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

by Henry Clark

  “Stop! Don’t put out the fire!”

  I threw myself at Pre and clamped my hand across his mouth. Then I remembered that all he had to do was think the words of the incantation, and it would work. I distracted him the only way I could think of.

  I threw us off the dragon.

  We tumbled down the left wing, dropped off the tip, and landed on the roof of the fire tower. We caught ourselves before we rolled off and dodged Modesty as she slid down the wing and landed next to us.

  “I can still put out the fire!” said Pre, scrambling to his feet and pointing his hands at the blazing dragon.

  “No,” I shouted, and got in his face. “We need the fire! Some fires you put out—some fires you let go!” From the direction of the dragon came a few small noises—pip! pip! pip!—and I was almost certain I was right. Then a few white things like soft hailstones rained down on us, and I was positive.

  “How do you know?” demanded Pre.

  “Because I know what rhymes with airborne and forlorn. Do you?”

  “Uh—foghorn?”

  “No. But Panacea Irksome knew. Seven hundred years ago, she foresaw this very moment! She made it one of her Seven Insights!”

  WHUMP!

  The sound of a muffled explosion came from overhead as every kernel in every ear of corn erupted at once. The shock wave hit us with the force of the grand finale at a fireworks show. The flying dragon became, briefly, a fuzzy white cloud; then the cloud disintegrated, and fluffy, spinning particles whirled through the air around us.

  “Do you think that was enough of a jolt to send Phloggie’s spirit back where it came from?” I asked.

  “I… I would think so!” Pre broke into a grin. A fluffy button landed on his nose. He crossed his eyes to look at it. “This is—”

  “Yes! POPCORN!”

  CHAPTER 31

  V FOR VICTORY

  Doorway,” said Modesty.

  Pre and I turned. Modesty was on the other side of the fire tower roof. Behind her, hanging in midair about five feet from the roof’s edge, was the faint, ghostly outline of a stone arch and the open doorway beneath it.

  “That looks like—” I said.

  “The door to the balcony on top of the library in Congroo,” Pre said without hesitation. “Remember how parts of the Abbey of Legerdemain started showing up in Mr. Davy’s house? The same thing’s happening here. Your tower and the library tower are congruent—they occupy the same place but in different worlds. Our two worlds are still joined—but just barely.”

  “It’s starting to fade!” cried Modesty.

  “Delleps warned me about this.” Pre shook his head. “She said I’d have to choose.” He turned to me. “Do you really think I could be a scientist?”

  “Well…” I thought for a second. “You certainly think like a scientist.”

  “He’s already a scientist!” Modesty stepped between us. “He made a barometer. He made an Aqua-Lung out of a windbreaker!”

  “Then, that’s it,” said Pre.

  “You’re staying,” I said, thinking it was obvious.

  “No. I’m going back. If I stay here, I’ll be one more scientist in a world of scientists. But if I go back to Congroo, I’ll be the only scientist there. If I have a different way of seeing things, then I owe it to my world to contribute the new ideas. I know who I am now. And—I have to rescue Master Index!”

  He hugged me, reached out, and dragged Modesty into the hug. After a final heartfelt squeeze, he broke the embrace, got a running start, and sprang from the roof. For a split second, I thought the stone doorway would disappear before he got there and he would plummet to the popcorn-covered ground, but he landed solidly in midair, turned, and waved at us. The doorway rapidly faded around him.

  And vanished. So did Pre.

  I realized, with a pang, that with him went our last connection to Congroo.

  “Drew!” I shouted at the empty space where the doorway had been.

  “What?” said Drew behind me, and I staggered forward, slipped on the sloping shingles, and went over the side. I twisted and grabbed the edge of the roof, and my feet found the windowsill beneath me.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, bending down to offer me a hand. I refused it.

  “We should all get off the roof and into the cab,” I said, my voice shaky with the scare I’d just had and my joy at having Drew back. “It’ll be safer.”

