John looked one last time for the window. He stood beneath where it was supposed to be and felt the air. Maybe it was there and they just couldn’t see it….
The bonfire blinked out and the woods were dark. Then, just as suddenly, the fire blinked on again, burning right at the edge of the meadow now. A great, black cauldron hung over the fire, and fog billowed out of it, pouring over the edges of the cauldron and onto the ground like sea foam. The shadow-shapes of goblins danced around the fire, and the dark fog whirled out in a steamy rush, as if the night-time itself were leaking out of the cauldron.
John and Danny took off running, following Ahab, across the meadow toward the house on the hill. They didn’t slow down until they struck a narrow, dirt road where the going got steeper and the meadow fell away behind them. When they looked back, the bonfire had vanished. There was no sign of goblins, no sound of laughter or drumming or flute music. The meadow was empty again, and night had fallen.
Ahead of them, the light of the full moon shone on the road. There were thick trees along either side. The house atop the hill was nearly invisible behind the trees now, and they could just see one of its windows, aglow with lamp light.
“Did you bring any candy?” Danny asked suddenly.
‘Yeah,” John said, opening up his belt pack. “All kinds. Danny held out his hand. “Licorice,” he said. “Anything licorice.”
“I didn’t bring any licorice,” John said. He unclipped the pack and held it open in the moonlight. There were peppermint and butterscotch candies wrapped in plastic and two or three purple bubblegums. Most of it was the kind of candy sold by the pound, out of bins at the grocery store.
“Let me see.” Danny took the pack from him. He pulled out the two chocolate bars. Both of them had been smashed flat. “They’re dead,” Danny said. Chocolate oozed out of the ends of the wrappers, and there was lint and sand stuck to it. “They smell like fish, too.” He dropped the candy back into the open pack.
“I don’t think it’s the candy that smells like fish,” John whispered. All was silent. Except for moonlight, the night was dark, and there was no sound but the wind rustling the trees. Then they heard a twig snap and the sound of dry leaves crackling underfoot. Then there was silence again, and the night was deadly still.
Ahab growled and took a step forward, cocking his head to the side. Danny reached down and grabbed his collar. Moonlit fog drifted out of the dark trees, and right then, in the blink of an eye, the bonfire sprang up again, glowing through the trees, and there was a rustling and crackling of things moving swiftly in the leafy darkness.
“Go!” John shouted, and the three of them took off running again, up the hill toward the house, into the misty darkness where the roadside trees blocked the light of the moon.
Chapter 11: The Fight on the Road
Goblins swarmed out of the darkness ahead of them, twenty or more, running silently in their rat shoes. Ahab leaped straight into the middle of them, nearly pulling Danny over onto his face and knocking the little men this way and that way into the dirt. John yelled, trying to scare them off, and Danny let go of Ahab and swung the backpack at the closest goblin. Halloween candy flew out onto the road, and one of the backpack straps caught around a goblin’s neck.
The goblin jerked away, yanking the pack out of Danny’s hand. Four other goblins began pulling on it, trying to reach inside. Others crawled on the road on their hands and knees, picking up fallen candy and shoving it into their mouths.
“Run!” John shouted. But Danny didn’t run. He chased the goblin with the pack and grabbed one of the straps. Immediately a goblin climbed onto his back like a smelly little ape. Another clutched his leg. Their hands snaked into his pockets. The goblin still holding the pack acted as if he were playing tug of war until Danny pulled him straight over onto his face.
John pushed goblins aside, trying to help his brother, and Ahab ran back and forth, chasing goblins up the hill and into the trees. Within moments the same goblins leaped back down onto the road and went charging after the candy and the backpack again, fighting madly with each other, poking and gouging and wrestling.
In the thickening fog, the trees were dark ghosts along the roadside. Goblins appeared and disappeared. John hit and kicked at goblins. Maybe the spectacles were broken, and didn’t work, but he wasn’t going to give them up. He grabbed a goblin that held onto Danny’s back and yanked it off, throwing it sideways into three more goblins just then coming down out of the trees. All four were knocked sprawling, but then were up again, capering forward, their eyes whirling and wild.
