Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware (20 page)

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, sticking 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.”

Lily looked straight down the barrel of Bntno's gun.

And then there was a crackle in the bushes. And another voice with a Doverian accent said, “Puts gun down! Puts gun down!”

Lily was confused. It was as if a prompter for a play was calling out the stage directions. She felt like she was hallucinating. But the voice came again. “All of you! No gun! Stand up! Hand up!”

A man stepped out of the bushes. He had a gun, too. He was wearing camouflage clothing.

“You've been following us!” cried Jasper.

“Puts gun down!” said the man.

Bntno slowly crouched and lay his pistol on the grass. He stood back up, his hands raised above his head.

“Thank you!” said Katie. “We were just thinking that he was going to—”

“Quiet silence!”
cried the new gunman.

Katie and Lily had no idea what was going on.

Jasper, I'm afraid, did.

“Sir,” he said, “I know what this is about.”

“You!” said the man. “Yes, you!”

“Who is this person?” asked Katie.

“Fifteen cent!” said the man. “Fifteen cent!”

“Ah,” said Jasper Dash. “Yes, I owe you fifteen cents. I deeply apologize. You very generously let me use your commuter vaultapult to chase—”

“I follow you days! I get that fifteen cent!”

Jasper smiled. “Indeed. And you've saved us again. We are very grateful to you. Of course, I shall pay what I owe you down to the last penny. May I put down my hands and get the change for you?”

The man nodded angrily.

Jasper reached down and felt in his pockets.

While he searched, Lily asked quietly, “Why didn't you just stop us early on? Why did you follow us?”

“Whenever I find you, you is always sleeped.”

“You could have woken us up,” said Katie.

“Very rude! No. I will not wake up the peoples. I not rude. This sir, he is rude.” The man gestured at Jasper.

“But you were fine with putting sugar in our gas tank,” said Katie.

“To stop you! But you are not stop! So next night, I catch up, I finds you, I come to speak to you, and you are snoozed again! I do not want to be rude man. So I try to write message to you: ‘Remember you owe me fifteen cent—'”

“But your Magic Marker ran out of ink,” said Lily.

“Yes! Bad for write on metal door.”

The Boy Technonaut was searching the pockets of his rucksack. He said, “I'm glad that this is all that the following business was about. It was getting quite worrying. Anyway, ha. Swell. Let me just…” His hands came up empty. Nothing. “Chums,” he said, “perhaps you have the fifteen cents?”

Lily started to check her jeans.

“Don't,” said Katie. “Bother. Don't bother.” She sounded kind of miserable.

“Why?” said Jasper. “Surely one of us has…” And then he realized.

“Nope,” said Katie. “I…um…I used all of our change to try to buy a Dr Pepper back at that base.”

“Every…penny…,” Jasper realized.

“Yeah,” said Katie. “Every last little penny.”

“Then,” said their stalker, “then thing end very badly right now. Very badly, yes. I take one of you with me as hostage. And now I get very rude, too.”

He raised his gun.

“You,” he said to Bntno. “Man with gun. You come with me as hostage.”

Bntno pointed to himself.

“Yes. Man with gun. Now. I pick up you gun. And you walk with me. We walk back to Dover. And you find me change, fifteen cent.”

“But I—”

“The gun speak louder than the talk!”
screamed the vaultapult attendant. “I have walk three day to come here. Make good speed!”

Bntno slowly and sadly gathered up his sleeping bag and his backpack. The man kept the gun on him. The man told Jasper and Lily how to tie Bntno's hands.

Then the man led Bntno away into the jungle,
Bntno complaining, in Doverian, that the Ministry of Silence would be peeved.

Soon they were gone.

For a while, the three friends stood where they were, kind of shocked. So much had changed so quickly.

The birds tootled and sang.

“Great Scott,” said Jasper. “I think we just had two problems solved at once.”

“Yeah…,” said Katie. “I…guess.”

“So you know which mountain the monastery is on?”

“Sure,” said Katie. “That one.” She pointed at the mountain with the pine forest.

“Oh,” said Jasper. He clapped his hands together briskly. “Well,” he said, “it's an excellent day for a walk, we have miles to go, and a friend awaits us at the end of the road. Have I mentioned that I feel like a redwood about to spread its limbs toward the sun?”

“And say to the morning, ‘Hello,'” said Lily.

