The Fromatius Mall stood at the edge of the parking lot and dominated the countryside around it.

No one seemed to know where the mall had come from; it just showed up one day in the field and sat there empty until the stores began to open. After six months, the mall’s owners held a “Grand Opening” celebration and employed the local marching band and trade guilds to help in the celebration.

Since the trades anticipated a profitable relationship with the mall, they were glad to help out. The schools were thrilled to have a place where the high-schoolers could work during the evenings and weekends. It would be a much better place for them to hang out in than the local Drive-In or bowling alley.

A few people down at the township hall talked among themselves about how quickly the mall had appeared and were stunned it showed up so fast. Although the building plans were submitted and the proper forms filled out, it seemed strange everything went as smoothly as it did when the mall was constructed.

Some of the local firms were hired to do the finishing work and pour the concrete for the sidewalks around the structure, but no one could recall ever seeing the construction firms who were hired to build the mall in town before. And before any of the trade guilds could complain about a lack of their involvement, it was there. As soon as it was constructed, the other trades were contracted and given lucrative contracts to maintain it.

Granted, some of the stores in place seemed a little odd for a suburban shopping mall, but there were enough major retailers in it to defer any bad thoughts from the local suburban moms. Besides, it was spring and people were getting ready for the summer. The big auto plant in the nearby town of Scipio was planning to shut down for two weeks of inventory. This would allow them the chance to make certain they had everything they needed for next year’s models and allow the employees to take vacations. Some employees had additional time in based on years of service and could take as much as two more weeks of vacation. Therefore, if your father or mother were one of the lucky ones to have started working there right after the Korean War, you could spend an entire month at some pleasure dome in Florida.

Lilly Arrad wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Her father ran an insurance company in Fromatius out of their house. Her mother stayed home and took care of her and her older sister when they were coming of age, but now she was looking into a job at the mall. Lilly didn’t want a job at the mall when it opened. She didn’t care for most of the kids she was stuck around all day at her high school and found a job with a catering company. However, most of the jobs her company pulled were at the mall for the various out of town dignitaries who came in to see how their store branches looked and what the sales represented. So, she might as well work at the mall. Perhaps next week’s job would take her somewhere else.

She sat on the hood of her Pinto and looked at the mall again. These things sprang up everywhere. Was the entire country turning into one big shopping mall? The 70’s surely brought with it a lot of novelties. Right now, she could look forward to attending college in the fall at Cincinnati. She had her future mapped out: international studies, find a diplomat, get married and spend the rest of her life throwing parties for foreign dignitaries.

She looked down and sighed.

Her shoes were still in the mall. She’d forgotten them and walked barefoot all the way to the car. She really needed to get beyond that, it was so childish. Now she would have to walk back in that place and get them.

Maybe she wouldn’t. She could drive home barefoot and find her spare sandals in the bedroom closet. She had the dance class tonight her sister taught.

Her sister, Rachel, had learned belly dancing in college and used it to supplement her spending money. Although Rachel married last month and left the house, it still felt as if she was around. With her older sister moved out, Lilly started to feel lonely. She still had a few good friends from the neighborhood, but everyone was headed to different places for college in the fall.

She wanted to stay close enough to come home on the weekend, but far enough to enjoy the life on campus and socialize with the right kind of people. She would be forced to stay in a dorm the first few years, but afterwards, she would find a better place to live. Somehow, the sorority life didn’t appeal to her, and Lilly doubted she would pledge one. She could see herself sharing an apartment after a year or two. Her friend Cindy started college a year early and wrote her letters about how crazy the college dorm life was in Indiana. It was one of her reasons for attending a school in Cincinnati.

The hood of her Pinto started to burn into her butt, so Lilly decided to hop off it and go home. It was early enough in the year to walk barefoot across a parking lot, but she had no desire to go back and retrieve the shoes. They were an older pair and she had more at home. She’d look for them tomorrow. The jeans, on the other hand, were precious. She’d spent the weekend fading them to just the right hue in her mother’s washing machine. They matched the light sweater she wore.

Lilly was small and, at five foot in height, didn’t expect to get much taller. She wasn’t a big eater and kept her weight at a comfortable hundred pounds. She even dieted down to ninety at one point, but didn’t like the way it made her feel. She stayed away from the pot smokers and druggies at her school, although she did enjoy her time on the literary magazine and French Club.

Lilly decided to forget the shoes and turned to open her car door when she saw something.

It was the new guy who transferred into school this year. He was sitting on the edge of the fountain at the entrance. He was staring at it and moving his hand over the water in the pool. The fountain was huge and filled up with coins every day from well-wishers who wanted to bring good luck by tossing three coins in it. But he wasn’t dropping coins in the fountain; he was busy with his eyes fixed on the pattern his hand traced through the air.

Now she was curious.

She finally remembered his name. It was Dion Bacchus. She remembered it because he was in her homeroom. One of the strange things she noticed one day was how many of her close friends had similar names to her last name. The school was huge. Her senior class had five hundred in its enrollment. Not only did the local auto industry contribute to its size, but the regional air force base added to it as well. It wasn’t unusual for her to call a friend’s house and have a “Colonel Adams” answer the phone.

Dion started school that year as a transfer student from some place in California that year, but mostly kept to himself. She had said little more than “hello” to him since he started. It was strange to see someone start school in their senior year and he didn’t seem to interact with anyone. Dion’s locker was two sections down from her, but Lilly seldom saw him speak to anyone. He was in her biology class as well, but she couldn’t ever recall him asking a single question.

This was too bad for Dion because plenty of the girls at school were obsessed with him.

He stood almost six foot tall, had dark features and black eyes with hair that cascaded down his back to a school-acceptable length. He wore the standard jeans and t-shirt apparel, which dominated in the school, but had an intense look on his face and a tight set of chest muscles that showed through his shirt.

A few girls approached him one day and, although he was polite, he didn’t speak very long with any of them. A few of the local tough kids who were into drugs and hard rock tried to corner him in the hall one day. He took the hand of one and gently pulled it off him. The kid who placed it there walked away swearing under his breath with a look of pain in his eyes. Lilly remembered the tough one later coming to school with his hand in a cast.

Rumors abounded about Dion’s background.

He lived with his aunt and uncle in one of the nicer houses on a good street, but people seldom saw him leave the house. The rumor most people believed was that his real parents died in some kind of tragic accident and his relatives were the only ones who could take him in. Some said his family were foreign spies, others said they were extraterrestrials who were under the protection of the air base. Among other things, the base was rumored to hold the bodies of aliens who’d crashed on Earth in a flying saucer. Some people believed Dion’s family were all black magicians who sacrificed goats in the back yard, although no one had ever seen it take place. The house where he dwelled was quiet and never gave the neighbors any reason to be concerned about what happened over there.

There were plenty of other strange things that happened in the neighborhood over the past few years, such as the professor of chemistry who was busted for making illegal pharmaceutics in his basement. The man later turned out to be deeply in debt to mobsters.

“I wondered why he always was on the pay phone at the grocery store,” Lilly’s mother had said to her when the arrest hit the news.

Since the fountain stood between her and the entrance to the mall, Dion would be directly in her path if Lilly wanted to go back in it for her shoes. This would allow her to see what he was up to by the fountain and retrieve her shoes at the same time. You weren’t supposed to enter the mall if you didn’t have shoes on, but she didn’t worry about it, as Lilly knew some of the mall security guards. They were constantly flirting with her.

She checked to make sure her car was locked before she picked up her leather purse and headed back into the mall.

The day was bright and sunny with birds circling in the sky. She looked up and realized the birds were vultures. It was an unnerving sight; what interest would vultures have in a mall? She decided they were riding the air currents drifting up from the ground. People believed vultures circled in the air to signal each other when there was something dead on the ground. But Lilly learned years ago it had to do with the way they used the updraft from warm air on the ground to glide. There might be places on the roof where the vultures nested. They weren’t all that far from Hinckley, Ohio where they returned every year to mate and nest. Perhaps the vultures were thinking about moving their nesting grounds to the mall?

The mall was dominated by a huge clock, which sat in the middle and towered over everything below it. Although the mall was an indoor shopping center, someone had decided it needed a clock tower rising up from the center of the complex so everyone in the parking lot could see what time it was. Access to the clock tower was almost impossible to find, or so she’d been told by a few friends whose parents worked in the mall. Even the plans approved by the local building committee were vague on this part of the mall construction.

Lilly walked past the fountain where Dion sat on the ledge. Something compelled her to stop and watch what he did with his hand. She froze when she saw a small column of water rise into the air close to his hand and fall. She stood there in amazement as he brought an entire wave of water up to his level and watched as it fell down into the pool. No one else was around the fountain at this time of the day.

As she stood there, Dion slowly turned around and aimed his piercing eyes into her own. Lilly felt as if her entire soul was bared to him. It seemed Dion could see into her very mind and knew everything about her. But she wasn’t scared. She didn’t feel any sort of animosity from Dion… just curiosity.

As he looked at her, two more columns of water rose into the air and slowly fell back down into the fountain. They were followed by a wave, which rose up to his height and sent a shower of coins into the air. The coins splashed back into the water as he continued to watch her. Dion kept one hand in the air over the fountain, but never once did the water come near him. She could see no dampness or watermarks on his clothes.

“How did you do that?” she asked him.

“Do what?” Dion said, withdrew his hand to one side of his body and rested it on the ledge of the fountain.

“The water… you had it moving and forming shapes in the air. I’ve never seen anyone do that. Are you some kind of magician?”

Dion smiled back at her. “You mean an illusionist, like Houdini or Copperfield? No, not like that. Not at all.”

He moved his hand over the water and a mist rose over it. As Lilly froze in place, she saw the mist form into a cloud over the fountain. The clouds turned into fantastic shapes. One became the figure of a dancer before it broke apart in the air. Another one turned from a boat into a dragon before a breeze blew it apart.

Dion lowered his hand and the mist over the fountain dissolved.

“Can I sit by you?” Lilly asked him. She trembled. This was the sort of thing that never happened. At least not to people like her.

“Of course, you can sit right here.” He indicated the space to his right.

Lilly’s feet took her to the fountain and her body sat itself down next to the strange man. Now that she was close, Lilly could see how handsome he was. She always felt Dion was cute, but this close she could sense the heat radiating from him and really felt his presence. Her heartbeat increased and she tried to avoid showing the sweat forming on her brow.

“Can I see your lighter?” he asked her.

How did Dion know she had a lighter in her purse? People didn’t smoke as they had in her parents’ day. Then it hit her: if he knew she had a lighter in her purse, he might know what else she had in it. With shaking hands, she opened the clasp on her leather purse and took out the cigarette lighter.

Her hand still trembling, Lilly handed it to Dion and placed her purse down. She hadn’t felt so vulnerable since an old boyfriend told her over the phone one night his parents had installed a hot tub in their backyard and they would be gone for the weekend.

Dion flicked the flint on the lighter and a flame popped out of one end. He held it up for a few seconds and watched the flame burn.

“I don’t think they want you to smoke out here,” she told him.

“Who said anything about smoking,” he said and held out the burning lighter in front of her.

Lilly watched as the flame grew to a height of what must’ve been about six inches. She didn’t believe it was possible for this to happen. The lighter couldn’t have that much fuel in it. The flames changed shapes, turned blue and became a human form. As her eyes grew wide, she watched the shape detach from the ground and run circles on the concrete. She saw the little figure made from fire run a figure eight in front of them for a few seconds. Then it stopped and seemed to look up at them. Two seconds later, it was gone in a puff of smoke.

“They just don’t last very long,” he explained as Dion returned the lighter back to her.

In front of the fountain was a small strip of grass that encircled it. At one time, the landscapers intended to plant flowers there, but the mall management decided against it. They reasoned it would deter people from enjoying the fountain and the flowers would be trampled. They left the strip where a few feet of grass grew and needed to be trimmed every year.

