by Henry Clark
“It shouldn’t do that,” he muttered, and I watched as he brought up the pictures he had taken of the spells in Modesty’s notebook and sent the pictures to my phone, along with the audio file he had made of himself reading the coin-gathering spell.
“This way,” he explained, “if my phone goes bonkers, we’ll still have the incantations.”
“What if I open those files and my phone goes bonkers, too?”
“That’s just a chance we’ll have to take.”
“Thanks.”
“How do we get out of here?”
“The same way we got in.”
“By getting lost?”
“Follow me,” I said, sounding more confident than I felt.
I led him around two corners and grinned when I saw the porta potty again. We were on the right track.
“Wait,” said Drew. “I’ll just be a second.”
He strode up to the portable toilet and reached for the handle.
The door flew open, and a zombie lurched out.
CHAPTER 5
DAVY’S DIGITAL VEGETABLES
We both jumped back. The man who staggered toward us looked like a walking corpse. His face was gray, his lips were blue—possibly cerulean—and his eyes were sunk deep into his head. He had a drooping mustache that appeared to have ice in it. Two bony hands stretched out from the sleeves of his hooded robe. One hand groped forward; the other cradled a large glass jar that glowed with a flickering orange light.
Drew fell backward into the corn, and I dodged to the left as the weird figure shambled past. He didn’t grab at us or wave his free hand in the air while moaning braaains or kiiidneys or the name of any other organ zombies supposedly enjoyed eating. He showed no sign at all that he saw us. He dragged one leg behind him in true zombie style, reached the end of the path, and disappeared around the corner.
“Whoa!” said Drew, and started laughing. He retrieved his glasses and hauled himself to his feet. “That guy’s good.”
“You think that was—”
“One of your dad’s high school kids. Who else could it have been? He probably overheard my idea about popping out of the porta potty.”
I knew the high schoolers weren’t supposed to get their costumes until the following day. This guy not only had his costume, but he was in full makeup. I was about to point this out to Drew when I remembered that a lot of the kids who were willing to work for my dad this time of year were a little… obsessed… with Halloween, might have their own costumes, and might even show up for work with their faces painted.
“I suppose,” I agreed, not entirely convinced. “Do you, uh, still need to use the, uh—” I waved my hand vaguely at the blue box.
Drew started to reach for the door handle, then pulled his hand back.
“Nope,” he said. “I think I can wait.”
We stared at the door.
“You think it’s like the clown car at the circus?” I asked. “A toilet with a never-ending supply of zombies inside?”
“Of course not,” Drew replied. Without moving.
I gathered up my courage and pulled the door open an inch. When nothing jumped out at me, I swung it wide. The box was empty. It was a nice, clean, yet-to-be-used toilet.
“That’s odd,” I said.
“You mean… that it smells like lemons?”
“No. When that guy came out of it, I thought I saw…”
“What?”
“Stone walls. On the inside. Gray rocks held together with cement.”
“Ohhh… kaaay.” Drew nodded hesitantly. “That’s… sort of what I thought I saw. Like, maybe it was painted inside to look like a dungeon. Your dad loves to paint stuff.”
“Yeah, but he wouldn’t paint this. Honest John wouldn’t like it. Neither would my mom—she’s been trying to get him to paint the downstairs bathroom for more than a year now.”
The cornstalks around us rustled, and the shadows on the path shifted.
“It could have been a trick of the light,” said Drew. “People always talk about tricks of the light. Apparently, light is a big practical joker.”
I watched as a faint pattern that looked a little like stacked bricks rippled over the toilet’s door.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “That has to have been it. A trick of the light.”
I turned and headed down the path in the same direction the zombie had taken. I made the only possible turn and faltered. Drew came up next to me.
“What?”
I pointed ahead of us. The rows of corn on either side formed one of the maze’s longest unbroken corridors.
“He wasn’t moving fast,” I said. “I mean—he was dragging a leg behind him. Where is he?”
