The Magic Spectacles
Author: James P. Blaylock
Date: 1991-01-01 08:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fantasy
Description: A YA adventure from World Fantasy Award winning author James P. Blaylock. A suddenly appearing curiosity shop owned by a small man who might, or might not, be the Man in the Moon; a pair of strange spectacles buried in a fishbowl full of marbles; an old window glazed with sea-green glass found beneath a suburban house; and two adventurous boys who buy the spectacles and climb through the window into a land of goblins, ghosts, and rope ladders that reach to the moon... Who exactly is Mr. Deener, the fat man who makes magic out of bits of coloured glass, has a passion for glazed doughnuts, and w
Publisher: Morrigan Publications

Also by James P. Blaylock

NOVELS

The Elfin Ship

The Disappearing Dwarf

The Digging Leviathan

Homunculus

Land Of Dreams

The Last Coin

The Stone Giant

The Paper Grail

Lord Kelvin’s Machine

The Magic Spectacles

Night Relics

All The Bells On Earth

Winter Tides

The Rainy Season

Knights Of The Cornerstone

Zeuglodon

The Aylesford Skull (forthcoming)

COLLECTIONS

Thirteen Phantasms

In For A Penny

Metamorphosis

The Shadow on the Doorstep

NOVELLAS

The Ebb Tide

The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

WITH TIM POWERS

On Pirates

The Devil in the Details

Copyright © 1991 by James P. Blaylock

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Dirk Berger. Cover design by John Berlyne.

Published as an e-book in North America by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD, in 2012.

ISBN: 9781936535675

Part one of three

Chapter 1: Pancakes and Autumn Leaves

A curiosity shop appeared in the center of a row of small stores downtown. A painted sign, faded with weather and sunlight, hung over the door. John couldn’t remember that the shop had been there yesterday. It seemed to him as if nothing had been there yesterday, and yet there was nothing new-looking about the curiosity shop, or about the old sign that swung slowly back and forth in the wind.

John and his brother Danny sat on a bench in the Plaza and looked across the street at the shop window, which was cobwebby and misty with dust. They could see almost nothing through it, except what looked like the skeletons of three fish hung upside down from the ceiling like windchimes.

Two big trees bent over the street outside, shaking bright green leaves in the wind. It looked to John as if the trees were laughing, although what they were laughing at he couldn’t say – maybe at the fish skeletons in the window, maybe at his own leafy reflection in the glass.

It was autumn, and there was something uneasy in the air, like Halloween ghosts flitting around lonely and lost on the first thin breath of winter. Sycamore leaves drifted from the big trees overhead, and in the quiet morning air John could hear the creaking of the sign across the street and the scrape and rustle of dead leaves blowing along the sidewalk. The grass in the Plaza had already turned brown, as if it were asleep, and the Plaza fountain barely worked at all, but just bubbled out little spurts of rusty-looking water.

(Chapter 1 continues after illustration)

“I heard that the water in this fountain comes from a long way under the ground,” John said, picking up a floating sycamore leaf. “Maybe from lakes in the center of the earth.”

“Who said that?” Danny asked. “Did you make it up?”

“Dr. Stone said it. He said someone found three fish in it last week, dead.”

They both looked at the window of the curiosity shop again. There was a light on inside now, but the shop was still mostly dark, and the light shined back in the darkness like the moon.

Last week a waitress at the lunch counter of Watson’s Drug Store complained that the maple syrup went sour almost as soon as it was opened, and so did the milk. And Dr. Stone, who was a veterinarian, said that the sparrows that nested in the Plaza trees were acting strangely. Some of them had been found lying asleep on the brown grass. A cat had eaten one of the sleeping sparrows and had fallen asleep on the grass, too, and wouldn’t wake up, and now it was in Dr. Stone’s office, asleep on a chair.

There had been a lot of fog lately, and people who worked in the downtown shops began to take long naps on foggy days.

Shopkeepers slept in their chairs, and waiters dozed while their customers waited for hamburgers. The fog smelled of fish and soap.

Maybe because so many people were asleep, things began to disappear from houses and shops. Mostly they were things made of glass, like costume jewelry and eyeglasses and prisms from old lamps. None of it was very valuable, except Dr. Stone’s antique pocketwatch, which had been stolen right out of his pocket.

John wondered what Dr. Stone knew about the center of the earth and whether the fish skeletons in the curiosity shop window had come from there. Some people thought the earth was hollow and that you could get to the land inside by sailing through a big hole in the top of the world. The UFOs hid out down there. And that was where the dinosaurs had gone, too, probably in a big hurry when they heard about the comet that was going to make them extinct. John had written it all down in his notebook, very scientifically, under the title “What Happened to the Dinosaurs”.

Sometimes he liked the idea of a door to another land, except that he would want to know, before he opened that door, what kind of things lived on the other side. It was sort of like one of those quiz shows where you got to be surprised by whatever was hiding behind curtain number three – a new car or a grinning fat man in a clown suit….

“Look,” Danny said suddenly, pointing down into the water of the fountain, “a good luck penny.”

On the bottom of the pool, among the skeletons of sunken leaves, lay a small coin. It looked like a round, dark hole.

Chapter 2: The Moon Penny

“Somebody probably made a wish and threw it in there,” John said. “I wouldn’t take it.”

“I would,” Danny said, pulling off his jacket. “Whoever threw it in probably wished that someone would find it. If I take it, then their wish has come true. I’ll be doing them a favor.” He reached into the water and fished out the coin, drying it off on his pants.

“Let’s see,” John said, and Danny held the coin out so that the sun shone on it. It wasn’t any kind of normal penny. There was a picture of a man’s face on one side – a very round face wearing spectacles and with crazy hair. “Wrong door,” John muttered. “We got the clown.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Danny asked, turning the coin over. On the tails side was a picture of a fish.

“It means I’d throw it back,” John said.

Danny shook his head. “Too late. Once you pick up a penny, you get all the luck out of it, whether it’s good luck or bad luck. Anyway, I think this is a moon coin and just dropped out of the sky. So don’t tell me it came from the center of the earth.”

John looked across at the curiosity shop again and at the fish skeletons hanging in the window. Clearly they were the skeletons of fish very much like the fish on the coin – fat and spiny and with huge round eyes. The shadows and dust were gone from the window now, and the light in the shop shone on a clutter of odd-looking junk.

They ran their bicycles across the street and stopped in front of the shop. Beneath the hanging fish in the window sat an elephant’s foot made into a stand for holding umbrellas, and next to that stood an enormous black raven and a big stuffed lizard with a red jewel in either eye. Piles of books tilted against each other, all of them dusty and old. The one on the top was something called The Wise Fishermen’s Encyclopedia. On its green cover was a drawing of a man wearing a night shirt and cap. He was fishing in a dry riverbed in the light of a full moon. A fish skeleton hung from the end of his line.

Next to that there was a fishbowl full of marbles. In the middle of the marbles, shoving up through them, was a pair of old spectacles with brass wire rims.

A gust of wind blew just then, and the trees on the curb rustled and danced. A great sheet of wrapping paper, all orange and red and yellow, whirled past, end over end like a pinwheel down the center of the street. Behind it rushed a circus of autumn leaves, and the sky was filled with the screech of wild parrots and the cawing of crows. It seemed to John that there was something on the wind, some faint smell, as if someone far away had made a bonfire of tree prunings and the wind was full of invisible smoke.

(Chapter 2 continues after illustration)

“Let’s eat,” Danny said suddenly. “I want some pancakes. How much money do we have?”

“Enough,” John said. Although what he was thinking was something more like, “Enough to buy that fishbowl full of marbles in the window.” Then he looked at the fisherman on the cover of the book again. He had the same face and hair as the man on the moon coin….

Maybe later they would come back for the marbles. Right now pancakes seemed like a better idea.

At Watson’s lunch counter they took a table by the window so that they could see people walk past out on the sidewalk. It wasn’t cold out, but it was blustery, and the wind made people clutch their coats around them as if it were going to blow the coats off and sail them over the rooftops like kites. A man raced past chasing a hat, and another man, right behind him, hurried along backwards so that the wind blew his coat shut instead of open. He had the goggly eyes of the fish on the moon coin, and John nearly pointed this out to Danny, but he stopped himself. Maybe he was getting fish on the brain.

Neither of them said very much while they were eating their pancakes, and finally John pushed his empty plate away. He had finished his cocoa, too. There was nothing left in his cup but a sort of brown paste. He took four crumpled dollar bills from his pocket, and Danny dug out two more and a handful of change. They counted out the coins, heaping them on top of the bills, making sure there was enough and with some left over for a tip.

Then Danny took the moon coin out of his pocket and turned it over in his hand, looking first at one side and then at the other. Outside, the wind stopped blowing. Flying leaves drifted to the street. People let go of their coats and pulled their collars straight.

Silently, John picked up his spoon, licked it, and stuck it carefully to his nose, so that the handle hung down over his chin like one of the screwball beards that the Egyptian Pharaohs used to wear. He leaned across the table and waited for Danny to look up….

… and right then he realized that someone was watching him through the window. He jumped in surprise. The spoon flipped off his nose, clattering down into Danny’s half-full water glass. Water splashed on the table, and John had to grab the glass to keep it from falling over.

“Hey!” Danny said, looking up. “What are you doing? I was going to drink that.

“Nothing,” John said. With his eyes he gestured toward the street.

Standing just outside the window was a little man in an old green coat. He was about as big as a dwarf or an elf, and there was bundle of sticks in a bag over his shoulder. His face was wrinkled and pinched, like the face of the moon. He took a pointed cloth cap from his pocket and pulled it on. People walked past without looking at him, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about him at all.

Or perhaps as if they simply couldn’t see him.

He winked at John and Danny very slowly, tipped his hat, and turned away.

The wind blew again, harder than ever. It swept a storm of leaves down the center of the street. The little man held onto his hat with both hands, and, as if he were made of paper, the wind whisked him away through the air, straight across the Plaza, past the fountain, and in through the door of the curiosity shop.

Chapter 3: The Window Under the House

As he watched the little man depart in a whirl of leaves, John realized that he had seen him before that morning….

It had been almost two months ago, right at the end of summer, in the week before school started. John and Danny had broken their bedroom window while playing baseball on the front lawn. There had been nothing left of the window but shattered glass all over the bedroom floor. Somehow, even the wooden frame of the window was knocked to pieces, and anyone could see that it wouldn’t do just to put in another piece of glass.

That’s when they got lucky, and Mrs. Owlswick down the block gave them a window. Mrs. Owlswick lived with her niece Kimberly in a big and very old house. Kimberly’s uncle, Mrs. Owlswick’s brother, had lived upstairs in the attic room. Everyone said that he had “gone away,” which was a polite way of saying he had gone crazy and one day had disappeared. Under the house, in a little cellar, Mrs. Owlswick stored odds and ends of stuff: old pieces of furniture, boxes of glass doorknobs, hinges, picture frames, clock parts, and the window, which was glazed with a ripply sort of pale green glass.

Their father very happily took the window. He said that he was “going to do the job right.” That meant that he was going to do it in the most complicated way he could, and make the job last. “Get me the pry bar,” he had said to John, and with it he had started pulling off the wall mouldings and prying out all the pieces of the old window, throwing them out onto the lawn where John and Danny dropped them into a trash barrel.

A couple of times their father had asked if the new window looked “plum”, from out there on the lawn, which didn’t make any sense at all, and so John said that the window might not look “plum”, but that it looked peachy. Right then their father hit his thumb with the hammer, and so he didn’t think the joke was very funny at all, and John and Danny had to go around the corner of the house in order to laugh.

Finally, late in the afternoon, he hung Mrs. Owlswick’s window in place of the old one and put the mouldings back up around it. They all came into the bedroom to have a look through it. The sun was just going down, and because of the ripply green glass, the world outside looked something like a tidepool, as if they were gazing out through shallow sea water.

It had rained the next morning. John sat on his bed, looking out at the street. Water ran in the gutter, splashing over the curb, and windy raindrops splattered against the glass. Someone with an umbrella was coming along down the sidewalk. He was small, maybe a new kid in the neighborhood. When he stopped in front of the house, John could see that he wasn’t a kid at all, but was actually a little man wearing a green cloth cap. On his back he carried a bundle of sticks. Rain poured off his umbrella in a curtain of drops.

He had stood on the sidewalk twirling his umbrella for a moment, looking at the house – or more particularly, looking at the new window, maybe looking through it. Then he walked away, past Mrs. Owlswick’s house, seeming to grow smaller and smaller as he vanished in the rainy morning air.

Now, two months later, the same little man had been looking in at them through the lunch counter window. Something was about to happen. John knew it. Another door was about to open, and there wasn’t going to be a new car behind this one either. More likely they’d get the clown again, along with an invitation to the circus of Dr. Wrinkle-face, where they’d be turned into fish or toads or something and kept in a cage.

They went outside and unlocked their bikes, then rode across the street again and leaned their bikes against the brick wall of the curiosity shop. John looked at the fishbowl full of marbles. They were good ones – the kind you hardly ever found. You could buy clear marbles in a plastic net bag at the market. And you could buy solid color marbles like the ones that come in a Chinese checkers game. Sometimes you found cats’ eyes in the dirt of a flowerbed, dropped there years ago by kids who are grown up now and don’t care about marbles anymore.

But the fishbowl in the window was full of the sort of marbles you could only find if you were really lucky. With the sun shining on them now, some were like swirls of frozen rootbeer. Some reminded him of tigers, or of a sunlit forest or a rainbow. Others looked like the earth seen from way off in space, as if he were sitting on the moon.

John suddenly wanted to buy them all. Marbles were like any sort of treasure; you needed a pile of them. The bigger the pile the better.

On the sign over the door was painted a picture of a man walking along a road, carrying a bundle of sticks. There was a full moon with a cheerful face in the sky above him. Under the painting were the words, “Come In.” So John pushed the door open, and he and Danny stepped through it, into the dimly-lit shop.

Chapter 4: The Fishbowl Full of Marbles

The shop was cool inside and full of odds and ends, all of it dusty. Stuff was piled on old tables and falling in heaps out of open wardrobes and spilling from the shelves of bookcases. Hanging from the rafters in the high ceiling was the skeleton of a giant bird held together with silver wire. There were books everywhere, all of them dark and old. There were stuffed bats and pictures of apes and clipper ships and old houses and serious looking people in bonnets and top hats. There was a jar with an enormous eye in it, and no end of old candles and silverware and crystal glasses. On the counter sat a lamp built out of an iron fish.

The little man in the green cap sat behind the counter on a tall stool. He had a book in his hand, and he peeked at John and Danny over the top of it. His bag full of tied-together sticks lay on the floor in front of the counter.

“What do you need?” he asked them. “Or more to the point, what do you want?” They could only see his eyes and half his nose. The rest of him was hidden by the book and the counter.

“Marbles,” John said, looking around. There was probably lots of other stuff in there he wanted too, but right now the marbles were enough. They didn’t have much money left after the pancakes.

“In the fishbowl,” Danny said. “In the window. We don’t need the glasses, though.”

The little man nodded. The point of his green cap wagged up and down. “You see very clearly, then?”

John shrugged and kicked Danny’s foot just to make sure that Danny knew how weird all this was. “I guess we just don’t want the glasses,” John said. “Just as many marbles as we can buy.”

Danny dug the rest of the change out of his pocket. “We have about a dollar,” he said.

Slowly the man’s head rose over the top of his book, until his whole face peered down at Danny’s handful of nickels and dimes. He rubbed the side of hi nose and asked, “Do you have a penny with the face of a man on it?”

“Abraham Lincoln,” Danny said.

“I was thinking of a different man, actually. The Man in the Moon.”

The wind blew so hard outside right then that it rattled the windows, and the air was full of leaves and dust. The sign over the door creaked and banged. The little man pretended to read his book again, but he watched Danny out of one eye.

For a moment John hoped that Danny wouldn’t find the moon penny. They shouldn’t have taken it from the fountain. It was connected somehow to the wind blowing outside and to autumn leaves and fish skeletons and window and sparrow sleeping in the grass.

But then Danny took it out of his pocket. He held it under the light of the iron fish lamp, and John stepped up next to him in order to get a better look.

The eyes of the moon-faced man on the coin were shut now, as if he had fallen asleep but hadn’t taken his spectacles off. John couldn’t be completely certain that his eyes had been open before, but he thought that they had been. And now, just as he looked more closely at the face, the eyes seemed to move behind their eyelids, like the eyes of a man dreaming.

The little man put his book down and took a magnifying glass out from under the counter. Except for the sound of the wind, it was ghostly silent. The shadows of leaves danced on the window pane and threw shadows across the floor. Through the magnifying glass the little man’s eye was enormous, like a whale’s eye.

“This is just what I want,” he said, nodding at them. “Moon penny. These are very rare. You don’t see one in a thousand years. I had one very much like this but I threw it into a fountain and made a wish. Are you sure you want to spend it?”

Danny didn’t say anything for a moment, as if he had swallowed something and was waiting for it to go down his throat. “Sure,” he said finally.

“I told you to leave it in the fountain,” John whispered.

“Take the marbles,” the little man said. “But it’s only fair to tell you that they aren’t all there; this is only some of them. They used to belong to a man, but he…lost them. Some day maybe he’ll want them back, and then you’ll have to give them up.”

(Chapter 4 continues after illustration)

“No problem,” Danny said. John nodded. It didn’t seem very likely. The little man dropped the moon penny through a slot cut in the top of the iron fish. Several seconds later there was a clank and a rattle of coins, as if the penny had fallen a long, long way, to the bottom of a well, maybe.

“Take the spectacles too,” he said. “You’ve bought the whole package, fishbowl and all. But if you meet the man who lost his marbles, think twice before you give him the spectacles. Don’t mean to alarm you, but they can be used for fell purposes. Like water, you know; you can drink it, and you can drown in it. Do you follow me?”

John nodded again. He didn’t follow a thing. He didn’t want the spectacles, but somehow he had them anyway. Or at least Danny had them. It had been his coin, after all….

“No exchanges, no refunds,” the little man said. He pointed to a sign on the wall. “All Sales Final,” it read.

He picked up his book again and pretended to look at it, but John was pretty sure that he watched them over the top of the pages as they picked up the fishbowl and went out. The wind slammed the door shut, and both of them jumped in surprise. When they turned around to look, the interior of the shop was dark again except for the fish lamp glowing way back in the shadows.

The sign hanging over the door was turned around. The old man painted on it was walking away from them now, carrying his sticks. The moon was asleep overhead. “Closed Up,” the sign read.

Chapter 5: The Treasure Under the House

They parked their bikes under the carport in the driveway. It was nearly noon. Across the street old Mr. Skink was raking dead leaves into a pile on his lawn, and Harvey Chickel, who lived at the end of the block and around the corner, was riding his skateboard up and down the sidewalk. Harvey looked bored, like he was having a terrible time. Being bored was his second favorite thing to do. His first favorite was causing other people trouble.

John knew that Harvey had seen them ride up. Harvey hadn’t waved because he wanted to let them know how bored he was. That meant Harvey hadn’t seen the fishbowl, which was good. Harvey had a problem with stealing things, and he wouldn’t look nearly so bored any more if he had seen it.

The fishbowl felt extra heavy, as if John had been carrying it for ten miles instead of ten blocks. When he was sure that Harvey wasn’t looking, he took the spectacles out of the marbles and put them into his jacket pocket. At once the fishbowl felt about half as heavy, as if the spectacles had been too full of gravity. He wondered if that was scientific. Did gravity make things heavy by filling them up? Or did it just sort of sit on things, and mash them down? He would have to start a gravity chapter in his book.

Carefully, he put the fishbowl down on the porch, hiding it behind a potted plant. Across the street, Mr. Skink paused to light his pipe, and just then the wind picked up his pile of leaves and blew it in every direction. Mr. Skink tried to stop them by waving his bamboo rake around as if he was trying catch butterflies in a net. Harvey Chickel burst into loud laughter and fell off his skateboard onto the grass. He rolled around and beat his hands on the ground.

“It wasn’t that funny,” Danny said. Danny didn’t like Harvey Chickel at all.

Mr. Skink said something to Harvey then, but John couldn’t hear what it was. Harvey stood up and said something back, and then Mr. Skink pointed at him with the stem of his pipe and said, very loudly, “I oughta…” and Harvey rode away on his skateboard before Mr. Skink had a chance to say what he oughta do. When he was half a block farther down the street, Harvey turned around and laughed out loud again, as if he had just then remembered how funny the whole thing was.

A door shut a couple of houses down, and an instant later their friend Kimberly stepped off her front porch. Actually it was the front porch of Mrs. Owlswick’s house, Kimberly’s aunt. Kimberly was a year older than John. She had long blonde hair and dreamy eyes. Her hair was tied into a pony tail with a red ribbon, and for some reason she was wearing a dress.

“Are you looking at her hard enough?” Danny asked. “Maybe you should take a picture.”

“It’s you that should take a picture,” John said.

Smiling, Danny said, “Right.”

Harvey Chickel hadn’t turned the corner toward home, but was skating up and down at the end of the block now. He must have seen Kimberly come out. Go home, John thought, but Harvey sat down on the curb as if he was waiting for something. He flipped his skateboard into the air so that it banged down onto the street. Then he pounded it against the curb a couple times, showing off.

Kimberly carried a red metal box about half as big as a loaf of bread. “Look at what I found,” she said, walking up to John and Danny and holding out the box.

The lid had a picture of a fountain on it, like the fountain in the Plaza. Beyond it sat a house on a hill. The house had diamond-paned windows and smoke curling up out of three chimneys. Flowering vines grew across the porch. On the roof stood a weather vane shaped like a fish skeleton. It pointed toward the rising moon, which was coming up between two hills. Under the picture were the words, East, West, Home’s Best.

“What a great can,” John said, staring at the fish skeleton. “Where did you get it?

“It used to belong to my uncle,” Kimberly said. “I found it under the house, behind where the old window was. Look at all this stuff.”

She opened the lid. Inside was a heap of costume jewelry, with big rhinestones that looked like diamonds and emeralds. There were glass prisms and tiny glass perfume bottles and a glass saltshaker shaped like… a fish.

“You found all that under the house? It’s like a treasure or something,” John said.

Kimberly nodded. “My aunt says it’s a goblin treasure.”

“There’s goblins under your house?” asked Danny. “I never heard anything about goblins leaving treasures under houses.

“I never heard about them being under houses at all,” John said.

