Jasper Dash and the Flame-Pits of Delaware (24 page)

Drgnan Pghlik threw open a bronze door.

They stepped into a huge cavern. It was lit by a weird, flickering blue light. Some daylight came from above. The cave had once been part of a volcano, and there was a hole that led straight up and out the top of the mountain.

But the eerie blue light came from below. There was a huge chasm in the middle of the floor, a fissure, a crack. It divided the room into two. And deep down there in the heart of the mountain was a blue glow: the sacred flames. Gases rose from the depths and wafted up into the rock chimney above.

Suspended above the chasm and the flame were five of the players from the Stare-Eyes team.

The boys hung from the ceiling. They sat cradled in chains, with their arms folded, their legs crossed, and their eyes open. The chain
baskets dangled them over the pit so they could soak up the energies radiating from the mountain's heart.

Their eyes glowed red, and their pupils were slits like snakes'.

They bathed in the light from the flame-pits of Delaware.

The dangling varsity players were in a trance. They did not move or seem to see. They just sat with folded arms and legs crossed, staring into space.

Drgnan Pghlik counted. “That's not all of them, is it?” he asked Katie.

“No,” said Katie. “We caught their Number Four in Dover. And Number Six is frozen upstairs in the dining room.” She scanned their faces. “And Number One is missing.”

“See!” said Drgnan. “There is their coach!”

Katie looked across the chasm. There on the other side of the cavern was Coach, leaning against the wall, grinning, and drinking, as he would say, “a brewski.” He stood next to a large lever attached to some sort of machine.

“What's that machine?” Katie asked Drgnan.

“It is a lever that controls the chains that hold people over the flame-pits. The chains are on a track in the ceiling. The lever, yes? It draws the chains over to that side of the chasm so that people can step off and the holy do not dangle forever.”

Katie inspected the room carefully. She looked up at the hanging jocks, at the mechanical track that held them in place, and at Coach, sitting by the engine that would move them. She saw that a bridge, also made of chains, ran across the fissure, right under the five meditating mob kids.

“I have an idea,” she said. “We can trap those five.”

Drgnan squinted. “What does my clever sister mean?”

“If we break that machine or pull out a gear or something, then the five players will be stuck there, you know, at our mercy. They won't be able to escape.”

“Ah!” Drgnan exclaimed with pleasure. “Indeed! The lever on this machine unscrews!”

“Okay,” said Katie. “If you can take on Coach, I can take care of the lever.”

Drgnan smiled. “It is an excellent plan,” he said. “So we cross the bridge.”

Katie inspected the glinting bridge. It swayed with gusts of blue that drifted up from the mystical flames beneath.

Katie's palms were sweating. She wasn't sure how excellent a plan it was, suddenly.

She and Drgnan started to creep across the cavern floor.

They were almost at the chain bridge beneath the dandled, zombie-eyed boys—when Coach saw them.

“Hey! Hey!” Coach belted. “You! Keep away from my boys! They're winners, and you're a bad influence!”

The coach ran forward and pulled his pistol out of his tracksuit.

Katie and Drgnan dropped to the floor behind an outcropping. Flights of bullets rattled against the stalagmites, the stalactites, the schist.

Katie whispered to Drgnan, “Okay. How are we going to do this?”

“Saint Lrtzmrk writes that when the falcon lands in the lagoon, then the frog seeks its dinner elsewhere,” said Drgnan.

“You don't have the faintest idea, do you?”

“No, my sister. None whatsoever.”

Katie peeked up over her outcropping—at the pit, at their adversary, at the five boys dreaming in the radiance of the sacred flames below them.

More bullets flew by.

And then Katie realized: Some of those bullets were coming from behind them.

She turned and grunted in surprise.

#1 stood in the door behind them, firing at their backs.

They were trapped.

Lily and Jasper were in a corridor full of monks. There was a lot of monastic excitement in the air. The monks conferred. They agreed: They had to get outside to safety, beyond the reach of the mob.

As they went down the hall, Jasper asked one of the older monks, “Your Holiness, are you sure you don't know the whereabouts of Bobby Spandrel? The leader of the gang? Just a little taller than me? Round, silver, featureless head? No hands or feet?”

“All of the gangsters have had faces,” answered the monk. “Except inside their hearts. There they have no faces whatsoever.”

“This way,” one of the monks ordered.

Jasper nodded. “We'll get everyone out of
the monastery, and then I'll slip back in to look for that villain Spandrel.”

They all hurried along the passageway toward the exit. Lisa Buldene was snapping pictures as fast as she could. “This is amazing!” she said. “I'm almost being shot at! Now I'm really alive!”

The passage came out at a flight of steps that led down the side of the volcanic crater to a little bridge. The monks poured down the steps.

And stopped.

There were ten gangsters in one big clump in front of them. Waiting.

The monks poured back up the steps.

“Secret door! Secret door!” they said, giddy with motion. Lily, Jasper, Lisa Buldene, and the monks scurried down a hall to a domed, circular chapter house. One slid a lectern aside and pointed at a secret passageway that led down.

They all ran down the cramped staircase—a hundred monks or more. They came out in a courtyard. They started to run for the exit.

And then saw, coming to block them, the same parade of ten toughs.

So the group ran back through the secret door, up the steps, out of the domed chapter house, down the hallway, and tried a bridge.