Then there was an explosion. Someone was running toward them down the road – not a goblin, but a man waving some kind of weapon. The goblins stopped fighting and stood still. There was another explosion, a kind of a whoosh, like a firecracker going off in a bucket of water, and the man ran out of the tree shadows and into the moonlight.
He was pretty fat, and he ran heavily, but he looked as if he meant business. He threw the gun to his shoulder and shot into the trees, and a spray of misty bubbles flew out of the gun. The breeze caught the bubbles and blew them across the road. A couple of the goblins slunk away into the trees. The rest hesitated, as if making up their minds.
“I’ll shoot!” the man with the gun yelled. ‘Back away!” Two or three goblins started laughing, pretending to be fat men shooting guns.
“Here now!’ the man yelled, “Go on now!”
When one of the goblins made a sort of raspberry noise with his lips, the man’s eyes flew open. “Well!” he shouted, suddenly furious. “I’ve decided to shoot! It’s time for a bath!”
The sound of the word “bath” seemed to put the fear into them, and suddenly, as if they were all thinking with the same brain, they ran howling away into the woods. The fog seemed to lift right then, and the bonfire blinked out. Once again the woods were dark and silent.
The man turned to John and Danny and bowed, although he couldn’t bow very far. “Allow me to introduce myself…” he started to say, but before he was finished he stopped and looked behind Danny, where one last goblin sat in the dust of the roadway, eating Halloween candy.
He shoved a piece into his mouth, not bothering to unwrap it first. He smelled as if he had been wrestling with dead fish and hadn’t taken a bath afterward, and his hair was like spider web. There were sticky candy smears all over his face. He looked around sorrowfully Then, screwing up his eyes, he shoved a long, bony finger into his mouth and pulled out a drooly piece of plastic candy wrapper. He looked at it for a moment and then ate it.
“My heavens!” said the man with the gun. He shut his eyes for a moment, as if the goblin’s manners were so bad that he couldn’t bear to watch. “Stand aside,” he told John and Danny, and then threw the gun to his shoulder, pointed it at the goblin, and pulled the trigger.
Chapter 12: Mr. Deener
There was a sound like sand being poured through a pipe, and a “bump, bump, bump, whoosh!” that nearly knocked the man over backward. The air was filled with mist that was wet and cold and smelled like soap.
The goblin shrieked, leaping to his feet and shaking like a wet dog. When the misty air cleared, the goblin stood there with a clean face, his hair neatly slicked down along the sides of his head. He looked at his clean hands in wonder, and then, as if he were trying to eat a carrot stick, he bit himself on the finger. He yowled, shaking his hand and looking surprised. Then he turned around and slouched away down the road to the meadow.
(Chapter 12 continues after illustration)
“And don’t come back!” the man with the soap gun yelled.
Right then a woman with a lantern appeared from around the bend in the road above them. She was gray-haired, very tall and neat and elegant. She looked incredibly like Kimberly’s Aunt, Mrs. Owlswick. Danny and John looked at each other, and Danny nodded, as if to say, “I told you so.”
The man with the soap gun bowed again. The hair above his ears stuck up into the air as if a heavy wind we
re blowing out of his coat collar. He wore a vest and a pair of walking shorts and high socks folded down at the tons with ribbons at the folds. His coat appeared to be very comfortable and well-worn, and although he looked a little too much like an overgrown goblin, he seemed altogether pleasant and well-fed.
“I’m Mister Deener,” he said, putting peculiar emphasis on the Mister part. “At your service.”
“I’m John,” John said, “and this is Danny and Ahab. We’re at your service too.” He bowed, and so did Danny.
“And this,” said Mr. Deener, gesturing at the woman with the lantern, “is Aunt Flo. She’s Polly’s Aunt Flo, which is what everyone calls her. You might as well call her that too.”
John and Danny both said hello and that they were glad to meet her. She looked just like the sort of person who would be called Aunt somebody.
“Your soap gun worked exceedingly well, Artemis,” she said. Then to the boys she said, “Mr. Deener is an inventor. He fell upon the notion that a goblin would fear soap more than almost anything, and so he built this weapon, which he’s just now gotten a chance to use for the first time. Very successful, I’d say.”
