The Magic Spectacles

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.

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