But the feature that set this building apart from anything Donny had seen was the solid curtain of flame that surrounded its blackened walls, lapping halfway up. At the bottom, the fire was a purple as dark as grape jelly. At the tips it was neon pink.
Donny raised his voice to be heard over the clatter of the wheels. “Is that where the chemist lives?”
“You got it,” Angela replied. “Behold the Hall of Elements.”
“How are we supposed to get in?”
“She has to let us in. On account of the moat of deadly fire.”
“Does she have a name?”
“It’s Ellie. Ellie Mental.”
Donny gave her a suspicious glare. “That’s a joke, right?”
“It started as a joke a hundred years ago. Then we all forgot her real name. But she’s fine with Ellie.”
The chariot came to a stop in front of the hall. Angela and Donny hopped onto the ground. “We won’t be too long,” she told the runner imps. She pointed to the right. “Help yourselves to the field of mushrooms over there.” The runners unfastened their own harnesses and trotted off, licking their scaly lips.
Donny stared at the deep-purple flame. “What kind of fire is that?”
“Special blend,” Angela said. “It’ll melt anyone who tries to get through, whether they’re infernal, mortal, or already dead.”
“I guess the chemist doesn’t like visitors.”
“Just being prudent,” Angela said. “Her works are valuable and potentially destructive. During the war with the Merciless, the bad guys raided this place and used Ellie’s stuff to fight the reformers. That’s when she created the moat. Now nobody gets in unless she lets them in.”
“How do you let her know you’re here?”
“We ring the doorbell, silly,” she said. “Come on.” Donny followed her forward, a wary eye on the flames.
A chain emerged from the burning wall at eye level. A pole was embedded in the ground, and the chain passed through a loop at the top of the pole and hung down, a fat metal ring at its bottom. Angela grabbed the ring and tugged. Somewhere beyond the flames, Donny heard the clang of a bell.
Angela stepped back and peered at the wall, a hand across her brow. A dim light glowed in one of the narrow windows above, in the center of the hall. A few seconds later Donny saw a silhouette step in front of the light.
“Hello up there!” Angela called out. “It’s me. I have some favors to ask.” She patted her satchel. “And I brought Ellie something!” The silhouette moved. A minute later Donny heard a sound beyond the fire, like doors creaking open. He squinted into the flames but couldn’t see.
“Seriously,” he said. “How do we get in there? Is this going to be dangerous? Because I can wait out here.”
“It’s not going to be dangerous,” Angela replied in a weary, singsong voice. “In fact, I think you’ll love it. It’s tubular.”
Donny was ready to chide her for using weird, outdated surfer slang, but then he saw an enormous glass tube emerge from the fire. A few wisps of neon flame that had been trapped inside slithered out and rippled into the air.
“Let’s go,” Angela said. She had to duck her head, but the tube was still big enough to allow her to jog through. Donny eyed the passage doubtfully. It looked sturdy enough. The sides were inches thick, obviously strong enough to hold his weight without shattering. But still, he could see those dangerous flames on all sides of the milky glass. What if the tube chose this moment to break? What if a rock came loose from above and fell on it, right when he stepped inside?
Angela peered back from the other side. “Come on, before it gets too hot.”
Donny shook his head, exhaled heavily, and entered the tube. It was awkward, walking on a curved surface. He put his hands out to steady himself. The glass was already almost too hot to touch. When he looked down, he saw the moat under his feet, filled with swirling, billowing fire. The hiss and sizzle of the flames pulsed through the glass. He didn’t breathe again until he emerged on the other side. “That almost melted my sneakers,” he said. “Why does—”
He cut himself off when he saw the creatures on either side of the tube. They were squat but powerful imps, about his height. Their bumpy alligatorlike hides were charred and sooty. As Donny stared, the imps drew the tube back into the room. He stepped quickly aside to avoid being run over. They rolled the tube against the far wall and chocked it with triangular stones, and then trotted back and closed and barred the front door. Every movement was efficient, as if they’d done it a thousand times before.
