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

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Henry Clark

  Jacket art copyright © 2020 by Mirelle Ortega.

  Jacket design by Marcie Lawrence.

  Handlettering by David Coulson.

  Jacket copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Little, Brown and Company

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  Visit us at LBYR.com

  First Edition: May 2020

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Clark, Henry, 1952- author.

  Title: What we found in the corn maze and how it saved a dragon : a novel / by Henry Clark.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Little, Brown and Company, 2020. | Audience: Ages 8-12. | Summary: “When three twelve-year-olds discover there are seven separate minutes a day they can do magic, they must use oddly specific spells to save a dragon, themselves, and the world”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019029634 | ISBN 9780316492317 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316492348 (ebook) | ISBN 9780316492324 (library ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Adventure and adventurers—Fiction. | Magic—Fiction. | Farm life—Fiction. | Humorous stories.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.C5458 Bc 2020 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029634

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-49231-7 (hardcover), 978-0-316-49234-8 (ebook)

  E3-20200326-JV-NF-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1: Change

  CHAPTER 2: A Really Well-Done Dragon

  CHAPTER 3: Seven Hundred Words Per Minute

  CHAPTER 4: Phlogiston’s Eye

  CHAPTER 5: Davy’s Digital Vegetables

  CHAPTER 6: As Easy as One-Two-Three

  CHAPTER 7: Four More Minutes

  CHAPTER 8: Seventh Daughter

  CHAPTER 9: Safe Crackers

  CHAPTER 10: Preffy Arrowshot

  CHAPTER 11: The View from the Fire Tower

  CHAPTER 12: Flyer-fries

  CHAPTER 13: Adjacent Worlds

  CHAPTER 14: The Girl from Stitchen

  CHAPTER 15: No Hour of Twelve

  CHAPTER 16: Gniche Versus Niche

  CHAPTER 17: High-Tension

  CHAPTER 18: A Walk on the Wild Side

  CHAPTER 19: Squishy Fishy Fun Park

  CHAPTER 20: Not a Martian Death Machine

  CHAPTER 21: House Tour

  CHAPTER 22: Pacifist Enforcement and Control Enchantment

  CHAPTER 23: Hypotheses

  CHAPTER 24: A Middle School in Disarray

  CHAPTER 25: Tanked

  CHAPTER 26: Seven Thirty BMS

  CHAPTER 27: The Tomato Juice of Doom

  CHAPTER 28: “I’m So Sorry!”

  CHAPTER 29: Magic Amok

  CHAPTER 30: This Dragon’s on Fire

  CHAPTER 31: V for Victory

  Acknowledgments

  For Tyler Keren.

  Hello, grandson!

  CHAPTER 1

  CHANGE

  It all started at 12:34 on a Saturday afternoon.

  The exact time is important. It couldn’t have happened five minutes earlier or an hour later.

  It had to be then.

  Drew and I were sitting on the grass in Onderdonk Grove, next to the brook that separates the nature preserve side of the park from the picnic area. On the opposite bank, both baseball fields had games going: one with adults, the other with Little Leaguers. Smoke from a barbecue grill rose in a straight line and then broke up and drifted east toward the town of Disarray, where Drew and I live. Our bikes leaned against a nearby tree.

  I dug a small stone out of the grass and tossed it into the water.

  “Did you tell them it’s a bad idea?” Drew asked, continuing a conversation we’d begun during the ride over, when we had stopped at an intersection to watch two moving vans leave town. He pulled his legs up, wrapped his arms around them, and rested his chin on his knees, turning himself into a compact, glasses-wearing boulder with mossy brown hair on top.

  “I’m pretty sure they know it’s a bad idea,” I said, looking around for another pebble. A leaf walked by to my left. I lowered my head so that I could see the ant beneath it. The leaf was five times the size of the ant, yet the tiny creature had no trouble with the load.

  “The farm stand’s losing money,” I added, raising myself back up. “My dad says if we have one rainy weekend this October, we’ll barely break even. If we have two rainy weekends, we’ll end up owing money.”

  “So… no rainy weekends would mean a profit?” Drew turned his head sideways and stared at me.

  “Not a big one.” I sighed. “Not like we used to get.”

  My family owns a farm. This is possibly why I look like a scarecrow. At least, that’s what some of the kids at school say. I’m tall and I’m bony, and my clothes sometimes fit and sometimes don’t because most of them are hand-me-downs from my brother, Glen, who’s six years older and three inches taller. And it doesn’t help that my last name is Sapling. My first name is Calvin, which is all right but not something I would have chosen, if anybody had asked. I try not to turn around whenever somebody shouts, “Hey, Sap!”

  “But Elwood Davy!” Drew muttered. “He owns half the town already.” He shifted closer to the embankment, picking up a few stones of his own. He’s eight inches shorter than I am, with a rounder face, and he knows how to weave twigs together to make little rafts that float down the stream, while the ones I make break apart and sink.

