The Magic Spectacles

by James P. Blaylock

  A moment later Danny looked in at the window again, wearing the glasses. “C’mon,” he said to John. “What are you waiting for? Ahab wants to chase rabbits. I’m holding on to his collar.”

  “Are there rabbits out there?” asked John. He wanted a good reason to go, unlike Danny, who almost never needed a reason to do anything. “Sure there’s rabbits,” Danny said. “And a creek, too. You saw it.”

  “Yeah,” John said. “Maybe…”

  “Forget maybe,” Danny said. “Only for a second.”

  “I’m going to bring some stuff,” John said.

  “What stuff? We don’t need any stuff. We aren’t going anywhere far.”

  “Just some Halloween candy,” John said, picking up a backpack from behind the bedroom door. “We’ll need a snack.” He turned around and started out of the bedroom. He wasn’t really interested in the candy; he just wanted another minute to think up a reason not to go. And yet he knew that he would go. Clearly he and Danny had been bound for the land beyond the window all day long, almost falling toward it, like Alice down the rabbit hole.

  Their mom was busy upstairs. He could hear the vacuum going. Their father was in the garage, cutting up wood to build a bookcase. They would think he and Danny were out playing around in the neighborhood. There wouldn’t be any problem. Nothing would go wrong.

  There were two cherry pie baking in the oven, and the smell of them was wonderful. John wished that he could take one along, but of course that was impossible. In an hour they’d be eating dinner anyway, and he could have all the pie he wanted, or nearly so. For now he grabbed a couple of handfuls of Halloween candy from each of their bags, and then searched around through the leftover candy until he found two Mars Bars, and he took those too. They were full-sized Mar Bars, not the little kind that come in a plastic sack.

  Just then he heard a scraping noise, followed by a sound like muffled laughter. The vacuum cleaner shut off He shoved the candy into the backpack and zipped it up, then went back out into the living room. There was his mother, just then coming down the stairs.

  She didn’t look as if she’d been laughing. “Have you seen my green Christmas pin?” she asked. “The one with all the red jewels, like holly berries? I had it out to wear it tonight, but now I can’t find it anywhere.”

  “No,” said John. “I haven’t seen it. I’ll watch out for it. Danny and I are going out for a while.”

  “Is your room cleaned up?” his mother asked.

  “Yeah,” John said, heading down the hall and into the bedroom. He snatched up their jackets, putting his on and then slipping on the backpack. At least she hadn’t asked where they were going. He would have told her the truth, and that would have been it. She wouldn’t have let them go. Danny leaned in through the window to take the jackets from him, and then disappeared.

  There was his hand again, holding the spectacles, waving them around. John put them on and climbed straight out through the open window, pushing the screen out behind him and hurrying so that he wouldn’t change his mind and chicken out. And just as he jumped down to the meadow and let go of the window sill, he suddenly thought about the fishbowl full of marbles, and he glanced one last time at the dresser where they had put the fishbowl.

  The top of the dresser was empty. The marbles were gone.

  Their bedroom window, Mrs. Owlswick’s window, hung in the air like a picture hanging on an invisible wall. Their house had vanished and everything else with it, and the air was full of the musty smell of oak trees and the sweet smell of wildflowers.

  “Can you see the window?” Danny asked.

  “Yes,” said John. “And I can see the bedroom through it, but not around it.”

  Danny nodded. “I know,” he said. “I can’t see the window at all, not without the glasses on.”

  John took the spectacles off, and the window vanished. Immediately he put them back on. “What did you do with the marbles?” he asked.

  “What?” Danny asked. “What do you mean? They’re in the fishbowl.”

  “Huh uh,” John said. “The fishbowl’s gone too.”

  “You’re crazy,” Danny said. “Let me see the glasses.”

  John started to hand them to him, but just then Ahab barked like crazy and ran off down a little path that led toward the woods. A big, long-eared rabbit ran along in front of him, straight into the bushes that grew along the edge of the creek. Ahab followed it into the leafy darkness.

  Danny ran down the path after him, shouting Ahab’s name, and John ran behind him, holding the spectacles in his hand. He was more worried about Ahab than about the window. If Ahab got lost, especially in a strange land…

  An old wooden footbridge lay across the creek, and their steps echoed on the loose planks. Beyond the bridge lay the woods, which were dark and dense. A path of weedy sand led between the trees. It was quiet and cool in the shade, with just the sound of leaves rustling and the sighing of the wind. Here and there was a patch of what appeared to be old pavement, as if maybe a street had run through the woods ages ago and was slowly being crumbled and buried by the forest. The oak trees around them were old, with long, tangled limbs, so that only a little bit of sunlight shined through to the forest floor.

