by Gabi Moore
“I thought they would sell,” said the man behind the counter. He was in his thirties and had a black beard with matching long hair down his back. He was short, not even five foot in height, but had a strong countenance. “And of course, they stopped selling as soon as I had a warehouse full of them. Did you want to buy one, perchance?”
“We’re interested in something else, Hobbs,” Dion said to him. “This is Lilly, by the way. Lilly, meet Heinrich Hobbstone, but everyone around here calls him Hobbs.”
“Well met,” he told her. “I hope the business picks up or I might end up moving out. I used to have a much bigger space down near the campus, but then waterbeds quit selling, so I’m here.”
“You have a lot of interesting things to sell in your store,” she told him as she perused the black light posters, record albums and small balances. “I’m not even going to ask what is on the back shelf.”
“How old are both of you? The state mandates I ask, which is why I just did.”
“Eighteen,” they both said at the same time.
“You have driver’s licenses?” he asked them. They both reached down their pockets and handed them over. The man carefully held them up to the light to look them over.
“You can’t tell the fakes unless you know the real ones inside and out,” he said. “One of these days, the state is going to come down hard on people and then they’ll regret looking the other way to turn a fast buck. As for myself, I plan to be here as long as I can. Big future in the books and posters. The music, not so much.” He handed the ID’s back to them.
“Okay,” he said, “Now I can talk to you. Just don’t ask me about the stuff I sell on the back shelf. The last thing I need is a pretty young girl wanting to know how to use massage oils. I have enough to deal with by being short and without a girlfriend.”
“I can’t imagine how you would go without a girlfriend,” Dion laughed. “Popular guy that you are. You must have a little black book somewhere?”
“I use it to record the calls from my ex-wives,” he said. “Now what is it you needed to see me about? I quit selling concert tickets last month, by the way. Lost a chunk promoting the Babe Ruth show with Hawkwind opening. Someday people will remember those bands, but not now.”
“I need a seer stone,” Dion said. “Do you have any here? I’m willing to pay a good price for one.”
“Why are these things so popular lately?” Hobbs asked him. “I had a man come in here just last week and I sold him a brown one.”
“Did it work?” Dion asked him.
“I guess it did. Never saw him again and I’m sure he’d have brought it back if it didn’t do what it was supposed to do. The guy claimed he’d found some metal plates in his backyard with Phoenician writing on it and needed to stone to translate. I told him the stones would work fine for any human language, but just because it translated, didn’t mean it would make any sense. You ever see what one of these will do for an old German text? Heck, you have to hunt around and find the verbs because they’re buried on separate pages. Not to mention the way words are blurred. Everything comes out ‘little girl neutral radish guild house forward’, if you understand what I’m talking about. Anyway, let me see what I have.”
Hobbs ducked under the shelf, not hard for him to do, and picked up a box. He placed the box on the counter and waited.
“Something wrong?” Lilly asked him as they waited with him.
“It only opens if it trusts the person who held it. Bought it from a kobold mine years ago and they built it to hold valuables to their specifications. They don’t trust anyone and hide all their valuables in these boxes.
The box appeared to be carved from a blue stone with spectral qualities. It had dragons sculpted into the surface and on one side the image of an earth-moving machine. Slowly, there emerged a hum from the box as the lid opened a little bit at a time.
“Guess it trusts us,” Hobbs laughed. “These things are expensive, but they’re safer than banks if you need to hide special items. I’d trust it before I would a safety deposit box.”
Hobbs took out a green stone and put it down in front of Dion. It was smooth, appeared to be made from jade, and had a transparent quality to it. Dion picked the stone up and handed it to Lilly who turned it over and noted the fine polished surface.
“You might want to test it out before you take it,” Hobbs told them. “I’d hate for you to leave here with one that didn’t work. Everyone would blame me, as usual.”
On top of the counter, Dion rolled out the map with the cryptic letters on it. He weighted it down with a stone smoking pipe on one end and lava light on the other.
Hobbs looked at the map with him. “You do have some strange letters on this,” he commented. “This is one of the better ones and it should make it readable. I have stones that can outperform it, but I save those for treasure hunters. Let’s see if it can do the job.”
The green stone began to pulse with an inner light and projected it across the map. Lilly stood there with Dion and watched as the light scanned across the map. As it did so, the letters on the map changed color and began to move. The letters morphed into different patterns as it tried to find some common goal.
“You sure this will work?” Lilly asked the man.
“Give it a chance. This seer stone came from the Islandia. I have confidence it will do the job.”
Slowly the letters reassembled into something that resembled English. Now Lilly could read it too. The letters marked the pathways into and out of all the mall sectors and even showed the location of the underground kingdom of the ghouls. She looked and noticed some of the temporal doors marked by the map, which the ghouls had used to take Emily away after her abduction.
“So how do those doors stay marked if they can be taken by the person who knows how to work them?” she asked Dion.
“The doors appear and disappear at different times. The door the ghouls took with them appears at another location in an hour. See? The map lists the times the door will appear and where it will show up.”
