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

by Henry Clark

  Then we ran out of rooms altogether and spiraled down through the ceiling of the lobby.

  The lobby was five stories high. I could see the end of our chute through the clear plastic.

  It was only ten feet ahead of us.

  Directly beneath us was a three-story drop to the roof of Elwood Davy’s house. The roof didn’t look soft and spongy. It was all angles and hard edges.

  Elwood Davy’s house was going to kill us.

  Modesty sailed out of the end of the chute first, followed immediately by Pre. I flipped to my stomach and tried to grab the rim around the tube’s end as it shot past but couldn’t.

  We were in free fall.

  CHAPTER 20

  NOT A MARTIAN DEATH MACHINE

  Most of the time we had been in the tube, we had been screaming.

  That had only been a rehearsal.

  We plummeted and screamed loud enough to be heard back at Sapling Farm. We fell through the open air of the building’s huge lobby, and beneath us, the roof of Elwood Davy’s old house got bigger and bigger, the way an approaching flyswatter must look to a fly.

  But then, somehow, Pre was no longer trailing Modesty—he was suddenly beside her—and I was beside Pre. And in the next instant, a giant invisible hand caught me, and all three of us were beside one another. We were all still falling, but much more slowly, until the net we had dropped into stretched to its limit and our noses were only inches away from the shingles on the roof. Some of those shingles needed replacing.

  Then the net bounced back, and we rose with it; then the net dropped again, and we fell a bit. We waffled up and down until the net, more or less, came to a halt. It was the kind of net you saw in a circus, beneath the trapeze artists. It was big and stretchy and tied to four tall metal poles that stuck up from the corners of the lawn surrounding the house.

  Those of us who had landed on our backs flipped to our stomachs, and the three of us studied the scene below. We were suspended about ten feet above the roof of the two-story house, but I could see a rope ladder dangling from one side of the net, so I wasn’t too worried about how we were going to get down. What I was worried about was the guy in the hammock.

  He was wearing plaid shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and had a straw hat pulled down over his face. He appeared to be sleeping. His hammock was on a raised deck just outside the house’s back door, along with some lawn furniture and a circular table with a bright-red umbrella sticking out of the center.

  “That’s got to be a dummy,” whispered Modesty. “Nobody could have slept through our screaming. Or maybe he’s dead. Eeeep!”

  The guy in the hammock pushed his hat back and looked up at us through dark sunglasses.

  “Hi there,” he said. “You’ll be pleased to hear I’m not dead. And I wasn’t in the middle of a nap. To be perfectly honest, I stretched out here to wait for you.”

  “You were expecting us?” Pre sounded as surprised as I was.

  “You’re not exactly masters of stealth,” he informed us. “Why don’t the three of you make your way down the ladder and join me? I’ll fetch us some lemonade.”

  He swung himself out of the hammock and strolled to the back door. In the time it took us to cross the net, with all its wobbling, and descend the ladder, with all its jiggling, he had set out a tray with four tall glasses and a frosty pitcher.

  “Do we run?” asked Pre, the last to step off the ladder.

  “Where to?” I asked.

  “He seems friendly enough,” said Modesty. “At least he’s not dressed as a security guard.”

  “How would a security guard dress in a place with a theme-park slide spiraling down the middle of it?” I asked.

  We crossed the lawn, kicked aside a stray soccer ball, carefully picked our way through the wickets and mallets of an abandoned croquet game, and joined our mystery man on the deck. As we approached, he took off his dark glasses and removed his hat.

  Revealing the face of Elwood Davy.

  “So nice of you to drop in,” he said, and gestured for us to join him at the table.

  We climbed three steps to get to him. The house was dark, except for a light in the kitchen and another in one of the basement windows.

