What We Found in the Corn Maze and How It Saved a Dragon

by Henry Clark

  “Midnight,” I said.

  “You’d think. But I tried that, and all that happened was Serene yelling at me for waking her up. So then I tried three AM—”

  “Why three AM?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. There’s just something creepy about three AM. I tried the spell that changes the color of a room, because that’s a short one, but my room was still aquamarine zebra stripes in the morning.”

  “Your room is aquamarine zebra stripes?” Drew sounded appalled.

  “I painted it myself. It honors all the zebras that have died because their habitats have been destroyed. Anyway, the only other magical-sounding time I could think of was seven o’clock, because seven’s supposed to be lucky, but it didn’t work. So I was just about to give up, but then I thought, What about twelve thirty-four in the afternoon?”

  “Why would that be magical?” I couldn’t follow her logic. I was pretty sure there wasn’t any.

  “Two reasons. It’s the time of day when I first found the book, and, get this, it’s also my gym locker combination.”

  “Your locker combination?” Something in my voice must have told her I didn’t believe it. She glared at me. I glared back.

  “Yes. My locker combination. One, twenty-three, four. I figured that had to be more than a coincidence. So I went into Patience’s room—she’s away at college—and I sat on the bed, and at exactly twelve thirty-four, I started reciting the color-changing spell. I just barely managed to get through it before twelve thirty-five. Suddenly—the room was fuchsia.”

  “It had a funny smell?” I asked.

  “Fuchsia is a color. Purplish-red. Not to be confused with magenta, which is reddish-purple. The color of the room before I started had been cerulean”—she held up her hand to keep me from speaking—“by which I mean, blue. My point is—the spell worked. But I tried it again twelve hours later, at twelve thirty-four AM, and nothing happened.”

  “You mean your living room stayed chartreuse?” Drew said sarcastically.

  “No, the upstairs bathroom stayed yellow. Who paints their living room chartreuse? So. What did I learn? After only two weeks of experimentation? When it took Madame Curie two years to discover radium?”

  “You learned”—Drew sighed—“that magic works but only for sixty seconds each day, beginning at thirty-four minutes past noon. You expect us to believe that?”

  “Whether you believe it or not doesn’t matter. The next day, I went to the Cost-Mart parking lot, sat under the only tree, and chanted the coin-gathering spell.”

  She stopped and looked at us. I knew what she wanted.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “And I made three dollars and fourteen cents. That’s how it’s done. Now delete your recording, and I’m going home.” She snapped the notebook shut, tucked it under her arm, and stood.

  “Wait,” I said. “The spell only gathered the coins that had been lost in the Cost-Mart parking lot? Nothing from the drugstore parking lot across the street?”

  “As far as I could tell. The spell is very picky about geography. If you’re in Onderdonk Grove, it only brings you coins that have been lost in Onderdonk Grove. I tried it in the schoolyard on Monday, and I made two dollars and seventy-one cents. I tried it in the same place two days later, and all I got were two dimes and a nickel. I figure those coins were lost after the first time I tried it.”

  I suddenly had the sinking feeling that the coin-gathering spell wasn’t going to solve any of my problems. It wouldn’t bring in enough money to keep Elwood Davy from buying our land, or enough to replace the Fireball 50, or even enough to pay a scrap-metal dealer to haul the harvester’s remains out of the field so they wouldn’t be there to constantly remind my parents—and me—of how I’d screwed up.

  “It doesn’t bring you every coin ever lost in the whole wide world,” Modesty continued, hammering more nails in the coffin, “and it doesn’t touch money that isn’t truly lost. The second time I tried it, I put some pennies behind a trash can, and they were still there after I read the spell. I knew they were there, so they weren’t lost.”

  “That must be why the quarter we found in the park stopped moving until we lost it again.” Drew nodded knowingly, like a scientist discussing lab results with another scientist.

