The Magic Spectacles (17 page)

He felt goblin hands snake into his jacket pockets and heard a goblin shout “Roke!” The other goblins piled off again, and John sat up. A goblin stood in front of him, waving the empty spectacles rims. The king snatched them out of his hand. He took one look at them, and then, finding the lenses empty, he shouted with rage and pushed the little goblin over backward.

He poked two fingers through the rims and then threw them hard into the kettle. Then he flung Danny’s jacket in after them. Then he picked up the little goblin that he’d pushed over and threw
him
into the kettle too. A great reek of steam rose toward the ceiling. The rest of the goblins stepped back a few paces, gabbling nervously. The king pointed a shaking finger toward John and drew his finger across his throat. He pointed at the kettle, gnashing his teeth together, rubbing his stomach. A crowd of goblins pushed John forward, giggling now, and smacking their lips and pinching John’s arms as if to see how fat he was.

The king turned around and shoved the doughnut monocle into the mist rising from the kettle The green circle appeared on the cavern wall again – bigger this time, like a green moon against a night sky. He plucked a marble out of the fishbowl and dropped it into the kettle. There was a great bubbling and popping and another reek of steam. Then suddenly there were shapes and shadows within the green light shining on the cave wall.

As if a door had opened, John heard the noise of traffic. He heard a horn honk and a cat meow. The shapes in the green light grew clear, and he saw that it was the front porch of his house. Something about it was different. There was no swing. And where the swing ought to be there was a long wooden planter full of flowers.

Someone stood outside the door, just then reaching for the knob. It was Mr. Deener, looking very young. He had just got home, it seemed. The door opened, and a woman appeared, and stood there.

That’s her! John said to himself. It was the woman at the end of the tunnel, the woman from the kitchen on the moon. It was Mrs. Deener, and her happy laughter sounded on the breeze as Mr. Deener went in and the door clicked shut.

The goblin king put his free hand over his heart and shook his head fondly, as if recalling happier days. The he plucked another marble out of the bowl, nodded at John, and dropped it into the kettle.

There was the front porch again, but in a different season. It was fog-shrouded now, so that he could barely see the front window or make out the color of the paint on the wooden siding. There was the wet smell of fog on concrete. And then, very clearly, he smelled that something was burning, like a pie left too long in the oven. …

A shadow fell across the porch – someone coming up the walk. It was Mr. Deener again. He was fatter now, and bald on top, and he seemed to be in a terrible hurry, brushing against a flower pot at the edge of the porch and knocking it down onto the walk. The pot broke, spilling out a lot of dirt and a green and red Christmas cactus. Mr. Deener didn’t even look at the fallen cactus, but fumbled in his pocket for the door key. Finding it, he worked the key into the lock, calling his wife’s name in a loud and frantic voice. He pushed the door open and went in. John could hear his voice calling and calling through the house until the voice died away and there was silence.

The goblin king wiped his eye, as if it had been him crying, and then stepped across into the green light, reached down, and picked up the Christmas cactus from where it lay on the walk in front of the house. He turned around, brushing dirt off the roots, then twisted the cactus up in his hands, bit the end off it, and stepped back into the cave as if he were stepping through a door. He began to laugh. Bits of chewed cactus fell out of his mouth. With a flourish of his hand, he pointed the stick-end of the doughnut monocle at the kettle, and then pointed it at John. “No roke,” he said, and shook his head sadly.

Before John had time to think or talk or move, he felt himself lifted into the air by a dozen goblins. He twisted and shouted and kicked, managing to jerk his hand free. He pushed one goblin over backward, then grabbed at another one. His hand closed over a jeweled pin on the goblin’s shirt. He held on, trying to twist out of their grasping little hands as the rest of the goblins carried him up the stone stairs toward the kettle. The pin tore loose from the goblin’s shirt, and John held onto it, closing it in his fist. The king scooped up dead fish and leaves and heaps of treasure and dumped it all into the pot.

“Roke, roke, roke,” he sang, and he ran his tongue across the tips of his pointed teeth. He picked up another crown, just like his own, made of leaves and twigs and rags, and then, bowing like Mr. Deener, he said, “Prince-cess Pol-ly,” and held the crown out toward her.