  He and Modesty wiggled their way off the overhang on either side of me, and a moment later, we were all securely inside. I hugged Drew, just as Modesty had predicted I would.

  “How’d you get back?” I asked.

  “Just now. Through there.” He pointed at the open trapdoor. “Everything around the library starting glowing blue about an hour ago. Then I heard Phlogiston roar—I had thought she was dead, so that was good news—”

  “Yes!” Modesty turned her face heavenward. “We did it, Dad!”

  “But,” continued Drew, “I decided maybe I shouldn’t wait until four fifty-six to come back—that was my original plan—so I tried opening a door right then and there, and it worked.”

  “Calvin!” My dad’s voice bellowed from somewhere below.

  “We’re up here!” I leaned out the window. “We’re all right!”

  “The fight between the statue and whatever that other thing was took out the bottom zig of the zigzag stairs,” he shouted up at me. “I’m fixing it! But it’s gonna take a few minutes before you can get down!”

  “Take your time!” I shouted back. “We’re fine!”

  So the logem’s fight with the chainsaw maniac had caused some damage. I knew, if I analyzed it, that I would turn out to be somehow responsible. My eyes traveled across Route 9 to the harvester’s hulk. Was that a trace of blue light lingering around it? Or only reflected moonlight? I whirled on Drew.

  “Is your phone still working?”

  “Barely. Battery’s down to two percent—”

  “Gimme! Quick!”

  He fished his phone out and jammed it into my hands.

  I zipped through the list of Magic Bites, found the one I wanted, and pressed it; then I pointed the phone at the harvester, as if it were a magic wand channeling my energy. I concentrated on the way the harvester had looked when it was new.

  Blippity-blork.

  “To Repair a Chimney?” asked Drew as he craned his neck to see what I was doing.

  “It’s gotta work,” I muttered. “Gotta, gotta, GOTTA.”

  It didn’t work.

  “Don’t forget Intensify,” said Modesty.

  My hands trembled. I skimmed to the intensification spell and jabbed it with my thumb.

  Blippity-brap!

  Blippity-brap! Blippity-brap! Blippity-brap!

  I kept stabbing the screen with my thumb, but I could see, even at that distance and through some thin filmy tears, that the Fireball 50 wasn’t changing. If anything, it looked more charred and blackened.

  “The magic is gone,” said Modesty, gently easing the phone from my fingers and handing it back to Drew. “It’s too late, Cal. You tried your best.”

  I slid to the floor of the cab. Modesty plunked herself down next to me.

  “We’ve put an end to digital vegetables,” she said. “Farm stands—and farms—will start making a comeback. And I can guarantee you, the real Elwood Davy isn’t going to be interested in buying yours. You saved your farm. Or, as I like to think of it, you helped me save your farm. And keep dragons from going extinct.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said. “None of that was my fault. The harvester burning, that was my fault. And for a couple of days, I could do magic. I could have fixed it. But I screwed up again. I wanted to make it up to my folks.”

  “‘So what happened to you, Drew, after the door slammed in your face and you were stranded in Congroo?’” Drew asked himself as he sat down next to us. “‘We certainly missed you.’ Well, I’m glad you asked.”

  “We were really worried,” I
assured him, leaning past Modesty so he could see my face. He held up his hand.

  “I got off the balcony in time to hide from Oöm Lout’s logem (I found a cupboard), and then Oöm Lout himself arrived with his posse of Quieters, which, let’s face it, is a really disturbing thing to call your police force—and Lout was furious that the library was empty, so he decided to close it permanently, and when they left, they chained and padlocked all the exterior doors and windows on the lower levels.”

  “So you’ve been trapped in the library all this time?” Modesty asked.

