The Crystal Lair (Inventor-in-Training)

by D. M. Darroch

  A primal scream erupted from Angus’s throat and he launched the stones as hard as he could at the lion’s powerful head. They bounced ineffectually off the feline’s right shoulder and scattered, but it was enough to get the animal’s attention. No longer considering the dire wolf a threat, the lion released Ivy and sprinted at Angus.

  Angus scrambled from the cave and fell over the rocks. He fled across the snow, thankful once again that he’d had the foresight to construct snowshoes. He looked over his shoulder and saw the lion emerging from the cave and searching for him. Adrenaline coursed through his veins as he realized the powerful animal was going to give chase. Snowshoes or not, there was no way he could possibly outrun the primeval beast.

  He faced forward again in time to watch his snowshoe catch on a protruding rock. He screamed as his body was propelled forward. Instinctively he threw his arms out to cushion his fall and he slid down the rocky ravine, his body alternately rolling and bouncing down the slope, the sloth fur becoming encased in wet, heavy snow along the way. His head smacked against a rock and his body ground to a stop at the bottom of the ravine.

  The dire wolf had dragged itself bleeding from the cave. The lion had let it live, but barely. It took every ounce of stubborn will Ivy had left to pull her injured body through the snow, inch by painful inch, into the shelter of the trees. She knew the blood trail was an invitation for the lion to come finish the job. But what difference did any of it make now? She had watched Angus fall off a cliff. Her low, plaintive howl sounded from the forest.

  Chapter Twenty: The Grocery Store

  Gus had never seen so much meat in one place. Sure, after a successful mammoth hunt there was meat hanging everywhere, drying and curing. But this was fresh pink meat and a variety of animals. What was a beef anyway? For that matter, what was a pork? Can you drool in a hallucination? He wondered if his unconscious self would drown in his own saliva.

  His grandmother reached out and grabbed a package of something that looked like mammoth jerky. “Bacon, for the salad,” she explained.

  “Come along, Angus. I need to buy some spinach.”

  Gus obediently turned and followed her. This food hut was huge. Everywhere he looked were boxes with strange symbols stacked on shelves, jugs of variously colored liquids, and open cases blowing wintery air and packed full of food-like items. The hut was so big that humans pushed large shiny wheelbarrows stuffed full of the foods.

  Gus was confused. “When was this food hut built?”

  “Oh, doesn’t your mom shop here? It’s nice, isn’t it? I think they finished construction on it a year ago this spring. Still looks new.”

  Sometime in the middle of the night, shortly after he’d tied up the cat and grabbed his spear, Gus had realized this was the deepest dream he’d ever had. He was trapped in a disorienting fog from which there was no escape. And Bonnie was on his mind every second.

  “I’ll get the spinach,” said Granny. “Would you please grab me a red onion? On second thought, make it two.”

  Gus looked at the bins full of colorful plant pieces. His grandmother was sorting through leaves. Perhaps she needed some fodder for the sloths, but with the monster gone, they should be able to let the animals graze again. He wasn’t sure what a red onion was or why the sloths would need two of them. There were many red things in these bins. He looked for the reddest plants he could find, and grabbed the largest two. He placed them in the shiny wheelbarrow.

  Granny glanced up. “Why did you put pomegranates in the shopping cart? I didn’t know you liked those.”

  Gus reached in to the shopping cart to retrieve them, but Granny took them from him and put them back in the cart.

  “That’s okay. I’m happy to buy them for you. Don’t forget my onions though. Red, remember? The yellow ones are too sweet.”

  Gus scanned the bins again. Here was a clue. Onions came in both red and yellow. Which of these plants had two colors? He saw them immediately. They looked nothing like the pomegranates. He picked up two red ones, avoided the yellow ones, and put them in the cart.

  “Angus,” said Granny. “Your mother needs to have more fruit in the house, I think. Why don’t you put a few pounds of those apples in a bag? I’ll buy them for you.”

  Gus stood stupidly blinking at his grandmother. “The bags, right here. These green plastic ones. Pull them like this, and then rip them apart.” Granny showed him how it was done. “Don’t you ever go shopping with your mother? Honestly, kids today are bilingual and play the piano before they can walk, but have no idea how to do something simple like bag a few apples.”

