The Magic Spectacles

by James P. Blaylock

  “That was close,” Polly said to John and Danny as the three of them went off to look for sticks and rocks. She carried the doughnut basket with her. “We nearly lost him that time.”

  “Did he used to be better?” John asked.

  “Heaps,” Polly said. “You should have seen him last week.”

  “Last week!” Danny said. “You mean he’s going to pieces that fast?”

  “Just as fast as he can,” Polly said.

  They gathered sticks near the forest’s edge and found rocks along the stream bed. “Let’s hurry,” John said, looking at the fog that drifted toward them through the woods.

  Mr. Deener seemed to be caught up in his work now. He handed John a jar of mint tea and gave the jar of pond water to Danny “Pile up some rocks over there,” he said, gesturing in two or three different directions at once. “Set the jars on the rocks. And be careful. Glass has a high degree of break-ability.” He nodded seriously and said, “Science taught me that.”

  “About here?” John called. He and Danny stood on either side of where the window should be. Ahab ran from one of them to the other, then ran over and sniffed the doughnut basket, then ran to the edge of the woods and barked at the trees.

  “That’s right,” Mr. Deener said without looking up. “That’s perfect. Ship shape. Spot on. Okey-dokey. Unscrew the lids please. That’s right. Now, Polly, take this jar of glass chips and carry it over yonder, in the direction of the moon.”

  Polly followed his instructions, ending up a little way to the east of the invisible window. “That’s it,” Mr. Deener called to her. “That’s the ticket. Stand ready to hoist it into the moonlight!”

  Hurriedly, he shoved the ends of the forked sticks into the ground and set the saucers into the forks, lining them up with the big glass lens, then standing back and looking at them over his thumb, like an artist. John and Danny walked back over and stood near Mr. Deener. Now that he was actually working, he didn’t seem at all confused or tired or even hungry. John almost believed that he would find the window. Even Danny looked hopeful.

  “Glass magic,” Mr. Deener said, “always requires moonlight, and plenty of it. Moonlight and magic – it’s all a matter of reflection, like looking into the water and seeing your own face. Sometimes you look pretty good sometimes you look like an ape. Do you follow me?”

  “I guess so,” Danny said, bending over to look through the big lens. “What about the cheese?”

  “What do you mean?” Mr. Deener asked, picking the cheese up.

  “What do we do with it?”

  “Why, we eat it!” Mr. Deener said, then broke off a piece and fed it to Ahab before dropping it back into the nearly-empty basket.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Ready,” John and Danny said at once.

  Mr. Deener snatched off the tablecloth and waved it at Polly who held her jar full of glass chips in the air. John and Danny watched through the big glass lens, waiting for the window to appear over the meadow.

  Pale moonlight drifted out of the sky like soft snow. It swirled together in a little pinwheel above the jar that Polly held. The jar grew brighter and brighter, the light spinning faster and faster above it. Then, with a sound something like a wave washing across a sandy beach, the spinning moonlight shot straight through the jar and out the bottom, colored pink and green and blue by the glass chip.

  Like lanterns suddenly switched on, the jars of pond water and tea glowed with colored moonlight that illuminated the three china plates, one after another, turning them pale green like seawater.

  “Anything there?” Mr. Deener asked.

  “Not yet,” John said.

  “Of course not,” Mr Deener said, raising one finger into the air. “We’ve constructed a primary lens. Telescopic science requires us to provide a secondary lens, purely for the purpose of reflection.”

  He picked up the coffee grinder then, pulling out a little wooden drawer from the bottom. After setting the grinder down, he licked his finger and held it up in the air. “Wind out of the east,” he said, stepping forward a few pace. “Look sharp!”

  Then he dumped the wooden drawer upside down and poured out the crushed spectacles lens. And at that instant, as if illuminated by the glass dust, Mrs. Owlswick’s window floated over the meadow again, hanging in the sky like a framed picture.

  Chapter 4: The Battle on the Meadow

  The window was open, just as they had left it yesterday evening. John could see the bunk beds against the far wall, the circus poster, the bookshelf above the bed. It was all so clear that he could almost read the titles on the spines of the books.

