The Magic Spectacles

by James P. Blaylock

  “Of course not,” Aunt Flo said. “I’m only asking you to be careful, and not give yourself a knock on the head.”

  Mrs. Barlow cleared her throat loudly, as if she had something important to say and wouldn’t put it off any longer. “Well, Deener,” she said, “I guess you’re going and that’s it. You won’t see reason. Take these glazeys, then. You’ll be hungry before you’re through. There’s more magic in a bag of doughnuts than in all this rubbish on the floor, and if you find. …”

  But she didn’t finish the sentence. Something seemed to catch in her throat. “My heavens,” she said, and she gave Mr. Deener the paper bag full of doughnuts. Then she turned around and rushed from the room.

  Mr. Deener stood there staring after her, his mouth open in wonder. For a moment it looked almost as if he would follow her. In the silence John could hear the wind crashing out in the night. The doors and windows shook, as if ghosts were rattling the knobs. Mr. Deener tucked the end of the paper bag through his belt and started hauling rope ladder out of the first of the baskets.

  “Never two of the same color together, Mr. Kraken,” he said. “Not unless they’re red.”

  John dropped two floats into the nets on the moon ladder, and it rose a few feet toward the ceiling. He wished Danny was here to help. The ladder traveled quickly. He would have to hurry to keep up. Mr. Deener stepped aboard the moving ladder, and without saying another word he disappeared upward, into the shadows.

  “I’ll just go see to Mrs. Barlow,” Aunt Flo said. “There’s no telling when he’ll be back. Let’s hope he finds what he’s looking for up there.”

  She left then, and John was alone in the laboratory. For five minutes he picked up glass floats and set them in the nets, and the ladder climbed and climbed and climbed until a half dozen baskets lay empty on the floor. John hauled another box of floats across the floor and kicked the empty baskets aside, hurrying to fill the nets before they rose out of reach. Above him there was nothing but darkness and the immense white circle of the moon, patchy with the shadows of mountains and river valleys.

  The moon ladder rose ever higher. John worked steadily through a third box of floats. His arms were tired, and his back was sore from bending over and straightening up. He thought about Danny, reading a book by the fireplace, but thinking about it just made him mad. He wondered what would happen if he stopped filling the nets. Would the ladder simply stop climbing? Would it fall? Mr. Deener had said something about it, but John couldn’t remember what.

  He picked up two red floats and slipped them into the nets, and just when he did there was a shout from upstairs. It sounded like Danny’s voice. There was silence for a moment and then the sound of glass breaking, followed by goblin laughter and the patter of feet running across the wooden floorboards of the rooms overhead.

  Chapter 6: What Became of the Moon Ladder

  There was the sound of glass breaking again, as if someone had thrown a rock through a window. The wind howled outside, and the house shook. Ahab ran past the open door of the laboratory, followed by three goblins carrying wooden spoons and potato mashers.

  “Hey!” John yelled, and he nearly dropped the floats and ran out into the hall. But just then Danny ran past, chasing Ahab and the goblins, and there was the sound of a sort of avalanche from the direction of the kitchen, followed by Mrs. Barlow’s voice, yelling. Goblin cackling filled the house, upstairs and down.

  Meanwhile the ladder kept rising out of the baskets, and by the time John turned around again, two of the string nets had slid away into the air without floats in them and were out of reach.

  “Darn!” John shouted, trying to stuff a float into an empty net, but he fumbled the float and it fell onto the ground and broke, and he had to reach into the box for another one as two more empty nets rose above his head. What had Mr. Deener said? – the higher it climbed, the more it wanted to fall. …

  He looked up. He could see Mr. Deener now, jut a dark speck against the white moon, like a flea on a lamp.

  The ladder stopped dead. John grabbed two floats. He would have to climb the ladder himself and fill the empty nets; otherwise Mr. Deener was stuck halfway to the moon. He tucked the floats into his jacket pockets and started climbing. The ladder swayed back and forth. He didn’t look down at the floor, but stared straight ahead, paying attention to each rung in the ladder, holding on tightly and wondering if his weight would yank the ladder right out of the sky.

  Finally the empty nets were even with his eyes. Very carefully he looked down. The floor with its baskets and boxes was far below him. One by one he dug the floats out of his pockets and slid them into the nets, and straightaway the ladder began to rise again. He started back down as quickly as he could, but it was like walking the wrong way on an escalator, and he rose into the air almost as fast as he climbed down.

  “Danny!” he yelled, and listened for a moment to the sound of banging and shouting. They wouldn’t hear him. He was stuck, and would have to wait till the ladder stopped again.

  But just then the laboratory window slammed open with a bang. Wind gusted through it, blowing the curtains at a crazy angle. The room swirled with flying leaves, and wind caught the ladder above the basket and blew it back toward the hall door.

  A goblin looked in through the open window. He tip-toed into the room followed by more goblins. They made clucking noises and looked around. One of them picked up three fishing floats and began to juggle. When he looked up he saw John. He pointed, gobbling with laughter, and let the floats drop to the floor where they broke to pieces.

  The ladder had stopped again, but by now John was high above the floor. He didn’t know how high, but the goblins looked very small. He held on tight to the ladder. One of the goblins picked up a glass float from a box, looked at it for a moment, and then threw it him. It flew past him, falling to the floor and shattering.

  The goblins shouted happily, and another one picked up a float and threw it straight at the wall. They all roared with laughter and excitement when it broke. One of them grabbed the bottom-most part of the ladder and held on while two of the others gave him a push. He swung across the floor, nearly to the open window. John held on with both hands as the ladder swayed back and forth and round and round.

  He felt it slip from the sky just then, and he dropped three or four feet before it caught again and held. The goblin hanging from the ladder began to climb, hand over hand, grinning up toward John and babbling nonsense that sounded like cartoon baby talk. He had a fish skeleton stuck in his hair, and his teeth were filed to sharp points. As soon as he got to the first two floats, he yanked one of them out of its net. Then he threw it at his friends below, exploding it against the floor.

  The ladder jolted downward, as if someone had jerked on it. The goblin reached for the second float.

  “Don’t!” John yelled at him, and started down the ladder.

  “Don’t, don’t, don’t!” the goblins yelled, dancing back and forth on the floor. One of them threw a float at the goblin on the ladder, who pulled the second float out of its net and threw it back at him.

  The ladder jerked downward again just as the goblins on the floor began to climb it. One of them made the glasses sign with his hands and fell straight off the ladder onto the pile of rope ladder.

  The moon loomed above, big and bright white now, as if they were all in the bottom of a deep well with the moon settled over it like a lid. It was close, as if it had come down to meet Mr. Deener part way. Shapes moved across its face, like shadow pictures on a movie screen, or like the moving eyes on the clinker flower in Mr. Deener’s garden.

  The goblins on the ground began to whip the ladder around as if they were shaking out a rug. John lurched backward, off balance, the rope jerking out of his hand. He grabbed for it wildly, but his fingers closed on air. He spun around, the ladder twirling dizzily. His feet slipped off the rungs, and he fell.

  The crowd of goblins seemed to rush upward toward him, and before he even had time to shout,
he slammed down into a half-full basket of rope, smashing the straw sides of the basket and rolling off onto the floor, knocking the little men over in a wild tangle of arms and legs.

  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.

  Chapter 7: The Sleeper Floats Away, Nearly

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

  Chapter 8: Someone Steals the Bag of Memories

  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.”