“Stop!” John shouted. “Wait!” The boiling kettle steamed beneath him, and the rising mist rose up around him like a heavy gray curtain. He looked down at the bubbling muck. There were bones in it, big ones. A fish head rose to the surface, stared at him through empty eye sockets, then disappeared again. He heard Polly scream, and at that moment he felt himself falling.

Danny ran down the hillside, away from the cave door. He looked back over his shoulder when he heard a wailing noise behind him, like the sound of a tormented ghost. He skidded to a stop, falling forward onto his knees and letting go of the leash. He rolled into a crouch, ready to jump up and run again. But there was no need to. Two of the goblins were crawling back toward the cave mouth on their hands and knees, as if they couldn’t stand the bright sunlight. The others stood inside, back in the darkness, hiding from the sun and peeking out through their fingers.

The two goblins on the ground stopped moving toward the door. They looked like dark, goblin-shaped ghosts, like frozen root beer, and Danny could see grass and rocks through them. They uttered one last terrible wail and vanished, and there was nothing left where they had been but patches of dead grass dusted with black ashes. The goblins in the cave hooted in fear, and then turned and ran back into the darkness.

Danny looked around to see where he was. A valley lay spread out below him, green with grass and bordered by deep woods. At the bottom of the valley, about a quarter of a mile distant, sat a lonesome house. It was a wooden house, yellow and white, and it took only a single, startling moment for him to realize that it was his house.

The camelia bushes along the side were covered with red and white flowers and with dark green leaves that shone against the yellow-painted boards. Wisteria vines, purple with blossoms drooped from the edge of the front porch roof. Smoke rose from the chimney even though it was a sunny day.

He closed his eyes and opened them again.

It was still there.

Beyond it, past the grassy bluffs that made up the front lawn, lay the ocean, vast and green and with breakers crashing along a rocky shore. There were no other houses in sight. There was no street, no neighborhood, no cars or people, only the house sitting all alone at the edge of the sea.

The lawn behind the house was clipped and green, with a patch of vegetable garden at the back of the grass and then a deep woods running away uphill to where the trees and everything else in the world disappeared in cloud drift. All was silent except for the cry of sea gulls and the sighing of the ocean.

Danny followed Ahab across the hillside toward the edge of the woods. He knew that he hadn’t gotten home; he was as far away from home as ever. He had found another piece of Mr. Deener’s magic. There was something false and unnatural about it, and it was no more like his house than a bat is like a bird.

Suddenly it struck him then that he couldn’t see any seagulls even though their cries repeated themselves every half minute or so, like a recording. And the sea waves broke on the rocks with the same hissing and sighing and crashing, over and over, as regular as breathing.

The trail from the cave struck a bigger path leading down from the top of the valley. He and Ahab followed it along the edge of the trees toward the back of the house, When they got to the garden Ahab stopped and wouldn’t go any farther, but sat down and put his head on his paws. What had looked like a vegetable garden from up on the hill was nothing but a patch of weeds. Danny watched the back of the house, not wanting to get any closer.

Someone moved beyond the kitchen window. Danny pulled on Ahab’s leash, stepping back in among the trees at the edge of the woods. It was a woman in the kitchen, working at the sink. Even though Danny hadn’t looked at the clinker flowers or seen the moon up close, he knew she was Mr. Deener’s dead wife; what was her name? – Velma.

Then, just as suddenly as she had appeared, she disappeared, blinking away like a goblin fire. There she was again, in the back bedroom now, sweeping the window sill clean with a whisk broom. Beneath that window, spread out over the grass, were odds and ends of Mr. Deener’s apparatus. There were china plates on forked sticks and big globes of clear glass and strings of prisms hung on kite string. And there was more apparatus beyond the corner of the house, back by the garage. On the driveway sat a pyramid built out of jars full of glass chips that shone like goblin jewels in the morning sunlight.

More glass magic; that’s all it was. It was worth about as much as a hat full of dirt, except that you could wear the hat once you emptied the dirt out. A house built of magic wouldn’t even keep out the rain. Danny suddenly had enough of it. Goblins or no goblins, it was time to go back into the cave and try again. He didn’t want anything more to do with Mr. Deener and his magic.