  “I wouldn’t say trapped; I pretty much enjoyed it. It was like being in a real-life Castle Conundrum. I knew you guys were smart enough to play To Open a Door whenever a Magic Minute rolled around, and I knew I wouldn’t be missed at home until Tuesday evening, and I really wanted to avoid my parents while they were trying to renovate the bathroom, so I pretty much made up my mind not to open a door from the Congroo side until four fifty-six on Tuesday morning, which would have given me time to go to school with Cal and be back at my folks’ in time for supper. And here’s a surprise: It turns out, I like porridge. I found a kettle of it in one of the back rooms.”

  “You were in a world without toilet paper,” said Modesty.

  “Yeah, but I was also in a world where one of the books grows its pages back whenever you tear one out, so it wasn’t all that bad. Although it would be nice if books, in general, were printed on softer paper. Which reminds me—” He pulled a folded sheet from his back pocket and spread it out against his knee. “I brought this back for you, Cal. Since you still think that you, personally, have to make up for what happened to the harvester.”

  He shoved the page in my face. I reared back so I could focus.

  “What?”

  “It’s a page from the Necro Name-a-Coin, the book that lists every type of coin ever found by the To Gather Lost Coins spell. The book updates itself every hour. Surprisingly, it doesn’t matter what world the coin was found in.” He pointed to one of the pictures on the page. “That’s one of the coins you found in your house, right? With a 1913 date, capital V on the back?”

  “Yeah. V is the Roman numeral for five, so it’s a nickel.”

  “Yes, it is.” Drew nodded. “But in this case, I think we could say V is for victory. Did I ever tell you my dad has a 1904 penny worth one hundred dollars?”

  “Lots of times. What’s my nickel worth?”

  “Three.”

  “Three hundred? Well, that’s… nice.”

  He pointed to the small print next to the picture.

  “Three million. Actually, three-point-seven million. Dollars. And I know that’s accurate, because I remember my dad getting all excited the last time a similar nickel sold at auction, and it sold for something pretty close to that. I didn’t realize you had the same type of coin until I saw the picture.”

  I grabbed the page from him.

  It was the same coin.

  “You… what… that can’t be…” I didn’t know what to say. Three million dollars could buy thirty new Fireball 50s. With change left over for a hundred leaf blowers.

  I jumped up and turned my pockets inside out.

  They were empty.

  I’d had the nickel. I knew I had. It had gone into my pocket the night I found it. The nickel had to be on me. There wasn’t anywhere else it could be. I felt frantically around in the cuffs of my jeans.

  Nothing but lint and a piece of popcorn.

  Had I spent it? Had I bought a three-million-dollar ice-cream cone in the school cafeteria? No—I hadn’t allowed myself ice cream since I destroyed the harvester.

  Wherever the nickel was, I didn’t have it.

  I’d screwed up again.

  “I’ve lost it!” I wailed as Drew hauled himself to his feet, plucked the piece of popcorn from my fingers, and ate it.

  “Porridge is nice, but you get tired of it,” he said.

  “Are we talking about this nickel?” asked Modesty, waving a coin in my face. I grabbed her hand and held it steady. The V on the coin was like two fingers jabbing me in the eyes. I shot her a quizzical look, and she shrugged.

  “It flew out of your pocket when you put money in the binoculars. So you had something of great value all along. You just didn’t realize it. If I had a nickel for every story I’ve read that ends that way…” She squinted at the five-cent piece appraisingly.

  I reached for the coin, but she closed her fist around it.

  “You found it,” she said, “I saved it, and Drew figured out what it’s worth. Sounds like a three-way split to me.”

  My parents believed everything.

  Or, at least, most of it.

  It took them a day or two to wrap their heads around it—I couldn’t blame them—but in the end, even though magic no longer worked in the World of Science, there was too much of our story that couldn’t be explained any other way. How the corn maze had vanished, where the lights on the Halloween barn had gone, what exactly my parents had seen when they had rushed out in the middle of the night and a mysterious figure was pounding Artie into toothpicks while the silhouette of something that looked like a dragon circled overhead. How the mysterious Artie-basher had vanished down Route 9, breaking the speed limit and doing it on foot.

