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

by Henry Clark

  Drew and I looked at each other.

  “I really hate this hat,” he said. And dove in after her.

  I took a last look around the kitchen, for one split second making eye contact with the soon-to-be-extinct uakari in the SAVE THE RAIN FORESTS poster; then I ducked my head, plunged through the fridge—

  —and found myself in another world.

  CHAPTER 11

  THE VIEW FROM THE FIRE TOWER

  I staggered into six inches of fresh snow that concealed a sheet of ice and slid across the width of a balcony. I hit a stone wall at the balcony’s edge that was a little too low for a kid who was a little too tall, and I almost fell a hundred feet to my death.

  Welcome to Congroo.

  I flailed my arms like windmills, got my center of gravity back over the building, and was able to backpedal a step. No one had seemed to notice my plight. Modesty and Drew were forty feet to my right, and Preffy was ten feet farther, his ear pressed to a door at the far end of the balcony.

  I pulled the mittens Modesty had loaned me out of the pockets of her dad’s jacket and wiggled into them. If Pre had been hiding on this balcony for more than a few minutes, I could see why it had taken an infusion of peanut-butter-chicken soup to revive him. The cold drilled its way into your bones.

  I spun and faced the wall, expecting to see the back of the refrigerator. Instead, I saw solid-looking stone with snow clinging to it, and my heart began to race. I reached out, and the tip of the mitten vanished. I leaned forward and found myself staring into Modesty’s kitchen. The cat, who had returned to her spot staring up at the fridge, took one look at my face peering down at her from the center of a cabbage and ran for her life.

  “Door’s still open,” I announced as I pulled back and watched refrigerator shelves disappear behind solid rock.

  I slid along the ice until I reached Drew and Modesty. Drew immediately turned to me and said, “It’s the view from the fire tower.”

  I looked out.

  The landscape was gray, as if all the life had been sucked out of it. The trees for miles around appeared dead and withered. Brown grass stuck up out of dirty snow, and the sky was crowded with the darkest clouds I had ever seen, even darker than the ones that had tricked me into trying to save the wheat crop from a nonexistent hailstorm. On a hill in the far distance sat the rocky ruins of what might once have been a castle, and a little closer, poking above the trees, were the spires of three gloomy buildings and possibly a house, all made out of the same dismal slate-colored stone.

  “It’s the view looking west,” he added as he pulled the turkey hat farther down his head.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said.

  “I can’t help it—my ears are cold.”

  “That’s not what I mean. This isn’t…”

  I faltered. It wasn’t, but it was. It was the view from the west side of the fire tower, which was also the view from my bedroom, only drabber and much more wintery. The spires matched the locations of the church steeples, the rocky ruins stood where the Davy’s Digital Vegetables tower now stood, and the slate-gray house squatted in the same spot as Modesty’s place. I leaned out as far as I dared and looked straight down. Beneath a fresh blanket of snow, crumbling foundations marked the locations where my house, the barn, and the farm stand would have been.

  “It’s like some weird, dying version of Disarray,” I admitted, feeling a chill run up my spine that had nothing to do with the wind.

  “This is the town of Dire,” Pre whispered as he came up behind me. “The ruins on that far hill are the remains of the Abbey of Legerdemain, and that spire on the left is the Wizened Wizards Home.”

  “In our world,” I replied, keeping my voice just as low, “that’s the Unitarian church, and the ruins on the hill are the location of a company called Davy’s Digital Vegetables. And this stone tower we’re standing on is in the exact same place as a forest-fire lookout tower my family owns.”

  “Your family likes to watch forest fires?”

  “It’s… part of an alarm network. Or it was.”

  “Master Index believes our two worlds share the same geography, right down to buildings and streets, even though the details differ from place to place.” Pre stepped away from us and once again pressed his ear to the door at the balcony’s end. “I don’t hear anything,” he reported. “I’m hoping it’s not a trap, but we really should find out what’s become of Master Index. He would have come looking for me if everything was all right. Maybe he did, but I wasn’t here.”