Mr. Deener nodded happily. “I put the fear into them,” he said. “I’m working on a device to blow them up like balloons. I’m going to float them away, all of them together. Maybe to the moon.” He looked at John and Danny out of one eye, as if he was going to ask them a trick question. “I suppose you two are the Kraken brothers?”
“No,” said Danny, speaking up. “We came here through a magic window that we found by looking through a pair of spectacles, and we can’t find the window now because the spectacles are broken.”
A look came across Mr. Deener’s face. His eyes opened wide and he scratched his head. Clearly he was thinking hard about something, and for a moment John almost expected him to make the glasses sign with his fingers and thumbs.
“Spectacles,” Mr. Deener said finally. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t care anything about these spectacles. Did someone tell you that I wanted a pair of spectacles? I make it a habit never to buy anything from door-to-door salesmen.”
“No,” Danny said. “Actually we didn’t come here to sell them. We just came by accident.”
“Well,” Mr. Deener said, “I don’t believe in accidents. Not that kind anyway. I assumed you were the Kraken brothers, come to help. I’ve been expecting them.” He looked confused for a moment. “I… I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought… for a moment I thought…” But he didn’t finish his thinking. He stood there looking sad now, remembering something, or maybe trying to remember.
“You’ll just have to go on expecting them, Artemis,” Aunt Flo said to him, “because this isn’t them.”
“Then allow me to say that it looks very much like them.” He started walking up the road, as if his interest in John and Danny had ended.
Aunt Flo leaned over and whispered to them that Mr. Deener had been waiting for the Kraken brothers for a long time. No one was sure that were any Kraken brothers, not really. They were probably Mr. Deener’s imaginary friends. “I’m one of his imaginary friends,” she said, “and so is my niece Polly.” Then she touched the side of her head with her finger and winked. “He’s lost some of his marbles,” she said. “He’s forgotten… too much.”
They all followed along after Mr. Deener, who soon forgot that he was sad. He started humming and singing to himself, and then laughing at the song when he came to what must have been the good parts. Twice he stopped, and said, “Hark!” and pointed the soap weapon at the woods. But there was no sign of any goblins, and in a few minutes they arrived at a cobblestone carriage drive at the top of the hill.
“Which of the brothers are you again?” Mr. Deener asked Danny, very abruptly, as if to catch him off guard.
“I’m Danny,” Danny started to say, but he was interrupted by Aunt Flo, who said,
“These are not the brothers, Artemis.”
“Are they due tonight, then?”
“No,” said Aunt Flo, “they are not.” Then she stopped for a moment to think about something, and said finally. “Maybe these are the brothers after all.” She turned to Danny and John and said, “Do you mind being Mr. Deener’s imaginary friends?’
(Chapter 12 continues after illustration)
“No,” John said. “I guess not. How imaginary do we have to be?”
Mr. Deener looked instantly happy. “Now that you’ve come, you don’t have to be imaginary at all,” he said. Then he looked puzzled again, and asked, “Why have you come? That’s what I’m wondering. I can’t quite recall it.”
“We don’t know either,” Danny said. “We just came.”
“But the wife…” Mr. Deener started to say, and then stopped, as if the mention of “the wife” had wrecked his thought. He smashed his eyes shut, pushing his cheeks up toward his forehead, so that all the feelings that were in his eyes and on his face got squashed out of it. When he opened his eyes he looked entirely pleasant again.
“I believe that this is them,” he said. “I’m a stinker if I don’t.” Then he looked at them all and said, “Which of you calls me a stinker?”
“None of us calls you a stinker,” Aunt Flo said, as they set out toward the house again. Flowers bloomed in flowerbeds, and the limbs of oak trees cast a tangle of moon shadows onto the cobblestones. Through the trees John could see a broad valley below them, sweeping down toward the meadow. The valley was cut by a dry river. Moonlight shone on the white stones of the riverbed far below them and on the wooden timbers of an old, broken-down dock. The ribs of a rowboat sat like a skeleton beneath the dock, as if it had been ages since there had been enough water to float it.