  Danny stood up and ran toward it, but after a few steps he slowed and stopped. The window was getting dim, fading away as if it had been painted with water on a summer sidewalk. The glass dust from the coffee grinder whirled around and around like a pale green wind devil, and then went racing off across the meadow. By then the window was gone.

  John stood up and stepped away from the magnifying lens, and Polly lowered the jar of glass chips and walked slowly back toward where Mr. Deener was lifting the lid from the doughnut basket.

  “Mrs. Barlow has insisted that I eat a number of these glazed doughnuts,” Mr. Deener said, helping himself. “I suggest you do too.”

  John could see that Danny wasn’t happy with the experiment. He looked as he had that morning when he was talking about going home through the cave. “At least we know it’s still there,” John said.

  “Certainly it’s still there,” said Mr. Deener. “If you open a window it stays open until someone shuts it.” He took a bite of doughnut – not like a pig, but very daintily, like he was eating a finger sandwich at a high tea. The doughnuts were all his now. There was no rush.

  “We kind of wanted to see if we could get through it,” Danny said, very slowly, as if to make sure that Mr. Deener understood him, and would quit talking nonsense.

  “The moon is a window,” Mr. Deener said, “gesturing with a doughnut. “Imagine that this doughnut is the sky. Now, the hole in the middle of the doughnut is the moon. From the Earth there seems to be a face on it, because actually there’s a man looking through it, like this. …”

  He held the doughnut about a foot in front of his face and looked at them through it. Then he ate the doughnut and licked the sugar off his fingers. “The trick is simply to get to the moon,” he said, “which is no farther away than your window is, and to crawl through it to the other side.” He pulled doughnuts out of the basket, looked at them, and put them back, as if searching for just the right one, and all the time he talked and talked – about doors and windows, about the moon ladder, about crawling in through the moon‘s ear with a flashlight and a picnic basket full of doughnuts.

  None of this talk was making Danny any happier. He looked at John and made the pinwheel sign. And just as he did, there was a loud thwack and the big glass lens shattered into pieces. There was the sound of goblin laughter from the woods behind them, and a rock whizzed past John’s ear, smashing a jar of pond water. A shadow drifted across the sun. The fog had come up.

  There were goblins on the meadow.

  “My weapon!” Mr. Deener shouted, just as a rock knocked a doughnut out of his hands and into the weeds.

  Four goblins were just then picking the soap gun. Three of them held onto it and a fourth pulled the trigger, spraying pink soap bubbles at Ahab as he danced back and forth barking. He leaped away, still barking, and more goblins came out of the woods, gobbling and waving and making the glasses sign with their fingers and yanking on each others’ hair and clothes. One of them picked up a stone and threw it at Mr. Deener. Another pitched a rock at one of Mrs. Barlow’s saucers, smashing it to bits.

  Danny picked up a rock to throw it back, but Mr. Deener got in his way, shouting, “Here now!” and striding toward the goblins like a mad school teacher on a playground. “Give that gun to me right now!” he yelled. “This instant!”

  The goblins hunched forward like fire
men holding a fire hose. There was the peculiar whooshing sound of the soap gun going off, and a spray of pink bubbles shot out of the barrel. Mr. Deener threw up his hands to keep the soap out of his face, and the goblins ran toward him carrying the gun, hosing him down again and shrieking and laughing. Danny picked up a rock and threw it back. It hit one of the soap gun goblins in the chest.

  Mr. Deener yelled just then and sat down hard on the meadow grass, as if the rock had hit him. He was pink and dripping with frothy soap, and he sat there trying to clean it off his face and out of his eyes. John hit another one of the soap gun goblins with a rock, this time in the arm, and Mr. Deener yelled “Ouch!” and grabbed his shoulder. “No throwing stones!” he yelled. “No more stones!”

  The goblins ran, carrying the soap gun toward the woods, where the fog was so thick now that the trees were just shadows. At the edge of the stream they dropped the gun and picked up big rocks. Mr. Deener stood up and ran toward them, waving his arms. “Wait!” he shouted. “Don’t!” But he was too late. The goblins lifted the rocks over their heads and then smashed them down onto the soap gun.

