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

by Henry Clark

  “Is that… pie?” Pre asked in a small voice. He was staring at a stack of clear plastic boxes on the room’s central table. I had forgotten he hadn’t had anything to eat, other than a bowl of peanut-butter-chicken soup and some watery tea.

  “Yes! Here,” I said, grabbing the topmost box, popping the lid, and handing the pie to him. “I’ll get you something to… cut… it… with…”

  My voice trailed off. Pre had the pie out of its metal plate and was devouring it whole. It was apple, which at least was less messy than cherry or blueberry. I grabbed him a bottle of water from the small fridge next to my mom’s desk.

  “You might want to go easy,” I reminded him. “The next Magic Minute isn’t for another eleven hours, so we can’t… um… send anything to Jupiter.”

  He stopped short, eyes wide, but seemed to decide it was worth it and continued to wolf down the pie.

  “What happens when somebody from your world pukes?” I asked.

  He paused just long enough to answer. “We clean it up.”

  “You don’t vomit on Venus? Or something?”

  “No. That would be silly.”

  Ding!

  Six completed carrots appeared in the DavyTron. Modesty pulled them out, punched in the code for another six, and threw the first half dozen down on the table in front of me.

  “I need two holes drilled in each carrot, one above the other, about an inch apart at the fat end. The holes should be just a little larger than the thickness of the wire.” She looked at me expectantly. I flipped open the box of drill bits and started searching for the right size.

  Pre came up for air. Modesty handed him a roll of paper towels from my mom’s desk, and he wiped his chin. He seemed delighted that the towels had perforations. He kept ripping off sheets, one right after another.

  “A perfect tear every time! Science is wonderful!”

  Modesty rummaged in her backpack and extracted Pre’s three-ring binder. She held it up to him.

  “How did this get in my gym locker?”

  Pre swallowed a final bite and took the binder from her. I removed the second set of carrots from the DavyTron and got it started on parsnips, then revved the drill and started punching two holes in each carrot.

  “I put it in a gniche,” said Pre. When Modesty and I only stared, he added, “A niche is a magical randomizing box, the name of which is sometimes pronounced gniche, with a hard g sound at the beginning, and sometimes pronounced niche, where the g is not only silent but missing, in keeping with the box’s randomizing nature. One never knows how the word is going to come out of one’s mouth or how it will appear on paper. Over the years, this has resulted in the loss of sanity of more than one copy editor. Simply put, a gniche is an anything box.”

  “An anything box?” Modesty sounded slightly dazed.

  “Anything can happen to what you put inside. A niche will reject all objects larger than a pizza—that’s a circular tomato pie made with cheese and sometimes anchovies—and no niche will accept anything that’s alive—in particular, it repels cats very strongly—and that’s probably just as well. Sometimes whatever you put into a gniche will be turned inside out. Or changed into a pastrami sandwich or grow a beard or become covered in polka dots. Most usually, though, whatever you put into a niche will disappear. Our scholars think the things that disappear might wind up in one of the Adjacent Worlds, such as Earth or Indorsia. We’re not sure. I placed my kindergarten notebook into the library’s gniche in the desperate hope it would wind up here in your world and somebody would be smart enough to use it to open the other side of the door that I’d been trying to create on our side almost constantly for the past three weeks.”

  Pre started in on a second pie. When he noticed Modesty looked particularly dumbfounded, he added, “Kindergartners use the spell to open doors they’re too short to reach. I came up with the idea that if the spell was used in two Adjacent Worlds around the same time, it might open a portal between them. There’d only have to be an actual physical door on one side or the other.”

  “You could have included a note explaining all this,” said Modesty.

  “No, I couldn’t have.” Pre wiped his chin with a perfectly torn towel. “Obvious attempts at communication get repelled even more strongly than cats. I know it sounds like a contrivance in a poorly written novel, and as a librarian I’ve seen more than my share, but magic is rife with such things. Gniches are an example of what led Panacea Irksome, our greatest thinker, to say magic isn’t arbitrary—it only looks that way.”

