The Magic Spectacles (14 page)

He sat up, breathing hard, scrambling to get out of the way as a goblin slammed down beside him, fallen from the sky. Another one landed on top of the first. The ladder was falling, faster and faster. Rope heaped up on the floor. Two goblins leaped up and ran out of the room, but the rest were quickly entangled in the falling ladder, which piled up on the floor, faster and faster, higher and higher.

John ran toward the door, shouting for Mrs. Barlow, for Danny, for anybody. There was a mountain of rope ladder now. Goblins tried to claw their way out of the tangles, but the ladder piled up on their heads, burying them. And then, as if in answer to his shouting, a tiny voice drifted downward from out of the darkness overhead.

(Chapter 6 continues after illustration)

John looked up, shading his eyes. Way up in the night sky, where the moon filled the entire ceiling now, Mr. Deener came falling, down and down and down, tumbling end over end like a coin fallen out of the moon’s pocket.

Mr. Deener lay on top of a mountain of cloth rope like an upside down bug, looking up at the moon. “I’m all right,” he whispered when John tried to help him. Then he gestured for John to leave him alone.

Goblins crawled out from where they were trapped in the rope, and one by one ran out through the open window. Mr. Deener didn’t pay any attention to them. There was broken glass everywhere, most of it smashed into little bitty chips. Hundreds of the glass floats had been broken, either by the goblins or in Mr. Deener’s fall.

There was the sudden yammering of goblins. Then the front door slammed, and Mrs. Barlow’s voice shouted, “And stay out!” and then the house was silent. Several goblins ran past outside the window right after that, heading away down the hill. John pushed the window shut and latched it.

“I saw her,” mumbled Mr. Deener, as if he were half asleep. “I was almost home.”

John knew who he meant. He remembered what Mrs. Barlow had said last night about Mr. Deener’s wife, Velma.

Aunt Flo appeared in the doorway. “He fell?” she asked quietly.

John nodded. “Goblins came in and wrecked things. I tried to help, but. …”

“You couldn’t have helped any more than you did.”

“He was close,” John said. “He saw … I guess he saw his wife. I saw someone too, so it wasn’t just his imagination. It was just before he fell. The moon filled the whole ceiling, and there were the shapes of things on it. I think it was a woman in a kitchen, cooking.”

“Cooking up something nice,” Mr. Deener said dreamily. “It was a pie. I believe it was a pie. I could smell a cherry pie cooking.”

“It was
our
kitchen,” John whispered to Aunt Flo.

“What was our kitchen?” Danny asked, walking into the room at last. His shirt was torn and he carried one of Mrs. Barlow’s big wooden spoons.

“It was our kitchen at home,” John said, “only up on the moon. I’m sure it was.” He had seen it, right enough, just before Mr. Deener had fallen – the stove, the cupboards, the glass globe over the ceiling lamp. …

“It hasn’t always been your kitchen, has it?” Aunt Flo asked.

“No,” John said. Of course it hadn’t been. The house was seventy years old.

“It was Mr. Deener’s house too?” Danny asked.

“For a long time,” she said. “And a very jolly house it was until things went wrong. He lived there for some years after Velma died. Finally he sold it to your parents. He couldn’t stand being there without her. They had been together in that house for nearly forty years. He saw her everywhere in it, even after she had died. She had sewn the curtains and cooked the food and bought the carpets. She had sat a thousand times in all the chairs, and every night they had slept in the same bed. There she was, wherever he looked.”

She stopped for a moment, as if making sure that she was telling the story right. “Of course it wasn’t
really
her, left over in the house after she died, any more than it was really her on the moon just now. It was just memories of her, and that’s what he couldn’t stand. He wanted it to
really
be her. He sat in that empty house all day and thought about her until he began to forget how to think about anything else.”

Danny said, “Why didn’t he just
quit
thinking about it? Why didn’t he
do
something? Go fishing or something?”

“He tried to,” Aunt Flo said, “but sometimes it’s not that easy to forget. He moved in with his sister, who lived down the street, and he almost never came out of his room and did nothing but experiment with glass magic. He thought now that if Velma could travel in the land of memory, then he would learn to travel there too. But he found that he couldn’t just pick and choose which memories to keep. Finally he found a way to break himself in half, and he gave the Sleeper a single terrible memory that he didn’t want. He’s been breaking off bothersome little bits of himself ever since.”

Polly and Ahab arrived from upstairs. “He’s sleeping nicely now,” Polly said to Aunt Flo. “Mrs. Barlow’s bringing up what’s left of the doughnuts. The goblins stole most of them.”

There was a tiny tapping on the window just then. Polly drew the curtain back and opened the door. A scattering of sycamore leaves blew into the room, each of them bearing a hennypenny man. Polly closed the window.

The henny-pennies landed and dragged their leaves into a corner, lining them up neatly. They rolled up their sleeves and started picking up pieces of glass, heaping the pieces into piles according to color.

Aunt Flo and Polly and John and Danny tiptoed out the door and went upstairs to bed, leaving the henny-pennies to clean up the laboratory while Mr. Deener slept on his heap of rope.

The bedroom was dark except for candlelight, and the house was quiet. John wasn’t sleepy at all. “So what happened upstairs?” he asked Danny, who had been quiet for the past five minutes.

“It was weird,” Danny said tiredly. “The Sleeper nearly floated away.”

“Floated away?”

“That’s right. That’s why Polly yelled. He was floating on the ceiling, bumping it with his nose. When we got up there he was almost over the stair. He was like a balloon. We had to tie a rope to him and try to pull him back in, over the bed.”