Later that afternoon, the three friends reached the great pine forests of Tlmp. Though the day was still warm, a chill wind beat at them as they climbed up through its heights. The boughs of the pines swayed, sending deep shadows skating across their faces.

“Who would have thought this weekend, when we were at the big game, that a few days later we'd be climbing a mountain looking for a monastery?” said Lily.

“Yeah,” grumbled Katie. “Who would've thought.” She sighed and spread out her steps to crunch a pinecone at each footfall. “At least,” she said, “I haven't thought about Choate Brinsley all day.”

“Choate?” said Jasper. “Why are you trying not to think about Choate?”

“Jasper,” said Katie pityingly. “You really don't understand, do you?” She hopped to crush a cone.

He furrowed his brow. “You puzzle me, Katie.”

“You know, sometimes, there's this attraction that can't be explained?”

“Are you speaking of gluons and quarks? Certainly they can't be explained entirely by current physics, but I hope that through the application of my antimatter accelerator—”

“That's not what I mean,” said Katie.

“An antimatter accelerator sounds a little dangerous,” said Lily.

“Yeah,” said Katie. “Who ever needed fast antimatter?”

“You are speaking,” Jasper intuited, “of the tender sentiments.”

Katie said, “Whoo-boy.”

“Yes, Jasper,” said Lily. “That's kind of what she's talking about.”

“You have a pash for Choate Brinsley?”

“A what?”

“A crush?”

“I did. He's always mean to me.”

“So you've stopped having a crush on him?”

“It's not really that simple.”

Jasper said, “Surely you can't want to spend time with someone who is mean to you.”

“Well, he wouldn't be mean to me if we were going out.”

Lily said, “You don't know that.”

“We could ride a tandem bicycle,” said Katie. “And go for canoe rides in the summer.”

“Katie,” said Jasper, “you're too good a person for Choate Brinsley. The girls he likes…They can't hold a candle to you. They're not funny like you are. They're not plucky like you are. They're not wonderful like you are. They have never stopped the hungry hauntings of zombies. They have never defeated a single toad god or had the pleasure of repelling gunplay with a trash-can lid.”

Katie felt her throat getting all wobbly. “Thank
you, Jas,” she said. After a minute of walking in silence, with Katie crunching on the pinecones, she said, “But you know, sometimes I kind of feel like I'd like to be normal. Maybe all three of us would be happier if we were more normal.”

“No one's normal,” said Lily quietly. “For people to be normal, there would have to be an average person. But people are too different. Look at all the people in Dover and then think about people back in Pelt. What's normal?”

“Exactly,” Jasper said.

“Normal,” said Katie, “means when you go out with your friends, you know you won't end the evening jumping over pits of talking carpenter ants.”

“I apologize for that,” said Jasper soberly. “But that was three weeks ago, and I wish we would all put it behind us.”

“Do you think Choate would ever—”

I am very glad that the conversation was interrupted at this moment by a long tentacle coming down out of the trees, because I have to say I do not like emotional conversations.

The Cutesy Dell Twins' books are filled with talk about who likes who and whether people are “right” for each other. In each and every book of that series, one or the other of them falls in love with somebody and spends the whole time thinking about him in a T-shirt, riding a horse—but nothing ever really works out for them. The guy's cuter jerky cousin comes to town, or it turns out he's really someone's brother in disguise, or he moves to Cincinnati, or they have a disagreement about how to take care of dogs. Talk, talk, talk. No one stumbles on any ancient devices, the stars in the night sky are pretty and not filled with alien menace, and there is never a single circular saw—let alone a circular saw with a conveyor belt.

My friends, where's the zest in that?

No, give me a slice of the life adventurous. Show me something unusual. Give me the stuff of dreams and nightmares!

For example, this gigantic, many-eyed beast currently warping its way between the trees, grabbing at Katie with its tentacles. Now
that
is
something to talk about. Would you rather we talked about the beast, with its thousand eyes and sloppy mouths and carking cries of hunger, or go back to “Is he right for me?” and “Oh, it's just like there's this fence between us and I can see between the pickets, but some are overgrown with this…” etc. etc.?

I know my answer. And I'll give it quick, because Katie might only have a few seconds left with her current arms and face.

Excuse me.

Okay: Roll the beast!

The beast swayed above them, its drooling mouths smacking, its tentacles snaking between the pine boughs. Its cries echoed over the crags and cliffs.

“Run!” said Jasper. “It's the Thing from the bridge in Greylag!”

They ran, bounding through spruce.