The Magic Spectacles (5 page)

The wall of their bedroom seemed to be gone. The toybox, the desk, the window curtains had disappeared, and there was only Mrs. Owlswick’s window floating in the air. The bedroom had vanished around it. He could still catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye if he looked sideways past the edge of the spectacles. But
through
the spectacles there was nothing but the window, floating there.

And beyond it, as if the window were a framed picture, was a meadow full of wildflowers. The whole street had disappeared: the front porch, the lawn, the sidewalk, Mr. Skink’s house – all of it was gone. Instead, on beyond the meadow, there was a woods with a stream running out of it. The sky was blue, with only a couple of clouds drifting through it like windblown fog, and the full moon sailing among the cloud like a ship at sea.

A house with three chimneys sat above the woods and the meadow on a distant, lonesome hill. John could just make out the weather vane on top. It was shaped like the skeleton of a fish

John took the spectacles off, blinked his eyes hard, and looked carefully at the lenses. Maybe there was something painted on them….

There wasn’t. They were the pale green color of water in a sunlit well, but they were perfectly clear.

He put the spectacles back on and took another look through the window Beyond the far-off house were mountains, bending around and falling away toward a big wash of blue-green, that might be the sky or might be the sea. The moon hung in the sky over the house, and smoke from one of the chimneys rose past it like cloud-drift. The world through the window was almost round, as if it sat on the inside of a very clear marble or on the wall of a fishbowl.

This is it, he thought suddenly, although he didn’t really know what he meant. But what he saw didn’t surprise him at all, not like it would have yesterday. He was ready for it. It was what the coin and the fish skeletons and the windy morning had been pointing toward all along, like signs along a road.

He flipped the catch on Mrs. Owlswick’s window and pushed it open.

“What are you doing?” Danny asked, putting down his book. “Let me try the glasses. Ahab woke up at the sound of Danny’s voice. He stood up and stretched then walked over and looked out through the window at the front porch.

“I’m opening the window, John said. “There’s something funny outside. Hold on.”

“There’s nothing funny outside.” Danny looked past him through the window. Penny, the next-door-neighbor’s cat, was asleep on the front porch swing. But besides Penny, the porch was empty. “Let me try them,” Danny said.

John shook his head. “Wait.” He looked again. It didn’t matter whether the window was open or closed. As long as he wore the spectacles he could See the meadow and the woods and the house. He took them off and handed them to Danny, and there was the front porch again, with Penny leaping on the swing.

“What is it?” Danny asked, looking through the spectacles. “It’s like a movie on the glasses or something.”

“I don’t think so,” John said after a moment. “I think it’s real.” “I’m going to find out,” Danny said.

“Wait,” John said when Danny unhooked the window screen. “You can wait here if you want to,” Danny said. He pushed the screen open.

“We’re not supposed to climb out the window,” John said, suddenly scared of what they might find out there. But Danny had already leaned across the sill and started to crawl through. “We can if there’s a fire,” he said. “There isn’t any fire.”

It was too late. Danny slid from the windowsill. And in that instant he vanished. Ahab put his paws on the sill and stuck his head out, sniffing the air.

Then a strange thing happened. Danny’s arm, all by itself, shoved in through the open window, past Ahab’s head. It stayed there, sort of hanging for a second, floating in the air and holding onto the spectacles.

John took them and put them on, then put his head out the window. There was his brother again, standing in the high grass of the meadow.

“Send Ahab,” Danny said to him. John put the spectacles on Ahab and boosted him up onto the window sill. “Jump!” he shouted, and Ahab jumped, vanishing suddenly in the air, just as Danny had vanished.

A moment later Danny looked in at the window again, wearing the glasses. “C’mon,” he said to John. “What are you waiting for? Ahab wants to chase rabbits. I’m holding on to his collar.”

“Are there rabbits out there?” asked John. He wanted a good reason to go, unlike Danny, who almost never needed a reason to do anything. “Sure there’s rabbits,” Danny said. “And a creek, too. You saw it.”

“Yeah,” John said. “Maybe…”

“Forget maybe,” Danny said. “Only for a second.”

“I’m going to bring some stuff,” John said.

