The Magic Spectacles (18 page)

The bag hit the side of the kettle with a wet
whump
. The kettle tilted, balancing on edge for one long moment, and then dropped to the floor and cracked to pieces like an iron Humpty Dumpty. The spindly little stand that held the fishbowl was knocked flying. The fishbowl itself flew like a ball through the uprushing steam, high overhead toward the back of the cavern where it shattered against the rock wall.

A great cry went up from the goblins and at the same time a billow of cold fog whirled from the broken kettle and from the lake of dark water on the floor. Jewels began to pop and snap like ice cracking, and the fog rose so thick and dense that it began to rain little crystal droplets of cold glass. John ran toward the broken fishbowl and so did Polly. Danny whistled for Ahab, and then took off in the same direction, away from the goblin king, who covered his head with both hands, leaping and dancing as if the falling droplets were bumblebees.

John snatched a burning torch from its niche in the wall and waved it over the ground. The marbles were gone. Shards of fishbowl glass lay everywhere, but on the smooth rock floor of the cavern there wasn’t a single marble to be seen. At first he thought they had vanished, but then, from the direction of the overturned kettle, eight little marbles came rolling in a line, right past the toe of Danny’s shoe and straightaway down the dark tunnel.

“There they go!” John said, pointing at the marbles as they rolled past and disappeared into the darkness. But he could see that these were smaller than the fishbowl marbles – a couple were pee-wees, as tiny as the eyes of a fish. They were marbles out of the kettle, partly boiled away. Everyone set out running, following after them, John carrying the torch in one hand and the doughnut monocle in the other. Faster and faster the marbles rolled, downhill now in a neat little line.

“They’re heading for the door!” Danny shouted, and just about then they rounded the last bend in the tunnel and the door appeared ahead of them, still wide open, the sun shining through and the green grass of the hillside visible beyond. John tossed the torch away. He wouldn’t need it now.

Already the marbles were gaining speed, pulling ahead. They rolled straight out through the open door, down the trail that led to the sea. And no more than twenty feet ahead of them rolled another line of marbles, maybe a hundred of them, glinting in the sunshine. It was the marbles out of the broken fishbowl. They bounced and leaped, hopping over stones and twigs.

It was no use trying to keep up. John was out of breath. Danny and Ahab passed him, and he quit running. Clearly they weren’t going to catch up with the marbles. Polly quit running too, and walked along beside him. It was then that John looked around and saw the house on the ocean. He stopped in his tracks and stared at it.

It was his house; there could be no doubt about that. He looked at the wild and lonesome scenery roundabout, and at Mr. Deener slowly sweeping the front walk with a broom, and at the marbles racing downhill toward him, and at the empty ocean stretching away as far as he could see.

“That is my house,” he said to Polly.

“I don’t think so,” she said. “I think it’s Mr. Deener’s house.”

They found Mrs. Barlow in the garden, sitting on the bench alone. Her head leaned on her hand, as if she was weary and sad. The bag of doughnuts lay in the dirt among broken pieces of clinker flower. The full moon shone overhead, flat and white like a painting on vast sheet of blue window glass.

“It’s all up with the Deener,” she said to them. “His head’s as dense as a cabbage.”

“Does he have the bag of memories?” Polly asked. “He hasn’t thrown them into the ocean, has he?”

“Oh, he’s still got them all right,” Mrs. Barlow said. “He walks to the edge of the ocean and stands there staring. Then he walks back into the house. He’s done that three times. I spoke to him, but he won’t say a thing. He just stares, like his head’s already lost in fog. Maybe he used to listen to me a little bit. I thought he did. Not now, though. Not anymore. You can shout in his ear, but the words just rattle around in his head like rocks in a can. And he’s… she’s….”

Mrs. Barlow couldn’t finish the sentence. Her breath caught in her throat. She shook her head and tried again. “There’s the clinker ghost of poor Velma Deener inside.”

Polly put her hand on Mrs. Barlow’s shoulder. “We’ll talk to him,” she said. “Don’t worry. Maybe we can still make him see.”

