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

  “There’s no such thing as magic,” I said.

  The sound of hammering came from the barn. My dad and the five high school kids he had hired were putting up the walls of the creepy rooms that would soon be filled with weird furniture and monster mannequins. Starting Friday, these same five kids and ten others would dress up as creatures and jump out at anyone foolish enough to pay to walk through the place. I would have helped assemble the rooms, but I was scheduled to work in the stand later that afternoon, and my mom didn’t want me covered with sawdust or glue or some sticky combination of the two.

  “You know there’s no such thing as magic, and I know it,” Drew agreed, “but Modesty Brooker made nickels and dimes jump into a bucket without touching them. And she had this book, with a page that says To Gather Lost Coins at the top, with some sort of spell or incantation written on it.”

  “This is not a book of spells,” I said, pushing the notebook toward him. “It’s a three-ring binder. Every kid in school has one exactly like it. A book of spells would be… would be—”

  “What?”

  “Old, for one thing. And musty-smelling, with a padlock on it and a leather cover with a creepy pattern that might or might not be a face but suddenly bites your hand if you try to open it.” I flipped randomly to the book’s middle. The page it opened to was titled To Brighten Teeth.

  “And the spells would be written in blood with a raven’s quill pen, and they wouldn’t be about painting rooms or… or—”

  “Dental hygiene?” Drew suggested.

  “Exactly. And the pages in this book were obviously written with a pencil.” I gave the book a quarter turn and read the first line beneath Teeth.

  “‘Gum puppy stump mucky; foo fee rump yucky.’ Does that sound like magic to you? This can’t be a book of spells.”

  Drew turned the book back to him and flipped to the front.

  “Well,” he said. “There’s one way to find out. You should probably crouch down on the ground with your hands cupped together.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “To catch the coins that are going to start flying at us after I read the incantation.”

  I folded my arms defiantly in front of me and rested them on the tabletop.

  “Okay,” Drew said, “but some of those coins were moving pretty fast. Don’t blame me if you get a dime stuck in your ankle. Or a silver dollar slices off your big toe.”

  I kept my arms where they were.

  But I pulled my feet up.

  Drew propped the binder on my folded arms, as if that was why I was holding them there. He pulled his phone from his pocket and took a picture of the page he was about to read from.

  “In case it, you know, bursts into flame or something while I’m reading.”

  He started to put his phone away, then flipped the book and took pictures of the next two pages.

  “We don’t have time to snap the entire thing,” I said. “I have to be at work pretty soon.”

  “Just give me a sec,” he said, adjusting his glasses, then twiddling his fingers on the phone’s face some more.

  “Now what?”

  “Audio recording,” he replied, finally placing the phone to one side. “It’s what a scientist would do. For future study.”

  He turned his attention back to the book and, in as deep and solemn a voice as he could manage, began to read.

  “‘Mully ully goo gafsik hummus, portnoy fidget punko summus; Rastafast interabang gunk embargo, trundleheim thimblewits dum escargot—’”

  I giggled. Drew shot me an angry glance, then giggled, too.

  “It’s not going to work if we laugh,” he said, straightening his shoulders.

  “No,” I agreed, “there’s absolutely nothing funny about this,” and burst out laughing again.

  “You and I both saw the coins move,” Drew reminded me. “So there is some reason to think this might work. I’m starting over.”

  I took a deep breath and held it. This time, Drew didn’t stop reciting until he had uttered every silly word and nonsense syllable on the page. It took him about a minute to get through it, but it felt like an hour because I was biting my tongue after the first ten seconds. As soon as he spoke the final line—

  “‘Bullriggies blefuscu batburgers blintz; purple flirp baby birp conestoga mintz!’”

  —we both turned and looked around us.

  Nothing.

  An acorn fell and hit Drew on the head. We both cringed and raised our hands to protect ourselves in case he had mispronounced one of the words and accidentally turned the spell into one that caused nuts to rain from the sky.

  But the acorn was the only thing that fell, and after a moment, we both relaxed.