  He glanced around. A hefty icicle was dangling from the overhang of the tower’s roof. He snapped it off and held it in the air like a club. Then the icicle broke, and the biggest chunk bounced off his head. He was left holding a useless stub.

  “I knew I should have brought my baseball bat,” said Modesty.

  Pre tossed aside the ice and pulled open the door.

  “They’re probably gone,” he said, “but until we’re sure, we have to go quietly.”

  The door led to a landing and a corridor that doubled back the way we had come—it was obvious we were now behind the windowless wall that ran along the back of the balcony—and then a side corridor took us to a spiral staircase. Its steps were thick slabs of stone that curled straight down the center of the tower, passing perilously through the middle of each level without any handrails, making us completely visible—and vulnerable—to anybody who might be waiting in the areas we descended through. Fortunately, there was no one.

  There were, however, an awful lot of books.

  “It’s a library!” declared Modesty, in nothing like a whisper, when we had reached the bottom floor and it had become obvious the place was deserted.

  The walls of each level we had passed through had been lined with books, dimly lit by candles flickering in floor stands. The window shutters had been tightly closed, presumably to keep out the cold, but the interior of the tower was barely warmer than the balcony. Freestanding bookcases had been arranged in odd patterns in the middle of the rooms. One of those patterns, on the third floor, had looked a little like Stonehenge.

  “Of course it’s a library,” muttered Pre as he poked his head under a long stone counter that faced a massive pair of doors at the library’s entrance. “Master Index and I are librarians.”

  “You’re not magicians?” asked Drew.

  “Well, everybody here is a magician, of course.” Pre walked briskly past aisles of books, glancing down each. “The three levels of magic are Everybody, Somebody, and Very Few. We can all do some degree of magic. I can get gum out of carpets, heat a teapot by holding it, and make sense of the Dewey decimal system, but the really big stuff is done by specialists.” He reached the end of the aisles, then tilted his head back and bellowed at the ceiling, “Master Index! It worked! The door opened! I brought back scientists! Hello?”

  He held up his hands to prevent us from speaking. We listened to the sound of books sitting on shelves. I glanced around, wondering where the scientists were.

  “They got him,” said Pre, his shoulders drooping. “I was hoping they were only here to give us a warning like the last time.”

  “The Quieters,” I said, to prove I had been paying attention.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “The government agency charged with keeping the peace.”

  “Of course,” said Modesty. “Librarians can be so noisy. The other day, Ms. Bowen shushed me so loudly, you could hear her out in the parking lot.” She folded her arms across her chest and raised an eyebrow at Preffy, clearly challenging him to explain.

  “I was hoping Master Index would be here to do this,” said Pre glumly. “But now I guess it’s up to me.” He stood a little straighter and squared his shoulders. “Put as simply as I can, the world of Congroo is coming to an end. Your world is destroying it. Only you can save us.” He blinked rapidly a couple of times. “I can’t believe I just said that. Half the books in the adventure section have somebody saying, Only you can save us. I never expected
to say it myself. To tell you the truth, I always imagined somebody saying it to me. As if I had the courage.” He looked down at his feet.

  Modesty opened her mouth to say something—possibly Librarians are weird—but before she could speak, a mournful moan came from outside the building. It was long and drawn out, and it sounded like the half-hearted roar of a very depressed lion.

  “Fazam!” said Pre. “I forgot about Phlogiston!”

  CHAPTER 12

  FLYER-FRIES

  Pre bolted for the back of the building. We followed him through a door that returned us to the ice and snow of the outside world. A cobblestone courtyard separated the library tower from a high stone wall with an arched opening in its center; he plunged through the arch, and when we caught up with him, I wasn’t surprised to discover we were in a maze.

  “This is exactly where our farm’s corn maze is,” I told him as we threaded through the stone passages. “Behind our fire tower. My father cuts the corn into a different pattern each year. This year, from above, the maze looks like a dragon. My dad says the dragon’s name is Phlogiston.”