  And, of course, why the farm was covered in popcorn.

  The 1913 nickel sold at auction in New York City for 4.3 million. If my dad had had any doubts about our story up until then, he was a true believer once the auction ended. We split the money evenly with Drew’s family and with Modesty’s, and my parents made some interest-free loans to neighboring farmers until everybody had time to recover from the damage the DavyTrons had done. There was still plenty of money left over for a brand-new Grain Gobbler 500, which was a bigger and better harvester, made by an entirely different company than the Fireball 50.

  Drew’s family used part of their share to renovate their entire house—including the addition of a second bathroom—and Modesty donated huge amounts in her father’s name to organizations dedicated to protecting wildlife and the environment. Drew and I gave some money to those, too. You didn’t spend time with Modesty without her enthusiasms rubbing off on you.

  Davy’s Digital Vegetables announced that DavyTrons would no longer work and that anybody who had kept their receipt could get their money back. The company also announced it was no longer a company. It was going out of business, but all the money it had made would be shared equally among the former employees, which gave everybody an estimated two years of income during which to find new jobs. The company’s “genetically modified” tomato plants withered the moment all the magic went back to Congroo. There had been nothing scientifical about them.

  About a week after our adventure, I received a package in the mail from Elwood Davy. Inside the padded envelope was a note—I believe this belongs to you—and my cell phone. It had been cleaned, charged, and the operating system updated. I turned it on and stared at the background photo of the burned-out harvester.

  I deleted it and replaced it with the photo that had been there originally, of my mom and dad and Glen and me having a cookout in Onderdonk Grove.

  It was a better picture than I remembered—it gave me a warm feeling just to look at it.

  And that, I realized, was magic that would work any time of the day.

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  Acknowledgments

  In what has to be the wildest coincidence ever, these are the exact words of the Congroo incantation To Express the Warmest Gratitude:

  To my editor, Deirdre Jones, who helped me get the manuscript down to a manageable length, and who was willing to defer to the CMS (Congroo Manual of Style) over the CMS (Chicago Manual of Style) if it hel
ped a poor struggling joke land a little better. (The Comic Comma really should be accepted by both manuals, a point I intend to raise at this year’s Comic Comma Con.)

  To my managing editor, Lindsay Walter-Greaney, and copy editor, Stacy Abrams, who wrote funnier things in their marginal comments than I had written in the novel, and noted that this was one of the few books they had seen that actually mentioned a copy editor in the text, a situation I intend to remedy with my next book: Lucida Bright, Mountain Climber Copy Editor. (The title of which LBYR marketing will no doubt change to something like What We Found in the Landslide and How It Saved a Bundle on Car Insurance.) (Just wait.)

  To my agent, Hilary Harwell, whose initial reading of the book fleshed out a number of characters, and who proved to me the Rocky Mountains are only a block or so away from the Avenue of the Americas, despite what Google Maps may say.

  To my daughter, Elyse, and son-in-law, Adam, without whom my wife and I would still be stuck in our very first Escape Room and this book would never have been written, unless, of course, I used a piece of coal from the overturned scuttle and wrote on the lining of the Mysterious Lighthouse Keeper’s raincoat.

  To my wonderful wife, Kathy, who tolerated my disappearing into the basement for days on end, even though our house doesn’t have a basement. (This is how fantasy gets written. She understands that.)

  To lifetime friends Terry Hunt and Paul Feldman, who joined me all those years ago at the Uniondale Mini Cinema, where all three of us memorized dialogue from classic movies, and who will therefore recognize that this book references—in the same paragraph—my two favorite 1930s film icons: the Wicked Witch of the West and Rufus T. Firefly. (“Throw me a magazine” is my favorite line in the book, and it isn’t even mine.)

  And finally… to all those readers who wrote in to tell me they found all eleven vegetables hidden in the “computer code” in Chapter 21.

  I had thought there were only ten.