  “It’s good for a few bucks here and there,” said Modesty, “but if you keep returning to the same place, you’re going to get less and less. And it doesn’t touch paper money. That’s why it’s not going to get you enough to save your farm.” She looked at me apologetically.

  “The magic works for more than a minute, though,” said Drew. “When we saw the coins move in the park, we chased them for a couple of minutes at least.”

  “Yes, and my sister’s room is still fu… uh, purplish-red,” Modesty confirmed, “and it took the coins in the park however long they needed to reach me from however far away they were.”

  “Oh. That reminds me,” said Drew, fishing the late-arriving dime out of his pocket. “This came for you after you left. It’s a 1963, so it’s worth more than ten cents. Closer to two dollars.”

  “You’re a coin collector?” Modesty asked.

  “My dad is.”

  “Keep it, then.” Modesty waved away the dime.

  “Magic seems awfully temperamental,” I said. And mostly useless, I thought. A spell that could fetch coins would fetch you only enough to buy a soda. And soda was among the things I had been denying myself ever since the Fireball 50 disaster.

  “But,” said Drew, “most of the spells in the notebook go on for pages. Nobody could speak fast enough to recite any of them in a minute.”

  “Ah!” said Modesty, like a teacher pleased with a student’s answer. It wasn’t a tone I was overly familiar with. “That’s just it. There are only two spells in the entire book that are short enough to work. All the rest are more than eight hundred words, and no human being can speak more than seven hundred words per minute and pronounce the words clearly enough to be understood.”

  “Is that for real?” I asked.

  “It’s in all the record books. The record holder, Betty Jo Tachylalia, only managed it by speaking nothing but prepositions. As, at, but, by, for, from, in, of, off, on, to—”

  “Enough!” I held up my hand. I was trying to work something out.

  “Enough is actually an adjective,” Modesty said. “Sometimes an adverb.”

  “If no human being can speak faster than seven hundred words per minute,” I said slowly, “then that would mean…” I stopped.

  “Ye-e-s?” Modesty dragged out the word.

  “That would mean… the original owner of this notebook… wasn’t human.”

  CHAPTER 4

  PHLOGISTON’S EYE

  A car alarm went off in the parking lot, making us all jump. It ended as quickly as it started, with an ear-piercing yip-yip-yip.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” said Modesty. “You’ve seen the handwriting in the notebook. It obviously wasn’t written by the bogeyman.”

  “No,” agreed Drew. “More like one of the bogeyman’s kids. Bogeyman Junior.”

  Modesty rolled her eyes.

  “I think it’s time we erased your video.”

  She plucked Drew’s phone from the table and ran her fingers over it until she found the photo app. She stared at the screen for a moment, then glared at us. “The only video on this phone is somebody squeezing their belly button in different ways to make it look like it’s talking!”

  “It says some pretty funny things,” said Drew, reaching out to turn up the volume. Modesty held the phone away from him. “It’s, uh, very upset about smelly sweatbands on underwear….”

  “You never took video of the coins moving,” Modesty snapped. “You lied, and then you blackmailed me into explaining about the spells. And here I was, thinking how good it felt to finally tell somebody, because I couldn’t share it with any of my blabbermouth sisters, and I thought Mum might be upset about the fuchsia bedroom, but I thought
maybe I could trust you two, and we could team up to research the best places to gather coins, and maybe one of you might be fast enough to say the door-opening spell—”

  “You have a door you can’t open?” I said.

  “It’s a door I’m very curious about, yes, but never mind, because now I know you’re a couple of jerks, and I wouldn’t hang out with either of you if you were the last jerks on earth!”

  She wound up her arm and pitched the phone out of the tower. Drew yelped, and he and I raced to the window to see where it went. It sailed over the corn maze in an impressive arc and fell into the center of Phlogiston’s eye. It caught a ray of sunlight, and the dragon winked at us.

  “Good throw,” I admitted.