  “I sent the elevator up for you.” He waved a hand at the three empty chairs across from him. Each had a glass of lemonade in front of it. “But I’m glad you chose the slide; it’s so much more fun. Although, to be honest, it was designed more for adults than for kids. It can be a bit frightening. All the employees voted on how it should end. It was either the free-fall drop into the trapeze net or a shorter drop onto a trampoline that would have been angled to bounce you into a swimming pool. Which would you have preferred?”

  “Uh… the net was… fine,” I said. The others nodded.

  “Great! Wonderful! We’ve tried so hard to make the work environment a fun place to be. Did you know everybody who works for Amazon gets their own pogo stick? And the Microsoft cafeteria has Fudge Brownie Fridays? And the Oompa-Loompas at WonkaCorp get a really nice retirement package? It has a crank on the side, and when you turn it, a clown pops out of the top.”

  “What does?” Pre asked.

  “The retirement package. Do sit down. You have so much to tell me.”

  Modesty pushed past me to take the seat directly across from our host. Pre and I settled in on either side of her. No one touched the lemonade.

  “We brought you a crown made out of carrots,” Modesty said proudly.

  “You did?”

  “Well, mainly carrots. With a few parsnips. We left it in the office on top of the building. We didn’t expect you to be here. Actually, we didn’t expect to be here ourselves. We were sort of kidnapped.”

  “You’re going to have a hard time believing what we have to tell you,” I said.

  “Oh, you’d be surprised what I’m willing to believe.” He took a sip of his drink and smacked his lips. “I already know, for instance, that the three of you are extraordinary children. You are either from some other planet or you’ve somehow mastered the powers of magic.”

  None of us moved. We stared across the table at him.

  “How do you know?” I asked. It came out as a whisper.

  “I saw you arrive. Imagine my surprise. I was sitting at the reception desk, reading a book, when I happened to look up, and I saw the trees shaking at the far end of the parking lot. I assumed, maybe, it was the work of a particularly large squirrel, and I returned to my book—I’m reading Mr. H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. It’s the one where Martians invade Earth and walk around in three-legged towers destroying everything with heat rays—then I glanced up again, and a Martian death machine was walking across the parking lot straight at me. I wasted no time falling off my chair.”

  “When was this?” asked Pre, sounding alarmed.

  “Just now.”

  “The Martians invaded Earth?” Pre jumped out of his chair. “Are they still upset about Jupiter? They said they were cool with it!”

  Our host stared at him. “You really aren’t from around here, are you?”

  I tugged on Pre’s shirt. “War of the Worlds is fiction.”

  “Oh. Fictional Martians. That’s all right, then.” He plopped back down.

  “As I was saying, I thought a Martian was after me, but when I peeked over the desk in abject terror, I realized it was just a forest-fire lookout tower—the fourth leg gave it away, along with the cabin at the top with the three of you leaning out of it. I said to myself, this is either science unknown here on Earth or an example of powerful magic.” He reached forward and twisted his lemonade glass a quarter of a turn. “So. Which is it?”

  “Magic!” the three of us shouted simultaneously.

  “That’s three votes for magic.” He twisted the glass back the way it had been. “I’ve always suspected magic might exist. Please tell me all about it.”

  “Well, this is certainly going to be a lot easier than we thought.” Pre sighed with relief. “I guess the best p
lace to start would be Congroo. That’s where I come fr—”

  “Hold on!” Modesty’s hand shot out and gripped Pre by the wrist. “Before we tell you anything, I have a question.”

  “Certainly. If you’d like to borrow War of the Worlds, I’ll be happy to lend it to you as soon as I’ve finished reading.”

  “That’s… not my question. My question is, let’s say you’re running a big company, and the company makes, oh… croquet mallets, and one day you find out that every time you make a croquet mallet, a tree in a rain forest dies. And you make so many croquet mallets that all the trees are dying and the rain forests are drying up and everything that lives in them is going extinct, including plants and dragons and, well, maybe not dragons but animals that help the entire world because they’re sources of medicine and oxygen and, and, well, beauty just for beauty’s own sake. They’re all going to die. Because you’re making croquet mallets. What do you do?”

