to know. She didn’t want to see how far she would fall if she slipped.

  Snow blew across her face. She wiped it away, blowing her frozen bangs out of her eyes.

  “Drgnan!” she heard Jasper call. “Drgnan? Where are you going?”

  With the dawn, the specter was flickering out.

  Drgnan Pghlik’s astral form turned once, his forlorn face finally beseeching them for help. Then he disappeared.

  “Drgnan! You can’t leave us like this!” said Jasper. “Which way? Which way?”

  Katie and Lily looked on in horror. But Jasper’s friend was gone.

  With the dawn, a great wind arose. A huge fan of snow swept across them and dissipated.

  “Look!” said Katie. “Look!”

  53

  It stood above them, about a half mile away, lit bright against a blue sky and dazzling plumes of snow.

  The monastery was built upon the craggy walls of a volcanic crater, crowning three little peaks, its bastions and bridges cast between them. It was a maze of sloping walls and stone towers, gardens of gemlike green and ornaments of brass dazzling in the morning sun—white stone and gilded spoons on which monks hurled themselves from temple to temple.

  It rose up out of a pine wood, through which paths wound, lined with gray prayer flags flapping in the breeze. From the high battlements, the morning horns sounded.

  Katie, Jasper, and Lily had reached Vbngoom, the Platter of Heaven.

  PART FOUR

  54

  The three made their way toward the monastery. They were glad that their approach was hidden by the forest. They knew things would be very dangerous for them once they got close to the walls.

  “Bobby Spandrel,” said Jasper, “is clever and ruthless. We must take every precaution.” He took out his ray gun and proceeded with it at the ready.

  “Jasper,” said Lily. “One thing with taking precautions? Just to remember?”

  “Yes, Lily?”

  “Your ray gun is out of batteries.”

  Jasper frowned. He pointed the gun straight up and fired it. Not even a flicker came out of the nozzle.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Curses.” He fired uselessly a few more times at the sky. “Ah well. Forward, chums.”

  “Forward,” muttered Katie.

  They walked down the path. On each side of them, there were gray prayer flags, thin and gauzy as ash, blowing in the mountain breeze.

  They crept through thickets of spruce. Ahead of them, they could hear the sound of engines and groaning. They didn’t like it at all.

  They rested for a minute against three pillars they found in a clearing, and they planned in whispers.

  “We don’t have any weapons,” said Jasper. “Not a single electro-atomic ray blaster among us. This worries me.”

  “How are we going to get into the monastery?” asked Katie. “We can’t just walk up to the front gates.”

  “It’s too bad we can’t dress like monks,” said Lily. “If we had…you know, monk suits.”

  “In movies,” said Katie, “when people need to get into a secret facility, they always run into three guards and then they grab them and pull them off-screen into closets for a second and then they come out wearing their uniforms. And the uniforms are always exactly the right size. Maybe they pull them into fitting rooms.”

  Lily and Jasper really had nothing to say to this, so Katie continued, “Which would be great, except my feet are a really weird shape. I have a short foot, like a size five, but wide. It would be really hard to find a guard shoe that would—”

  “Um, hey,” whispered Lily.

  She pointed straight up.

  The others looked up at the top of the three pillars they were resting against.

  Sitting on top of the pillars were three old monks, naked except for white loincloths. Their eyes were closed. Their beards had grown down and intermingled with their knees, their toes, and vines.

  “Great Scott!” said Jasper. “Hermits!”

  “What are they doing?” said Katie.

  “Meditating! That’s Brother Klrt! That would mean…he’s been atop that pillar for almost forty years!”

  “Then,” whispered Lily, “he and the other two might not be needing these.” She pulled three green robes and capes out of the bushes where they had been hanging.

  “Swell!” cried Jasper. “Perfect!”

  “Yuck,” said Katie. “There’s bird doo on one of them.”

  “Where?” said Lily, holding out the fabric and flipping it back and forth.

  “On one of the hermits.” Katie was still craning her neck to check out the tops of the pillars. “I think it’s pigeons.”

  “Brother Svbnm was always a friend to the animals,” Jasper recalled. “He had a chummy way with squirrels that kept him in tetanus shots for years.”

  Lily handed robes and capes to her friends. As it happened, the clothes fit the three kids precisely. They hid their packs in the bushes.

  As they fastened the chains that held on their capes, Jasper paused.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Katie.

  Jasper hesitated. He said, “Remembering the past is sometimes a joyful and a sad thing at the same time.”

  “I know what you mean,” said Katie.

  “What are you remembering?” asked Lily.

  “All the happy months. Chasing butterflies in these woods. My friend Drgnan Pghlik and I whistling chants and carving yak-butter sculptures. Singing evensong. Going to bed early to the sound of the monastery gong. Sleeping soundly in my horsehair nightgown. Rising early, as the conch shells were blown on the mountaintops and running downstairs through the cold hallways to a bath of hot coals…”

  “Hot coals?” exclaimed Lily.

