The Magic Spectacles Read online

  ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

  NOVELS

  The Elfin Ship

  The Disappearing Dwarf

  The Digging Leviathan

  Homunculus

  Land Of Dreams

  The Last Coin

  The Stone Giant

  The Paper Grail

  Lord Kelvin’s Machine

  The Magic Spectacles

  Night Relics

  All The Bells On Earth

  Winter Tides

  The Rainy Season

  Knights Of The Cornerstone

  Zeuglodon

  The Aylesford Skull (forthcoming)

  COLLECTIONS

  Thirteen Phantasms

  In For A Penny

  Metamorphosis

  The Shadow on the Doorstep

  NOVELLAS

  The Ebb Tide

  The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

  WITH TIM POWERS

  On Pirates

  The Devil in the Details

  Copyright © 1991 by James P. Blaylock

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Dirk Berger. Cover design by John Berlyne.

  Published as an e-book in North America by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD, in 2012.

  ISBN: 9781936535675

  CONTENTS

  Also by James P. Blaylock

  Copyright

  The Magic Spectacles

  Part one of three

  Chapter 1: Pancakes and Autumn Leaves

  Chapter 2: The Moon Penny

  Chapter 3: The Window Under the House

  Chapter 4: The Fishbowl Full of Marbles

  Chapter 5: The Treasure Under the House

  Chapter 6: Fish Bones and Rat Shoes

  Chapter 7: The Magic Spectacles

  Chapter 8: Through the Bedroom Window

  Chapter 9: Goblins

  Chapter 10: The Fog from the Kettle

  Chapter 11: The Fight on the Road

  Chapter 12: Mr. Deener

  Chapter 13: Mr. Deener Has a Fit

  Chapter 14: Glazed Doughnuts

  Part two of three

  Chapter 15: Upstairs in the Old House

  Chapter 16: The Sleeper Puts on His Hat and Goes Out

  Chapter 17: Making a Goblin

  Chapter 18: The Clinker Garden

  Book Two

  Chapter 1: The Face Among the Weeds

  Chapter 2: Danny Comes Up with a Plan

  Chapter 3: Mrs. Owlswick’s Window

  Chapter 4: The Battle on the Meadow

  Chapter 5: Mr. Deener Sets Out

  Chapter 6: What Became of the Moon Ladder

  Chapter 7: The Sleeper Floats Away, Nearly

  Chapter 8: Someone Steals the Bag of Memories

  Chapter 9: In the Tunnel of the Creaking Doors

  Part Three of three

  Chapter 10: What Danny Found in the Cave

  Chapter 11: The Mark on the Final Door

  Chapter 12: The Fishbowl Full of Marbles

  Chapter 13: Through the Green Light

  Chapter 14: The Broken Clinker Flower

  Chapter 15: The Runaway Marbles

  Chapter 16: In the House of Dreams

  Chapter 17: The End of Mrs. Deener

  Chapter 18: The Marbleston Pie

  Chapter 19: The Deener Blows His Top

  Chapter 20: The Return of Mr. Deener

  Chapter 21: What Happened After That

  Author Bio

  Part one of three

  Chapter 1: Pancakes and Autumn Leaves

  A curiosity shop appeared in the center of a row of small stores downtown. A painted sign, faded with weather and sunlight, hung over the door. John couldn’t remember that the shop had been there yesterday. It seemed to him as if nothing had been there yesterday, and yet there was nothing new-looking about the curiosity shop, or about the old sign that swung slowly back and forth in the wind.

  John and his brother Danny sat on a bench in the Plaza and looked across the street at the shop window, which was cobwebby and misty with dust. They could see almost nothing through it, except what looked like the skeletons of three fish hung upside down from the ceiling like windchimes.

  Two big trees bent over the street outside, shaking bright green leaves in the wind. It looked to John as if the trees were laughing, although what they were laughing at he couldn’t say – maybe at the fish skeletons in the window, maybe at his own leafy reflection in the glass.