“You think he still dragged his leg once he was out of sight? Obviously he came around the corner and ran like crazy.”
“Yeah. You’re right,” I agreed nervously. “You know, that’s not such a bad idea.”
“What?”
“Running like crazy!”
I sprinted. Drew came pelting after me. We made a dozen lefts and half as many rights, and a minute later, we shot out of the maze’s exit. We crossed the lot, burst into the back room of the farm stand, and slammed the screen door behind us.
My mom turned on her swivel chair from the antique desk where she kept accounts, looked me up and down, and said, “You’re taking over from Cindy in fifteen minutes, and you look like you just fell off a hay wagon.”
My mom’s brown hair was half out of its bun and hanging down one side of her face, and a sprig of timothy grass was clinging to the bib of her apron, so she might have fallen off the same hay wagon. I considered pointing this out to her, then thought better of it. I brushed dust and bits of straw off my shirt instead. Drew dove into the office’s tiny bathroom.
As I ran a hand through my hair and came away with a clump of corn silk stuck to my fingers, I asked, “Are any of the kids working with Dad dressed up?”
“No,” replied Mom, coming over to fiddle with my shirt collar. “They’re all stark naked.”
“No, I mean, dressed for Halloween. Like, I dunno, wearing a monk’s robe and old-man makeup?”
“The Robinson boy has on the wrong shade of eyeliner for his color eyes.” She flicked something off my left shoulder. “Other than that, I haven’t noticed anyone. You haven’t been prowling around the maze, have you?”
“Maybe a little,” I said, not wanting to go into detail. “Two or three paths. To make sure it’s puzzling. Which it is. Holy cow.” I looked past her and felt the room reel around me. “You didn’t!”
For a moment, I could tell she didn’t know what I was talking about. Then she rolled her eyes and gave me a sour look.
“No, I didn’t,” she said angrily. “But the men from Davy’s Digital Vegetables were very insistent. As a token of their gratitude because we’re even considering selling the farm to them.”
Mom stepped aside, and I got a full view of the big black box set up next to the computer on her desk. It looked like a cross between an oversize microwave and a Kchotchke 3000, which was the janky 3-D printer in the school art department. No matter what your design looked like, the machine always produced a blobby plastic figure that resembled the melting-face guy in a painting by Edvard Munch called The Scream. The box on my mother’s desk had DAVYTRON ULTRA in raised letters on a silver plaque attached to its front. An upside-down can of tomato juice stuck out of the box’s top.
“Wow.” Drew came out of the bathroom and stopped dead next to me. “A DavyTron Ultra! Is that model even out yet?”
And yes, we had both just learned that magic was real and that there were spells that could be performed if you talked super fast, and that should have been the only thing on our minds. But this was a DavyTron Ultra. No one else in the world had a DavyTron Ultra, except maybe Elwood Davy himself. The machine had been in the news constantly for the past month. It had its own Facebook page, Twitter account, and Zapflutter board, even though nobody had ever heard of a
Zapflutter board. That’s how new it was.
“I refused to let the men from Davy anywhere near the house,” my mom said with a sniff. “They wanted to put it in the kitchen, along with a two-month supply of their tomato juice”—she waved her hand at one of the windows, and I realized it was partially blocked on the outside by a stack of cardboard boxes—“so I told them to set it up here. Apparently, it needs to be near a router.”
“That’s how it updates,” said Drew. “Happens every night to keep the program from getting corrupted. I read that somewhere.” He walked over to the black box and peered at a small monitor next to its keypad. “Holy crimolies. You can make pumpkins. Nobody can make pumpkins yet. They only announced the upgrade yesterday.”
The DavyTrons were 3-D printers that made vegetables. Real, edible vegetables. All you had to do was open a two-quart can of Davy’s Deluxe Tomato Juice, jam it upside down over a receptacle at the top of the machine, and type in the code of the veggie you wanted. Twenty seconds later, the door would pop open, and there would be your carrot or potato or—if you weren’t careful—asparagus.