  “Maybe the memory takes away the pain,” said Jasper.

  “It must be hard for you,” said Katie, “knowing that your friends are in trouble because of your archenemy.”

  Jasper looked down at the forest floor and nodded. “Yes,” he said. “This is my fight, not Vbngoom’s. Bobby Spandrel has lured me here. Now it’s time for me to show him that I stick by my friends.”

  “Don’t worry, Jasper,” said Lily. “We’ll stick by our friend, too.” She put her hand on his.

  Jasper smiled weakly. “Thank you, Lily.” He cleared his throat. “Well. Let’s be off, shall we?”

  Katie asked, “Are you sure it’s okay to take these clothes?”

  “I am sure that the three brethren wouldn’t mind,” said Jasper. “Their minds are on deeper things than mere clothes. Hip, hip, and away!”

  The three, now clad as monks, slipped off into the wood, leaving the clearing empty. Katie�
��s voice echoed back, saying, “It’s a good thing they don’t wear shoes, because it would be really hard to find a girl’s size five wide in the…”

  Birds sang in the hemlock trees and spruce. Butterflies wandered past. A deer walked through the clearing, browsing on moss.

  The deer heard a movement and bounded off into the woods.

  Up on top of the pillars, one of the monks had moved. His long beard flexed around his knuckles.

  He stretched a scrawny arm and yawned. Twigs and acorns dribbled to the forest floor from his fists and pits.

  “Okeydokey,” he said in Doverian. “Hey! Hey, guys! Time’s up!”

  Lids fluttered. The other two monks awoke. “Huh?” said one. “What’s up?”

  “Time’s up,” said Klrt. “That makes forty years. On the button. On the nose. We’re done.”

  “Oh, great,” said Svbnm, rolling his head from side to side to crack his neck. “I could really use a glass of orange Tang and some baked beans.”

  “All righty,” said Klrt, standing up on his pillar. “Let’s go down and…Hey. Hey! Where’s our…Hey! Whoa! Some joker stole our stuff! We can’t go back to the monastery like this! Where’s…”

  Meanwhile, the three monks’ clothes, with kids in them, crept closer to the sound of engines and groaning.

  55

  Under the towers and temples of Vbngoom was a sheer wall of granite blocks, raised up five hundred years before to repel the invasion of white-haired reavers from the frosty fastnesses of Winterthur.

  Painted upon that wall was the ferocious chicken, guardian of the monastery, the symbol of the Realm of Delaware: blue, three-eyed, scream-beaked, and with a hundred wings and legs, each clutching a different weapon as if to say: Puny mortal! Wish you to be smote by my drumsticks? Seek not my tenders!

  The ancient paint upon that wall was faded.

  Faded, too, was the power of the monks. They now worked at the base of the wall while mobsters watched. The monks had been ordered to help build a road so the mobsters could drive right up to the gates of this new hideout, instead of parking near the bottom of the mountain. Robed men staggered along in lines, carrying rocks to lay as pavement. Their green robes were torn and black with grit. As they marched dolefully along, they sang a ragged chant in Latin to keep up their spirits. Chants in Latin are normally one of the only things that can cheer up a monk, but in this case, it sounded so slow and heartsick, it was more like a groan. The monks, even little kid monks, were bowed low beneath the weight of stone.

  The road almost reached the front gates of the monastery.

  A white van was parked on the new cobbles.

  Crouched in the bushes, Jasper was aghast. “I can’t believe they’re building a road. Can’t they let anything alone? Can’t anything be cut off from anything else? Can’t anything be lost?”

  Lily knew what he meant. She loved places that people had forgotten, like the old gas station rotting on the edge of the forest in Pelt, all gray wood and brown metal. She liked to walk there sometimes and imagine that during tempests the king of the forest, dry leaves swirling around his motorcycle, would skid to a halt and demand unleaded gas from shadowy attendants while a mossy-faced knight sat in his sidecar.

  Everyone has those places we know about and no one else knows: maybe a tunnel you pass in the subway that’s never used anymore, or maybe a room in your school you find once and can never find again, or maybe just a little group of trees you see every day from the bus and have never been to but where you imagine something magical might happen.… And then one day, you go by that stand of trees, and you discover they’ve put a Planet Liquor store there, and the grand opening is Tuesday, but you miss the little tiny wood you knew because you miss the dreams it inspired.

  This is how Jasper felt. Gazing up at the fortifications, he mused, “That wall withstood the flaming arrows of the barbarian bandits of Winterthur, nigh on five hundred years ago. The bandits learned to fear the chicken. And yet now—now common mobsters have broken into the peaceful calm of the monastery. It is a sad day, chums.”

  “So what are we going to do?” asked Katie. “Because the mobsters don’t look like they fear the chicken.”

  “We could wait until they send some monks into the gates,” said Lily. “Then we could just walk out and follow them in.”