  “What does ‘magic is fluid’ mean?” Modesty asked, plucking the bookmark with Irksome’s Seven Insights out of the binder and reading the top Insight. Pre had turned his attention back to the second pie, only a sliver of which now remained.

  “It flows like water,” Pre replied after taking a moment to swallow. “Some places in Congroo are like deserts, with very little magic, and other places are like oceans, full of magic. Magic behaves like a liquid—that’s why it can drain out of Congroo to somewhere else. We once had an avalanche, and a whole lot of magic got bottled up behind the Delectable Mountains, and we had to use blasting spells to free it. There were wizards surfing on it when it came gushing out. Everything in its path glowed blue for the next three days.”

  “Done!” I announced, and stepped away from a table that was covered by two dozen carrots and parsnips, each with two holes drilled neatly in their tops.

  “Perfect,” said Modesty, and shoved me aside with her hip. She bent over the veggies and began rearranging them.

  “When can we go see Mr. Davy?” Pre asked as I took the towels away before there were none left on the roll.

  “Not today,” I said. “It’s Sunday, so the DavyTron factory is closed.”

  “Tomorrow,” Modesty said with her back to us, as she did whatever she was doing to the root veggies. The spool of wire I had thrown her danced around the tabletop. “I’m thinking we sneak out of school during lunch and walk over. The Davy Tower is only about a mile away. We should start thinking about what we’re going to say to him.”

  “One thing we should ask him about is the DavyTron software updates,” I said, having given it some thought. “Drew said the machines get updated every twenty-four hours. What if that happens at the exact same time every night? And what if it happens to be one of the Magic Minutes?”

  “You think the incantation for transmutation might be part of the update code?” Modesty sounded skeptical. “That would be quite a coincidence.”

  “If we’re not doing anything until tomorrow,” said Pre, “I’ll need a place to sleep tonight. That tower we saw as we approached, the one you and your family watch forest fires from—”

  “We don’t watch forest fires. It’s called a fire watchtower because it’s part of a system for preventing forest fires—”

  “Oh. Good. That sounds much less depraved. Anyway, I think I’d like to sleep up there, if you’ll permit me. Your world is so nice and warm, I wouldn’t mind sleeping in a place with open windows. Especially in a tower. I’ve slept in one all my life.”

  “Sounds good to me,” said Modesty before I could suggest anything different. “Smuggle him up there, give him some snacks, and lend him a sleeping bag.”

  “You have bags that sleep?” asked Pre.

  “It’s a bag you sleep in,” said Modesty. “And then we’ll all meet in the tower around one AM, just in time for the one twenty-three Magic Minute.”

  “Why… would we do that?” I asked.

  “You want to rescue Drew, don’t you?”

  “I can do that in my room. Just me, my phone, and the Magic Bite for To Open a Door. It doesn’t need a committee.”

  “Shortsighted.” Modesty sniffed. She looked around. “Are there wire cutters?”

  There weren’t, but after a moment I found a pair of nail clippers in my mom’s desk and handed them to her. She turned back to her project.

  “How is it shortsighted?”

  “It’l
l take three seconds to play the Magic Bite for To Open a Door. Boom. You’ve got Drew back. You hug; Drew says thank you, thank you, thank you—and we’ve still got most of a Magic Minute left. Magic Bites take three or four seconds to play—we could try out a dozen spells before the minute’s up.”

  “Performing that many spells in rapid succession would not be wise,” Pre said in alarm.

  “And we’ll have a technical adviser from Congroo with us so we don’t blow ourselves up or anything. And he”—Modesty turned and looked meaningfully at Pre—“might have a spell or two of his own to contribute.”

  “I can’t imagine what those spells might be,” said Pre, trying to bite into the side of the water bottle. He caught me staring and said, “The cork won’t come out.”

  I took the bottle and unscrewed the cap. I handed both back to him; he studied the cap, said, “It’s threaded! Like the lids of the flyer-fry jars. Ingenious!” and gulped down half the water.

  “Ta-da!” Modesty trumpeted.

  I turned back to her.

  She was wearing a crown.