  Gus rolled his eyes. “I saw that!” said Granny. Gus filled a bag with apples and put it in the cart. “Did you weigh them?” she asked. “Give them to me.”

  She snatched the bag out of the cart and plunked it on a large shiny device. Gus watched as the device sank under the weight of the apples and a black arm moved around a circular face with more strange symbols.

  “See?” she said. “Four, and almost a half, pounds. Now I’ll have an idea how much they’re going to cost me.” She removed the bag and the device popped up while the black arm dropped to the left.

  Curious, Gus pushed the device down and watched the arm move slowly up and to the right. He let go and the arm winged back to the left with a loud pong.

  “Angus! Quit playing with the scale! Honestly, anyone would think you’re five!” Granny pushed the cart. “Come along! Oh drat, we forgot the onions.” She scurried back and grabbed two round balls with peeling skin. Their evil acidic odor assaulted Gus’s nose when she dropped them into the cart. In his opinion, they were most certainly not red.

  Gus’s first excursion into a grocery store continued like this. Granny asked him to retrieve something, he brought back something entirely different, and the shopping cart’s contents grew.

  And then in the frozen food section somewhere between ice cream and shelled peas, it happened. The prim old stranger wasn’t dressed for a day of grocery shopping. Her pearl necklace, floral dress, and polished and pointy shoes indicated she had stopped briefly on her way to or from a more fashionable engagement.

  She adjusted the straw hat on her head. She was an avid crafter and an amateur fashion designer, and her creativity had exploded all over this hat. She had attached the leaves, berries, and plastic flowers herself with her hot glue gun. The addition of the bird had been sheer inspiration but did make the hat a trifle unbalanced.

  She pushed her shopping cart slowly along, peering through the closed glass doors until she found the diet dinners. She stopped to compare prices and calorie counts when a war whoop shouted into her right ear caused her to clutch her chest and sink to the floor.

  Standing in line at the checkout with his grandmother, Gus had seen the fashionable older woman enter the store. He watched her stride purposefully toward the frozen food section. He had seen her stand indecisively in front of the closed freezer doors. He had known that every moment counted.

  He raced to her side, roared his most ferocious roar, and grabbed the hat from the gasping woman’s head. He whacked it into the freezer doors, once, twice, three times. The glue held tightly to the leaves and berries. He tossed it to the floor and began stomping and jumping on it.

  “Die! Die!” he yelled.

  Still, the plastic flowers clung to the hat. He reached down, grabbed the bird, tore it from the hat, and ran with it to the front of the store. The automatic doors sensed him and opened to the outdoors. With all his might, Gus threw the bird into the parking lot and raced back to the speechless and gasping woman cowering in the frozen food aisle.

  He reached down and respectfully helped her to her shaking feet. “Are you okay, ma’am? That vulture almost ate your brain.”

  The cashier paused a moment from scanning a box of cereal and smiled at Angus’s mortified grandmother. “Well, in his defense, it was a hideous hat.”

  Chapter Twenty-One: Angus Mounts Up

  Hot air puffed at Angus’s closed
eyelids. The not entirely unpleasant stink of rotted leaves drifted up his nostrils. A gentle poking at his cheeks and forehead grew more insistent. One of his eyelids was pulled rudely open and he woke grumbling.

  He realized he had the worst headache of his life. He grabbed his head and moaned. He squinted his eyes gingerly open and saw a thick black hose dangling above his forehead. He attempted to focus his blurry vision and succeeded only in crossing his eyes.

  The hose waggled to and fro and then curled upon itself in an alarming manner. Angus gasped and tried to raise his head to get away from what must be some weird black snake. Pain sliced through his head cutting from ear to ear, and he squeezed his eyes shut again.

  His head hurt so badly he didn’t much care if the bizarre snake bit him with venomous fangs or squeezed all the breath from him before devouring him whole. Just make the throbbing stop! When instead of the expected strangulation or poisoning he felt a soft brushing against his cheek, he dared to open his eyes again. This time they were better able to focus on the snake-hose-thing. It wiggled around to the top of his head and removed his safety goggles.