  It was autumn, and there was something uneasy in the air, like Halloween ghosts flitting around lonely and lost on the first thin breath of winter. Sycamore leaves drifted from the big trees overhead, and in the quiet morning air John could hear the creaking of the sign across the street and the scrape and rustle of dead leaves blowing along the sidewalk. The grass in the Plaza had already turned brown, as if it were asleep, and the Plaza fountain barely worked at all, but just bubbled out little spurts of rusty-looking water.

  (Chapter 1 continues after illustration)

  “I heard that the water in this fountain comes from a long way under the ground,” John said, picking up a floating sycamore leaf. “Maybe from lakes in the center of the earth.”

  “Who said that?” Danny asked. “Did you make it up?”

  “Dr. Stone said it. He said someone found three fish in it last week, dead.”

  They both looked at the window of the curiosity shop again. There was a light on inside now, but the shop was still mostly dark, and the light shined back in the darkness like the moon.

  Last week a waitress at the lunch counter of Watson’s Drug Store complained that the maple syrup went sour almost as soon as it was opened, and so did the milk. And Dr. Stone, who was a veterinarian, said that the sparrows that nested in the Plaza trees were acting strangely. Some of them had been found lying asleep on the brown grass. A cat had eaten one of the sleeping sparrows and had fallen asleep on the grass, too, and wouldn’t wake up, and now it was in Dr. Stone’s office, asleep on a chair.

  There had been a lot of fog lately, and people who worked in the downtown shops began to take long naps on foggy days.

  Shopkeepers slept in their chairs, and waiters dozed while their customers waited for hamburgers. The fog smelled of fish and soap.

  Maybe because so many people were asleep, things began to disappear from houses and shops. Mostly they were things made of glass, like costume jewelry and eyeglasses and prisms from old lamps. None of it was very valuable, except Dr. Stone’s antique pocketwatch, which had been stolen right out of his pocket.

  John wondered what Dr. Stone knew about the center of the earth and whether the fish skeletons in the curiosity shop window had come from there. Some people thought the earth was hollow and that you could get to the land inside by sailing through a big hole in the top of the world. The UFOs hid out down there. And that was where the dinosaurs had gone, too, probably in a big hurry when they heard about the comet that was going to make them extinct. John had written it all down in his notebook, very scientifically, under the title “What Happened to the Dinosaurs”.

  Sometimes he liked the idea of a door to another land, except that he would want to know, before he opened that door, what kind of things lived on the other side. It was sort of like one of those quiz shows where you got to be surprised by whatever was hiding behind curtain number three – a new car or a grinning fat man in a clown suit….

  “Look,” Danny said suddenly, pointing down into the water of the fountain, “a good luck penny.”

  On the bottom of the pool, among the skeletons of sunken leaves, lay a small coin. It looked like a round, dark hole.

  Chapter 2: The Moon Penny

  “Somebody probably made a wish
and threw it in there,” John said. “I wouldn’t take it.”

  “I would,” Danny said, pulling off his jacket. “Whoever threw it in probably wished that someone would find it. If I take it, then their wish has come true. I’ll be doing them a favor.” He reached into the water and fished out the coin, drying it off on his pants.

  “Let’s see,” John said, and Danny held the coin out so that the sun shone on it. It wasn’t any kind of normal penny. There was a picture of a man’s face on one side – a very round face wearing spectacles and with crazy hair. “Wrong door,” John muttered. “We got the clown.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Danny asked, turning the coin over. On the tails side was a picture of a fish.

  “It means I’d throw it back,” John said.

  Danny shook his head. “Too late. Once you pick up a penny, you get all the luck out of it, whether it’s good luck or bad luck. Anyway, I think this is a moon coin and just dropped out of the sky. So don’t tell me it came from the center of the earth.”

