by Gabi Moore
With the increase in population came the need for schools. Whereas the town once had three elementary schools and a high school, it now boasted of two high schools, four junior high schools and a chain of elementary schools. This mandated the hiring of an army of schoolteachers who moved to the town from outside the state, which created more tension between the town’s older residents and new ones. Even the school board elections, which used to be sleepy, became heated on several occasions.
Then there was the Air Force base next door. Wrought Field was established to test experimental aircraft before the Second World War, but boomed in the years after it. It wasn’t uncommon for people to put their phones down because a B-52 bomber was flying overhead. Likewise, plenty of glass windows suffered until complaints to the base commander stopped test aircraft from breaking the sound barrier over the neighborhoods. Rumors abounded about the alien from outer space in the deep part of the base, but no one at the top level would ever confirm or deny their existence. The truth was stranger and seemed to be connected to the appearance of the mall somehow.
As they walked into the mall, past the glass entrance doors, which swung in both directions, Lilly saw someone she hadn’t seen in a long time. It was Detective Charles, a friend of her dad’s. It struck her odd he was at the mall as he worked for the Scipio Police Department and seldom left his district. He’d grown up with her father and was practically an uncle to her.
“I see someone who might be able to help us,” she told Dion, after sliding up to him and trying to act as if they were a couple. “It’s a cop my dad knows who works out of the city.”
“You can’t tell him too much,” Dion said. “What is he going to do against the forces in this place?”
“You have no idea what that man has encountered in Scipio,” Lilly said. “Detective Jones is legendary down there. He’s solved more murders than anyone in the state. Dad once told me the department thinks he’s a psychic of some kind over the ways he can get information out of people. We don’t have to tell him a thing about Emily, but he might know some things that could help us. Besides, what’s he doing here in the middle of the day?”
“Okay, just be careful what you say to him.”
Detective Jones was a short man in his forties who had a fashionable beard, neatly trimmed to police specifications. The police department relaxed the dress code for him as he worked undercover. Lilly wasn’t even sure he’d want her to say hello if he was on a case, but he waved in their direction when they walked up to him.
“Little Lilly!” he said. “Getting so big! And who is this?”
“My friend, Dion. Dion, meet Detective Jones, I’ve known him all my life.”
“No need for the ‘Detective’ title. I’m off work today and shopping for a present for the wife’s birthday. Today I’m ‘Mr. Jones’.”
“So you’re not here working on a case,” Lilly said.
“Nope. Just shopping. I hate it. I usually leave the shopping to my wife most of the time. Can’t do it today and none of my daughters are around, so I decided to come by myself.”
“Why don’t you show Dion one of your tricks?” Lilly asked.
Dion, who’d been tracking the location of the trashcans, swung his head back around.
“Tricks?” he asked them.
“He’s a real magician,” she said. “All my life he’s been showing me how to perform little tricks to impress my friends.”
“Just an amateur,” the detective laughed. “I’ve had an interest in stage magic all my life. Over the past few years, I‘ve started to order tricks through the mail and try to pick up my skill level. I find that it helps build connection with the suspects during interrogation. Show them a simple card trick and it lowers the tension. One of these days, I’ll retire and build an act around it. I was always a fan of the mental tricks I used to see on TV as a kid.”
“I’d love to see one,” Dion told him with a smile.
“I just happen to have a pack of cards on me.” The detective took a step back, withdrew a standard pack of playing cards from his pocket and shuffled it several times.
After he finished shuffling the cards, he handed one to Dion. “Ace of hearts, as you notice, now please hold the card facing downward.”
As instructed Dion flipped the card over and held it down.
“Now let me look through the pack and see if I can find something that beats it,” he said. Jones shuffled his deck of cards several more times and withdrew a card. He turned it over to reveal a six of diamonds.
“Don’t think I’ve found anything to beat what you are holding. Why don’t you turn the card over and let’s try it again.”
Dion flipped the card over to reveal the card that had now transformed into a six of diamonds.
“Didn’t beat it, but at least I found an equal,” the detective laughed.
“Nice,” Dion said. “I won’t even ask you did that because you won’t want to give the trick away. You ever use your stage magic to solve crimes or get suspects to confess?”
“No, just to build rapport and confidence with people I talk with and find a way to kill time. It helps to loosen tension. If we have to go into someone’s home for instance, I can help entertain the kids while my college is interviewing someone. Works to bridge feelings to all the communities we help out.”
“I see. I know some tricks myself; would you like to see one?”
“Of course,” the detective said with eager eyes. “I’m always looking to build my repertoire. What can you show me?”
Chapter 7
“Can I have three random cards out of your pack?” Dion asked. The detective shuffled the deck and handed him a trio.
Dion smiled, took the cards and walked back over to a table where he’d sat with his friends before the encounter with the ghoul cleaners. He carefully placed the cards in a small lean-to where they supported each other on top of the table. Then he walked around the arrangement to make sure there were no air currents from any direction to blow it over.