Dion reached down and picked up some dirt. It was moist from the recent rains and he kneaded it into the shape of a heart. He placed the dirt heart down on the ledge of the fountain between them and washed his hands in the fountain. The heart turned red and then formed into a crystalline pattern. Seconds later, it became a brilliant and shiny piece of onyx.

“Wow. Can I pick it up?”

“Go ahead.”

Lilly reached down and picked up the onyx heart. It was solid when her fingers made contact, but by the time it was up to the level of her face, the onyx was dirt again. As she looked at it, the glossy black became brown and crumbled in her hands.

“Doesn’t last very long either,” he told her. “I’m working on it.”

“How does this happen?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” He looked at her with an intensity she’d seldom seen before.

“I mean, you have to have some tricks to make those things appear to move, don’t you? My sister told me about a man at a bar who pulled all kinds of coins out of her nose and ears. She told me he showed her how he did it later.”

“Oh, that,” he laughed. “You mean this sort of trick?” Dion held out a quarter and waved his hand in front of her. “Give me your hand,” he commanded.

Lilly held hers out and felt his strong fingers hold it from the other side.

He took the hand with the quarter in it and dropped two quarters into her palm. She looked up at him, her lip-gloss shining in the sunlight. Lilly was glad she hadn’t worked the green eye shadow today.

“This is what I did,” he explained to her. Dion proceeded to show Lilly the method by which he’d hidden the first quarter behind the second and only held up one to her face. When he opened his hand, two had fallen into her palm because she’d been deceived and only saw one.

“It appears so simple,” Lilly told him. “But I still can’t figure out how you made the water rise, or the fire dance.”

“Different kinds of talent,” he told her. “One is based on deception; the other comes from the elements. One fools you; the other is from destiny. It just so happens my destiny was to shape the genius of the elementals.”

“Are you saying it’s something you’re born with?”

“We all have our talents. Some of us have to work a lot harder at them than others. At least that is what my dad told me. My aunt can’t make it happen, but my uncle can. What you see here…” he waved a hand over the fountain and another column of water rose up to it. He shook his hand and the column fell back, “…is talent, but not much. I was supposed to learn the rest of it from my father, but he’s gone.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” Lilly said. She felt her heart race. If he reached out for her now, Lilly didn’t know what she’d do. Damn the talk her mother gave her last month and the one she’d had with her former boyfriend. Her eyes were starting to cloud over.

“They are both alive,” he told her. “I know everyone at school think they’re dead. But they’re very much alive.”

“Then why do you stay with your aunt and uncle?”

“Protection,” he explained. “The same person who kidnapped them wants me as well. My aunt and uncle can stand up to that person. Alone, I can’t. I’m not strong enough… yet. But when I am, I’ll get them back. But not until I’ve reached my full strength.”

Lilly looked up at Dion again. She wanted to help him, but what was she getting herself into today? She didn’t know this guy. In a few months, she’d be off to college and a whole new life awaited her. Enough with the petty smart kids and the cheerleaders. The hell with the officer’s wives and the daughters whose names were kept out of the paper.

She remembered a girl carried to the car, high as a kite, by her boyfriend. The same girl was featured in the local community paper when she received a scholarship from an air force service organization. Good and fine, she could snort some real quality drugs in college before she returned to be married off to some corpsman.

And how much of what Dion told her had truth to it? Sure, it had seemed strange and wondrous to see fire run in circles on the floor, but if he knew the secrets of illusions, couldn’t Dion fool her with his assumed powers? How much was a trick and how much was what she wanted to believe? What kind of game was he playing? Was she in the process of being set up for something?

“You don’t understand,” Dion told her. “Most people can’t. There aren’t too many of us around who have this ability. My dad once said that most people can do some of it, but people in our family who can manipulate the elementals are very rare. I was taught not to use it. But I’m on the verge of something and I have to figure out what the best way is to get it.

“And this has taken you here?” she asked. “Can’t your aunt and uncle help you?”

“They could, but I don’t want to put them into harm’s way. My uncle has some of my ability, but not much. He has more than most people and this might attract the wrong sort of attention to him. All kinds of people would like to take what we can do and use it for bad things. It’s happened in the past, which is why we don’t talk about it.”

“So why are you telling me this?”

A few moments passed in silence.

“I need help… and I like you, Lilly. You have a good head and a better heart. I don’t see that very often.”

“This is crazy,” she said and started to rise up from the ledge around the fountain. “All you want to do is get into my pants. Sorry, Dion, I am no woman’s fool and everything you just did can be explained.”

Lilly felt anger overtake her senses.

She was angrier than when her last boyfriend had tried to do some things she objected to in the back seat of his parent’s Ford at the local drive-in movie theater. She had to explain the bite mark on her neck to her mother, who seemed to find it funny. At least she didn’t have to explain anything else. Mark this one down as another guy who’d stolen his dad’s copy of The Sensuous Man.

“Perhaps you need a better demonstration,” he said to her. “This will tire me out, but I think you will find it instructive.”

Before she demanded Dion tell her what he was talking about, he leaned back away from the water and closed his eyes. He began to concentrate intensely and breathed deeply.

Lilly cocked her head and looked at him again. If this was his attempt to impress her, it was not going to succeed. She turned and started to walk back to her car.

The wind stopped her.

It began as a steady breeze, which slowly reached its zenith as she turned and looked in the direction it came. The breeze began to pick up and emerged from the entrance to the mall. Both doors of the main entrance were blown open by a sudden rush of air from the inside of the building. It began to howl in her direction, threatening to blow her over. Lilly was certain, if anyone had been at the entrance, it would have blown them into the parking lot. Lilly felt her curly hair sent into a halo behind her as the wind picked up in intensity. It felt as if she was inside a tornado.

She turned and looked in the direction of Dion.

The young man continued to sit on the ledge in a state of concentrative meditation. His hands were on top of his knees with the palms facing up in the air. His hair also blew back from him, away from the force of the wind inside the mall. Lilly wanted him to make it stop; she was ready to tell him to bring this thing to an end because she believed him.

She heard a whirling sound and something was spinning out of the doors in her direction. Stunned, Lilly watched her shoes fly out of the mall at her. They were the Earth Shoes she’d bought last year and still liked to wear, no matter how out of style they’d fallen in the past few months. The shoes spun around each other in a rapid circle, then struck not ten feet in front of her. When they hit the ground, the shoes slid in her direction and stopped moving the moment they bumped into her feet.

The howling wind died down and turned into a breeze. With the force of the wind gone, the mall doors slowly closed shut. Soon the breeze was gone and Lilly stood there facing her shoes and the dust blown around her from the wind.

She turned to look at Dion.

He was bent over the ledge of the waterfall with an exhausted look on his face. Dion gagged and sat back up. Lilly, ignoring her shoes ran over to him and helped him sit back up.

“Are you okay? You made the wind blow like that? That’s insane!”

“I’m all right,” he told her, his eyes still having trouble focusing. “Just don’t ask me to do it again.”

“I didn’t.”

“Not by words, but by your actions. I could tell I would have to prove this to you. It’s worn me out and I can’t do it again today. Not until I have the power given to me by the Grandmaster of the Air. Don’t forget your shoes; I went to a lot of trouble to retrieve them for you.”

Lilly ran over to her Earth Shoes and strapped them on her feet. How had he known where to find them? Of course, he’d realized barefoot senior girls didn’t wander around a mall and deduced she’d left her shoes inside. But how did he know where to locate them?

“How did you find them?” Lilly asked as she walked back over to Dion. At least the rough concrete and asphalt no longer hurt her feet.

“They called to you,” he explained. “You wear something long enough, it becomes part of you. It’s why I don’t change styles very often. I’ve had jackets plead with me for help.”

Lilly felt her pulse race again. She might be able to discount what he’d done with the lighter and dirt as a parlor trick, but a windstorm? No, there was no way he could’ve blown her shoes out of the mall unless he knew of some technology far in advance of anything in the world.

She sat down next to him. “Didn’t you say you needed my help? How?”

“I have to go into the mall today,” he told her. “There are four Grandmasters of the Elements at any given time. All four of them are inside that mall for reasons I don’t understand. I can’t fully use my abilities unless they confirm them on me. I can only go inside when the mall is open and I can’t do it alone. I need someone I can trust who will watch my back and protect me from what is inside that mall.”

“But it’s just a shopping mall,” Lilly blurted out. “What in the world could be inside it that would hold you back?”

It’s not just an ordinary shopping mall,” he told her. “It looks that way from the outside. My parents knew one of them was about to spring up somewhere in the United States. But just as they located this one, someone kidnapped them. I need full use of my powers or they won’t be rescued.”

Lilly turned around and starred at the entrance. She’d just been inside the mall. “Looks perfectly normal to me,” she said. “What makes this one so different?”

“It’s not what is on the outside that makes it different,” he told her, “it’s what’s on the inside.”

He stood up and walked over to the entrance and made sure he never ventured too close. Dion walked around the front, but kept a respectable distance away from the doors. Lilly noticed he stayed away from the area under the roof of the porch. It appeared he sensed something he didn’t like which came from its direction.

“You might think it’s just a mall,” he said to her, “and for all practical purposes it is one. Most people who come here don’t think about how it showed up so suddenly. My aunt and uncle have watched over this place for years. It used to be a barren field, you know. Some farmer had it in his family for generations. Nothing of value would grow here. Before the settlers came, the Indians avoided this patch of land; they knew something wasn’t right with it. But it was right for one thing, and the mall hides it nicely.”

“What does it hide?” Lilly asked him. By now, she was ready to believe anything. Anyone who could make a whirlwind bring her shoes out the door had to be plugged into something powerful.

“It doesn’t hide a thing,” he continued. “It stands watch over the Abyss. Note what is over the top of the mall on the porch.”

Lilly looked up and saw the fiberglass sphinx over the entrance. Everyone laughed at it the day the mall opened. They poured in to look at all the shops on display. She’d noticed the sphinx symbol all over the mall and assumed it tied in with some kind of Egyptian motif. Never did it occur to her the symbol might have something to do with the mall itself.

“The sphinx stands watch and guards the gate,” Dion explained. “This mall is a gate of sorts, and the builder of it wants to keep the gate hidden from view. What better place to hide something than in plain sight?”

“Are you telling me this place is dangerous?”

“Not unless it knows you are wise to it. Even then, it won’t bother you if you don’t bother it. I know all about its secrets and so it would rather I stay out. But, if I am to rescue my parents, I need to go inside and find the elemental grandmasters. The problem is that the mall closes at nine promptly and it’s almost two in the afternoon.”

“It’s spring break,” Lilly explained. “We can always come back tomorrow.” Whatever he wanted to do in there, she wanted to be part of it.

“Not enough time,” he said. “It will take me long enough to find each one of them. I can’t do what I have to do in one day. Why don’t you come in there with me and see if we can find the first of them?”

Chapter 2

I didn’t take long for Lilly to give her answer.

They walked into the mall, beautiful music playing on the PA system and waited for the electric doors to open. This time a few shoppers trotted out.

It was a Monday and it meant fewer shoppers than usual. Plus, most of the buying would take place on the weekend, when there were sales. The luncheon Lilly had helped to cater was tied in with a big sales promotion several of the anchor stores were involved with as part of a national program. The TV stations were all set to run the ads through the week. When she heard about it, Lilly was pleased, as she was sick of all the Bicentennial crap they ran all week long.

They walked into the mall and headed up the main corridor to the inside. On either side of them were small restaurants and shops. Lilly could see the waterbeds place, but never went inside, as it seemed sleazy for a mall store. Too much incense and peppermint for her taste. They continued on their way and walked past a novelty store, which sold plenty of lava lights and posters. It was another day in the mall to most of the people who strolled around it. Hard to believe they were at the gates of hell, according to Dion.

“Looking for something special?” a tall man with a military haircut said to them.

They stopped the moment they saw the security guard uniform. He was a tall man with a muscular build, but the look of a predator was in his eyes. Lilly knew who he was: Officer Karanzen, who was in charge of mall security. Look the wrong way at him and you’d be hauled down to a holding cell until your parents arrived.