But now the mobsters were on the other side of the bridge, waiting for them.

So the group turned and ran back.

“To the spoons! To the spoons!” the monks called. They charged up stairs and arrived on the roof of a tower. There was one of the vaultapults there, with a trigger to pull it back and release it.

“Two by two!” a monk called. “We will be shot over the gangsters' heads to that tower, where we shall make our way…”

The words died on his lips. He was pointing at another tower, but mobsters poured out of a trapdoor there and stood, arms folded, waiting to receive whoever landed there.

Lily looked at the other towers.

Mobsters. Mobsters. Mobsters.

“Pyramids of Snefru!” Jasper swore. “We're trapped, chaps!”

“It's like they knew where we were going!” said Lily.

“It's like someone was…” Jasper stopped talking.

“Like someone was what?” said Lisa Buldene.

Jasper looked down. “Like someone was
telling
the gangsters which direction we were going in all the time.”

“Who would do a rotten thing like that?” said Lisa Buldene.

Full of rage, Jasper looked her in the eye. He said, “I should have known—the moment I saw your pants.”

“My pants?”

“No human being would willingly wear pants that zipped off at the knee—no normal human being—unless
they had rocket-thrusters in place of their detachable feet.
”

Lily stared aghast at the New Yorker. Could it be?

Lisa Buldene's hand was on her own throat. Her fingers were plucking at her skin.…
Scrabble, scrabble, scrabble…
Pulling on her chin…
Yanking off her face!

Her real head was a foot-and-a-half-wide silver sphere that rang with energy and static. She cast off her rubber hands.

“Bobby Spandrel,” said Jasper, with disgust.

“We meet again, Boy Technonaut,” said the international arch-criminal. “But this, I believe, will be the last time.”

Katie Mulligan and Drgnan Pghlik crouched in the cavern by the flame-pits, fired on from both sides. In front of them, across the pit, was Coach. Behind them, near the door, was #1.

Bullets splintered stone. Drgnan squatted flat and clucked with his tongue.

Suddenly Katie had another idea.

Over the din of lead, she shouted, “We need to get near the boys! No one will shoot us if we're near the—”

No time to explain—she grabbed Drgnan Pghlik's hand and tugged. Together they rushed forward, toward the edge of the pit, toward the bridge—and the Coach rushed toward them. He stood on the opposite cliff, taking aim.

The girl and the monk had reached the chasm. They faced the enemy.

Coach stood at the other end of the bridge. He trained his pistol.

And suddenly Drgnan Pghlik jumped, hurled himself into the air, and grabbed at the first chained, meditating kid. With both hands, he clamped on, and that first jock rocked—slamming into the next one—

Coach frowned.

The second jock knocked the third, the third jock knocked the fourth, the fourth jock knocked the fifth—and Coach, on the opposite cliff, was whacked sprawling. He stumbled—arms up—and fell off the edge of the cliff. He tumbled about eight feet to another little cliff, where he lodged, knocked out, spread-eagled, almost upside down.

Katie, wobbling, crossed the bridge. It swayed. It bucked. It heaved like a dog spitting up.

#1 had run to the chasm behind them,
jumped, and now hung from another one of his team members, kicking and punching at Drgnan. Drgnan defended with knees and wrist blocks. The team, suspended, rocked back and forth, slamming into one another. Drgnan and #1 threw themselves from side to side to avoid getting crushed between meditating sport-brats. They hurled punches around the arms of the glow-eyed boys.

Katie stepped off the bridge and ran to grab the lever. If she could unscrew that lever, the boys would be trapped in their chain cages. Even if they woke up from their trances, they couldn't free themselves. She made a dash for the controls to the sacred rotisserie.

She grabbed the lever. She didn't know how to detach it. She struggled with it. She pulled it to one side.

Suddenly an engine cranked to life, and the five suspended boys—and Drgnan and #1, holding fast, flailing—began trundling toward her.

If they reached her side of the cliff, Katie
realized, and somehow woke up, then suddenly there would be six people to fight instead of just one. But if she didn't get the baskets to safe ground, then Drgnan Pghlik would be trapped hanging on to them above the abyss.

Drgnan and #1 struggled on the swaying champs. #1 hissed to the monk, “I've eaten bigger animals than you.” He showed his teeth. His eyes were green slits. He lashed out with a kick that sent his champ into a spin and caught Drgnan on the side of the head.

Drgnan almost lost his grip. He grabbed for the chains.

Katie threw the lever the other way. The machinery clanked and reversed. The line of athletes started rolling back out over the pit.

“Fortune smiles, my sister!” yelled Drgnan Pghlik. He blocked a punch to his gut. He called to her, “Unscrew the lever!”

“You'll be trapped!”

“Quickly!” said Drgnan.

The athletes were hanging above the center of
the flame-pits again. There they stopped. Katie began unscrewing the lever.

It was free—she had it—and she ran back to the bridge.

She looked at Drgnan fighting valiantly. She thought that the two of them made a good team. Her and him. Fighting crime, side by side. She was suddenly electric with joy in adventure.

At last Coach was sitting up, looking around. His gun had fallen into the flame-pit.

Katie rushed over him, clambering across the bridge of chains. Drgnan and #1 popped up and down around the swaying teammates. Drgnan looked battered, hanging awkwardly by one hand and one foot, his robe torn, his head reeling.