“We’ve got the old, second-generation model, the DavyTron LISA, at home,” Drew said as he took a brochure from a stack on top of the machine. “It’s much smaller than this, and the only things it makes are turnips, lima beans, and zucchini. Whoa.” He pointed at the brochure. “There’s a list of codes for eighteen precut jack-o’-lantern faces!” He looked imploringly at my mom. “Can we, Mrs. Sapling?”
“That’s one of the worst things about it,” my mom informed him. “Once you no longer have very small children trying to carve very big pumpkins with very sharp knives, Halloween stops being a scary holiday. Also, it stops being a creative one. That’s my opinion anyway.”
“Please?” said Drew, waving the brochure.
My mom held up her hands and turned away. Drew took that as a yes and rapidly tapped in a ten-digit code on the keypad. The can of DDT Juice went glug, and through the DavyTron’s glass door, we could see a dozen metal nozzles spraying orange goop that quickly solidified into a perfect pumpkin, which developed the evilly grinning features of a fiend from hell. Ding went a bell, the door popped open, and a bunch of roasted pumpkin seeds tumbled down a chute on the side of the device like coins from the return slot of a vending machine.
“This is so great!” Drew said.
“No, it isn’t,” I said, putting the pumpkin on the table. “First of all, it only works with Davy’s Deluxe Tomato Juice. The tomatoes are special—”
“They’re genetically modified,” chimed in my mom, “and Davy’s Digital Vegetables owns all the patents, so they’re the only company that can grow the right kind. If you use any other brand of juice in the machine, you get a pile of something that looks like cow manure.”
“That’s why Davy’s is buying up so much farmland,” I added. “They need it to grow their tomatoes. My dad says the day will come when nothing else is being planted. Anywhere.”
“Well,” said Drew, scooping up a handful of pumpkin seeds and popping some into his mouth, “if you can make any kind of veggie you want, you wouldn’t need to plant anything else.”
“It’s the reason the farm stand isn’t doing well,” I said quietly. “It’s the reason we’ll be selling it and moving away.” Even as I said it, I remembered that my destruction of the Fireball 50 hadn’t helped. Digital vegetables might be the reason the farm was failing, but the loss of the harvester was making it fail a lot faster than it should have.
“Oh.” Drew’s shoulders sagged, and a pumpkin seed tumbled from his lips. “Right. I forgot. This actually stinks, doesn’t it?”
“The part I really don’t like,” said my mother, turning the pumpkin so she didn’t have to look at its face, “is Davy’s Digital Vegetables has only been in business for three years, and yet they say they already have their machines in sixty percent of homes in the country. How is that possible?”
“Hey, wait.” Drew brightened. “Maybe you won’t have to move, Mrs. Sapling. Cal and I have this great idea for making money!”
“We do?” I said.
“What would that be?” inquired my mom, sounding amused.
“Room painting. We’ll go door-to-door and convince people to let us change the color of their rooms.”
“That’s a lovely thought, Drew,” my mom said as she settled herself back at her desk and a spreadsheet reappeared on her computer screen, “but I’m afraid you’re not going to find too many people willing to hire two twelve-year-olds to paint. You might have better luck mowing lawns.”
“No,” replied Drew. “I think the painting thing will work.” He gave me a conspiratorial look. “We might have to do the first few for free, to get the word out, but I’ll bet people line up to hire us once they find out how fast we work.”
My mom tried to stop herself from laughing but failed. She shook her head, looked over at me, and said, “You have to be out front in five minutes.”
Drew waved his phone in my direction and said, “I’ll call you.”
He went home, and I went to work. Over the next four hours, I sold three bags of apples, two pounds of potatoes, and a pot of chrysanthemums. Not good for a Saturday afternoon in late September. Twice I made mistakes giving people change, because I kept thinking about everything that had happened since that morning: the stampeding coins, Modesty and her notebook, the strange guy staggering out of the toilet—usually, people staggered out only when the toilets hadn’t been cleaned—and I had an uneasy feeling things were only going to get weirder.