  She had threaded the veggies together in a circle, alternating the parsnips with the carrots, the pointy ends sticking upward, and put the whole assembly on her head. As crowns went, it didn’t look too bad.

  “I don’t get it,” I admitted.

  “This,” she said, tapping one of the parsnips, “is absolutely brilliant. We know Elwood Davy poses for pictures with kids who make things with his vegetables, right? Well, tomorrow, when we get to Davy headquarters, we tell the receptionist we made this crown for him, and we’d like to present it to him personally. I mean, how could he resist? I look adorable. Then we’ll get to talk him out of destroying Congroo. We’ll save the dragons!”

  “One problem. What makes you think it will fit him?” I asked.

  “He’s a genius, right?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “I modeled it on my own head!”

  CHAPTER 17

  HIGH-TENSION

  I’m not really all that good at magic,” Preffy admitted a little later. It was ten minutes until I was due to start my cashier shift at the farm stand. We had left the office before anyone could walk in on us, and the three of us were hanging out at the Invisible Goat corral. Modesty still had the carrot-and-parsnip crown on her head. Occasionally, she gave a regal wave to passing motorists.

  “In fact, I’m terrible at it,” Pre continued. “Half my spells are misfires. It’s a matter of concentration. I’m usually thinking of something else. For instance, only yesterday, I was levitating a bunch of books back into the celebrity biography section, but I was also working on an invention of mine: a glass jar with a piece of rubber stretched across the top and a straw glued over the center of the rubber but sticking out past the edge of the jar—I think the straw might move when bad weather is approaching, but I haven’t tested it yet.”

  “The books wound up on the wrong shelf?” I guessed.

  “The books flew out the window.”

  Pre leaned over the corral’s fence, stretched out a hand, and made the squeaky noise with his lips that many people mistakenly think will attract animals.

  “I don’t believe there are any goats in here,” he said after a moment.

  “There aren’t,” Modesty confirmed.

  “But the sign—”

  “Yeah, the sign,” I said, gesturing to the fence post next to us.

  INVISIBLE GOATS

  INVISIBLE GOATS (CAPRA NOSEEUS) ARE NATIVE TO PATAGONIA, WHERE THEY ARE CONSIDERED A TRIPPING HAZARD.

  THEY ARE PRIZED FOR THEIR MILK, WHICH IS UDDERLY TRANSPARENT.

  “We had goats,” I said, “and a pair of llamas and a couple of sheep for a long time. They weren’t livestock; they were pets, and we kept them out front here so farm-stand customers could see them. But we had to find a good home for them a few weeks ago to save money. My dad made the sign. That’s his sense of humor.” I glanced across the road and gave the burned-out harvester a dirty look.

  “Oh,” said Pre quietly.

  “Are we all agreed we have to keep the existence of Congroo a secret?” said Modesty, clearly sensing it was time to change the subject. “We don’t tell anybody about it except, of course, Elwood Davy, who’s the only person who needs to know.”

  She levered the crown from her head and placed it in a cake box we had found. A strip of cardboard bent into a circle held the crown’s shape, and the cellophane window on the front of the box showed it off like jewelry in a display case.

  “Oh, absolutely,” agreed Pre. “The fewer of your people who know about my world, the better. We can’t let anyone with powerful science at their disposal try to breach the barrier between here and there. It would be a catastrophe for both sides. But Mr. Davy must know about Congroo already—otherwise, he couldn’t be siphoning magic out of it.”

  “Okay.” Modesty handed me the boxed-up crown. “I’ll leave this with you. And I’ll be back around twelve forty-five tonight.” When I gave her a questioning glance, she added, “I have a window I sneak out of. Leave the tower gate unlocked, and I’ll come right up.”

  Modesty departed on her bike. I waited for our only customers to drive away, made sure my dad and his high school helpers were still working inside the barn, then escorted Pre up to the top of the fire tower. I left him with a sleeping bag, some water, and a box of Cheerios.

  The three of us had agreed we all needed to sleep, since it was possible we might be up for most of the night, so after putting in my four-hour shift at the farm stand, having supper with my folks, and telling them that Drew wouldn’t be spending the night after all, I announced I had a math test to study for and went up to bed.

