Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware

by M. T. Anderson

  At first, Nrrrgarha was lulled by the sound of Drgnan’s voice.

  But hours passed—days, probably—and now Nrrrgarha was getting restless. He no longer purred when curled next to Drgnan. He fidgeted. And after a few days in the game closet, Drgnan smelled unwashed, and he knew the tiger was thinking about meat.

  So Drgnan started to think again about escape.

  Of course, he had tried several things already. He had attempted to unscrew the hinges. No luck. He had searched the closet for something he could saw with or scratch away at the bottom of the door with. No luck.

  But now he had a new idea.

  Carefully, he reached across Nrrrgarha to the shelf where the games were stored.

  The tiger growled at him. The growl was irritable. Like he might just swipe at the boy.

  “Consider a still, peaceful place,” said Drgnan. “Nrrrgarha, listen to me. Picture a mountain pool.”

  The tiger growled.

  “With a caribou in it.”

  The tiger growled louder.

  Drgnan had a box in his hand. He drew it over to him. The box sagged and torqued in the air over the tiger’s head.

  Drgnan lay the box on his lap. Carefully, he removed the lid and felt the contents.

  He felt the grain of the board…some cards…a pile of fake money…and yes, houses, many small houses…

  Monopoly. Monastic Monopoly. He felt triumphant, as if he’d just bought the Water Works, Westminster Abbey, and the Vatican, and built a line of hotels straight across them.

  Slowly he picked up the stack of cards. He slid one under the door, keeping the corner of it under his finger.

  Now he needed something to poke with.

  Here was his plan: He knew the key was still in the keyhole. He could poke it from his side so it would fall out on the other side. It would land on the Monopoly card. Then he would draw the card slowly back under the door, bringing the key with it. Then he would unlock himself, and he and Nrrrgarha would be free.

  But he needed something to poke the key with. He groped through the Monopoly box. For a second, he thought maybe the die-cast metal top hat or the 1930s roadster would do the trick, but the car’s running boards were too wide. It didn’t fit in the keyhole.

  He lay the Monopoly game aside and reached back over to the shelf.

  He came up with Travel Scrabble. Because it was the Doverian edition, it had hardly any vowels.

  Then another long box. He lifted it over to him. He laid it on his knees.

  Nrrrgarha stirred restlessly.

  Drgnan prowled around the board. Little holes, with…

  ZAP! There was a red light—a bulb—and Nrrrgarha rose to his feet, snarling.

  It was Operation, Drgnan realized. An old game where you try to remove body parts with tweezers. The patient’s nose lights up when you get it wrong. Drgnan had knocked the metal tweezers against the metal edge near the funny bone.

  He didn’t really want to think about anyone removing body parts at the moment.

  Nrrrgarha stood in the darkness, growling deep in his throat.

  Young Drgnan Pghlik reminded himself that his heart must be as still as a pat of wolf-butter on a hot cinnamon bun. He cleared his mind of tigers. Though one stood two feet from him, showing its fangs in the darkness.

  Stifling his fear, Drgnan lifted the tweezers out of the game box. He felt for the door handle. He inserted the tweezers in the keyhole and inched them forward.

  “You are a fine tiger,” he said to his hungry companion. “You are a prince of tigers. The stars themselves marvel at your serenity.”

  The tweezers hit the key.

  Gently, Drgnan shoved.

  The key slid.

  The key fell.

  He heard the clatter as it hit the Monopoly card and the floor.

  Nrrrgarha’s snarl had slowed to an angry ticking.

  Drgnan eased the card toward him under the door. The key was there.…It was almost under …almost…almost…al—

  It hit against the bottom of the door. There wasn’t enough space. It couldn’t fit. He slid it one way and then the other. No dice. It didn’t fit. It just didn’t.

  The light in the next room snapped on.

  “Hey! Hey! Look at this!”

  Movement of shoes.

  “Kid in a dress is trying to escape.”

  Despair hit Drgnan hard. The tiger still bridled. The gangsters knew he was trying to get out. His plan had failed.