“What stuff? We don’t need any stuff. We aren’t going anywhere far.”

“Just some Halloween candy,” John said, picking up a backpack from behind the bedroom door. “We’ll need a snack.” He turned around and started out of the bedroom. He wasn’t really interested in the candy; he just wanted another minute to think up a reason not to go. And yet he knew that he
would
go. Clearly he and Danny had been bound for the land beyond the window all day long, almost falling toward it, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

Their mom was busy upstairs. He could hear the vacuum going. Their father was in the garage, cutting up wood to build a bookcase. They would think he and Danny were out playing around in the neighborhood. There wouldn’t be any problem. Nothing would go wrong.

There were two cherry pie baking in the oven, and the smell of them was wonderful. John wished that he could take one along, but of course that was impossible. In an hour they’d be eating dinner anyway, and he could have all the pie he wanted, or nearly so. For now he grabbed a couple of handfuls of Halloween candy from each of their bags, and then searched around through the leftover candy until he found two Mars Bars, and he took those too. They were full-sized Mar Bars, not the little kind that come in a plastic sack.

Just then he heard a scraping noise, followed by a sound like muffled laughter. The vacuum cleaner shut off He shoved the candy into the backpack and zipped it up, then went back out into the living room. There was his mother, just then coming down the stairs.

She didn’t look as if she’d been laughing. “Have you seen my green Christmas pin?” she asked. “The one with all the red jewels, like holly berries? I had it out to wear it tonight, but now I can’t find it anywhere.”

“No,” said John. “I haven’t seen it. I’ll watch out for it. Danny and I are going out for a while.”

“Is your room cleaned up?” his mother asked.

“Yeah,” John said, heading down the hall and into the bedroom. He snatched up their jackets, putting his on and then slipping on the backpack. At least she hadn’t asked where they were going. He would have told her the truth, and that would have been it. She wouldn’t have let them go. Danny leaned in through the window to take the jackets from him, and then disappeared.

There was his hand again, holding the spectacles, waving them around. John put them on and climbed straight out through the open window, pushing the screen out behind him and hurrying so that he wouldn’t change his mind and chicken out. And just as he jumped down to the meadow and let go of the window sill, he suddenly thought about the fishbowl full of marbles, and he glanced one last time at the dresser where they had put the fishbowl.

The top of the dresser was empty. The marbles were gone.

Their bedroom window, Mrs. Owlswick’s window, hung in the air like a picture hanging on an invisible wall. Their house had vanished and everything else with it, and the air was full of the musty smell of oak trees and the sweet smell of wildflowers.

“Can you see the window?” Danny asked.

“Yes,” said John. “And I can see the bedroom through it, but not around it.”

Danny nodded. “I know,” he said. “
I
can’t see the window at all, not without the glasses on.”

John took the spectacles off, and the window vanished. Immediately he put them back on. “What did you do with the marbles?” he asked.

“What?” Danny asked. “What do you mean? They’re in the fishbowl.”

“Huh uh,” John said. “The fishbowl’s gone too.”

“You’re crazy,” Danny said. “Let me see the glasses.”

John started to hand them to him, but just then Ahab barked like crazy and ran off down a little path that led toward the woods. A big, long-eared rabbit ran along in front of him, straight into the bushes that grew along the edge of the creek. Ahab followed it into the leafy darkness.

Danny ran down the path after him, shouting Ahab’s name, and John ran behind him, holding the spectacles in his hand. He was more worried about Ahab than about the window. If Ahab got lost, especially in a strange land…

An old wooden footbridge lay across the creek, and their steps echoed on the loose planks. Beyond the bridge lay the woods, which were dark and dense. A path of weedy sand led between the trees. It was quiet and cool in the shade, with just the sound of leaves rustling and the sighing of the wind. Here and there was a patch of what appeared to be old pavement, as if maybe a street had run through the woods ages ago and was slowly being crumbled and buried by the forest. The oak trees around them were old, with long, tangled limbs, so that only a little bit of sunlight shined through to the forest floor.

Suddenly they could hear Ahab crashing around ahead. He barked once, then growled, then fell silent. They walked along carefully, looking into the shadows and listening hard. Soon they found themselves in a circular clearing. There was a stone ring in the middle of it, cracked and old and partly covered with vines.