Officer Karanzen had a tough-as-nails attitude with a reputation to match it. He was known to personally body tackle shoplifters and kept the mall free from thieves and scam artists. He also had no love for freaky kids and could spot a bottle of cheap wine hidden inside a purse or jacket at fifty yards. More than a few of Lilly’s friends were forced to have their parents scrub their arrest records to get into the right college because of this man. He was feared and hated by half of her high school class. The other half had quit going to the mall soon after it opened.

“Just here for the mall shopping, Officer,” Lilly said to him, doing her best sad little girl smile. She hoped it would work.

“You, I know,” the security officer said to her. “Him, I don’t know.” He stared intently at Dion, examined his eyes and seemed to recognize something.

“Don’t give me any trouble,” he said to Dion. “I’m here to make sure this place stays open. We don’t want to close like that mall on the other side of town.”

The Shell Mall due north of where they stood had opened ten years ago, one of the first in the area. But it was on hard times and all the stores were about to close. Some said it was just bad luck and the new mall took away all of the business.

Officer Karanzen was an old style security guard who didn’t appreciate smart mouthed kids in his mall. He considered it his mall because it was where he worked and lived. No one ever saw him leave the mall. Ever. He seemed to be there before anyone else in the morning and was always the last person to leave in the evening. If there was a break-in or a problem with the utilities, he was the first one on the scene. No one knew where he lived because his personnel files were accessible only to the owners of the mall. It was said he could be seen walking around at night checking out abandoned cars and people who were parked in the lot too long after closing. No one ever saw him eating or taking a bathroom break. He came with the mall and was there when the construction crews were pouring concrete.

No one in their right mind crossed the officer or they would vanish into his holding cell until the cops, or parents, came to pick them up. There were a few kids from the high school Lilly knew who tried to mess with him. They never said what happened from the time they were placed in confinement until picked up, but none of them ever wanted to return to the mall.

“He just stared at me while I was in there,” one former bad kid had said to Lilly. “He sat in front of the cell and grinned. He never said a word. I’ve never been so terrified in all my life.” The kid went on to become the president of the school bible club.

One of the rumors, which circulated around the high-schoolers, had Officer Karanzen as a former marine sergeant in Korea who was dismissed for injuring too many recruits. Others said no, he was an ex-green beret from Vietnam who enjoyed his deep cover missions too much and the military had to get rid of him. The current favorite theory about Karanzen was that he was an experiment in progress. A group of scientists decided to create the perfect sentry and he was the prototype.

Lilly didn’t believe him to be evil, as most of the kids who came under his glance. She thought he truly believed that what he did protected the mall. He seemed to have a strange sense of ownership when it came to it. She’d never run afoul of him, but noticed the officer in his daily rounds checking every little imperfection and finding the slightest thing out of commission. She’d watched him inform a store that one of their exterior light bulbs was out three seconds after it popped. She observed him take a missing toddler to his mother before the woman was aware the child was gone. He seemed to have a strange way of knowing when something was just “not right” in the mall.

As they stood there, Officer Karanzen’s security guards emerged and slowly formed a semi-circle around him.

He had eleven security guards working for him at the mall. All of them were young men. The oldest was only thirty years old. He’d picked them up in the first week the mall opened. Although some of them were from the area, no one recalled seeing any of the guards outside the mall once it opened. They were all rumored to live in a group house somewhere near Miamisburg. Each wore the grey pants and blue shirt with a cap. It was on the cap where the name of the security company who employed all of them was listed: Bread and Salt Services, or “BS” as everyone she knew called it. For some reason the symbol of the company was a black diamond. It was sewn into the patches on the guards’ uniforms.

Lilly stood there and wondered when the last time was when she’d seen all of the guards together. Usually no more than three or four were on duty at any given time, including the afterhours shift. But today, they were all here at once. They stood at attention, hands to each side and backs straight. For some reason, Karanzen wanted to make a show of force, which was a little bit strange since the only two people he faced was Dion and Lilly.

“Have you met my boys?” Karanzen asked them. “No, I don’t think you’ve ever had a chance to meet them all. I had them in today for a training exercise. You never know when walking dead zombies might take over a mall, heh, heh. You haven’t seen any zombies around here have you?”

“Only the ones I’m looking at right now,” Dion responded. He folded his arms over his chest and continued to stare at Karanzen and his men.

“Let me introduce them to you,” the older man said to them. “This is Bella; we call him ‘Toadie’, because he’s always looking for things under rocks. After him is Gamer, he has a little bit of trouble remembering things, but we’re working on that aren’t we?”

The second young man smiled. “I try, boss.”

“That’s a good boy. Next we have Amon.”

A black guard with a very wolfish appearance stepped forward and grinned.

“And we have our great hunter, Bayer; you bagged a deer last week, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sah,” another young man said as he made a small bow. “With a bow too.”

“I thought hunting was over,” Dion noted.

“Not for me,” Bayer grinned.

“I’m sure he’s hunting some place where it’s legal,” Karanzen said. “I also want to introduce Zeppy; he came to us from New Mexico, by way of the army.”

A man who had American Indian features nodded at them.

“And after him we have Salle,” Karanzen continued his introductions. “Why don’t you tell them about your hobby?”

“I like to put on armor,” the man said to them, “and beat my friends up with a wooden sword on the weekends. It’s cool because they wear armor too.”

“And continuing down the line,” the officer said. “Is Izzy.” Another nod. “He may look a little crazy, but it takes a lot to make him mad, right?” The one called Izzy nodded again.

“After him we have Lab,” Officer Karanzen went down the line. “He’s originally from Old Mexico, but came up this way after a tour in Vietnam.” A man with Latin features smiled at them.

“And here’s Bert,” Karanzen announced as he patted another man on the shoulder. “He wants to be a fireman someday, but he’s with us for now. Lord, son, do something about your breath and chew gum.” The new guard dropped his eyes.

The next guard he introduced was a huge man, with arms the size of tree trunks. His neck matched and the square face peered out at the world. “This is Forest, but we like to call him ‘Woody’.”

The man never cracked a smile and continued to stare at them with two piercing grey eyes.

“And our latest recruit is ‘Furry’ here,” Karanzen showed off the last guard. “You can guess why he has that nickname.” He was young, barely out of his teens and covered with a course rug of snow-white blond hair.

“I wanted you to meet them all,” Officer Karanzen said to them. “Because I think we’ll need to keep a watch on you two. Especially you, Dion. I have this feeling you might be in line to cause me some trouble. I don’t like trouble. I like a safe and secure mall, son. I like places where people can shop, meet other people, and do their business in safety. That is what I like. So tell me, are we on the same page, Dion?”

“Absolutely, Officer,” Dion smiled. “I see you want to guard your little part of the abyss in absolute security. I have no intention of messing with it.”

Karanzen stared at Dion and mulled over his response. It wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear, but it would do for right now.

“I’m glad we’re in agreement, Dion. We’ll be moving along. Just remember, if you need anything, we’re always here to help.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

Officer Karanzen turned and marched back down the corridor, past the door to a restaurant and to the entrance of the main mall. They watched him leave. As he walked away, his security guards formed a column and followed behind him. Not once did they turn and look back at Dion or Lilly.

“What did you do to get his attention?” Lilly asked Dion.

“Show up,” Dion said. “He is the guardian of this place and sensed why I’m here. He doesn’t like anything messing with his authority and I represent an unknown quantity. He doesn’t like unknown quantities.”

“Do you ever wonder about where malls came from?” Dion asked her as they walked down the corridor.

“Not really. I assumed they were always there. Now that I think about it, they haven’t always been around. I remember when that one opened up on the other side of the city years ago. I was just a kid and there was some big movie premiere at it. My parents didn’t want to go see the movie, I think it had something to do with missionaries and they didn’t like the subject, but it was a big deal at the time. I remember watching the big lights out front.”

“Shopping malls are from Austria,” Dion told her. “Believe it or not, someone wanted to duplicate the Vienna he remembered from the days before World War II. They’d been around for a long time, arcades run back over a hundred years ago. But the basic two-floor design you see everywhere came from Vienna. He wanted to transport what he remembered to the United States.”

“He sure was successful,” Lilly said. “I see them all over the place.”

“You do wonder how long it can all last,” Dion continued. “These places have a cycle. Everything has a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. As far as I can tell, this is the only mall in the world were you will find all three.”

“You will find stores in this mall that don’t exist anywhere else,” he continued, “because this is no ordinary mall. It has five sections, four of which we can access. Notice this directory and map, for instance.” He pointed to it where it was situated at the inner entrance to the mall. It displayed all four divisions and a directory of the stores was below it.

“Notice that the center section of the mall is left blank. Do you wonder why that is? Did you ever stop to wonder why the center of the mall, where the big clock tower sits, is blank on this map?”

Lilly went up to the directory and stood on her toes to get a better look at it. “Now that you mention it,” she said. “It doesn’t have anything listed for the middle. Funny, I never thought about it before.”

“It’s because the mall owners don’t want you to think about it. I was once told the best way to hide something is to put it in out in the open. That’s exactly what they’ve done. The mall owners have hidden something in the middle of the mall no one would ever expect. No one thinks about looking for the Holy Grail in a parking lot, they’re too busy trying to find The Chapel Perilous in a dark wood. You can hide a treasure in a candy machine and no one will be the wiser because no one will believe you. They’re too busy trying to locate it on a map they bought off a street vendor.”

“Hey! I didn’t expect to see you here today,” a voice said behind them.

Chapter 3

Both Dion and Lilly turned to see who’d spoken to them.

It was Emily, Lilly’s close friend from across the neighborhood. At one point, the two of them were so close people thought they might be sisters. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

Emily and Lilly were the same height, although the resemblance ended there. Lilly was small and dark, while Emily had a certain amount of bounce on her body. Both had known each other since kindergarten and attended the same schools for years. Because of their names, Lilly Arrad found herself sitting at the assigned seat next to Emily Aaron all through the four years of high school. Likewise, both girls were first in line for whatever needed to be done. It wasn’t always that way, because sometimes the teachers would begin from the back row. The worst were students whose names began with “M” who always found themselves in the middle of the list. At some future date, a social psychologist would look into performance based on first letter of the name and discover those whose names began with the middle letters of the alphabet would end up in the middle of the grade score as well.

Emily tended to be the less vocal of the pair, although both of them had similar temperaments. Their families weren’t that close. Living three blocks away in their suburban neighborhood was the equivalent of living in different sides of the country, because seldom did families emerge from their houses to talk. Emily’s father would finish the workday glued to the television set and she with him. Emily had no other family members and seldom saw her mother as she’d divorced from her chemist husband when Emily was five. The courts had awarded her visitation rights, but her mother seldom exercised them. It was rare for her to spend more than a few hours at a time with her mother who lived a carefree life as an artist in Dark Springs, a small liberal town outside a liberal college of the same name.

Lilly would spend the summers travelling with her parents, who’d managed to save and organize their money to the best way possible. It was long before the days of fast cash and loose change, but her father knew how to play the stock market and had a good sense for what would move when the time was right. Lilly’s house had every modern contraption, whereas Emily was forced to watch TV on an old black and white model until her last year of high school. Lilly had a state of the art TV antenna, which could rotate by a control on top of the set for better reception.

It happened that both girls discovered they had the same tastes in music, movies and boys. They would double date all through high school and share information on how to tame the beast that seemed to lurk inside every high school boy. When Emily visited her mother, she would slip inside her mom’s nightstand library and report the findings to Lilly.

They went to their first concert together, Rod Stewart, and planned to follow him around on tour one summer until both of their parents found out their plans and nipped it in the bud early. When they both received their drivers’ licenses, they would take the family cars and travel down to Scipio, the big industrial town near them, and shop at the cool record stores. They’d already used a fake ID to get into a few bars to see some bands, which their parents didn’t know about.

One of their favorite things to do was visit the mall and act as if they were British. After a careful study of all things British, they found it possible to mimic British accents and mannerisms to the point where they could fake their way through any store. At the time, it was rare for anyone from England to appear in the Midwest, so they could get away with it. Had they tried this in a coastal city with a large expatriate British population, it might not have worked so well.