  “My pitches have been clocked at fifty-five miles per hour,” Modesty informed us. “Which is seriously impressive.”

  “Only for someone who’s thirteen,” Drew corrected her.

  “I’m twelve!” she snapped.

  “I’m sorry we lied to you,” I said, realizing it bothered me that we had been less than honest with her. “But I don’t think sending a nonexistent video of stampeding coins to Channel Seven would be blackmail, exactly.”

  “No,” she said. “Threatening to do it—that’s when it’s blackmail. It’s no better than cyberbullying. You wouldn’t cyberbully someone, would you?”

  “No! I would never do that,” I said, flustered. I had been cyberbullied by some kids who got a video of me using the hand dryer in the bathroom on the front of my pants after a particularly out-of-control handwashing. The kids had put it on the Internet and made comments that had nothing to do with handwashing. “We would never do that,” I added to include Drew, who was nodding vigorously. “I apologize, and I mean it. Really.” I stared at her. She stared back. “This is where you say, ‘Apology accepted.’”

  She studied some cobwebs on the ceiling, glanced out the window, then looked back at me.

  “No,” she said. “Actually, it isn’t.”

  She dropped through the cab’s trapdoor before Drew or I could say anything else. We listened to her furious footfalls thunder down all 123 steps. This was followed by a moment of silence, then the sound of her fist hitting the locked chain-link gate.

  “That’s going to make her even madder.” I sighed and started down after her.

  She was waiting with her arms folded and a look on her face that could have caused passing birds to fall dead at her feet.

  “I can’t believe you locked me in.”

  “I didn’t lock anybody in,” I said as I undid the padlock. “I locked nosy farm-stand customers out. They sometimes wander up the tower if they find the gate open, and if anything were to happen to them—like falling out and landing on their head or, worse, landing on somebody else’s head—my family could get sued. I wasn’t holding you prisoner.”

  I pushed the gate open, and she stormed past me to retrieve her bike from where it was leaning against a pyramid of pumpkins. A moment later, she left a plume of dust behind as she pedaled furiously out of the parking lot.

  “Do you think she was telling the truth?” asked Drew as we watched her disappear over a rise in the road.

  “You mean about being mad? Yeah, I’d say so. I hope we never meet Serene.”

  “No. I mean about finding the notebook in her gym locker. Why would a book of spells be in a gym locker? That’s totally wacky.”

  “So is money moving by itself,” I reminded him. “I’m just sorry she’s upset with us. We probably shouldn’t have blackmailed her or whatever.”

  “Yeah,” said Drew, pulling me toward the entrance to the maze. “Maybe you can make up with her. I think she likes you more than she likes me. Then maybe she’ll let us see the notebook again. I bet if we practice saying tongue twisters, we might be able to speak more than seven hundred words per minute.”

  We reached the maze’s entrance. Drew gave an uneasy glance to the hulking wooden statue of a maniac in a hockey mask holding a chainsaw. My dad had carved it himself out of a single ten-foot-tall tree stump, and he had used a chainsaw to do it. He said that made it art.

  So my mother had named the maniac Artie.

  I led the way into the maze. The corn always whispered inside, even when there wasn’t a breeze anywhere else, and the sky always seemed a little bit darker, whether or not there were any clouds. Each year, the cornfield was like any other cornfield until my dad cut paths into it. Then, suddenly, it had its own weather.

  “Do we have to solve the maze, or can we cut across?” asked Drew as he started to push aside some of the stalks that lined the path. I caught him by the elbow.

  “I know you want your phone,” I said, straightening the stalks he had bent, “but my dad would kill us if we cut through. It’s bad enough when lunkheads like Mace Croyden and his friends do it on purpose; it spoils it for everybody else. We have to stick to the paths.”

  I rearranged the stalks a little more until they looked exactly the way they had before Drew messed with them. I wished all damaged things could be fixed that easily.

  “But you do know how to get to the center?”