He walked back to Jones and Lilly. “You see the cards. They came out of the same deck you handed me. You notice there are no air gusts or wind currents in this section of the mall. We’re too far away from the door to let it affect them. Right now, no one is next to the table. So would you not agree that the cards should stay in place until someone comes by and knocks them over?”
“I’d expect them to stay put, yes,” Jones agreed.
Dion folded his arms and concentrated.
This was not something he did very often. The air elementals were very difficult to summon and wouldn’t always appear when needed. They tended to be flighty and hard to control. When they did show, sometimes they performed their job a little too well. The one from early in the day had exhausted him. But for what he needed, it shouldn’t be too hard to bring one up.
He was still for a good thirty seconds until he felt one around this part of the mall. This wasn’t a large one, but enough to do what he needed. Dion concentrated and let it know he would be very grateful if the elemental could simply knock the cards over. The air elemental was intrigued and decided to help him, making Dion remember that, until he obtained his full power from the Air Elemental Grandmaster, Dion owed him a favor. Dion agreed and promised to let it out through the nearest door. With the deal sealed, the air elemental swooped in the direction of the cards.
Jones expected the cards to merely fall over, the result of a kinetic trick Dion would set up. All he needed to do was time it out so the cards appeared to fall on his command. The detective had seen such tricks done before and, if done properly, always impressed a bar audience. But what happened here surprised him to no end.
The three cards blew up into the air by a gust of wind that sent them flying across the concourse. They landed far from each other, which forced Dion to walk over and pick them up. He walked back and returned them to the detective. While he was bringing them back, he spotted something in a nearby trashcan and made a detour toward it.
>
It was the map.
The ghouls had managed to dump it before they took Emily. Relieved, he rolled it up, put it under his arm, and headed back in the direction of the detective.
“That was amazing,” Jones said as Dion handed him the cards. “I have no idea how you pulled that trick off and don’t even want to ask. You have been practicing a long time?”
“All my life.”
“Do you have any idea if anyone has come up missing in this place lately?” Lilly asked Jones. “One of our friends has been gone for a few days and her mother thought she might have gone here before she left.”
“Never heard a thing about people disappearing at this mall. But it’s a new one. The one on the other side of town? Maybe, they’re having some trouble over there, always happens when you have a place where people congregate. I’ll keep an ear out and let you know if I hear anything.”
“Thank you,” Dion said. “I’m sure you have Lilly’s phone number at her parents’ house. We would appreciate it. Oh, and one other thing, when you leave could you hold the door open to the count of five?”
“Sure, any reason why?”
“Something I’m working on that involves the trick I just showed you. I think you’ll feel a gust of air at the five second mark.”
“No problem.”
Jones walked to the door, opened it and held it open for the five-second count. At the fifth count, he turned and looked at Dion with a face that said “Well?”
His jacket was pushed aside by the gust of wind as the air elemental flew out the door and into the freedom of the outdoors. Dion could sense the relief it felt to be outside the mall and into the fresh air. The detective gave him a funny look as the door automatically closed behind him.
“You have to tell me how you did that,” Lilly said. “With your abilities, I’m guessing.”
“I made a deal with an air elemental which was stuck inside this part of the mall,” Dion explained. “It’s supposed to be off limits to them, from what I can tell. It wanted outside and I offered to let it go if it would knock the cards over. All Jones had to do was hold the door open long enough for it to escape. It’s gone and that was the burst of wind you just saw.”
“Wow, can you actually see these things around us all the time?”
“It depends on how powerful they are. An Elemental Grandmaster can bind and control them. I haven’t reached that level. Not even close. It’s why I need to find the other Elemental Grandmasters, so I’ll have all the abilities. Right now, I can see air elementals riding in storm clouds and recognize ghouls on the ground. Water sprites aren’t so hard to see either and they will gladly do things for me just to get attention. I’ve seen fire elementals dancing around in buildings, which were burning down. There’s another kind of elemental too, but I don’t know much about them.”
Dion pulled out the papyrus and sat down in front of a table outside one of the shops. He unrolled the map and looked at it. Lilly could tell by his groans that something was very wrong.
“They get food all over it?” she asked him. “I saw you pull it out of the trash.”
“No, the writing has changed. It was in Coptic, now it’s in ancient Sumerian. I can’t read the new language.” He held it up for her to look at. He was right; this was a completely new style of writing which was even more bizarre than the last one.
“It has to have something to do with it being close to the ghouls,” Dion said. “This map was made by someone with particular cartographer skills. They made it so that the language is fixed to the last person who last used it. If we use it to find Emily, the next person who sees it will be looking at a map in English.”
“But the ghouls didn’t use it for anything. They tossed it away.”
“I know, and there’s not a thing I can do about it. Something about the ghouls being elementals affected the map. I don’t understand it either, but the end result is that we don’t have a map I can read.
