The Magic Spectacles (15 page)

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.

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.