“So all we have to do,” Lilly said, “is to find where the next door to the ghoul subbasement will open?
“Little bit more difficult,” Hobbs said. “The door opens to a corridor which terminates in the subbasement where the ghouls live. You need to take that passageway down there if you are going to end up where Emily was taken. And the passageway will be dark. Ghouls don’t care as they have special vision which allows them to see in the dark.”
“But even cats have to have some light,” Lilly pointed out. “Do these corridors have a light source of their own?”
“Not always, and it’s not a good idea to take a torch down there with you as they signal to the ghouls that someone is in the corridor. You need to get down to their subbasement without them knowing you are on the way.”
“And ghouls can see in a spectrum other than visible light,” Dion explained to her. “They can use infrared radiation to find their way around. They have excellent hearing as well.”
“So what are we going to use once we find the door?”
“I have just the thing for you,” Hobbs said. The little man went below the counter again and came back up with a cardboard box. He placed it next to the seer stone box.
“Picked this one up the last time I paid a trip to the kobold mines. I do a fair amount of business in the rock and gemstone market, so I thought it would come in handy. But I think you will need it better than me. At least right now.”
He opened the box to withdraw a carbide lantern attached to a miner’s helmet. It was attached to a container, which strapped to the waist and had a small valve hooked to the lamp. The lamp fit snuggly on the helmet.
“Is it some kind of magic?” Lilly asked him.
“Depends on how you define magic. This one uses sacred calcium carbide stones which, when treated with holy water, release sprits in the form of acetylene gas. The sprits travel up to the lens where they are ignited. They provide the divine light of i
llumination to the path you seek. So it is a kind of elemental earth power, just one miners use all over the world.”
“What do we do if the ghouls attack us?” she said. “They’ll know we’re headed their way when they see the light.”
“For a small fee I can sell you another mystical weapon,” he told them. “I’ll need the paperwork to satisfy the government elves. It projects elements of your will in the form of lead at rapid velocities and will make them think twice about a second attack, should you need to use it.”
“That is quite all right, Hobbs,” Dion told him, “but I don’t want to resort to firearms unless absolutely necessary. I can’t imagine what a gunshot would sound like that deep in the subbasement and we’d all lose our hearing. I’ve got a few ideas of my own on what to do about the ghouls if they attack us.”
“Your decision,” Hobbs replied with a grin on his bearded face. “Even a concussion grenade might come in handy down there. No fragments, just a big bang. No worse than setting off a huge firecracker.”
“I like my hearing too much,” Dion said. “One of those things could rupture an eardrum.”
“I tried. Just keep in mind you don’t have a lot of earth elemental power you can use against them. It will take more than a few rolling boulders to keep those things at bay if they charge you.”
“I’ll keep it in mind. How much do I owe you this time?”
“I’ll send the bill to your aunt and uncle. They’re good for it.”
Hobbs packed the mining helmet in a backpack and showed Dion how to use it. The lamp and gas unit sat combined on top of the helmet and had an ignition switch inside it. He told Dion to be careful about firing it up as too much gas in the chamber could cause an explosion. He also included a large flashlight for Lilly to carry and tossed in a miner’s helmet for both of them.
“You’ll want that helmet,” he made clear. “There may be some low ceilings in that corridor. The only ones who use them on a routine basis are the ghouls and they have no trouble slipping around tight passages.”
“I’ll let you know how everything turned out,” Dion told him as he picked up the pack with all the equipment inside it.
“Take care of her,” Hobbs said. “You really shouldn’t bring along anyone who doesn’t have elemental powers. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t advise you to go down there as there’s a certain aspect of danger in the corridors. But I can see you want your friend back and I don’t know another way to get her. Tell your aunt and uncle I said hello and to expect a bill.”
Lilly and Dion left the store with the map, seer stone and pack. After they’d walked a distance down the concourse, Dion found a table where he could spread the map out and look at it. Lilly noticed the lettering on the map was still in English.
“Do you still need the seer stone since it turned the letters into English?”
Dion was studying the map and comparing their location to the one on it. “It will change back if the seer stone leaves the vicinity of the map.”
“Is there some kind of range for the seer stone? I mean, five feet, twenty, a hundred?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had the chance to use one of these before. I think it’ll work so long as I keep it close to the map. This is why I intend to hang on to it and keep it in my pocket until I get back to the surface. I might even return it to Hobbs once this adventure is over. I don’t know if he has a return policy, but my aunt and uncle should get some money back for it if we don’t need it anymore.”
“Does it have a life expectancy?”
“Good question. Anything part of the Earth Element does. Well, it usually does. However, they’re not like car batteries where you can know exactly when they’ll fail. Although, come to think of it, even car batteries have a big range of life. So maybe they are like car batteries. Good point.”
“But I’ve found where the next doorway to the subbasement will appear,” he told her. “It’s due to open in another ten minutes on the other side of the concourse under the stairs.”
Lilly and Dion hurried down the concourse in search of the mysterious door. As they went, the two of them passed some of the security guards who gave them a menacing look.
