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

by Henry Clark

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen them. But that’s what the legend says. I’m assuming it means magic. We can’t do this here—Mum will kill me if she comes home and the parlor is puce. Quick—into the pantry!”

  We followed her around the corner, through the kitchen, and into a cramped room next to the stove. She yanked a chain to turn on an overhead light and pulled the door shut behind us.

  “I assume you brought your phone,” she said, giving me a look that said if I hadn’t, she might brain me with one of the jars of peach preserves on the shelf next to us.

  “Yeah,” I was relieved to say. I fished the phone out of my pocket. The time was 10:10.

  “Quick,” Modesty instructed me. “Cue up your recording of the color-changing spell. Play it the second I give you the signal.”

  I found the file and hovered my finger over the screen.

  “If we’re using my phone, why’d you waste time getting the notebook?” I asked.

  “In case you, or your phone, screw up. There still might be time to read the spell from the book.”

  The time advanced to 10:11. Even before Modesty poked me, I started the playback. I even sped it up a bit to make sure it finished before 10:12.

  The walls of the pantry remained the dull yellow they’d been when we first crowded in.

  “Well.” Drew sighed. “It was worth a shot.”

  Modesty wasted no time popping the door and striding out.

  “I think it may have something to do with the numbers not really being consecutive,” I theorized as I followed her. “If you write out ‘ten eleven’ in numerals, it’s one-zero-one-one. Not the same as ‘twelve thirty-four,’ which is one-two-three-four. More, you know, numerical.”

  “Maybe.” Modesty wasn’t happy. “But we’ll try again at eleven twelve and twelve thirteen, just to make sure. And we definitely have to check out the PM versions of one twenty-three and two thirty-four and the rest. In the meantime, I have a project for us.” She let the notebook fall open on an island in the center of the kitchen. The island’s hardwood countertop sat atop a cabinet that, surprisingly, had an antique safe in the middle.

  Modesty popped open the binder’s three rings and lifted out the pages. She divided them by eye and handed a third of them to me and a third to Drew.

  “Here’s my idea.” Modesty jogged her third to make it even. “You go out on the porch”—she nodded at Drew—“and you stay here in the kitchen”—nodding at me—“and I’ll go up to my room. We’ve each got seven or eight incantations. Read them aloud, record them on your phone, and speak slowly enough to get each word right. Label your recordings so we know which is which. Then we’ll meet back here, speed up the recordings so they all play out in less than a minute, and we’ll make new recordings of the sped-up versions. If we work quickly, we’ll have an audio library of all twenty-three spells by the time twelve thirty-four rolls around. Then we can try out whichever one of them we want….” She paused. “As long as it’s the door-opening spell.”

  Drew and I took a few moments to absorb all this. The plan was pretty much the same one I had worked out while eating breakfast, and I was a little upset I hadn’t been given the chance to suggest it.

  “Why the door-opening spell?” asked Drew.

  “Most of my life, I’ve wanted to know if there’s anything in the safe.” Modesty pointed at the squat metal box beneath the counter. “My folks bought it at an auction back when my dad was still alive. Mum thought it would look good in the kitchen. Dad built the island around it.”

  I gave the safe a second look. The door had fancy pin-striping in faded red paint that crisscrossed at the corners and did curlicues down the sides. Above the worn combination dial, a tarnished medallion declared THE OSO SAFE COMPANY.

  “It’s never been opened?” Drew asked, kicking it gently, as if that might do it.

  “Mum says it isn’t likely there’s anything valuable inside, otherwise it never would have wound up in the same auction as plastic flamingos and a life-size cardboard cutout of Elvis Presley. But I’m not so sure, and I’ve always wanted to know.”

  “Drew and I will only do what you ask under one condition,” I said, putting my handful of pages down on the stove and folding my arms across my chest.

  “Right,” agreed Drew, then turned to me and silently mouthed, What?

  “We each get a copy of the recordings for our own use,” I declared. “Otherwise, there’s no point in us helping you.”

