by Jae Vogel
“Where are we?” Lilly asked. And given their surroundings, it was an honest question.
“Someplace… else,” Mr. Jehuti said. He and his wife were with them. He too wore a scarf around his head and was dressed in a long robe, which fell to the ground. In one hand, he carried a scroll. His other hand rested on a staff.
“Don’t worry,” his wife spoke, “the subjective time of this place won’t register when you return. We find it better to come here to hold conferences. There are less ears to hear and eyes to see. In the other place, we don’t have enough power to block those who would interfere.”
Mrs. Jehuti wore an elaborate skirt, similar to the one she had on in the news agency and a backless top. Her long woven hair was tied back by a headband, just as it was before. But this time the feather in the headband was much larger and elaborate. She too held a staff in one hand.
Lilly looked off in the distance. There was a pyramid under construction. The work crew was busy hauling stones across the sand from the river using a sled pulled by oxen. As they headed toward the pyramid, a man came running up to them and held out a set of plans. The foreman of the crew consulted the plans, pointed out a few things, and then the man ran back in the direction of the building project with his plans under one arm. The work crew continued to move the stone block in the direction of the construction site.
“Amenhotep wants to make sure it’s done on schedule,” Mr. Jehuti chuckled. “He’s never satisfied with any of his design work. Such a perfectionist.”
“We were talking about Elementals,” Dion said to them.
“Elementals, yes,” Mr. Jehuti continued. “They are all over that mall. You, I am sure, felt them the moment you walked inside. They seldom leave the mall since it’s safer for them to stay there. The mall builders used a lot of them. They needed to get the project completed faster than anyone thought possible. There are many kinds of elementals inside the mall, but four major ones you will encounter. Right now, you must be wary of the ghouls as they thrive in their earth element. You will encounter the sylphs eventually, who fly in the element of air. There are also water nymphs, which can cause you more problems than you might expect. Lastly there are the salamanders.”
“Those lizard things I find under logs?” Emily said. “They don’t seem to be much of a problem.”
“Not the same kind of salamander,” Mrs. Jehuti informed her. “These are a type of fire spirit. They have the potential to be the most dangerous ones of all.”
“We don’t know what kind lived in the center of the mall,” Mr. Jehuti said. “We have never been to the center. And, ultimately, that is where you must travel to find your parents.”
“Once you achieve full power in each element,” Maya Jehuti added, “you will have dominion over that elemental. They don’t want to be bound to anyone, so the elementals will stop at nothing to prevent you from reaching your goal. They share this with those who control the mall.”
“How will I know what to look for?” Dion asked.
Lilly moved to one side of Dion while Emily turned to watch a boat sail down the river near where they were standing.
“You will learn to tell them from you encounters,” Mr. Jehuti said. “It will take time, and once you have located each Grandmaster of the Element, you won’t need to as they will be bound to you. Until then, be wary of groups of people who seem to be working toward a common goal inside the mall.”
“Do you have any more questions?” his wife said to them.
“Are we in the past?” Emily asked her.
“We are in a past. It’s not the same past you read about in school, but one which still exists. I think it is time to return.”
Instantly, the desert landscape vanished, and they were back inside the news agency.
Dion and the girls blinked several times as the trip had created a distorted sense of reality. Emily looked down and saw her clothes were back to the way they were. She looked at her wristwatch. Only thirty seconds had elapsed from the time they left to the time they returned.
“Not subjective to the local time,” Mrs. Jehuti said to her again. The couple that owned the store were back inside it, still dressed in the same matter from the time they left. Once again, the older man handed the scroll back to Dion.
“You will need this if you are to locate the Grandmasters of the Elements. I don’t worry and know you will be able to find them without much trouble. But be wary of what I told you.”
Dion thanked them both.
They walked out of the news agency and back into the main concourse of the shopping mall. It was still there. Lilly expected to return to the desert landscape and watch the work crew continue to pull the sled, but they were back to where they had been.
“So, all we have to worry about is a group of people working together,” Lilly said to her friends. “Great, that could be so many people. What do we do? Watch out for a fire brigade running into this place? We’ve already been informed Officer Karanzen doesn’t count.”
“I’m almost scared to go anywhere,” Emily said. “I just came back from the desert and don’t even know how I got there. Nothing in this place makes sense.”
“It makes plenty of sense,” a man who was seated on a bench said to them. They turned in his direction, as he hadn’t been seated there when they entered the news agency. “You have to understand the rules by which this place operates. When you know them, it becomes very clear.”
Sitting on the bench was an elderly man in a leisure suit, eating an ice cream cone. He was bald and had a gold chain around his neck. He continued licking the ice cream cone as he regarded them. The man’s voice was high-pitched and nasal, and he spoke with an educated British accent.
“Ice cream cones,” he sighed. “One of my weaknesses. The doctor says I should lay off them, but I can’t help myself. They won’t be the death of me this time, but if I continue to indulge, I’ll be sent back and I don’t want that. Oh, dear me, where are my manners? You can call me Edward.”
