Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware

by M. T. Anderson

  He fell silent. His old eyes glistened as he saw the seven Stare-Eyes players walk in with Coach and Team Mom.

  Jasper, Katie, and Lily felt their stomachs sink. The squid weighed heavily.

  The seven players walked around the dining hall, sneering.

  “Okay, girls!” roared Coach, and the monks all stopped eating and looked up at him, except three in the middle of the table, who kept looking down.

  Coach smiled and crossed his arms. “We just got back from a little trip. A little trip to other states. Outside Delaware.”

  Team Mom snarled, “Our fingers are strong from clawing our way to the top.”

  Her husband said, “We sold over two million smackers’ worth of your monastery garbage to museums. Statues and cups and stuff. Bye-bye. You ain’t going to see it no more.”

  “No more,” said Team Mom.

  “Now. We need a little help,” said Coach. “Because tonight we want to soup up the kids. Give them some more magic power. Already, they can hypnotize by looking. That worked out real well for them. We can do some brain-talking. That’s great. But we want them levitating by a week from now.”

  “Floating,” said Team Mom.

  “In the air. Magically. You savvy?” Coach made a whistling, rising-up noise and made two of his fingers float like legs over his other hand. “Now we know it’s not just putting the kids in front of the sacred flames. They also got to hear the right stuff to think about. And we wonder which one of you clowns is going to tell us.”

  “You only give us what we’ll take anyway,” said Team Mom. “We take the best for our chupperkins.” She rubbed the blond head of the nearest team member fondly. “They are our best boys. They deserve everything wonderful.”

  There was a silence in the dining hall. No one wanted to help the Stare-Eyes team levitate. They were awful enough already. Who wanted them to be awful in windows and on roofs?

  “Who’s going to spill the beans?” said Coach. “Who’s going to tell them how to levitate?”

  No one raised their hand. The Stare-Eyes Champs walked back and forth along the length of the table.

  And then #6 stopped just opposite Jasper. He turned his head to the side.

  And he said, “Hey! Look here!” He pointed.

  Jasper had been recognized.

  57

  #6 froze. His mouth was open. His finger was raised. He didn’t move. Jasper held his gaze furiously.

  Their eyes were locked. Invisibly, their spirits struggled like sumo wrestlers bulging with the flab of anger.

  Everyone stared. #6 still pointed into empty space.

  “Oh, me?” said the monk next to Jasper. “The young gentleman points to me? Yes, I will tell all. The sea cannot hold back its tides when the moon calls.” He rose up. “It is decided, then. I will tell you the secrets of levitation. You will hold these excellent children before the sacred flames.”

  “Great,” said Coach.

  “But you must know, there is great danger in being broasted in the flame-pits of Vbngoom if you have not had the proper training.”

  “So how long will the proper training take? We can get a whiteboard up here, some Magic Markers. What kind of time do you need?”

  “Twenty-five years, thirty years,” said the monk. “Then they shall be ready to face the flames.”

  “No go,” said the Coach. “Why don’t we try to get them levitating by four-thirty tomorrow? That’s what I call thinking like a winner.”

  The monk frowned. “You endanger your children,” he said.

  “You say no, and we’ll hang some of the littler monks out the window by their heels again.”

  The monk sighed. “Then by tomorrow,” he said.

  “See? Attitude improvement. Rah rah rah. Stars and stripes in the air. Let’s go.” Coach snapped. “Come with us.”

  “I leave my squid behind me,” said the old man, nodding. “So shall we all, on our last day, abandon our squid.”

  #6 trembled. He wanted to yell out. Everything in him tried to sound a warning. But he was locked in place by Jasper’s glare.

  Behind them, the other boys filed out of the room, giving each other the high five. Coach and Team Mom led the way, with the old monk between them.

  #6 remained behind.

  For many minutes, his eyes and Jasper’s stayed locked.

  The other monks left. The gangsters left. Still, Jasper, Katie, and Lily sat at the table, and #6 stood, pointing, his eyes glazed, his mouth open.

  Twenty minutes later, Jasper unhooked his gaze, wiped his mouth on his napkin, and said, “Jakeloo. And we’re off.”