  The man sitting across from us stroked his chin.

  “Why would it take an entire tree to make a single mallet?” he asked.

  “They’re very big mallets,” Modesty replied crossly. “Answer the question.”

  “Well, morally and ethically…”

  “That’s a good start.”

  “Morally and ethically, if I were running a company that was doing this, I would have to stop production of croquet mallets. Maybe… I’d start making baseball bats.”

  “No,” shouted Modesty. “You don’t have an alternative. You either make mallets or you go out of business. The rain forests are dying.”

  “Then… I guess… I go out of business.”

  “Good answer. Okay, we tell him.”

  We told him.

  Not in any straightforward way, and not without interrupting one another and correcting one another and repeating, using different words, something that one of us had already said. Pre described Congroo and the idea of Adjacent Worlds and why there are so many books about librarians—which I thought was a little off topic—and how DavyTrons were doing transmutation and draining all the magic out of Congroo. Then Modesty told about finding the notebook and our first meeting with Pre, with special emphasis on how she destroyed the Dust Devil with a can of anti-cling spray. And I—finally—summed it all up by saying how important it was that all the DavyTrons be shut down and no new ones be made.

  Not one of us mentioned how magic worked for only five minutes each day. In fact, the way we had told our story, we sort of implied we could do magic anytime we wanted. Apparently, each of us had decided that the fewer people who knew which minutes were magic, the better. We were thinking as one.

  Which was a little scary.

  The last thing I said was, “And I know this might sound selfish, what with the fate of an entire world at stake, but if the DavyTrons stop making digital vegetables, it would also save my family’s farm. We’re getting less and less customers, and we’re going to have to sell the place. To you.”

  “Oh,” said our host. “If your family’s farm is about to be purchased by Davy’s Digital Vegetables, that must mean your last name is… Alvarez?”

  “Uh, no—”

  “Bonheur?”

  “No—”

  “Chung? Denovich? Fujiwara? Gupta? Horowitz? Littlefeather?”

  After each name, I shook my head.

  “MacDonald? Nnamani? O’Keefe? Papadopoulos? Renshaw? Sapling?”

  “Yes! Sapling!”

  “Ah, yes. Sapling. I should have started with Zefferelli and worked my way back.”

  “All those families are losing their farms?” I asked.

  “This week. Yes. And while it’s a pity that this is happening to so many of you, you have to admit, compared to what’s happening to this world of Congroo, your misfortunes are nowhere near as bad.”

  “They’re bad enough,” I said angrily.

  “So you believe us,” said Pre, sounding hopeful.

  “Oh yes. Of course I do.” He stared into his lemonade and frowned. “Although I wouldn’t have believed a word of it if I hadn’t seen you arrive in an ambulatory fire-watch tower.”

  “Not ambulatory,” I corrected him. “State Forestry Service.”

  “It walked here,” he replied.

  “It sure did,” I agreed.

  “So?” Modesty pressed her fists down on the table and leaned halfway across it. “Are you going to shut this place down? Or… are you going to put a lot of farmers out of work and force the population of an entire world back into the Dark Ages?”

  “Oh, I would shut this place down in a heartbeat—I understand everything you’ve told me, and I agree it’s a terrible situation—but I can’t. It’s not mine to shut.”

  “What do you mean?” I squawked. “This is your company.”

  “It’s not.”

  “You’re Elwood Davy.”

  “No.”

  “We’ve seen you on television,” said Modesty. “There’s a picture of you in your office.”

  “It’s not my office, and that’s not my picture. I am not Elwood Davy.”

  I was getting tired of being on the wrong side of the looking glass. Just once, I wanted people—and inanimate objects—to behave the way I expected them to. I understood life could be random, but things were getting ridiculous.

  “Then… who are you?” I demanded.

  He stretched his arms out to either side and grinned a grin that would have reached to his fingertips if his cheeks hadn’t been there to stop it.