They’d already fooled one store clerk just by their presence in the store. The man had innocently assumed they were British when he heard them talk in their fake accents. He walked up and asked them what part of England they were from that day. Amazed, they played along and had the poor store clerk convinced that they were recent immigrants. Whenever they were in the mall, they would make a beeline for his store and pull the same routine. They were almost exposed one day when a friend of Lilly’s mother saw them near the store. They aborted their plans and avoided the place until they were certain she’d left.

Both of them had plans for college out after graduation. With Lilly, it was international studies at Cincinnati; with Emily it would be theater at the state college in Columbus. The future looked bright for them as college was very affordable that year and the overseas competition minimal for their programs. Both took the college preparatory tests and did very well.

Prom season was on the horizon. Neither one wanted to be seen with just anyone. They hoped to be approached by another senior of equal social status. The prom was supposed to be held at some swanky hotel in Scipio, but they would let their dates do the planning. There was still plenty of time for them to look forward to the most important evening of high school.

“I had to work a lunch,” Lilly said to her friend. “What are you doing over here? We talked last night and I thought you were meeting your dad for dinner.”

They entered the main section of the mall and looked down the corridor, which was flooded with light. In the center of it was a long planter with decorative vegetation growing up toward the weak sunlight, which filtered down from the skylights. They looked up to the second level and could see the shoppers going from one store to another. Some of the stores were from national chains, but, as Dion mentioned earlier, many of them had no equivalent outside the mall.

Arthur’s Music was situated directly in front of them. It was a chain of stores found in malls all over the country. For a small price, you could find the latest popular vinyl on display and the harder to find material in the back. Lilly enjoyed the store because it always placed the records she wanted directly in front. She remembered years ago when she went in and saw the psychedelic light display in the corner. For a moment, she thought it was one of those headshops that lined the street next to Scipio University. She was told you could find all sorts of things there that couldn’t be found anywhere else.

“You still haven’t told me why you’re still here,” Emily said to her.

Lilly had the strangest feeling Emily was jealous of Dion. She couldn’t understand why; she was dating a guy from the science club who had plans to attend Case-Western in the fall. The guy was supposed to be some kind of genius who would go far in life.

“Dion needs help finding something,” she told her. Lilly looked at him with her dark eyes and wondered how much he wanted her to say.

“We need a map,” he told her. “We need to find the store which sells the special maps to the mall.”

“You mean the bookstore?” Emily said to them. “Honestly, I don’t know why you need to buy a map. Doesn’t the directory tell you everything you might need to know?”

“There is a lot in the mall not on the directory,” he told her. “To find the special stores, you need a special map. I need to find the store which sells the special map.”

“What is so special about the map that you need it to find your way around the mall?” Emily demanded. “I never have any trouble finding my way around. Why don’t you just ask me where you need to go?”

“Dion thinks his parents might be somewhere in the mall,” Lilly said to her. She turned and smiled at Dion, hoping she hadn’t made a mistake of some kind.”

“What? I thought your parents were dead? Isn’t that why you live with your aunt and uncle?”

“I have reasons to believe they are held inside the mall,” Dion explained. “I really don’t want to go into my reasons, but I need to find some people who are inside the mall to get help.”

Emily turned and gave Lilly a questioning look.

Lilly knew what was going through her head. She thought he was nuts and his insanity had spread to her. The school had more than its fair share of bent minds. Some said it was because of its proximity to the airbase where tests were conducted in the dead of night. Others thought it might be something in the drinking water. And there was one group that believed it to be caused by an old Indian curse. Right now, Emily felt Dion and Lilly had taken leave of their sanity.

“Could you do one of those tricks you showed me?” Lilly asked him. “Maybe show her something that will convince her she needs to help us?”

“I wish it was that easy,” Dion sighed. “And for your information, it isn’t a trick. I can only do what my destiny allows.”

“At least show her something,” Lilly said. “I’d hate her to think I’ve gone nuts without a good reason.”

“I’m inside the mall and this changes everything,” Dion explained.

“You’re saying it doesn’t work inside the mall?” Lilly asked with a strange look on her face. Was this one of those conditional things con men and bunko artists used to trick people out of their money? It wouldn’t be the first time a boy tried to trick her to give something up.

“I’m saying if…. I do something like that in the mall it will alert the wrong people in the mall that I’m here.”

“What are you talking about?” Lilly said. “We’ve already had a run-in with Officer Karanzen and his minions. Whom else do we have to worry about? I don’t think the sheriff ever comes in this place unless he gets a call about shoplifting.”

“Officer Karanzen?” Emily said with surprise. “That explains why I saw him walking down the concourse. He looked angry. He had those thugs of his with him. All of them in fact. Is something going on I should know about?”

Dion looked at Emily, and then turned to Lilly. “Okay, I’ll show her a little bit of what I can do. Not so much to set off alarms, but enough so she’ll understand. I can do some small things, but we have to keep moving when I’m done. Even a little bit of change can alert the wrong people if they are close to us.”

He walked to the large planter in front of them. The two girls followed behind. Next to the large garden planter ran a bench where people could sit down and relax. It was a new concept the mall introduced to the busy shoppers who were out for a day to spend their money or run up credit cards. He seated himself down by the planter and looked at the soil in front of him until he found what he needed to locate. The girls seated themselves next to him.

Dion looked into the dark earth transported from a local greenhouse into the interior of the mall and concentrated. He closed his eyes and leaned back on the bench with his hands on the ends of his knees. Most people who walked past him assumed he was resting or, maybe in some kind of meditation. But Dion was using all the power he’d inherited from his family to harness the power of the earth element. He sat there and breathed slowly but with intensity.

Emily, who wore a blue top over a pair of white painter’s pants, turned to Lilly. “Is he okay? Should we go find a nurse or something?”

“He’s fine. Give him some time, he’s in the middle of doing something and it doesn’t always come easy to him.”

Both Lilly and Emily heard a sound inside the huge planter and turned to see the source. Inside the planter, where there was a little bare spot in the dirt, a plant was growing. It hadn’t been there before, but now it was. It began as a little sprout, pushing its way up through the soil and then reaching the surface of the dirt and showed some green. This took place as they watched it happen. It reminded Lilly of a time-lapse film of a growing seed she had watched in a biology class on a 16mm projector. But this was not a trick of photography; the plant grew before their eyes.

Now the green stalk reached the lower leaves of the plants around it and began to rise above the twigs and branches around it. It was a healthy shade of green and sprouted two leaves, which unfolded and lifted upwards them as if they were two arms reaching out to heaven. Several more leaves and stems emerged from the soil. They were inches in height in a matter of minutes. The plant reached a height of six inches and sprouted small buds all over it. When the buds were at the level of the other plants in the soil, they unfolded to bloom into bright flowers of yellow and blue.

“I don’t believe I’ve just seen that happen,” Emily said to her friend. “How does he do that? What’s the secret? Some kind of new plant food?”

“No plant food,” Dion said as she relaxed and opened his eyes. “I will it to happen. It only works if the destiny of those plants was to grow and bloom. I’ve speeded the process up, nothing more. The problem is, those plants will wilt faster as well. There is a price to be paid for all this elemental energy to be expended.”

Emily reached over to the new flowers in the planter. “Is it okay to touch them?” she asked. “Will it cause a problem if I come into contact with one?”

“No, they can’t cause you any problems. I wouldn’t pick one and take it home, though. Even if one of Officer Karanzen’s men didn’t stop you, the flower would be wilted by the time you got it back. As I said, the process was accelerated. What blooms quickly, fades just as quick.”

The two girls examined the flowers and commented on how beautiful they’d looked while growing, while Dion rested on the bench.

He didn’t like to do these small demonstrations. Not only did it have the potential to alert any elemental being in the mall that an elemental worker was around, but also it took a lot out of him. Until the full source of the power was transferred to him by the Grandmaster of the Earth Element, he would be exhausted to show these small examples. He knew it was important to get Emily on their side, but he didn’t want to do any further demonstrations to get people’s attention.

“We are close to the bookstore where I can buy the map,” he told them. “I think I see it over there, next to the bathrooms.” Dion pointed to the other side of the concourse.

The girls looked to see a new bookstore in the space occupied by a blank wall just a few days ago. The mall management had a good way of concealing any place which was not rented. They had a portable wall, which could be spread across the front of the empty storefront. It concealed its true nature, and no one would ever notice. When the mall was initially opened, there were quite a few of them. They prevented the mall from looking underutilized. Now most of the spaces were rented and there was no need to conceal empty space.

The bookstore was called “The Ramses News Agency” and had an Egyptian theme to it. This didn’t surprise Lilly, as the King Tut exhibit was still fresh in many people’s minds. She’d stood in line with her parents for hours to see it when the show passed through Cincinnati. It was the talk of the summer that year and the exhibit left many cultural artifacts in its wake. There were hit records and nightclubs with faux Egyptian themes that remained popular for years. She decided this news agency, or bookstore, was trying to ride what was left of the fame.

“This is the place,” Dion said. “It will have what I need.” They both followed him into the store.

“Wow,” Emily said to Dion. “You really made a plant grow. That’s incredible… can you make a plant sing?”

“No,” he told her as he walked through the entrance. “It’s a very bad thing to make a plant sing.”

The door to the store was slid back, which allowed everyone the chance to walk inside it. As they walked through the entrance, Lilly looked up and noticed the images of two Egyptian goddesses who joined hands over the transom and looked down at the customers as they walked under them. She thought they might be supposed to represent Isis, but wasn’t sure.

The news agency was filled with books and magazines, just as they had expected. Lilly thought the name for it was a little odd, as most places which sold books and magazines, were called “book stores” and not “news agencies”. Still it was a minor point and one she didn’t trouble herself over.

In the front of the store was the magazine rack. It stretched down one entire side of the store. Lilly walked up to it and noticed the rack displayed publications in all languages. She was impressed as it carried the latest fashion magazines from Paris and local ones too. She looked up and didn’t see the usual “This is not a library!” sign. Nor did she see any security mirrors, which usually covered the store and allowed the clerks to see if anyone was shoplifting.

The air smelled of exotic spices and herbs. She found it a pleasant scent, even if it did remind her of a head shop. She looked down the length of the store and noticed several older men at the end of one rack trying to conceal the magazines they were perusing at the top row of the display. She snickered, as the subject matter was obvious. Funny how you would know just from a walk into the store what they read.

Dion was in the middle of the store in search for what he needed to find. Lilly couldn’t locate the map section, but was sure it was there somewhere. This was a news agency, so where else would you find one? Even Emily was perplexed where you would look. Didn’t they sell maps?

“Can I help you?” a voice said to Lilly from the side.

She turned to face an older man who appeared to be from the Middle East. He was tall, thin and had a very birdlike appearance to him. This had to be the owner, or manager, she decided and noticed he held a clipboard in one hand and a pen in the other. He would know what they needed to find and where it was located.

“We’re trying to find your map section," she said to him. “My friend doesn’t trust the directory to find what he needs in the mall and he claims you can help him.

“Permit me to introduce myself,” he said to her as the man placed his pen into a pocket on his jacket. “I am Mr. Jehuti. I opened this store myself last week and I will be glad to help you find what you need.”

“Yourself?” a voice said behind him and a very regal woman stepped out from behind the counter. “Don’t I get some credit?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. This is my lovely wife, Maya,” he introduced her. “She keeps me in line and restores the divine harmony we need to keep this place running.”

Lilly noted the woman had long coarse hair tied back by a headband. For some reason she had a feather in the headband. She wore a long dress that brushed along the floor. The woman radiated energy and all three of them could feel her presence.

“We need to find the special map of the mall,” Dion said to them. “Not one of the regular ones. I need the map which shows me all the places not indicated on the regular ones.”

Mr. Jehuti looked at him for a few moments and closed his eyes. His wife came up behind him and touched his shoulder. He opened his eyes and smiled at the three young people in front of him.