  They left. #6 remained standing, hypnotized.

  Later that evening, someone was thoughtful enough to rest a bowl of after-dinner mints on #6’s outstretched hand. They hung a sign from his arm that read, HOWDY! ASK US ABOUT OUR HOMEMADE SPINACH QUICHE!

  They were really good mints.

  58

  As soon as they had left the dining room, Jasper led them away from the other monks. “We’ve got to go unlock the board game and tiger closet,” he said. “That’s where they’re keeping Drgnan Pghlik.”

  They walked carefully through the monastery, up hallways and stairs.

  Lily was amazed by what she saw. She loved how ancient and mysterious everything was. She felt a thrill when she saw the old paintings on the walls, obscured by years of smoke: pictures of the beginning of the world or its end, the cracking of the globe; acts of heroism and generosity from previous ages played out in crowns of gold and coats of satin on mountaintops and forests. There were paintings of the huts of hermits and the courts of kings.

  She wanted to spend a lifetime learning about them, about all of their secret meanings. Why did one saint bake bread made of sand, while another was covered with grasshoppers? Each picture had its secret story. As they rushed past them, Lily wanted to pause and study them all.

  But there was no time.

  Carefully Jasper led them up a final twisting staircase. The door at the top was latched. Slowly he drew up the latch and pressed with his fingertips so the door swung inward.

  It was a recreation room. There was a Ping-Pong table, as well as stacks of other entertainments: a toboggan, the monastery’s water-polo net, a croquet set, and so on. At the far end of the room was a closet door with a key in the keyhole. A sound of growling, like a wild beast with the taste of monk-flesh on its tongue, came from the closet.

  A mobster guard was posted to the room. He was asleep, curled up on the air-hockey table. He had his thumb in his mouth.

  Carefully Jasper, Katie, and Lily crept across the floor. The mobster snored.

  The imprisoned tiger made an answering growl.

  Jasper hoped that Drgnan Pghlik was still uneaten, at least most of him.

  Lily couldn’t stop staring at the gangster. He had a gun. A real gun. He probably had killed people before, except he would call it “bumping them off” or “zotzing” or “croakin’ ’em good.”

  Lily knew that you should never stare at anyone when you don’t want them to see you. Even if you have never been exposed to the sacred fires of Vbngoom, there is some weird way that people can feel it when you stare at them, even if they can’t see you. Lily knew this, and didn’t want to alert the mobster, but she couldn’t tear her eyes away because she was so frightened of him.

  Meanwhile the Boy Technonaut was standing by the board game and tiger closet. He reached out and very gently turned the key in the lock.

  The door swung open.

  There was Drgnan Pghlik with his eyes closed. He looked completely calm, although his head was in the tiger’s mouth, with the animal’s fangs pressing into his cheek and neck.

  The boy opened his eyes with a snap. He saw Jasper, and his face lit up with joy.

  Jasper, Lily, and Katie put their fingers over their lips to shush him.

  He reached out and grabbed Jasper’s hand in a hearty shake. It jiggled the tiger.

  Nrrrgarha, seeing the open do
or, let Drgnan go. Drgnan sprang out of the closet. Jasper stepped into the closet, over the tiger, and scanned the games quickly.

  Drgnan looked at him quizzically. Jasper held up the ray gun for Drgnan to see, and opened its battery compartment. Drgnan nodded, checked to see that the ray gun required triple-A batteries, and then pulled out a toy robot from the stack of games.

  Jasper turned the robot over to find the battery pack. Its eyes lit up. In a loud recorded voice like a gravel-grinder, it bellowed, “Have no fear! Gau-Grza to the Rescue!”

  And with that, the gangster sat up.

  59

  “Whoa! Kid with a dress is sprung!” said the gangster, and raised his gun.

  Lily ducked—

  —which would not have saved her from flying bullets—

  —but did save her from being whacked by the monastery tiger leaping through the air and onto the gangster.

  The gangster was knocked backward. His gun fell to the floor. Lily, Katie, Jasper, and Drgnan backed away, appalled. The gangster and the tiger wrestled on the air-hockey table.