  “His company made the offer.” I shrugged. I had seen my dad shrug a lot lately. Maybe it was contagious. “The farm stand makes more money these days off the corn maze and the monster barn than it does from selling produce. And it’s not enough. My dad says you can only milk Halloween for six, maybe seven weeks out of the year. He also says the offer from Davy is decent. We have a week to think it over.”

  We fell silent as we watched one of the adult baseball players run backward to catch a pop fly, crash into another player, and miss the ball, allowing the batter to miraculously make it to second.

  “If your parents sell the place, you’ll move,” said Drew. He sounded the way I felt. “Couldn’t they hold out till spring?”

  “If there was enough money in the bank,” I said. “But. You know.” I shrugged again. “The Fireball 50.” I forced a lilt into my voice as I said it, as if the words were song lyrics rather than the name of a charred pile of junk I could see from my bedroom window. The Fireball 50 w
as something I said whenever I felt the need to remind myself that my family’s money problems were mostly the result of something I had done. Usually when I mentioned it around Drew, he knew enough to change the subject.

  Usually.

  “That wasn’t your fault,” he said.

  The ant with the leaf made it to the anthill. Other ants gathered around and started nibbling the leaf into smaller pieces that could be dragged underground.

  “They’re selling. They really don’t have any other choice,” I said, as if Fireball 50 had never passed my lips.

  We watched an empty plastic bottle bob past in the brook. It snagged against a rock, filled with water, and disappeared.

  After a while, Drew said, “This doesn’t change our sleepover plans, does it? I’m already packed.”

  “That’s not until tomorrow,” I reminded him.

  “Even so. It’ll be bad news if I have to be home.”

  Drew’s parents had arranged for him to stay at my place on Sunday and Monday nights while they tore apart their house’s one bathroom and tried to update it into the twenty-first century. The toilet was being ripped out and, knowing Drew’s parents’ lack of plumbing expertise, might take more than a day to replace. There had been talk of chamber pots.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a tiny movement in the grass. I turned my head slightly, expecting to see another leaf on its way to the anthill.

  But it wasn’t a leaf.

  It was a coin.

  And it was sliding through the grass faceup, heading for my foot.

  So the time would have been 12:34.

  “Hey,” I said, happy for the diversion. “That’s got to be Super Ant. It’s actually carrying a quarter.”

  Drew leaned over to see. The coin wobbled out of the grass and onto a stretch of bare dirt. “Why would an ant need a quarter?” he wondered.

  “Maybe it’s looking for a soda machine.”

  The coin hit my sneaker and stopped. It backed up an inch, then came forward and hit my sneaker again. I could have moved my foot, but I wanted to see what would happen. The coin tried three more times to get through the sole of my sneaker, then backed up and started to go around.

  I reached down and gently lifted the quarter, expecting to see three or four ants working together or possibly a very muscle-bound ant all by itself.

  There was nothing under the coin.

  Only dirt.

  Really.

  “Whoa!” I said, squinting at the quarter.

  “It’s gotta be some sort of trick,” said Drew. “Is there a thread attached to it?”

  “There’s nothing attached to it.” I turned the coin from heads to tails and back again. It was tarnished and worn at the edges, and its date was the year my grandfather was born. But otherwise, there was nothing strange about it.

  Except that it had been moving by itself.

  I put it back on the ground.

  It did nothing. Just sat there.

  I nudged it.

  Still nothing.

  I flipped it over and nudged it again.

  It didn’t budge.

  “Maybe it’s playing possum,” said Drew.

  “It’s a coin,” I said. “It can’t play anything.”

  “It could play an arcade game if you had enough of them,” Drew reasoned. “Toss it here.”

  I picked up the quarter and flipped it at him. It bounced off his fingers and landed in the grass; he scrambled after it, raking his hands through the grass, but he came up empty.

  “Lost it.”

  Which was all the quarter needed.

  It came out of the grass, rolling on its edge this time, and slipped onto the narrow dirt path that led to the wider trail at the top of the embankment.

  “It’s rolling uphill,” I said in disbelief.

  “We gotta follow it!” Drew jumped to his feet and clambered up the slope.

  I was right behind him.

  The coin reached the trail and made a right.

  “It changed direction,” Drew muttered. “That’s not possible.”

  “None of this is possible,” I reminded him. “Don’t lose it!”

  We kept pace with the coin. It showed no sign of slowing down.

  A sweaty man in a jogging suit rounded the bend and trotted straight at us, the wires of his earphones flopping like the wattle on a rooster. We split to either side of him, and his right foot stomped down less than an inch from the coin, which wobbled a little, then straightened and accelerated.

  “No way!” I gasped, halting in my tracks and catching Drew by the sleeve.

  “What?” Drew looked but missed what I was seeing.

  I pointed.