  “Right,” Drew repeated, this time with more confidence. “That way, we’ll be able to brighten our teeth at three forty-five in the morning whenever we want!”

  “I suppose that’s fair,” Modesty admitted. “It’s not like I’d be giving you the power of invisibility or levitation or mind reading or anything dangerous like that.”

  “Yeah, why is that?” Drew wondered. “Why are all the spells in the book so boring? They don’t do anything you couldn’t do yourself with only a little effort.”

  “The noblest use of magic is to accomplish household chores,” said Modesty. “That’s Irksome’s Fifth Insight. And you know what it tells us?”

  “What?”

  “Irksome had kids. Otherwise, why go on about how good it is to do chores? The really cool magic, Irksome probably kept for herself.” Modesty picked my pages up off the stove and jammed them back in my hands. “We’re wasting time. Let’s get to work.”

  She caught Drew by the sleeve and started out of the room with him.

  “Wait,” I said. “What if somebody walks in on me?”

  Modesty paused in the doorway.

  “The triplets,” she said, “are away at college. The twins are at a sleepover and won’t be back till late. And right now, Mum’s sitting in the ER with Prudence. The only one who might walk in on you is the cat.”

  “Emergency room?” I asked.

  “She was skateboarding with a machete.”

  “Skateboarding with a machete!”

  “Is that anything like running with scissors?” asked Drew.

  “It’s faster and more dangerous,” Modesty informed him. “Prudence doesn’t like to duck for low branches.”

  “Is she all right?” I asked, imagining doctors reattaching an arm.

  “Eighteen stitches. They’re on her face, so Mum’s demanding a plastic surgeon, but the doctor she wants is playing golf. It’ll be a while. The cat, if you see her, is named Grimalkin.”

  She tugged Drew through the door, and I had the room to myself.

  CHAPTER 9

  SAFE CRACKERS

  As a kitchen, Modesty’s couldn’t make up its mind whether to be modern or old-timey. Cabinets that looked at least a hundred years old surrounded new appliances, and the floor had dark bumps where knots stood out like islands in a sea of worn wood. The one wall without cupboards had a poster of a fog-shrouded jungle with critters peering out of the mist, above block letters saying SAVE THE RAIN FORESTS. An ironing board on a hinge stuck out below the poster. The board was ancient, but the iron on it looked like a spaceship about to blast off. Hanging under an antique cupboard was a fancy-looking microwave.

  I was happy to see there wasn’t a DavyTron.

  I spread out the spells I was responsible for. Modesty had given me seven:

  To Sop Up a Spill

  To Get Chewing Gum Out of a Carpet

  To Repair a Chimney

  To Cast a Reflection

  To Summon the Forces of Torque

  To Walk with Stilts

  To Tidy a Drawer

  She was right; most of the spells seemed to involve housekeeping or manual labor. The only one that sounded close to what I thought was true magic was To Summon the Forces of Torque. That had a real ring to it. I imagined reciting it and an army of skeletons rising out of the earth in full battle armor to do my bidding. I’d finally be able to get back at Mace Croyden, this kid at school who always called me “Sap.” We’d see who the sap was when skeletons were chasing him down the hall.
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br />   So that was the spell I started with.

  It was the usual collection of gobbledygook. I rehearsed lines like “Widdy foo calla shoe gastropod fiddles; twickenham marjoram multihued skittles” a few times, then set my phone to Record but messed up halfway through. I didn’t go back to the beginning, though. I just backtracked a little and recorded over my mistake. I didn’t see how doing it that way would make much difference. We were, after all, going to speed up the recordings until we all sounded like cartoon mice.

  I recorded the first four of my spells while keeping an eye on the clock. At 11:12, I stepped into the pantry and tried to change its color. No go. Even the green labels on the pickle jars stayed green. I came back out and recorded the remaining three spells, jumping in the air once when something brushed my leg. It was Grimalkin, who was chubby, green-eyed, and gray except for white mittens. She sauntered over to the refrigerator and stared up at it.