  “I know how to get to the exit,” I said as I led the way to the first intersection and made a left. “But it’s possible to get in and out without passing through the middle.”

  We rounded a bend.

  “You really think repeating tongue twisters like rubber baby buggy bumpers will help us talk faster?” I asked as we went right, left, and left again.

  “It might. There’s got to be a way to squeeze those incantations into a minute. I wish I had taken pictures of more of them. And Modesty’s bookmark. You think my phone’s okay?”

  “I don’t see how falling from a hundred feet could have hurt it.”

  We made a turn and passed a seven-foot-tall blue plastic box with a door on it, set back into the corn. A sign on the door said HONEST JOHN’S HONEST JOHNS.

  “Toilet?” Drew asked.

  “Yup. We always have three of them in the maze. Sometimes people wander around so long, they need one.”

  “My folks could use one while they’re redoing our bathroom,” said Drew, then grabbed me by the sleeve. “Hey! You know what you should do? Put one of the high school kids dressed as a zombie inside one of them. Then they could jump out at anybody who comes to use it.”

  “We tried that once,” I admitted. “Turns out, it’s not a good idea to scare people when they’re looking for a restroom.” We reached another intersection, and I turned to see where the fire tower was. “I think… if we make the next three rights, that should get us to the middle.”

  The walls of corn on either side of us were impossible to see through. My dad always planted a variety of corn called maze maize. It was especially dense. We made the next three rights, but instead of winding up in Phlogiston’s eye, we found another Honest John.

  “We’re not going in circles, are we?” Drew wanted to know.

  “I… don’t… think so?”

  “Call my phone. When it rings, we’ll know what direction it’s in. We can follow the sound.”

  I fished my phone from my pocket and tapped Drew’s number. We both leaned forward, as if this would somehow improve our hearing. From two paths away, a woman’s voice said, “Ring, ring.”

  Drew and I exchanged glances.

  “Is that one of your ringtones?” I asked.

  “Ring, ring,” said the woman again.

  “No!” said Drew. “I’d die of embarrassment.”

  “Ring, ring.”

  “It’s coming from that way.” I pointed.

  “Then maybe we should go this way,” said Drew, pointing in the opposite direction.

  “Do you want your phone back or don’t you?”

  “Not if it’s possessed.”

  “Ring, ring.”

  I pulled him down a path I thought would take us to the maze’s center. We made a right, then a left—

  —and, rounding an especially tall clump of cornstalks, found
ourselves in the eye of the dragon. Drew’s phone lay facedown in the center of the clearing. It said “Ring, ring” again and quivered as if it were eager to be picked up. Drew didn’t give it the satisfaction. He nudged it with his foot and flipped it over. A photo of his belly button was on the screen.

  “You’re getting a call from your navel,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Ring, ring,” said the phone.

  “Answer it,” I suggested.

  “Why? We both know it’s you calling.”

  “What if it isn’t? Your ringtone for me is the Darth Vader theme.”

  “Instead of me answering, why don’t you hang up? If it keeps ringing, it isn’t you.”

  “Okay.” I canceled the call. We both looked down. Drew’s phone didn’t move. All was quiet. Then—

  “Ring, ring.”

  “D’oh!” Drew snatched up the phone and shouted, “Hello!”

  “Thank you for using the Congroo Help Line,” the same voice that had been saying “Ring, ring” announced loudly over the speakerphone setting. “How may we assist you?”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is the Congroo Help Line. Thank you for allowing us to assist you.”

  “What’s the Congroo Help Line?”

  “Sorry. Only one question per call.”

  Whoever it was hung up. The screen flickered with an odd shade of reddish-purple. Or, possibly, purplish-red.

  “I wonder if that’s magenta?” I said.

  Drew shook the phone, and when the screen’s weird color didn’t change, he switched it off. It took longer to reboot than it should have, but when it came back, it looked normal. Then the screen started to pulse, going from dim to bright and back again. Drew grimaced.