  A second coin—a nickel—had slid out from under a bush and was tumbling end over end, heading in the same direction as the first. The quarter caught up with it, and they traveled on together. To our left, a faint hissing sound and a disturbance in the grass was either a snake or—

  Another quarter tumbled onto the trail, raising a tiny dust cloud as it surfed on its belly.

  “It’s a coin migration,” declared Drew as we both started running again.

  “Coins don’t migrate.”

  “They must. That would explain why sometimes I can’t find my lunch money.”

  The three coins skidded to the left and departed the trail, slowing down as they plunged into the weedy meadow that stretched to the trees bordering the park to the west. Two bright copper pennies sailed up a tuft of bent-over grass, became briefly airborne, then landed ahead of the first three coins, taking the lead.

  “Fifty-seven cents!” shouted Drew.

  “More than that!” I waved to either side. The grass and weeds rustled as small things in a hurry brushed past their stems. “It’s a stampede!”

  “I wonder what they’re running from,” Drew said.

  “Probably some guy with a metal detector.”

  At least two dozen coins rolled and tumbled around us as we ran. In front of us, the fastest ones started to funnel into a single line.

  “They’re heading for that tree.” I pointed to an elm at the edge of the park. Beyond the tree was a chain-link fence. “Don’t lose them!”

  We sprinted, and I slammed into the tree first. Drew came in a close second, and the coins veered to our left. The two pennies were still in the lead, and as they sped by, I looked around the tree to see whether they would go through the fence to the road beyond.

  Not quite.

  A girl was crouched in front of the fence holding a bright-yellow beach pail against the ground. The first penny flew into the pail and thumped against the bottom. A moment later, the second penny joined it.

  Drew leaned past me, and I caught him before he could draw the girl’s attention. Her black hair was pulled back from her face and gathered in a thick bun stuffed with what looked like pencils or pens—or possibly chopsticks. Smudges on her nose and cheeks made her look as though she’d gotten too close to the frosting on a multicolored cupcake.

  I recognized her as the captain of the Disarray Dolphins, the school swim team. She wasn’t in any of my classes, and she moved too quickly for conversation in the halls. The one time I’d tried to speak to her, she’d been nearby when I said, “Hey, I like your back—” but was thirty feet away by the time I said, “—pack.” I’d been trying to compliment her on the very cool hand-painted rhinoceros on her bag, but it had come out as I like your back. Talk about awkward. I pulled Drew farther behind the tree.

  As we watched, a stream of coins rolled, spun, and tumbled into her pail. Just a few at first, then a bunch, then a trickle. Then none. She looked up, as if to see if any more were coming.

  “Modesty Brooker!” Drew blurted, then lost his balance and staggered forward. I stepped out after him, since I no longer saw any sense in hiding.

  “Hi,” I said, raising my hand in what I thought was a friendly greeting.

  She bolted, clutching her plastic bucket. She doubled back to snatch up her rhinocer
os backpack, then ran to a break in the fence. She wiggled through the gap, scrambled onto a bike, and was down the road before we’d even managed a step.

  “Hey! Come back!” I shouted after her. “We don’t want the money! We just want to talk!”

  She disappeared around the bend.

  “Okay,” said Drew. “That was strange.”

  “Strange isn’t the word for it,” I replied as we walked to the spot where she had been crouching. “Did we just dream that?”

  A dime rolled out of the weeds and bounced off Drew’s shoe. He picked it up.

  “I would say no—we didn’t dream it.”

  “Hey,” I said. “She forgot something.”

  I fished a three-ring binder out of the tall grass along the fence. Its cover was spattered with paint and frayed at the corners. I flipped it open.

  Handwritten at the top of the first sheet of loose-leaf were the words:

  To Gather Lost Coins

  The rest of the page was filled with gibberish. Odd syllables and real words were mixed together in sentences that meant nothing, as if they had been put together for the way they sounded rather than their sense.

  I turned the page. The second sheet had the heading:

  To Change the Color of a Room

  It was followed by the same kind of nonsense as on the first sheet.

  “What is this?” I wondered aloud.

  “Well,” said Drew, scanning the pages as I turned them, “as a guess, and based on what we just saw, I’d say… maybe…”

  “What?”

  “Maybe it’s a book of… magic?”

  CHAPTER 2

  A REALLY WELL-DONE DRAGON

  Cal, you can’t argue with what we saw,” Drew said half an hour later as we sat at one of the farm stand’s picnic tables, the binder open between us.

  From where we were, I could see cars pulling in and out of the parking lot. Business may have looked brisk, but it wasn’t; the overflow parking field on the other side of Route 9 was empty. So empty that I had an unobstructed view of the blackened remains of the Fireball 50 combine harvester in the wheat field beyond. I stared at it just long enough to get my usual queasy feeling, then shifted my gaze to the pumpkin-shaped sign by the roadside, which announced that this year’s corn maze, haunted hayride, and monster barn would have their spooktacular opening on Friday.