  “Hey!” he complained and grabbed at it. It dropped the safety goggles on to his chest and squeezed his hand. He yanked his hand back sharply.

  Gritting his teeth through the pain, Angus rolled to his stomach and raised himself to his knees. He took a deep breath and vomited. It felt like his brain was exploding inside his skull. Something pulled the fur hood from his head and stroked him through his hair. And then Angus noticed the enormous hairy foot standing directly beside him.

  “Aaaah!” yelled Angus. He rolled away from the monstrous foot and bumped into its twin. He turned his head painfully toward the sky and stared up at a twitching proboscis.

  “A mammoth!” gasped Angus.

  “No, actually a mastodon,” said the mastodon. “I do look similar to a mammoth, but I’m not closely related. I have shorter legs, a longer body, and more muscles than a mammoth. My teeth are different from a mammoth’s also. More suited to chewing leaves and branches of trees and shrubs. My kind lives in forests and woodlands. I believe mammoths prefer grasslands.”

  “Enough with the natural history lesson! Where’s the lion?” Angus grabbed his fallen goggles, checked to be sure his toolbelt and the World Jumper were intact, and tried to scramble to his feet. He collapsed again, heaving on the snow.

  “Careful, careful,” soothed Ivy. “You had a very nasty fall off the cliff up there and, from the knot at the back of your head, I can tell you whacked yourself pretty good, too.”

  “We need to get out of here! What if the lion finds us?”

  “Easy there. I don’t think we’ve got to worry about her while I’m in this body. She’s not going to attack a huge, healthy mastodon. Too dangerous. I could cause her some serious bodily damage. You’re safe with me.”

  Angus rested his head in the cold, numbing snow and closed his eyes.

  “And the dire wolf?”

  “Bleeding a short ways from here. I went as far as I could in its body but jumped as soon as I saw the mastodon herd. I had to get to you.”

  “Is it dying?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then we have to help it.”

  “After we help you. Do you think you can climb onto my back?”

  Angus sat up slowly. The mastodon looked anxiously down at him. “How? I’ve ridden a horse once or twice, but they’ve all had stirrups and saddles. I’ve never ridden bareback. How will I get up there anyhow?”

  “Can you stand?”

  Angus rose shakily. He wobbled and Ivy grabbed his elbow with her proboscis, steadying him. “Okay?”

  Angus began to nod in the affirmative and instantly regretted the head movement. He grimaced and muttered, “Yeah.”

  “Here’s something you don’t hear every day,” began Ivy. “Step on my nose.” She extended her proboscis, bending the end of it like a tiny step. Angus grabbed it and pulled his body up to rest on it.

  “Ow! Ow! Ow! Get off! GET OFF!” hollered Ivy. Angus thudded to the ground. He landed heavily on his bottom. Now both ends of him throbbed.

  “What did you do that for!” he demanded angrily.

  “I didn’t realize that would hurt so much. It felt like you were pulling my nose clear off the front of my face. How much do you weigh?”

  Angus ignored the question. “So how do you suggest I get on?”

  The mastodon swung her proboscis back and forth. “I’ll have to bend down and we’ll have to find you something to climb up on.” She looked around. “Plenty of boulders here. How about that one?”

  Angus got to his feet and limped to the huge rock she had indicated with her proboscis. Maybe it was the same one that had knocked him unconscious. He stood on top of it. Ivy settled herself gingerly on the ground. First, she bent her front right and front left legs and knelt on them. Next, she bent her back left leg and finally her back right leg. Angus lay across her huge back and tried to straddle his legs across it.

  “Ow! Your back is too wide. I can’t ride you.”

  “Try to ride sideways.”

  “I’ll fall off!”

  “You can hold on to my ear.”

  “That will make me fall off more slowly. It won’t keep me on.”

  “Are you suggesting we build a saddle? Out here in the middle of nowhere? With an angry, hungry lion on the prowl?”

  “No. I’m just wondering if it would hurt you too much for me to sit on your neck.”