  I would hate to have to report that the tiger ate the gangster, even if the gangster was a very bad person.

  So let’s jump three minutes ahead.

  Plans! Plans! Jasper and Lily ran one way, to try to warn the other monks that an uprising was afoot. Katie and Drgnan Pghlik ran the other way to try to stop the Stare-Eyes team from gaining secret powers from the sacred flame deep in the catacombs beneath the monastery.

  The tiger went his own way, looking for more gangster meat.

  Through the temple Katie and Drgnan sprinted, pillars fluttering past as they dashed. On all of the pedestals were dark places where statues of gold and silver had stood—statues now dragged away and sold to make money for the World-Wide Lootery. Drgnan reached a huge stone ogre and pressed a series of warts. A secret door slid open.

  Meanwhile Lily and Jasper took steps two by two. They ran up toward the dormitories. Jasper slid the batteries from the robot into his gun. He snapped the grip shut. Jasper and Lily scampered across a landing.

  Bullets! Mobsters fired!

  Jasper and Lily crouched at the turn in the stairs. Jasper shot bolts of light from his ray gun—there was an angry curse from above—and he and Lily smelled the scent of burning polyester. He had hit one of the mobsters smack in the cheap suit.

  Katie and Drgnan now rushed through halls buried deep within the mountain. Candles and torches lit the way.

  “Where are the sacred flames?” asked Katie.

  “In the heart of the mountain,” said Drgnan Pghlik. “They are the source of all our power. These Stare-Eyes children and their mobster parents do not understand the power of the flames. There is much danger there.”

  There was much danger everywhere.

  60

  Jasper was locked in a gun battle with the mob. He fired his laser.

  Lily hated gunplay. She didn’t think violence was a good idea. She always hoped it could be avoided through the use of false mustaches, clever ploys, logical conversation, and a few rolling boulders.

  But Jasper was desperately blasting away at the enemy. Lily felt like she couldn’t just stand there and do nothing while he protected her. Especially because, as usual, his batteries weren’t going to last forever. She’d noticed his gun went through batteries kind of quickly. Pretty soon, his laser beam was going to get all dim and fizzly.

  Bullets zinged past her. She closed her eyes, trembling.

  Jasper fired. There was another curse word down the corridor, and Weasel Chops O’Reilly said, “He almost fried my kisser! You little punk! I’m gonna need that some day! For kissing!”

  “I hope not, you scoundrel!” said Jasper. “I hope that no woman ever calls the number on the clammy little scraps of paper you doubtless force into their hands at hamburger rallies and 4-H fairs!”

  Jasper did not have a very clear idea of where gangsters met their ladies. Weasel Chops O’Reilly usually met his classy dames down at the booze joints on the corner of Squat Street and Hard Luck or at prizefights between battling robots.

  Meanwhile Lily didn’t know what to do.

  “Lily,” said Jasper. “I’ll hold off the gangsters. You run down that hallway there to the dormitories! Tell the monks what’s happening! Ask them where I can find Bobby Spandrel!”

  Lily nodded and ran down the hallway.

  Jasper fired around the corner at the mobsters. His forehead had broken out into a sweat.

  Lily ran as fast as she could to the door of the monks’ dormitories. “Hurry!” yelled Jasper behind her. “I can’t hold them for long!” Lily hurried. She threw the door open to find the monks all kneeling on the floor, serenely praying.

  “Um,” she said, “um, excuse me.”

  The monks looked up.

  Lisa Buldene was sitting there, too, trying to work her cell phone. She looked up in astonishment. “It’s the girl from Dover! How did you get in?”

  “Never mind, Ms. Buldene! We’ve got to get out!” To the monks, she said, “Jasper Dash—he was here years ago, you might remember him—anyway, Jasper Dash is holding the gangsters off!”

  There were happy nods when they heard that Jasper Dash had returned.

  “Jasper needs help finding Bobby Spandrel, the leader of the gang!”

  This is normally the place in the story when the monks would all agree to help fight the mobsters, and everyone would cheer and rush out of the room and victory would follow immediately.