  (Chapter 4 continues after illustration)

  “By golly!” Mr. Deener shouted. And with a wild cry he grabbed up a rock nearly as big as his head and threw it as hard as he could. It flew about six feet and landed in the weeds. The goblins laughed and laughed and threw handfuls of stones, half of the goblins rushing at Mr. Deener and the other half staying behind to beat the soap gun to pieces.

  John and Danny and Polly ran to help him. Goblins pulled Mr. Deener’s hair and hauled at his legs, snapping his suspenders and heaping dirt on the top of his bald head. John pulled a goblin away, and immediately it grabbed onto his jacket, gobbling and hooting. Two more leaped at Danny just as Ahab ran into the middle of them, barking into their faces.

  There were too many of them, and all of them seemed to have gone crazy. Half of them were capering around on their hands and knees, chasing Ahab and barking. Five or six clung to Mr. Deener’s back, and kicked him in the ribs as if he were a horse that wouldn’t run. More goblins appeared in the fog at the edge of the woods, and John could see that a fire was burning back in among the trees.

  Suddenly Polly ran into the middle of all of them, carrying the picnic basket. She reached inside, pulled out a glazed doughnut, and threw it onto the ground. Then she threw another into the air. And then another and another until Mrs. Barlow’s doughnuts rained down on their heads.

  The goblins fell silent. They looked at the doughnuts for a moment as if they couldn’t quite believe it. And then, in a mad rush, they forgot about Mr. Deener and everything else and went scrambling over the ground, fighting and gouging and clawing and tearing doughnuts out of each other’s hands.

  Mr. Deener crawled into the middle of the stream and sat down, washing his hands in the water. He didn’t pay any attention at all to the goblins or the doughnuts or anything else. It was as if his mind had gone to the moon.

  Danny picked up the soap gun. The barrel was twisted at a funny angle where it had been slammed with a rock, so to aim it at the goblins he had to point it nearly at the stream. John and Polly and Ahab backed away, and the goblins wrestled with each other in a big knot, mashing doughnuts into the grass.

  First one and then another of them noticed the soap gun and where it was pointed. They began picking up flattened doughnuts and running away with them toward the woods. Within moments the whole crowd of them was gone, and it was quiet on the foggy meadow again.

  And right then the barrel fell away from the rest of the soap gun. Just like that it thumped into the grass in front of Danny’s feet. Pink slime poured out of the inside of the gun, and Danny dropped it and stepped away so that it wouldn’t get on his shoes.

  Mr. Deener uttered a heavy sigh and stood up, shivering with cold and soaked through with soap and creek water. He poked at the pieces of the soap gun with the toe of his shoe. Then he picked up a smashed doughnut out of the dirt, and then he shook his head sadly and said, “When Mrs. Barlow finds out about the plates, this is all I’ll have to eat.”

  “Nonsense,” Polly said to him. “You didn’t break the plates. We’ll tell her the truth.”

  “The truth!” Mr. Deener said. “I don’t want any more of the truth. This is the only truth!” He held up the smashed doughnut. Dirt and bits of grass clung to it. “Alas!” he cried. “Don’t worry about me any longer, Pol. I won’t suffer too much.”

  Then he started to take a bite out of the doughnut, or pretended as if he was going to, but Polly grabbed it away from him and threw it like a saucer into the woods.

  He shrugged, as if he didn’t mind eating trash, as if, perhaps, it was the only thing left that he was fit to eat. “Alas,” he said again, and then turned around and lumped off down the path that led toward the house on the hill, his wet pants sticking to his legs, leaving the rest of them to pick up the pieces of glass magic on the meadow.

  Chapter 5: Mr. Deener Sets Out

  The moonlit night was windy and loud. Leaves scraped against the laboratory windows, and John could hear the slow creak, creak, creak of moving trees outside. The air in the laboratory smelled like duty marbles. There were pieces of the moon ladder all over the place – boxes full of glass fishing floats and miles of rope tied into a ladder with rungs every foot or so, all of it heaped into enormous straw baskets.

  Mr. Deener stood on top of a tall wooden step stool in the middle of the floor, weaving holly and ivy vines into the top of the moon ladder, which floated in the air as if it were hanging by a sky hook. Polly held onto a string that was tied to the top rung of the ladder. The string was pulled tight in her hand like the string of a kite.

