What We Found in the Corn Maze and How It Saved a Dragon

by Henry Clark

  I woke with a start.

  The clock on the nightstand said 11:45.

  My phone, on the bed next to me, was glowing the weird magenta color that had appeared on Drew’s phone before he’d restarted it. I squinted at it groggily.

  “Ring, ring,” it said.

  I sat bolt upright and flicked the phone away from me. I wasn’t ready to answer it. The last time a phone had said Ring, ring and Drew had answered, the Help Line person had hung up on him, claiming she would answer only one question. I didn’t want to make the same mistake.

  “Ring, ring.”

  I had no idea what my question should be.

  I picked up the phone gingerly between my thumb and forefinger, as if it were a mousetrap with a dead mouse dangling from it, and walked over to my desk. The screen read UNKNOWN CALLER. If it rang two more times without being answered, the call would go to voice mail.

  “Ring, ring.”

  I jabbed the Answer button.

  “Hello,” I said, being careful not to make it sound like a question.

  “Hello.” The voice was the same woman who had been saying Ring, ring. “Thank you for using the Congroo Help Line. Please listen carefully, as our options have changed. They change on a daily basis. And there are always fewer of them. It’s getting scary. Press One if you wish to ask a question. Press Two if you wish to make a statement. Press the side of your head with your index finger if you are thinking.”

  I self-consciously pressed the side of my head with my finger.

  “Press Three if you wish to hear the options again.”

  I pressed Three.

  “Not really.” The voice sounded annoyed. “I refuse to repeat myself. If you couldn’t understand the options the first time, you’re not the person I should be talking to.”

  I pressed One and asked, “How do I do magic?”

  “Ah. Good. Now we’re getting somewhere. Listen carefully. This will be in the form of a rhyme. Rhymes are mnemonics.”

  I started to say “What?” but bit my tongue.

  “Here we go,” continued the Congroo Help Line. “Ahem. When the time comes, you will see, a magician you will be—as easy as one-two-three.”

  I waited for the rest of it. The silence stretched.

  “That’s it.” I made sure my voice didn’t rise with a question mark at the end.

  “That’s it,” agreed the Congroo Help Line.

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “Yes, it does.”

  “It isn’t even good poetry.”

  “It does what it set out to do.”

  “It’s nonsense. ‘When the time comes, you will see, a magician you will be—as easy as one-two-three.’” I examined each word as I said it. I was right. It didn’t answer my question.

  “There,” said the Help Line. “I told you it was mnemonic.”

  “Moronic is right,” I agreed.

  “Mnemonic. Something that helps you remember. Like Roy G. Biv. The letters in the name Roy G. Biv help you remember the names of the first seven rulers of Congroo: Ravenel, Orion, Yolanda, George, Blaine, Irksome, and Viridis. Irksome, Congroo’s first-ever oracle, was renowned for her Seven Insights, of which Popcorn is perhaps the most infamous. Many scholars believe Popcorn was intended for a different list entirely, Irksome being the last of our rulers to do her own grocery shopping. So there may only be Six Insights, but we say seven, because seven is a very important number in magic. You might find it beneficial to remember this. Viridis, while not as famous as Irksome, bred racing dragons and discovered, interestingly, that a dead dragon can be reunited with its anima if the anima is given a jolt. But first, of course, you have to find the anima, and they’re only visible for a short time after the dragon’s death. The other five rulers were pretty dull, but then, they did live seven hundred years ago, when there was a lot less going on. What’s your name?”

  “Uh.” I hesitated, but I couldn’t think of any reason not to give my name to a strange woman who was trying to be helpful, even if she wasn’t very good at it. “Calvin Sapling.”

  “Ah. A tree name. Very strong. Very powerful. I am Delleps. Delleps is spelled backward.”

  “Delleps is what spelled backward?”

  “Sorry. Only one question per call.”

  The click told me I had messed up. I shook the phone angrily, then checked the call log to see if I now had the number of the Congroo Help Line. If I could call back, I could keep calling until all my questions were answered. But the log showed nothing more recent than yesterday.

