Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware

by M. T. Anderson

  Jasper darted toward them, hoping to stop the attendant from firing.

  Jasper leaped from the one roof to the other just as #4 was fired in the other direction. They passed in midair, arms spinning. The stem of the vaultapult was still wocka-wocka-wocka when Jasper landed.

  “I want to follow that boy!” Jasper demanded to the attendant. “Make speed!”

  “Fifteen cents for trip,” said the attendant.

  Jasper spluttered and looked down at his nightgown.

  He slapped theatrically at his hips, where there were no pockets. “Can I pay you later?” he asked.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “Saturn’s rings, man! Please?”

  “This is impossible, sir. Fifteen cents.”

  “I beg of you.”

  “Eh, sir. Old saying: No dough, no throw.”

  Jasper scowled. “While I usually deplore this sort of tactic,” he said, “I would like to point out that I am the one with the gun.”

  The attendant thought this over. Finally, he nodded. “You pay tomorrow?”

  “I pay tomorrow. Send me where that boy went.”

  “Step in, sir.”

  Jasper clambered into the bowl of the vaultapult. The attendant cranked back the arm. Jasper had only done this a couple of times before, and that was during the day. Now he felt a tingly hysteria. A roller-coaster terror. Height was all around him. He was curled up, about to be thrown through the air over chasmlike streets and concrete walls. He held his breath. He jolted backward by degrees. He held on to his legs and tried to remember not to tense. He took three deep breaths and told himself that soon, he would—

  WHAM! He’d been hucked.

  Lights—impossible lights—moving impossibly quickly. He blinked rapidly. The city was spread beneath him—the domes lit by searchlights—the candles in homes—the torches carried in procession—the hotel signs half lit and half broken.

  Jasper spread his arms and legs, his nightgown flapping. He could fly. He could fly!

  Not too long until touchdown. He saw #4 ahead of him—already clambering down from the receiving trampoline and disappearing into a door.

  Jasper clicked the safety-catch into place on the gun—steeled himself—relaxed his arms—and with an unbearable jolt hit the mat. He bounced.

  Up into the night air again he soared. And down.

  His foe was getting away.

  His foe was probably several floors below him.

  And so Jasper bounced helplessly as his enemy escaped.

  30

  The bouncing slowed. Jasper grabbed at the edge of the trampoline. It slipped from his grasp. Next bounce, he grabbed again. Held.

  His knees still jolted, but he was steady. He clambered off the trampoline and rushed to the door.

  It was an apartment building. Many of the stairs were still in place. He galloped down them, jumping over the spots where the concrete had crumbled to sand. From a landing, wide-eyed toddlers watched him pass.

  Down five flights he ran and leaped. Now he could hear a jabber of voices: angry tenants who’d been shoved by #4 as he passed. They were in a crowd, on the second floor.

  Jasper pushed through them and rushed to the window.

  #4 was already across the street, running up a flight of stairs that led to the top of one of the ancient city walls.

  By the time Jasper reached the top of those walls, #4 would be gone. The traffic in the road below was at once clogged and dangerous: mules, motorcycles, Vespas, trucks, all braying and honking and beeping and swerving around one another and shoving and shouting.

  No way he could reach the boy in time. Unless—

  A ladder salesman in the middle of the street, his wares strapped to his head, suddenly turned to see if it was safe to cross.

  Jasper jumped from the window. He landed on the man’s ladder, pranced from rung to rung across the street.

  Just as he was about to leap off the ladder onto the old brick staircase opposite, the man swiveled his head to look the other way. Jasper cursed (“Crom’s teeth!”) and watched helplessly as he swung back out over the road. He grabbed at the stiles of the ladder to stabilize himself.

  #4 had stopped ascending. He grinned down at Jasper with wolfy teeth.

  Jasper looked—and saw a truck was coming. He would be knocked down into the street and flattened. The truck honked a desperate warning.

  Jasper did the only thing he could. He fired the gun into the air.

  The ladder salesman looked up in surprise.