  “This is a kid’s notebook,” I said, riffling the pages. “There are cross-outs and scribbles, and if these are magic spells, most of them are ridiculous. I mean, To Open a Door. How lazy is that? In the time it would take to speak the words, you could get up, open every door in your house, and close them again.” I read off the names of more spells as the pages fluttered through my fingers. “To Walk with Stilts, To Untangle Yarn, To Cast a Reflection, To Repair a Chimney, To Get Chewing Gum Out of a Carpet, To Materialize a Storm Cloud—”

  A shadow fell across the table between us.

  “Hey,” said Drew, “you materialized a cloud just by saying—”

  “Give me my book back!”

  Drew and I jumped.

  Modesty Brooker was leaning over us. Up close, it turned out the sticks in her hair were paintbrushes, and the smudges on her face were paint. It made sense, since she was wearing an artist’s smock. She slammed her hand down on the notebook and yanked it away from us. Drew’s hand shot out and caught the book by the bottommost of its three rings.

  “Let go! It isn’t yours!” Modesty said angrily.

  “We found it in the grass,” I said.

  “I thought it was in my backpack.” She huffed. “I came back for it the moment I realized.”

  “Finders keepers?” Drew suggested, then looked like he regretted it as she spun the notebook to the right and twisted his fingers in the ring.

  “Owww.”

  “We were going to return it,” I said.

  “When?”

  “Monday. At school. We figured it was yours. It’s not like we stole it.”

  Modesty locked eyes with Drew.

  “Let go,” she said.

  He released the notebook. She tucked it under her arm and started to walk away. I grabbed Drew’s phone, held it up, and called after her, “We took video of the moving coins!”

  It was a lie, but I thought it might make her come back.

  It didn’t.

  “You’re in it,” I added.

  She stopped walking.

  She turned slowly and came back to us.

  “Video of coins moving by themselves could easily be faked using stop-motion photography,” she said testily, “so what you’ve got doesn’t prove a thing.”

  “There are always idiots who think the latest photo of Bigfoot is real,” I said. “No matter how fake it looks. If we sent our video to Milton Supman over at Channel Seven News, and he ran it in the Wide World of Weird segment, you’d have people camping out on your doorstep wanting to know how you got coins to jump into a bucket.”

  “Right!” agreed Drew. “Uh… just how did you do that? Get coins to jump into a bucket?”

  Modesty gave us a sour look.

  “If I tell you, will you delete the video?”

  “I promise you, no one will ever see it.” I held up my hand as a pledge.

  A family with three kids plunked themselves down at the table next to us, each of them with a steaming ear of corn from the snack bar, butter already running down their kernel-speckled chins.

  Modesty eyeballed them.

  “Anywhere we can go where it’s more private?” she asked.

  I glanced around, considered the abandoned poultry shed where we had once kept prize-winning c
hickens, then noticed the shadow that stretched across the shed’s roof.

  “You bet.” I nodded. “Follow me.”

  I threaded my way through the picnic tables, past the vacant goat pen, to the base of the fire lookout tower.

  The tower was a single room perched on top of four steel legs, with an open-air stairway that zigged four times and zagged five until you popped through a trapdoor in the floor of the cab, which is what a fire lookout tower room is called.

  I used my key to unlock the gate at the base of the stairs, locked it behind us once we were through, and the three of us climbed the 123 steps to the top.

  “Nice view,” Modesty said once we got there. She took a moment to turn 360 degrees, which is what most people do, to look out the glassless windows that stretch across all four walls and allow you to see, on a clear day, ten miles in any direction. To the west, it gave a good view of downtown Disarray.

  “People pay five bucks to come up here to look at the maze,” I said, stepping to the clunky pay-per-view binoculars bolted to the floor atop a green metal post.

  My dad said that the tower and binoculars had paid for themselves after only a single Halloween, eight years earlier. He had bought the tower for $900 and spent twice that to move it seventy miles from Tinderwood State Forest to the edge of our cornfield. The binoculars were surplus from a national park. The heart-shaped metal box that held the lenses always reminded me of the head of a space alien. I popped a quarter into the alien’s nose, looked into its eyes, and swiveled its head in Modesty’s direction. I jumped back when all I saw was her eyeball.

