The Magic Spectacles (6 page)

“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.

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.

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!”