  He pulled the card back under the door. The one the key had rested on.

  In the faint light from the other room, he could just read it. It said, GET OUT OF JAIL FREE.

  No such luck.

  The tiger paced in the shadows, waiting.

  45

  Lily was awakened by something around dawn. She thought it was someone sneaking, or maybe talking. She lay very still and listened to the morning sounds. The dawn chorus of birds was singing. The bushes and trees were loud with them.

  Finally Lily decided that the sound had been her imagination. Still, she was awake. She thought she would get up and watch dawn rise over the Four Peaks. Carefully she unzipped her sleeping bag partway—the zip trundling slowly, tooth by tooth, down the seam. She folded back a tri-angle, pulled her legs out, and rose.

  She had not gone two steps, however, when Katie stirred and whispered, “Hey! Lily! Are you up?”

  “Yeah,” said Lily.

  “One sec,” said Katie, and she also got up. Jasper and Bntno didn’t move.

  Katie and Lily walked a little ways away from the camp and sat on a hill of grasses, watching the sky lighten. The grasses waved around them. The sky went from navy to a strange, simmering white.

  The mountains turned red with the first sun.

  Lily thrilled at the sight of that dawning. It seemed to her like the world was beginning again, like there was something pure and fresh about things. It didn’t matter, somehow, that most walls were covered with dirt and that people punched each other in the lunch line. There was hope for the world, she felt, so long as there were mountains and forests and morning light.

  Soon they could see the features that Jasper had mentioned on the mountains: the one farthest from them coated in white glacier; another with a lake on it, surrounded by grasses and trees; another draped in a deep pine forest; and a final one, with only occasional thickets on it, but with a giant pillar that could be seen from their roost several miles distant.

  “So we don’t know which one is which?” said Katie.

  “No,” said Lily.

  “And Jasper really doesn’t know? He’s not just being a pain?”

  “He was unconscious when he was taken up Tlmp.”

  “So what are we going to do?” said Katie. “We don’t even know where we’re going anymore. And we may be being followed.”

  Lily thought about it. They watched flocks of white birds soar above the forest. They watched a distant family of mountain goats—just brown specks on the rough stones—jump along the mountain trails.

  Suddenly Lily said, “I have an idea.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. I just realized—I think we might be able to figure out which mountain is which.”

  Katie looked at her. “Okay,” said Katie. “Be my guest.”

  46

  Lily ran back down the hillock to the camp. She carefully fished out the There and Back Again™Guide to Greater Delaware from Jasper’s pack. She also took a notebook and a pen.

  Bntno was muttering in his sleep as usual. His pillow was over his head. Jasper was snoring slightly, his arms sprawled in the grass. Lily left them and made her way back to Katie’s side.

  “Okay,” said Lily. “I wonder if we can’t work out which mountain is which through deduction.” She flipped open the notebook. She thumbed through the There and Back Again™. She passed it to Katie. “Read this part out loud again,” she said.

  Katie looked at a couple of the pictures on the page—both of women sitting smiling on
top of heaps of grain—and then read: “‘Though the Four Peaks look the same height, trekkers will find that Mount Minndfl is actually considerably shorter than the nearby peak covered with deceptively inviting pine woods. English explorer and adventurer Leslie Arbuckle-Smythe climbed both that forested peak—despite its imposing height—and Mount Bdreth because he was too superstitious to climb near the ancient, rune-inscribed pillar that stands on one of the other mountains.’”

  “Okay?” said Lily.

  “Okay,” said Katie. “What now?”

  “We have four mountains. Called?”

  “I don’t know,” said Katie. “They all sound like someone hawking loogies into a metal trash can.”

  Lily leaned over and read the guidebook over her friend’s shoulder. She said, “Tlmp, Bdreth, Drgsl, and Minndfl.”

  “Right. Loogies.”

  Lily said, “So now let’s write down what we know about them.”

  She wrote (and read):

  “1. The monastery of Vbngoom is on top of Tlmp.

  2. Lesley Arbuckle-Smythe climbed Mount Bdreth and the mountain with the pine forest because he was too superstitious to climb the mountain with the pillar.