  I paced the room, sat back down, and wrote out the awful poem she had given me in answer to the question “How do I do magic?” I also wrote down “DELLEPS” in big block letters. She was right. It was spelled backward.

  The clock at my bedside said five past midnight. Modesty had said she’d tried doing magic at 12:34 at night but had discovered it worked only at 12:34 in the afternoon. I decided to double-check. Maybe she had mumbled or her clock had been fast or the room temperature had been wrong. Who knew what might affect the way magic worked?

  I read To Change the Color of a Room out loud and recorded it on my phone. I played it back, caught two places where I’d possibly mispronounced words, and recorded it again, getting my time down from fifty-seven seconds to fifty-one.

  After two more rehearsals, I figured I was ready. I watched the clock, and my hands started to get sweaty the closer it got to 12:34. As soon as the clock changed, I read through the spell. I did it in less than a minute, but the walls stayed the same faded wallpaper pattern of cows in a field that dated back to when the farmhouse was new. I was really sick of those cows.

  So Modesty was right. Magic didn’t work at thirty-four minutes past midnight. I put on my pajamas and crawled under the covers. I was asleep in minutes.

  This time, mercifully, I didn’t dream.

  At 1:20, my eyes popped open, and I scrambled out of bed. I turned on the lamp and reread the note I had made of the Help Line’s answer to my question.

  “When the TIME comes,” I mumbled to myself. Then added, “Easy as ONE-TWO-THREE.”

  I looked at the clock.

  1:21.

  “TIME,” I repeated. “One… twenty-three.”

  I waited. The clock advanced to 1:23. I read the spell again, keeping it to less than a minute and being careful to say all the words correctly, without slouching in my seat, in case posture had anything to do with it.

  I jumped up so fast, I knocked over the chair.

  The room had turned purple.

  CHAPTER 7

  FOUR MORE MINUTES

  My entire room was now a shade of purple that Modesty probably had a special, many-syllabled word for. And it was only the walls, not the switch plates or the moldings or the ceiling. It had been done very professionally.

  I whooped, danced around my fallen chair, and slapped the wall to see if it was wet. It wasn’t, although it did feel a little warm, as if it were running a fever. I set my chair back up, sat down, snatched a pencil, and scribbled:

  12:34

  1:23

  Then I thought for a moment—I pressed my index finger to the side of my head to make it official—and added:

  2:34

  3:45

  4:56

  5:67

  After a moment, I scratched out 5:67, since there was no such time. All the rest were real times that involved consecutive numbers. That, I was guessing, might be the key. Maybe magic was fond of times when numbers appeared in numerical order.

  I’d be able to test that idea three times before the sun came up.

  The first test, coming in a little over an hour, should have been easy to stay awake for, but I caught myself nodding off after twenty minutes. I tried to recite the yarn untangling spell into my phone, but reading phrases like “Mantong tagalongs shooby-doo nibble; mishegoss double-cross snackie-poo kibble” soon had my eyelids drooping.

  I forced myself awake and set my alarm for two thirty. I was
grateful that my parents had their bedroom on the ground floor and that Glen was away at school; I didn’t need anybody knocking on my door asking what the commotion was. I nodded off again, but the alarm did its job, waking me at two thirty. I got up and paced back and forth with my eye on the time.

  2:34.

  I started to recite the color-changing spell and tripped up within the first few seconds, saying “nasty chums” instead of “ghastly crumbs,” and then I messed it up again when I started over. I groaned as I realized I wouldn’t be able to say the spell within sixty seconds.

  Then I realized… maybe I didn’t have to.

  I seized my phone, found my earlier recording of the spell, and played it, sliding my finger along the playback line to speed it up. My recorded voice went up high and became very fast. I sounded like a chipmunk. The recording ended with ten seconds to spare.

  The room turned school bus yellow.

  Not my favorite color.

  But still.