“So how do you figure into all this?” Dion asked the man. He was surprised, as the man was a new factor in the game in progress.
“I don’t,” he explained. “I’m just here as an enlightened observer. I can give advice, but not if it will make a difference. So please don’t ask me what form you elementals will take, I have no idea.”
“Are you here to join us?” Lilly asked him.
“Now isn’t that charming?” he said to them. “A pretty young lass asks if I want to join her. I’m not back for five minutes and my old ability returns. No, I’m just here to watch and report. I’ll be around from time to time. Think of me as a one-man Greek Chorus. Excuse me, but are you allowed to smoke in here?”
“No,” Dion told him and pointed at the “No Smoking” signs on the wall.
“That is indeed a shame. Alas, this age is so unenlightened. I expected better, but already I have seen wonders never anticipated. Is it true you all own televisions?”
“Most of us do,” Emily told him. “My aunt won’t have a TV in her house, but she’s the only person I know who doesn’t have one.”
“A shame. I never thought they would replace cinemas.”
“So what kind of advice can you give us?” Dion asked.
“I can only tell you what you already know,” he replied. “I can tell you to pay attention to what you won’t. Who do you think around here does most of the work associated with the earth?”
They looked at each other and thought for a while.
Finally Emily spoke.
“It can’t be a construction crew,” she said. “All of that work is done.”
“True. Now look about you and think about what the next most obvious example might be.”
They turned and looked down the concourse. Nothing was apparent.
Then Lilly noticed something.
There were janitorial workers everywhere. At least ten different people were involved in emptying the trash and sweeping the floors. They all had their
uniforms on and were very busy at their jobs. One of them waxed a brass handrail, another hauled bags of trash out of a can. And every single one of them was glancing in their direction as they carried out their tasks. She watched them move closer every time they did something. This wasn’t random; the crew was closing in on them.
“The cleaners,” Lilly whispered. “The cleaners are watching us.”
“Don’t look and make it obvious,” Dion said. “Just focus on what’s in front of you.”
Lilly and Emily did their best but they couldn’t help but turn in the direction of the janitorial staff as the cleaners began to move closer to them. The cleaners did everything they could to make their actions appear normal and fit into the daily business of running the mall. However, there were a few things that anyone would find odd about them.
First of all, they all had the same appearance. Each one had a large forehead and shaggy hair. All of them wore sunglasses, even inside the mall. None of them were women, all were men. None of the cleaners appeared to be more than five foot two in height. It appeared someone had printed a basic form of “cleaner” and used the template to create a horde of them. They moved slowly, but with deliberation. Each step took them one closer to Dion and his friends.
“Excellent,” said the man called Edward. “I see you are waking up. I wish I had a cigar; there must be a tobacco vendor around here somewhere. Alas, you tell me I can’t smoke inside this place. Such a shame. You colonists have such strange values. Anyway, can you guess what they might really be?”
“Gnomes,” Emily blurted out. “They are really gnomes. The mall has contracted out to a company which uses gnomes as janitors.”
“Wrong. But close,” the man on the bench, said. “They are not gnomes, but ghouls, creatures who frequent graveyards. This is why they need to wear the sunglasses. The light hurts their eyes. They are used to activity under the light of the moon. The brightness of the sun is too much for them.”
“These are the elementals associated with earth?” Dion said to him. “How does that work out?”
“Think about it,” Edward said as he adjusted the silk shirt that he had over his corpulent body. “They live underground and do not usually come out in the daytime. But the mall has to have them work all day long, so the unlucky ones get to clean up while the mall is open. There are a lot more of them, but they stay in the subbasement in the daytime. Have you ever had to interact with a cleaner in this place?”
“I can’t say I have,” Emily said.
“Me neither,” said Lilly.
“That is how the management would like it kept,” Edward pointed out. “Most people don’t even acknowledge that the cleaners are here. They are invisible and no one could even remember what they looked like. The ghouls want it kept that way too, because it assures them a steady source of employment and a decent place to live. They can stay in the subbasement and no one is even aware they are down there outside the mall management. If you look at the nametag on their shirts, they all say ‘Bob’. Now don’t you find it funny no one has ever asked themselves why all the cleaners are called the same name?”
“From the way you describe it,” Dion said, “it sounds there’s a benefit to both the mall management and the ghouls.”
“Oh, there is. I don’t see this arrangement lasting forever, though. Eventually someone will notice and the management will be forced to hire some humans to do the job who won’t attract much notice either. In the meantime, they have a whole group of humanoid creatures who will keep the place clean and only cost them room and board. Eventually the ghouls will realize they can do better than push a broom or clean a handrail, but this will be far in the future.”
“So they don’t want Dion to gain power of the earth elementals because it threatens their status?” Lilly asked. “It seems rather short-sighted of them.”
