The Magic Spectacles (10 page)

“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.

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.

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.”

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.”