The Magic Spectacles (9 page)

“Anybody out there?” John whispered.

“No,” Danny said, “but I can hear him working downstairs, dragging things around.”

Danny started pulling his clothes on: Here we go again, John thought. “We better not,” he said. “What if Polly or Aunt Flo wakes up and finds us messing around through the house? What are we going to tell them?”

“We’re going to ask them how come they’ve got the Sleeper held prisoner upstairs.”

“Prisoner?”
John said. “He was out fishing earlier. What kind of prisoner is that?”

But Danny was tying his shoes, getting ready to go out into the hall. “Wait!” John said, “I’m going too.” He wasn’t about to stay behind, even if this meant new trouble, which it probably did. He pulled his shoes on.

(Chapter 15 continues after illustration)

The house was quiet now. Even Mr. Deener had quit bumping around. The long hallway was empty and full of shadows, lit only by moonlight through the tall windows looking out toward the meadow. From outside came the sound of the wind. Floorboards creaked as they walked slowly toward the stairs that led up into the darkness of the tower. There was no moonlight on the stairs, and it was ghostly dark.

“I’m not going,” John whispered.

“Afraid of the dark?” Danny asked, putting a foot on the first stair.

“No,” John said. “I’m just not stupid, that’s all.”

Danny shrugged and started up without him. John hesitated for a moment, looked back down the empty hall, and then, holding on tight to the wooden handrail, he followed Danny up into the darkness. He held his breath. This was
really
dumb. A man lay sleeping in the room above, and they were going to walk in on him. What if the Sleeper woke up? What would they say?

The stairway brightened, and they found themselves at the edge of a large round room. Again there were windows facing the meadow. The full moon hung in the sky like a lantern, shining through the windows and casting their crisscross shadows across the floor. They could see all the way to the woods beyond the meadow. Amid the dark trees there was the yellow glow of a goblin fire.

John shivered, suddenly cold. He glanced around the room. A bed sat against the far wall, nearly hidden by a wide chair. Someone was lying in the bed – the Sleeper. His face lay in the shadow of the chair, shaded from the moonlight that shone ghostly-white on his nightshirt and sheet. He stirred uneasily in his sleep.

On another wall sat a tall wardrobe with the door standing half open. It seemed to be full of white nightshirts, all hanging very neatly. On hooks beside the open door hung a half dozen pointed cloth nightcaps.

John took a step backward, and then another one, feeling with his foot for the top tread of the stairs. It was wrong to be there, to be snooping in someone’s room. At any moment the Sleeper might awaken. Clearly the man wasn’t a prisoner. There wasn’t even a door on his room….

Just then Danny pressed his finger to his lips and motioned for John to follow him. Silently he stepped across to get a closer look at the man who lay in the bed. Ready to turn and run, John followed him. Just three steps more….

There were the doughnuts beside the bed on a nightstand. The Sleeper hadn’t taken a bite. There was a full water glass, too, and an unopened book that was covered with dust.

The man turned in his sleep, creaking the bedsprings. John grabbed the sleeve of Danny’s shirt. And then, suddenly, as if he had been jerked forward by a rope, he sat up. Moonlight shone on his face.

It was Mr. Deener.

Danny turned and slammed into John, and they both stumbled back toward the open wardrobe and climbed in among the nightshirts. John reached out to close the door once they were inside. He left it open only a couple of inches, just so he could see the edge of the bed.

The Sleeper flopped back down and began to breathe heavily and slowly. The minutes passed. Each time John started to push open the door to slip out, the Sleeper rolled over in bed, or mumbled something in his sleep, or made smacking noises with his mouth, and John had to snatch the door shut again.

The nightshirts in the wardrobe smelled partly of mothballs and partly of the same kind of soap that had blown out of Mr. Deener’s gun. On the floor lay several pairs of bedroom slippers with fur around the ankles. There were no shirts or pants or shoes or any other daytime clothes.

“No!” the Sleeper said suddenly. Then there was a long silence. John held his breath and listened. Finally, in a voice full of sadness, the Sleeper said, “I didn’t
mean
to. I
would
have been there. I
should
have been there. Where was I? Oh, don’t ask!” And he sobbed so hard that something rattled in his chest, as if part of him was broken.

“It’s Mr. Deener!” Danny whispered.

“It
couldn’t
be,” John said.

“It is,” Danny said. “I saw him straight on. It’s Mr. Deener. The Sleeper is Mr. Deener!”

“Shh!” John whispered. The bed creaked, and the Sleeper’s feet swung off the mattress and onto the floor. He stood up. John could see him clearly now. Maybe it was just the moonlight, but what he looked like was the
ghost
of Mr. Deener. He stepped into his bedroom slippers and then stood there for a moment like a man who has forgotten something but can’t quite remember what. He turned toward the wardrobe, and John flattened himself against the back wall, pulling the nightshirts across in front of his face and peering between them.

Very slowly the Sleeper walked to the wardrobe door. Both his hands reached out. For a moment they hovered there, waving in the air like the hands of a sleepwalker in a cartoon. Then the hands moved, and John heard the rattle and scrape of the fishing pole as the Sleeper picked it up from where it lay tilted against the edge of the wardrobe. Muttering, he turned and shuffled in his slippers toward the stair, carrying the fishing pole with him.