  It was eight thirty, which I was pretty sure was four thirty BMS—Before Midnight Snack—Congroo time, which made it feel even earlier.

  I couldn’t sleep.

  Not at first anyway. My head was filled with everything that had happened over the weekend, from stampeding coins to an annoying girl with a notebook full of magic to a gargoyle that exploded if you hit it with anti-cling spray to my best friend getting left behind in the World of Magic. It took me a while to convince myself that we would be getting Drew back in only a matter of hours. He was clever—he had found the keyhole behind Baron Orblacker’s eye patch in Castle Conundrum—so I was confident he would figure out what he needed to do to reopen the door between the worlds.

  Then I started worrying about what we could possibly say to Elwood Davy to convince him to stop making DavyTrons. I imagined drawing him a chart:

  NO DAVYTRONS = NO MAGIC DRAIN = CONGROO WARMS BACK UP = FLYER-FRIES SURVIVE = DRAGONS DON’T DIE OUT = MORE MAGIC GETS MADE

  I wondered if there would be a blackboard he’d let us use. Then I started wondering if the spell called To Repair a Chimney might, at the very least, knock some of the soot off the Fireball 50; the harvester had certainly smoked like a chimney once the blaze got going. Then I remembered I actually did have a math test the next day and I should be studying for it….

  Which was when I fell asleep.

  My alarm went off at a quarter to one. I left the house quietly through the back door, and when I arrived at the base of the tower, Modesty was waiting for me. Together we climbed the zigzag stairs and found Preffy sitting in one corner of the cab, cozily wrapped in his sleeping bag.

  “I’ve thought of a spell that might help,” he said. “It’s called To Make an Agreeable Atmosphere.”

  “What… does that do?” I asked him warily.

  “Sounds like a spell the people on Jupiter might need,” said Modesty.

  “There isn’t any life on Jupiter,” Pre informed her testily as he stood and wiggled out of the bag. “The Sanitation Commission made sure of that before we started sending our euphemera there. Going ahead without an environmental impact study would have been criminal.”

  “Oh. Of course. Silly me.”

  “To Make an Agreeable Atmosphere creates the smell of baking bread.”

/>   “How does that help us?” I asked.

  “According to a study by IBM,” Pre said primly, “different smells influence how people behave. The smell of baking bread makes them more agreeable. If there’s a smell of baking bread when we ask Mr. Davy to stop draining the magic out of Congroo, he might be more willing to do it.”

  “IBM?” asked Modesty.

  “The Institute for Better Magic. The problem is that the incantation that produces the spell is five pages long. I’ve memorized it, but there’s no way I can envision it from start to finish in less than a minute. Things are so much easier in Congroo, where magic works all the time and there isn’t a big rush to get things done.”

  “You don’t have to speak the incantation out loud?” I said, not exactly sure what he meant by envision.

  “No, of course not. You just have to picture each word accurately and hear the correct pronunciation in your head. And if you leave off the final three or four syllables, the spell doesn’t work until you finish it, so you can have dozens of spells stored up and ready to go when you need them. They stay fresh for months. That’s how wizards used to duel with each other, back before dueling was outlawed. Anyway, the best magicians can envision about two thousand words per minute. I’m not that good; I figure I can manage maybe, oh, I don’t know… seven hundred?”

  “Couldn’t you just envision the spell now,” I suggested, “but save up the final syllables and think them during one of the actual Magic Minutes?”

  “That’s not how it works.” Pre shook his head. “I would have to start the spell during one Magic Minute, continue it during the next, and so on, until I finished it in however many Magic Minutes it takes.”

  “Funny we didn’t think to spread out the longer spells like that,” said Modesty. “But here’s something we did try, and it works! Phone, please.”

  She unpocketed her phone and held out her hand for mine.

  Both phones agreed it was 12:53. By the time Modesty finished explaining Magic Bites to Pre and how they could condense a ten-minute incantation into something that sounded like blippity-blip, the phones said 1:03.