Magic existed.
Anything could happen.
CHAPTER 6
AS EASY AS ONE-TWO-THREE
The farm stand closed at seven. I climbed the little hill behind the stand to our house and joined my parents for dinner. Mom shared an e-mail she had gotten from my brother, Glen, who was away at SAFE—the School of Agriculture and Field Engineering. My dad said he missed Glen, especially with the monster barn in the works. Nobody talked about the farm being sold, and I decided against babbling about books of spells and migrating coins. For some reason, I wanted to keep the whole thing between Drew and me. And Modesty.
I finished my usual small plate—I hadn’t had much of an appetite lately—skipped dessert, and, after loading the dishwasher, went up to my room on the third floor.
The room shared the top of the house with the storage attic. Its two windows were above the treetops and looked west toward town. I could see three church steeples, the cupola on the town hall, and, only a little closer than all those buildings, the third floor of the old Brooker place, where Modesty lived. A light was on in her attic. I had never been in her house, but it had been constructed by the same builder who had built ours 150 years earlier, and both houses were the same from the outside. So I assumed they were both the same on the inside. Plenty of room for seven sisters.
On the far end of town, on Gernsback Ridge, I could also see the top floors of the Davy Tower, the world headquarters of Davy’s Digital Vegetables. Four years earlier, Elwood Davy’s parents’ house had stood there, with the one-room apartment over the garage, where Elwood had invented the DavyTron. The house and the garage were still there, in the center of the tower’s lobby, and the lobby’s huge windows enabled the lawn and flower beds to keep growing, despite being indoors. You got to see inside the house if you took the factory tour.
I flopped down onto my bed, took out my phone, and stared at it. The background photo on the screen was of the burned-out remains of the Fireball 50, while it was still smoldering. I had downloaded the picture from the fire department’s website. It had replaced one of my family and me that I liked a lot better, but the smoldering hulk had a purpose, and until I figured out some way to make it up to my parents, it would always be the first thing I saw when I looked at my phone.
I didn’t text much.
Or do much of anything else with my phone unless it was absolutely necessary.
Now, though, I brought up
the three image files Drew had sent me. Each was a photo of a different page in Modesty’s notebook. They were too small to be read comfortably on the phone’s screen, so I transferred them to my computer, increased the contrast, and printed them out.
The first page was the spell To Gather Lost Coins. The second page was To Change the Color of a Room. I was disappointed to see the third was To Untangle Yarn. The yarn spell was a paragraph longer than either of the other two: It ran at least eight hundred words. There was no way I could speak it in the space of a single minute. Fortunately, I didn’t have any yarn I wanted to untangle.
I lay sideways across my bed, studying the coin spell, reading it aloud, trying to improve my speed every time I read it. I said “rubber baby buggy bumpers” over and over, until I fell asleep mumbling “rugby bobby badger baggers.”
The sky was full of storm clouds.
They had appeared out of nowhere on the western horizon, darker and angrier than the clouds that had, not long ago, swept a hailstorm across our farm and ruined a prize crop of winter wheat. I hadn’t wanted it to happen again. My parents had been ninety miles away at an agricultural meeting in Pratchettsburg—the topic of the meeting was “Digital Vegetables: Threat or Passing Fad?”—and our seasonal workers weren’t due to start for another two days, when bringing in the wheat was going to be priority number one.
I’d decided I could do it myself.
Our new Fireball 50 combine had an onboard computer that was smart enough to turn the lumbering forty-foot machine when it reached the end of a field. I had ridden with my dad twice and knew I could handle it. Which I did, pretty well, for almost two full acres of harvested wheat. Then some chaff blew into the engine, caught fire, and the extinguisher I grabbed emptied itself before the fire was fully out. I jumped off just as the flames spread from the engine to the grain carrier, and the whole thing went up like a barrel of gunpowder.
The storm passed to the south.
We didn’t get any hail.
Not one bit.
