The Magic Spectacles (13 page)

“Nonsense,” Polly said to him. “
You
didn’t break the plates. We’ll tell her the truth.”

“The truth!” Mr. Deener said. “I don’t want any more of the truth. This is the only truth!” He held up the smashed doughnut. Dirt and bits of grass clung to it. “Alas!” he cried. “Don’t worry about me any longer, Pol. I won’t suffer too much.”

Then he started to take a bite out of the doughnut, or pretended as if he was going to, but Polly grabbed it away from him and threw it like a saucer into the woods.

He shrugged, as if he didn’t mind eating trash, as if, perhaps, it was the only thing left that he was fit to eat. “Alas,” he said again, and then turned around and lumped off down the path that led toward the house on the hill, his wet pants sticking to his legs, leaving the rest of them to pick up the pieces of glass magic on the meadow.

The moonlit night was windy and loud. Leaves scraped against the laboratory windows, and John could hear the slow creak, creak, creak of moving trees outside. The air in the laboratory smelled like duty marbles. There were pieces of the moon ladder all over the place – boxes full of glass fishing floats and miles of rope tied into a ladder with rungs every foot or so, all of it heaped into enormous straw baskets.

Mr. Deener stood on top of a tall wooden step stool in the middle of the floor, weaving holly and ivy vines into the top of the moon ladder, which floated in the air as if it were hanging by a sky hook. Polly held onto a string that was tied to the top rung of the ladder. The string was pulled tight in her hand like the string of a kite.

John hoped that Danny would come downstairs. He was up in the bedroom sulking, although what he said was that he wanted to read a book. After what happened on the meadow that afternoon, he said he didn’t care anymore about Mr. Deener’s magic. He hated magic. John said that it wasn’t the magic that mattered – what mattered, somehow, was helping Mr. Deener. And Danny had said that he was through helping Mr. Deener. It was time Mr. Deener learned how to help himself.

John looked up toward the ceiling. It seemed impossibly far away. There was a round skylight in it, like a watch crystal, and the full moon shone through it. The moon seemed to be getting bigger by the moment, as if it were slowly drifting toward the earth.

“We’ll use vine magic to initiate propulsion,” Mr. Deener said. “Certain vines and shrubs climb toward moonlight. Lunar moths ride to the moon on rafts woven out of pieces of ivy vine. That’s a little-known fact.”

“Sounds like a lot of dad-blamed gas to me, Deener,” Mrs. Barlow said. She stood with her arms folded, holding a paper sack in one hand.

“That’s right,” Mr. Deener said. “They use helium gas when they can get it. Sometimes they try to fly there without any help at all, but the space winds blow the dust off their wings, and they’ve got to turn back. That’s a fact. Thirteen percent of the particulate matter making up rainbows is dust from the wings of moths and butterflies. Hand me up one of those floats, Mr. Kraken.”

John picked up one of the glass balls and started to give it to Mr. Deener, who said, “Not a blue one, a red one. That’s it. That’s the ticket.” He took a red float from John and hung it into a little net bag that was woven into the rope of the ladder. Every few feet there were two more nets, right opposite each other. “Red glass is what you want for moon travel,” he said, nodding seriously. “But there aren’t many red floats in the boxes, so save them up. Portion them out. They’re made with melted gold, believe it or not, boiled with holly berries and pearl oysters. Let’s have another one.”

John found a second red float and handed it to Mr. Deener, who hung it in the net opposite the first float, and then shouted, “Cast her loose, Polly.”

Polly let go of the string, and the top of the ladder rose into the air toward the ceiling. It went up into the darkness ten or twelve feet, quickly and silently, and then stopped. Mr. Deener hung two more floats in the next pair of nets and it rose again, up toward where the moon filled nearly the whole skylight now.

“The higher it climbs,” Mr. Deener said, stepping onto the ladder and holding on, “the more it wants to fall. Load the nets with floats, Mr. Kraken. Don’t miss any, or heaven knows where we’ll end up. And Polly. …”

“Yes,” Polly said.

“Will you sit with. …” He nodded toward the door and the stairs beyond. Clearly he meant the Sleeper, who had come in from fishing only about a half hour ago, walking in his sleep, his bedroom slippers covered with river dust. “I don’t expect trouble,” Mr. Deener said, “but…”

“But you didn’t expect trouble with the firefly lamp either,” Mrs. Barlow said, “and you blew the top of the shed off with it and nearly burnt the house down.”

“We’ll take care of the Sleeper,” Aunt Flo said.

“I’ll go up there now,” Polly said, and then she left the room in a hurry and climbed the stairs.

For the first time it occurred to John that something might happen to Mr. Deener. Maybe it was a dangerous thing to try to climb to the moon on a rope ladder. John didn’t like climbing any kind of ladder. He didn’t even like climbing over fences. There was no way he was “going home by way of the moon,” as Mr. Deener had put it. He wasn’t going anywhere without Danny. But then of course Mr. Deener couldn’t
really
be climbing to the moon anyway. The moon was 252,970 miles away. There weren’t enough baskets on earth to hold that much rope ladder.

“We’re ready,” said Mr. Deener and he climbed down to the floor.

“I suppose we are,” said Aunt Flo. “Please don’t hurt yourself. We need you, you know.”

“Nobody needs an old thing like me,” he said. “But I don’t plan to hurt myself. I’ve told you, although I don’t at all think you believe me or understand, that I mean to come back after all of you. I won’t abandon you.”

“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.

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.