Although it was a long way away, John could see that someone dressed in white, in a nightshirt maybe, sat at the end of the dock, just like the man from the cover of the book in the curiosity shop – The Wise Fishermen’s Encyclopedia. Bats darted through the air above him, and the moon cast the shadow of his fishing pole across the dry, bone-white bed of the river.
Chapter 13: Mr. Deener Has a Fit
The house had a big front porch with white-painted chairs on it. Rose bushes covered with dark red flowers climbed on wooden trellises at both ends of the porch. Lamplight shone through the front windows, which were made of old, watery glass, just like Mrs. Owlswick’s window. Through them John could see a cheerful fire burning in a stone fireplace. Nearby, a table was set for dinner. A girl sat in a chair in front of the fire, sewing doll clothes. She must be Polly, the other of Mr. Deener’s “imaginary friends”. She looked just like Kimberly.
Ahab pushed in past all of them and headed for the fire, just as if he lived there. He wagged his tail at the girl as he went past, then curled up in front of the heath and went straight to sleep. The girl went over and patted him on the head. “What’s his name?” she asked.
“Ahab,” Danny said.
“It sounds like the name of a king,” she said.
“He behaves just like a king,” Mr. Deener said. “He was the scourge of the goblins out there on the road tonight. And this, by the way, is…” He gestured at John. “What was your name again?”
“John,” John said. “And this is my brother Danny.”
“I’m Polly,” she said, and she curtsied in an old fashioned way Her hair was shorter than Kimberly’s, and there was something else about her… Perhaps it was that she was dressed a little bit old-fashioned too, in a blue dress with lace. Her skin was pale, like a delicate china plate, and, maybe because of the strange, flickering light from the fireplace, it seemed to John that he could very nearly see through her.
“The soap gun was a great success,” said Aunt Flo.
Polly said, “I knew it would be,” and she kissed Mr. Deener on the cheek. He sat down in the chair that she had been sitting in.
Just then a woman who looked like an unhappy ghost walked into the room. She was round and short, like a barrel, and was dusty-white. Even her hair was white. She carried
an enormous wooden spoon.
“I’ve spilt the flour,” she said.
“Bother the flour,” said Aunt Flo. “Scoop up what you can and sweep the rest into a box we can make cakes for the squirrels with any that’s got dirty.”
She wasn’t a ghost; she was just covered with flour. She wiped her face clean with her sleeve.
Mr. Deener looked worried all of a sudden. “Cakes for the squirrels?” he said. “What about my cakes? Do I get a cake?”
“You’ll get a dusty old clod,” said the woman, evidently still mad at having spilled the flour. But just then the smell of something baking – a pie, maybe, or a tray of cookies – came sailing out into the room, as if someone had opened an oven door.
Mr. Deener put his hand on his forehead and stood up. Then he moaned and sat back down, sinking low into his chair, so that his chin was pushed down into his chest and his eyes were squished into his cheeks again. “A dusty clod,” he said. “It’s what I deserve!”
“Best not to start him up, Mrs. Barlow,” Aunt Flo said to the flour woman. Polly put a hand on Mr. Deener’s shoulder. “You won’t have to eat clods,” she said to him. “I’ll find you something nice. We’ll find him something nice, won’t we?”
John said, “Of course we will.”
And Danny said, “Sure.”
“Cake?” Mr. Deener asked.
“Of course there’ll be cake,” said Aunt Flo.
“And pies, I don’t doubt?” Mr. Deener sat up straighter, cheering up at the idea of pies and cakes.
“He’s starting up!” cried Aunt Flo. “Catch him!”
Mrs. Barlow rolled her eyes and slapped the wooden spoon into her open hand, as if she were about to conk him on the head with it. Then she turned around and tramped away toward the kitchen.
Mr. Deener’s fingers drummed on the arms of his chair. His face was suddenly wild, like the face of a starving man looking in at a restaurant window. “Cookies!” he said. “And bread and cupcakes and honeycakes and curli-que rolls. And cinnamon twists and puffo-sweets and doughy delights and chocolate pinwheels!”
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