  An oddly dressed figure caught their attention. In the middle of the line of male monks was one woman. She was wearing a fleece jacket, dirty prayer scarves, and hiking pants that could zip off at the knee to make shorts.

  Lisa Buldene.

  She was also carrying rocks. She looked very tired. Even the dye in her hair looked tired.

  She said to everyone she passed, “You know, this is really withering my spirit. Don’t think I won’t call someone to complain. Because this is completely dimming the light of my joy.”

  “Keep your pants on, New York,” said one of the mobsters. “I don’t want to hear no guff.”

  “Someone from the tourist board is going to hear about this,” said Lisa Buldene. “I didn’t come here to haul rocks. I came here to find myself, and I don’t expect—”

  “You are gonna find yourself six feet underground, lady, if I do not commence hearing the delicious sound of silence right about nowish.”

  Lisa Buldene trudged on. Her head hung. She stopped complaining.

  “Poor Lisa Buldene,” said Katie.

  Lily couldn’t agree more. She imagined Lisa Buldene seeking this place she had dreamed of, finding it somehow, this hidden vale, these towers around this sacred crater—and then being immediately captured by mobsters and forced to carry rocks. Lily thought it must have been terrible for Lisa Buldene, to have her dreams smashed like that.

  “The monks are just as innocent as her,” said Jasper. “There’s no reason any of them deserve this.” With a look of defiance in his eyes, he said, “It’s me Bobby Spandrel wants.” He frowned. “And it’s me Bobby Spandrel is going to get.”

  With that, Jasper Dash walked out of the bushes toward the towering gates.

  The other two rushed after him.

  Jasper saw that the gates had been opened so a work party could file inside. He followed after them, not so close as to look like one of their number, but close enough so the doors wouldn’t shut before he and his friends got inside.

  The gates were fifteen feet high, set in the blank stone wall. They were guarded by mobsters with machine guns.

  The long line of monks with rocks disappeared into the gates. Pulling their hoods low, Lily, Katie, and Jasper followed after.

  The shadows swallowed them.

  They were inside.

  56

  A wide passageway led up through the cliffs. It was lit by torches in brackets on the wall. The monks struggled along. Hanging back just slightly were three shorter monks. One of them—Katie—wobbled at every step because the rocks hurt her bare feet. Lily was worried Katie would give herself away. Lily had figured out how to arch her feet so she wouldn’t lurch around in pain, and Jasper didn’t seem bothered at all.

  They came back out into the sunlight. They were in a courtyard. The doors were all of shining brass, and banners flapped in the mountain winds.

  Jasper, Katie, and Lily were about to cut away from the line of monks when they stopped dead in their tracks.

  There were Team Mom, Coach, and the seven remaining Stare-Eyes players, talking in a group.

  “Hey, you three!” yelled Coach. “Go into the dining room with the others! Chow time, then back out to work!”

  The three turned their heads away, shifting their cloaks to mask their faces. They followed the others.

  Lily felt terrified, being near so many guns, so many angry men.

  They snaked up halls and down halls and through cloisters. They followed the rest into the dining room. Mob guards stood along the walls.

  The procession of monks put down their rocks in a pile by the door and filed along the two sides of the table. Miserably they all sat at
once.

  Katie, Lily, and Jasper sat with them, heads bowed low. Lily folded her hands and rocked her knuckles back and forth on the table, to have something to do.

  Another monk came in with a big vat of tree-squid. It was a Friday, so the monastery was serving fish. He dished out some tentacle and eyeballs for each monk. When everyone had been served, a mobster banged on a gong. They took out their wooden sporks and started eating.

  The three kids were hunkered as low as they could over their bowls of squid. They didn’t want anyone to see their faces—or their hair, especially. All the monks were shaved bald. This was a time when Lily really regretted her bangs. They kept flopping in front of her eyes. This was a situation when bangs might mean death. Or, as the mobsters might have put it, bangs might mean ka-pow.

  Jasper was slurping up tentacle when the monk next to him (a master artist from the scriptorium) whispered, “Brother Dash. You have returned like the lark in spring.”

  Jasper replied, “The lark never strays too long from the nest.”

  “Even when the tree is charred,” said the monk sadly. “And cut down and the wood is treated and pressurized and made into an easy-to-assemble lawn gazebo.”

  “A cry was sent out by Brother Pghlik.”

  “You will not find Brother Pghlik here. He stood up to the invader, and they cut him down and locked him in the board game and tiger closet.”

  “With the tiger?!”

  “And the board games. We fear he has been eaten.” The old monk took a bite. “Stones do not weep: The water freezes on their faces.”

  “We’ve got to save him!”

  “Things are very bad here, young Dash. These evil men take their children into the forbidden places in the monastery, to the flame-pits, and hold them before the sacred fires. Their children acquire magical strengths that many men study years to acquire. We seek to acquire those powers with wisdom. They acquire them with foolishness. They steal our priceless treasures and they take them away from the monastery to sell in other lands. They gather wealth so that they may be the most powerful robbers in the—”