“You have come to the right place,” he told them. “You want the map produced by Come Forth By Day Cartographic. It just so happens I have one behind the counter. Dear, would you please go get it for our honored guests?”

The woman walked back behind the counter, her skirts swirling as she went. She returned with a scroll that was tied with a ribbon. She handed it to her husband.

“It has all the hidden places marked,” the storeowner told Dion. “You will find what you need on this map. I caution you to be very careful with it, as these are hard to obtain. You don’t want the wrong sort of people or things to find this. The map company would be very disappointed if they discovered it fell into the wrong hands.”

“How much do I owe you for this?” Dion asked as he took the map from Mr. Jehuti.

“Nothing. It was sent to me because I knew you would come by and need it sooner or later.”

“I don’t know how to thank you.”

“No need. Knowing we have helped and allowed you to continue on your search is all the gratitude we need. I record things around here and your visit will make for such an entry.”

The woman turned to Dion. “You should be very careful about what you do inside the mall. There are many who do not want to see you succeed on your journey.”

“I’m aware of that,” Dion told them, “but I must continue. My parents’ lives are at stake and I am the only one who can rescue them.”

“Do you have knowledge of what you are up against?” she asked.

“A little.”

“Good. Know that there are many agencies in this mall you do not see, but once they understand you are here, they will do what they can to prevent you from succeeding. I want to see harmony established again, it is why I am here with my husband. I can’t do much from the inside, but you know who to come and see if you need advice.”

“Thank you,” Dion said. “Glad to know I have some help if I need it. Not so glad to know there are so many against me, but it was something I suspected.”

“Wait,” Mr. Jehuti said to Dion as they started to leave, “how much knowledge do you have of the elementals that reside in this mall?”

Dion and the girls turned back around to face him. “I know there are some here and about,” he said. “We were introduced to the ones who work for Officer Karanzen. I didn’t realize they have such a back story.”

“Those are not elementals,” Mrs. Jehuti told them. “They are something else which he controls, but we are not sure what. I think they were humans at one time and now he has control of them.”

“Are you telling us the security guards are some kind of zombies?” Emily asked, one foot crossed over the other, half-confused, half-scared.

“How free is it to talk in front of them?” Mr. Jehuti said to Dion. “I understand why you are here, but they don’t seem to share your abilities.”

“It’s okay. I’ve shown each of them what I can do and they are satisfied of it.”

“I think we need to take this conversation somewhere else,” his wife spoke. “Would any of you mind if we moved to another location to talk about it?”

“I have no objection,” Dion said. He turned to the girls. “What about the two of you?”

“It’s all fine with me,” Lilly told them.

“I suppose,” was Emily’s response. “But who will watch the store for you?”

“We won’t be gone that long,” Mrs. Jehuti replied. “Relative to the subjective time, that is.”

Then the entire store vanished.

Chapter 4

Emily opened her eyes again to see a sun in the sky overhead. She looked at it just long enough to focus on it. It seemed to her there was something next to the sun in the sky, but she could not see it very well with the glare from the light.

Emily shielded her eyes with her hand and looked again. There was something behind it, pushing it along. It didn’t move very fast, but the thing that pushed the ball of sunlight was exerting itself. What was it?

A beetle.

A beetle?

Emily shaded her eyes and looked again. It was a giant beetle, which moved the sun in the sky. The light hurt her eyes and she looked around her.

Dion and Lilly were with her in a vast desert. She looked down and found herself shoeless and standing on the hot sand. She no longer wore the painter’s pants and blue top. Now she had on a wrap-around dress, which lacked a back. Dion and Lilly were dressed in a similar fashion. Dion had a scarf over his head. It was secured with a band around it in the form of golden snake.

“Where are we?” Lilly asked. And given their surroundings, it was an honest question.

“Someplace… else,” Mr. Jehuti said. He and his wife were with them. He too wore a scarf around his head and was dressed in a long robe, which fell to the ground. In one hand, he carried a scroll. His other hand rested on a staff.

“Don’t worry,” his wife spoke, “the subjective time of this place won’t register when you return. We find it better to come here to hold conferences. There are less ears to hear and eyes to see. In the other place, we don’t have enough power to block those who would interfere.”

Mrs. Jehuti wore an elaborate skirt, similar to the one she had on in the news agency and a backless top. Her long woven hair was tied back by a headband, just as it was before. But this time the feather in the headband was much larger and elaborate. She too held a staff in one hand.

Lilly looked off in the distance. There was a pyramid under construction. The work crew was busy hauling stones across the sand from the river using a sled pulled by oxen. As they headed toward the pyramid, a man came running up to them and held out a set of plans. The foreman of the crew consulted the plans, pointed out a few things, and then the man ran back in the direction of the building project with his plans under one arm. The work crew continued to move the stone block in the direction of the construction site.

“Amenhotep wants to make sure it’s done on schedule,” Mr. Jehuti chuckled. “He’s never satisfied with any of his design work. Such a perfectionist.”

“We were talking about Elementals,” Dion said to them.

“Elementals, yes,” Mr. Jehuti continued. “They are all over that mall. You, I am sure, felt them the moment you walked inside. They seldom leave the mall since it’s safer for them to stay there. The mall builders used a lot of them. They needed to get the project completed faster than anyone thought possible. There are many kinds of elementals inside the mall, but four major ones you will encounter. Right now, you must be wary of the ghouls as they thrive in their earth element. You will encounter the sylphs eventually, who fly in the element of air. There are also water nymphs, which can cause you more problems than you might expect. Lastly there are the salamanders.”

“Those lizard things I find under logs?” Emily said. “They don’t seem to be much of a problem.”

“Not the same kind of salamander,” Mrs. Jehuti informed her. “These are a type of fire spirit. They have the potential to be the most dangerous ones of all.”

“We don’t know what kind lived in the center of the mall,” Mr. Jehuti said. “We have never been to the center. And, ultimately, that is where you must travel to find your parents.”

“Once you achieve full power in each element,” Maya Jehuti added, “you will have dominion over that elemental. They don’t want to be bound to anyone, so the elementals will stop at nothing to prevent you from reaching your goal. They share this with those who control the mall.”

“How will I know what to look for?” Dion asked.

Lilly moved to one side of Dion while Emily turned to watch a boat sail down the river near where they were standing.

“You will learn to tell them from you encounters,” Mr. Jehuti said. “It will take time, and once you have located each Grandmaster of the Element, you won’t need to as they will be bound to you. Until then, be wary of groups of people who seem to be working toward a common goal inside the mall.”

“Do you have any more questions?” his wife said to them.

“Are we in the past?” Emily asked her.

“We are in a past. It’s not the same past you read about in school, but one which still exists. I think it is time to return.”

Instantly, the desert landscape vanished, and they were back inside the news agency.

Dion and the girls blinked several times as the trip had created a distorted sense of reality. Emily looked down and saw her clothes were back to the way they were. She looked at her wristwatch. Only thirty seconds had elapsed from the time they left to the time they returned.

“Not subjective to the local time,” Mrs. Jehuti said to her again. The couple that owned the store were back inside it, still dressed in the same matter from the time they left. Once again, the older man handed the scroll back to Dion.

“You will need this if you are to locate the Grandmasters of the Elements. I don’t worry and know you will be able to find them without much trouble. But be wary of what I told you.”

Dion thanked them both.

They walked out of the news agency and back into the main concourse of the shopping mall. It was still there. Lilly expected to return to the desert landscape and watch the work crew continue to pull the sled, but they were back to where they had been.

“So, all we have to worry about is a group of people working together,” Lilly said to her friends. “Great, that could be so many people. What do we do? Watch out for a fire brigade running into this place? We’ve already been informed Officer Karanzen doesn’t count.”

“I’m almost scared to go anywhere,” Emily said. “I just came back from the desert and don’t even know how I got there. Nothing in this place makes sense.”

“It makes plenty of sense,” a man who was seated on a bench said to them. They turned in his direction, as he hadn’t been seated there when they entered the news agency. “You have to understand the rules by which this place operates. When you know them, it becomes very clear.”

Sitting on the bench was an elderly man in a leisure suit, eating an ice cream cone. He was bald and had a gold chain around his neck. He continued licking the ice cream cone as he regarded them. The man’s voice was high-pitched and nasal, and he spoke with an educated British accent.

“Ice cream cones,” he sighed. “One of my weaknesses. The doctor says I should lay off them, but I can’t help myself. They won’t be the death of me this time, but if I continue to indulge, I’ll be sent back and I don’t want that. Oh, dear me, where are my manners? You can call me Edward.”

“So how do you figure into all this?” Dion asked the man. He was surprised, as the man was a new factor in the game in progress.

“I don’t,” he explained. “I’m just here as an enlightened observer. I can give advice, but not if it will make a difference. So please don’t ask me what form you elementals will take, I have no idea.”

“Are you here to join us?” Lilly asked him.

“Now isn’t that charming?” he said to them. “A pretty young lass asks if I want to join her. I’m not back for five minutes and my old ability returns. No, I’m just here to watch and report. I’ll be around from time to time. Think of me as a one-man Greek Chorus. Excuse me, but are you allowed to smoke in here?”

“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 in 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.’

“The restaurants,” Lilly pointed out behind them. “We can go to one of them. Shouldn’t be much trouble. We can go have dinner and hope they’ll be gone by the time we’re finished. Maybe we can get a table near the window and keep watch on them.”

They all agreed this was as good an idea as any of them had. The ghouls weren’t moving, but eventually the Elemental Grandmaster would make them leave the front of his or her pharmacy. Dion and his friends couldn’t wait all day so they turned to the restaurants behind them.

“We have two choices,” Dion said to Lilly and Emily. “Chinese or this New Orleans place.”

“Never ate New Orleans style before,” Emily said. I vote in favor of it.”

The other two agreed and they walked to the entrance.

Baron Sam’s New Orleans Chicken didn’t appear to be very big from the outside. They were disappointed to see there was no window that looked at the pharmacy across the hallway. The trio stopped and looked at the menu outside the restaurant, which was posted for all to see. The prices appeared to be quite reasonable so they pushed the door open and went inside.

Inside, the restaurant was decorated for Mardi Gras. Colorful beads decorated the interior and vinyl masks lined the walls. The interior was designed to resemble some place off Canal Street with French influenced architecture built into it. They stopped and took it all in for a few minutes until someone came up to them.

“Greetings!” a loud voice said to them. “I am Baron Sam and I rule here!”

They turned to face a tall black man who wore a top hat. He handed each of them menus and asked them if they’d ever been inside his establishment before.

“I don’t believe so,” Dion told him. “At least not me. I don’t think any of my friends have ever been here either. I see you specialize in New Orleans food?”

“Yes,” he laughed again. “We serve food from Louisiana and also from Haiti. Have you ever tried blackened catfish? It is one of our specialties?” Baron Sam quickly found them a table and had a waiter bring them water.

Through the PA system Dixieland jazz music played. From one wall extended the branches of a tree with imitation Spanish moss. Dion expected to see a fog machine unleash a mist at some point. The girls took it all in and looked at the set-up before them. After reading the menu, they made their order.

Before the food was served, Baron Sam came back to see them. “Excuse me,” he asked them. “Did you by chance visit the bookstore down the concourse? It’s run by a relative of mine and he let me know three young people who fit your description might come by.”

“In fact,” Dion said to him. “We were just there before we came here. He gave me a special map I needed to find my way around the hidden sections of the mall.”

“Ah, you must be the young man on the quest. This explains those cleaners out in front of the pharmacy. The lady who owns it is Athena West and you will need to see her. I’ve been on the phone already with the mall management and told them to get the cleaning crew moved. Not only are they causing people to avoid the pharmacy, but customers will also stay away from this side of the mall when they see all of them outside. People will just assume some kind of disaster has taken place and won’t go near here.”

“So you must know about who the cleaners are,” Emily said to him. “Have they always used ghouls to take care of the building maintenance?”