She shook her head. “He’s lost in magic,” she said, gesturing toward the house and the ocean. “He’s stupid with it. He meddled with it so long that his brain turned into moonbeams and toadstools. He’s a hopeless old fool, and so am I. I’ve plumb run out.”

“Well I haven’t,” Danny said. “I’m going in there.”

“And I’m going with you,” John said. His brother’s eyes seemed suddenly to be smouldering, just like when he had stared down Harvey Chickel in the driveway – when was it? Day before yesterday? It seemed like the distant past. “Let’s go,” he said, and with Danny, Ahab, and Polly following he led the way around the side of the house.

Henny-penny men hovered outside the windows, looking into the kitchen, their leaves darting this way and that way through the air, Mrs. Deener worked at the counter inside, washing dishes in a sink overflowing with pink soap bubbles. The bubbles rose from the sink and drifted straight through the windows even though they were closed tight, as if the window glass was simply another one of Mr. Deener’s illusions. The henny-pennies sailed their leaves into the glass trying to get through, but the leaves bounced off, and the soap bubbles popped roundabout the little men, answering them with pink drops.

Mr. Deener himself crouched on the walk in front of the house. It was a little concrete path that ended on the weedy beach. An old broom was tilted against a hibiscus bush with big orange flowers on it, and half the path was swept clean. The line of fishbowl marbles lay in the grass, bumped up against the edge of the walk, and Mr. Deener, wearing a beat-up old hat on his head, held the bag of memories open in his hand, one by one picking up the marbles and putting them into the bag with the others. The bag rattled and jumped as if it were full of live mice, and Mr. Deener’s face seemed to shift and squinch up and leap around with it, like the face of a man being stung by bees.

From the front yard, it was clear that something was wrong with the house, something off-key, like goblin music. A misty sort of ghost light swirled around it, and the windows themselves seemed one moment to be glass, with sunlight shining off the panes, and the next moment to be dark, empty air, like the shadows of windows. Smoke tumbled up out of the chimney like steam out of a kettle.

Mr. Deener didn’t even see them. He tied off the mouth of the bag, then turned and looked for a moment at the ocean. Like the moon in the sky, the sea looked like a painting on a window, and it seemed to John as if shadows moved beneath its surface – maybe the shadows of vast, dark whales, or maybe the shadows of evening traffic moving along the roads and avenues of another world.

Mr. Deener swung the bag in his hand, and for a moment John thought that he was going to pitch it into the sea. Then, without a glance in their direction, he walked into the house and shut the door, taking the marble bag with him. Ahab lay down on the lawn then and put his head on his paws. When John and Danny and Polly walked up onto the porch he didn’t follow, but turned around and ran back up along the side of the house toward where they had left Mrs. Barlow.

John knocked on the door. The knock echoed through the house like the tolling of a clock. He could barely feel the door if its insides had against his knuckles. The wood was papery, as if it had been eaten by termites. A minute passed and nothing happened.

John knocked again, harder, and Polly shouted, “It’s us, uncle Deener. We’ve come for a visit!”

There was the sound of footsteps. The door swung open and there stood Mr. Deener. He seemed barely to recognize them. He didn’t smile, and he didn’t look like a happy man.

“We were just out taking a walk,” Danny said.

“First rate,” Mr. Deener said. “What a capital idea. A good day for it.” He started to shut the door, but Danny put his foot in the way. Mr. Deener smashed his face up, pulling his head down into his collar, as if he were going to have one of his fits.

“Won’t you let us in, uncle Deener?” Polly asked.

“I know that voice,” Mr. Deener said, opening one eye. “Is it really Miss Polly?”

“Of course it is,” John said. “You remember Polly. It’s us, too – the Kraken brothers.”

Mr. Deener looked hard at John. “What an absurd name,” he said. “I don’t remember it.”

“Yes you do,” Danny said. “Try.”