  And Jasper slid down the tilted ladder, arms spread like a surfer’s, and hopped off onto the staircase.

  The chase was on again.

  #4 was on top of the wall now, scrambling past crenelations and moldering turrets with pagoda roofs.

  Jasper gained the roof. He was feeling triumphant already. His opponent had lost valuable time in wolfy jeering. There was a lesson to be learned there, Jasper thought soberly as he grabbed at the boy’s tracksuit.

  He spun #4 around. #4 struggled.

  Jasper held the boy’s arms.

  #4 stared at him.

  Jasper stared back.

  The two stood without moving.

  #4’s comic eyebrows wriggled.

  Jasper did not budge.

  #4’s eyes turned to serpent slits.

  Jasper glared back.

  A battle of wills was going on without words or motion. The two boys trembled.

  Jasper could feel his brow prickling, sweat along his neck. He shut these things out and thought only about the eyes. He concentrated all of his might upon his enemy.

  He could feel #4 bending, giving in. #4’s eyes snapped to human.

  Through grit teeth, Jasper demanded, “Who… are… you?”

  “Li’l… Weasel Chops… O’Reilly.”

  “Where… is… your… team?”

  “The Royal Grant… Hotel.”

  “Who… are… they?”

  “We… we work for… Bobby… Spandrel.”

  “Bobby Spandrel! My archenemy!” Jasper gasped beneath his breath. He asked, “You mean a treacherous fellow with a round, silver head?”

  #4 shivered with horror. He gibbered, “Bobby… Spandrel…”

  “And your Coach? And Team Mom?”

  “Coach… and Team Mom… just supervise… the selling… of the artifacts.”

  “Where is Bobby Spandrel?”

  #4’s breathing was squealy and ragged. His shoulders rolled up and down. With labor, he finally said: “Vbngoom.”

  At that, he collapsed. Jasper watched the pupils contract from human to snake and then to asterisk. Then #4 fell to the ground, senseless.

  The interrogation was over.

  31

  After Jasper had called an ambulance and had seen that the comatose Delaware Stare-Eyes player was well-cared for at the hospital, he called Katie and Lily at the hotel and told them that the game was afoot, and what the score was.

  He met them at the Royal Grant Hotel. They were already sitting there in the lobby, looking anxious, when he strode in. “Right-o,” he said. “To work!”

  “Jasper?” said Katie. “First of all, how do you expect us to face seven Stare-Eyes players, their coach, and their team mom? Second of all, Mr. Genius, would you stop and look down?”

  “Huhn?” said Jasper unintelligibly, and looked down. He looked up. “Aha,” he said. “In my haste to ensure that my opponent’s medical condition is stable, I have completely forgotten that I am not wearing clothes.”

  His nightgown was bedraggled. His bare feet were coated in mud.

  “We already asked about the Stare-Eyes team,” said Lily. “They left about an hour ago. They told the guy at the desk that they had gotten an urgent message and they couldn’t stay.”

  “Drat,” said Jasper. He thought for a minute. “About an hour ago… Hmm… Why, that’s just when I was confronting Number Four on the city wall. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sent them a mental message, through ESP, telling them t
hat I had captured him. And I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re the ones who knocked him out—so I wouldn’t discover more about their diabolical schemes!”

  “That makes sense,” said Lily.

  “Did they leave anything in the room? Any clue or neglectful spoor?”

  “Sure,” said Katie. “They left a sign saying, ‘We went thataway.’”

  “Eureka! Which way did it point?”

  “Well, when the hotel clerk took it out of the garbage and gave it to me, it pointed over there, but now it’s folded up in my pocket, so it’s pointed—”

  “The staff disturbed the crime scene?” sputtered Jasper. “That note could have—”

  “She’s joking, Jasper,” Lily whispered.

  “Sarcasm,” said Katie.

  He frowned. A little stung, he said, “I guess some of us have time for larks because they are not being hurled through the air in high-speed chases.”

  Katie said, “And some of us have time to put on clothes before spending a night out on the town.”