So far, Officer Karanzen had no reason to have them removed from the mall. He’d warned them it could all change, so they needed to be wary this time.
The mall was its cheery self.
You had to work there or know what really went on behind the scenes to understand the place. The mall was an endless army of consumer goods cycled into the hands of those who needed or thought they needed them. A vast army of display experts and managers sought to find the perfect way to portray the goods they carried to the public.
Lilly wondered how many of these stores would still be here in twenty years. Already, older shopping centers were fading into the sunset as the clientele headed for newer, brighter lands with trained staff to wait on them. It was the perfect place to hide anything that merged with the supernatural. Besides, a shopping mall was a supernatural experience in and of itself. People entered forlorn and emerged in a state of euphoria from their purchases.
Supposedly, someone had tried to build a New York style disco inside the mall when it first opened. It never lasted, as so much from the East Coast didn’t when they tried to import it to the heartlands. It never stopped people from taking what they found on the affluent parts of the country and shoving it on the less affluent wage earners in the Midwest. She wondered how much longer the factories would last which ringed the town and city. They seemed so smoky to her and full of grime. One day nature would revolt and shut them all down. In place of the factories would stand crumbling buildings, and no one would remember what they had been used for in the beginning. The only thing that ever seemed constant in this world was change.
She watched a security guard from one of the armored car services enter the mall and head in the direction of an anchor store. He would leave with a satchel full of cash in a few minutes. Then he’d be on his way to deposit it in the bank. Eventually someone would figure out they could follow the armored car and make a little withdraw of their own. Did the armored cars have some kind of elemental protection of their own? She made a mental note to ask Dion about it later. It seemed like a possibility. Why not? Perhaps they had a representative of each element riding in the car, ready to defend it against any robbery attempts. Two elemental riding up front and two in the back. Didn’t he say there was a fifth? Would the fifth ride in the engine?
“Here it is,” Dion told her when they reached the door. “Exactly when and where the map told us we could find it. It will only be here for another ten minutes so we have to move quickly.”
He began walking toward it.
The door resembled any other access door in the mall. It had no window and had the words “Employees Only” written on it.
“Is it locked?” she asked him.
“Not to me it isn’t.” He reached out to grab the handle. Nevertheless, the door stayed firm. He jerked on the handle a few more times, but it stayed firm.
“I don’t get this,” he said. “I should have enough recognition by the mall to open any door that’s not physically locked. How do I get into this one?”
“You didn’t ask me for the key,” Edward’s voice sounded behind them.
The funny Englishman stood there wearing a robe. He had a hood over his head, which gave him a vaguely sinister look as he held out a skeleton key to Dion.
Dion took the key from him. “I didn’t see a keyhole on the door,” he told Edward. “How does it work?”
“Just touch the key to the door and it will recognize it. The ghouls reset the doors to keep you out. They didn’t realize there is a grandmaster key that can override them. Now what are you going to need before you go down there besides a miner’s helmet?”
“A weapon to protect us,” Lilly said. “We will need something to prevent the ghouls from coming after us once we’re in the corridor. All Hobbs had were guns. Do you know where we
can get something else?”
“As a matter of fact I do and here he comes right now.”
Down the concourse came a maintenance man pushing a floor polisher. He was human and pushed the polisher up to them. The man left in front of Dion and Lilly, and then walked away.
“A floor polisher?” Dion said to him. “That is your idea of a weapon? What am I supposed to do? Use it as a club?’
“Now, now, dear boy,” Edward said. “Think about it. This polisher has no electrical cord. You can push it all the way down to the subbasement where the ghouls live. It is gas powered and starts with a simple pull chain. Just like a lawn mower, don’t forget to adjust the choke.”
Then he disappeared.
Dion stood there and looked at the empty space. “Great,” he said to the empty space where Edward had stood just moments ago. “We need to get her back and we have no way to do it that makes sense. What am I supposed to do with this thing?’
“I have no idea,” Lilly said, “but Edward wouldn’t have left it here if it had no use. He’s been helpful so far.”
“I could use something practical from that deus ex machina,” he told her. “This is absurd. Anyway, we have to get through the door before it closes again. You can carry this. Looks like I’ll push the damn polisher.” He handed Lilly the pack and moved the floor polisher to the door. Once at the door, he touched it with the skeleton key. There was a click and the door unlocked. Dion pushed on it and this time it opened.
It wasn’t long before the door clicked shut behind them.
Chapter 8
Other than the light filtering under the door, Lilly and Dion found themselves in a dark, empty chamber. Lilly couldn’t see a thing, but she heard Dion grumble as he bumped into a wall.
“Hand me the pack,” he told Lilly. “I need to light that lantern on top of the helmet.”
“I watched Hobbs do it too,” she said and placed the pack down on the cool floor. “I think I can light it as well as you.”
She unzipped the pack and felt around inside for the helmet with the lantern attached. She carefully lifted it out and found the ignition switch. Just as Hobbs showed them, she depressed the button to the count of three and heard a pop as the lamp became illuminated.