  John looked across at the curiosity shop again and at the fish skeletons hanging in the window. Clearly they were the skeletons of fish very much like the fish on the coin – fat and spiny and with huge round eyes. The shadows and dust were gone from the window now, and the light in the shop shone on a clutter of odd-looking junk.

  They ran their bicycles across the street and stopped in front of the shop. Beneath the hanging fish in the window sat an elephant’s foot made into a stand for holding umbrellas, and next to that stood an enormous black raven and a big stuffed lizard with a red jewel in either eye. Piles of books tilted against each other, all of them dusty and old. The one on the top was something called The Wise Fishermen’s Encyclopedia. On its green cover was a drawing of a man wearing a night shirt and cap. He was fishing in a dry riverbed in the light of a full moon. A fish skeleton hung from the end of his line.

  Next to that there was a fishbowl full of marbles. In the middle of the marbles, shoving up through them, was a pair of old spectacles with brass wire rims.

  A gust of wind blew just then, and the trees on the curb rustled and danced. A great sheet of wrapping paper, all orange and red and yellow, whirled past, end over end like a pinwheel down the center of the street. Behind it rushed a circus of autumn leaves, and the sky was filled with the screech of wild parrots and the cawing of crows. It seemed to John that there was something on the wind, some faint smell, as if someone far away had made a bonfire of tree prunings and the wind was full of invisible smoke.

  (Chapter 2 continues after illustration)

  “Let’s eat,” Danny said suddenly. “I want some pancakes. How much money do we have?”

  “Enough,” John said. Although what he was thinking was something more like, “Enough to buy that fishbowl full of marbles in the window.” Then he looked at the fisherman on the cover of the book again. He had the same face and hair as the man on the moon coin….

  Maybe later they would come back for the marbles. Right now pancakes seemed like a better idea.

  At Watson’s lunch counter they took a table by the window so that they could see people walk past out on the sidewalk. It wasn’t cold out, but it was blustery, and the wind made people clutch their coats around them as if it were going to blow the coats off and sail them over the rooftops like kites. A man raced past chasing a hat, and another man, right behind him, hurried along backwards so that the wind blew his coat shut instead of open. He had the goggly eyes of the fish on the moon coin, and John nearly pointed this out to Danny, but he stopped himself. Maybe he was getting fish on the brain.

  Neither of them said very much while they were eating their pancakes, and finally John pushed his empty plate away. He had finished his cocoa, too. There was nothing left in his cup but a sort of brown paste. He took four crumpled dollar bills from his pocket, and Danny dug out two more and a handful of change. They counted out the coins, heaping them on top of the bills, making sure there was enough and with some left over for a tip.

  Then Danny took the moon coin out of his pocket and turned it over in his hand, looking first at one side and then at the other. Outside, the wind stopped blowing. Flying leaves drifted to the street. People let go of their coats and pulled their collars straight.

  Silently, John picked up his spoon, licked it, and stuck it carefully to his nose, so that the handle hung down over his chin like one of the screwball beards that the Egyptian Pharaohs used to wear. He leaned across the table and waited for Danny to look up….

  … and right then he realized that someone was watching him through the window. He jumped in surprise. The spoon flipped off his nose, clattering down into Danny’s half-full water glass. Water splashed on the table, and John had to grab the glass to keep it from falling over.

  “Hey!” Danny said, looking up. “What are you doing? I was going to drink that.

  “Nothing,” John said. With his eyes he gestured toward the street.

  Standing just outside the window was a little man in an old green coat. He was about as big as a dwarf or an elf, and there was bundle of sticks in a bag over his shoulder. His face was wrinkled and pinched, like the face of the moon. He took a pointed cloth cap from his pocket and pulled it on. People walked past without looking at him, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about him at all.

  Or perhaps as if they simply couldn’t see him.

  He winked at John and Danny very slowly, tipped his hat, and turned away.

