by Jae Vogel
“No,” Dion told him and pointed at the “No Smoking” signs on the wall.
“That is indeed a shame. Alas, this age is so unenlightened. I expected better, but already I have seen wonders never anticipated. Is it true you all own televisions?”
“Most of us do,” Emily told him. “My aunt won’t have a TV in her house, but she’s the only person I know who doesn’t have one.”
“A shame. I never thought they would replace cinemas.”
“So what kind of advice can you give us?” Dion asked.
“I can only tell you what you already know,” he replied. “I can tell you to pay attention to what you won’t. Who do you think around here does most of the work associated with the earth?”
They looked at each other and thought for a while.
Finally Emily spoke.
“It can’t be a construction crew,” she said. “All of that work is done.”
“True. Now look about you and think about what the next most obvious example might be.”
They turned and looked down the concourse. Nothing was apparent.
Then Lilly noticed something.
There were janitorial workers everywhere. At least ten different people were involved in emptying the trash and sweeping the floors. They all had their uniforms on and were very busy at their jobs. One of them waxed a brass handrail, another hauled bags of trash out of a can. And every single one of them was glancing in their direction as they carried out their tasks. She watched them move closer every time they did something. This wasn’t random; the crew was closing in on them.
“The cleaners,” Lilly whispered. “The cleaners are watching us.”
“Don’t look and make it obvious,” Dion said. “Just focus on what’s in front of you.”
Lilly and Emily did their best but they couldn’t help but turn in the direction of the janitorial staff as the cleaners began to move closer to them. The cleaners did everything they could to make their actions appear normal and fit into the daily business of running the mall. However, there were a few things that anyone would find odd about them.
First of all, they all had the same appearance. Each one had a large forehead and shaggy hair. All of them wore sunglasses, even inside the mall. None of them were women, all were men. None of the cleaners appeared to be more than five foot two in height. It appeared someone had printed a basic form of “cleaner” and used the template to create a horde of them. They moved slowly, but with deliberation. Each step took them one closer to Dion and his friends.
“Excellent,” said the man called Edward. “I see you are waking up. I wish I had a cigar; there must be a tobacco vendor around here somewhere. Alas, you tell me I can’t smoke inside this place. Such a shame. You colonists have such strange values. Anyway, can you guess what they might really be?”
“Gnomes,” Emily blurted out. “They are really gnomes. The mall has contracted out to a company which uses gnomes as janitors.”
“Wrong. But close,” the man on the bench, said. “They are not gnomes, but ghouls, creatures who frequent graveyards. This is why they need to wear the sunglasses. The light hurts their eyes. They are used to activity under the light of the moon. The brightness of the sun is too much for them.”
“These are the elementals associated with earth?” Dion said to him. “How does that work out?”
“Think about it,” Edward said as he adjusted the silk shirt that he had over his corpulent body. “They live underground and do not usually come out in the daytime. But the mall has to have them work all day long, so the unlucky ones get to clean up while the mall is open. There are a lot more of them, but they stay in the subbasement in the daytime. Have you ever had to interact with a cleaner in this place?”
“I can’t say I have,” Emily said.
“Me neither,” said Lilly.
“That is how the management would like it kept,” Edward pointed out. “Most people don’t even acknowledge that the cleaners are here. They are invisible and no one could even remember what they looked like. The ghouls want it kept that way too, because it assures them a steady source of employment and a decent place to live. They can stay in the subbasement and no one is even aware they are down there outside the mall management. If you look at the nametag on their shirts, they all say ‘Bob’. Now don’t you find it funny no one has ever asked themselves why all the cleaners are called the same name?”
“From the way you describe it,” Dion said, “it sounds there’s a benefit to both the mall management and the ghouls.”
“Oh, there is. I don’t see this arrangement lasting forever, though. Eventually someone will notice and the management will be forced to hire some humans to do the job who won’t attract much notice either. In the meantime, they have a whole group of humanoid creatures who will keep the place clean and only cost them room and board. Eventually the ghouls will realize they can do better than push a broom or clean a handrail, but this will be far in the future.”
“So they don’t want Dion to gain power of the earth elementals because it threatens their status?” Lilly asked. “It seems rather short-sighted of them.”
“It might seem that way to you,” Edward said. “But you haven’t had to live in a cave all your life, afraid of the sun, afraid of the humans on the surface and starving for whatever food you could get. The ghouls are like vultures, they only eat things that are in a state of decay. There are plenty of things they can eat around here. Plenty of sandwiches tossed away every day for them to let age. As I said, eventually they will figure out who is getting the better of the relationship, and then the mall management will need to find another kind of earth elemental to live in this part and keep it balanced.”
“Wait a minute,” Emily said. “Are you telling us there are a lot of elementals for each kind of element?”
“Quite a number, actually,” Edward confirmed. “You guessed wrong about the gnomes, but they could’ve easily brought them into this location for the right price. The ghouls made them a better offer and they occupy the earth element section of the mall.”