  “That’s no coincidence,” Pre acknowledged without breaking stride. “Sometimes, when conditions are exactly right, people in one Adjacent World can briefly become aware of things in another. Labyrinths can be focal points. So can lakes. Phlogiston is a common name for a female dragon.”

  “Not where we come from.”

  “Nevertheless, our maze isn’t in the shape of a dragon—it has an actual dragon in the center. They like living in the hearts of labyrinths. People in Congroo build mazes in their backyards in the hope of attracting a resident dragon. They’re good luck.”

  “We planted special bushes in our backyard,” Drew piped up. “To attract… um… butterflies.”

  “The dragons can fly in and out of the maze as they please,” continued Pre, apparently unimpressed with Drew’s comparison, “but for some reason, they like it when visitors have to follow a convoluted path to get to them. Fazam!”

  Pre stopped short. Drew crashed into him. We had rounded a corner and discovered a wooden door hanging off a single hinge, partially covering an opening in the wall.

  “What have they done?” Pre gasped. He swung the door on its lone hinge—which snapped, and the door fell away—and the four of us looked into a small room with empty shelves on three of its walls and an overturned coal stove in its center. The glowing coal had spilled and fanned out across the floor. The tiny room was beyond toasty.

  “Watch where you step,” Pre warned as he eased himself gingerly inside. The rest of us solved the problem of navigating a floor strewn with hot coals by peering in from the edges of the doorway.

  “I can’t believe this.” Pre shook his head in dismay. “There were twenty-eight jars of dragon food being kept at exactly the proper temperature in here, and they took them all and kicked over the stove! I think they took a section of stovepipe, too! Quieters don’t do that kind of thing.”

  “Maybe they weren’t Quieters,” I suggested, having seen way too many TV shows where bad guys masqueraded as cops.

  “Without dragon food, Phlogiston will be dead in a day!” Pre said desperately. “And with no Phloggie, there’s no saving Congroo. Nobody in their right mind would do this!”

  He turned to leave but then paused and stared at a spot just inside the door.

  “They missed one!” he shrieked, stooping to pick up a large glass jar that was glowing with a familiar orange light. He stepped out of the storage room with the jar clutched protectively to his chest. “But this will buy another day, maybe a day and a half, for Phloggie.”

  The moaning roar we had heard while in the tower came again—much closer but noticeably feebler.

  “No time to waste!”

  Preffy darted past us, and we ran the twisted paths of the maze with him until we rounded a corner and—

  The center of the maze was full of dragon.

  The creature was curled tightly in on herself, golden wings folded like a tent around most of her body, her head resting on one cushioning forearm. Judging from the farm machinery I was familiar with, she might have been—if stretched out—about a hundred feet long. Her scales were the size of skateboards. The creature’s color shimmered between gold and green, except her thinner parts, like claws and eyelids, which were possibly cerulean but definitely some shade of blue.

  “Phloggie!” Pre shook the food jar, and it started buzzing like a drop-kicked beehive. “Num-nums!”

  The dragon raised an eyelid the size of a garage door and looked blearily at us. Pre lifted the jar to make it more visible. The dragon sighed—a yellow mist formed around her nostrils—and the eyelid sagged shut.

  “No! No. Don’t give up. This is a really tasty batch.” He twisted the top off the jar, and the buzzing got louder. He turned the jar upside down and shook it. “Fazam! It’s too cold. They won’t come out. I hate it when I have to break the glass!” He raised the jar over his head.

  “What’s in there?” demanded Modesty.

  “Flyer-fries,” said Pre.

  “You mean fireflies,” said Drew.

  “No, fireflies are harmless. Flyer-fries, on the other hand, can scorch the hair right off your head!”

  He smashed the jar against the dragon’s leg and released a huge cloud of angry, brightly glowing insects. They swarmed wildly for a moment, then got their act together and flew straight at us. We all had the presence of mind to scream like four-year-olds.

  Pre ducked. Drew fell back against Modesty, who fell back against me, and the three of us went down like a very short line of dominoes.

  The insect swarm dove at us.