“They live under houses when they have too,” Kimberly said. “That’s what my aunt says. I mean, where else? They can’t just go down to the motel. They’d rather live in the woods, but there aren’t any woods around here, so they get under your house through secret tunnels.”

“That’s a lie!” someone said in a loud voice.

It was Harvey Chickel. No one had heard him come up. He had an unhappy face, as if someone had tricked him into eating brussels sprouts. Usually he looked that way when other people were having fun. Kimberly closed the lid of the box.

“There’s nothing under houses but dirt,” Harvey said, and he spit on the ground, nearly hitting his own foot.

Kimberly looked straight at him and said, “Some people think that everything is just dirt. But they’re wrong.”

“They’re not as wrong as you are,” Harvey said, and he looked for a moment like he was going to hit her.

John’s stomach felt suddenly empty. He wondered what he was going to do. He hated this kind of thing. Harvey was famous for it. In a second he would start pushing people. He had hit Kimberly at school once. Harvey had hit nearly everyone at school at least once. That was all he could think of to do when he got mad. Kimberly had hit him back, right in the stomach, and she looked like she was ready to hit him again.

“Miss perfect,” Harvey said. “What are you all dressed up for, a tea party?”

“My aunt’s taking me to lunch,” Kimberly said. “So what?”

“Your uncle going?” Harvey asked. Kimberly didn’t say anything. She just looked at him.

“I heard he was in the hatch,” Harvey said. The men in white suits came to get him with big nets. That’s what my dad said. That’s where he is right now, I bet –in the hatch. My dad said that your uncle didn’t change out of his pajamas for five years. He used to stick a fishing pole out the window and fish in the bushes with junk tied to the end of the line for bait. One time my dad tied this rubber fish to the line and yanked on it.” Harvey snorted through his nose. Probably it was meant to be laughter. “Why don’t you shut up?” Danny said.

“You shut up,” Harvey said. “He used to live in your house. That’s who owned this place, a nut case. I heard he went crazy when his wife corked off.”

Kimberly didn’t say anything. She stood there looking at the lid of the treasure box.

“Where is he then if he’s not in the hatch?” Harvey said.

“What do you care?” Kimberly said. Maybe he took a bus to the moon.

“What I think…” Harvey started to say.

“What we think,” Danny said, “is that nobody cares what you think.”

“You want to make something out of it?” Harvey asked. Here it comes, John thought. He got ready to grab Harvey’s arm. He couldn’t think of anything else. This was just what Harvey wanted. All of a sudden he would get going with his fake karate and would start making grunting noises and kicking the air. Danny didn’t say anything, but just stood there looking into Harvey’s face.

Harvey spit again and shook his head. I’ll tell you so what,” he said to Kimberly. “I bet you stole all this junk.”

“Who asked you?” Danny said. “We don’t care what you think, remember?”

“Nobody has to ask me nothing,” Harvey said, giving Danny another hard look. What he said didn’t make any sense, and John hoped that Danny wouldn’t point that out. Maybe if no one said anything he would just leave. Instead of leaving, he spit again, but some of the spit ran down his chin, and he made a slobbering noise with his mouth when he tried to suck it back in. His face got red. “You wait,” he said, probably to Danny. Then he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He wouldn’t look at anyone now, but rode away on his skateboard, really fast, as if he was going someplace important. “Wimps!” he yelled over his shoulder.

“That was really gross,” Kimberly said when he was gone. “How come boys spit?”

“I don’t spit,” John said.

“Boys just spit,” Kimberly said. “I don’t understand it. Harvey Chickel’s head must be full of spit or something. He’s like a squirt gun.”

“He’s a hoser,” Danny said.

“He didn’t used to be that bad,” John said. “I remember a couple of years ago when he gave me two jelly doughnuts, just for no reason at all.”

“That must have been before I knew him,” Kimberly said.

“They must have been poisoned,” Danny said.

“He used to like to do all kinds of stuff,” John said. “Hide-and-go-seek, climbing trees, riding bikes, whatever.”

“Now he’s too tough,” Danny said.

“Right,” Kimberly said. “I bet that’s why he spits, because he’s so tough.”

“I was over at his house,” John said, “on the day he gave me the doughnuts. His father was supposed to come and pick him up. They were going to the mountains or something for the weekend. He only gets to see his father every once in a while. Anyway, Harvey was all packed and everything. He was waiting around for hours, and his father never came.

“Ever?” Kimberly asked.

“Not for a couple weeks. He just forgot, I guess. He was always doing that. Later Harvey tried to tell me his father had showed up late, and they went anyway, but I knew he was lying. He never went anywhere.

“Did you call him a liar?” Danny asked.

John shook his head.

“He would have called you one.”

“Yeah,” John said. “I guess that’s why I didn’t.”

Kimberly opened the treasure box again, and they sat down on the porch to look through the stuff. John didn’t want to say so, but he knew that Harvey might be partly right. The jewels in the box might be part of the stuff stolen from the shops around the Plaza. Of course Kimberly hadn’t stolen any of it.…

And right then she pulled Dr. Stone’s pocket watch out of a tangled string of blue glass beads.

Danny looked at John, but didn’t say anything.

“I wonder if it’s real gold,” Kimberly said.

“I think so,” John said, having a look at the watch. The initials A.W.S. were engraved in the back of the watch case. “I know so.”

“How?” she asked.

“Because he knows whose watch it is,” Danny said, looking over John’s shoulder at the engraved letters.

It was the stolen jewelry, or at least some of it. Kimberly set the box down on the porch and pushed it away from her, as if there were bugs in it. They told her about Dr. Stone losing the watch and about what he had told them about the stolen things. Then, as if he had gotten an idea, Danny suddenly jumped up and ran around the corner, into the carport. A moment later he shouted.

When John and Kimberly arrived, he was pointing at the crawlspace under the house. It was a square hole, just big enough for a person to creep through. There was a screen door covering the hole in order to keep cats and possums out. The door was unlatched and pulled partly aside.

Someone, or maybe some thing, had been under there.

Chapter 6: Fish Bones and Rat Shoes

The police came shortly after that. No one knew who had called them. It seemed like half the neighborhood was standing around in the carport. When Kimberly got back, John and Danny’s parents were talking to the police. Their dog Ahab wandered around sniffing the ground, smelling out clues. A man in brown coveralls and carrying a flashlight was just then climbing through the crawlspace, disappearing under the house like the wicked witch of the east.

Kimberly told John that she hadn’t gone to lunch with her aunt after all. Instead, her aunt had taken her around to the downtown shops in order to see if any of the treasure in the box actually had been stolen. Shopkeepers claimed about half of it. She gave the pocket watch back to Dr. Stone and then went to the police station with the rest of the treasure. The police kept it, just in case somebody should claim it, and Kimberly was left with an empty box.

“What’s supposed to be hidden under there?” John’s father asked, nodding at the crawlspace.

“Probably costume jewelry,” one policeman said.

“Glass junk,” the other one said. “Somebody’s been stealing it from local antique shops and ditching it under houses.”

“Why would anyone do that? John’s mother asked.

The first policeman scratched his head. “Nobody knows,” he said. “Probably it’s just a nut.”

“A nut,” their father said. “That would explain it. It’s probably the same nut that stole the fish out of our refrigerator. Three trout just vanished from the freezer yesterday afternoon. Someone’s been stealing potted plants off the porch, too. Probably it’s a gang of nuts.”

Both policeman looked at him as if he was the nut, and John wished that his father wouldn’t talk like that, especially around people like teachers and policemen, who usually didn’t know he was trying to be funny.

There was a shout from the man in the coveralls, and a few moments later his head appeared in the crawlspace. His face was streaked with dirt. “Got it!” he said, and pulled himself through onto the driveway carrying a canvas bag full of stuff He dumped it out in a pile and raked through it with his fingers. Mixed in with the glass jewelry and marbles and prisms were a scattering of bones, mostly fish skeletons, as if someone had been having a fish picnic under there, one of the other bones, maybe from a rat, had hole drilled into it, like a flute.

By now, more neighbors stood around out on the sidewalk and watched. The wind blew leaves across front lawns, and the sky was full of racing clouds. Across the street, Mr. Skink was asleep on the grass, and six or eight crows hopped around him, picking up fallen walnuts. More crows dropped the walnuts from telephone lines into the street, and still more crows hopped around on the street eating the broken nuts.

Harvey Chickel rode his skateboard up and down the sidewalk, edging around people and shoving his way through. Whenever he could get John’s attention he nodded his head slowly, as if to say, “I told you so.” Once or twice he drew his finger across his throat and pretended to drop dead.

John wondered if Harvey Chickel had been the one that called the police. It would have been a rotten thing to do.

“They’ll think it’s us that stole it,” Danny said to John.

“No they won’t,” John said. “They’re finding stuff all over the place.”

There was a shout from the man who lived next door to the Skinks. His crawlspace had been meddled with too. Everyone moved across the street, including John and Danny and Kimberly. The policemen checked the neighboring houses. The Skink’s crawlspace was nearly hidden by bushes. Although it was closed, there was a heap of fish skeletons lying just inside the screen.

The man in the coveralls didn’t look very happy, but one by one he climbed under each house and came out again with more treasure and more skeletons. He smelled like dead fish. Under Mr. Skink’s house he found the skin of two rats. The heads and tails were still attached, as if someone had taken the guts and bones out in order to turn them into a pair of bedroom slippers.

Mr. Skink was still asleep on the lawn, but his wife woke him up to show him the rats, and he told her to leave him alone, that he didn’t want to see any rats. “It’s the cats,” he said, shaking his head darkly. “Too doggone many cats. I oughta…” Then he fell asleep again with his head on a pile of leaves.

Each time another treasure was found, the mystery grew.

“Must be pirates,” John’s father said to a policeman. “They used to bury treasure all over the place instead of spending it.”

The policeman blinked at him, as if what he said was gibberish. But it didn’t sound like gibberish to John. How else could you explain it. Even Harvey Chickel, who sometimes seemed to do things for no good reason at all, wouldn’t have stolen the stuff and then left it lying around under other people’s houses.

That was crazy – nearly as crazy as all the fish skeletons.

There was only one way in which the fish skeletons weren’t crazy. The morning had been full of fish skeletons. Downtown Orange seemed to have become the fish skeleton capital of the world. One or two fish skeletons didn’t mean anything. But here in one morning there was about a million of them, hanging in windows, drawn on the covers of books, painted on the lids of decorated cans, scattered under half the houses on the block.

There was no use mentioning any of this to the police, who clearly didn’t care as much about rats and skeletons as about stolen jewelry. Rats and skeletons only confused things, and, like Mr. Skink, the police were happy enough to blame all that on cats. What would really confuse things would be to bring up marbles and moon coins and goblin tunnels, even though John was certain by now, even though he didn’t know why, that all of them were connected. And whatever they were connected to didn’t have anything to do with cats….

Just then Harvey Chickel hit Mr. Skink in the head with a walnut. He woke up looking mad and rubbing his forehead. Immediately he pointed at Harvey and started yelling. Everyone was leaving by then, walking away across the street. But they turned now to watch.

Harvey put his hands out to his side and opened his mouth, as if he couldn’t believe that Mr. Skink would accuse him of such a terrible thing as throwing a walnut.

“It was a crow,” Harvey said, pointing to the birds on the wire overhead. “I swear!”

“It was not a crow,” Mr. Skink said. “You deliberately hit me in the head with a walnut!” He turned to the two policemen, who were standing by their car now. “Arrest this boy for assault,” he said.

“Honest!” Harvey said. “I didn’t do anything, did I, John?” He looked at John and winked.

John stood there silently.

“Did I?” Harvey said. He made a pleading face.

“I think it was a crow,” John said after another moment.

He waited. If anyone else had seen Harvey throw the walnut, then they were both done for. It was bad enough to lie, but worse to be caught lying.

Mr. Skink gave him a dirty look, and that was worse yet. There was nothing really wrong with Mr. Skink; he was just a little bit gruff, and he didn’t like Harvey. John didn’t want to be disliked, even by Mr. Skink, but that’s what had happened. It only took an instant.

Nobody else noticed or seemed to care. Even Harvey didn’t care. He started riding up and down on his skateboard again. Tomorrow, even Mr. Skink probably wouldn’t remember. Only John would.

Everybody went home. The police left. The street was nearly empty. Harvey rode past on his skateboard as John was walk-in up the driveway toward the porch.

“Told you so,” Harvey said, and pushed John on the back. Laughing, he rode away down the sidewalk and around the corner. John stood there watching him go.

“The jerk,” Danny said. “You should have pushed him off the skateboard.” He walked away toward the porch.

John shrugged. Maybe he should have pushed Harvey back. But why? The only thing that would come of it was more trouble. He hated trouble. He hated pushing and fighting. He hated it when people were mean for no reason at all. What he couldn’t understand, ever, was why people like Harvey Chickel liked it.

Suddenly John thought that if he could invent one thing in his life, just one, it would be a giant eraser. The first thing he’d do with it would be to use it to erase the last few minutes. That’s what the world needed, a fat rubber eraser that you could carry in your pocket and use to get rid of your mistakes. He decided to write it down in his book along with his gravity ideas.

Chapter 7: The Magic Spectacles

It was impossible to divide the marbles up. They flipped a coin to see who would chose first. There was no problem with that. But there was no way to separate them into two piles. The marbles kept running back together, as if there was dip in the floor. They tried putting them into jars, but there was something wrong with that, too. The little puddles of marbles in the jars were too small, for one thing. In the fishbowl the marbles had looked like a collection. Now they looked like a collection cut in half. Then one of the jars fell over, and Danny tried to grab it, and accidentally knocked the other jar over too, and the marbles ran together again like two rivers flowing into a lake.

They tried again, switching marbles back and forth and being careful with the jars, but it still wasn’t any good. When they were done, the fishbowl sat there empty on the floor. Full of marbles, it had been almost magical, like a treasure chest in a cave. But now, empty, all the magic had gone out of it.

Then Ahab came into the room and walked straight through the jars, t knocking them over again. Maybe thinking they were bugs, he began to push them around with his nose. The sound of their rolling was loud on the wooden floor as they disappeared behind the dressers and toybox, bumping into the wall rolling away again along the floor mouldings until they all ended up under the bed. Danny crawled underneath and rolled them back out, and John caught them and dropped them back into the fishbowl, all except the last two.

One of those was white, with a red and green swirl through it like a piece of Christmas candy. John put it into his pocket. “I want this one for a good luck charm,” he said. “It’s all I want. You can have the rest.”

“Let’s just leave the ret in the fishbowl,” Danny said, holding one last marble in the palm of his hand. “I’ll keep this one.” It was pink and blue, the color of an Easter egg or of a springtime sky at sunset.

The wind blew harder than ever outside, making a moaning noise around the window. It was a cold wind, and the sky was full of clouds. In the western sky, the sun shone from beneath the clouds like an orange half-hidden by a china plate. That morning it had seemed to John that something unusual was about to happen, something big. But now, late in the afternoon, the wind had scoured most of the mystery out of the day.

There was nothing left to do but clean up their bedroom. That, for some reason, had to be done every Saturday, no matter what. It would be easier just to shut the door, so that no one could see in, but somehow that wasn’t good enough for their parents. The room had to be cleaned because it had to be cleaned.

Danny put books away on the shelves while John picked up toys and tossed them into the toybox and into baskets lying around on the floor. They found a pile of old, dried-out banana peels behind the toy box along with an empty carton that had once held frozen fish sticks.

“That’s not my trash,” John said, pointing at it. “What was this, some kind of midnight snack?”

“Don’t look at me,” Danny said. “I’m sure I eat frozen fish sticks out of the box.”

“Then who put it there? Dad?”

“You tell me and we’ll both know,” Danny said.

John picked all of it up anyway. The banana skins were as stiff as cardboard. He smashed it all down into the trash can and then shoved a lot of old scrap paper on top of it, stomping it flat so that the can was only half full and didn’t have to be emptied. He pitched a few dirty clothes out into the hallway, and the room was nearly clean except for a couple of things that were hard to put away but that fit just fine under the bed.

“Watch me do a trick,” John said finally.

There was a certain amount of dust and sand and shreds of paper and who knows what-all kinds of tiny stuff left on the wooden floor. John held his jacket by the neck, gave it a flourish like a magician’s cape, and whipped it back and forth through the air, a couple of inches above the floor. As quick as winking, dust and debris swirled into the air, sand and craps shot away under the bed and dressers. Like magic, the floor was clean. He bowed, dropping his jacket onto his bed.

There were three books that wouldn’t fit into the bookcase, so Danny stuffed two of them into his shirt drawer and said that he was through too. “I’ll read this one,” he said, and then flopped down on his bed and opened the third book.

John sat down on his own bed and stared out the window. Someday someone would invent a robot to clean bedrooms. Once he and Danny had built one out of tin cans tied together with string, but it wouldn’t stand up. Because of that they had called it “the sleeping robot” for a while, but then Harvey Chickel had stepped on its head and smashed it. After that they called it “the dead robot” until it was left outside in the rain and got rusty and their father threw it away.

The house was quiet now, with only the sound of the wind whispering outside. It was a late-afternoon sort of quiet, lonesome and still, and it reminded John of being in the curiosity shop that morning. The whole room was washed in underwater colors from the sunlight shining through Mrs. Owlswick’s window.

The spectacles lay on the windowsill where John had put them an hour ago. He had forgotten all about them. The watery light shone through them, too, and reflected from the wooden floor in green, over-lapping circle.

Something seemed to be moving through the spectacles light, like dim pictures on a movie screen. There were leafy tree waving in the wind and the shadow-shapes of distant hills. Specks of dust floated through the light like drifting autumn leaves. Then clouds moved across the sun outside, and the green light dimmed and was gone.

(Chapter 7 continues after illustration)

John picked the spectacles up and put them on in order to look out the window. And what he saw through the window was curious – as curious as anything that had happened so far that day.

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

Chapter 8: Through the Bedroom Window

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.

Chapter 9: Goblins

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.

“Hey!” John said to Danny. “That’s mom’s pin! That’s the one she lost!” And then he realized that it hadn’t been lost at all; it had been stolen, just like the fish out of the refrigerator and – what else? The marbles? He remembered the laughter he had heard, the noise in the living room….

The first goblin shoved out his hand again. Then he made circles of his thumbs and fingers and held them over his eyes. The other goblins nodded their heads and made turkey noises, and one of them, the one with the prisms, made circles of his fingers and thumbs too, but poked himself in the eye by mistake.

One of the other three laughed, and the one with the poked eye reached across and yanked the Christmas pin off the other’s shirt. The third goblin snatched it away and poked the prism goblin in the ear with his finger, and suddenly the three of them were yowling and hissing and poking and scratching and pulling at prisms and pins and hitting each other on the »nose. The first goblin ignored them. He held out his hand again.

John knew what the goblins wanted. And he knew now where the lens must have gone. The goblins had taken it. Now they wanted the rest of the spectacles.

Ahab yanked loose from Danny’s grip just then and barked straight into the goblin’s face. The three that were wrestling on the ground looked up in surprise. Ahab barked again, and the goblin with his hand out took a step back, treading on the hand of the goblin with the filed teeth, who bit him on the back of the leg. Ahab leaped forward, and the goblins jumped up together and ran down the path, howling and gobbling and waving their arms. One by one they ducked away into the woods, disappearing from view There was a crashing and rustling for a moment, and then silence again. Ahab stood barking at the place where they’d left the path, but he didn’t follow.

“Quick!” John shouted, running toward the meadow. Danny and Ahab ran behind him. The woods began to brighten a little. The trees were farther apart, and the fog wasn’t as heavy out along the edge of the trees. John could see the moon overhead again. Just before them lay the bridge over the creek, and beyond that lay the empty meadow.

As he ran across the footbridge, John pulled the spectacles out of his pocket and put them on, closing his right eye so as to look only through the lens. The moon turned green in the sky like a piece of old cheese, and the meadow stretched out before them like an emerald sea – utterly empty.

There was nothing but wind-swept grass and wildflowers. The window was gone.

Chapter 10: The Fog from the Kettle

It was easy to find the place where the window had been. The grass was still smashed down beneath it, and there was a little trail of flattened grass leading toward the bridge. But through the broken spectacles, John could see only empty meadow, and it was hard to imagine that there had ever been a window there at all. The quiet breeze stirred the flowers and the tall grass, and the afternoon was lonesome and strange. Even Ahab stood still and looked around uneasily, listening to the airy piping of goblin flutes way off in the woods.

Maybe the window had moved. Maybe the wind had blown it somewhere – off toward the woods or across the meadow or down toward the sea….

But there was no window to be seen in any direction. And through the broken spectacles everything looked flat, like a painting on a piece of glass. The magic had gone out of them; the window had vanished.

“Let me try them,” Danny whispered, and John handed him the spectacles without saying anything, even though he knew they wouldn’t work. Leaves drifted past on the wind. The eastern sky was shadowy gray, and the evening was getting cold.

“I don’t know why you had to go and drop them,” Danny said after a moment. He handed the spectacles back to John. “You should have had them in your pocket.”

“It wasn’t my fault that they broke,” John said, putting them back on. “You were the one that knocked me over. Why didn’t you watch out? And I told you not to crawl through the window anyway, didn’t I? I knew it was a bad idea.’

“I didn’t make you come,” Danny said. He picked up a rock and threw it hard, right at where the window had been.

“Don’t!” John said.

“Why? There’s nothing there anyway, now that you broke the glasses.” He threw another rock.

“The problem was you picking up the coin from the fountain,” John said. “I told you that’s bad luck, taking coins out of a wishing well. That’s what got us here.”

“Yeah,” Danny said, “except that it wasn’t a wishing well. And besides, the glasses would have got us home again anyway, if they weren’t broken.”

John said nothing. There was no use. They couldn’t argue the glasses back together again. And the mention of home reminded him that on Pine Street the streetlights would just be coming on. There would be lamps glowing in people’s living rooms and fires in fireplaces. He remembered the cherry pies that had been baking in the oven, and he wondered if his mother and father would eat any of the pie if he and Danny didn’t show up by dinnertime. Maybe they wouldn’t eat at all. They’d be out in the neighborhood, going door to door. Probably they would call the police….

(Chapter 10 continues after illustration)

A big sycamore leaf blew past just then, nearly bumping John’s nose. Something yanked on the spectacles, and they were jerked around sideways. He grabbed the brass frame and swatted at the leaf with his other hand. The leaf went spinning away, and he heard the hollering of a very small voice, like a radio with the volume turned too far down.