“Ever since the mall opened,” he told them. “They are normally spread through all sections, but they have their base of operations out of this part of the mall because it’s the element which governs them. I know the management threatens them all the time with gnome replacements if they have problems. However, today is the first time I’ve ever had to deal with them doing anything unusual. I’m guessing they really don’t want you to meet up with Mrs. West.”

“They’ve stalked me earlier in the day,” Dion explained. “They know I’ll be able to bind them if the Earth Element Grandmaster bestows her powers on me. But I really don’t know what they have to worry about.”

“They don’t want to lose their place in here,” the man explained. “The ghouls have no desire to hiding out around graveyards and forced to avoid humans. They’ll do just about anything to stay away from the way they used to live. Personally, I think the mall management takes advantage of them, but they don’t seem to mind the arrangement. At least for now.”

The food arrived and they finished their chicken dinner in less than half an hour. Dion had money with him that day and paid for all their meals. It was delicious food and they complemented Baron Sam on his cooking. He thanked them and quickly handed the trio change so he could return to the kitchen. As they left, Lilly could hear him barking out orders in Creole to the cooks in the kitchen.

The ghouls were still outside blocking the entrance to the pharmacy. They seemed to have an attitude that they could wait there as long as anyone else could. The three friends stood there and watched them continue to polish and clean the floor outside the pharmacy. Anytime anyone would attempt to enter it, they would stare at them and shake their heads.

“Can I have a look at that map?” Emily asked Dion. “Maybe I can figure out a way out of this mess.”

“You can try,” he told her while handing it over to her. “But I don’t see how you’ll have any better luck than I did. Remember, it’s all written in Coptic.”

“Whatever,” she said as she untied the scroll and spread it out on a nearby table. “I can figure it out from the layout. I scored the highest in my class on mechanical reasoning. I have a good head when it comes to abstract reasoning too.”

As the others sat down at the table with her, she traced a hand down the corridors and concourses marked on the scroll. “Funny thing,” she said, “not only does this map list a restaurant which isn’t supposed to be here, but it shows a separate service entry for it too.”

“I guess the werewolves don’t want it obvious what they serve,” Lilly said to her. “I’m sure it would cause all kinds of trouble with the health board.”

“Look,” she said while pointing out a few other eating establishments on the map. “If this means the same thing, there are at least five places scattered through this mall which are restaurants, but aren’t open to the general public. This one is pretty big and looks like some kind of a cafeteria. But why is it located in the basement?”

Dion looked at the map with her. “It’s for the ghouls. I’m guessing they don’t want anyone around to see what they’re eating. When you consider they have the same nutrient requirements that a vulture has, it makes sense. I’m sure the smell must be horrible down there.”

“But not to the ghouls,” Lilly said as she looked at it with her friends. “It probably gets a very different response from them.”

“Now that is something we can use,” Dion said as if he’d just had and epiphany.

“What do you mean?” Lilly asked him.

“All we have to do is find some roadkill outside to distract the ghouls. Shouldn’t be too hard with all the cars speeding past the mall.”

“Yuck,” Emily turned her face in disgust and tossed her blond hair over one shoulder. “You can go find some roadkill and bring it inside; I’ll try and locate another path around the ghouls.”

They looked at the map for another ten minutes, but nothing emerged that made any sense. The ghouls continued to block the front of the pharmacy and acted as if they were doing some kind of advanced cleaning. Anyone who approached them found a reason to leave after they glared in response. Even with the sunglasses on, the ghouls could be imposing.

“If they are paralyzed by strong light,” Lilly said, “might there be a way to direct some powerful sunlight on them and get through to the Earth Grandmaster?”

“Where are we going to find the arc lights?” Dion said. “You have to rent those things and I have no idea where we’d find one.”

“Get a mirror of some kind and shine it in their direction?” Lilly suggested as she continued to search through the map. “It might blind them long enough to get past.”

“Same issue,” Dion said. “We have to find one. Where would you find a mirror large enough to shine light on the whole group? In addition, there is the problem of finding a beam of intense enough sunlight to direct in their direction. I don’t see one handy.”

They continued to stare in the direction of the ghoul cleaning crew who returned their gazes with contempt.

At one point, the owner of the pharmacy opened the door and walked out to confront the ghoulish crew in front of the store. This had to be the Athena West, The Earth Grandmaster, they realized, although they could only see her from a distance. She stepped out and nearly slammed the door behind her.

“So this is why we haven’t had any business in the last hour,” the woman thundered at them. “Can’t you finish up whatever you are doing and move on? Look, I have bills to pay and you need to get this wrapped up.”

The ghouls stopped working but continued to stand in place. Finally, the storeowner realized they blocked the entrance to her pharmacy for a reason.

“Oh, trying to keep someone from coming to me for elemental help, is that it?” she said. “Do you have any idea what I can do if you keep this charade up? All it takes is one phone call to the center and you will all be scampering under the moonlight trying to survive. You have fifteen minutes and if you aren’t gone, I will go directly to the mall manager.”

She stood there and maintained the standoff.

The pharmacy owner was a tall woman, who appeared to be of African ancestry. Dion stood there and thought he’d never seen a woman so black in all his life. She was the color of anthracite coal in a mine at midnight. He didn’t think it was possible to make a person so dark in complexion. She wore a lab coat over a short dress and had a pair of boots, which were made from tooled brown Moroccan leather. Her hair was teased out but tied back by a black wrap that descended down to her shoulders. She was tall and had to be a good six foot two in height, and the boots she wore made her appear that much taller.

“Fifteen minutes, you hear me?” she said to the ghouls. “You are gone in fifteen minutes or else.” The door shut hard behind her as she returned to the pharmacy.

“That’s her!” Dion said to his friends. “It has to be the Earth Element Grandmaster! She matches the description on the map! And Baron Sam told us about her!”

“What description?” Emily said to him as she rolled the map up. “I didn’t see one.”

“It’s there if you read Coptic. And I felt the power from her. Didn’t you?”

“Oh, I felt something all right,” Lilly said, “but it was mostly her wrath.”

“If she’s the Elemental Grandmaster,” Emily said, “then why don’t we just go over and meet her? The heck with those idiots trying to keep us away from the pharmacy.”

Still carrying the map, Emily leaped up from the table and walked in the general direction of the pharmacy. Dion and Lilly tried to say something, but her mind was made-up. Emily had a reputation for being headstrong and nothing was about to stop her from going in the direction of the ghoul cleaning crew.

She got as far as the first line of the ghoul crew.

Before he could do a thing, Dion watched Emily being grabbed by two of the ghouls. It wasn’t so obvious as to attract the attention of the shoppers. They were incredibly organized and coordinated, better than he ever thought possible.

The first ghoul acted as if he was ready to let her pass. Emily ignored him and walked right into the middle of the ghoul assembly as another ghoul innocently dropped a bucket of water in front of her. Emily stopped at the puddle, which formed in the floor as another ghoul took her by the shoulders and pushed her in the direction of yet another one. She started to say something but the final ghoul grabbed her by the shoulder as the one before him took the other shoulder and walked her to the nearest service exit. The doors swung behind them as they vanished into it. The remaining ghouls finished cleaning the floors and fixtures, picked up their cleaning implements and followed their brethren into the service corridor.

The entire episode took less than thirty seconds.

Lilly looked at Dion in disbelief. “What are we going to do? They just kidnapped Emily!”

Chapter 6

“We’ve got to stop them!” Dion said and began fast walking to the service corridor, just in time to be confronted by officer Karanzen and four of his security guards.

The guards materialized out of nowhere, blocking him as he approached the service door and stopped both him and Lilly from walking further.

“Bella, Bert, Bayer and Izzy,” Dion said to them as he remembered their names. “Let me guess, you ran out of B’s and had to make with a last minute replacement?”

“Check this out,” Bert said, his bad breath already assaulting the nose of Dion. “The kid remembers our names. We have a real smarty here.”

“Yep,” Izzy agreed, “he’s so smart we may have to find him a school. Who gets to take the smart boy to detention?”

“That is my job.” It was officer Karanzen who’d materialized out of nowhere. “We have a problem here, guys? Something I need to know about?”

“Our little friend was causing a commotion,” Bella announced as he continued to fidget. He slowly withdrew his nightstick from the holder on his utility belt. “Did you see him throw a punch at me? I think the little punk just swung at me.”

“Put the stick back,” Officer Karanzen snapped at his guard. “Nobody starts anything unless I give the order. Get fresh again and I’ll send you back to where I found you.”

Karanzen’s words had the right effect. Bella returned his stick to the belt and became glum.

“So what really happened?” he demanded from Dion and Lilly. “I come around the corner and my boys are ready to stomp you flat. Now talk!”

“Emily was grabbed by the cleaners,” Dion told him. “She tried to walk across them and they took her down the service corridor.”

“So that explains the call I had from Mrs. West. She just let me know the cleaners were out in front of her store preventing anyone from coming inside. I called management and they told me it would be handled. I came over myself to see what was going on.”

He turned to his men. “Did you see anyone with these two?”

“Nope,” said Bert, “Not a soul.”

The other three agreed with him.

“I don’t see anyone around either,” Officer Karanzen said. He turned to Dion and Lilly. “If they took the girl, and I only have your word on this, it had to be cleared with the management. Now, the management of this mall may not be the Ace of Spades, but one thing they would never do is abduct a local girl. A local girl could cause them trouble. A local girl would involve investigations and all sorts of things bad for business. So if the cleaners took her it means the management wanted to see her for some reason. In other words, she’s safe and will be released soon. Maybe one of the cleaners saw her lift something. I don’t know, but I’ll call the main office and find out by the end of the day.”

“I don’t believe one word of what you just said,” Dion told him. “You’re covering for someone.”

“I’m here to keep the mall safe!” Karanzen snapped back. “Safe means dealing with punk kids who try and cause problems. Sometimes an example has to be made. This mall has the lowest thefts and least safety issues of anyone in the country. I plan to keep it that way.”

“You’re such a model employee, Officer Karanzen,” Dion said. “I’m sure you’d haul your own grandmother off if it meant a promotion.”

“Never had a grandmother, Junior. Or parents for that matter, so don’t try that angle either. I will warn you to stay out of my way. I’ll find out what happened to your little girl friend, but on my own schedule. And don’t cause problems looking for her. Don’t mess with the shoppers or cause any issues because if you do I’ll have you tossed out of the mall. And my boys would like nothing better than to bounce a smart kid off the pavement.” The guards behind him gave Dion a sinister grin.

Officer Karanzen and his guards turned and walked away from the two and vanished down the concourse.

“What do we do?” Lilly asked. “Can you go to the Earth Grandmaster and get her help? Aren’t you supposed to see her anyway, to get your power?”

“No. Not until we rescue Emily. If she finds out I didn’t go help a friend in need, she’d most likely consider me unworthy and refuse to grant me the power. We have to locate Emily and get her back before we can do anything else.”

“The problem is,” Dion said, “we don’t have the map. She was carrying it when they grabbed her. I’m tempted to go after them in that service corridor, but it could lead anywhere. Make a wrong turn down there and you might have the whole ghoul clan waiting for you. As a matter of fact, some of these doors are…”

Dion stopped when he noticed the service door was gone. He walked up to the blank wall and put his hand on it. Solid. Yet, there was a door there twenty seconds ago.

“Gone?” Lilly asked. “But I just saw them take her through a door that was mounted in the wall!”

“Temporal door,” Dion said. “The ghouls have access to doors they can slap anywhere they need them to be. The door has a mate they keep wherever they want. The door they took her through redirects to the other one. I suspect it is down in their part of the mall, but I’m not entirely sure.”

Dion was staring at the wall when a familiar face appeared next to him. It was Sam Vestal, an old friend of Lilly.

“You been here long?” he asked. “I just got here. Need to buy some shoes. Say why are you looking so glum?” he said, deliberately ignoring Dion.