  “Done?” asked Drew, poking his head around the corner.

  “Just finished. Now I really need to speak something other than gibberish.”

  “You’re in the wrong house for that,” he said cheerfully, putting his phone next to mine on the counter. “One of my spells was To Remove Unwanted Nose Hairs. I always thought magic would be more…”

  “Magical?”

  “Glamorous. I don’t even have nose hairs.”

  “Older people do,” I said, studying his phone. He had come up with short file names for his spells the same way I had. Teeth. Cloud. Warm. Intensify. View. Egg. Nose Hairs. The color of his screen was still a little off.

  “What’s View?” I asked.

  “To View Things More Clearly. I’m betting it’s a spell that washes windows.”

  “What about Egg?”

  “To Empty an Egg without Breaking the Shell. Maybe so you don’t get bits of shell in your omelet.”

  “And Intensify?”

  “Now, that one might actually be useful.” He opened a cupboard, didn’t see anything interesting, and closed it. He opened another. “The full name’s To Intensify an Enchantment. Sounds to me like it might make another spell more powerful. Like, maybe expand the coin-gathering spell so it pulls them in from a greater distance. We have to try that. Have you checked out the cookie jar?” He lifted the head off a ceramic pig.

  “Those cookies were made by my sister Fidelity,” Modesty announced, bustling in and adding her phone to ours. She dropped the loose-leaf binder onto the counter and started putting our pages back in. “Fidelity wants to be a chef when she grows up, so she keeps practicing, but she never follows recipes exactly. Eat at your own risk.”

  “Why are the chocolate chips green?” Drew held up a cookie.

  “Because they’re peas.”

  Drew dropped the cookie back in the pig.

  “If you’re hungry, the saltines are safe.” Modesty nodded at a tin that presumably held little square crackers. Then she started shuffling the three phones around like she was playing the card game where you have to guess where the queen is. She paused, looked at me strangely, and pointed to my phone.

  “Why that picture?”

  The last thing I wanted was to discuss the Fireball 50. I shrugged and pretended to be interested in the ironing board.

  “That’s how he beats himself up for burning down the family harvester,” Drew said, and I whirled on him.

  “You did that?” Modesty leaned forward and studied the picture more closely.

  “We don’t talk about this,” I said to Drew in the fiercest whisper I could manage.

  “You and I talk about it all the time,” Drew protested. “We need a second opinion.”

  “How did it happen?” asked Modesty.

  “There was a storm coming,” said Drew, “and nobody else was around. He was trying to save the barley.”

  “The wheat,” I corrected him.

  “I’m changing up the story. Trying to keep it fresh.”

  “You’re bored with it?”

  “A little.”

  “Harvesters catch fire,” said Modesty. “All the grain dust blowing around. I’m sure it was an accident.”

  “When other kids have accidents,” I said, “they have to pay for a broken window or fish their homework out of the toilet. This”—I tapped my phone—“is a one-hundred-thousand-dollar accident. It’s why my parents are selling the farm.”

  “They’re selling the farm,” said Drew, “because digital vegetables are putting farm stands out of business.”

  “The harvester wasn’t insured?” asked Modesty.

  “It had been,” I admitted. “But my folks cut back when business started to go bad.”

  “Were your parents furious?”

  “No.” And that was the part that bothered me the most. “The main thing they were concerned about was that I was all right.” My voice cracked on all right, a dead giveaway that I wasn’t. I turned toward the fridge and swallowed the lump in my throat.

  “He voluntarily gave up his weekly allowance,” said Drew, who had, for some annoying reason, become a fountain of information.

  “How long before he gets it again?” asked Modesty.

  “Two hundred and eighteen years,” said Drew. “He’s got a countdown calculator on his phone—”

  “You were about to do something with these?” I turned back and gathered the phones together on the countertop.

  Modesty finally sensed the mood.

  “Yes. Right.” She pushed me gently aside and spread the phones back out. “Okay. Everybody, quiet.”