“It’s something to keep in mind,” Dion said to him. “I hadn’t realized there was such variety per element.”
“You have much to learn,” Edward said.
The man on the bench pulled a pocket watch out of his jacket and looked at it. “Well, well, I have over stayed my time. Good luck, my pretties, you will need it in order to find what you seek, but I have faith in your abilities.”
Then he vanished.
It was sudden. One minute he was sitting there with an ice cream cone, the next he was gone. There was no flash of light or anything else. He was simply no longer there and the space on the bench was no longer occupied.
“Another variable in the equation,” Dion said. “I suppose we will meet many more so long as we stay here.”
“I don’t think we should stay here,” Lilly said to her friends. “We should move on and try to find a way to avoid the ghouls.”
“They’ll only follow us,” Emily said. “What’s worse, they know this place far better than we do. I doubt there’s a place we can hide that they don’t know about.”
Dion noticed a table near the bench with a few chairs around it. “Let’s sit there,” he said. “It will take them at least a half an hour to reach us at their pace. I want to look at the map and see what it shows.”
They went to the table and sat down. Dion rolled out the map and looked inspected it in great detail.
“What kind of paper is this thing on?” Lilly asked him. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Papyrus,” Dion said. “They printed the map on papyrus. When you consider how we came by it, I’m not too surprised. At least it isn’t on vellum.”
The map was not printed. As they looked at it, it became evident it was hand painted. All the corridors and grand concourses of all four sections of the mall were on the map, but each figure was drawn by hand and colored in with care. Strange symbols listed what each
one was for and how it related to the overall structure of the mall. Neither Emily nor Lilly could read the words written on the map.
“What language is this?” Lilly finally asked them. “It looks like Greek.”
“Not Greek,” Dion told her. “Coptic. The ancient Egyptian language written out with Greek letters. See? There are words in Greek you can read… if you understand the Greek alphabet.”
“But some of these letters don’t look Greek,” she continued.
“There were sounds in the Egyptian language which Greek didn’t possess. The Egyptians came up with some letters for those sounds.”
“I thought the Egyptians used those funny picture writings,” Emily said to them as she stretched her legs out. She kept an eye on the ghoul cleaners who were still headed in their direction.
“You mean hieroglyphs,” Dion said. “They started with those, but you need to be a decent artist to write in that form. It was difficult to find and train scribes who could do what the nobility needed, so they developed a shorthand version called hieratic. That was still too complicated so the Egyptians came up with a form known as demotic, which consists of a serious of dashes and strikes. Coptic is the easiest one to learn, so it stayed around.
“Not that it does us a lot of good,” Lilly said. “We can’t read the map, so how can we tell what it says?”
“I can,” Dion said. “I can use it to read the map, so I’ll be able to find our next target.”
“You can read this?” Emily asked him. “Dion, you are full of surprises. How many languages do you read?”
“Besides English? Three. Latin, Mandarin Chinese and Coptic. My parents insisted I learn these three when I was growing up. They seemed to think it was very important I knew them. Looks like they were right.”
“So what does it show us?” Emily asked. She leaned over the cryptic signs on the map, trying to decipher the symbols and how it related to what was indicated.
“Let’s see,” he told them as he ran his long fingers over the papyrus. “The walls are clearly marked on all levels. They split each level into a separate map, but the basement and subbasement are divided twice. Not much room in the subbasement and there is an exit marked which leads in and out. Must be how the ghouls travel to and from the mall.”
“Well this is interesting,” he continued. “There are stores on this map which don’t appear on any other. Now why would you not want a store to appear on a map of the mall?”
“Maybe they’re not really stores?” Emily said. “Perhaps something else?”
“No, these are stores, but I don’t think they’re supposed to appeal to humans. That’s it! Each of the five stores marked in gold aren’t accessible to humans.”
“How can that be?” Lilly asked him. “How do you have a store in a mall which restricts entrance? I thought the whole idea of a mall was to have a central location where anyone could come to shop.”
“Anyone can also include customers who are not human,” Dion told her. “For instance, this particular store would appeal to ghosts because it carries new tombstones and listings for houses they can haunt. I’m sure if I probe deeper, I would find it had insurance against mortal interference.”
“How do they keep out the humans from going inside it?” Lilly asked Dion. “It seems like any other store on the map.”
“You know those fake barricades on the front of empty stores? The ones you don’t notice because they fit in so well with the mall architecture? They have them over the stores where humans aren’t supposed to shop. Ghosts can go right through the barricade, but a human wouldn’t even know it was there. I’m not sure how they keep mortals out of the stores which appeal to the vampires and werewolves, but I’m sure there is a way to do it.”
They looked at the map for a few more minutes, ever mindful of the steady approach of the ghoul cleaners. Finally Dion pointed out another store on the map. “There it is,” he told them, “the location of the Earth Elemental Grandmaster. I need to go there right away.”
“How do you know it’s the right location?” Lilly asked.