“Look!” Danny shouted, pointing at the leaf.

John saw it at the same time: there was a tiny man riding on it, holding onto the stem as if it were the tiller of a boat. He wore a hat the size of a pea. More leaves sailed toward them in a long line out of the woods. They were shaped like dried stars with the points turned up and were painted autumn colors. On each leaf sat a man about the size of a water beetle.

One of the leaves swerved toward John’s face again. The little man riding on it grabbed at the spectacles, and John stepped backward and out of the way. This one didn’t have a hat on. He was bald on top, like the goblins, and he wore a vest and striped pants. Under his arm he had a tiny fishing pole, and between his crossed legs there was a heap of colored glass chips.

More leaves blew past, maybe twenty in all. Most of the leaf sailors carried fishing poles and chips of glass. And as was true of the goblins, all of the little men looked very nearly alike. They were all plump and had funny sprouts of hair and worried looks on their faces. They followed each other in a curvy trail across the meadow, rising and falling on the breeze, flying away in the direction of the cottage on the far-off hill. Finally they were just specks in the distance.

“Did you see what they were carrying?” Danny asked. His eyes were wide, as if he couldn’t quite believe any of it. John nodded.

“Do you think it was pieces of our spectacles?”

“Maybe,” John said. “How do I know?” He was still mad because of what Danny had said about him breaking the spectacles. A curtain of fog had fallen over the woods, and the trees were nothing but black shadows now. Just then a drum began beating, very low like a heartbeat, or like someone pounding on an iron kettle with a big wooden spoon. A light blinked on, back in the woods. The light leaped and died and then leaped again, like a bonfire flaring up. It made a streaky orange light through the fog.

Ahab walked back and forth restlessly, then stopped and barked, then ran off in the direction the leaf men had taken, up toward the house on the hill. He stopped, barked, looked back at John and Danny, and then ran a little farther.

John looked one last time for the window. He stood beneath where it was supposed to be and felt the air. Maybe it was there and they just couldn’t see it….

The bonfire blinked out and the woods were dark. Then, just as suddenly, the fire blinked on again, burning right at the edge of the meadow now. A great, black cauldron hung over the fire, and fog billowed out of it, pouring over the edges of the cauldron and onto the ground like sea foam. The shadow-shapes of goblins danced around the fire, and the dark fog whirled out in a steamy rush, as if the night-time itself were leaking out of the cauldron.

John and Danny took off running, following Ahab, across the meadow toward the house on the hill. They didn’t slow down until they struck a narrow, dirt road where the going got steeper and the meadow fell away behind them. When they looked back, the bonfire had vanished. There was no sign of goblins, no sound of laughter or drumming or flute music. The meadow was empty again, and night had fallen.

Ahead of them, the light of the full moon shone on the road. There were thick trees along either side. The house atop the hill was nearly invisible behind the trees now, and they could just see one of its windows, aglow with lamp light.

“Did you bring any candy?” Danny asked suddenly.

‘Yeah,” John said, opening up his belt pack. “All kinds. Danny held out his hand. “Licorice,” he said. “Anything licorice.”

“I didn’t bring any licorice,” John said. He unclipped the pack and held it open in the moonlight. There were peppermint and butterscotch candies wrapped in plastic and two or three purple bubblegums. Most of it was the kind of candy sold by the pound, out of bins at the grocery store.

“Let me see.” Danny took the pack from him. He pulled out the two chocolate bars. Both of them had been smashed flat. “They’re dead,” Danny said. Chocolate oozed out of the ends of the wrappers, and there was lint and sand stuck to it. “They smell like fish, too.” He dropped the candy back into the open pack.

“I don’t think it’s the candy that smells like fish,” John whispered. All was silent. Except for moonlight, the night was dark, and there was no sound but the wind rustling the trees. Then they heard a twig snap and the sound of dry leaves crackling underfoot. Then there was silence again, and the night was deadly still.

Ahab growled and took a step forward, cocking his head to the side. Danny reached down and grabbed his collar. Moonlit fog drifted out of the dark trees, and right then, in the blink of an eye, the bonfire sprang up again, glowing through the trees, and there was a rustling and crackling of things moving swiftly in the leafy darkness.

“Go!” John shouted, and the three of them took off running again, up the hill toward the house, into the misty darkness where the roadside trees blocked the light of the moon.

Chapter 11: The Fight on the Road

Goblins swarmed out of the darkness ahead of them, twenty or more, running silently in their rat shoes. Ahab leaped straight into the middle of them, nearly pulling Danny over onto his face and knocking the little men this way and that way into the dirt. John yelled, trying to scare them off, and Danny let go of Ahab and swung the backpack at the closest goblin. Halloween candy flew out onto the road, and one of the backpack straps caught around a goblin’s neck.

The goblin jerked away, yanking the pack out of Danny’s hand. Four other goblins began pulling on it, trying to reach inside. Others crawled on the road on their hands and knees, picking up fallen candy and shoving it into their mouths.

“Run!” John shouted. But Danny didn’t run. He chased the goblin with the pack and grabbed one of the straps. Immediately a goblin climbed onto his back like a smelly little ape. Another clutched his leg. Their hands snaked into his pockets. The goblin still holding the pack acted as if he were playing tug of war until Danny pulled him straight over onto his face.

John pushed goblins aside, trying to help his brother, and Ahab ran back and forth, chasing goblins up the hill and into the trees. Within moments the same goblins leaped back down onto the road and went charging after the candy and the backpack again, fighting madly with each other, poking and gouging and wrestling.

In the thickening fog, the trees were dark ghosts along the roadside. Goblins appeared and disappeared. John hit and kicked at goblins. Maybe the spectacles were broken, and didn’t work, but he wasn’t going to give them up. He grabbed a goblin that held onto Danny’s back and yanked it off, throwing it sideways into three more goblins just then coming down out of the trees. All four were knocked sprawling, but then were up again, capering forward, their eyes whirling and wild.

Then there was an explosion. Someone was running toward them down the road – not a goblin, but a man waving some kind of weapon. The goblins stopped fighting and stood still. There was another explosion, a kind of a whoosh, like a firecracker going off in a bucket of water, and the man ran out of the tree shadows and into the moonlight.

He was pretty fat, and he ran heavily, but he looked as if he meant business. He threw the gun to his shoulder and shot into the trees, and a spray of misty bubbles flew out of the gun. The breeze caught the bubbles and blew them across the road. A couple of the goblins slunk away into the trees. The rest hesitated, as if making up their minds.

“I’ll shoot!” the man with the gun yelled. ‘Back away!” Two or three goblins started laughing, pretending to be fat men shooting guns.

“Here now!’ the man yelled, “Go on now!”

When one of the goblins made a sort of raspberry noise with his lips, the man’s eyes flew open. “Well!” he shouted, suddenly furious. “I’ve decided to shoot! It’s time for a bath!”

The sound of the word “bath” seemed to put the fear into them, and suddenly, as if they were all thinking with the same brain, they ran howling away into the woods. The fog seemed to lift right then, and the bonfire blinked out. Once again the woods were dark and silent.

The man turned to John and Danny and bowed, although he couldn’t bow very far. “Allow me to introduce myself…” he started to say, but before he was finished he stopped and looked behind Danny, where one last goblin sat in the dust of the roadway, eating Halloween candy.

He shoved a piece into his mouth, not bothering to unwrap it first. He smelled as if he had been wrestling with dead fish and hadn’t taken a bath afterward, and his hair was like spider web. There were sticky candy smears all over his face. He looked around sorrowfully Then, screwing up his eyes, he shoved a long, bony finger into his mouth and pulled out a drooly piece of plastic candy wrapper. He looked at it for a moment and then ate it.

“My heavens!” said the man with the gun. He shut his eyes for a moment, as if the goblin’s manners were so bad that he couldn’t bear to watch. “Stand aside,” he told John and Danny, and then threw the gun to his shoulder, pointed it at the goblin, and pulled the trigger.

Chapter 12: Mr. Deener

There was a sound like sand being poured through a pipe, and a “bump, bump, bump, whoosh!” that nearly knocked the man over backward. The air was filled with mist that was wet and cold and smelled like soap.

The goblin shrieked, leaping to his feet and shaking like a wet dog. When the misty air cleared, the goblin stood there with a clean face, his hair neatly slicked down along the sides of his head. He looked at his clean hands in wonder, and then, as if he were trying to eat a carrot stick, he bit himself on the finger. He yowled, shaking his hand and looking surprised. Then he turned around and slouched away down the road to the meadow.

(Chapter 12 continues after illustration)

“And don’t come back!” the man with the soap gun yelled.

Right then a woman with a lantern appeared from around the bend in the road above them. She was gray-haired, very tall and neat and elegant. She looked incredibly like Kimberly’s Aunt, Mrs. Owlswick. Danny and John looked at each other, and Danny nodded, as if to say, “I told you so.”

The man with the soap gun bowed again. The hair above his ears stuck up into the air as if a heavy wind were blowing out of his coat collar. He wore a vest and a pair of walking shorts and high socks folded down at the tons with ribbons at the folds. His coat appeared to be very comfortable and well-worn, and although he looked a little too much like an overgrown goblin, he seemed altogether pleasant and well-fed.

“I’m Mister Deener,” he said, putting peculiar emphasis on the Mister part. “At your service.”

“I’m John,” John said, “and this is Danny and Ahab. We’re at your service too.” He bowed, and so did Danny.

“And this,” said Mr. Deener, gesturing at the woman with the lantern, “is Aunt Flo. She’s Polly’s Aunt Flo, which is what everyone calls her. You might as well call her that too.”

John and Danny both said hello and that they were glad to meet her. She looked just like the sort of person who would be called Aunt somebody.

“Your soap gun worked exceedingly well, Artemis,” she said. Then to the boys she said, “Mr. Deener is an inventor. He fell upon the notion that a goblin would fear soap more than almost anything, and so he built this weapon, which he’s just now gotten a chance to use for the first time. Very successful, I’d say.”

Mr. Deener nodded happily. “I put the fear into them,” he said. “I’m working on a device to blow them up like balloons. I’m going to float them away, all of them together. Maybe to the moon.” He looked at John and Danny out of one eye, as if he was going to ask them a trick question. “I suppose you two are the Kraken brothers?”

“No,” said Danny, speaking up. “We came here through a magic window that we found by looking through a pair of spectacles, and we can’t find the window now because the spectacles are broken.”

A look came across Mr. Deener’s face. His eyes opened wide and he scratched his head. Clearly he was thinking hard about something, and for a moment John almost expected him to make the glasses sign with his fingers and thumbs.

“Spectacles,” Mr. Deener said finally. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t care anything about these spectacles. Did someone tell you that I wanted a pair of spectacles? I make it a habit never to buy anything from door-to-door salesmen.”

“No,” Danny said. “Actually we didn’t come here to sell them. We just came by accident.”

“Well,” Mr. Deener said, “I don’t believe in accidents. Not that kind anyway. I assumed you were the Kraken brothers, come to help. I’ve been expecting them.” He looked confused for a moment. “I… I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought… for a moment I thought…” But he didn’t finish his thinking. He stood there looking sad now, remembering something, or maybe trying to remember.

“You’ll just have to go on expecting them, Artemis,” Aunt Flo said to him, “because this isn’t them.”

“Then allow me to say that it looks very much like them.” He started walking up the road, as if his interest in John and Danny had ended.

Aunt Flo leaned over and whispered to them that Mr. Deener had been waiting for the Kraken brothers for a long time. No one was sure that were any Kraken brothers, not really. They were probably Mr. Deener’s imaginary friends. “I’m one of his imaginary friends,” she said, “and so is my niece Polly.” Then she touched the side of her head with her finger and winked. “He’s lost some of his marbles,” she said. “He’s forgotten… too much.”

They all followed along after Mr. Deener, who soon forgot that he was sad. He started humming and singing to himself, and then laughing at the song when he came to what must have been the good parts. Twice he stopped, and said, “Hark!” and pointed the soap weapon at the woods. But there was no sign of any goblins, and in a few minutes they arrived at a cobblestone carriage drive at the top of the hill.

“Which of the brothers are you again?” Mr. Deener asked Danny, very abruptly, as if to catch him off guard.

“I’m Danny,” Danny started to say, but he was interrupted by Aunt Flo, who said,

“These are not the brothers, Artemis.”

“Are they due tonight, then?”

“No,” said Aunt Flo, “they are not.” Then she stopped for a moment to think about something, and said finally. “Maybe these are the brothers after all.” She turned to Danny and John and said, “Do you mind being Mr. Deener’s imaginary friends?’

(Chapter 12 continues after illustration)

“No,” John said. “I guess not. How imaginary do we have to be?”

Mr. Deener looked instantly happy. “Now that you’ve come, you don’t have to be imaginary at all,” he said. Then he looked puzzled again, and asked, “Why have you come? That’s what I’m wondering. I can’t quite recall it.”

“We don’t know either,” Danny said. “We just came.”

“But the wife…” Mr. Deener started to say, and then stopped, as if the mention of “the wife” had wrecked his thought. He smashed his eyes shut, pushing his cheeks up toward his forehead, so that all the feelings that were in his eyes and on his face got squashed out of it. When he opened his eyes he looked entirely pleasant again.

“I believe that this is them,” he said. “I’m a stinker if I don’t.” Then he looked at them all and said, “Which of you calls me a stinker?”

“None of us calls you a stinker,” Aunt Flo said, as they set out toward the house again. Flowers bloomed in flowerbeds, and the limbs of oak trees cast a tangle of moon shadows onto the cobblestones. Through the trees John could see a broad valley below them, sweeping down toward the meadow. The valley was cut by a dry river. Moonlight shone on the white stones of the riverbed far below them and on the wooden timbers of an old, broken-down dock. The ribs of a rowboat sat like a skeleton beneath the dock, as if it had been ages since there had been enough water to float it.

Although it was a long way away, John could see that someone dressed in white, in a nightshirt maybe, sat at the end of the dock, just like the man from the cover of the book in the curiosity shop – The Wise Fishermen’s Encyclopedia. Bats darted through the air above him, and the moon cast the shadow of his fishing pole across the dry, bone-white bed of the river.

Chapter 13: Mr. Deener Has a Fit

The house had a big front porch with white-painted chairs on it. Rose bushes covered with dark red flowers climbed on wooden trellises at both ends of the porch. Lamplight shone through the front windows, which were made of old, watery glass, just like Mrs. Owlswick’s window. Through them John could see a cheerful fire burning in a stone fireplace. Nearby, a table was set for dinner. A girl sat in a chair in front of the fire, sewing doll clothes. She must be Polly, the other of Mr. Deener’s “imaginary friends”. She looked just like Kimberly.

Ahab pushed in past all of them and headed for the fire, just as if he lived there. He wagged his tail at the girl as he went past, then curled up in front of the heath and went straight to sleep. The girl went over and patted him on the head. “What’s his name?” she asked.

“Ahab,” Danny said.

“It sounds like the name of a king,” she said.

“He behaves just like a king,” Mr. Deener said. “He was the scourge of the goblins out there on the road tonight. And this, by the way, is…” He gestured at John. “What was your name again?”

“John,” John said. “And this is my brother Danny.”

“I’m Polly,” she said, and she curtsied in an old fashioned way Her hair was shorter than Kimberly’s, and there was something else about her… Perhaps it was that she was dressed a little bit old-fashioned too, in a blue dress with lace. Her skin was pale, like a delicate china plate, and, maybe because of the strange, flickering light from the fireplace, it seemed to John that he could very nearly see through her.

“The soap gun was a great success,” said Aunt Flo.

Polly said, “I knew it would be,” and she kissed Mr. Deener on the cheek. He sat down in the chair that she had been sitting in.

Just then a woman who looked like an unhappy ghost walked into the room. She was round and short, like a barrel, and was dusty-white. Even her hair was white. She carried an enormous wooden spoon.

“I’ve spilt the flour,” she said.

“Bother the flour,” said Aunt Flo. “Scoop up what you can and sweep the rest into a box we can make cakes for the squirrels with any that’s got dirty.”

She wasn’t a ghost; she was just covered with flour. She wiped her face clean with her sleeve.

Mr. Deener looked worried all of a sudden. “Cakes for the squirrels?” he said. “What about my cakes? Do I get a cake?”

“You’ll get a dusty old clod,” said the woman, evidently still mad at having spilled the flour. But just then the smell of something baking – a pie, maybe, or a tray of cookies – came sailing out into the room, as if someone had opened an oven door.

Mr. Deener put his hand on his forehead and stood up. Then he moaned and sat back down, sinking low into his chair, so that his chin was pushed down into his chest and his eyes were squished into his cheeks again. “A dusty clod,” he said. “It’s what I deserve!”

“Best not to start him up, Mrs. Barlow,” Aunt Flo said to the flour woman. Polly put a hand on Mr. Deener’s shoulder. “You won’t have to eat clods,” she said to him. “I’ll find you something nice. We’ll find him something nice, won’t we?”

John said, “Of course we will.”

And Danny said, “Sure.”

“Cake?” Mr. Deener asked.

“Of course there’ll be cake,” said Aunt Flo.

“And pies, I don’t doubt?” Mr. Deener sat up straighter, cheering up at the idea of pies and cakes.

“He’s starting up!” cried Aunt Flo. “Catch him!”

Mrs. Barlow rolled her eyes and slapped the wooden spoon into her open hand, as if she were about to conk him on the head with it. Then she turned around and tramped away toward the kitchen.

Mr. Deener’s fingers drummed on the arms of his chair. His face was suddenly wild, like the face of a starving man looking in at a restaurant window. “Cookies!” he said. “And bread and cupcakes and honeycakes and curli-que rolls. And cinnamon twists and puffo-sweets and doughy delights and chocolate pinwheels!”

He got up and began to walk around the room, stiff-legged, like a sleepwalker in a cartoon. He looked straight ahead of himself, as if he could see a thousand desserts in the air and was eating each one in his mind.

“Meringues,” he said. “Jelly rolls, cinnamon rolls, sugar rolls, milk-doggies, monkey bread, popovers, pollyannas, pinky winkys, polliwogs, popinjays, poppolumps…” His voice rose like a tea kettle going off.

“Stop him, quick!” shouted Aunt Flo.

Polly clutched Mr. Deener’s arm and tried to steer him back to his chair. It was no use. He was crazy with the idea of food, and he wouldn’t sit down or keep still. He tried to rush toward the kitchen, but Polly still had hold of his arm, and Aunt Flo grabbed the tail of his coat and yelled, “Hurry, Mrs. Barlow!”

Mr. Deener picked up a doily from the back of a chair and stuffed it into his mouth. He tried to chew it up. “Salt!” he shouted. His eyes blinked open and shut and he waved his arms, knocking a vase off a table. He began to shake, and the house shook with him.

The dinner plates jumped and clanked. Glassware rattled in the cupboards and plaster dust fell from the ceiling where the hanging lamp swung back and forth. Rubble fell into the fireplace. Doors and windows banged open and shut. Danny and Polly scrambled under the dining room table. John ran for an open doorway, braced himself in the middle of it, closed his eyes, and held on. Mr. Deener’s eyes were mashed closed now. His hands groped in the air.

There was a terrible creaking noise that grew louder by the moment, maybe from deep in the earth. The wind moaned and howled outside the windows, and there was the crash of thunder from the sky. It sounded as if the whole house, the whole hillside, the whole strange land, was shaking and blowing apart and in moments would collapse in a heap like a house of cards.

Chapter 14: Glazed Doughnuts

“Excuse me,” someone said to John, and tapped him on the shoulder. The house still swayed crazily and the air was full of a roaring sound. Holding on, John turned around, and there was Mrs. Barlow carrying a long wooden dowel strung with glazed doughnuts. “Coming through,” she said. John moved out of her way and she charged into the room, hurrying toward Mr. Deener, who was tottering back and forth and making loud smacking noises.

Mrs. Barlow waved the doughnuts back and forth under his nose. Slowly he quit shaking. The roaring faded. The dishes in the cupboard clattered one last time and grew still, and the pictures on the wall quit swaying and righted themselves. The lamp in the ceiling swung slowly back and forth. John let go of the doorway, and Danny and Polly crawled out from under the table.

“When the Deener is in one of his fits,” Mrs. Barlow said, “there’s no one but me who can settle him down. It’s doughnuts that does it – glazeys only. No cake doughnuts.”

“I’ll just have one of those,” said Mr. Deener, opening his eyes. “Two of them, maybe.” He slumped in his chair. “The pup will need one too,” he said, whistling for Ahab, who looked out from behind the table where he had gone to hide during the shaking. “And some for the brothers, of course.”

But then Mr. Deener took the whole line of doughnuts away from Mrs. Barlow and began to eat them all himself, in two bites each, gulping them down and sort of wheezing, as if he were catching his breath. In a moment there were only two doughnuts left, which he held over either eye, looking through them at John and Danny.

“This is a doughnut scope,” he said to them. “You can see things through a doughnut. Windows and doors.” After saying this he ate both doughnuts at once, piled on top of each other and smashed together, like a doughnut sandwich.

“Well!” said Mrs. Barlow. “Aren’t we a pig!” She set the water glasses upright on the table again.

Mr. Deener breathed heavily. His hands twitched on the arms of his chair. “I am ashamed,” he said. “I was…”

“Overcome,” said Polly helpfully. Then to John and Danny she said, “He can’t help himself when the fit comes over him. He has to have doughnuts, quick.”

Danny whispered, “Won’t he eat anything else?”

“Not when the fit’s on him,” Polly said. “When he has the fit, it’s got to be glazed doughnuts. Aunt Flo says it comes from remembering. Uncle Deener is what she calls a sufferer.”

“Have we got any more?” Mr. Deener asked the cook. “Not for me, of course. I don’t want them. I’ve eaten plenty. You couldn’t make me eat another one. Not if you tried.” And with that he stopped talking and looked around, as if waiting for someone to make him try. “I mean for the pup,” he said. “And the brothers. Look at them, skinny as sticks. The goblins have eaten the candy that they were bringing for me. It’s a filthy shame. We must have another rod of glazeys, Mrs. Barlow!”

“We know what your little game is, Deener,” said Mrs. Barlow, giving him a look. “You’ll snatch them up and eat them too, and the rest of us can go starve.”

Ahab trotted over and licked Mr. Deener’s hand, which was all sugary from the doughnuts. Mr. Deener sighed deeply and said that Ahab understood him. And then Polly said that she understood him too. And Danny and John said that they did too, although actually John didn’t understand him at all.