  The wind blew again, harder than ever. It swept a storm of leaves down the center of the street. The little man held onto his hat with both hands, and, as if he were made of paper, the wind whisked him away through the air, straight across the Plaza, past the fountain, and in through the door of the curiosity shop.

  Chapter 3: The Window Under the House

  As he watched the little man depart in a whirl of leaves, John realized that he had seen him before that morning….

  It had been almost two months ago, right at the end of summer, in the week before school started. John and Danny had broken their bedroom window while playing baseball on the front lawn. There had been nothing left of the window but shattered glass all over the bedroom floor. Somehow, even the wooden frame of the window was knocked to pieces, and anyone could see that it wouldn’t do just to put in another piece of glass.

  That’s when they got lucky, and Mrs. Owlswick down the block gave them a window. Mrs. Owlswick lived with her niece Kimberly in a big and very old house. Kimberly’s uncle, Mrs. Owlswick’s brother, had lived upstairs in the attic room. Everyone said that he had “gone away,” which was a polite way of saying he had gone crazy and one day had disappeared. Under the house, in a little cellar, Mrs. Owlswick stored odds and ends of stuff: old pieces of furniture, boxes of glass doorknobs, hinges, picture frames, clock parts, and the window, which was glazed with a ripply sort of pale green glass.

  Their father very happily took the window. He said that he was “going to do the job right.” That meant that he was going to do it in the most complicated way he could, and make the job last. “Get me the pry bar,” he had said to John, and with it he had started pulling off the wall mouldings and prying out all the pieces of the old window, throwing them out onto the lawn where John and Danny dropped them into a trash barrel.

  A couple of times their father had asked if the new window looked “plum”, from out there on the lawn, which didn’t make any sense at all, and so John said that the window might not look “plum”, but that it looked peachy. Right then their father hit his thumb with the hammer, and so he didn’t think the joke was very funny at all, and John and Danny had to go around the corner of the house in order to laugh.

  Finally, late in the afternoon, he hung Mrs. Owlswick’s window in place of the old one and put the mouldings back up around it. They all came into the bedroom to have a look through it. The sun was just going down, and because of the ripply green glass, the world outside looked something like a tidepool, as if they were gazi
ng out through shallow sea water.

  It had rained the next morning. John sat on his bed, looking out at the street. Water ran in the gutter, splashing over the curb, and windy raindrops splattered against the glass. Someone with an umbrella was coming along down the sidewalk. He was small, maybe a new kid in the neighborhood. When he stopped in front of the house, John could see that he wasn’t a kid at all, but was actually a little man wearing a green cloth cap. On his back he carried a bundle of sticks. Rain poured off his umbrella in a curtain of drops.

  He had stood on the sidewalk twirling his umbrella for a moment, looking at the house – or more particularly, looking at the new window, maybe looking through it. Then he walked away, past Mrs. Owlswick’s house, seeming to grow smaller and smaller as he vanished in the rainy morning air.

  Now, two months later, the same little man had been looking in at them through the lunch counter window. Something was about to happen. John knew it. Another door was about to open, and there wasn’t going to be a new car behind this one either. More likely they’d get the clown again, along with an invitation to the circus of Dr. Wrinkle-face, where they’d be turned into fish or toads or something and kept in a cage.

  They went outside and unlocked their bikes, then rode across the street again and leaned their bikes against the brick wall of the curiosity shop. John looked at the fishbowl full of marbles. They were good ones – the kind you hardly ever found. You could buy clear marbles in a plastic net bag at the market. And you could buy solid color marbles like the ones that come in a Chinese checkers game. Sometimes you found cats’ eyes in the dirt of a flowerbed, dropped there years ago by kids who are grown up now and don’t care about marbles anymore.

  But the fishbowl in the window was full of the sort of marbles you could only find if you were really lucky. With the sun shining on them now, some were like swirls of frozen rootbeer. Some reminded him of tigers, or of a sunlit forest or a rainbow. Others looked like the earth seen from way off in space, as if he were sitting on the moon.