  “They study the maze for a while,” I continued, stepping aside and offering Modesty a free peek through the eyepieces, “then they head back down, pay their ten bucks to go into the maze, and they still get lost.”

  Modesty ignored my binocular offer and strolled to the east side of the cab. She leaned out the window a little. Then she leaned out a lot.

  “That’s a really well-done dragon!” she cried, sweeping her head back and forth to take in our cornfield.

  I leaned out next to her.

  “It sure is,” I agreed. “My dad says its name is Phlogiston.”

  The corn maze stretched out below us in a dozen shades of green. The walkways of the maze formed a picture of a giant dragon curled in on itself with its head in the center. The previous year, the maze had been in the shape of the high school football mascot—a tough-looking anteater—and the year before that, the Mona Lisa with crossed eyes staring at a spider on her nose. My mom says my dad’s mazes are what Michelangelo would have done, if Michelangelo had owned a tractor.

  “We really shouldn’t be leaning out this far,” I said.

  “It’s okay; I have perfect balance.” Modesty slid out even farther, stretched her arms forward and her legs back as if she were swimming, and teetered on the windowsill on the flat of her stomach. She looked from side to side. “Comes from years of dance class. Why did you paint your harvester black?” She pointed in the direction opposite the maze. “Just for Halloween?”

  I didn’t want to talk about it. “It’s not paint, okay? It’s… soot from when the harvester burned. Please come back inside.” I caught her by the wrist and dragged her into the cab. “If you fell out of the tower, I would get so yelled at.”

  “Harvester fire, huh? Those are more common than people think.” Modesty adjusted her smock. “I’ve got an uncle in Alberta—”

  “So how much did you make?” asked Drew, stepping between Modesty and me, this time changing the subject exactly the way he was supposed to.

  Modesty’s scowl, which had disappeared while she was admiring the view, came back.

  “How much did I make?”

  “From your coin collecting.”

  “I haven’t counted it yet,” she said sharply. “I came straight here the moment I realized I didn’t have the notebook. I knew where to go after the two of you popped out from behind the tree, and I thought, Oh, it’s Scarecrow Boy from the farm stand.”

  “You can call me Cal,” I said, “and I’ve only dressed as a scarecrow once. Three Halloweens ago as a character in the corn maze. The past two years, I’ve been the Grim Reaper. Little kids sit on my lap, tell me what they want for Halloween, and get their picture taken.”

  “Parents take pictures of their kids sitting on Death’s lap?” asked Modesty.

  “It’s a Halloween thing.”

  “What do most kids want?”

  “Candy.”

  Modesty walked back across the cab and stared down at the parking lot. Drew and I came over to see what she was pretending to be interested in. I could tell she didn’t want to say how she had caused coins to jump into a bucket.

  A big black limousine was pulling in to the farm stand, taking up three parking spots. Two guys with matching bald spots and business suits got out. They opened their trunk, lifted out a large cardboard box, and lugged it into the main building.

  “Those guys look rich,” said Modesty. “Maybe you’re going to make a big sale.”

  “Oh, we are,” I said glumly. “Those guys work for Davy’s Digital Vegetables. They’ve got my folks pretty much convinced to sell our land.”

  “Ick,” said Modesty. “I hate DDVs. Their cucumbers are awful. The seeds are completely unconvincing. I hope your parents don’t have to sell. At least, not to them.”

  “Maybe they won’t have to,” I said, “if I, like, knew a way to pick up some spare change….”

  It had already crossed my mind that the To Gather Lost Coins spell might be a way for me to help my folks. At the very least, it could mean money toward a new harvester.

  “It wouldn’t help,” said Modesty, returning to the table at the center of the cab and plunking the binder down on it. Drew had already left his phone there; Modesty’s hand twitched toward it, but then she refrained from grabbing it. “I’ve never managed to make more than four dollars any time I’ve tried.”