  I had done it. I had figured out how to squeeze more than seven hundred words into a single minute. For some reason, we had all assumed a magic spell had to be spoken by a living person. A witch. A wizard. A sorcerer’s apprentice. I had discovered it worked just fine with a wizard’s cell phone.

  I had also discovered there was more than one minute each day when magic worked: 12:34. 1:23. 2:34.

  I was betting it would work at 3:45.

  And 4:56.

  The five minutes each day when time was told with consecutive numbers.

  Figuring it out had been as easy as one-two-three.

  I didn’t see why, if magic worked at these times early in the morning, it shouldn’t work when the exact same times rolled around in the afternoon. Was magic like my aunt Lucy? She called herself “a morning person” and was full of energy before noon, but she fizzled out and fell asleep if she took you to a matinee movie. So maybe magic had more energy in the AM than in the PM. But then, why did it work at thirty-four minutes past noon and not at thirty-four minutes past midnight?

  I needed to talk to Modesty.

  I tried to find her number on my computer. There was no listing, which was just as well, since I probably would have called her then and there at three AM, a time she thought of as creepy. I decided I would have to go over in person once the sun was up.

  At 3:45, I played a recording of the coin-gathering spell at double speed, whizzing through it in twenty-six seconds. I sat back and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  I realized I should have stuck with the color-changing spell. At least with that one, you knew immediately if you had succeeded. Gathering lost coins didn’t work if you were in a place where nobody ever lost coins. My family wasn’t the type to misplace money. We pretty much knew where every penny was.

  I got up, planning to set my alarm for 4:51 and get an hour’s sleep before the final Magic Minute of the night, when I heard three tiny taps on my bedroom door.

  I froze with my hand outstretched toward the doorknob. The house, as far as I knew, wasn’t haunted, but it was 150 years old and maybe, just maybe, somebody doing magic in the attic might have awakened something.

  Then three coins slid sideways under the bottom of the door, righted themselves, and rolled across the floor to fall at my feet. I relaxed and picked them up.

  I was richer by a 1952 dime, a 2012 quarter, and what I assumed was a 1913 nickel because the back of it said V CENTS. I knew V was the Roman numeral for five. That one, I figured, must have been stuck between floorboards for a century or so. My jeans were hanging off a knob on my dresser. I slipped all three coins into the pocket where I kept the rest of my change.

  At 4:56, I turned my room bright pink.

  I cringed. The color was so intense it hurt my eyes, and it would probably be even worse once sunlight started streaming in. I pulled down the window shade, climbed into bed, dragged the covers over my head, and slept.

  Five hours later, Drew and I were standing on Modesty Brooker’s front porch.

  CHAPTER 8

  SEVENTH DAUGHTER

  The Brooker house wasn’t completely identical to my family’s place. It was dark green while ours was gray, and their porch didn’t wrap around to the back. But otherwise, the house was the same size and shape and had the same arrangement of windows. I had never been closer to it than the street. For some reason, standing at the front door now made me nervous.

  I had bicycled over to Drew’s first. He hadn’t answered my calls, and it turned out his phone was messed up. The words FATAL ERROR 678 were the only things that appeared on its screen. Falling from a hundred feet hadn’t done it any good.

  “You’re going to Modesty’s?” Drew had grabbed a hoodie and pushed me out the door. “She owes me a phone. Let’s go.”

  I didn’t tell him anything about what I had discovered the night before. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to—I was bursting with it—but I figured it would be better if I waited and told him and Modesty at the same time. All I said was that I had something important to discuss with them both.

  I rang the Brookers’ doorbell. A dog barked off in the distance, and one of Disarray’s many church bells announced a Sunday service. But the house itself was quiet. I rang the bell again. I was about to knock when Drew and I heard somebody coming downstairs. I expected Modesty’s mother or one of her sisters. Instead, Modesty opened the door. She was wearing her baggy smock with many pockets and splotches of paint on it. A blue smudge on her cheek was possibly cerulean. She didn’t look happy to see us.