Sam was one of the benchwarmers in the local football games. He liked to think of himself as a serious player and starter, but he just wasn’t big enough to make the starting line-up. He also possessed a mouth that made him the object of scorn throughout the school. Sam moved to the district at the start of the term last year because his dad accepted a position as athletic coach. Sam had played for a rival school the years previously. He had a better position on the other team’s line-up, right guard, but they put him a little further back in the new school. It didn’t matter as his current used him as decoy after it was noticed the other team’s school would ignore the plays to pummel him down the field. The same thing happened with the every school they played. It soon was apparent Sam hadn’t made himself very popular over the area.

“We were with Emily,” she told him. “We’re trying to find her.”

“Emily,” he said trying to put a name to a face. “Oh, her. Cute chick, don’t know why she doesn’t get around better than what she does. I used to see her at that store she worked at all the time she worked there. Place closed down when the new mall opened. I’m surprised she didn’t come to work here.”

“Emily doesn’t like working retail,” she told him. “I’m here because I had to help with a banquet they were having last week.”

“You should come out to The Montebello with me some night, I could get some beer and have some fun.”

The Montebello was the local Drive-In. One of the first Drive-In movie theaters in the area. It was known as the local “cultural center” by the police who often had to visit it to break-up fights or escort kids home who tried to get inside for free.

Dion remembered driving past it with his aunt and uncle and noticed the line of cars, which ran down the road for a good mile. On some clear nights, you could even drive by close enough and see the images of whatever movie played on the screen. Only the top guys in the school could entertain bragging rights after taking their dates to The Montebello. However, the local mating games had no interest to him, as his number one goal was to locate his parents.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” Lilly said. “I appreciate you thinking about me, but I’m not the girl you’re looking to find.”

“Keep it in mind,” he told her and walked away as he gave Dion a smirk while he walked past him.

“That boy has a high opinion of himself,” Lilly said to Dion. “I don’t share it. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anyone who does. You talk behind enough people’s backs and soon no one wants to have anything to do with you.”

“Our immediate problem is to locate Emily,” Dion said. ”I will say I’m glad he didn’t stick around. I don’t see him as being much help. He’s the type who would try to rush the ghouls and, as you just saw, that is exactly what they want you to do.”

“So how do we find her? We don’t have the map and the door is gone. I don’t want to wait around and let that big creep Karanzen take care of locating her.”

“Let me think about this. I don’t want to rush into anything. It could make things even worse. The ghouls won’t dare harm her. They want to use her to keep me away from the Earth Elemental Grandmaster. So long as they have her, they know we don’t dare approach her.”

“But they can’t keep her forever,” Lilly said. “Sooner or later they have to let her go or the police will get involved, and even Karanzen is scared of them.”

“Officer Karanzen is scared of nothing. The only thing he cares about is keeping this mall safe. He keeps it safe because so long as it is protected he has a job.”

“He’s the guardian,” a voice said behind them. “He takes care of the Abyss.”

They turned to see the strange little Englishman known as Edward behind them. Gone was his leisure suit. It was replaced by knee pants, a tweed cap and a short jacket. He held an unlit pipe in one hand, which he placed in his mouth.

“Remember,” Lilly said to him,” you can’t smoke in the mall.”

“I know, I know,” he said in his nasally voice. “Can we go outside? They still let you smoke in this beastly outdoors, don’t they?” He turned and looked for an exit. Seeing one, he headed for it with the two high school seniors behind him.

Once outside he inhaled the air and sat down on a bench. Edward pulled out a match, struck it on the bench and used it to light his pipe. Lit, he inhaled the fumes and let them out slowly. Now relaxed, he folded his legs under him in a way Lilly had watched yoga adepts do it on TV.

“Really can’t stand the air in that place,” he told them. “Too many people. Peasants all of them, running around like slaves at a market. You Americans, always so busy with yourselves.”

“And where do you come from?” Lilly asked him. “England?”

“Originally, but now I’m a traveler from beyond. Beyond is a boring place and I’m pleased they let me come back here from time to time. Dion has attracted all kinds of attention and it appears I get the role of his guardian angel. I’m not holy, but I do the best I can.”

“I thought I was supposed to find my own personal guardian angel?” Dion said. “I didn’t think they were sent by post.”

“You get the economy class version today,” Edward told him, as he inhaled on the pipe again. “In due time you’ll get the customized version, but right now I’m here to help. So what is it this time? They wouldn’t have sent me unless you needed help.”

“The ghouls kidnapped our friend Emily,” Lilly told him. “They know Dion doesn’t dare approach the Earth Elemental Grandmaster if he’s abandoned a friend. They even took the map we were given by Mr. Jehuti and his wife. How are we supposed to locate Emily and get her back without the map?”

“Don’t forget the door,” Dion said. “They took the door behind them when they left.”

“Oh, they used one of those temporal doors, huh?” Edward laughed. “They did want to use her to get back at you, didn’t they? Let me think about what to do.”

Edward turned and watched the setting sun and sighed. “I miss this. You do have some spectacular sunsets in this country.” He dropped to his knees and bowed.

“Hail, Ra!” he said and stood up again.

“Now about your problem,” he continued. “You do need the map, but I think you’ll find it in the trash somewhere. The ghouls don’t know what it’s for because they can’t read. They don’t speak either, but they have very good hearing and communicate by looking at each other a certain way. So why would they have the map? Simple, they took it when they seized her and have no clue as to what it can be used to for. So what you have to do is look around and see if it’s in any of the trash cans around the door they took with them.”

“But what if they took the map with them?” Dion said, “Surely they dumped it wherever they went. Does that mean we’ll have to travel all the way to the subbasement to get the map?”

“Not necessarily. They are very nimble creatures. They might’ve grabbed the map from her and dumped it before you noticed. In spite of what you might think, the ghouls are very neat creatures and don’t like to take any waste into their dwellings. Go back to the trashcans and rummage through them. You might find it there.”

“We’ll still have to go underground to get her back,” Lilly said. “How will the map help us find the way down?”

“The map will have the location of doors and passages which lead to the subbasement that the ghouls don’t know about. Find a passage they can’t possibly know about and use it. You will be able to tell it’s a passage they won’t use if the map shows it to be illuminated. The ghouls will avoid any passage with light as it hurts their eyes.”

“You make it sound so easy,” Dion laughed, “but we’re supposed to find the map in the trash, use it to travel underground in a secret passage and rescue our friend from carnivorous ghouls.”

“Don’t worry, they only eat carrion. Plenty of that for them around the mall. So long as the restaurants order too much food every day. Someday they’ll learn how to order food supplies better than what they do and the ghouls will move on. But right now, the arrangement works out for everyone.”

Edward pulled out his pocket watch again and looked at it. “Oh dear, time to go. Mustn’t overstay my allotted time, I will make them very cross with me.” He inhaled on his pipe one more time and vanished.

“So, he shows up when we’re at a hard spot?” Lilly asked Dion. “He doesn’t look like an angel.”

“I’m not certain when he’ll show up, but he’s been a help,” Dion said.

“Might as well go back in the mall. Will you be able to use your powers down in the subbasement?”

“I can use them anywhere. But I don’t have very strong ones right now. Making a column of water rise, causing a plant to grow, I can do these things, but they exhaust me.”

They walked back into the mall, passing up people as they entered it. A few of them Lilly knew, but these were not people they could share their quest to find Emily. A few of Lilly’s friends waved at her and she returned the response. Several looked at her funny, no doubt due to Dion being with her as she walked along. Dion was not one of the popular boys at the school and some of the adults in the town thought of him as a little strange. Dion’s uncle worked for the local university and taught philosophy. They didn’t blend in very well to the standard military/farmer/tradesman cliché that ran the town.

Fromatius was originally a rural farm district outside of the urban Scipio. Once upon a time, the schools were small and the principal source of income was chicken farms. But, as the roads improved and the city grew congested, people with money began to move out of town. Fromatius was on the main road between Xenon, another town to the west, and Columbus, much further to the center of the state. As people moved into the area, developers saw the chance to make some cash and tossed up houses across the shrinking farms. Old timers would still talk about where the cow farms were in the past, but they shrank every year. Sometimes the farmhouse would remain and be surrounded by rows of new tract homes.

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.”

Hobbs took out a green stone and put it down in front of Dion. It was smooth, appeared to be made from jade, and had a transparent quality to it. Dion picked the stone up and handed it to Lilly who turned it over and noted the fine polished surface.

“You might want to test it out before you take it,” Hobbs told them. “I’d hate for you to leave here with one that didn’t work. Everyone would blame me, as usual.”

On top of the counter, Dion rolled out the map with the cryptic letters on it. He weighted it down with a stone smoking pipe on one end and lava light on the other.

Hobbs looked at the map with him. “You do have some strange letters on this,” he commented. “This is one of the better ones and it should make it readable. I have stones that can outperform it, but I save those for treasure hunters. Let’s see if it can do the job.”

The green stone began to pulse with an inner light and projected it across the map. Lilly stood there with Dion and watched as the light scanned across the map. As it did so, the letters on the map changed color and began to move. The letters morphed into different patterns as it tried to find some common goal.

“You sure this will work?” Lilly asked the man.

“Give it a chance. This seer stone came from the Islandia. I have confidence it will do the job.”

Slowly the letters reassembled into something that resembled English. Now Lilly could read it too. The letters marked the pathways into and out of all the mall sectors and even showed the location of the underground kingdom of the ghouls. She looked and noticed some of the temporal doors marked by the map, which the ghouls had used to take Emily away after her abduction.

“So how do those doors stay marked if they can be taken by the person who knows how to work them?” she asked Dion.

“The doors appear and disappear at different times. The door the ghouls took with them appears at another location in an hour. See? The map lists the times the door will appear and where it will show up.”

“So all we have to do,” Lilly said, “is to find where the next door to the ghoul subbasement will open?

“Little bit more difficult,” Hobbs said. “The door opens to a corridor which terminates in the subbasement where the ghouls live. You need to take that passageway down there if you are going to end up where Emily was taken. And the passageway will be dark. Ghouls don’t care as they have special vision which allows them to see in the dark.”

“But even cats have to have some light,” Lilly pointed out. “Do these corridors have a light source of their own?”

“Not always, and it’s not a good idea to take a torch down there with you as they signal to the ghouls that someone is in the corridor. You need to get down to their subbasement without them knowing you are on the way.”

“And ghouls can see in a spectrum other than visible light,” Dion explained to her. “They can use infrared radiation to find their way around. They have excellent hearing as well.”

“So what are we going to use once we find the door?”

“I have just the thing for you,” Hobbs said. The little man went below the counter again and came back up with a cardboard box. He placed it next to the seer stone box.

“Picked this one up the last time I paid a trip to the kobold mines. I do a fair amount of business in the rock and gemstone market, so I thought it would come in handy. But I think you will need it better than me. At least right now.”

He opened the box to withdraw a carbide lantern attached to a miner’s helmet. It was attached to a container, which strapped to the waist and had a small valve hooked to the lamp. The lamp fit snuggly on the helmet.

“Is it some kind of magic?” Lilly asked him.

“Depends on how you define magic. This one uses sacred calcium carbide stones which, when treated with holy water, release sprits in the form of acetylene gas. The sprits travel up to the lens where they are ignited. They provide the divine light of illumination to the path you seek. So it is a kind of elemental earth power, just one miners use all over the world.”

“What do we do if the ghouls attack us?” she said. “They’ll know we’re headed their way when they see the light.”

“For a small fee I can sell you another mystical weapon,” he told them. “I’ll need the paperwork to satisfy the government elves. It projects elements of your will in the form of lead at rapid velocities and will make them think twice about a second attack, should you need to use it.”

“That is quite all right, Hobbs,” Dion told him, “but I don’t want to resort to firearms unless absolutely necessary. I can’t imagine what a gunshot would sound like that deep in the subbasement and we’d all lose our hearing. I’ve got a few ideas of my own on what to do about the ghouls if they attack us.”

“Your decision,” Hobbs replied with a grin on his bearded face. “Even a concussion grenade might come in handy down there. No fragments, just a big bang. No worse than setting off a huge firecracker.”

“I like my hearing too much,” Dion said. “One of those things could rupture an eardrum.”