John watched the flickering candle flame. “I think he was going to the moon with Mr. Deener. Mr. Deener can’t get away without taking the Sleeper along. I bet he fell onto the bed when Mr. Deener fell out of the sky.”

“Actually he fell onto the floor. He landed right on top of a goblin and nearly squashed him. Mrs. Barlow threw most of the goblins out the window, into the pond. They really trashed her kitchen. Me and Polly lifted the Sleeper back onto the bed. He was light, like he was made out of air or something.”

John lay there for a while, not saying anything. He wondered what his brother was thinking. All day long he had been mad – about the spectacles, about the meadow. But now, even though the moon ladder hadn’t worked, he didn’t seem to be. Maybe he had made up his mind about something – about the cave. That was worrisome.

Finally John said, “Anyway, what I think is that…” but then he realized that Danny had fallen asleep again. “Danny,” he whispered, but there was no answer. He lay there watching the moon through the window and thinking about things – about his parents and what was going on back home. Were they asleep? Were they worrying about him?

He began to worry about them worrying, and he wished that he and Danny were at home, sleeping in their own beds. And then suddenly he wished that he could work a little bit of Mr. Deener’s glass magic himself, that he could turn his worrying into a goblin. He would throw it out the window into the pond. Except that then the woods would soon be full of goblins that looked like him, and that stank and wore rat shoes. That was even worse than worrying. Wishing and worrying wouldn’t help. They had to
do
something.

Right then he decided. Tomorrow morning, if Danny wanted to try going home through the cave, then John would go with him.

In the morning Danny was gone.

John woke up to the sound of Mrs. Barlow’s voice in the hallway, and the first thing he noticed was that Danny’s bed was empty.

“It’s been
stolen
,” Mrs. Barlow shouted.

John jumped out of bed, grabbing his shirt off the chair. He saw a note on the table. “I’m going to try the caves,” it read. “I’m taking Ahab. I’ll be back with help. Daniel.”

The candle holder was gone from the table. John opened the drawer. It was empty. Danny had taken all the candles. The backpack was gone. John jumped out of bed and started pulling on his clothes. There was no time to waste. He would go after Danny alone if he had to. …

He went out through the door just as Polly ran past, heading back up the hall to her own room. When she saw John she said, “Someone stole the bag of memories. We don’t know who. Maybe Uncle Deener and maybe the goblins, but we’ve got to get them back. Uncle Deener’s gone, too. We’ve got to find him. She pushed open the door to her bedroom and went in.

Mrs. Barlow was in the kitchen, shoving doughnuts into a sack. Through the window John could see that the rose bushes in the garden had lost most of their flowers in the night. There were some blooms left on them, but the ground beneath the bushes was carpeted with blood-red petals. Water still bubbled out of the spring, but only in a sort of trickle now, and the creek down along the meadow looked like a muddy-brown ribbon. It was as if autumn had turned to winter overnight.

Aunt Flo came in with Polly, and John showed them Danny’s note. Mrs. Barlow slapped her forehead, as if the note was the last thing in the world she wanted to see, “Through the
cave!
” she said. “And on the same day that the Deener chooses to high-tail it.”

There was a rumble then, and the house shook. John grabbed the edge of the counter to steady himself. He looked out the window just as a rain of petals fell from the rose bushes. The trees shook in the garden, and muddy water boiled out of the spring. The sundial toppled over into a flowerbed, and a storm of apples thudded to the ground.

And then, just for a moment, the sky went dark, like a screen in a movie theater when a film ends.

The shaking passed. Slowly the sky brightened, and everything was ghostly silent, as if waiting.

“Just a trembler,” Mrs. Barlow said. “But the next one could bring the house down.”

(Chapter 8 continues after illustration)

“You’ll have to find both of them,” Aunt Flo said. “And the sooner the better. I’ll stay with the Sleeper. We don’t want to lose him too.”

“We won’t lose any of ‘em!” Mrs. Barlow said, handing John the bag full of doughnuts. “I don’t care who stole the memory bag – whether it was the Deener himself or his gang of ruffians; I mean to find it and him too. And if any of those little scalawags get in my way. …” She picked up the big wooden potato masher and swung it heavily through the air.

There was no sign of any goblins in the woods – no fires, no fog, no laughter, no flute noise. Everything was eerily quiet and still. There wasn’t even the sound of birds. The mouth of the cave was just as it had been – dark and cool and with the wind whispering around it like ghosts around an open tomb.

The ground was still soft and wet because of the water leaking out of the fountain. There were footprints of both Danny and Ahab leading into the cave. But that was all. There was no sign of Mr. Deener.

“The Deener’s gone down to the sea,” Mrs. Barlow said. “I was afraid of that.” She sighed, as if she was tired. “He’s going to throw the bag into the ocean, just like he said he’d do, and that’ll be the end of him. All my work gone to smash.”

“What’ll we do?” John asked.

“You’ll go after your brother,” Mrs. Barlow said, “and leave the Deener to me. Polly, you go with John. Take the candles. I won’t be needing any. I’ll take the glazeys, but I don’t guess they’ll help.”

She opened her basket and pulled out a bag of doughnuts. Then she handed out candles and matches and candlesticks. She gave Polly the basket, which was still half full of loose candles and lunch, and said to John, “If you find Danny and bring him out, then head on back up to the house quick. But if you find your way home, then stay there and God bless you.”