“So what are we going to do? You want me to go to a pay phone and call Jones’ house? I can always tell his wife we need his help bad and he’ll come back. Don’t know how long that will take….”
“No, I still don’t want to get him involved. We bring him into it and whoever runs this mall might get very angry. There are all kinds of things they can do to ban us from the place. The right word to Officer Karanzen and we’d never be able to get back inside here.”
“Is there any other way to read it?”
“I’ll have to find a seer stone,” he told her. “It’s a small crystal you can use to read any document in any language. Now, who around here would sell one of those…” he looked around the mall at all the stores in the distance and eventually his eyes spied a gift store called Trollworks.
“Think I found it!” Dion announced as he got up from the bench with the map back under his arm.
Lilly followed Dion to the store, which had a small display of minerals and silver jewelry in the window. It also had a few black light posters, something she hadn’t seen around in years. Perhaps the store had plenty of stock it wanted to get rid of.
Inside, her eyes were struck with a variety of colors and her nose with an assortment of scents. Lilly felt the chill of cool air and turned to see a terrarium on the counter where all sorts of curious plants grew. Small animals worked their way around inside the tank, but she couldn’t identify the species. She turned and saw a glass case filled with cut geodes, polished quartz and other beautiful minerals. The entire store was filled with samples from the mineral kingdom with one special case filled with fine stones set in silver rings and brooches. Around the walls of the store, which was very small, were posters in fluorescent colors designed to glow under ultraviolet light.
“I thought they would sell,” said the man behind the counter. He was in his thirties and had a black beard with matching long hair down his back. He was short, not even five foot in height, but had a strong countenance. “And of course, they stopped selling as soon as I had a warehouse full of them. Did you want to buy one, perchance?”
“We’re interested in something else, Hobbs,” Dion said to him. “This is Lilly, by the way. Lilly, meet Heinrich Hobbstone, but everyone around here calls him Hobbs.”
“Well met,” he told her. “I hope the business picks up or I might end up moving out. I used to have a much bigger space down near the campus, but then waterbeds quit selling, so I’m here.”
“You have a lot of interesting things to sell in your store,” she told him as she perused the black light posters, record albums and small balances. “I’m not even going to ask what is on the back shelf.”
“How old are both of you? The state mandates I ask, which is why I just did.”
“Eighteen,” they both said at the same time.
“You have driver’s licenses?” he asked them. They both reached down their pockets and handed them over. The man carefully held them up to the light to look them over.
“You can’t tell the fakes unless you know the real ones inside and out,” he said. “One of these days, the state is going to come down hard on people and then they’ll regret looking the other way to turn a fast buck. As for myself, I plan to be here as long as I can. Big future in the books and posters. The music, not so much.” He handed the ID’s back to them.
“Okay,” he said, “Now I can talk to you. Just don’t ask me about the stuff I sell on the back shelf. The last thing I need is a pretty young girl wanting to know how to use massage oils. I have enough to deal with by being short and without a girlfriend.”
“I can’t imagine how you would go without a girlfriend,” Dion laughed. “Popular guy that you are. You must have a little black book somewhere?”
“I use it to record the calls from my ex-wives,” he said. “Now what is it you needed to see me about? I quit selling concert tickets last month, by the way. Lost a chunk promoting the Babe Ruth show with Hawkwind opening. Someday people will remember those bands, but not now.”
“I need
a seer stone,” Dion said. “Do you have any here? I’m willing to pay a good price for one.”
“Why are these things so popular lately?” Hobbs asked him. “I had a man come in here just last week and I sold him a brown one.”
“Did it work?” Dion asked him.
“I guess it did. Never saw him again and I’m sure he’d have brought it back if it didn’t do what it was supposed to do. The guy claimed he’d found some metal plates in his backyard with Phoenician writing on it and needed to stone to translate. I told him the stones would work fine for any human language, but just because it translated, didn’t mean it would make any sense. You ever see what one of these will do for an old German text? Heck, you have to hunt around and find the verbs because they’re buried on separate pages. Not to mention the way words are blurred. Everything comes out ‘little girl neutral radish guild house forward’, if you understand what I’m talking about. Anyway, let me see what I have.”
Hobbs ducked under the shelf, not hard for him to do, and picked up a box. He placed the box on the counter and waited.
“Something wrong?” Lilly asked him as they waited with him.
“It only opens if it trusts the person who held it. Bought it from a kobold mine years ago and they built it to hold valuables to their specifications. They don’t trust anyone and hide all their valuables in these boxes.
The box appeared to be carved from a blue stone with spectral qualities. It had dragons sculpted into the surface and on one side the image of an earth-moving machine. Slowly, there emerged a hum from the box as the lid opened a little bit at a time.
“Guess it trusts us,” Hobbs laughed. “These things are expensive, but they’re safer than banks if you need to hide special items. I’d trust it before I would a safety deposit box.”