Mrs. Barlow went back into the kitchen and came back out with another stick of doughnuts, which Mr. Deener tried to snatch out of her hands.

“Clods!” she shouted at him. “Dirt clods and muddy water!” Mr. Deener collapsed into his chair, squishing up his cheeks and eyes again.

Mrs. Barlow passed out the doughnuts. Just for luck, John looked through the holes in the doughnuts, hoping that Mr. Deener’s “doughnut scope” wasn’t just nonsense. Maybe it was something he could write up in the science section of his book He couldn’t see anything unusual through them.

“Save two for… for the Sleeper,” said Mr. Deener, rising sadly from his chair.

“He won’t eat them,” said Mrs. Barlow. “You know very well he won’t. They’ll sit by his bedside and dry out. I say we tie the Sleeper up and make him eat one.”

Aunt Flo said, “Never mind that. When he comes in from fishing he’ll need his sleep. The squirrels will eat the doughnuts right enough if the Sleeper lets them dry out. Nothing will be wasted. Mr. Deener is quite right.”

“Fishing!” Mrs. Barlow said, as if she didn’t like the word. “Hmph!”

“I’ll take them to his room,” said Polly, and she slipped the two glazed doughnuts off the dowel and hurried away toward a wooden stairs that angled up toward a second floor. Mr. Deener looked very sad again lone day he’ll catch his fish,” he said, wand then maybe things will change.”

For a moment nobody spoke, although Mrs. Barlow looked like she wanted to. Then, cheerfully, Aunt Flo said, “Time for dinner.”

The idea of dinner seemed to brighten Mr. Deener up even more. He shook John’s hand. “Which of the brothers are you?”

“John.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Mr. Deener. “I’ve been waiting for your arrival, you know. You have such a preposterous last name – Kraken. Do you know what a Kraken is?”

“No, sir,” John said.

“It’s a giant sea creature – a squid or an octopus or some kind of nautilus. It pretends to be an island, and people come along on boats and pitch tents on it and eat picnic lunches, and then, in the middle of their sandwiches, it rises up and eats them. Very funny, eating your lunch on a squid’s back. Why didn’t they just name you squid?”

John didn’t know what to say to that, so he smiled and shrugged, and just then Polly came back downstairs and said, “He’s back. Sound asleep.”

Mr. Deener sighed very heavily. “Fish?” he asked.

Polly shook her head, and Mrs. Barlow came in carrying a platter with a roast beef on it and potatoes and carrots heaped around. She laid it on a table set for all of them, herself included, and with one plate at the head of the table where no one sat. It was clearly intended for “the Sleeper,” whoever he was. Mr. Deener plucked up a big serving spoon and began to shovel potatoes and slices of roast beef onto his plate, filling and filling and filling it until he had a sort of mountain of food. Then he looked up, surprised, and said, “For you, my dear,” and reached the plate across toward Polly, who shook her head politely.

“I couldn’t eat half that much,” she said. “You have it, Uncle Deener. You look hungry.”

“I am, and that’s the truth,” Mr. Deener said. He started to eat, wrinkling up his forehead and chewing very steadily through the whole-plate of food. Then he served himself another, and then called for pie when it was done, and ice cream for the pie, and coffee to go with it, all of which Mrs. Barlow brought in great quantity, telling him that she had a mind to serve him dirt cutlets or worm sandwiches or some other awful thing if he didn’t quit pigging the food up.

“He eats for two,” Aunt Flo said, as if to explain Mr. Deener’s tremendous appetite.

“I’m through,” said Mr. Deener. “I’m full up.” And he fed all the scraps to Ahab in a big heap. Then he said, “I’m going in to work,” and he nodded to everyone, saying to John and Danny, “I’m building a device for the purposes of exploring the moon.”

“A telescope?” asked Danny.

“No, a ladder,” said Mr. Deener, and he walked out with his hands clasped across his stomach and a toothpick in his mouth.

“And you ought to go up to bed,” Aunt Flo said to Polly. “You can show the boys to their room.” Then she said to John and Danny, “We’ll get down to the business of helping you find your way home in the morning. Mr. Deener will see the way, if you’ll help him to see it. We’re all hoping that Mr. Deener will see the way’

So they followed Polly up the stairs, passing the half-open door of the room where Mr. Deener worked. He was dressed in an apron now and was twining holly leaves and ivy vines onto the rungs of a rope ladder. Heaped on the floor were old books and a ribby old umbrella with all the fabric pulled off and a scattering of globes made of colored glass, like fishing floats, all of them the size of oranges.

“You know the clothes you were sewing?” John asked Polly.

“Are those for the little leaf men?”

“Yes,” she said. “They’re called henny-penny men, actually.”

“Where do they come from?” Danny asked.

“Uncle Deener makes them,” Polly said. “He makes them up out of “spare parts”. That’s what he says. I told him I’d sew their clothes.”

“Doesn’t he make any henny-penny women? “John asked.

She shook her head. “He can’t. He tried once, but something went wrong and he had a terrible fit. You saw how he got tonight. It was like that, only worse.”

They climbed the second flight of stairs to the third floor, where yet another set of stairs angled away into a sort of tower. Somewhere above them lay the Sleeper, with his glazed doughnuts beside him on a plate.

Their bedroom had a fireplace of its own and was very cheerful with wood paneling and books and a big painting on the wall of two apes sitting in a tree, watching a crocodile go past on the ground below.

After Polly left, Danny fell asleep right away. It had been a long and tiring day. John lay awake, watching the fire burning low in the grate and Ahab asleep in front of it. The curtains were drawn back, and leaves drifted past it on the night wind, maybe carrying henny-penny men. The sky was full of stars.

They had been lucky to fall among friends instead of among goblins. But John missed his bedroom and his mother and father. He knew they would think that he and Danny were lost, and that they wouldn’t get any sleep that night at all. If only he could call them on the telephone and tell them that the two of them were safe and that Ahab was there with them.

Thinking that way made him grow more and more sleepy and he began to dream about being home again. He and Danny were playing marbles in the backyard with Kimberly – or was it Polly? He dreamed that the back gate scraped open. It was Mr. Deener coming in, as if he lived there, as if it were his back yard. Only it wasn’t Mr. Deener all of a sudden; it was a great fat goblin, wearing rats for shoes.

Part two of three

Chapter 15: Upstairs in the Old House

A noise woke John up. It was a crash, like glass breaking, and then someone saying “Ow!” very loudly. Then it was quiet again.

“What was that?” Danny asked.

John sat up in bed and looked around. There was still an orange glow from the fireplace, but the room was dark and full of shadows. “I don’t know,” John whispered. “Maybe it’s Mr. Deener, making his moon ladder.”

“I think he wants to steal the glasses,” Danny said. “I don’t trust him.”

“Maybe,” John said. “Let’s be careful with them.” He climbed out of bed, found his jacket, and checked the pocket. There were the spectacles, safe and sound. Danny got up and stepped across to the door. He pushed it open softly. Light shined into the room from the lamp in the hallway.

“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.

Chapter 16: The Sleeper Puts on His Hat and Goes Out

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.

Chapter 17: Making a Goblin

“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.

“Go, foul creature,” he whispered, and pointed toward the open window. It shambled across the floor and climbed out into the night. Then, strangely, John saw a mouse climb out through the window behind it—only it couldn’t be a mouse, because it ran standing up, on its hind legs. Both of them were gone into the darkness outside, and Mr. Deener was left alone in the room.

Something bumped into the toe of John’s shoe.

He looked down at the floor, and there lay a marble. At first he thought it was spinning, but then he could see that it was simply full of light, maybe moonlight, and it was the light that was spinning inside the marble. He bent down to pick it up.

“Oh oh,” Danny said just then, and John looked up, expecting to see Mr. Deener coming to get his marble back.

But it was Mrs. Barlow, heading toward them down the hall, holding a cloth flour sack open in front of her. “I’ll take that,” she said, “if you don’t mind.”

At the sound of her voice Mr. Deener turned around and looked at the open door. On his face, pushed down very low across the bridge of his nose, were the magic spectacles, the one good lens still glowing with moonlight.

Chapter 18: The Clinker Garden

Mrs. Barlow held the flour sack open so that John could drop the marble into it. From inside the sack came a moaning noise like wind under a door, and then a noise like muttering voices. When she snatched the bag shut and tied the top with a string, it jumped and rumpled in her hand, as if it were full of live toads.

“Calm down!” she said to the sack, and shook it a little. It thumped a couple of times, like a heartbeat, and then was still.

Just then there was the sound of a door or a window slamming shut. Mr. Deener had gone outside, into the darkness. The laboratory was empty. Across the floor was a trail of what looked like glowing sea foam, as if Mr. Deener were leaking moonlight from the cuffs of his trousers. “The glasses!” Danny said. “He took them!”

“Quick!” said Mrs. Barlow, “Follow me!” But instead of going out through the laboratory, she hurried down the hall toward the kitchen again. “We’ll bring him back!” she said. “We’ll tweek his nose for him!”

In the kitchen she opened a cupboard and pulled out two big watering cans. Then she shoved the flour sack into the cupboard and shut and locked the door, putting the key into her apron pocket. Too much thievery, she said, pointing at the locked cupboard. “Goblins?” Danny asked.

“Only once,” she said. “The other times it was him, the Deener. He gets into a state, like tonight, and he can t be trusted.” She handed a watering can to John and another to Danny and said, “Fill these with lemonade.”

“What?” Danny asked. He sounded as if he couldn’t believe it. “Lemonade?”

She pointed toward the corner of the kitchen where a big crock with a wooden lid sat against the wall. “Fill ‘em up,” she said.

John pulled the lid off the crock. It was full of lemonade. Slices of lemon peel floated on top. Danny took a dipper from a hook on the wall and used it to dump lemonade into both watering cans.

“Poor Deener,” Mrs. Barlow said, picking up a big wooden spoon and heading out into the hall again. “He’s a good man. He’s just gone to seed.”

“If he’s such a good man,” Danny asked, “then how come he stole our spectacles?”

“He’s what you might call a Humpty Dumpty,” Mrs. Barlow said to him. “The medical men call it ‘going to pieces’. That’s the technical term. What it means is he’s taken a fall. He’s all broken up. I’m saving the pieces of him in my flour sack.”

“I’ll break him up,” Danny said.

“No you won’t,” John told him. “That won’t help at all. He’s got to be put back together again. He just needs…something.” He couldn’t think of what it was, but there was something about Mr. Deener that he liked – the doughnuts, maybe. Or the talk about sea monsters and moon ladders. “We really don’t know why he took the spectacles,” John said. “Maybe they’re his.”

“Maybe,” Mrs. Barlow said. “And maybe he’s just a stinker.” She whacked the wooden spoon into her open hand, pushed the front door open, and said, “Careful with that lemonade. She pointed across the cobblestone drive, into the deep shadows of the trees. A splotch of moonlight lay in the darkness as if someone had poured it out of a can. Even as they watched, it seemed to be disappearing, soaking into the ground and drying up.

“He went down the hill,” Mrs. Barlow said. “He’s working the clinker garden again.” She shook her head, and her voice was tired, as if she was downright sick of Mr. Deener ‘working the clinker garden’, whatever that meant.

They followed the trail through the trees. John held the watering can in front of him in order to keep it steady. His hands were sticky with lemonade that had slopped over the side. A tangle of blackberry vines grew along the edges of the narrow path, and here and there, down near the ground, more little scraps of moonlight were caught in the vines where Mr. Deener had brushed against them on his way down to the clinker garden.

“Hark!” Mrs. Barlow whispered, stopping suddenly. John listened. He could hear Mr. Deener humming somewhere ahead, but the vines were so high he couldn’t see anything. The humming sounded like flies in a bag. There was a pause, followed by the sound of Mr. Deener’s voice, talking to someone. John waited to hear who would speak back to him. The Sleeper? Aunt Flo? But there was nothing. No one else spoke. Mr. Deener began to hum again.

They crept forward. The path wound around toward the bottom of the hill, not far from where they’d fought with the goblins earlier that evening. The berry vines ended at the edge of a broad patch of dirt and dead weeds. Mr. Deener stood among the weeds, bent over at the waist. Behind him, on a fallen log, sat an old wooden coffee grinder with a crank on top. He had a watering can of his own, and was pouring something out of it onto the ground, something that was blue in the light of the full moon.

“There, there, my dear,” he said, standing up and moving a few feet farther on. “And here’s a tasty drop for you.” There were faint popping sounds like bubbles bursting. He searched in the weeds, poured more blue liquid out of the can, and said, “Aren’t you looking fabulous tonight!”

“I knew it,” Mrs. Barlow whispered, looking past the edge of the berry vines. “He’s watering the clinkers again.” She shook her head sadly and clicked her tongue.

“What’s clinkers?” Danny asked.

“Charcoal,” she said. “Ashes. Burnt lumps out of the fireplace. You pour salt and laundry bluing on them and they grow into a kind of fungus garden.”

“Sounds okay,” John whispered, trying to see through the vines. “It’s like a moon garden.”

Mrs. Barlow said, “Hmph!” as if it didn’t sound okay to her at all.

John wondered what laundry bluing was. He would ask Mr. Deener about it, and then write the formula out in his book before he forgot it – except that his book was at home Anyway, that was a good way to be friendly Maybe they were going to have to trust Mr. Deener in some way, no matter what Mrs. Barlow said.

Mr. Deener emptied his watering can right then, shaking the last drops out onto the ground. Then he got down onto his hands and knees, took the spectacles out of his pocket, and put them on. He put his face very near to one of the lumps in the weeds, and then cocked his head to the side, staring at it through the unbroken lens.

Just then Danny stood up, as if he were going to rush out and take the spectacles back right then and there. John grabbed him by the back of the shirt. “Wait!” he whispered. “Not yet!”

Mr. Deener stood up and took off the spectacles. He didn’t act like he’d heard anything. He turned the spectacles over in his hands, as if they were a dying bird. Then, slowly and carefully, he picked up the coffee grinder from the log, snapped the lens out of the spectacles, and dropped it into the hole at the top of the grinder.

“Hey!” Danny shouted, pulling himself free and jumping out from behind the vines.

But it was too late. Shaking his head sadly, Mr. Deener ground the spectacles lens to pieces in the coffee grinder.

Book Two

Chapter 1: The Face Among the Weeds

Mr. Deener walked slowly past them, carrying the coffee grinder and the watering can and heading back up the hill. His face was blank, as if he had left his mind in a box somewhere. In the moonlight he looked more like the Sleeper than like the Mr. Deener that had defeated the goblins on the road. For a moment John thought that Danny would try to take the coffee grinder away from him. But he didn’t. It was too late to do anything at all.

John didn’t look at his brother. Why had he told him to wait? Why had he stopped him? John kicked a rock on the path, and it bounced away into the weeds. Danny couldn’t have done anything about it anyway, he told himself. He kicked another rock. “How did I know?” he asked Danny.

“What did you think,” Danny said, “that he was going to just give them back?” He shook his head, as if he couldn’t quite believe John could be so stupid.

“I didn’t smash them up,” John said, getting mad.

“Same thing anyway,” Danny said.

“No it isn’t,” John said. “I just wanted to give him a chance, that’s all.”

“And that’s his last chance,” Mrs. Barlow said. “So both of you be quiet. No one’s to blame. You two are starting to sound like the Deener. He’s all full of blame. Blame for this, blame for that. The whole world wants to blame something on someone else. That’s why nothing ever gets fixed; everybody’s too busy blaming everybody else.” She thumped her wooden spoon into her hand again, as if she wanted to conk the whole world on the head, and knock the blame out of it.

“Now pick up those cans,” she said, “If you boys want to help the Deener, you can start right now. But I’ll warn you; sometimes helping people is like having rocks in your shoes.”

“Help him?” Danny asked. “I just wanted the spectacles so that….”

“Don’t worry about the spectacles,” Mrs. Barlow said. “Forget the spectacles. That’s the kind of trash I’m talking about. That’s the Deener’s way of doing things. What we want to do is put his head between two ears for him, and keep it there.” She nodded hard at them, as if that was the last word she would hear on the subject of the spectacles.

The brass frames, bent and empty, lay in the dirt. John picked them up. They were junk now When he handed them to his brother, Danny tossed them back down into the weeds without looking at them. John picked them up again and put them into his pocket.

“Here’s a clinker fungus,” Mrs. Barlow said suddenly, pointing at the ground. “Watch out you don’t step on it.”

A mushroom-shaped rock seemed to be growing up out of the dirt, as if it were rooted there. She pulled the dead, blue-stained weeds back from around it. It was the size of a cauliflower, and would have been the same color but for the laundry bluing poured over it. At the bottom it was black as if it were dusted with ashes. The top was covered with tiny, bluish-white crystals.

“Douse it with lemonade,” Mrs. Barlow said, pointing at it with the spoon. “It won’t take much.”

Danny poured lemonade onto it, out of his watering can. The crystals fizzled and popped, and the lemonade turned muddy blue and frothy, almost like cake frosting. There was a wheezing noise, and suddenly the whole clinker flower sank into itself like a rotten pumpkin and turned into a pool of black glop.

“Let’s find the others,” she said. “It’s better not to look at them close. They’re too awful.”

But John was already looking at one. There was something weird about the pattern of little crystal flowers on top. There was a face in them, as if the thing was a head, sprouting up out of the ground. For a moment John thought it was a reflection of the face of the man in the moon.

But then he saw that it wasn’t. It was a woman’s face, and not any kind of reflection.

Clouds crossed the moon just then, and the eyes moved in the clinker fungus. A look came into them like the look of a person waking up scared, lost in a strange and lonesome place. They darted back and forth, looking for something but not seeing it.

John stepped backward and at down on a fallen tree trunk. He set his watering can down.

“You looked too close,” Mrs. Barlow said, picking up the can and putting a hand on his shoulder. “They fool you, like those insects that look like leaves or twig. They’re not what you think they are. Don’t make the same mistake that the Deener makes. Don’t think that there’s something there when there’s not.”

She dumped lemonade on it, and with a sighing breath of air the clinker fungus turned to black glop just like the other one had.

“Whose face is it?” John asked as Danny and Mrs. Barlow searched for more of them among the weeds.

“Bless her poor soul,” Mrs. Barlow said, shaking her head and dousing another one with lemonade, “it’s Velma, the Deener’s wife. She’s been dead these last five years, and the old fool thinks he can fetch her back to life with clinkers and salt and pieces of broken glass.”

Chapter 2: Danny Comes Up with a Plan

When he woke up next morning, John thought at first that the clinker garden had been nothing more than a bad dream. He almost reached for his jacket in order to check the pocket, but the look on Danny’s face made him stop. It hadn’t been a dream. The spectacles were worthless to them.

“I’m going back,” Danny said.

“We can’t,” John said.

“So don’t come. I didn’t say ‘we’, did I? I’ve got a plan.”

John knew straight off what the plan was. It involved the cave they’d seen beyond the fountain. Danny had talked about it last night, before they’d fallen asleep. His having a plan was a bad sign. It was a word that usually meant trouble. It had been Danny’s plan to climb through the bedroom window in the first place, although there was no use mentioning that now. It was better to be logical about it.

“We don’t even know where the cave goes. It’s too dangerous anyway. It’s full of goblins.

“How do you know?” Danny asked.

“Because I heard them in there. They were all over the place. You saw the fishbones and all.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. And anyway, the goblins are getting into our neighborhood somehow. I’ll bet anything it’s through the cave. Where else?”

“I don’t know where else,” John said. “So what? Because I don’t know where else, then it must be through the cave?”

“Why not?” Danny asked. “It’s as good as anything else.”

“You can’t go alone.”

“I can take Ahab.”

“I don’t think it’s as easy as that,” John said. “You’re not a goblin. How do you know you can get home through the cave even if they are getting through that way? You’d just be walking into trouble. And besides that, there’s too much crazy stuff going on with Mr. Deener and all. If we just walk away, none of the problems get fixed.”

“Let Mr. Deener fix his own problems,” Danny said. “He sure isn’t helping us fix ours. He’s making them worse. Sometimes I think it’s you that’s got the problem. Just like with Harvey Chickel. You think you can change people by being nice or something, but you can’t.”

Someone knocked on the bedroom door. “You up?” It was Mrs. Barlow’s voice.

“Yeah,” John said, answering for them both. He opened the door.

“The Deener and I had a talk,” she said. “He’s sorry about the spectacles, and he’s agreed to search for your window. I’ve promised him all the glazeys he can eat if he finds it, and I’ve got a couple of picnic baskets put together. But remember, work first, eat second, or else he’ll eat himself sick, and that’ll be the end of it. He’s down on the meadow now, setting up his apparatus, so you’d better hurry.”

“He’s sorry,” Danny said as they headed down the hall. “That really helps.”

“He’s going to find the window,” John said hopefully. “Give him a break. Let him do his work.”

“I’ve seen his work,” Danny said. John was silent. As usual, there was no use arguing.

Ahab was already out front, sniffing around on the cobblestones. Mrs. Barlow handed John a picnic basket, and then Polly came out carrying another basket along with a tiny suit of men’s clothes. She laid the suit out carefully on the porch.

“Good,” Mrs. Barlow said. “There’s another one that won’t have to run around naked. Got the glazeys?” “Yep,” Polly said. “Three dozen.”

“The Deener will want them all, mind you. If you let him see them before he’s done his work, he’ll be all over that basket like a dirty pig.”

“We won’t let him be a dirty pig,” Polly aid.

Mrs. Barlow went back inside, and the three of them started down the hill toward the meadow. The sun was shining, and there was no sign of any fog. The woods were dark and quiet. Danny walked on ahead, as if he didn’t want to talk about his plan anymore. At least he was going along to the meadow. And maybe Mr. Deener would find it, John thought. Maybe…. From the top of the hill they could see far and wide – down toward where the meadow fell away into the sea, up toward where the meadow turned into hills and the hills into mountains. John hadn’t noticed it yesterday evening because of the fog and the darkness, but now he could see that the world seemed to be half in summer and half in autumn. The hills and meadow were brown and dry in the land beyond the house, and the lonesome trees were bare of leaves.

Nearer the house things got a little greener, and then a little greener yet, until, very near to the house itself, everything was so green that it seemed as if even the coldest winter or driest summer couldn’t change things.