  3. Mount Minndfl is shorter than the mountain with the pine forest.”

  “Okay,” said Katie. “Now I’m completely confused.”

  “So am I,” said Lily. “So let’s try this.” On her tablet, she made a kind of tic-tac-toe grid, four columns by four rows. Across the top, in each column, she wrote the name of one of the mountains: Drgsl,Bdreth,Tlmp, and Minndfl. Then she continued, “Okay. Now, we have four mountains in front of us: the pillar mountain, the lake mountain, the pine mountain, and the glacier mountain. And we have to figure out which is which.” In the rows going down, Lily wrote pillar,lake,pine forest, and glacier. Her chart looked like this:

  “Now, we can try to figure out which mountain is which by a process of elimination.” Lily looked at the clues for a minute and then thought out loud. “Okay. Okay. We know from clue number two that Mount Bdreth is not the mountain with the pine forest or the mountain with the pillar.”

  “How?”

  “Because it says that this man climbed Mount Bdreth and the mountain with the pine forest instead of the mountain with the pillar. So Mount Bdreth must not be either of them. So we write X’s in the Bdreth column, next to pillar and pine forest. Because Bdreth can’t be either one.” She scribbled down the X’s, so her chart looked like this:*

  “Oh, yeah…,” said Katie. “Now it’s too bad we don’t know the heights of the different mountains, because then maybe we could figure out which one is Mount Minndfl.”

  “We don’t need to know the heights,” said Lily. “That third clue at least tells us that Mount Minndfl is not the pine mountain. So we put an X where the Minndfl column meets the pine mountain row.”

  “So what do we have?”

  “Well, Mount Tlmp could be any of them…so can Mount Drgsl. Mount Bdreth could be either the lake or glacier. And Mount Minndfl could be the glacier, the lake, or the pillar.”

  Katie looked at this set of clues, her interest clearly piqued. “Hmm,” she said. “We need to know more.”

  “We need another clue,” said Lily.

  Luckily they were not living in a world where there are rarely enough clues, and we wander around sadly in our trench coats, kicking at tired grass in empty lots as the greasy rain falls. They were in a book where the final clue always comes to you, and you snap, and say—

  Lily snapped. “I’ve got it!” she said. “I just thought of something!”

  “Uh-huh?” said Katie.

  “The menu at that restaurant we went to had deep-fried Mount Drgsl Squid on it!”

  “You’re not talking about breakfast, are you?”

  “No—so there must be water on Mount Drgsl. Mount Drgsl must be the mountain with the lake on it!”

  Katie’s mouth was open. “Oh, yeah!” she said, with admiration in her voice. “Yeah! Because the squid’s there! Write that down!”

  “Okay,” said Lily, looking over her notes. “So we know that Mount Drgsl is the lake. I can put an O there. That means that…” (She crossed things out.) “Mount Bdreth, which we said could be either the glacier or the lake can’t be the lake. The lake is ruled out. So Mount Bdreth must be the glacier…”

  Katie leaned over to look at the notebook, grabbing Lily’s shoulder. “And that means that Mount Minndfl must be the pillar!”

  “And so Mount Tlmp—,” said Lily—and they both exclaimed together, “must be the mountain with the pine forest on it!”

  They gave each other a high five.

  They looked up at Tlmp, towering above them, the peak snaring clouds.

  “Jasper will be so excited!” said Lily.

  “Yeah,” said Katie. “I feel kind of bad for being a jerk to him.”

  “He understands,” said Lily.

  “That I’m a jerk?”

  “No, you’re not a jerk,” said Lily. “You’re a wonderful friend.”

  “Not always.”

  Lily smiled. “You saved me from cannibals.”

  Katie thought about this. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, yeah. The cannibals. I think I just pulled on your arm a lot.”

  “That was good,” said Lily.

  “The cannibals would have pulled on your arm too. Except they would have had buffalo-style hot sauce on it.”

  “Your pulling kept me running. And you slowed down your own running for me. So I wouldn’t fall behind.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “You know you did.”

