The Magic Spectacles (21 page)

“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.

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.