Water gushed from a spring that rose through a brick well at the back of the house, and turned into the little stream that cut along between the meadow and the woods. Near the well, Aunt Flo was just then pruning rose bushes that were covered so thickly with enormous blooms that they looked from that distance like rainbow-colored clouds. She waved down toward them, and John waved back.

(Chapter 2 continues after illustration)

“Why is everything so dry up there?” John asked, pointing toward the distant hills. “Was there some kind of fire or something?”

“No,” Polly said. “It’s just that the land is half asleep.”

“Like Mr Deener,” John aid. “I mean, like him and the Sleeper.”

“You met the Sleeper?” Polly asked.

“We saw him when he went out fishing last night.” That was close enough to the truth. There was no use saying anything about going upstairs. “Does he ever catch any fish?”

“Never,” Polly said. She fed part of a doughnut to Ahab, and John told her about the pancake and hot chocolate at Watson’s, and about how he and Danny would ride down there on Saturday mornings together. It was hard to believe that they’d been there only yesterday; it seemed so far away now.

There was something lonesome and empty on the breeze, something that felt like winter coming. It was easy to imagine that even down on the meadow the wildflowers and grasses would soon begin to fall asleep too, as if the whole land belonged to Mr. Deener somehow, as if he were the king of it. More than that – as if the land was Mr. Deener. “Do you have a bicycle?” John asked Polly suddenly. She shook her head. “There’s nowhere to ride one, I guess. Not around here.”

“Are there any other kids around?”

“Just you two,” she said.

“That’s all? Ever? Who do you play with?”

“The henny-pennies mostly. I sew clothes for them and they bring me things. Treasures, you know Pretty things they’ve taken away from the goblins. They love to play cards and hide and seek.”

“Cards? The little men?”

“It’s because Uncle Deener loves to play cards, or used to. He lost that part of him, but I think Mrs. Barlow has it in her bag of memories.” “In the flour sack?” John asked.

“Uh huh. She’s saving them up for him. They’re in love, I think, but Uncle Deener doesn’t know it yet.”

In the morning sunlight, Polly reminded John of Kimberly again, except for the pale, china-doll cast to her skin. When he tried to see Kimberly’ face in his mind, what he saw was Polly’s face instead. The same was true of Aunt Flo. Did she look like Mrs. Owlswick, or did Mrs. Owlswick look like her? Was that the same thing? He tried to imagine Mrs. Owlswick’s face, but he couldn’t. “Have you always lived here?” he asked.

“What do you mean,” asked Polly. “I guess so. Where else is there?”

“Did you come from somewhere? I mean, are there, like, cities or something around here?”

She shrugged, almost as if she didn’t know what he was talking about. “We stay pretty much around home. Uncle Deener can’t be left alone for too long. He’s always up to some kind of magic. You never know what he’ll do. One time he made the whole house disappear. We were working in the vegetable garden and it was just gone. Just like that. Aunt Flo had to talk him into finding it again.”

“But are there towns and like that? Back up in the hills maybe?”

“I guess so,” Polly said. “Sometimes I see lights at night, from my window. And once I saw something flying. I guess it was an airplane, but it was so far away that it might have been a bird or something that Uncle Deener dreamed up.”

“Where was the airplane going?”

“I don’t know: Where do they go?”

“Places,” said John. “They go to places.” This kind of talk was starting to scare him. His house suddenly seemed farther away than ever, like a photograph faded by sunlight.

“How do you know about airplanes if you never see them?”

“I remember them,” she said. “And there’s pictures in books. And anyway, it was probably something Uncle Deener dreamed up, like I said. Do you remember when you first saw an airplane?”

John shook his head. He couldn’t remember when he first had seen almost anything. Maybe it was better not to think about that. “What about Mrs. Barlow?” he asked. “Where is she from?”

Polly shrugged. “She came years ago. She knew Uncle Deener from a long time ago, and came to help one day. She just came to the door. I don’t know how she got here.”

The autumn wind felt chilly just then. John zipped up his jacket. What had Polly said? Just something Uncle Deener dreamed up.

“Are you and Aunt Flo really Mr. Deener’s imaginary friends?” he asked.

“Of course we are,” Polly said. She laughed then, and took off running. Over her shoulder she hollered, “Race you to the meadow,” and her laughter carried back to him on the wind. He ran after her, but he couldn’t catch up.

Chapter 3: Mrs. Owlswick’s Window

They found Mr. Deener on the meadow, setting out his “apparatus,” as he called it. There were two bottles of colored glass chips and a glass magnifying lens as big as a plate. There were jars of mint tea and pond water, and three of Mrs. Barlow’s china saucers and a moon-shaped green cheese. The soap gun lay in the grass over by the creek. Henny-penny men flew through the air, swooping down to say things into Mr. Deener’s ears. He swatted at them, sending the leaves flying.

In the middle of the apparatus sat an open basket, and inside the basket sat the coffee grinder that Mr. Deener had used last night to grind up the spectacles’ lens.

“There,” Mr. Deener said, taking off his glasses and polishing them on his shirt. “I’m a stickler for arranging things just so. “I’m…” He looked at John and Danny, and then looked away and polished his glasses again. “I’m…dreadfully sorry that I borrowed your spectacles and ground them up. I won’t do it again, I can assure you.” He put his glasses back on.

“It’s okay,” John said. Really it wasn’t okay, but so what? It was a new day. There was no point being mean about things. Danny nodded, but he didn’t say anything. He walked out across the meadow looking for the place where the window should have been. The grass and wildflowers were even more smashed down than they had been lat night, and there were fish bones scattered everywhere. A crowd of goblins had pretty clearly been out there snooping around.

Mr. Deener stood back and looked, first through his glasses and then over the top of them. “There’s something there,” he said. “Definitely something there.”

“Can you see it?” John asked, excited all of a sudden.

“See what?” Mr. Deener asked.

“Why, the window,” John said.

“No,” Mr. Deener said. “Perhaps I’ll eat a doughnut. Mrs. Barlow wants me to eat at least two dozen this morning.”

“So soon?” Polly asked. “We’ve just finished breakfast.”

Mr. Deener looked at the picnic basket and began to blink very rapidly, grabbing at the air with his hands as if he was trying to find something to hold on to.

“Steady, Uncle Deener!” Polly said.

“I think he’s starting up again,” John said.

“Thank you,” said Mr. Deener, “I believe I will have one. And he took a tremendous bite out of a pretend doughnut and smacked his lip. “My,” he said, rubbing his stomach. “I’ll just have another one. I’m a big doughnut man. A big doughnut man.”

“He is starting up,” Polly aid.

The henny-pennies darted past him, tugging on his coat, shouting at him in tiny voices. Mr. Deener had his eyes shut and began eating imaginary doughnuts with both hands, stuffing them down his mouth.

“He can go on like this all day,” Polly said. “When he eats imaginary doughnuts, he never gets filled up. Uncle Deener!” She tapped him on the shoulder.

He started to hum.

“Uncle Deener!” Polly shouted.

He shoved another imaginary doughnut into his mouth, then reached into the air beside him and found another. “Yum,” he said, talking to himself.

“I knew it,” Danny said. “Let’s just give him the basket of doughnuts and go check out the cave.”

Mr. Deener sat down heavily on the grass. The earth shook. One of the jars of pond water fell over, and for a moment the sun seemed to dim. A henny-penny man landed on Mr. Deener’s shoulder and shouted into his ear. Mr. Deener brushed it away and began to grab at the air, as if he were picking doughnuts off a tree. The earth shook again. Mr. Deener hummed louder and louder.

“Give him one at least,” John said. “Hurry.”

Polly opened the basket, took out a doughnut, and put it into Mr. Deener’s hand. When he shoved it into his mouth he sat up straighter, opening his eyes and looking surprised and happy.

“Why, someone’s given me doughnut!” he said. Then he saw that Polly held the open basket and he reached in after another one. He pulled out a third and fourth, which he tried to cram into his coat pocket. Two henny-pennies flew up and snatched one of the doughnuts away, dropping it immediately Polly caught it in the basket and closed the lid.

“Of course,” Mr. Deener said, eating the second doughnut.

He breathed deeply, as if he’d just run a race. John and Danny helped him to stand up. He wiped his forehead, leaving a line of sugar glaze across it. “This is hard work,” he said, “but someone’s got to do it. We wont tolerate slackers, will we? Why was I sitting on the ground? Am I a slacker?”

“Of course not,” Polly said. “You’ve just been resting.”

“Good,” he said, giving everyone a look and nodding his head to show that he meant it. “Who mentioned the cave?”

Nobody spoke for a moment, and then Danny said, “I did.”

“Stay out of it,” Mr. Deener said. “It’s a terrible dark place. Nothing in there but lost things.”

He held the third doughnut in front of eye like a monocle squinting through it at the meadow. “It’s no good,” he said, eating it. “I’m afraid I don’t see a thing. Complete waste of time coming out here, just like I said. Might as well have lunch.”

“Perhaps the apparatus….” Polly said to him.

“What about it?”

“You were going to use it to find the window,” John reminded him.

“The window?”

“The invisible window,” Danny said. “We’ve come out here to find the invisible window!”

Mr. Deener nodded. “Why didn’t you say so?” he asked. “We’ve got a fog coming up. Pretty soon you won’t see your nose on your face. If it was me who was looking for a window, I’d get at it.”

“It is you that’s looking for a window, Uncle Deener!” Polly said.

He looked surprised. “It is?” he asked. “Then fetch me some forked sticks and some flat rocks and quit fooling away the morning.”

“That was close,” Polly said to John and Danny as the three of them went off to look for sticks and rocks. She carried the doughnut basket with her. “We nearly lost him that time.”

“Did he used to be better?” John asked.

“Heaps,” Polly said. “You should have seen him last week.”

“Last week!” Danny said. “You mean he’s going to pieces that fast?”

“Just as fast as he can,” Polly said.

They gathered sticks near the forest’s edge and found rocks along the stream bed. “Let’s hurry,” John said, looking at the fog that drifted toward them through the woods.

Mr. Deener seemed to be caught up in his work now. He handed John a jar of mint tea and gave the jar of pond water to Danny “Pile up some rocks over there,” he said, gesturing in two or three different directions at once. “Set the jars on the rocks. And be careful. Glass has a high degree of break-ability.” He nodded seriously and said, “Science taught me that.”

“About here?” John called. He and Danny stood on either side of where the window should be. Ahab ran from one of them to the other, then ran over and sniffed the doughnut basket, then ran to the edge of the woods and barked at the trees.

“That’s right,” Mr. Deener said without looking up. “That’s perfect. Ship shape. Spot on. Okey-dokey. Unscrew the lids please. That’s right. Now, Polly, take this jar of glass chips and carry it over yonder, in the direction of the moon.”

Polly followed his instructions, ending up a little way to the east of the invisible window. “That’s it,” Mr. Deener called to her. “That’s the ticket. Stand ready to hoist it into the moonlight!”

Hurriedly, he shoved the ends of the forked sticks into the ground and set the saucers into the forks, lining them up with the big glass lens, then standing back and looking at them over his thumb, like an artist. John and Danny walked back over and stood near Mr. Deener. Now that he was actually working, he didn’t seem at all confused or tired or even hungry. John almost believed that he would find the window. Even Danny looked hopeful.

“Glass magic,” Mr. Deener said, “always requires moonlight, and plenty of it. Moonlight and magic – it’s all a matter of reflection, like looking into the water and seeing your own face. Sometimes you look pretty good sometimes you look like an ape. Do you follow me?”

“I guess so,” Danny said, bending over to look through the big lens. “What about the cheese?”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Deener asked, picking the cheese up.

“What do we do with it?”

“Why, we eat it!” Mr. Deener said, then broke off a piece and fed it to Ahab before dropping it back into the nearly-empty basket.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Ready,” John and Danny said at once.

Mr. Deener snatched off the tablecloth and waved it at Polly who held her jar full of glass chips in the air. John and Danny watched through the big glass lens, waiting for the window to appear over the meadow.

Pale moonlight drifted out of the sky like soft snow. It swirled together in a little pinwheel above the jar that Polly held. The jar grew brighter and brighter, the light spinning faster and faster above it. Then, with a sound something like a wave washing across a sandy beach, the spinning moonlight shot straight through the jar and out the bottom, colored pink and green and blue by the glass chip.

Like lanterns suddenly switched on, the jars of pond water and tea glowed with colored moonlight that illuminated the three china plates, one after another, turning them pale green like seawater.

“Anything there?” Mr. Deener asked.

“Not yet,” John said.

“Of course not,” Mr Deener said, raising one finger into the air. “We’ve constructed a primary lens. Telescopic science requires us to provide a secondary lens, purely for the purpose of reflection.”

He picked up the coffee grinder then, pulling out a little wooden drawer from the bottom. After setting the grinder down, he licked his finger and held it up in the air. “Wind out of the east,” he said, stepping forward a few pace. “Look sharp!”

Then he dumped the wooden drawer upside down and poured out the crushed spectacles lens. And at that instant, as if illuminated by the glass dust, Mrs. Owlswick’s window floated over the meadow again, hanging in the sky like a framed picture.

Chapter 4: The Battle on the Meadow

The window was open, just as they had left it yesterday evening. John could see the bunk beds against the far wall, the circus poster, the bookshelf above the bed. It was all so clear that he could almost read the titles on the spines of the books.

Danny stood up and ran toward it, but after a few steps he slowed and stopped. The window was getting dim, fading away as if it had been painted with water on a summer sidewalk. The glass dust from the coffee grinder whirled around and around like a pale green wind devil, and then went racing off across the meadow. By then the window was gone.

John stood up and stepped away from the magnifying lens, and Polly lowered the jar of glass chips and walked slowly back toward where Mr. Deener was lifting the lid from the doughnut basket.

“Mrs. Barlow has insisted that I eat a number of these glazed doughnuts,” Mr. Deener said, helping himself. “I suggest you do too.”

John could see that Danny wasn’t happy with the experiment. He looked as he had that morning when he was talking about going home through the cave. “At least we know it’s still there,” John said.

“Certainly it’s still there,” said Mr. Deener. “If you open a window it stays open until someone shuts it.” He took a bite of doughnut – not like a pig, but very daintily, like he was eating a finger sandwich at a high tea. The doughnuts were all his now. There was no rush.

“We kind of wanted to see if we could get through it,” Danny said, very slowly, as if to make sure that Mr. Deener understood him, and would quit talking nonsense.

“The moon is a window,” Mr. Deener said, “gesturing with a doughnut. “Imagine that this doughnut is the sky. Now, the hole in the middle of the doughnut is the moon. From the Earth there seems to be a face on it, because actually there’s a man looking through it, like this. …”

He held the doughnut about a foot in front of his face and looked at them through it. Then he ate the doughnut and licked the sugar off his fingers. “The trick is simply to get to the moon,” he said, “which is no farther away than your window is, and to crawl through it to the other side.” He pulled doughnuts out of the basket, looked at them, and put them back, as if searching for just the right one, and all the time he talked and talked – about doors and windows, about the moon ladder, about crawling in through the moon‘s ear with a flashlight and a picnic basket full of doughnuts.

None of this talk was making Danny any happier. He looked at John and made the pinwheel sign. And just as he did, there was a loud thwack and the big glass lens shattered into pieces. There was the sound of goblin laughter from the woods behind them, and a rock whizzed past John’s ear, smashing a jar of pond water. A shadow drifted across the sun. The fog had come up.

There were goblins on the meadow.

“My weapon!” Mr. Deener shouted, just as a rock knocked a doughnut out of his hands and into the weeds.

Four goblins were just then picking the soap gun. Three of them held onto it and a fourth pulled the trigger, spraying pink soap bubbles at Ahab as he danced back and forth barking. He leaped away, still barking, and more goblins came out of the woods, gobbling and waving and making the glasses sign with their fingers and yanking on each others’ hair and clothes. One of them picked up a stone and threw it at Mr. Deener. Another pitched a rock at one of Mrs. Barlow’s saucers, smashing it to bits.

Danny picked up a rock to throw it back, but Mr. Deener got in his way, shouting, “Here now!” and striding toward the goblins like a mad school teacher on a playground. “Give that gun to me right now!” he yelled. “This instant!”

The goblins hunched forward like firemen holding a fire hose. There was the peculiar whooshing sound of the soap gun going off, and a spray of pink bubbles shot out of the barrel. Mr. Deener threw up his hands to keep the soap out of his face, and the goblins ran toward him carrying the gun, hosing him down again and shrieking and laughing. Danny picked up a rock and threw it back. It hit one of the soap gun goblins in the chest.

Mr. Deener yelled just then and sat down hard on the meadow grass, as if the rock had hit him. He was pink and dripping with frothy soap, and he sat there trying to clean it off his face and out of his eyes. John hit another one of the soap gun goblins with a rock, this time in the arm, and Mr. Deener yelled “Ouch!” and grabbed his shoulder. “No throwing stones!” he yelled. “No more stones!”

The goblins ran, carrying the soap gun toward the woods, where the fog was so thick now that the trees were just shadows. At the edge of the stream they dropped the gun and picked up big rocks. Mr. Deener stood up and ran toward them, waving his arms. “Wait!” he shouted. “Don’t!” But he was too late. The goblins lifted the rocks over their heads and then smashed them down onto the soap gun.

(Chapter 4 continues after illustration)

“By golly!” Mr. Deener shouted. And with a wild cry he grabbed up a rock nearly as big as his head and threw it as hard as he could. It flew about six feet and landed in the weeds. The goblins laughed and laughed and threw handfuls of stones, half of the goblins rushing at Mr. Deener and the other half staying behind to beat the soap gun to pieces.

John and Danny and Polly ran to help him. Goblins pulled Mr. Deener’s hair and hauled at his legs, snapping his suspenders and heaping dirt on the top of his bald head. John pulled a goblin away, and immediately it grabbed onto his jacket, gobbling and hooting. Two more leaped at Danny just as Ahab ran into the middle of them, barking into their faces.

There were too many of them, and all of them seemed to have gone crazy. Half of them were capering around on their hands and knees, chasing Ahab and barking. Five or six clung to Mr. Deener’s back, and kicked him in the ribs as if he were a horse that wouldn’t run. More goblins appeared in the fog at the edge of the woods, and John could see that a fire was burning back in among the trees.

Suddenly Polly ran into the middle of all of them, carrying the picnic basket. She reached inside, pulled out a glazed doughnut, and threw it onto the ground. Then she threw another into the air. And then another and another until Mrs. Barlow’s doughnuts rained down on their heads.

The goblins fell silent. They looked at the doughnuts for a moment as if they couldn’t quite believe it. And then, in a mad rush, they forgot about Mr. Deener and everything else and went scrambling over the ground, fighting and gouging and clawing and tearing doughnuts out of each other’s hands.

Mr. Deener crawled into the middle of the stream and sat down, washing his hands in the water. He didn’t pay any attention at all to the goblins or the doughnuts or anything else. It was as if his mind had gone to the moon.

Danny picked up the soap gun. The barrel was twisted at a funny angle where it had been slammed with a rock, so to aim it at the goblins he had to point it nearly at the stream. John and Polly and Ahab backed away, and the goblins wrestled with each other in a big knot, mashing doughnuts into the grass.

First one and then another of them noticed the soap gun and where it was pointed. They began picking up flattened doughnuts and running away with them toward the woods. Within moments the whole crowd of them was gone, and it was quiet on the foggy meadow again.

And right then the barrel fell away from the rest of the soap gun. Just like that it thumped into the grass in front of Danny’s feet. Pink slime poured out of the inside of the gun, and Danny dropped it and stepped away so that it wouldn’t get on his shoes.

Mr. Deener uttered a heavy sigh and stood up, shivering with cold and soaked through with soap and creek water. He poked at the pieces of the soap gun with the toe of his shoe. Then he picked up a smashed doughnut out of the dirt, and then he shook his head sadly and said, “When Mrs. Barlow finds out about the plates, this is all I’ll have to eat.”

“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.

Chapter 5: Mr. Deener Sets Out

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.

Chapter 6: What Became of the Moon Ladder

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.

He sat up, breathing hard, scrambling to get out of the way as a goblin slammed down beside him, fallen from the sky. Another one landed on top of the first. The ladder was falling, faster and faster. Rope heaped up on the floor. Two goblins leaped up and ran out of the room, but the rest were quickly entangled in the falling ladder, which piled up on the floor, faster and faster, higher and higher.

John ran toward the door, shouting for Mrs. Barlow, for Danny, for anybody. There was a mountain of rope ladder now. Goblins tried to claw their way out of the tangles, but the ladder piled up on their heads, burying them. And then, as if in answer to his shouting, a tiny voice drifted downward from out of the darkness overhead.

(Chapter 6 continues after illustration)

John looked up, shading his eyes. Way up in the night sky, where the moon filled the entire ceiling now, Mr. Deener came falling, down and down and down, tumbling end over end like a coin fallen out of the moon’s pocket.

Chapter 7: The Sleeper Floats Away, Nearly

Mr. Deener lay on top of a mountain of cloth rope like an upside down bug, looking up at the moon. “I’m all right,” he whispered when John tried to help him. Then he gestured for John to leave him alone.

Goblins crawled out from where they were trapped in the rope, and one by one ran out through the open window. Mr. Deener didn’t pay any attention to them. There was broken glass everywhere, most of it smashed into little bitty chips. Hundreds of the glass floats had been broken, either by the goblins or in Mr. Deener’s fall.

There was the sudden yammering of goblins. Then the front door slammed, and Mrs. Barlow’s voice shouted, “And stay out!” and then the house was silent. Several goblins ran past outside the window right after that, heading away down the hill. John pushed the window shut and latched it.

“I saw her,” mumbled Mr. Deener, as if he were half asleep. “I was almost home.”

John knew who he meant. He remembered what Mrs. Barlow had said last night about Mr. Deener’s wife, Velma.

Aunt Flo appeared in the doorway. “He fell?” she asked quietly.

John nodded. “Goblins came in and wrecked things. I tried to help, but. …”

“You couldn’t have helped any more than you did.”

“He was close,” John said. “He saw … I guess he saw his wife. I saw someone too, so it wasn’t just his imagination. It was just before he fell. The moon filled the whole ceiling, and there were the shapes of things on it. I think it was a woman in a kitchen, cooking.”

“Cooking up something nice,” Mr. Deener said dreamily. “It was a pie. I believe it was a pie. I could smell a cherry pie cooking.”

“It was our kitchen,” John whispered to Aunt Flo.

“What was our kitchen?” Danny asked, walking into the room at last. His shirt was torn and he carried one of Mrs. Barlow’s big wooden spoons.