  “Well, some of us—”

  “Hey,” said Lily, “let’s go back to bed. We have to be up in four and a half hours to meet our guide. Let’s not fight.”

  They stepped outside the hotel and flagged down a three-wheeled taxi. They got in, and it drove them through the skinny, steep streets, past old crumbling Baroque facades and shuttered windows, past brass shrines black with old smoke and murky pools where laundry hung to dry.

  “I cannot believe that Bobby Spandrel has taken over Vbngoom,” said Jasper desolately. “It was an island of peace in a world of confusion. And now—probably to get back at me—he is there stealing its treasures and beating the stuffing out of its monks.”

  Lily rubbed Jasper’s arm awkwardly but kindly. She said, “We’re going to stop him.”

  “It’s my fault,” said Jasper. “We have to get there as fast as possible. I’m the one Bobby Spandrel wants.”

  “What is it he wants you for?” asked Katie.

  “I suspect, to get revenge for foiling all his plans.”

  “Like in Jasper Dash and the Cowpoke Caper, ” said Lily.

  “Exactly. Most recently, he sent out thousands of fake electronic mails to people telling them they had won millions of dollars in a global lottery. They just had to send him their bank account information, and he would give them their prize. But really, he planned to use that information to withdraw all their money and leave them penniless. But his efforts came to nothing. No one fell for the scam because Bobby Spandrel’s gangster typists were such atrocious spellers.”

  “What does spelling have to do with it?” Katie asked.

  Jasper explained, “A small error, but important. No one would freely give their bank account number to something called ‘The World-Wide Lootery.’ I was tipped off, and I traced Spandrel to his secret base beneath an old abandoned pulled-pork restaurant in North Carolina. I went in and busted his computers and found the priceless black diamond, the Eye of the Jaguar, and returned it to its rightful owner.”

  “What Eye of the Jag—”

  “It must be Bobby Spandrel’s World-Wide Lootery that is up at the monastery now. Don’t you see, chums? Time after time, when he’s been about to kill thousands or steal millions, I have stumbled upon him and tried to stop him. So, why, I think this is his revenge. He wants to lure me back to the place that means the most to me of anywhere in the world. He wants to ruin it. He wants me to suffer as he has suffered. He probably sent those artifacts you saw, Katie—the dagger, the idol, and the model of Vbngoom—to Pelt specifically so I would see them in our museum and know something was wrong in the mountains of Delaware.” Heavily Jasper finished, “Those monks are probably suffering because of me.” He put his hands around his own throat and stared, horrified, into the night.

  The cab dropped them off in front of the wreckage of the Sky Suite.

  They went in, trudged up the stairs, and got back into bed.

  Lily lay in the darkness and listened to Jasper breathing in the next bunk. She could tell he was still awake. She wished there was something she could say to soothe him. She was glad they were setting out on their trek the next day. He would not be satisfied until they confronted his arch-enemy.

  Lily wondered if she had an archenemy. She didn’t think she did. She went through the possibilities in her head. She was getting sleepy.

  Outside, taxis rattled through the pitted streets. Trios of drunks sang rounds in the doorways of nightclubs, their neckties loose, their shirts soaked with sweat from dancing.

  Tomorrow, Lily thought to herself. Just a few hours. Tomorrow.

  Across the dark alley, on the gargoyles, pigeons shrugged their shoulders.

  PART THREE

  32

  Dover does not sleep at dawn. The sleep of that city is fitful; and though it is still dark at six, the people who live in those ancient streets and squares are already going about their early-morning chores. The women wash clothes in cracked fountains that once celebrated the triumphs of some long-forgotten duke; men light fires in the hearth. Boys and girls scrub their infant sisters in cauldrons, and mules sigh in their stalls. Priests trudge up stone steps to the tops of towers to chant prayers to their gods.

  Three figures stood by the piled ruins of the Sky Suite and the wall of the Dupontville Fine Excellent View Stay Hotel. The mist was thick around them. Already, women walked along the

  street with baskets of fried rolls on their heads, calling out prices. A man with a bicycle basket full of fresh beets rolled past, hawking his veggies.