  Suddenly they could hear Ahab crashing around ahead. He barked once, then growled, then fell silent. They walked along carefully, looking into the shadows and listening hard. Soon they found themselves in a circular clearing. There was a stone ring in the middle of it, cracked and old and partly covered with vines.

  It was a fountain, very much like the one in the Plaza at home, but ruined by time and weather. A trickle of water gurgled out of a rusty pipe in the center of it, filling the ring about a foot deep before the water seeped out through a crack and soaked away into the muddy sand. A few fish skeletons lay in a heap nearby. They listened, peering into the trees.

  “Ahab?” John said. Then, louder, he shouted, “Ahab!” and Ahab came leaping out of the bushes and bounced straight into Danny, wagging his tail.

  Danny stumbled backward into John, and John fell straight over onto the path, sitting down hard. The spectacles flew out of his hand, spinning through the air and smashing against the stone ring. John jumped to his feet and snatched them up from where they had fallen.

  One of the green lenses was gone. Where it had been there was nothing but an empty circle of brass wire.

  Chapter 9: Goblins

  They searched through the high grass and in the bushes around the fountain, but found only a few old fishbones and a dead rat that was dried up like cardboard, Ahab sniffed back and forth, barking into the bushes every time there was a rustling noise.

  “That’s just rabbits,” John said to him. He hoped that was true.

  They crawled around on their hands and knees and poked into the sand with their fingers. They parted the grass a few blades at a time. They looked under bushes, then shook the bushes and looked under them again. Finally they looked for it in the clear water in the fountain, but they couldn’t find anything, not a single chip of green glass.

  While they searched, the sun went down beyond the trees, and the woods fell slowly into shadow. There was the wet smell of fog in the air, and the sky overhead was gray and misty. The moon shone faintly through the mist, and wind blew the branches high overhead.

  John pushed through some bushes, kicking at the grass with his feet. It was useless. The lens couldn’t have flown this far. They were wasting too much time searching for it. One of the lenses was still whole, anyway, and that ought to be enough to see the window again….

  There was suddenly the sound of laughter, something like the gobbling of a turkey. John looked up, and there, just beyond a pair of enormous old oak trees, was the dark mouth of a cave. It was partly overgrown by bushes, just a ragged black circle leading downward into the side of a rocky hill. The laughter had come from the cave. John was certain of it.

  Danny came up behind him, holding onto Ahab’s collar. “Did you hear it?” he whispered.r />
  John nodded. Ahab growled. From out of the cave came the echoing sound of a flute. There was no melody to it, just a scattering of crooked, off-key notes.

  They backed away toward the fountain. John thought about their bedroom window; it seemed suddenly to be a long way off. The flute stopped and the woods were silent. “C’mon,” he said, and Danny didn’t argue. The three of them set out through the woods, down the path to the meadow. John patted his jacket pocket. He could feel the spectacles frame inside.

  They were halfway to the meadow when a tiny man, not much taller than John’s belt buckle, stepped out onto the path and stood there grinning. For a moment John thought he was the little man from the curiosity shop, but he wasn’t. He was too ugly. His skin was wrinkled and green like an old dollar bill out of someone’s pocket.

  The top of his head was bald, and the hair around his ears was thin and wispy and it stood away from his head as if it were electrified. Clearly he hadn’t washed in about a year. His clothes were stitched up out of the skins of bats with the heads left on, and his shoes were just like the rat slippers from under Mr. Skink’s house. The long rat tails were tied around his ankles like the straps of sandals.

  “Goblin,” Danny whispered, and just then came the sound of giggling from among the foggy trees on either side of the trail. There were more of them, hiding in the shadows. The goblin held out his open hand.

  “What does he want?” Danny asked.

  “Money, maybe,” said John, reaching into his pocket. He pulled out eight cents – three pennies and a nickel. It wasn’t much, but what did goblins know about money? He turned his pockets inside out then, to show the creature that it was all he had. Then he held out the coins, and immediately the goblin slapped them out of his hand, into the weeds along the trail.

  Three more goblins jumped out onto the path and scrambled after the fallen coins. They had skinny little arms and fat bellies. One of them grinned, put a penny into his mouth, and swallowed it. His teeth were filed to points like cannibal teeth. He had a fishbone tuck in his hair like a comb. The goblin next to him wore a piece of fishing line tied around his neck with old glass prisms hanging from it. The third had a jeweled pin stuck like a badge to his raggedy shirt. It was a green Christmas wreath, with red rhinestones among the green, like holly berries.

  “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.

  Chapter 10: The Fog from the Kettle

  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.