It was a fountain, very much like the one in the Plaza at home, but ruined by time and weather. A trickle of water gurgled out of a rusty pipe in the center of it, filling the ring about a foot deep before the water seeped out through a crack and soaked away into the muddy sand. A few fish skeletons lay in a heap nearby. They listened, peering into the trees.

“Ahab?” John said. Then, louder, he shouted, “Ahab!” and Ahab came leaping out of the bushes and bounced straight into Danny, wagging his tail.

Danny stumbled backward into John, and John fell straight over onto the path, sitting down hard. The spectacles flew out of his hand, spinning through the air and smashing against the stone ring. John jumped to his feet and snatched them up from where they had fallen.

One of the green lenses was gone. Where it had been there was nothing but an empty circle of brass wire.

They searched through the high grass and in the bushes around the fountain, but found only a few old fishbones and a dead rat that was dried up like cardboard, Ahab sniffed back and forth, barking into the bushes every time there was a rustling noise.

“That’s just rabbits,” John said to him. He hoped that was true.

They crawled around on their hands and knees and poked into the sand with their fingers. They parted the grass a few blades at a time. They looked under bushes, then shook the bushes and looked under them again. Finally they looked for it in the clear water in the fountain, but they couldn’t find anything, not a single chip of green glass.

While they searched, the sun went down beyond the trees, and the woods fell slowly into shadow. There was the wet smell of fog in the air, and the sky overhead was gray and misty. The moon shone faintly through the mist, and wind blew the branches high overhead.

John pushed through some bushes, kicking at the grass with his feet. It was useless. The lens
couldn’t
have flown this far. They were wasting too much time searching for it. One of the lenses was still whole, anyway, and that ought to be enough to see the window again….

There was suddenly the sound of laughter, something like the gobbling of a turkey. John looked up, and there, just beyond a pair of enormous old oak trees, was the dark mouth of a cave. It was partly overgrown by bushes, just a ragged black circle leading downward into the side of a rocky hill. The laughter had come from the cave. John was certain of it.

Danny came up behind him, holding onto Ahab’s collar. “Did you hear it?” he whispered.

John nodded. Ahab growled. From out of the cave came the echoing sound of a flute. There was no melody to it, just a scattering of crooked, off-key notes.

They backed away toward the fountain. John thought about their bedroom window; it seemed suddenly to be a long way off. The flute stopped and the woods were silent. “C’mon,” he said, and Danny didn’t argue. The three of them set out through the woods, down the path to the meadow. John patted his jacket pocket. He could feel the spectacles frame inside.

They were halfway to the meadow when a tiny man, not much taller than John’s belt buckle, stepped out onto the path and stood there grinning. For a moment John thought he was the little man from the curiosity shop, but he wasn’t. He was too ugly. His skin was wrinkled and green like an old dollar bill out of someone’s pocket.

The top of his head was bald, and the hair around his ears was thin and wispy and it stood away from his head as if it were electrified. Clearly he hadn’t washed in about a year. His clothes were stitched up out of the skins of bats with the heads left on, and his shoes were just like the rat slippers from under Mr. Skink’s house. The long rat tails were tied around his ankles like the straps of sandals.

“Goblin,” Danny whispered, and just then came the sound of giggling from among the foggy trees on either side of the trail. There were more of them, hiding in the shadows. The goblin held out his open hand.

“What does he want?” Danny asked.

“Money, maybe,” said John, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out eight cents – three pennies and a nickel. It wasn’t much, but what did goblins know about money? He turned his pockets inside out then, to show the creature that it was all he had. Then he held out the coins, and immediately the goblin slapped them out of his hand, into the weeds along the trail.

Three more goblins jumped out onto the path and scrambled after the fallen coins. They had skinny little arms and fat bellies. One of them grinned, put a penny into his mouth, and swallowed it. His teeth were filed to points like cannibal teeth. He had a fishbone tuck in his hair like a comb. The goblin next to him wore a piece of fishing line tied around his neck with old glass prisms hanging from it. The third had a jeweled pin stuck like a badge to his raggedy shirt. It was a green Christmas wreath, with red rhinestones among the green, like holly berries.