Donny looked around at the space they’d entered. It was a simple entryway, not much bigger than a parlor, with only a few stone benches for furniture. There were exits from the hall on both sides. One was a ramp, and the other was a stairway. Both curved gently up into the innards of the building.
One of the imps waved for them to follow. When they walked up the stairs, the other imp trailed behind. They emerged on a landing above a tall, round room that encompassed the entire core of the beehive. Donny’s lips puckered into a silent whistle when he saw what was in there.
It looked like a primitive laboratory, with a riot of equipment crammed into a space not much bigger than a school gymnasium. There were tables all over the floor, littered with glass vessels, ceramic jars, boxes, racks of test tubes, mortars and pestles, crucibles, and old-fashioned balance scales. A dozen cauldrons of all sizes were suspended over flames. Everywhere Donny looked, he saw solutions that steamed and bubbled inside glass spheres, their vapors rising into the air or passing through an octopus tangle of glass pipes. Freestanding chimneys stood over brick ovens, kilns, and open hearths. They rose up and pierced the domed roof or angled sideways to jut through the walls.
Among all that equipment, a dozen or more imps were working. Some supervised the experiments, and some were busy crushing crystals or stones into fine powders. One imp was making glass objects by blowing into a pipe with molten glass at the end. All around that imp were his creations: tubes, bowls, pipes, beakers, and more.
The reek of brimstone was strong inside, along with a hundred other bitter, pungent, or acrid smells that assaulted Donny’s nose.
Blobs of fire drifted overhead. They were smaller but thicker, more liquid versions of Sulfur’s luminescent clouds, and each was a different color. A yellow blob drifted past a blue one, and where they touched, both turned green until they separated again. It’s like being inside a giant lava lamp, Donny thought. As he gazed up, something strange emerged from a blob: a miniature hot-air balloon with an imp in a leather seat suspended below, using something like swim flippers to guide the craft through the air.
Half of the floor below had been paved with flat stone, and the rest was the natural ground of Sulfur. In the center of it all, a beautiful, almost liquid plume of multicolored flame rose from underground. Donny knew that type of flame, because he had seen it before. That was the Crude, the one that could be refined into all the other forms of infernal fire. He had no doubt that the Hall of Elements was built on this site to take advantage of that spout.
The stairs that brought them to this landing continued to the floor of the hall. There, staring up at them, hands on hips, stood the chemist.
Ellie Mental was a tall, slender, imposing archdemon, dressed in baggy overalls, a fire-damaged short-sleeve shirt, and a heavy leather apron. Her shape was more or less human, but she was covered in scales that might have been mostly gold at one time, but were now burnt or stained by years of chemical mishaps.
She pointed at Donny. “Who is that?” she asked. It was a rich, imperious voice.
“Oh, him? Just my worthless human servant,” Angela replied. “Or pet. Or whatever. He’s sort of useful but likely to die before long during one of my missions. Not that I care.”
Donny stared at Angela, his mouth twisted. She winked at him with the eye that was turned away from the chemist.
“Likely to die?” asked Ellie. “You mean he’s not already dead? That’s a
living mortal?”
“That’s right.”
“Hmmm.” The chemist gave Donny an avid, hungry stare. “Can I have him for some experiments?”
Donny looked at Angela. He shook his head in tiny but rapid movements. She bit her cheek to keep from laughing. “Sorry, Ellie, but no. I need him undamaged for the time being,” she said. She walked down the stairs. Donny followed, eyeing the chemist with a newly heightened wariness.
“Lamentable,” said the chemist. She raised both hands and beckoned with her fingers. “But you brought me something?”
Angela pushed the satchel behind her back. “Only if you can help me out.”
Behind the chemist, a screech erupted from one of the cauldrons and rose in pitch. “Better cover your eyes,” Ellie said.
“Why—” began Angela, but that was all she got out before, with a mighty whistle, a burst of brilliant white light shot out of the cauldron. It was worse than looking into the sun. Donny closed his eyes and raised his forearm a fraction of a second too late. The light was so strong that it passed right through his eyelids. When he blinked his eyes open, the world looked like it had been bleached. He saw lights pulsing everywhere.