  “I… am an impostor!”

  CHAPTER 21

  HOUSE TOUR

  We really should have introduced ourselves right off the bat,” said the man who wasn’t Elwood Davy. “I have you at a disadvantage, and it’s entirely my fault. I apologize. I learned your names as you told your story—it was inevitable, since you thought it was so important that I should know who did what and who said something especially stupid—but I was remiss in not identifying myself the moment we met. My name is”—his eyes flicked across the lawn—“Spalding Wicket.”

  “Are you a Quieter?” Preffy asked suspiciously, apparently forgetting our word for police.

  “A quieter what? I’m more of a blabbermouth than anything. I find conversation absolutely fascinating. I portray Elwood Davy when tour groups come to the house. Actually, I’m supposed to portray him the way he was four years ago, just before he invented the DavyTron, but he looked pretty much the same then as he does now. That’s my job. Have any of you ever taken the tour?”

  “You’re saying you’re not Elwood Davy?” I stared him in the eyes. He didn’t blink.

  “I assure you, I am not.”

  “You say your name is Spalding Wicket,” I said. “Really? You’re sure about that? Spalding, as in… the name on the soccer ball out there on the lawn? Next to the wicket?”

  “Life would be awfully dull without coincidences.” He shrugged.

  “I’ve been on the factory tour,” said Modesty. “When I was in fifth grade. After they took us through the factory, we came here to the house, and a woman pretending to be Elwood Davy’s mother took over from the tour guide and led us through the house.”

  “Ah! That would have been Mildred Pinkerton. Such a dear. She’s so sweet, hummingbirds hover around her head, trying to get at her earwax. If you saw Mildred, that means you were here on a Tuesday. Tuesday is my day off.”

  “I was here last year,” I said. “There was a guy mowing the lawn, pretending to be Elwood Davy’s father. He stopped mowing and took the group through the house.” That school trip had been three days after I had incinerated the harvester, so the details of the tour were a blur. But I remembered the guy with the mower.

  “That would have been Vern Wilson. Very cautious man, Vern—he staples sticky notes to things, just to be sure. So if you saw Vern, that means you were here on a Thursday. Thursday is my other day off. It’s a pity, really. I do a much better tour than either of them. In fact—follow me!”

  He pushed h
is chair back so suddenly it fell over, and he headed for the kitchen.

  “That’s a very strange scientist,” said Pre.

  “Not everyone in our world is a scientist,” Modesty told him. “They’re actually few and far between.”

  “Then I’m very fortunate to have found you two.”

  “True,” said Modesty. “But about that—”

  I glanced at my phone.

  “Ten past three!” I was so upset I jumped up, and my chair went over, too. “We missed the two thirty-four Magic Minute! We didn’t try to open a door for Drew! He might have been trying from his side. I screwed up again!”

  “Set your alarm,” said Modesty.

  “What?”

  “Set your alarm for the next Magic Minute. So we don’t miss it. And… don’t just set it—change your alarm tone from whatever it is now to the Magic Bite for the door-opening spell. That way, the spell will be cast even if you forget.”

  “Scientifical,” Pre said approvingly.

  It took a moment for me to absorb what she had suggested. Then I hugged her.

  “Modesty! You are brilliant!”

  She looked completely taken aback but then said, “Yes. I am. Please let go.”

  “Are you coming?” Spalding Wicket leaned back out the door. “I’ve turned on the animatronic grandfather. He’s been updated to say more than four hundred possibly appropriate things!”

  He disappeared back into the house. I set my alarm to three forty-five and changed the alarm tone. Then I jammed the phone into my pocket, and we followed Spalding into the kitchen.

  The table was set for a family of three. Spalding pointed to one of the chairs and said, “It was here, twenty years ago, that five-year-old Elwood Davy first realized he liked broccoli. None of the other guides include that in their tours.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” said Modesty.

  “Is this you?” Pre asked, squinting at a photograph stuck to the fridge.