When the sound of his footstep faded, John and Danny climbed out into the room. There were noises from below again –bumping, scraping, and the sound of Mr. Deener’s voice singing the same loony song he had sung on the road that night. So, what did that mean? That there was a Mr. Deener upstairs and a Mr. Deener downstairs? The Sleeper looked like Mr. Deener; the goblins looked like Mr. Deener; the henny-penny men looked like Mr. Deener; the whole place was full of Mr. Deeners, all of them acting like nuts.

John slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and took out the spectacles just to make sure they were safe. The moonlight through the window shone on an old pair of broken reading glasses with black plastic frames. The spectacles were gone.

“They’re gone!” John said out loud.

Danny was already at the top of the stairs, ready to follow the Sleeper down. “What?” he asked. “What’s gone?”

“The spectacles. They’re gone. They were in there when I went to bed. I checked. Look.” He held out the glasses from his pocket.

“He stole them!” Danny said. “That’s what woke us up. He came into the room and stole them. Heck.”

“Maybe,” John said. “Maybe….”

“Maybe nothing,” Danny said. “It’s a good thing you were keeping them
safe
. Again.” He turned around and started down the stairs, into the darkness below.

“Wait,” John said. “Where are you going?”

“To get them back,” he said, not even slowing up.

John wanted to argue. It wasn’t
his
fault that the glasses were stolen, any more than it had been his fault when they’d broken in the woods. But there was no use arguing if Danny wasn’t there to argue back. John started down the stairs himself, hurrying to catch up. Danny was right about Mr. Deener, anyway Mr. Deener had wanted the glasses. The goblins wanted them. The henny-pennies wanted them….

Danny went straight across the hall at the bottom of the stairs without even looking to see if it was safe. He passed down into the darkness again, and John bolted across the hallway after him, both of them crossing another hallway at the bottom of the second set of stairs and going on down to the ground floor. There was a glow of light from the distant kitchen and another from the open doorway of Mr. Deener’s laboratory, but otherwise it was dark. Mr. Deener’s singing had suddenly stopped, and John could hear water splashing, as if in a sink. There was no sign of the Sleeper.

Danny slowed down, flattening himself against the wall outside the laboratory. He held his finger to his lips, as if he thought John was about to start talking. Together they peeked around the corner of the door. Mr. Deener stood with his back to them, washing his hands in a bowl of water that sat on a high wooden table. Pink bubbles floated up out of the bowl, and water slopped over the edge and onto the table. The air was full of the smell of goblin soap.

“I’m the saddest man alive!” Mr. Deener cried, and his voice shook with big, humping sobs. “I
can’t
wash it out! All the soap in the world isn’t enough!”

There were tall glass windows beyond him, like skinny doors, side by side in the wall. One of them was open. Its thin curtains blew inward on the night wind, and moonlight shone through it. The shadow of someone in a pointed cap and loose shirt moved through the night beyond the curtains. John could see the silhouette of the fishing pole in his hand just before he disappeared into the shadow cast by the trees.

A flurry of autumn leaves blew in through the window just then and scraped across the wooden floorboards, dancing around Mr. Deener’s feet. He began to hum, but the humming had no tune to it. Like goblin music it was just a mess of sounds.

He took the bowl of water off the table and lay it on the floor. Then he stepped across to an old bookcase, reached in among the books, and pulled down a glass jar, which he set on the table. Moonlight glowed through the jar. It was filled to the top with chips of colored glass, red and green and yellow and blue, all stirred together in a circus of colors.

He reached high over his head to where a rope dangled in the air, leading up into the darkness of the high ceiling. There was a creaking noise when he pulled on the rope. He let it go with a snap, and the end of the rope flew up into the air, and there was the sound of something rushing downward like a bucket down a well. A window appeared from above, jerking to a stop in front of the table. It looked exactly like Mrs. Owlswick’s window.

Danny stood up and stepped into the opened doorway. John lunged forward and grabbed him by the shoulders, pulling him back into the shadows. “Wait!” John whispered into his ear.

(Chapter 17 continues after illustration)

“That’s our window!” Danny whispered back to him. “He stole that too!”

“If that’s our window, then good,” John said. “At least it’s safe. At least we know where it is. But probably it’s a window just like ours. Let’s see what he’s up to.”

Mr. Deener’s humming suddenly stopped, and both John and Danny held their breath, waiting. Had he heard them? John peeked past the door frame again. Mr. Deener stood very still in front of the table. He seemed to be looking into the jar of glass chips as if it were a crystal ball. His hair blew in the wind through the open window, and his coat-tails danced.

Silver moon beams shined into the room, drifting toward the hanging window, seeping into it. As if it were an aquarium, the level of moonlight rose in the window, higher and higher, swirling around in the pale green glass until it flowed out over the top, spilling into the open jar of glass chips.

Mr. Deener stood right behind the table, still peering closely into the jar. He was no longer humming or singing or crying or talking to himself, but seemed to be hypnotized by what he saw in the jar. Rainbow-colored moonlight shone through his wispy hair, and the hanging window swung slowly back and forth in the wind.

And then, from out of nowhere, a goblin stood next to Mr. Deener.

It had happened so quickly, that John had barely seen it appear. There had been a blur of light and shadow, and then the moonlight had seemed to blink, and the goblin stood there on its skinny little legs. It was half Mr. Deener’s size,—a shriveled-up Mr. Deener. It shook its head and gobbled a little bit, as if trying out it voice for the first time. Then it began to cry, sounding very much as Mr. Deener had sounded just a few minutes earlier. Mr. Deener gasped and trod backward, pushing it away from him.