  “What do you two want?” she asked, gripping the door as if at any moment she might slam it.

  “A new cell phone,” Drew chirped before I could stop him.

  “No, we don’t,” I said, putting a hand in front of Drew’s face. The door wasn’t open as much as it had been a split second earlier, and the gap was getting narrower.

  “We’re here to apologize again,” I said, sounding like a sped-up voice recording, “and I’ve found out there’s more than one minute each day when magic works.”

  The door, which was almost closed, reopened the width of Modesty’s frown. I nodded encouragingly. The door opened another inch.

  “You’d better not be joking,” she said darkly.

  “We’re not. We really do want to apologize. I’m sorry we tricked you yesterday, and I admit threatening to use video of you without your permission was wrong, maybe even bullying, even though the video didn’t exist, and I’m hoping you can forgive us and we can be friends.”

  “Mmmphff,” Drew added, my hand still across his mouth.

  “That’s not what I meant when I said you’d better not be joking.” Modesty reset the door back to frown width, which seemed to be the default.

  “There are five minutes each day when magic works,” I said.

  The door opened wide enough for Modesty to take a small step forward and join us on the porch.

  “Oh… all right,” she said grudgingly. “I accept your apology.”

  “You broke my phone,” Drew announced, holding it up to her.

  Modesty scowled. “What’s wrong with it?”

  “What’s wrong with it? It’s—” Drew turned the phone around. The screen showed the correct time and Drew’s usual background photo of Myron, his pet hamster.

  “Oh,” he said, deflating. “It got better.”

  Modesty sat down in the center of her porch swing and stretched out, placing one hand on each of the swing’s arms in a clear invitation to us to find someplace else to sit. Not that next to her on the swing would have been my first choice. Drew plopped into a wicker chair. I leaned against the porch railing.

  “Which five minutes?” asked Modesty.

  I described everything I had done during the previous night, from my conversation with Delleps—“turns out Irksome’s this woman who lived hundreds of years ago”—to my first successful experiments in magic—“my room’s still this hideous, eye-burning pink”—and by the end of a very dramatic pres
entation—I did a particularly nice job acting out the scene where the three coins showed up like little round ghosts at my door—Modesty was sitting on the edge of her swing. Her eyes were bright.

  “So this means,” she said breathlessly, “not only can we try out every single spell in the book, but we’ve got four more times each day when we can do it!”

  I liked that she was saying we. It meant she had actually forgiven us and was thinking of us as friends. Or at least fellow researchers in the growing field of magic.

  “It’s just too bad four of the Magic Minutes are in the middle of the night,” I said.

  “Hey!” Drew jumped up. “What about nine ten? Or ten eleven? Eleven twelve? Twelve thirteen? Those are all clock times, and they’re all consecutive numbers. Are they Magic Minutes?”

  Modesty looked at her watch. “It’s ten oh eight now. We’ve got three minutes until ten eleven. C’mon!”

  She bolted from the swing, and we ran after her as she shot through the front door. The rug in the entry hall skidded sideways as we galloped over it, and we managed to go up four steps on the staircase before she halted, turned, and caught us by our sleeves.

  “No.” She spun us around and faced us back the way we had come. “Wait for me in the parlor. I’ll only be a sec.”

  We obediently trotted down to the space that, in my house, we called the living room. A central table had a half-finished jigsaw puzzle on it, and the pile of ash in the fireplace had a few glowing embers. There was no TV, no radio, no computer. No video games. It didn’t surprise me she didn’t call it the “living room.”

  “Holy cow,” said Drew, looking at a photograph on the mantel. “She’s got six sisters.”

  “I’m the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter,” Modesty said, sweeping into the room with the three-ring binder. “Do you know what that means?”

  “You can’t get a word in edgewise?” Drew guessed.

  “No. And that’s sexist, even if it happens to be true in this case. Being the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter means I’m specially gifted when it comes to unseen forces.”

  “What unseen forces?” I asked.