  And disappeared as a scaly chin passed over us, followed by a long reptilian neck. Phlogiston’s head had darted out, lightning fast, jaws wide open, and scooped most of the frenzied bugs from the air. The few flyer-fries that remained fluttered aimlessly here and there, and the dragon’s head darted to and fro, snapping them up, until only one remained, struggling upward into the cold air with rapidly dwindling enthusiasm. The dragon nosed up under it, inhaled, and it was gone.

  Phlogiston’s head drew back on her arched neck, and she eyed the four of us without much interest. Her eyelids drooped, her head sank back on the cushion of her arm, and she became motionless again.

  “She used to be so lively.” Pre sighed and straightened up. He kicked aside some broken glass from the jar.

  We had gotten to our feet. Modesty put a comforting hand on his shoulder.

  “She’s beautiful,” she said.

  “Three years ago, there were eight thousand dragons in Congroo.” He reached out and patted Phlogiston’s nose. “Today there are just Phlogiston and her mate, Alkahest. He lives in Bleek, the next town over. This area used to be the largest dragon breeding ground in all of Congroo. Now it’s dwindled to nothing. Remember I showed you the ruins of the Abbey of Legerdemain?”

  We nodded.

  “That was once the home of Viridis, seventh ruler of Congroo. She was our greatest dragon expert and kept a stable of racing dragons. Until it burned down. She would have been so sad to see this.”

  “So,” I said, “what happened?”

  Pre wagged his head glumly from side to side.

  “The only thing dragons eat is flyer-fries. The only thing dragons can survive on is flyer-fries. Three years ago, there were such vast swarms of the insects, they would sometimes block out the sun for days at a time. They actually gave us more light than the sun. People were disappointed when the swarm passed, and we went back to dim, old sunlight. Then… our magic started to get sucked away.” Pre looked at us as if he thought we were personally responsible. “The temperature dropped, and almost all the flyer-fries died off over the course of a single week. The streets were covered with them. We had to shovel the sidewalks. The dragons started dying off right after that.”

  I had forgotten how chilly I was, listening to this awful story. Modesty looked appalled. Drew appeared slightly nause
ated.

  “The terrible thing is,” Pre continued, “dragons are the source of magic. When they breathe out that stuff that looks like fire, it’s not really fire. It won’t burn you. It’s what magic looks like before it dissolves in the air, spreads out, and gets used for doing work.”

  “Work?” I asked. “Like all the chore spells in your book?”

  “Exactly,” Pre said. “And much, much more, of course. The dragons take something pre-magical that the flyer-fries have and turn it into the energy that powers Congroo. True magic. And all of it’s going away.”

  “It’s a disrupted ecosystem!” Modesty exclaimed. “Exactly the kind of thing my dad kept warning everybody about. How can we help? What will happen to the people of Congroo?”

  Pre hunched his shoulders. “Oh, most of the Congruents will probably survive—for a while. But they won’t be able to use magic anymore. And Congroo will be a lot colder. The climate-control enchantments, which have been shutting down one by one as the magic has drained, will be gone completely. We’ll be back in what we call the Dark Ages, the way we were before the Renaissance, when we learned to use the magic that was all around us. Warlords will probably rise to power again, and there will be wars, and then most of the Congruents will die, and everything will be terrible.”

  DINK-bingle-BONK!

  An odd musical sound came from the direction of Pre’s chest. He reached up, plucked at a leather cord around his neck, and drew out a crystal pendant from under his robe. It looked like an emerald and glowed with a faint greenish light. He dangled it in front of his face and said, “Excuse me—I have to take this.”

  He stepped away from us and spoke to the crystal.

  “Hello?”

  “Third apprentice, second class, Preface Arrowshot?” inquired a woman’s voice.

  “Yes.”

  “Please hold for Hemi-Semi-Demi-Director Oöm Lout, sixty-fourth assistant head of the Weegee Board.”

  A moment later, a disembodied, greenly glowing head materialized in front of us. It frowned beneath a tsunami wave of combed-over hair and had a squint like the flame on my dad’s welding torch.