  “My neck!”

  “It’s a lot narrower. I could scoot myself up there. But what if I’m too heavy?”

  “Okay. It would be easier than making a saddle. If it works. Be ready to get right off if you’re too heavy!”

  “Agreed.” Angus shimmied forward and gently straddled the mastodon’s neck. “Is that okay?”

  “Not too bad. Don’t squeeze with your legs though. Balance yourself with my ears. I’m getting up now. Hold on.” Angus rocked forward as Ivy straightened her legs in the opposite order she had first folded them: back right leg, back left leg, then the front left leg and the front right leg.

  “Still on?” she asked.

  Angus wiggled his bottom until he was perfectly centered and answered, “Yes. Let’s go.”

  The mastodon lumbered through the valley, and Angus swayed gently side to side on her neck.

  “How are we going to climb back up to the top?”

  “We aren’t. We’ll follow the valley around and come out on the other side of the village.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “This body is telling me. It must be some route this mastodon travels with her herd. It’s like I’m seeing a map in my head, and all I need to do is follow it.”

  “A paleolithic GPS!” Angus laughed and regretted it instantly as his head hammered.

  “I left the dire wolf body somewhere around here. There she is!”

  The injured animal lay in a heap. When they approached, it growled and raised its hackles.

  “Do you think it will attack?” asked Angus. And then a miraculous thing happened. At the sound of his voice, the dire wolf whined, wagged its tail, and tried to stand.

  “She recognizes you!” said Ivy. “And even more surprising, she seems to like you!”

  “Hey, what’s not to like,” demanded Angus.

  “She’s a wild animal. She should either want to fight you or flee from you. For some reason, she trusts you.”

  “You trust me,” said Angus. “Maybe she does because you did while you were in her body.”

  The mastodon considered this for a moment. “Do you think the animal minds stay in the bodies when I body jump? That they share the body with me, like roommates?”

  “That might explain why you have a map in your head right now. How about you let me off so I can check her out?”

  Ivy lowered herself slowly and Angus rolled off. He hurried to the dire wolf’s side and quickly examined the hurt animal. She yelped and
growled as he probed her back leg, but she didn’t bite him.

  “I don’t think anything’s broken. Lots of flesh wounds. Maybe a pulled muscle. Some rest and she should heal up nicely.”

  “Great, Dr. Doolittle. Any idea how to get her back to the village?”

  Angus pulled off his snowshoes and tethered them together. He prodded the wolf until she moved uneasily to the conveyance. After a bit of coaxing, she settled down upon it.

  “Think you can pull her?” he asked Ivy.

  The mastodon bent her head and reached for the sled. “I can reach it if I bend my head, but I can’t walk all the way to the village like this.”

  Angus pulled the safety goggles from his head and untied the leather laces of his boots. He braided the laces and the elastic band of the goggles into a makeshift rope. He lashed the rope to the front of the sled. Next, he gripped the goggles and pulled, stretching the rope as far as it would extend, and then gave it to Ivy.

  The mastodon gripped the plastic goggles and asked, “What if they break?”

  “Then I fix them.” He climbed back on to her neck and the three of them set off for the village.

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Aches and Pains

  On the trek back to the village, the shooting pain in Angus’s skull subsided to a dull throbbing. Despite the nagging drumbeat between his ears, he couldn’t keep himself from wondering why the lion hadn’t attacked him as he lay defenseless at the bottom of the cliff.

  Perhaps he’d been thinking out loud because Ivy suddenly said, “It’s odd that the lion didn’t chase you down the ravine.”

  “I was completely unconscious. She could have taken her time.”

  “And I wasn’t there to help you,” added the mastodon.

  “So why didn’t she kill me?”

  “You know,” began Ivy. She stopped midsentence and scratched her head thoughtfully with her proboscis. She picked up the cord and began dragging the wolf on the sled again before she continued her thought. “I saw you roll off that cliff. She was almost on you. When you went over, she stopped in her tracks. She looked a bit confused and wandered back and forth for a while. She was doing strange things, like pawing at her eyes and sniffing the air.”