  “But the money does come to you,” Drew said, nodding encouragement.

  “Of course it does. I can be downright magnetic when I put my mind to it.”

  “Is that how it works?” I asked. “Magnetism?”

  “No, Scarecrow Boy.”

  “Cal,” I suggested.

  “It’s not magnetism.” She tapped the notebook with her finger. “It’s magic.”

  “I knew it,” said Drew.

  “The problem is,” she added, “magic only works for one minute each day.”

  CHAPTER 3

  SEVEN HUNDRED WORDS PER MINUTE

  Think about it,” said Modesty. “Why hasn’t anybody ever gotten magic to work? Everybody talks about it; everybody would love if magic existed; there are a zillion stories about magic, but nobody’s ever done it. Why? Because magic can’t be performed at any old time. It can only be done during one particular minute of the day.”

  “When?” I asked.

  “Twelve thirty-four in the afternoon.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. You’ve got sixty seconds. Twelve thirty-five rolls around, you’re done.”

  “That’s stupid,” said Drew.

  “Stupid or not, that’s how it works.”

  “How do you know this?” I was having enough trouble believing in magic. Magic with conditions was even less believable.

  “I figured it out. It took me two weeks. But nobody else has been able to figure it out ever, so I’m thinking that makes me smarter than anybody else who’s ever lived. Of course, I had the notebook and the bookmark, and they didn’t, so I suppose that gave me an edge. I’m not only very smart; I’m also very fair.”

  “But not modest. Despite your name.”

  “My sister Patience interrupts people all the time, my sister Serene has a temper you wouldn’t believe, and my sister Verity can’t be trusted. Mum says our names were supposed to help form our personalities.”

  “Why would she think that would work?”

  “Her name is Hope.” />
  “Bookmark?” asked Drew.

  Modesty frowned, as if she had let slip something she shouldn’t have. Then she shrugged and pulled a narrow slip of paper from one of her smock’s many pockets. She held it up so Drew and I could read it.

  If a child had written the pages in the notebook, then an adult using a quill-tip pen had carefully lettered the writing on the bookmark.

  IRKSOME’S SEVEN INSIGHTS

  Magic is fluid.

  Magic evolves.

  The three levels of magic are: Everybody, Somebody, and Very Few.

  Dragons are the source of magic—unless it’s something they ate.

  The noblest use of magic is to accomplish household chores.

  Magic isn’t arbitrary—it only looks that way.

  Popcorn.

  “This was in the book when I found it,” Modesty explained, “in between the pages marked To Summon the Forces of Torque and To Open a Door. It’s what made me think the things in the book might be incantations.”

  Drew reached for the bookmark. Modesty tucked it back into her smock.

  “How can popcorn be an insight?” I asked.

  “You’d have to ask Irksome—whoever, or whatever, Irksome is,” Modesty replied.

  “Where did you get the book?” asked Drew. “Somewhere in that weird old house of yours?”

  I glanced at him. Modesty’s house was as old as mine. It was the same size and style. Drew had never called my house “weird.”

  “I found it in my gym locker.”

  “Your… gym locker?”

  “Three weeks ago, on the first day of school. Ms. Dalton assigned me the locker, and when I opened it, there was the notebook. I was going to turn it in, but when I searched for a name, I found the bookmark, and that got me interested. I took the book home and tried reading some of the incantations out loud. I chanted them, I sang them, I shouted them.”

  “What happened?” asked Drew.

  “Serene told me if I didn’t knock it off, she’d staple my lips shut. That was all right, because I was feeling pretty silly, since nothing magical had happened. But the next morning, after a good night’s sleep, it occurred to me: Maybe magic has rules, and I wasn’t following them. Maybe I should have recited the incantations outdoors or with a cone-shaped hat on or in the locker room where I first found the book. So I tried those things and dozens of others, including reciting the incantations with a mouthful of popcorn—I don’t recommend that—and when that didn’t work, I finally thought, well, Maybe magic works better at certain times of the day.”