  John hoped that Danny would come downstairs. He was up in the bedroom sulking, although what he said was that he wanted to read a book. After what happened on the meadow that afternoon, he said he didn’t care anymore about Mr. Deener’s magic. He hated magic. John said that it wasn’t the magic that mattered – what mattered, somehow, was helping Mr. Deener. And Danny had said that he was through helping Mr. Deener. It was time Mr. Deener learned how to help himself.

  John looked up toward the ceiling. It seemed impossibly far away. There was a round skylight in it, like a watch crystal, and the full moon shone through it. The moon seemed to be getting bigger by the moment, as if it were slowly drifting toward the earth.

  “We’ll use vine magic to initiate propulsion,” Mr. Deener said. “Certain vines and shrubs climb toward moonlight. Lunar moths ride to the moon on rafts woven out of pieces of ivy vine. That’s a little-known fact.”

  “Sounds like a lot of dad-blamed gas to me, Deener,” Mrs. Barlow said. She stood with her arms folded, holding a paper sack in one hand.

  “That’s right,” Mr. Deener said. “They use helium gas when they can get it. Sometimes they try to fly there without any help at all, but the space winds blow the dust off their wings, and they’ve got to turn back. That’s a fact. Thirteen percent of the particulate matter making up rainbows is dust from the wings of moths and butterflies. Hand me up one of those floats, Mr. Kraken.”

  John picked up one of the glass balls and started to give it to Mr. Deener, who said, “Not a blue one, a red one. That’s it. That’s the ticket.” He took a red float from John and hung it into a little net bag that was woven into the rope of the ladder. Every few feet there were two more nets, right opposite each other. “Red glass is what you want for moon travel,” he said, nodding seriously. “But there aren’t many red floats in the boxes, so save them up. Portion them out. They’re made with melted gold, believe it or not, boiled with holly berries and pearl oysters. Let’s have another one.”

  John found a second red float and handed it to Mr. Deener, who hung it in the net opposite the first float, and then shouted, “Cast her loose, Polly.”

  Polly let go of the string, and the top of the ladder rose into the air toward the ceiling. It went up into the darkness ten or twelve feet, quickly and silently, an
d then stopped. Mr. Deener hung two more floats in the next pair of nets and it rose again, up toward where the moon filled nearly the whole skylight now.

  “The higher it climbs,” Mr. Deener said, stepping onto the ladder and holding on, “the more it wants to fall. Load the nets with floats, Mr. Kraken. Don’t miss any, or heaven knows where we’ll end up. And Polly. …”

  “Yes,” Polly said.

  “Will you sit with. …” He nodded toward the door and the stairs beyond. Clearly he meant the Sleeper, who had come in from fishing only about a half hour ago, walking in his sleep, his bedroom slippers covered with river dust. “I don’t expect trouble,” Mr. Deener said, “but…”

  “But you didn’t expect trouble with the firefly lamp either,” Mrs. Barlow said, “and you blew the top of the shed off with it and nearly burnt the house down.”

  “We’ll take care of the Sleeper,” Aunt Flo said.

  “I’ll go up there now,” Polly said, and then she left the room in a hurry and climbed the stairs.

  For the first time it occurred to John that something might happen to Mr. Deener. Maybe it was a dangerous thing to try to climb to the moon on a rope ladder. John didn’t like climbing any kind of ladder. He didn’t even like climbing over fences. There was no way he was “going home by way of the moon,” as Mr. Deener had put it. He wasn’t going anywhere without Danny. But then of course Mr. Deener couldn’t really be climbing to the moon anyway. The moon was 252,970 miles away. There weren’t enough baskets on earth to hold that much rope ladder.

  “We’re ready,” said Mr. Deener and he climbed down to the floor.

  “I suppose we are,” said Aunt Flo. “Please don’t hurt yourself. We need you, you know.”

  “Nobody needs an old thing like me,” he said. “But I don’t plan to hurt myself. I’ve told you, although I don’t at all think you believe me or understand, that I mean to come back after all of you. I won’t abandon you.”