Even Angela rubbed her eyelids with her fingertips. “Sheesh, Ellie, a little more warning would be nice.”
“Eh, you’ll recover soon enough. Now, what do you need from me?”
Angela squinted and blinked. “I have a question first, actually. Do you happen to have a vessel for catching souls on hand?”
Ellie’s head rocked back. “We don’t make those. Why would you ask?”
Angela unzipped her satchel and reached into it. Ellie leaned sideways and tried to see what else Angela had in that bag, but Angela angled herself to shield it with her body. She took out the piece of glass that she had retrieved from the basement in Puerto Rico and handed it to Ellie. “Can you tell me anything about this? Like, where it was made?”
Ellie held it high so the lights of the fiery blobs shone through it. “This is amateurish work. Look at how irregular and murky the glass is. Not my glassblower, for certain.” She handed it back to Angela. “As for where it was made, it could be from anywhere in Sulfur. There’s nothing special about it, really.”
“Hmph.” Angela pursed her lips.
“But what have you really come here for?” Ellie asked.
Angela stuffed the fragment back into her satchel. “A few things. First off, we might have a rogue ferryman to deal with.”
The chemist angled her head to one side. “Rogue ferryman? Never heard of such a thing.”
“Well, I can assure you they exist. We cornered one recently and barely survived the encounter. Do you have anything that can help? If we meet another one, I’d rather avoid a battle. A knockout would be nice. Or temporary paralysis. Or something.”
The chemist rubbed her chin hard, like kneading dough. “There’s a challenge. A ferryman is a powerful creature. An ordinary knockout solution won’t fit the bill. I’ll be guessing, but I think I can make something potent enough.” She pulled a notepad and a ballpoint pen from her pocket. Donny expected that she’d use parchment and a quill, but it looked like somebody had gone to an office supply store for her at some point. Another, closer look around the room showed Post-it notes stuck everywhere, and three-ring binders, calculators, and markers and whiteboards covered with scribbles.
As the chemist wrote furiously in her notebook, Donny took another look around the Hall of Elements. Behind them, in a hollow area under the stairs, something that looked completely out of place startled him: a plush reclining chair and a pair of couches, arranged in front of a huge television with a DVD player and an old VCR on a shelf below, and tall speakers on both sides. He wondered where they got electricity to run the equipment. Then he saw the electrical cords that ran along the floor and were wired at the other end onto a metal rod that stuck out of a huge ceramic urn. Some kind of battery, Donny thought. He shook his head. A home theater, in a chemical laboratory, in the underworld. The pure weirdness of Sulfur never ceased to amaze him, when it wasn’t putting his life in danger.
The sound of paper being torn from the pad brought his attention back to Ellie Mental. With her notes clutched in her hand, she looked at a table halfway across the room. There, a grizzled old imp sat examining a glass container full of a frothing green liquid. “Quibble!” she shouted. “Put that beaker down and come over here.”
“This is a flask, not a beaker,” Quibble called back. “Beakers have straight sides.”
“Just get off that chair and come here,” snapped Ellie.
“Chairs have backrests. This is a stool.”
“Quibble!” the chemist roared. The grizzled imp sighed, hopped off his stool, and waddled over.
Ellie shoved the paper into the imp’s gnarled hand. “Assemble these ingredients. But don’t combine them. Off you go.” The imp plodded away. Ellie turned back to Angela and eyed the satchel, an eager smile on her face.
“Hold on,” Angela said. “I have two more requests.”
The chemist crossed her arms. “You’ve already asked for a lot.”
“The next one’s easy,” Angela said brightly. She unbuckled her sword from her side and handed the whole thing to the chemist, still in its sheath. “The flame has gone dim. It needs a recharge.”
Ellie pulled the sword partly out. Where the blade touched the air, it became cloaked in a dull orange flame. “Yes, it does. Not a problem. An overnight bath in vat number seven will refuel it,” the chemist said. She shoved the sword back in and set it on the table.