  Out of the darkness and mist came Bntno, already smiling. “Excellent children,” he said. “You are ready?”

  “Top o’ the morning, Bntno,” said Jasper, who was always chipper at dawn. “We’ve just been digging out our backpacks and supplies.”

  Lily said hello, but Katie just looked around and said, “Hi. Where’s your jeep?”

  “Oh, jeep,” said Bntno. “We walk short way to my jeep. I leave it short way down this street.”

  “We’re off then, chaps,” said Jasper, heaving his pack up onto his back.

  They followed Bntno down the street.

  Now the mist was rising. Lily could see down the dark alleys. Corn hung to dry on the roofs and eaves of houses. Electrical wires were strung from old, elaborately carved windows, windows wound around with wooden dragons, with stags and pigs, with angels and devils. Lily glanced into courtyards as they passed and saw the children coming out of tiny doors in their school uniforms: tunics and smiley-face masks of white rice paper. In one courtyard, a mangy, flea-ridden griffon lay couchant, chained to the wall, flies buzzing around its slow-blinking head. It lapped water out of an old orange juice container.

  “What do these posters say?” Jasper asked their guide, pointing to the walls.

  “It say… It say… ‘Citizens! Your Adorable Autarch loves you! Cuddle his image like a puppy!’”

  “The Autarch,” muttered Jasper, “steals from the poor to give to the rich.”

  “That’s awful,” said Lily.

  “If the children will please not criticize our kind and generous Autarch,” said Bntno, smiling, “then maybe we will not spend the rest of the year upside down in a charcoal pit.”

  “Speaking of the rest of the year,” said Katie, “just how far away did you park your jeep?”

  “A little farther,” he said. “You follow me.”

  Women watched the four of them from rickety porches high up on the houses.

  An hour passed. Now people were done with their washing and their breakfast, and they were biking to jobs or being flung to work.

  Lily looked in amazement at the high tile roofs slumped with age and growing with grass, at the goats grazing there, at the intricately deco-rated courtyards she spotted through arches, signs of greater days.

  A wizard hanging bundles of herbs out to dry on racks watched them pass.

  “Um,” said Katie, a little more impatiently. “As in:
Um?”

  “No problems!” said Bntno merrily. “This way, inquisitive youngster!”

  Another hour or two passed. Now it was full day, and the four walked through the city’s great marketplace, where girls in shrouds shouted prices through megaphones, and fathers pawed through stacks of rayon socks for their children, and the delicious smells of deep-fry came from barrels over fires, and goose-boys bartered with kitchen girls. Earth-moving equipment ground and stumbled along over the potholes and cobblestones. Donkeys wandered past watermelon stands. Platoons of tusked, six-armed guardsmen from high Lumbrook in barbed helmets passed each other and slapped each other high fifteens.

  Lily was mesmerized by the jumble of activity. She couldn’t believe all of the color and light and sound. It was too much to take in at once. One moment, she was delighted to see children playing in the square; the next moment, she was outraged that the Autarch kept everyone so poor and so frightened. She gaped at the clatter and action and stepped carefully over the piles of ox dung.

  “Hey,” said Katie, “I know I might sound kind of like a… you know, repeating thing, but

  haven’t we been walking for kind of a long—”

  “Just down this road, asking friend,” said Bntno, putting his hands over his eyes in a gesture of respect, and running into a roadside shrine.

  Two real eyes blinking behind the eyes of a crocodile idol watched them pass.

  An hour and fifteen minutes later, it was getting hot and the mist had burned away entirely, leaving a deep blue sky above the glittering pagoda roofs and complicated domes and spires of the gilded temples far behind the children. The three kids and their guide were no longer in the city. The pterodactyls had come out and circled around those distant towers, crying. Bntno and his charges were on a broad road with mud-and-tin shacks on either side of it, advertising tires or handmade dentistry. Behind the shacks were cornfields and a few sick oxen tied to trees.

  “Okay,” said Katie. “It’s ten-thirty and we’ve been walking since—”