“It might seem that way to you,” Edward said. “But you haven’t had to live in a cave all your life, afraid of the sun, afraid of the humans on the surface and starving for whatever food you could get. The ghouls are like vultures, they only eat things that are in a state of decay. There are plenty of things they can eat around here. Plenty of sandwiches tossed away every day for them to let age. As I said, eventually they will figure out who is getting the better of the relationship, and then the mall management will need to find another kind of earth elemental to live in this part and keep it balanced.”
“Wait a minute,” Emily said. “Are you telling us there are a lot of elementals for each kind of element?”
“Quite a number, actually,” Edward confirmed. “You guessed wrong about the gnomes, but they could’ve easily brought them into this location for the right price. The ghouls made them a better offer and they occupy the earth element section of the mall.”
“It’s something to keep in mind,” Dion said to him. “I hadn’t realized there was such variety per element.”
“You have much to learn,” Edward said.
The man on the bench pulled a pocket watch out of his jacket and looked at it. “Well, well, I have over stayed my time. Good luck, my pretties, you will need it in order to find what you seek, but I have faith in your abilities.”
Then he vanished.
It was sudden. One minute he was sitting there with an ice cream cone, the next he was gone. There was no flash of light or anything else. He was simply no longer there and the space on the bench was no longer occupied.
“Another variable in the equation,” Dion said. “I suppose we will meet many more so long as we stay here.”
“I don’t think we should stay here,” Lilly said to her friends. “We should move on and try to find a way to avoid the ghouls.”
“They’ll only follow us,” Emily said. “What’s worse, they know this place far better than we do. I doubt there’s a place we can hide that they don’t know about.”
Dion noticed a table near the bench with a few chairs around it. “Let’s sit there,” he said. “It will take them at least a half an hour to reach us at their pace. I want to look at the map and see what it shows.”
They went to the table and sat down. Dion rolled out the map and looked inspected it in great detail.
“What kind of paper is this thing on?” Lilly asked him. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Papyrus,” Dion said. “They printed the map on papyrus. When you consider how we came by it, I’m not too surprised. At least it isn’t on vellum.”
The map was not printed. As they looked at it, it became evident it was hand painted. All the corridors and grand concourses of all four sections of the mall were on the map, but each figure was drawn by hand and colored in with care. Strange symbols listed what each one was for and how it related to the overall structure of the mall. Neither Emily nor Lilly could read the words written on the map.
“What language is this?” Lilly finally asked them. “It looks like Greek.”
“Not Greek,” Dion told her. “Coptic. The ancient Egyptian language written out with Greek letters. See? There are words in Greek you can read… if you understand the Greek alphabet.”
“But some of these letters don’t look Greek,” she continued.
“There were sounds in the Egyptian language which Greek didn’t possess. The Egyptians came up with some letters for those sounds.”
“I thought the Egyptians used those funny picture writings,” Emily said to them as she stretched her legs out. She kept an eye on the ghoul cleaners who were still headed in their direction.
“You mean hieroglyphs,” Dion said. “They started with those, but you need to be a decent artist to write in that form. It was difficult to find and train scribes who could do what the nobility needed, so they developed a shorthand version called hieratic. That was still too complicated so the Egyptians came up with a form known as demotic, which consists of a serious of dashes and strikes. Coptic is the easiest one to learn, so it stayed around.
“Not that it does us a lot of good,” Lilly said.
“We can’t read the map, so how can we tell what it says?”
“I can,” Dion said. “I can use it to read the map, so I’ll be able to find our next target.”
“You can read this?” Emily asked him. “Dion, you are full of surprises. How many languages do you read?”
“Besides English? Three. Latin, Mandarin Chinese and Coptic. My parents insisted I learn these three when I was growing up. They seemed to think it was very important I knew them. Looks like they were right.”
“So what does it show us?” Emily asked. She leaned over the cryptic signs on the map, trying to decipher the symbols and how it related to what was indicated.
“Let’s see,” he told them as he ran his long fingers over the papyrus. “The walls are clearly marked on all levels. They split each level into a separate map, but the basement and subbasement are divided twice. Not much room in the subbasement and there is an exit marked which leads in and out. Must be how the ghouls travel to and from the mall.”
“Well this is interesting,” he continued. “There are stores on this map which don’t appear on any other. Now why would you not want a store to appear on a map of the mall?”
“Maybe they’re not really stores?” Emily said. “Perhaps something else?”
“No, these are stores, but I don’t think they’re supposed to appeal to humans. That’s it! Each of the five stores marked in gold aren’t accessible to humans.”
“How can that be?” Lilly asked him. “How do you have a store in a mall which restricts entrance? I thought the whole idea of a mall was to have a central location where anyone could come to shop.”
“Anyone can also include customers who are not human,” Dion told her. “For instance, this particular store would appeal to ghosts because it carries new tombstones and listings for houses they can haunt. I’m sure if I probe deeper, I would find it had insurance against mortal interference.”
“How do they keep out the humans from going inside it?” Lilly asked Dion. “It seems like any other store on the map.”