“I tried. Just keep in mind you don’t have a lot of earth elemental power you can use against them. It will take more than a few rolling boulders to keep those things at bay if they charge you.”

“I’ll keep it in mind. How much do I owe you this time?”

“I’ll send the bill to your aunt and uncle. They’re good for it.”

Hobbs packed the mining helmet in a backpack and showed Dion how to use it. The lamp and gas unit sat combined on top of the helmet and had an ignition switch inside it. He told Dion to be careful about firing it up as too much gas in the chamber could cause an explosion. He also included a large flashlight for Lilly to carry and tossed in a miner’s helmet for both of them.

“You’ll want that helmet,” he made clear. “There may be some low ceilings in that corridor. The only ones who use them on a routine basis are the ghouls and they have no trouble slipping around tight passages.”

“I’ll let you know how everything turned out,” Dion told him as he picked up the pack with all the equipment inside it.

“Take care of her,” Hobbs said. “You really shouldn’t bring along anyone who doesn’t have elemental powers. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t advise you to go down there as there’s a certain aspect of danger in the corridors. But I can see you want your friend back and I don’t know another way to get her. Tell your aunt and uncle I said hello and to expect a bill.”

Lilly and Dion left the store with the map, seer stone and pack. After they’d walked a distance down the concourse, Dion found a table where he could spread the map out and look at it. Lilly noticed the lettering on the map was still in English.

“Do you still need the seer stone since it turned the letters into English?”

Dion was studying the map and comparing their location to the one on it. “It will change back if the seer stone leaves the vicinity of the map.”

“Is there some kind of range for the seer stone? I mean, five feet, twenty, a hundred?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t had the chance to use one of these before. I think it’ll work so long as I keep it close to the map. This is why I intend to hang on to it and keep it in my pocket until I get back to the surface. I might even return it to Hobbs once this adventure is over. I don’t know if he has a return policy, but my aunt and uncle should get some money back for it if we don’t need it anymore.”

“Does it have a life expectancy?”

“Good question. Anything part of the Earth Element does. Well, it usually does. However, they’re not like car batteries where you can know exactly when they’ll fail. Although, come to think of it, even car batteries have a big range of life. So maybe they are like car batteries. Good point.”

“But I’ve found where the next doorway to the subbasement will appear,” he told her. “It’s due to open in another ten minutes on the other side of the concourse under the stairs.”

Lilly and Dion hurried down the concourse in search of the mysterious door. As they went, the two of them passed some of the security guards who gave them a menacing look.

So far, Officer Karanzen had no reason to have them removed from the mall. He’d warned them it could all change, so they needed to be wary this time.

The mall was its cheery self.

You had to work there or know what really went on behind the scenes to understand the place. The mall was an endless army of consumer goods cycled into the hands of those who needed or thought they needed them. A vast army of display experts and managers sought to find the perfect way to portray the goods they carried to the public.

Lilly wondered how many of these stores would still be here in twenty years. Already, older shopping centers were fading into the sunset as the clientele headed for newer, brighter lands with trained staff to wait on them. It was the perfect place to hide anything that merged with the supernatural. Besides, a shopping mall was a supernatural experience in and of itself. People entered forlorn and emerged in a state of euphoria from their purchases.

Supposedly, someone had tried to build a New York style disco inside the mall when it first opened. It never lasted, as so much from the East Coast didn’t when they tried to import it to the heartlands. It never stopped people from taking what they found on the affluent parts of the country and shoving it on the less affluent wage earners in the Midwest. She wondered how much longer the factories would last which ringed the town and city. They seemed so smoky to her and full of grime. One day nature would revolt and shut them all down. In place of the factories would stand crumbling buildings, and no one would remember what they had been used for in the beginning. The only thing that ever seemed constant in this world was change.

She watched a security guard from one of the armored car services enter the mall and head in the direction of an anchor store. He would leave with a satchel full of cash in a few minutes. Then he’d be on his way to deposit it in the bank. Eventually someone would figure out they could follow the armored car and make a little withdraw of their own. Did the armored cars have some kind of elemental protection of their own? She made a mental note to ask Dion about it later. It seemed like a possibility. Why not? Perhaps they had a representative of each element riding in the car, ready to defend it against any robbery attempts. Two elemental riding up front and two in the back. Didn’t he say there was a fifth? Would the fifth ride in the engine?

“Here it is,” Dion told her when they reached the door. “Exactly when and where the map told us we could find it. It will only be here for another ten minutes so we have to move quickly.”

He began walking toward it.

The door resembled any other access door in the mall. It had no window and had the words “Employees Only” written on it.

“Is it locked?” she asked him.

“Not to me it isn’t.” He reached out to grab the handle. Nevertheless, the door stayed firm. He jerked on the handle a few more times, but it stayed firm.

“I don’t get this,” he said. “I should have enough recognition by the mall to open any door that’s not physically locked. How do I get into this one?”

“You didn’t ask me for the key,” Edward’s voice sounded behind them.

The funny Englishman stood there wearing a robe. He had a hood over his head, which gave him a vaguely sinister look as he held out a skeleton key to Dion.

Dion took the key from him. “I didn’t see a keyhole on the door,” he told Edward. “How does it work?”

“Just touch the key to the door and it will recognize it. The ghouls reset the doors to keep you out. They didn’t realize there is a grandmaster key that can override them. Now what are you going to need before you go down there besides a miner’s helmet?”

“A weapon to protect us,” Lilly said. “We will need something to prevent the ghouls from coming after us once we’re in the corridor. All Hobbs had were guns. Do you know where we can get something else?”

“As a matter of fact I do and here he comes right now.”

Down the concourse came a maintenance man pushing a floor polisher. He was human and pushed the polisher up to them. The man left in front of Dion and Lilly, and then walked away.

“A floor polisher?” Dion said to him. “That is your idea of a weapon? What am I supposed to do? Use it as a club?’

“Now, now, dear boy,” Edward said. “Think about it. This polisher has no electrical cord. You can push it all the way down to the subbasement where the ghouls live. It is gas powered and starts with a simple pull chain. Just like a lawn mower, don’t forget to adjust the choke.”

Then he disappeared.

Dion stood there and looked at the empty space. “Great,” he said to the empty space where Edward had stood just moments ago. “We need to get her back and we have no way to do it that makes sense. What am I supposed to do with this thing?’

“I have no idea,” Lilly said, “but Edward wouldn’t have left it here if it had no use. He’s been helpful so far.”

“I could use something practical from that deus ex machina,” he told her. “This is absurd. Anyway, we have to get through the door before it closes again. You can carry this. Looks like I’ll push the damn polisher.” He handed Lilly the pack and moved the floor polisher to the door. Once at the door, he touched it with the skeleton key. There was a click and the door unlocked. Dion pushed on it and this time it opened.

It wasn’t long before the door clicked shut behind them.

Chapter 8

Other than the light filtering under the door, Lilly and Dion found themselves in a dark, empty chamber. Lilly couldn’t see a thing, but she heard Dion grumble as he bumped into a wall.

“Hand me the pack,” he told Lilly. “I need to light that lantern on top of the helmet.”

“I watched Hobbs do it too,” she said and placed the pack down on the cool floor. “I think I can light it as well as you.”

She unzipped the pack and felt around inside for the helmet with the lantern attached. She carefully lifted it out and found the ignition switch. Just as Hobbs showed them, she depressed the button to the count of three and heard a pop as the lamp became illuminated.

Now there was light inside the chamber. Lilly place it on her head and tightened the strap over her chin. She carefully adjusted the flame until the heat of the lamp was down and the chamber was fully exposed.

“Hey!” Dion said and raised his hands as she swung her head in his direction. She realized the lamp had blinded him and turned her head in a different direction. She reached back in the pack and handed him the second hard hat. He too placed it on his head and tightened down the strap. They turned to look at the corridor in front of them.

It continued in a downward slope to the subbasement, but they were only able to see part of it as the light limited what could be viewed. Dion shrugged and began to push on the handle of the floor polisher as they walked down the smooth concrete ramp, which took them deeper into the home of the ghouls.

“They’ll know we’re coming just from that light,” she said to him in a low voice. So far, they had seen stonewalls and smooth floor, but nothing else. The corridor was void of any kind of mice or rats, for which Lilly was thankful.

It was also very quiet.

She had no idea what to expect when they reached the subbasement, but it shouldn’t be very long. The mall only had two basements and they’d entered on the ground floor. There was the possibility that this corridor’s length didn’t correspond to the elemental lengths, but Lilly didn’t want to think about that. She assumed the passage would be the same length from the surface to the subbasement as if they’d entered using a normal stairs. They continued their movement down to the ghoul level.

A few more minutes of travel and they were in front of a pair of doors that read “Subbasement”.

Dion took a minute to stare at it. “Pretty much sums it up. Let’s see what’s on the other side.”

Before they reached the door, it swung open to reveal the ghoul cleaners from the pharmacy. There were twelve of them this time and each one carried a club and wore mirrorshades.

Lilly shined the light from her lantern on them, but it made no difference. They stood there, patted their clubs, and stared at the two interlopers.

It was in that moment Dion realized what use the floor polisher would have against the ghouls. He clicked the choke into position and pulled the chain on it, firing up the gas engine. The floor polisher screamed into life with a roar slightly greater than a lawn mower. It was loud and the close walls and ceiling of the corridor amplified the noise.

The ghouls screamed, dropped the clubs and grabbed their ears. Some of them fled to the other side of the door, most howled in pain from the noise created by the floor polisher. The noise was so loud that it even hurt Dion’s ears. However, he let it roar; slowly walking up to the ghouls with the polisher as it created a wall of sound they couldn’t stand.

The ghouls who remained in the corridor dropped to the floor and shook their heads as they tried to silence the painful noise. With enhanced hearing, the roar of the floor polisher sent them into spasms of agony. Dion watched them howl for a few minutes, then shut the engine off.

A few of the ghouls stood up, breathing heavy. They didn’t say a word, but looked in fear at the floor polisher. Dion waited until one of them stood up and put his hand on the pull chain. The ghoul waved his hands, and hugged himself. The meaning was clear and all Dion needed to do was walk in their direction with the floor polisher. The ghouls waved their heads and vanished on the other side of the doors while bowing.

Dion stood in place with his hand on the pull chain.

“The noise,” he told Lilly. “They can’t stand the noise. Edward knew it, which is why he had the guy bring me the floor polisher. So long as I have the ability to send sound waves in and mess up their world, they’ll do what we want.”

“I don’t want to go through those doors,” Lilly said. “I hope they bring Emily back out because we just might have to do it.”

A few minutes later the ghouls returned with the bound and gagged form of Emily. They approached Dion and held her up so the light from Lilly’s headlamp shone on her. It was Emily, as far as they could tell, even with the smeared make-up, they knew it had to be her. She was unable to say a thing.

One of the ghouls pointed to the map under Dion’s arm. “I think they want to make a trade,” he said to Lilly.

“I thought you told me the ghouls can’t read and didn’t know how valuable that map is. Why would they want to trade for it?”

“Could be that they know how useful it is. Could be they found out when they kidnapped Emily.”

“I don’t trust them,” he told Lilly. “These elementals have a tendency to get the better of the trade. I want to be sure it’s her.” He gestured to the ghouls to remove the gag from her mouth.

One of the ghouls reached up and untied the rag they’d stuffed in Emily’s mouth. “Thank God you’re here,” she cried out. “I thought I would never get out of this place!”

“Who am I?” Dion asked her.

“Why you are, umh, ah….”

“Who is that?” Dion said pointing to Lilly.

“That’s um….”

Dion pulled the chain on the floor polisher motor and the machine began to howl. The ghouls dropped Emily who promptly changed into a ghoul and they all thrashed around on the floor. Dion hit the stop button on the floor polisher and the machine wound down.

“Enough of this!” he yelled at them. “Go get the real Emily or I’ll walk this thing running right into your homes!”

Gasping again, the ghouls picked themselves up from the floor and walked back through the doors.