  Unfortunately, these monks had taken a vow of complete nonviolence, so biffing gangsters in the schnozz was out of the question. Their martial arts training was not supposed to actually be used for fighting, but instead as a way of exercising the mind and combating the inner demons such as anger, desire for worldly goods, and procrastination. Not stooges with machine guns.

  Oh, yeah, the machine guns. There was a lot of gunfire coming from the staircase now.

  Lily felt very nervous.

  But let’s change the scene.

  Deep beneath the earth, Katie and Drgnan Pghlik raced through the catacombs. They lifted their knees high and scampered past tombs guarded by serpents. They slid down the banister of the crematorium.

  Drgnan Pghlik threw open a bronze door.

  They stepped into a huge cavern. It was lit by a weird, flickering blue light. Some daylight came from above. The cave had once been part of a volcano, and there was a hole that led straight up and out the top of the mountain.

  But the eerie blue light came from below. There was a huge chasm in the middle of the floor, a fissure, a crack. It divided the room into two. And deep down there in the heart of the mountain was a blue glow: the sacred flames. Gases rose from the depths and wafted up into the rock chimney above.

  Suspended above the chasm and the flame were five of the players from the Stare-Eyes team.

  The boys hung from the ceiling. They sat cradled in chains, with their arms folded, their legs crossed, and their eyes open. The chain baskets dangled them over the pit so they could soak up the energies radiating from the mountain’s heart.

  Their eyes glowed red, and their pupils were slits like snakes’.

  They bathed in the light from the flame-pits of Delaware.

  61

  The dangling varsity players were in a trance. They did not move or seem to see. They just sat with folded arms and legs crossed, staring into space.

  Drgnan Pghlik counted. “That’s not all of them, is it?” he asked Katie.

  “No,” said Katie. “We caught their Number Four in Dover. And Number Six is frozen upstairs in the dining room.” She scanned their faces. “And Number One is missing.”

  “See!” said Drgnan. “There is their coach!”

  Katie looked across the chasm. There on the other side of the cavern was Coach, leaning against the wall, grinning, and drinking, as he would say, “a brewski.” He stood next to a large lever attached to some sort of machine.

  “What’s that machine?
” Katie asked Drgnan.

  “It is a lever that controls the chains that hold people over the flame-pits. The chains are on a track in the ceiling. The lever, yes? It draws the chains over to that side of the chasm so that people can step off and the holy do not dangle forever.”

  Katie inspected the room carefully. She looked up at the hanging jocks, at the mechanical track that held them in place, and at Coach, sitting by the engine that would move them. She saw that a bridge, also made of chains, ran across the fissure, right under the five meditating mob kids.

  “I have an idea,” she said. “We can trap those five.”

  Drgnan squinted. “What does my clever sister mean?”

  “If we break that machine or pull out a gear or something, then the five players will be stuck there, you know, at our mercy. They won’t be able to escape.”

  “Ah!” Drgnan exclaimed with pleasure. “Indeed! The lever on this machine unscrews!”

  “Okay,” said Katie. “If you can take on Coach, I can take care of the lever.”

  Drgnan smiled. “It is an excellent plan,” he said. “So we cross the bridge.”

  Katie inspected the glinting bridge. It swayed with gusts of blue that drifted up from the mystical flames beneath.

  Katie’s palms were sweating. She wasn’t sure how excellent a plan it was, suddenly.

  She and Drgnan started to creep across the cavern floor.

  They were almost at the chain bridge beneath the dandled, zombie-eyed boys—when Coach saw them.

  “Hey! Hey!” Coach belted. “You! Keep away from my boys! They’re winners, and you’re a bad influence!”

  The coach ran forward and pulled his pistol out of his tracksuit.

  Katie and Drgnan dropped to the floor behind an outcropping. Flights of bullets rattled against the stalagmites, the stalactites, the schist.

  Katie whispered to Drgnan, “Okay. How are we going to do this?”

  “Saint Lrtzmrk writes that when the falcon lands in the lagoon, then the frog seeks its dinner elsewhere,” said Drgnan.