“It was our kitchen at home,” John said, “only up on the moon. I’m sure it was.” He had seen it, right enough, just before Mr. Deener had fallen – the stove, the cupboards, the glass globe over the ceiling lamp. …

“It hasn’t always been your kitchen, has it?” Aunt Flo asked.

“No,” John said. Of course it hadn’t been. The house was seventy years old.

“It was Mr. Deener’s house too?” Danny asked.

“For a long time,” she said. “And a very jolly house it was until things went wrong. He lived there for some years after Velma died. Finally he sold it to your parents. He couldn’t stand being there without her. They had been together in that house for nearly forty years. He saw her everywhere in it, even after she had died. She had sewn the curtains and cooked the food and bought the carpets. She had sat a thousand times in all the chairs, and every night they had slept in the same bed. There she was, wherever he looked.”

She stopped for a moment, as if making sure that she was telling the story right. “Of course it wasn’t really her, left over in the house after she died, any more than it was really her on the moon just now. It was just memories of her, and that’s what he couldn’t stand. He wanted it to really be her. He sat in that empty house all day and thought about her until he began to forget how to think about anything else.”

Danny said, “Why didn’t he just quit thinking about it? Why didn’t he do something? Go fishing or something?”

“He tried to,” Aunt Flo said, “but sometimes it’s not that easy to forget. He moved in with his sister, who lived down the street, and he almost never came out of his room and did nothing but experiment with glass magic. He thought now that if Velma could travel in the land of memory, then he would learn to travel there too. But he found that he couldn’t just pick and choose which memories to keep. Finally he found a way to break himself in half, and he gave the Sleeper a single terrible memory that he didn’t want. He’s been breaking off bothersome little bits of himself ever since.”

Polly and Ahab arrived from upstairs. “He’s sleeping nicely now,” Polly said to Aunt Flo. “Mrs. Barlow’s bringing up what’s left of the doughnuts. The goblins stole most of them.”

There was a tiny tapping on the window just then. Polly drew the curtain back and opened the door. A scattering of sycamore leaves blew into the room, each of them bearing a hennypenny man. Polly closed the window.

The henny-pennies landed and dragged their leaves into a corner, lining them up neatly. They rolled up their sleeves and started picking up pieces of glass, heaping the pieces into piles according to color.

Aunt Flo and Polly and John and Danny tiptoed out the door and went upstairs to bed, leaving the henny-pennies to clean up the laboratory while Mr. Deener slept on his heap of rope.

The bedroom was dark except for candlelight, and the house was quiet. John wasn’t sleepy at all. “So what happened upstairs?” he asked Danny, who had been quiet for the past five minutes.

“It was weird,” Danny said tiredly. “The Sleeper nearly floated away.”

“Floated away?”

“That’s right. That’s why Polly yelled. He was floating on the ceiling, bumping it with his nose. When we got up there he was almost over the stair. He was like a balloon. We had to tie a rope to him and try to pull him back in, over the bed.”

John watched the flickering candle flame. “I think he was going to the moon with Mr. Deener. Mr. Deener can’t get away without taking the Sleeper along. I bet he fell onto the bed when Mr. Deener fell out of the sky.”

“Actually he fell onto the floor. He landed right on top of a goblin and nearly squashed him. Mrs. Barlow threw most of the goblins out the window, into the pond. They really trashed her kitchen. Me and Polly lifted the Sleeper back onto the bed. He was light, like he was made out of air or something.”

John lay there for a while, not saying anything. He wondered what his brother was thinking. All day long he had been mad – about the spectacles, about the meadow. But now, even though the moon ladder hadn’t worked, he didn’t seem to be. Maybe he had made up his mind about something – about the cave. That was worrisome.

Finally John said, “Anyway, what I think is that…” but then he realized that Danny had fallen asleep again. “Danny,” he whispered, but there was no answer. He lay there watching the moon through the window and thinking about things – about his parents and what was going on back home. Were they asleep? Were they worrying about him?

He began to worry about them worrying, and he wished that he and Danny were at home, sleeping in their own beds. And then suddenly he wished that he could work a little bit of Mr. Deener’s glass magic himself, that he could turn his worrying into a goblin. He would throw it out the window into the pond. Except that then the woods would soon be full of goblins that looked like him, and that stank and wore rat shoes. That was even worse than worrying. Wishing and worrying wouldn’t help. They had to do something.

Right then he decided. Tomorrow morning, if Danny wanted to try going home through the cave, then John would go with him.

Chapter 8: Someone Steals the Bag of Memories

In the morning Danny was gone.

John woke up to the sound of Mrs. Barlow’s voice in the hallway, and the first thing he noticed was that Danny’s bed was empty.

“It’s been stolen,” Mrs. Barlow shouted.

John jumped out of bed, grabbing his shirt off the chair. He saw a note on the table. “I’m going to try the caves,” it read. “I’m taking Ahab. I’ll be back with help. Daniel.”

The candle holder was gone from the table. John opened the drawer. It was empty. Danny had taken all the candles. The backpack was gone. John jumped out of bed and started pulling on his clothes. There was no time to waste. He would go after Danny alone if he had to. …

He went out through the door just as Polly ran past, heading back up the hall to her own room. When she saw John she said, “Someone stole the bag of memories. We don’t know who. Maybe Uncle Deener and maybe the goblins, but we’ve got to get them back. Uncle Deener’s gone, too. We’ve got to find him. She pushed open the door to her bedroom and went in.

Mrs. Barlow was in the kitchen, shoving doughnuts into a sack. Through the window John could see that the rose bushes in the garden had lost most of their flowers in the night. There were some blooms left on them, but the ground beneath the bushes was carpeted with blood-red petals. Water still bubbled out of the spring, but only in a sort of trickle now, and the creek down along the meadow looked like a muddy-brown ribbon. It was as if autumn had turned to winter overnight.

Aunt Flo came in with Polly, and John showed them Danny’s note. Mrs. Barlow slapped her forehead, as if the note was the last thing in the world she wanted to see, “Through the cave!” she said. “And on the same day that the Deener chooses to high-tail it.”

There was a rumble then, and the house shook. John grabbed the edge of the counter to steady himself. He looked out the window just as a rain of petals fell from the rose bushes. The trees shook in the garden, and muddy water boiled out of the spring. The sundial toppled over into a flowerbed, and a storm of apples thudded to the ground.

And then, just for a moment, the sky went dark, like a screen in a movie theater when a film ends.

The shaking passed. Slowly the sky brightened, and everything was ghostly silent, as if waiting.

“Just a trembler,” Mrs. Barlow said. “But the next one could bring the house down.”

(Chapter 8 continues after illustration)

“You’ll have to find both of them,” Aunt Flo said. “And the sooner the better. I’ll stay with the Sleeper. We don’t want to lose him too.”

“We won’t lose any of ‘em!” Mrs. Barlow said, handing John the bag full of doughnuts. “I don’t care who stole the memory bag – whether it was the Deener himself or his gang of ruffians; I mean to find it and him too. And if any of those little scalawags get in my way. …” She picked up the big wooden potato masher and swung it heavily through the air.

Chapter 9: In the Tunnel of the Creaking Doors

There was no sign of any goblins in the woods – no fires, no fog, no laughter, no flute noise. Everything was eerily quiet and still. There wasn’t even the sound of birds. The mouth of the cave was just as it had been – dark and cool and with the wind whispering around it like ghosts around an open tomb.

The ground was still soft and wet because of the water leaking out of the fountain. There were footprints of both Danny and Ahab leading into the cave. But that was all. There was no sign of Mr. Deener.

“The Deener’s gone down to the sea,” Mrs. Barlow said. “I was afraid of that.” She sighed, as if she was tired. “He’s going to throw the bag into the ocean, just like he said he’d do, and that’ll be the end of him. All my work gone to smash.”

“What’ll we do?” John asked.

“You’ll go after your brother,” Mrs. Barlow said, “and leave the Deener to me. Polly, you go with John. Take the candles. I won’t be needing any. I’ll take the glazeys, but I don’t guess they’ll help.”

She opened her basket and pulled out a bag of doughnuts. Then she handed out candles and matches and candlesticks. She gave Polly the basket, which was still half full of loose candles and lunch, and said to John, “If you find Danny and bring him out, then head on back up to the house quick. But if you find your way home, then stay there and God bless you.”

She put her hand on Polly’s shoulder. “As for you, Pol. …” She started crying then. “You’re what he deserved,” she said. “If you weren’t, then he couldn’t have invented you, and he wouldn’t have known that you were his friend – imaginary or otherwise. The old fool doesn’t understand that.”

After saying that, she kissed Polly on the cheek and hurried away without looking back.

John only half knew what she meant. What he did know, and had known since yesterday afternoon out on the meadow, was that while Danny and he were only pretending to be Mr. Deener’s imaginary friends, Polly really was one. And sooner or later all imaginary friends, like the window in the air or like a landscape in a dream, faded away and vanished.

Real friends didn’t. John looked into the cave. It was dark as midnight. His brother was in there somewhere, along with Ahab. He lit candles for both of them and then put the matches away in his pocket. Together they stepped into the darkness. The candles lit the rocks for ten feet roundabout them and threw their shadows against the cave wall, but beyond the little circle of yellow light there was a solid wall of black. Although the air was still, there was the sound of the wind even inside the cave, like someone breathing or like the sound of very distant ocean waves breaking on a rocky shore.

They walked into darkness. The glow of sunlight through the mouth of the cave disappeared behind them as the tunnel fell away, deeper into the earth. Their footsteps scuffed on the smooth stone floor, and they stopped now and then to listen. Always there was the breathing of the wind and the sound of a rushing ocean. Once John shouted Danny’s name, and they stood still, listening for an answer, but there was nothing – just an echoing shout followed by a silence so deep that it seemed to John as if something was listening.

Soon the tunnel forked, but blocking the left fork was a broad wooden door set into the rock. The door had iron bands strapped across it and the bands were fixed down with big rusty bolts. The wood was cracked and old, and there was a keyhole at the edge of the door with a heavy key in it that was so rusted it clearly hadn’t been turned in ages, but had become part of the iron lock around it.

Polly put her hand on the key, but then quickly drew it away, and a look of sadness came into her face. “Not that door,” she said softly. “He wouldn’t want us in there.”

“He?” John asked. “He who?”

But right then Polly pointed toward the cave wall alongside the other fork. “Look!” she said. “A mark!” There was a black streak of soot smudging the stone, as if someone had tried to draw an arrow on the rock with smoke. On the floor beneath it were drips of candle wax.

“He’s marking his way,” John said.

During the silence that followed his words, John heard what might have been the sound of a flute, very faintly and far away. There were just a few echoing notes, and then silence again.

“What was that?” John asked.

“What?” Polly asked. “I didn’t hear anything.”

“Nothing, I guess,” John said. There was no use mentioning goblins now. He wasn’t going to turn back, no matter what. If Danny had run into goblins up ahead, then he needed help more than ever.

Very shortly they came to another door, this one set right into the wall of the tunnel. John put his ear against the wood and listened. There was the sound of music on the other side, very faintly, like an old radio playing.

“I’m going to try it,” he said, putting his hand on the key. It was cold and was gritty with rust, and it turned with a heavy thunk that echoed through the cave. The door swung slowly outward, and a cool wind blew out around it. The radio noise was louder. Carefully, they looked past the edge of the door.

The tunnel was long and straight, with more locked doors in the walls, dozens and dozens of them in a long line. There was a light at the end, very far away, like the moon through the wrong end of a telescope. All at once, like the goblin fires in the woods, the distant circle of light winked out, then suddenly winked on again, closer, then closer yet. Still it seemed to be enormously far away.

It was a lighted room. A woman moved about in it, dusting with a feather duster. John could see the edges of chairs and tables, and he could hear the woman’s voice, singing along with the scratchy radio music. The tune was familiar, and he realized that it was the tune that Mr. Deener sometimes tried to hum.

The woman looked up, as if she had just then heard something. She was the same woman that had been at work in the kitchen on the moon and whose face had seemed to peer out from within the clinker flower. Then the light winked again, and was suddenly so vastly far away that it was just a pinpoint of light, like a firefly in a dark woods. John and Polly pushed the door shut, and John turned the key in the lock.

“Danny wouldn’t have gone that way,” he whispered. “But one of these doors might work like our window. We should check them all.”

They walked deeper into the cave, holding their candles in front and playing the light on the walls and ceiling, looking for another of Danny’s marks. Every tunnel that forked off from their own seemed to lead downward, deeper into the earth, and at every fork Danny had left a mark with candle smoke. They found the burned down end of one candle lying in a pool of wax.

Most of the wooden doors were locked tight, and twice the ancient keys snapped off in a shower of rust when John tried to turn them. The doors that did open revealed distant lighted rooms, just as the first had. Some rooms were empty. Some were so far away that they looked like stars in the night sky. In one they could just see the back of someone’s head over the back of a chair, and in another they saw Mrs. Deener again, just taking something out of the oven. The smell of cherry pie drifted out toward them, and somehow the smell was so sad and lonesome that they shut the door as quickly and silently as they could and went on.

“Let’s try one more,” John whispered.

They were deep in the cave now. He hadn’t heard any more goblin music, but he had a feeling that somehow, in some strange way, the cave, or something in it, knew they were there. It was better not to talk out loud. They reached the next door, and he tried the key. It was cold in his hand, almost freezing. The rusty hinges moaned when the door opened. It sounded just as the Sleeper had sounded when he moaned in his sleep, and John thought he heard the whisper of the Sleeper’s unhappy voice, talking in a nightmare. Cold air drifted from within. He set his candlestick down and held onto the edge of the door with both hands.

Beyond it lay darkness just barely lit with an eerie silver light. A door some distance down the tunnel creaked slowly open, as if stirred by the cold air. It stood just so for a moment, and then slammed shut. Then another door opened, and another, and both of those slammed shut. For what looked to be miles and miles, doors slowly opened and then slammed again, and there was the sound of heavy breathing in the air that reminded John of the Sleeper again.

And then the silvery light began to dim in the distance. The air in the tunnel grew frosty cold. Something – a vast dark shadow seemed to be advancing down the tunnel, blotting out the light. The open doors slammed shut, bang, bang, bang one after another. The icy wind blew in their faces, as if some great, vastly cold thing was filling the dark tunnel, pushing out the light and the air.

John saw it then – a shape as black as water in a deep well, rushing toward them. Its face was a nightmare tangle of cobweb and dust, with empty eyes and a black, gaping mouth full of dark terror and fear and pain. Polly screamed. John turned his eyes away from it as a cold surge of fear flew up into his throat. His heart pounded in his chest as both he and Polly threw themselves against the wood and iron of the door, forcing it closed.

The out-rushing cold air howled past them, trying to drive the door back open, and there was a high, wailing noise like the scream of a banshee and the wham wham wham of slamming doors, faster and faster and louder and louder.

“Push!” John yelled, and right then the door closed against the rock of the tunnel, and he leaned against it with his feet set behind him as Polly dropped the basket and used both hands to twist the key in the lock.

There was a last wild note to the howling then, and the thing hurtled against the wooden door, knocking John over backward even though the door was shut and locked. The iron bands bulged out in a spray of rust and creaking rivets, and there was the sound of wood cracking and splintering. With a cry of rage and despair, the thing beyond the door battered it once more, and the iron bands bulged outward again, the door straining against the ancient, rusty lock, which moaned and screeched under the desperate weight. There was a terrible grinding noise, and a bolt popped loose with a loud snap and shot across the tunnel and into the far wall.

John scrambled to his feet, knocking over his candlestick. He grabbed Polly by the hand and took off running, down the tunnel and into the darkness until the sound of smashing and screaming and slamming and tearing faded behind them.

Part Three of three

Chapter 10: What Danny Found in the Cave

Danny was deep into the cave when his first candle burned down almost to nothing. He held it against the rock wall so that the black smoke made a smudge. He would have to find his way out, and that meant making a mark at every tunnel that branched off from the main tunnel. He had read the book Tom Sawyer, and he knew a little bit about caves, and about how people get lost in them.

He set the candle stub down on the tunnel floor and sat down next to it in order to rest. Ahab kept standing, as if he was restless and wanted to be on his way. It couldn’t be that far to the other end of the cave. If goblins were coming and going, carrying fish lunches, then just no way it could take anything like all day to get to the other side.

He pictured his house in his mind. Where would he come out? Beneath it? He imagined the look on his parents’ faces when he and Ahab crawled out of the crawlspace after all this time, carrying a candlestick.

So far he hadn’t seen any goblins in the cave, although there had been a pile of fish skeletons outside one of the big wooden doors, as if goblins lived behind it and threw their garbage into the tunnel.

He had heard flute music twice and goblin laughter once, but all of it was just a far off echo. He didn’t mind the music as much as the laughter. He loosened the rope that tied Ahab to his wrist, and, after lighting another candle on the dwindling flame of the first one, he set out again. His idea was to walk until he used up half the candles. If he discovered nothing by then, he would burn the other half of the candles on his way out, following the smoke marks. That meant lighting just three more candles before he started back, or maybe two and a half, just to be safe.

He didn’t like the look of the doors in the cave walls. There was something about them – the way they were all locked from the outside, ages ago, as if there were things sealed up in there that should stay sealed up. And if one of the doors would lead him home, it wouldn’t be a door with a key rusted in the lock.

There was a rustling in the darkness behind him. Ahab turned and growled, and Danny held his candle in the air as high as he could to throw light back down the tunnel. But there was nothing, just silence now. Ahab tugged on the leash, and Danny started walking a little more quickly than he had been, careful not to walk so fast that he put out the candle flame, and listening hard for the sound again.

Instead, he heard goblin laughter, just a short snatch of it, cut off sharp. It had come from some distance behind him. It was impossible to tell how far. There were enough twists and turns in the tunnel so that the goblins might not have seen him yet. He thought about blowing out his candle so as to hide himself in the darkness. But it would be too awful to be surrounded by goblins in the dark, to feel their snaky little hands on his neck. …

Could goblins see in the dark, like cats?

He walked faster yet. The candle flame guttered and nearly went out, but he didn’t slow down. There was a scurrying sound behind him, like leather scuffing a rock floor – goblins in rat shoes.

He came to another of the doors in the cave wall. This one had a key in it, like the rest, but the key was clean, as if polished by many hands. The door had an iron latch, and the latch also was shiny-black with use. Quickly, without thinking twice, Danny passed the candle across the door, making a wavery looking “D” in candle smoke. Then, getting set to run if he had to, he turned the latch and pulled the door open. Ahab slipped through it and Danny followed, pulling the door shut again behind him as smoothly and silently as he could.

He turned around, holding the candle out in front of him. A broad cavern spread away on every side. Tall columns of stone rose toward the distant ceiling. There was the sound of the ocean somewhere near, and the wind smelled salty and wet, like a sea wind.

But Danny only paid a moment’s attention to the wind. Glittering in the candle light was the most astonishing thing he had ever seen: heaps and heaps and heaps of treasure, more than any pirate treasure he had ever read about. There were piles of necklaces and broaches and rings and bracelets encrusted with every color and size of jewel. There were diamonds and rubies and emeralds and pearls and purple amethysts and all manner and type of glass bauble, and all of it was heaped on the floor and piled up against the rock walls, spilling out of chests and boxes and bags. The jewels reflected the candle light, over and over, a thousand million times, and the cavern glinted with rainbow light.

It was goblin treasure, tons of it, piles of it, lakes and rivers of it. And right in the middle of all of it sat an immense black iron kettle, just like the one that had sat in the woods. Foggy steam leaked out of it, wisping toward the distant ceiling.

And next to the kettle, sitting on a spindly black table built of twisted iron rods, was a fishbowl half full of marbles.

Chapter 11: The Mark on the Final Door

It wasn’t until they stopped running that John realized they had left the basket behind them along with his candle and candlestick. Polly still had her candle, but only a couple of inches of it were left. Besides that, they had the matches in John’s pocket. That was all – enough, maybe, for twenty more minutes, then darkness. John struck one of the matches, and they lit the piece of candle and looked at the tunnel around them.

Nothing had changed. They might as easily have been ten feet into the cave or ten miles. There was no going back after the basket, either – not now that they had stirred up the shadow thing beyond the second door. Maybe there was no going back at all.

But there was no going on, either – not far, not without light to see by.

John looked behind, back into shadows that were as deep and dark as the ocean at midnight. He strained to hear something, anything. The creature in the tunnel of creaking doors had seemed to be nothing but darkness and cobweb and dust, and it had been silent as death as it rushed toward them down the tunnel. If it was loose, they wouldn’t hear it come.

Was the air growing cooler now?

He looked at Polly, who had moved farther down the tunnel and stood now before another door. John didn’t care about the doors any longer. He wasn’t going to open another one without a very good reason. Doors and windows had been nothing but trouble for him, and the doors deep in the cave here seemed to hide nothing but Mr. Deener’s sad memories.

But then Polly held the candle flame near the door itself, and there, clearly smudged against the wood, was the smoky outline of the letter “D.”

Chapter 12: The Fishbowl Full of Marbles

Danny knew straight off what bowl of marbles it was. John had been right: the marbles in the fishbowl were not regular marbles at all; they were Mr. Deener’s lost marbles. That’s what the little man in the curiosity shop had been talking about. Along with the marbles in Mrs. Barlow’s flour sack, they made up the bits and pieces of Mr. Deener’s past, hardened into glass.

There was the sound of hushed, whispering voices in the cavern, just like the voices in Mrs. Barlow’s bag, and he could hear the click, click, click of the marbles knocking together in the bowl. They seemed almost to be boiling, as if they wanted to jump out of the bowl. Danny stepped down into the cavern and walked toward it, past heaps of treasure and fish bones. He ought to simply take the whole bowl. It was his, after all. He had paid for it with the moon penny. He would grab it and get out of there, leaving the rest of the treasure behind. He didn’t want stolen treasure.

But just as he reached for it a scuffling noise sounded beyond the cavern door. There was laughter and the low gobble of goblin voices. A key turned in the lock. The door swung wide open. Six goblins stood there, holding lighted torches. One of them was big – a head taller than Danny. His mouth hung open stupidly, and in the torchlight Danny could see that his teeth were sharp like an animal’s teeth.

The goblins saw him at the same time, and with a wild cry they rushed into the room, yapping and hooting. Danny held onto Ahab’s leash, and, forgetting about the marbles, the two of them ran straight across the top of the treasure, crunching and smashing, wading through piles of jewels. Danny ducked in among the high stone columns, dodging first behind one and then another.