“I remember…what I choose to remember,” Mr. Deener said. “You can come in for a moment, but don’t touch anything. No mud on the carpet, if you don’t mind, and no fingerprints on the window glass. I can’t offer you anything to eat, I’m afraid.”

He swung the door open and let them in. Mrs. Deener moved back and forth in the kitchen, appearing and then disappearing, first at the counter, then at the kitchen table, then at the counter again. She didn’t seem to know they were there. She wore an apron and yellow potholder gloves, which she shoved into the sink full of soapy dishes.

In the living room the furniture was covered with doilies, and there were flowers in a vase on the table. They weren’t any kind of flowers that John had seen before, and when he sniffed them, they didn’t smell like anything at all. Up close they looked as if they were made from cobweb or had been spun out of moonlight. Almost nothing in the house was really solid or was quite the right color. It was a ghost house, through and through, and it was dim and dark inside, like an aging memory.

“Nice flowers,” John said, gesturing with the doughnut monocle at the vase.

Mr. Deener seemed to see the monocle for the first time, he turned his face away, as if he didn’t like the look of it. “Won’t look through it,” he said.

“No one’s asking you to,” Danny said, and John shook his head at his brother. There was no use being impolite. Mr. Deener was like a piece of thread pulled very tight. Another little yank and he’d snap.

John put the monocle behind his back, and Mr. Deener sat down in a big, comfortable-looking chair, holding the bag of memories on his lap. The chair seemed real enough, more solid than anything else in the room. Maybe that was because he had known it so well. He had sat in it ten thousand times, so he remembered it clearly. His eyes stared out the window now, toward the sea. The walls of the house didn’t keep the sea breeze out very well at all.

After a moment John realized that Mr. Deener wasn’t going to say anything.

“So you’ve moved out here?” John said.

“I’ve moved back home,” said Mr. Deener. He said it in a flat sort of voice, almost an echo. There didn’t seem to be anything much left inside him. He was like the flowers on the table. He had the appearance of Mr. Deener, but everything that ought to have been inside him had leaked out, into the marbles and goblins and henny-pennies.

Mrs. Deener came into the room. She was pleasant looking and smiling, still wearing the yellow potholder gloves. But she didn’t seem to see anybody but Mr. Deener. He took the plate of food she gave him and said thank you, and then he put it down on the little table next to his chair. It was pork chops and mashed potatoes and cauliflower. All of it was covered with gravy that was perfectly white.

Mr. Deener scooped up a fork full of potatoes and poked it at his mouth. The potatoes blinked away and were gone, just like that, into nothing. He nodded, though, as if he liked the mouthful of air that he had eaten, and he forked up some cauliflower, which also disappeared. He had the look on his face of someone who hadn’t eaten in ten years, but who had suddenly remembered how food used to taste, back in the good old days.

He cleaned his plate that way. When he was done there wasn’t even a spot of gravy left. It was cleaner even than if Ahab had been at it. Mrs. Deener came back in and took the plate away, and Mr. Deener said the food was “delicious.” Then he went back to staring out the window.

“Come with us” Polly said.

Mr. Deener sat staring, his mind gone to the moon. “I’m home,” he said finally. “I’ve come home to stay.”

“Mrs. Barlow’s been making doughnuts,” Danny said.

“Mrs. Barlow?” said Mr. Deener, as if he barely remembered Mrs. Barlow, maybe from a dream.

“Yeah,” John said. “You remember Mrs. Barlow – cakes, doughnuts, cookies, pies “. …

Mr. Deener didn’t say anything for a long minute. Then he said, “I…I used to like a doughnut.”

“Let’s all go for a nice walk,” Polly said. “We’ll find you a doughnut.”

Mr. Deener didn’t budge.

“Mrs. Deener could come along,” said John. “Maybe she’d like to come up to Aunty Flo’s for dessert.”

Mr. Deener seemed to be made of stone. They could hear the sound of running water and of plates clanking together in the sink.

“We were hoping to have another go at the moon ladder,” John said. “Or maybe you could try something else. I know, maybe you could make a flying carpet or build a moon car out of tin cans or something.”