“Hey!” Donny shouted. His fingertips had an odd, tingly feeling. When he looked down, he saw another imp, who had snuck up from behind and held a jar of pink fire under his hand. Donny jerked his hand away.
“Did that hurt?” croaked the imp.
Donny scowled and flexed his hand, then raised it to keep it out of the imp’s reach. “No,” he said.
“Huh,” said the imp. He sniffed at the flames. “It was supposed to hurt.”
Angela snorted back some laughter and then assumed a serious expression when Donny whipped his head around to glare at her. “Ellie!” Angela said. “Tell your staff: absolutely no experiments on my human.”
Ellie mouthed, Shoo, and waved the imp away.
“Now then, one more thing,” Angela said. She flashed her most charming smile and tented her hands in a pleading gesture. “I could really use a fire escape. Type two.”
A fire escape? thought Donny.
“A fire escape?” said the chemist. “You’ve gone too far. You know how tricky those are. And the ingredients are priceless!” She flung her hands in the air. “You ask too much!”
“Fire escape, type two,” Angela repeated. She swung her satchel around to the front and then unzipped it. Ellie’s eyes grew wide. Angela reached in, took out a DVD, and held it in front of the chemist, who froze as if in a trance.
Donny looked at the DVD. It was some movie from the forties or fifties. The cover showed grinning sailors in white uniforms, a dancing woman, and the New York City skyline across the bottom. The title was in big red letters: ON THE TOWN. Under that, it said, They Paint The Town With Joy!
The scales on Ellie’s face bristled. “What’s it about?”
Angela looked at the back of the case. “This is a musical about ‘three sailors on shore leave in New York City, searching for fun and romance before the day is up.’ ”
“Aaaagh!” the chemist said. Her hands trembled. “But . . . what are sailors?”
Angela shrugged. “Men in little white hats who sing and dance.”
Ellie’s voice rose in pitch and volume as she grew more fevered. “Is it as good as Singin’ in the Rain?”
“Of course not,” Angela said. “But it’s good.”
“It has songs? And dancing?”
“It wouldn’t be much of a musical if it didn’t.”
“Give it here!”
Angela held the DVD farther back from
Ellie’s grasping hands. “Fire escape?”
“Yes, yes! You’ll have it by tomorrow!”
Angela tossed the DVD to Ellie, who snatched it out of the air with cobra-quick hands.
Donny was suddenly aware that the chatter in the room had stopped. Every imp stared, frozen, at the DVD that the chemist held high above her head. “A musical!” Ellie bellowed. The imps shrieked in reply, abandoned their work, and followed her as she dashed for the home theater.
“Remember, you said tomorrow!” Angela called out between cupped hands.
“I’ll have it all sent over!” Ellie bellowed. She switched on the television and DVD player as Quibble clawed at the cellophane wrapper on the DVD case, trying desperately to find the seam. The imps piled onto the couches. They left the recliner directly in front of the television for Ellie.
“We’ll let ourselves out, then,” Angela said, not bothering to shout. She and Donny headed back up the stairs. The two imps at the entrance opened the door and slid the glass tube through the flames.
Soon they were back outside the Hall of Elements, and Donny was finally able to ask the question. “What’s a fire escape?”
“Exactly what it sounds like,” Angela chirped. She was in an excellent mood, practically walking on her tiptoes. “It can open a temporary fire-portal just about anywhere, instantly. Handy to have in an emergency.”
“Are we planning to have an emergency?”
“Planning? I don’t think that’s how emergencies work. It’s nice to have in our back pocket, just in case. Come on. Let’s go find our runners so they can take us back home.”
CHAPTER 42
As the chariot approached the Pillar Obscura, Donny saw Zig-Zag running down the street to intercept them, his arms waving over his heads.
“Hold it, guys,” Angela told the runners, and the long-legged imps complied. The chariot rolled to a stop beside Zig-Zag.
“He’s here!” Zig said with a huff.
Down in Flames Page 17