The goblins crowded toward him. One snatched at his wrist, knocking the candlestick out of his hand, and another grabbed onto the cuff of his pants and tried to pull him over. He kicked his foot, and the goblin went sprawling. Ahab yanked hard on his leash, pulling it out of Danny’s hand. And then, barking and growling, he leaped into the middle of the goblins, snapping his teeth in their faces as they turned with a shout and ran back the way they’d come.

Danny whistled once, then turned and ran deeper into the cavern, back into the darkness. He couldn’t fight all the goblins, but he could outrun them. Ahab would follow him. He still had candles and matches in his pocket. …

Suddenly, right in front of him, the biggest of the goblins stepped out from behind a stone pillar. His hair was wild, and his eyes seemed to be spinning like tops. He wore what looked like Mr. Deener’s cast-off clothes, dirty and ripped, and he gnashed his teeth together as he reached out and clutched Danny’s jacket. Then, laughing out loud and slobbering, he began to drag Danny back out toward the torchlight and the treasure.

Just then Ahab ran out from among the stone columns. He snarled and jumped just as Danny twisted away, shrugging out of the jacket. The big goblin staggered backward when Ahab slammed into him. Ahab’s teeth closed on the goblin’s shirt, tearing a wide hole in it, and the goblin threw up his hands and hooted in fear, ducking sideways and trying to scuttle away, pushing at Ahab with his hands.

Danny whistled again, and at the same moment he turned and ran. Ahab followed behind him, turning around once to bark, and then coming along fast again. The shadows deepened. Danny stopped and searched in the darkness for Ahab’s leash, feeling around with his hands. He found it, and, slipping his hand through the loop, he ran as fast as he dared, letting Ahab lead him down the tunnel, away from the treasure room.

Almost at once there was a great lot of gobbling and wailing behind them and the stamping of goblin feet. They were coming. He could see the flicker of torchlight back along the tunnel. He couldn’t run any faster, not in the darkness. He trailed his right hand against the stone wall, squinting his eyes to see into the gloom.

The sounds behind him grew more distant. They were outrunning the goblins. Ahead of him a light sprang up, like a slash of yellow fire along the floor. Something was there, maybe blocking the tunnel. He tugged on the leash, and Ahab slowed down, growling and looking behind them into the darkness. Danny put out his hand. A door blocked the tunnel. There were no branching tunnels. This was it – the end.

He heard the sound of breaking waves – a distant hissing and booming. He could smell sea air leaking up through the sunlit crack beneath the door. Goblin noise filled the tunnel, and torchlight danced on the stone floor. Ahab’s fur stood up along his back. His back legs tensed, ready to spring. The six goblins appeared from around the bend in the tunnel. They let out a whoop and rushed howling toward Ahab, holding the burning torches out in front of them, champing their teeth and hissing.

Danny grasped the key and turned it. The door swung outward, and sunlight flooded the cavern, nearly blinding Danny as he jumped through the door with Ahab following. The two of them ran out onto a grassy hillside just as the goblins closed in behind them, clutching hands reaching out to haul the two of them back into the darkness.

Chapter 13: Through the Green Light

John stood looking at the mark on the door, thinking about the little piece of candle that was left and the few paltry matches in his pocket, thinking about what might lie behind them down the tunnel and about the darkness that surely lay ahead.

Had Danny marked this door because he had opened it, and knew that it led home? Or had he chosen it for no good reason at all, just as Polly and John had chosen the door with the terrible shadow locked behind it? John put his hand on the key. Unlike most of the others doors, this one was well-used. Something was coming and going through it.

And right then he knew that it didn’t matter what lay beyond the door. It was enough that Danny had gone through it. His brother had met whatever danger lurked on the other side, and now John would too. He didn’t have any choice.

Cautiously he twisted the key in the lock. It turned with a loud thunk, just as the others had done. The door opened outward, and for a moment he and Polly waited, ready to slam it shut again. But this time there was no creaking and slamming. There was no music playing. There was only the faint smell of the ocean and the restless, distant sigh of breaking waves. A flickering light shone from within, out onto the tunnel floor.

He grasped the cold iron that sheathed the door and looked past it. Unbelieving, he blinked his eyes hard and opened the door wider. For there on the floor of the cavern, illuminated by the light of burning torches, lay a vast sea of treasure, piled into every sort of chest and box and bag,’ spilled out in multicolored pools. Polly looked past his shoulder, and he heard her catch her breath in surprise.

And then he saw the steaming kettle and beside it the fishbowl full of marbles.

So the marbles weren’t lost to them after all! John could get them back. He would get them back, and right now. He stepped into the room, past the half-open door.

(Chapter 13 continues after illustration)

A hand shot out from along the wall and grabbed his wrist. Another hand caught his ankle. There was a hoot of wild goblin laughter.

“Run!” he shouted to Polly, and tried to twist away. But it was too late. Polly didn’t run, she grabbed his arm and tried to yank him loose. Goblins pushed the door open and swarmed through. Goblin hands latched onto their wrists and ankles clothes. The goblins dragged them into the cavern, and the door slammed shut behind. More goblins rose from behind treasure boxes and rocks and crept out of the deep shadows and from holes in the cavern floor and walls. There were dozens of them, like an army of little Mr. Deeners, all shriveled and dirty and dressed in the skins of bats and rats.

An enormous goblin stood up from behind the kettle. He nodded his head slowly and squinted his eyes. He looked like a Mr. Deener badly made up out of spare parts. His arms were too long, like ape arms, and he had a face like a pudding. He was at least as fat as Mr. Deener, and looked as if he had been dumped into his clothes with a shovel. He wore a bow tie made out of tree bark, and his hat, or maybe crown, was tied up out of old rags and sticks and leaves. Wild strands of hair waggled out from beneath it. Clearly he was the king of the goblins, and was proud of it.

The goblins marched John through the treasure, up to where the king stood waiting. The king made the glasses sign with his fingers. “I don’t have them,” John said, and shook his head. “Ugh,” the king said, still looking through the finger glasses. “Ugh yourself,” John said. “I don’t have the glasses. Mr. Deener ground them up and the wind blew them away.”

The king nodded and made a sort of pickle face, as if finally he understood and was studying what John had told him. Then he grinned. His teeth were filed to points. He made the glasses sign again. He didn’t understand anything.

“The…glasses… broke” John said, talking slowly and clearly.

“Roke!” the king said, grinning even wider, showing his teeth.

“That’s right,” John said. “Roke.”

The king bent down and picked something up off the ground. It was a flat circle attached to a long stick and with a hole in the middle. But the hole wasn’t empty. Even in the flickering torchlight John could see that the hole was in fact a piece of pale green glass. The light shining through it cast a green glow on the cave-wall behind.

It was the lost spectacles lens, fitted into the hole in a flattened, dried-out glazed doughnut. Then the doughnut had been tied onto a broken stick. The goblin peered at John through it as if he were looking through a magnifying glass or monocle. His eye was immense.

He shoved the end of the stick through a rip in his shirt and made the glasses sign again, saying, “Roke!” and then nodding happily and holding his open hand out, as if maybe John would understand him now and give up the spectacles.

John shook his head and held his own hands out. Then he remembered the empty wire rims that he’d picked up in the weeds of the clinker garden. They were still in his jacket pocket. He thought about them for a moment before taking them out. With his hand hiding one of the lens holes, he held them up for the king to see.

“Roke! Roke!” the king shouted, dancing and pointing. A great cry went up from the rest of the goblins – cries of “Roke! Roke!” that sounded like the croaking of happy frogs. John put the spectacles back into his pocket and crossed his arms.

The king’s smile collapsed, as if it had been made out of wet sand that had suddenly dried out. He reached out his hand and opened and closed his fingers. “Roke” he said, and then something that sounded like, “Gimme.”

“Nope,” John answered. “No roke. Not unless you let us go.” He pointed to himself and then to Polly and made little walking-finger movements with his right hand.

“No roke?” the king said. He frowned, studying things out again in his dimwit way. With a sly grin he picked something else up off the floor and held it up.

It was Danny’s jacket.

Suddenly nothing was funny anymore. “Where is he?” John shouted, and he started forward. He didn’t know why – maybe to take the jacket away, maybe just to push the king over backward. At once a dozen goblins rose up on either side of him, and before he had taken two steps they dragged him down onto a pile of treasure. He wrestled and fought and kicked, and for one brief moment he caught a glimpse of Polly pulling herself free of the goblins that were guarding her, but then he was buried under goblins and half sunk in a heap of jewels.

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.

Chapter 14: The Broken Clinker Flower

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.

Chapter 15: The Runaway Marbles

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.

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.”

Chapter 16: In the House of Dreams

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.”

“Or maybe we could skate home on doughnut grease,” Danny said. “Maybe we could all put on nightshirts and catch dead fish out of a dead river. What did you do that was so bad, anyway? Why don’t you just forget about it?”

Mr. Deener’s eyes were shut. Out in the kitchen, Mrs. Deener suddenly started to sing. She got the words wrong, started over, and then got the words wrong again. Mr. Deener squished his face up, looking as if he were going to pop. Suddenly there was a furious clanking noise from the sink as if an octopus were washing dishes, banging them all together at once. A tea kettle started to whistle. Pan lids rattled. Cupboard doors opened and closed with a bang. There was an orchestra of kitchen noises, and Mrs. Deener’s voice, singing like a madwoman.

“There’s nobody in the kitchen!” Danny shouted in a voice even louder than all of Mrs. Deener’s noises. “There isn’t even a kitchen!”

Mr. Deener smashed himself into his chair, remembering harder and harder. All at once there was the smell of flowers in the room, and the bouquet on the table stirred just a little, as if in a wind. The whole house was growing more solid. Colors were brightening. The tea kettle screeched. Suddenly they could hear heavy footsteps in the bedroom. It was Mrs. Deener in there too, moving around. There she was again, sewing something in the den. She was here, she was there – disappearing in one room, reappearing in another. The whole house, and Mr. Deener too, seemed ready to boil over.

Suddenly, without warning, Danny snatched the bag of memories off Mr. Deener’s lap, turned around, and ran toward the front door.

Chapter 17: The End of Mrs. Deener

“What!” Mr. Deener shouted, leaping from his chair and holding onto his hat. “Stop! Thief!” He gestured helplessly and took a half step forward.

Danny pulled open the door and stood there, ready to run. “Come on and get them!” he shouted, holding up the bag.

“Yeah!” John said. “Go get him, Mr. Deener!”

Polly grabbed Mr. Deener’s arm and tugged on it, trying to pull him forward. “Don’t be a chicken!” she yelled. “Don’t just give up!”

But all of the fire went out of Mr. Deener’s eyes, and he slumped back down in the chair like a heap of wet ashes and began muttering. The smell of the flowers faded, the tea kettle hissed and fell silent, the light in the room dimmed.

Mrs. Deener floated out of the kitchen, drifting past them like an airborne jellyfish. Her feet were three or four inches from the floor. Her head was cocked over sideways and her eyes were nearly closed. She sailed in through the den door, and John heard her bumping around among pieces of furniture. There was a heavy thud, as if she had knocked finally into the wall.

Out over the sea the sun turned dark. The house fell into shadow. John could see stars shining overhead, right through the ceiling – stars that were perfectly round, like glass marbles, like holes cut out of a black paper sky.

After a time, Mr. Deener began to hum. He sat up a bit straighter, and his fingers traced patterns on the arm of his chair. Slowly the darkness lifted. He hummed louder. The sun shone again. The walls of the house turned solid. The stars disappeared. He began to sing a song without words, but with a lot of tum-tee, tum-tee, turns. The tea kettle started up and Mrs. Deener reappeared in the den door, still floating, but with her eyes wide open now. She waved her potholder-covered hands like a dancing puppet as she headed back in toward the kitchen. Her jaw clacked up and down, and a hollow-sounding noise came out of her throat.

“Would…you…like…sup-per…Art-ty?” she croaked, hovering in the air behind his chair. “Some… nice… white… grave-ey… and… spuds?”

Mr. Deener nodded happily and said, “Why, yes, my dear,” without looking around, and she drifted on into the kitchen where pots and pans immediately began clanking and the oven door banged open and shut like the windblown doors in the cave with the shadow in it. “I love a mashed spud,” Mr. Deener said, smacking his lips.

“Let’s get out of here,” John said. He shuddered. This was worse than he had imagined. They weren’t going to talk Mr. Deener into anything. His head was full of pond water, like one of the jars out on the back lawn.

“Come on,” John said, and he and Polly went out through the door, following Danny. “I’ve got an idea,” he said when they were out on the front walk again.

(Chapter 17 continues after illustration)

“Good,” Danny said. “What is it? I hope it’s not a moon car built out of tin cans again. That was one of the dumbest. …”

“Never mind that,” John said “I’ll show you what it is.” He headed around the side of the house, toward the back yard where Mrs. Barlow’s china plates were lined up on the lawn, one after another. “Watch this,” he said, and he jumped on one of the plates, cracking it in half. He knew what needed to be done. Mr. Deener didn’t need his sympathy any more. Mr. Deener didn’t need anybody’s sympathy. Mrs. Barlow was right. He needed someone to shout into his ear and wake him up.

“All right!” Danny said. “Now you’re talking!” And he swung the flour bag full of marbles, knocking apart the pyramid of jars.

Polly picked up a plate and zingoed it off across the lawn and into the ocean, and John kicked another like a football. Danny picked up two more and banged them together like cymbals. They went after the rest of the bottles of pond water and mint tea next, unscrewing the lids and dumping water out onto the lawn. Right then Ahab came running from the woods. There were a dozen henny-pennies on his back. Two more rode on his head, steering him by pulling on his ears. They ran through a glass bowl full of green cheese, knocking it flying, then kicked over the jars of glass chips. Other henny-pennies threw stones at mirrors and glass bottles and swung like apes on the strings of prisms until they came clattering down in a heap.

Mrs. Barlow got up from her bench to help. “That’s it!” she shouted. “Wreck the house! We’ll fix his wagon! Well clean his plow!” She picked up the last whole plate and held onto it, keeping it safe while she watched the rest of them destroy Mr. Deener’s apparatus.

The web of light that encircled the house shimmered and shuddered. The air was full of the noise of tea kettles and slamming cupboard doors. Pink soap bubbles poured out of every window, bursting in the air. The chimney faded and vanished, and the roof along with it. The garage blinked away. The windows were nothing but dark holes, and the wood siding on the house seemed to crumble into termite dust and blow away on the sea wind.

In the space of a few moments, the whole house was gone, and Mr. Deener sat smashed into his favorite chair, holding onto the stuffed arms of the thing as if he were holding onto a rowboat on a tossing sea. The ghost of Mrs. Deener drifted back and forth where the kitchen had been, moving her arms as if she were still opening cupboard doors and stirring pans on the stove.

Slowly she lost all color and substance, and the grass and sky and sea shone through her. There was a small pop, like the bursting of one last soap bubble, and then there was nothing left of her but an apron and two potholders floating over the meadow.

Chapter 18: The Marbleston Pie

The sea wind caught the apron and the potholders and blew them away over the treetops like leaves, and the last little bits of Mrs. Deener were gone. For some reason Mrs. Barlow was crying again. A half hour ago she had been sad that Mrs. Deener had come back; now she seemed to be sad that Mrs. Deener was gone. She looked out at where Mr. Deener sat alone in the wind, heaved a great sigh, wiped her eyes, and took the bag of memories from Danny.

“I’ve been saving them up,” she said, looking into the bag, “so that the Deener can one day have them back, when he’s ready for them. Maybe I kept them too long.” She caught sight then of the doughnut monocle in John’s hand and asked, “What’s that thing?”

“That’s what’s left of the magic spectacles,” John said, holding it in the air like a sceptre. “We took it from the goblins.” “Keep it safe,” she said. “We might need it yet.”

“Let me carry it,” Danny said, taking the doughnut monocle. John let him have it without arguing.

Mrs. Barlow stood thinking, then held the bag of memories up and looked at it, then stood thinking again. Finally she shrugged her shoulders and pointed at the ocean. “Fetch me a pile of periwinkles off the rocks. And while you’re at it, bring me the Deener’s hat. I’ll get things going back in the woods. We’ll give it one last try.” She walked away then, still deep in thought.

“His hat?” Danny said to John.

“Periwinkles?” Polly asked.

John shrugged. Mr. Deener sat now on top of a moss-covered rock in the grass. His chair was gone. His eyes were still smashed shut. His hair stuck straight out under the brim of his hat. The henny-pennies landed on his shoulders and tugged on his ears. One of them climbed up onto his nose and pushed one of his eyelids open as if he were opening a garage door. Ahab licked his face.

“Mr. Deener!” John shouted.

He wouldn’t budge.

The henny-pennies yammered at him with their tiny voices, and Mr. Deener clapped his hands over his ears, nearly squashing one of the little men. He kept his hands there, pressing out the sound of their yelling.

They swarmed around, shouting “Deener! Deener! Deener!” but Mr. Deener might as well have been a lump of painted chalk.

The wind blew off the ocean, and the sun and the moon hung in the sky, unmoving. It was as if the world was stopped dead. Goblin steam rose out of the hilltop behind them, and the door to the caves stood open. There was a rumbling back in the hills, as if the ground was unsettled, and the sound of the waves rose and faded as if it came from a radio and someone were turning the volume up and down. The land passed in and out of shadow, even though there were no clouds in the sky. Mr. Deener sat there as ever, seeing and hearing nothing. Mrs. Barlow waved at them from up at the edge of the forest. She pointed to her head.

“Oh, yeah,” John said, “his hat.” He shrugged, there was no use asking for it. He simply reached out and took it.

Mr. Deener clapped his hand to his head, but it was too late. When his ear was uncovered, the henny-pennies yammered at him like little pieces of his conscience, giving him advice. He closed his ears and sat unmoving again, his eyes mashed shut, as if all his magic had turned him at last into stone and he would sit forever here at the edge of the ocean, at the uttermost end of all things.

Polly stepped down toward the water, walking out among the black rocks along the shore. John and Danny followed, carrying the hat, and together they plucked periwinkles off the rocks and dropped them in until the hat was full. The periwinkles looked like black snails. Waves rolled up to their feet, never quite touching them, and then soaked away into the sand. The rocks and sand stayed dry, as if the water wasn’t water at all, but was just a dark and restless shadow.

They carried the hat up the beach, walking past Mr. Deener. Even the henny-pennies had deserted him. Mrs. Barlow worked in the weedy garden. She had kicked aside the pieces of clinker flower and scooped a hole out of the dirt, then lined the hole with rocks. Henny-penny men flew back and forth through the forest trees, gathering up twigs and dried leaves and dumping them into the hole. The flour sack lay empty nearby along with the plate that Mrs. Deener had saved from destruction.

“Where did the marbles go?” Danny asked, handing her the hat full of periwinkles.

She nodded at a round bundle lying against a fallen log. It was her apron, gathered around the marbles, the apron strings tying it closed.

“We’re going to bake the Deener one last pie,” she said.

“A periwinkle pie?” John asked. It sounded horrible, especially when there was a basket full of doughnuts to eat.

“Nope,” Mrs. Barlow said. “We’ll bake him a marbleston pie. It’s like a cottleston pie, only it’s stuffed with marbles instead of cottles.”

“What’s a cottle?” Polly asked.

“Nobody knows,” Mrs. Barlow said, dumping the periwinkles into the flour sack. She winked, closing up the top of the bag and hefting it in her hand. “Just heavy enough,” she said. “Now, give me that basket of doughnuts.”

John opened the doughnut basket that Mrs. Barlow had brought down from the house. She took out the doughnuts one by one, smashing them flat between her hands and then laying them into the hat, one over the other until the inside was lined with flattened doughnuts. Danny lit a fire in the pit, and he and Polly threw sticks onto the fire until it was burning. Mrs. Barlow said that they would want hot coals and not flames, so they let the fire burn down until the bottom of the pit was red and glowing.

They found a round flat rock that they laid carefully over the coals, and Mrs. Barlow set the doughnut-lined hat upside down on the rock and poured all of the fishbowl marbles into it. Then she flattened more doughnuts, laying them over the marbles like the top crust of a pie. After soaking her apron in cold water, she folded it up and laid it over the crust, spread an inch of dirt on it, and then heaped hot coals on top so that the pie would cook evenly, from top to bottom.

Soon the pie started to smoke, and there was the terrible smell of burning hat. Voices mumbled out from inside it, rising and falling, gobbling and yammering, shouting snatches of words that made no sense but were full of pain and regret and sadness.

Shapes appeared in the rising smoke. The ghostly outlines of old automobiles and faces swirled up into the air, stretching and pulling themselves into smoky wreaths in the sea wind. The gray images of plates of food and of radios and television sets rose like spirits from a grave. The shapes of houses and trees and shoes and fishing poles wisped out, followed by a furry-looking dog with no tail. The dog seemed to look out at the ocean, and as if he suddenly saw Mr. Deener sitting out there alone, he opened his mouth in a silent bark before disappearing forever in the air over the forest.

Flames licked up along the sides of the hat, and the brim suddenly caught fire like a burning wheel. The marbles inside glowed like a hot red circle, and the smoke poured out, streaming up into the sky.

“Done,” Mrs. Barlow said at last. She shoved two sticks into the flames, one on either side of the hat, and lifted it out of the pit. The burning brim fell away onto the ground, and John stamped it out in the dirt.

“All the pie that’s fit to eat,” Mrs. Barlow said. “Enough is as good as a piece. Hand me that plate.”

Danny did, and Mrs. Barlow set the plate on top of the pie and then flipped the whole thing over so that the pie sat on the plate with the round side up. Mr. Deener’s hat was a wreck, what was left of it. She pulled fragments of it away from the doughnut crust, which was scorched black in the spots where the hat had burned through. Finally the pie sat there finished, round on top, like the hill with the caves in it, exactly the size and shape of Mr. Deener’s head. Hot marbles shone from between the rings of doughnut crust.

“We’ll let it cool for a bit,” Mrs. Barlow said. “Some pies are good hot, but this isn’t one of ‘em.”

“What are we going to do with it?” John asked, kicking dirt in to the pit full of hot coals in order to put out the fire.

“We’re going to feed it to the Deener,” Mrs. Barlow said.