“It is colored black and has the alchemical earth symbol on it. If you look at other sections in the mall, you’ll see the symbol for air, water and fire on them. There is one store in each of the four mall sections where the Elemental Grandmaster resides. It’s marked with the symbol of that element. Here…” he pointed out each store on the map. “All I have to do is reach the store and find the Elemental Grandmaster who runs it.”
“Sounds easy enough,” Lilly said. “How do we pull this off? It’s never as easy as the plan. And I think our ghoulish friends have begun to cut us off.”
They could see the ghoul cleaners in motion as they surrounded them. There was still a way out, but it would close very soon if they didn’t move.
“So which is the store in our section?” Emily asked Dion. “I’d like to get this wrapped up today and go home. Those ghouls are giving me the creeps.” She watched as two of them who swept the floor looked up and grinned.
“Here,” he said and pointed to a store on the map. “It’s a pharmacy called The Alchemist Shop. The Elemental Grandmaster has to reside there. Makes sense when you consider alchemy was the ancient science of purification of material matter.”
“I thought the alchemists were trying to find a way to make gold,” Emily said. She continued to keep the progress of the ghouls under observation.
“That was what they told everyone. It was a way to get royal patronage while you continued your work. They attempted to understand the basic forces of the universe with the materials they had with them. Sometimes it was a quest for the philosopher’s stone or the universal solvent. Sometimes it was internal and the ‘great work’ would change them as much as it changed the object of their experiments.”
“It appears to be on the opposite side of the restaurants,” Lilly said, “if that’s what is supposed to be here. Funny, I count three restaurants on this map across from it; I thought there were only two…”
“Number three is for werewolves,” Dion told her, “you’re not supposed to know it’s there. It looks like a short walk down the concourse, so let’s go.”
Dion rolled the map up and tied it with the leather strand Mr. Jehuti gave him when he was handed the map. They began walking in the direction of the pharmacy. Naturally, their path took them on a collision course with the ghouls.
Chapter 5
Three of the ghoul cleaners were directly in front of the trio as they headed to the pharmacy. However, this time of day the mall was crowded with shoppers who wanted to take advantage of the early shopping.
Two of the ghouls put their brooms down and glared at Dion and his friends as they walked past them. The ghouls didn’t dare interfere with them, as it would alert the other shoppers. Emily could see the rage in their faces as they walked past them. The ghouls had attempted to close in on them by stealth, but now they walked past them. There was nothing the elemental creatures could do about it.
Emily smiled at the ghoul cleaner as she walked by him. She could see him twist the broom handle in his hands as they went past.
“It won’t be so easy the next time,” Dion said to his friends. “They tried stealth to put a stop to me this time. Next time they’ll be more aggressive.”
“I don’t see what they can do to slow you down,” Lilly told him. “Imagine the bad publicity if a mall shopper is jumped by the janitorial staff. The papers will be full of stories and the county will launch an investigation. What happens when they find the ghouls living in the subbasement? I don’t think they want it to happen.”
“They may look slow and stupid,” Dion warned them, “but they’re out of their environment. They’ve managed to survive outside for thousands of years by avoiding contact with humans. They have all kinds of ways to get back at us. So long as we’re in the mall, they are fighting on their own territory. Keep that in mind.”
Soon the pharmacy loomed ahead. It was directly across from them i
n a few minutes. It was also next to one of the mall theaters.
The Alchemist Shop was a small pharmacy, which was easy to miss from the outside. The exterior had few glass windows and only one entrance, which was behind a closed door. Unlike most of the mall shops, this place had a reason to restrict traffic from the inside and out. There was only one sign on the exterior, which proclaimed it to be a “Full service pharmacy” and a smaller one which promised “Compounding on premises”.
“It has those colored water glass things,” Emily observed as they stood outside and looked at it. “You can tell it’s a pharmacy.”
“I suspect the Elemental Grandmaster wants it that way,” Dion said. “He or she has plenty of customers who come to him or her alone, I would guess. No reason to advertise the presence to just anyone.”
“At least we’re here,” Emily said. “Now let’s go inside and see what the deal is with you receiving these powers. Maybe I’ll even go home early.”
The moment she spoke, there was a commotion in from the lobby next door. They turned and watched as twelve ghoul cleaners emerged from the lobby with floor polishers, vacuum cleaners, mops, brooms and rags. As they stood and watched, the ghouls set up a barricade right outside the pharmacy and began to clean. In minutes, the floor polishers ran at full speed and the ghouls were busy with glass cleaning and doing what they could to remove every speck of dirt in front of the pharmacy. They parted to allow a few confused customers to leave the pharmacy, but prevented anyone from entering it. At no time did any of the ghouls speak to each other or the shoppers. It appeared they had a way to communicate which did not involve sound.
“I have to give them credit for planning,” Dion said to his friends. “Still, they can’t block the entrance to the pharmacy forever. Eventually they’ll have to move on. Even Officer Karanzen won’t tolerate this kind of behavior for long.”
“Yeah, but what do we do in the meantime?” Emily asked him. “We can’t sit out here all day waiting for them to move.’