He looked away up the hill. From where he stood it looked almost round, like the top of Mr. Deener’s head. The door into the cave stood open like a dark eye looking out onto the sea. “Let’s get out of here,” he said to Ahab, and then stepped forward into the garden. There was a crunching under his foot, and he looked down to see a broken piece of what must have been a gigantic clinker flower. Its edges were dark with dirt and soot. More fragments lay scattered in the weeds, as if the clinker flower had burst apart like a ripe toadstool.

Holding onto Ahab’s leash, he took off running, back up the path along the woods, cutting off across the grass toward the door in the hillside. He slowed down only when the hill got steeper, but he didn’t stop. Ahab ran ahead of him now, yanking him along. It was just when he got to the open door that he saw someone come out of the woods up the valley, walking down the path toward the ocean. He stepped into the darkness of the cave and watched. It was Mrs. Barlow.

At first he thought the wind had started up and was blowing stuff out of the trees, because she was surrounded by big sycamore leaves that dipped and twirled and flew in wide circles around her head, darting down the path and back up it again. Then he knew it was henny-penny men, charging along in front of her as if trying to make her hurry up.

He almost stepped out into the sunlight and waved at her, but he stopped himself. He still had five candles left to burn. Nothing had changed. Mr. Deener had pretty clearly gone off his chump, as their father would say. Let Mrs. Barlow see to him. The best thing to do was try the cave again. If the goblins were still messing around in the treasure room, then he and Ahab would run right through the middle of the silly little creeps and straight out through the other door.

He let go of the leash in order to light a candle, and then he set out down the shadowy corridor. As the tunnel curved, the sunlight disappeared behind him, and the darkness settled in. He walked slowly and softly, ready to run.

Then, suddenly, there arose a sort of mad cheering from the treasure room ahead. He heard the terrible laughter of the big goblin. A shout followed the laughter, and not a goblin shout, either. There was a scream. …

Ahab barked and leaped forward, into the darkness, dragging the leash behind him. The tags on his collar jingled once, and then he was gone.

John threw his hands out and twisted in the air, grabbing for the edge of the cauldron. In that moment he saw a gray blur and felt something smash into him, and suddenly he wasn’t falling anymore. He was knocked backward, slamming into the goblin king and bowling him over, and the two of them tumbled through the dozen goblins that a moment ago had tried to throw him into the pot.

There was a wild barking and growling and goblins fled away on every side, pushing and shoving and poking each other, stumbling over the piled up treasure. John realized suddenly that it was Ahab they were running from. Ahab had come to save him! John pushed himself to his knees, looking around for Danny. Maybe the lost jacket didn’t mean anything at all. …

The king scrambled toward where Polly was trying to yank herself out of the grip of three yowling goblins. He was hooting and yipping waving the doughnut monocle in one hand and the sticks-and-rags crown in the other. Just then Danny ran out of the darkness at the back of the cavern. He waded straight across the top of the treasure, knocking helter skelter through the goblins.

The king tried to shove the crown onto Polly’s head and to hurry her toward the cavern door, but Danny leaped from atop a pile of treasure and landed on his back and the two of them stumbled forward as Polly pulled free of the king’s grasp. The king threw his hands out to catch himself, and the doughnut monocle flew into the air, turning over and over in the glow of the torches so that a kaleidoscope of green light flashed and flared on the cavern walls.

John leaped for it: he took one step up onto a wooden crate of treasure and threw himself into the air, reaching upward. His fingers touched the twirling stick. He closed his hand over it as he fell, rolling into a gunnysack stuffed with dead fish and jumping straight to his feet. With his free hand he picked up the sack, spilling out fish, and twirled it around and around his head, aiming to throw it at the pack of goblins that were rushing to help the king.

Ahab’s furious barking filled the air as he ran in circles around the kettle, chasing goblins. The kettle rocked and shuddered, and black water and fish skeletons and no end of jewelry and dead leaves and bones and muck washed over the side, hitting the floor with a whoosh of boiling steam. John let go of the bag, and it flew out of his hand like a meteor. But instead of bowling over the mob of goblins, it sailed straight toward the kettle, which was just then rocking forward and spilling out a dark wave of goblin brew, dangerously close to crashing down from its rocky shelf.