Chapter 19: The Deener Blows His Top

Out on the front lawn, Mrs. Barlow put down the basket with the pie in it. Ahab lay down next to it, as if to guard it, and Mrs. Barlow shook the flour sack in Mr. Deener’s face. The periwinkles inside clattered together like marbles. Mr. Deener’s hand shot out and he grabbed the sack, quick as a snake striking, as if someone would try to snatch it away again.

“Mine,” he said.

“That’s right Deener,” Mrs. Barlow told him. “They’re yours. Time’s wasting. What’ll it be?”

“It’ll be mirrors and smoke,” Mr. Deener said. “The world is mirrors and smoke. Now the mirrors are broken and the smoke has blown away on the wind. There’s nothing left but to throw these into the deep ocean. Nothing else left.”

“We’re left,” Danny said.

“Nothing’s left!” He shook his head, his eyes clamped tightly shut. “I’ve made a hash of it. Breaking things up and casting them away. I had choices to make. Too many choices. I want to rest from them. No more choices. No more questions.”

He swung the bag slowly, back and forth, listening to the periwinkles clacking inside. For a long time he said nothing. Then, with a sigh, he said, “I loved her. That was worth something.”

“It was worth everything,” Mrs. Barlow said. “And yet I betrayed her.”

“You betrayed yourself. In your heart, Deener, you don’t have any enemies except yourself. Quit pulling your own hair out. Love was worth everything, wasn’t it? Do you think you’ve used it up? You can’t use it up. Blame isn’t worth dirt. It’s a fraud. But you keep carrying it around, like a fifty dollar bill. All this idiot magic, and you still haven’t got rid of it. That’s what you want to throw away, Deener – the blame.”

“Then I’ll truly have nothing,” Mr. Deener said.

“You’ll still have your memories,” Polly said. “The good ones. And you can get more good ones.”

“And you’ll have us,” John said.

“That’s right,” Danny said. “you’ll have us as friends. That’s a start.”

But he shook his head as if he wasn’t convinced, as if it was too late for starting. He had tried to give away all the old memories, all the old regrets, but he was still holding them in his hand, tied up in a sack. He rattled the bag again, listening to the clacking from inside. “Sounds like a lot of old bones,” he said.

Abruptly he stood up, planting his feet widely, as if the sea wind would knock him over. He opened his eyes a little, squinting out at the ocean. The sun dimmed and the sky grew dark. The wind blew fiercely, and the cries of the unseen seagulls were drowned by the sound of pounding surf, Waterspouts rose and fell beyond the waves, barely visible now in the twilight.

Taking the flour sack in both hands, he swung it slowly in a circle around his head. There was the sound of a low whump, whump, whump, as it passed through the air. The black waves rolled in toward shore over the murky rocks, higher and higher, as if within Mr. Deener himself a shadow was rising that would fill him with darkness. Around and around the sack swung as the sky grew darker and the ocean rose over the beach.

Suddenly Danny raised his hands as if he would grab the sack away, and John cried, “No!” at Danny and Mr. Deener both.

The sound of his voice seemed to break the spell. The spinning sack slowed, the tide fell away, the sun shone again. Mr. Deener let the sack fall at his feet. He looked utterly worn out, like a man come home at last from a dark journey. Suddenly he began to cry, and he hugged Polly to him. His glasses fogged up from the crying. He took them off and wiped them with the hem of his coat. Then he kicked the memory bag with the toe of his shoe. The bag flew open, and periwinkles rolled out of it.

Mr. Deener looked at them, horrified. “They’ve rotted!” he cried. “Black and rotten! I’ve waited too long!”

“They’re just periwinkles,” Danny said, picking one up. “See. It was just a bag full of snails.”

“Snails?,” Mr. Deener said flatly, taking the winkle from Danny and looked closely at it. “All my memories have turned into black snails.” He looked around, trying to make sense of things.

“No they didn’t,” Danny said. “We tricked you.”

“It tricked you, too,” John said to Danny. “You were going to grab the sack, weren’t you? You were going to stop him from throwing it away.”

“Of course I was going to stop him,” Danny said.

“What about what you said, about him making his own choices?”

“So it was a stupid choice. What can I say? And he didn’t choose that anyway, did he?”

“Black crawling things,” Mr. Deener said, bending over and poking at the periwinkles in the sand.

“You passed the test,” John said to him. “You didn’t throw everything away. It doesn’t matter what was in the bag.”

“That’s right,” Mrs. Barlow said. “Let’s eat.” And then, as if by accident, she reached across and knocked Mr. Deener’s glasses off his nose, saying, “Oh my!” The glasses fell on top of the scattered periwinkles. Immediately Mrs. Barlow stomped her foot down on the glasses, and the hard shells cracked them to pieces. “I am sorry!” she said, as Mr. Deener groped after them. He held up the empty frames and wiggled his fingers through them.

Just then Mrs. Barlow opened the basket and took out the plate with the marbleston pie on it. It was maybe the awfulest looking piece of food that John had ever seen, all patchy and burnt and with melted sugar glaze from the doughnuts bubbled up through the marbles like dried slime.

Mr. Deener looked closely at it, blinking his eyes rapidly. “It looks…” he started to say. “I mean, without my glasses…”

Mrs. Barlow winked at Danny, who pulled the doughnut monocle out of his pocket. “Try mine,” Danny said, slipping the monocle in front of Mr. Deener’s face.

“I say!” Mr. Deener said, peering at the pie through the monocle. “Cherry! Fat as anything too, and with a crust like a cloud.”

Vapor rose out of the pie, curling in a wispy line through the green glass lens in the monocle. Mr. Deener breathed deeply, smacking his lips. “Delicious!” he said. To John the pie smelled like something out of an incinerator. “I’m as hungry as two dogs!” he said. Then he looked at Ahab and said, “No offense.”

“Then don’t wait for company, Deener,” Mrs. Barlow said. “Dip in.”

While Danny held the monocle, Mr. Deener scooped out a handful of pie and took a huge bite, chomping it down and making a terrible crunching noise. “Mmm,” he said, as if he hadn’t eaten anything that good in years. He paused for a moment to dislodge something that was stuck in his teeth, then went back to eating.

He scooped out another piece, and then another, and as he gobbled it all down, Mrs. Barlow nodded and smiled, very happy with herself.

“Filling,” Mr. Deener said, pausing for a moment. “Very rich.”

“Nutritious,” Mrs. Barlow said. “Have another little dab.”

He ate another piece, chewing very slowly now. The pie was almost gone. A few more marbles lay in the bottom among broken pieces of crust. He put his hand on his stomach and groaned a little, then sat down on the rock again and waved the pie away.

“I’m full,” he said. “Not another bite.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Barlow said. “I’ve seen you eat pies twice this size. One more little nibble?” She gathered the last bits of the pie together in her fingers and shoved them into Mr. Deener’s mouth. Then she wiggled his chin up and down, making him chew them up. “That’s right,” she said, “down they go.”

Mr. Deener swallowed, then staggered backward as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Ooh!” he groaned. “I’ve got a bellyache.” He passed his hand in front of his eyes, then held it out in front of him as if he didn’t quite know what it was. His eyes shot open, and a look of puzzlement came into his face, like a sleepwalker just waking up. His face began to bounce and twitch. He clutched his forehead with both hands and strode out toward the ocean, kicking through the shallow water until he was waist deep. “Cold!” he shouted. “Cold!” His arms jerked helplessly and his head bobbed up and down.

“He’s digesting them,” Mrs. Barlow said.

Polly nodded. “I don’t think they agree with him,” she said.

“They give him the fantods,” Mrs. Barlow said. “I wish I had a bi-carb to give him.”

Mr. Deener hooted something at the sky. His arms waved around his head like a windmill, and he came skipping back up into shallow water, his wet pants clinging to his legs. The waves sucked out to sea, leaving him high and dry. Hundreds of fish flopped around his feet, their scales glittering like jewels in the sunshine. Another wave washed through, rolling up around Mr. Deener’s knees, clutching at him, trying to drag him backward as it rushed away seaward again. He grabbed his stomach, reeling up the beach toward dry sand and making a fearful moaning noise.

“I think they’re making him sick,” Danny said.

“If only he can keep them down…” Mrs. Barlow started to say, but just then came a tremendous explosion from behind them, like a volcano erupting. The ground shook, and there was a tearing noise and a sound like an enormous tea kettle going off, louder and louder and louder until the whistling filled the air like the sound of the wind at the end of the world.

And then, as if the earth were blowing its top, the entire hill of caves flew into the air, end over end, sailing up into the sky on a tremendous, uprushing billow of steam.

Chapter 20: The Return of Mr. Deener

The earth beneath the hill looked like an ant colony under glass. Goblins ran this way and that way, up and down sunlit pathways that had once been dark tunnels. The heavy wood and iron doors toppled to the ground in clouds of rusty dust, shaking the earth. Some of the goblins tried to flee into the woods, but fell in the sunshine and simply evaporated into the air, leaving behind them black, goblin-shaped blotches.

A night-dark shadow lay over the ground like a heavy, low fog, right at the center of the hill. It surged back and forth, as if blown by a great wind, and dark swatches of it tore off and blew away, stretching into ghostly heads with wide, gaping mouths and hollow eyes. A terrible moaning noise came from the mouths of the ghosts, and from the shadow on the ground arose the sound of doors slamming, faster and faster and faster. The goblins that were left fled away from it with wild cries that echoed down toward the sea.

John knew what the shadow was; it was the thing he and Polly had seen in the cave. And right then, like the sudden touch of fear and sorrow, something wintery-cold and dark ran through him. His heart beat in his chest, and he threw his hands in front of his face. Ahab howled. Mr. Deener shouted one long, drawn-out, “Noooo!”

At the sound of Mr. Deener’s voice, the shadow tumbled up into the air like dirty smoke. For a moment the moon was blotted out and there sounded a thin and distant cry, like the windy shriek of a goblin flute. John put down his hands. The fear and the sorrow had passed away, swallowed by the moon. The sky was clear.

There was nothing left of the caves but toppled doors and the crawling shapes of the last few goblins. Like bad dreams, the goblins faded and vanished. The stony pathways disappeared, and the hundreds of wood and iron doors blinked away with a sound like the faint and distant popping of soap bubbles.

Where once the caves had stood, green grass billowed in the wind. At the far edge of the grass stood the fountain, with the oak woods rising behind it. Water flowed from the fountain now, and the sunlight shone on the spray as it blew away on the breeze. Beyond the fountain and woods lay the meadow, and beyond that stood the house with its diamond-paned windows and its weather vane like the skeleton of a fish.

John thought suddenly of Kimberly’s treasure can, and the words written on it: “East, West, Home’s Best,” and he knew that what he was looking at now, from down at the edge of the sea, was the very scene that was painted on the lid of the can. Right then it seemed to him that he could see the window again, hanging small and distant over the meadow.

Mr. Deener lay on his back, staring at the sky. Sycamore leaves lay scattered on the ground roundabout him, but there wasn’t a henny-penny man to be seen. Mrs. Barlow took his hand and rubbed it, and he blinked his eyes and sat up.

“It is a brand new day,” he said, looking around. Then he stretched and yawned and said, “My heart feels like an alligator.”

“Good man,” Mrs. Barlow said. “How’s your stomach?”

“Never better,” he said.

“Teeth loose?”

“What?” he asked. “Why should my teeth be loose? I have the teeth of a hippopotamus.” Then he winked at John and scratched his head. He stood up. “I’ve been thinking about the car built of tin cans,” he said. “I believe you to be a man of science, and with your help I think we can build the thing, although I’m not certain we can get to the moon in it unless we have a driver.” He looked hard at Danny.

Danny shrugged. “Sure,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

“Well, that’s settled then.” Mr. Deener dusted off the seat of his pants. He shook Danny’s hand and then shook John’s hand. His grip was strong, and his eyes were clear. “I want to thank you both,” he said. Then he hugged Polly again and wiped a tear from his eye. “You’ll be staying,” he told her. “You and Flo.” It wasn’t a question. He was simply telling the truth.

She nodded and took his arm. Mrs. Barlow took the other one. With John, Danny, and Ahab following, they set off across the grass. Danny carried the doughnut monocle, but they left the basket and pie plate behind, along with the rest of the broken-up apparatus. By the time John remembered it and turned around, the sea had washed across the beach, and all of it was gone. Another wave rolled through, sweeping the beach clean of everything, even rocks. The sound of the seagulls was gone, too, and although the vast ocean still shimmered in the sunshine, it looked flat and still now.

In the dark patches of ground where the goblins had fallen, scattered bits of trash lay in the grass – broken bottles and rusty coat hangers, old clocks and radio tubes, broken phonograph records and scraps of old clothing. Mr. Deener kicked through some of it, as if he might find something useful or memorable there, but he didn’t bother to pick any of it up.

Aunt Flo stood on the meadow, shading her eyes with her hand, watching them approach through the grass and wildflowers. The Sleeper lay nearby on his bed, dressed in his nightcap and nightgown. It seemed as if Mr. Deener couldn’t quite bring himself to look at the Sleeper. He looked in the other direction, toward the now-distant ocean. It was a faraway look, as if he could still see the little house on the bluffs where he had lived for a time with the ghost of his wife.

“Look,” Danny said, pointing at the bed. Now that they were closer, the Sleeper didn’t look like Mr. Deener anymore; he didn’t look like a man at all. He was nothing more than a bundle of straw and rags dressed up in night clothes. Like the goblins and the moon ladder and the rest of Mr. Deener’s magic, there was nothing to the Sleeper but junk and fakery.

The open window hung over the meadow again. Sunlight glinted from the sea-green glass, and the window curtains blew outward on the breeze. Ahab ran toward it, barking happily. Through it came the smell of cherry pies baking in the oven. The smell seemed almost to knock Mr. Deener over backward. “Pie!” he said.

“In we go,” Mrs. Barlow said, helping Ahab through the window. “Dogs first.” There was the sound of Ahab jumping down into the room, and then he stuck his head back out the window and barked.

“Okay, okay,” John said. There was no time to waste. He boosted himself over the window sill. Ahab licked his face, as if he was so happy to be home that he couldn’t help himself; he had to lick something. John pulled himself forward, leaning into the room, trying to wiggle through. Ahab licked him again, and he let go to wipe his face and tumbled down onto the wooden floor.

Just then he heard his mother say something from out in the living-room. It was as if he had never been gone at all. “Hurry,” he said to Danny, grabbing his arms and dragging him through the window.

“What?” he shouted to his mother. “Just a second.”

“I said did you ask Danny about my Christmas pin?” Her footsteps sounded on the floor of the hall.

Just then Mrs. Barlow appeared in the window. Mr. Deener helped push her from behind. She was a tight fit. John grabbed onto her arms and pulled. Danny dragged the beanbag chair across and under the window just as she popped through, falling face-first into the chair. “Oomph,” she said.

“What on earth?” Their mother stood in the hallway, looking in through the open bedroom door. Their father stood behind her. Their mouths were open in disbelief.

“We’re having some friends in,” John said.

“Through the window?” his mother asked. “What’s wrong with the door?”

“You can’t get here through the door,” Danny said, helping Mrs. Barlow out of the chair.

“Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” she said, smoothing her clothes.

Mr. Deener looked in at the window then. He waved and said hello, and then, without waiting to be invited, he tilted across the window sill, kicking his feet as if he were swimming. Buttons popped off his coat. “Terribly sorry,” he said, falling into the beanbag chair and rolling off onto the floor. “The boy’s right. Door won’t work in this case.” His hair was wild when he stood up, and his coat and vest were pushed up under his armpits.

“Mr. Deener,” he said, by way of introduction, and he put his hand out. “Artemis Deener.” John’s father shook it.

“Artemis Deener?” John’s mother said. “Didn’t you used to. …Didn’t we buy. … Aren’t you…?”

“That’s entirely correct. I’ve come back. Your sons were kind enough to invite me in. Is that a cherry pie I smell cooking?”

“Deener!” Mrs. Barlow said. “Where’s your manners?”

“In fact it is,” said their mother. “I just put it on the counter to cool. We’d be happy if you’d join us for a piece. We’ve got ice cream too.”

“Tip top,” said Mr. Deener. “Someone fed me a pie a short time back that was apparently full of pits. Gave me the most awful indigestion.” He looked at Mrs. Barlow. “Tasted burnt, too.”

“Where’s Polly?” Danny asked, looking out the window.

John looked past him. What he saw was the front porch, the lawn, the street. Mr. Skink was raking leaves again. Penny the cat climbed the porch steps and jumped up onto the swing. “Aren’t they coming?” John asked.

Mr. Deener shook his head. “Not through the window.”

Danny took the doughnut monocle out of his back pocket. The doughnut fell off the end of the stick. John picked it up and handed it to him, and Danny peered through it, out the window. “Wait,” he shouted, but then was silent, as if there was no point in yelling. After a moment he waved. He handed the monocle to John.

Through it, John could see Aunt Flo and Polly, very far away now. The full moon was like a tiny white marble in the sky. In the hazy distance the hills were green, and the river flowed down onto the meadow, not dry white anymore, but like a blue ribbon. Far away rose what looked like chimney smoke, maybe from unseen farmhouses that had just awakened out of an autumn sleep. As John watched, the whole world beyond the window rushed away from him. Polly waved, and John waved back.

“Who is it?” asked their mother, stepping over to the window.

“Just some friends of ours,” Danny said.

She looked out. “Why that’s Kimberly and Florence Owlswick,” their mother said, and she shut the window and turned the latch.

“We’ll give them a piece of pie, too. There’s enough for everyone.”

“I’ll just let them in, if you don’t mind,” Mr. Deener said, looking past her out the window. John looked too. It was Kimberly and her aunt, heading up the walk. What a coincidence. Mr. Deener hurried from the room followed by everyone except John and his mother.

John slipped the doughnut monocle into his jacket pocket. There, lying inside, was the holly berry Christmas pin. He handed it to her.

“Wherever did you find it?” she asked, pinning it on her blouse. “I looked high and low for it.”

John blinked at her, wondering whether to tell her the truth – that he had snatched it off a goblin’s shirt when he was about to be boiled in a kettle full of bones and fog and glass jewelry. Maybe later he’d tell her.

“I found it outside,” he said.

“Outside?” She turned toward the door. A big hubbub was just then starting up in the living room over the return of Mr. Deener. “Outside. Isn’t that the strangest thing?”

“I guess it’s one of them,” John said.

Chapter 21: What Happened After That

Autumn passed away. Christmas came and went. In January Mr. Deener and Mrs. Barlow got married on a rainy Saturday afternoon and moved into a white wooden house near the library, on Center Street. That spring Mrs. Barlow opened a doughnut shop where the curiosity shop had been. There had been nothing left in the empty shop but the one dusty green copy of the Wise Fishermen’s Encyclopedia. She gave the book to John and Danny to keep.

Mr. Deener went into the business of making marbles in his garage. He set up complicated magnifying apparatus in order to heat his glass kiln with moonlight. The sleeping cat from Dr. Stone’s office lived in the garage among the jars of colored glass chips. Only it wasn’t asleep anymore; it had awakened on the afternoon of their return from the magic land, and Mr. Deener adopted it and was teaching it not to eat sparrows. On that same afternoon the fountain in the plaza had gurgled suddenly to life, as if, like the cat, it too had simply been asleep.

As an experiment one Saturday morning, John, Danny, and Kimberly gave Harvey Chickel some of Mrs. Barlow’s doughnuts. At first he pretended he thought they were poisoned, and he wouldn’t eat them. Then he forced himself to eat one and said that it “tasted like dirt.” Then he ate two more and asked if that was all and got mad when they said it was. He didn’t push anybody, though, and he didn’t spit.

Instead he went over to the Deeners’ house with everyone else, and all of them ate more doughnuts and listened to Mr. Deener explain his theory of tin cans and moon travel. Harvey made the pinwheel sign around his ear a couple of times, but he hung around all afternoon while Mr. Deener showed them how to make the rainbow spiral in a glass marble.

And he showed them how, if you had a clear eye and the right tools, you could learn to make the marbles round every time, as round as a soap bubble or the moon or the hole in a perfect doughnut.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

World Fantasy Award winning author James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written eighteen novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His steampunk novel Homunculus won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his short story "The Ape-box Affair," published in Unearth magazine, was the first contemporary steampunk story published in the U.S. Recent publications include Knights of the Cornerstone, The Ebb Tide, and The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs. He has recently finished a new steampunk novel titled The Aylesford Skull, to be published by Titan Books.

Table of Contents

- Title
- Also by James P. Blaylock
- Copyright

- Part one of three

- Chapter 1: Pancakes and Autumn Leaves
- Chapter 2: The Moon Penny
- Chapter 3: The Window Under the House
- Chapter 4: The Fishbowl Full of Marbles
- Chapter 5: The Treasure Under the House
- Chapter 6: Fish Bones and Rat Shoes
- Chapter 7: The Magic Spectacles
- Chapter 8: Through the Bedroom Window
- Chapter 9: Goblins
- Chapter 10: The Fog from the Kettle
- Chapter 11: The Fight on the Road
- Chapter 12: Mr. Deener
- Chapter 13: Mr. Deener Has a Fit
- Chapter 14: Glazed Doughnuts

- Part two of three

- Chapter 15: Upstairs in the Old House

- Chapter 16: The Sleeper Puts on His Hat and Goes Out

- Chapter 17: Making a Goblin

- Chapter 18: The Clinker Garden

- Book Two

- Chapter 1: The Face Among the Weeds
- Chapter 2: Danny Comes Up with a Plan
- Chapter 3: Mrs. Owlswick’s Window
- Chapter 4: The Battle on the Meadow
- Chapter 5: Mr. Deener Sets Out
- Chapter 6: What Became of the Moon Ladder
- Chapter 7: The Sleeper Floats Away, Nearly

- Chapter 8: Someone Steals the Bag of Memories

- Chapter 9: In the Tunnel of the Creaking Doors

- Part Three of three

- Chapter 10: What Danny Found in the Cave
- Chapter 11: The Mark on the Final Door
- Chapter 12: The Fishbowl Full of Marbles
- Chapter 13: Through the Green Light
- Chapter 14: The Broken Clinker Flower
- Chapter 15: The Runaway Marbles
- Chapter 16: In the House of Dreams
- Chapter 17: The End of Mrs. Deener
- Chapter 18: The Marbleston Pie
- Chapter 19: The Deener Blows His Top
- Chapter 20: The Return of Mr. Deener
- Chapter 21: What Happened After That

- Author Bio

- More books by James P. Blaylock