  “Lily…”

  “I know I’m slow.”

  “You’re not slow.”

  “I’m kind of slow. Thank you for slowing down.”

  “Can we not make this into one of those conversations where everyone talks about how pathetic they are?” said Katie. She stood up. “Let’s go wake up the boys and tell them we’ve figured out where the monastery is.”

  They grinned at each other.

  Together they ran down the hill and toward the camp.

  When they got there, both Jasper and Bntno were still in their sleeping bags. Bntno was still muttering under his pillow.

  Katie tiptoed over and prepared to seize Jasper by the shoulders and wake him up with a start, screaming, “Fire!” She stood with her fingers massaging the air.

  Then she looked up at Lily. Lily had walked near Bntno’s sleeping bag and was frozen strangely in place. Lily put her finger to her lips.

  So Katie was very quiet when she reached down and shook Jasper and whispered, “Jas…Hey, Jas, we figured out which mountain is which.”

  She looked again at Lily for approval. Lily was frantically waving her hands and shaking her head. Lily pointed to Bntno’s sleeping bag.

  Katie didn’t know what was going on, but she froze. They both listened.

  “Come in, Ministry of Silence…,” Bntno was muttering. “Here, Agent Bntno…Ministry of Silence, please come in…”

  Bntno was a spy!

  47

  “Agent Bntno…This, Agent Bntno…We are at Four Peaks.…Yes, you hears me? We are at Four Peaks.…”

  Lily stood absolutely still, wondering what to do. They would somehow have to lose Bntno before they continued on their way! Otherwise, he would report the whereabouts of the monastery to the government, and the Awful and Adorable Autarch of Dagsboro would plunder its remaining treasures and use its powers for tyrannical evil.

  “Children have made it to Four Peaks,” whispered Bntno. “Tonight, I will—”

  “Alley-oop!” exclaimed Jasper, raising himself up on one elbow. “Katie, were you about to grab me roughly and startle me awake?” He smiled. “You have to get up pretty early to surprise Jasper Dash.”

  Katie covered her face with her hands. Lily stood up straighter.

  Bntno stopped talking in his sleeping bag. He cleared his throat.

  “The excellent children are awake?” Bntno said, s
ticking his head out. “I have very strange dream where I talk out loud. Very strange dream.”

  “Did I hear,” said Jasper loudly, “that you two have figured out which mountain is which?”

  Katie frowned. Lily waved her hands.

  “Well?” said Jasper. “Drop the soup, chums! Which is it? Where’s the monastery? I’m ready as an evergreen to spread my limbs up to the sun and say, ‘Hello, happy morning!’” He stretched and crawled out of his sleeping bag.

  Katie and Lily didn’t say anything.

  Bntno looked a little suspicious. “You know which mountain?” asked Bntno. “How instructive!”

  “Which is it, then?” said Jasper.

  Katie rocked on her heels. “We don’t know,” she said. “We didn’t figure it out.”

  “What’s the fuss, then?” said Jasper.

  “I think they knows,” said Bntno. “They are the joking people; they not tell us for joke. But now joke over. Now they tell.”

  Lily and Katie looked at each other desperately. How were they going to warn Jasper? How were they going to get rid of Bntno before he found out what they knew and reported it to the government?

  “We really don’t know,” said Lily.

  “Nope,” said Katie. “We are as dumb as coal.”

  Bntno smiled widely. He stepped out of his sleeping bag. In one hand was a small walkie-talkie-like thing: his two-way radio. In the other hand was a gun. “The girls know somethings,” he said. “They know I maybe tell a thing or another thing to Ministry of Silence. But it is time now for talking. Yes? It is time now to tell.”

  Bntno pointed the gun at Lily. “Tell us. Which mountain is monastery of Vbngoom on? We would like to go there with helicopter. Make the monks salute our Terrifying and Awful Adorable Autarch. Get some magic powers for our Ministry of Silence. You tell us. Tell us where it is.”

  “Don’t, Lily,” said Jasper. “The monastery is depending on you.”