  She played my recording of the coin-gathering incantation, sped it up, and recorded the sped-up version on Drew’s phone. Then she sped up the sped-up version and recorded it on her own phone. The incantation whizzed by in less than two seconds. You couldn’t make out a single word. It sounded like blippity-blip. Then she started to do the same thing with all the rest of the spells.

  “Aren’t you making them too fast?” I asked when she paused at 12:13 so Drew could go into the pantry and try to change its color. “You can’t make out any of the words.”

  “I’m betting that doesn’t matter. I’m making sound bites. Actually, I’m making Magic Bites. If we can get each of the incantations to play in two or three seconds, we should be able to cast more than one spell during the same minute.”

  “That would be great,” said Drew, coming back from the pantry. “We could untangle yarn while walking on stilts. Oh—your pantry’s still the same yucky yellow.”

  “So twelve thirteen isn’t a Magic Minute.” Modesty frowned. “I didn’t think it would be, after ten eleven and eleven twelve weren’t. Too bad.”

  Drew stopped to study the animals on the SAVE THE RAIN FORESTS poster. “Man, that is one sad-looking monkey!”

  “It’s a uakari,” said Modesty absently as she set up the next recording. “Practically extinct. When it dies out, probably something else that depended on the uakari will die out, too. Then a third and a fourth thing. And so on. Everything’s connected. That’s what my dad always said. He once wrote an article about the uakari.”

  “Your dad was a writer?” I asked, feeling that everything she had just learned about the harvester and me deserved some information from her in return.

  “He sure was,” she said, and stopped fiddling with the phones. She turned to the ironing board, removed the iron, and raised the board on its hinges so it stood upright against the wall, partially obscuring the rain forest poster.

  On the underside of the board was another poster, this one reproducing a book cover. It was a collage of three photos: a huge machine—ten times the size of the Fireball 50—crushing a swath of trees in its path, a whale floating belly-up amid garbage, and a group of men sawing the horn off a dead rhinoceros. The title of the book was Life’s a Web… Beware the Spiders. It was by Homer Brooker.

  “That was my dad’s first book. He said he regretted the title—that it was unfair to real spiders. But it was a runner-up for the Rachel Carson Prize. He was in Ken
ya researching his next book, about a certain type of honeybee that’ll go extinct if strip-mining continues, when a game warden friend of his learned about poachers killing elephants for their ivory, and my dad joined the posse to go looking for them. That was the last we ever heard from him.”

  She pressed the ironing board until something went click! When she stepped away, the board remained standing, flush to the wall. The uakari was still visible. The ironing board next to it looked like a tombstone.

  “That was two years ago.”

  She went back to our phones.

  Drew and I goggled at each other.

  “That’s terrible,” I said. “Modesty, I’m so sorry—”

  She raised a hand. “Everybody, hush—we’re recording.”

  She turned the four remaining incantations into Magic Bites, then made a big show of transferring all the files she had just made to our phones.

  “That’s fair, right? Nobody can say I’m not fair. I’m the fairest of them all.”

  “Did your mirror tell you that?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.

  “No, my mirror just grins at me; it’s so happy to be my mirror.” She saw the way I was looking at her and added, “My dad’s been gone for two years now. Somehow, I’m going to continue his work. All the coins I’ve gathered with the coin spell, I’ve donated to a group that defends wildlife. I figure that’s a start. And that’s all I want to say about this right now. Find another subject.”

  “Why is your cat staring at the fridge?” asked Drew.

  Modesty looked past Drew to where Grimalkin squatted, and she shook her head. “Fidelity made ice cream yesterday. That cat loves anything with fish in it. Hey, it’s almost twelve thirty-four! Stand back. We’re going to get this safe open!”

  She pushed us away from the counter, and Drew and I crouched so we had a good view of the safe’s door. She tickled her phone until she had the door-opening spell cued up, slid the playback volume to High, then waved the phone around as if it were a wizard’s baton. She aimed it at the safe’s combination dial.

  “Have you ever tried the coin-gathering spell here in the house?” I asked.