The Magic Spectacles E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 257

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

A YA adventure from World Fantasy Award winning author James P. Blaylock. A suddenly appearing curiosity shop owned by a small man who might, or might not, be the Man in the Moon; a pair of strange spectacles buried in a fishbowl full of marbles; an old window glazed with sea-green glass found beneath a suburban house; and two adventurous boys who buy the spectacles and climb through the window into a land of goblins, ghosts, and rope ladders that reach to the moon... Who exactly is Mr. Deener, the fat man who makes magic out of bits of coloured glass, has a passion for glazed doughnuts, and whose seeming twin brother sleeps fitfully in an attic room? And who are the little men who ride out of the forest on windblown sycamore leaves in order to whisper into Mr. Deener's ear? Is Mr. Deener, like a fallen Humpty Dumpty, broken apart? John and Danny need to know. To find their way home they'll have to put Mr. Deener back together again and solve the mystery of the sleeping land - a task that leads them to the pool of reflections in the deep woods and ultimately to a house built of light and magic and memory that sits at the edge of the heart's ocean. PRAISE FOR JAMES P. BLAYLOCK: "Blaylock is one of the most brilliant of that new generation of fabulist writers." — Washington Post Book World "Blaylock allows us to see the mundane world through new eyes, to perceive the familar as strange and therefore fascinating - for what it is as well as for what it might be." — Charles de Lint "[Blayock has]...a gift for drawing characters who are eccentric in delightful and original ways, whichever side of the war they are on." — Publishers Weekly

Leseprobe

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. BlaylockAll 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 gazing 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.

John suddenly wanted to buy them all. Marbles were like any sort of treasure; you needed a pile of them. The bigger the pile the better.

On the sign over the door was painted a picture of a man walking along a road, carrying a bundle of sticks. There was a full moon with a cheerful face in the sky above him. Under the painting were the words, “Come In.” So John pushed the door open, and he and Danny stepped through it, into the dimly-lit shop.

Chapter 4: The Fishbowl Full of Marbles

The shop was cool inside and full of odds and ends, all of it dusty. Stuff was piled on old tables and falling in heaps out of open wardrobes and spilling from the shelves of bookcases. Hanging from the rafters in the high ceiling was the skeleton of a giant bird held together with silver wire. There were books everywhere, all of them dark and old. There were stuffed bats and pictures of apes and clipper ships and old houses and serious looking people in bonnets and top hats. There was a jar with an enormous eye in it, and no end of old candles and silverware and crystal glasses. On the counter sat a lamp built out of an iron fish.

The little man in the green cap sat behind the counter on a tall stool. He had a book in his hand, and he peeked at John and Danny over the top of it. His bag full of tied-together sticks lay on the floor in front of the counter.

“What do you need?” he asked them. “Or more to the point, what do you want?” They could only see his eyes and half his nose. The rest of him was hidden by the book and the counter.

“Marbles,” John said, looking around. There was probably lots of other stuff in there he wanted too, but right now the marbles were enough. They didn’t have much money left after the pancakes.

“In the fishbowl,” Danny said. “In the window. We don’t need the glasses, though.”

The little man nodded. The point of his green cap wagged up and down. “You see very clearly, then?”

John shrugged and kicked Danny’s foot just to make sure that Danny knew how weird all this was. “I guess we just don’t want the glasses,” John said. “Just as many marbles as we can buy.”

Danny dug the rest of the change out of his pocket. “We have about a dollar,” he said.

Slowly the man’s head rose over the top of his book, until his whole face peered down at Danny’s handful of nickels and dimes. He rubbed the side of hi nose and asked, “Do you have a penny with the face of a man on it?”

“Abraham Lincoln,” Danny said.

“I was thinking of a different man, actually. The Man in the Moon.”

The wind blew so hard outside right then that it rattled the windows, and the air was full of leaves and dust. The sign over the door creaked and banged. The little man pretended to read his book again, but he watched Danny out of one eye.

For a moment John hoped that Danny wouldn’t find the moon penny. They shouldn’t have taken it from the fountain. It was connected somehow to the wind blowing outside and to autumn leaves and fish skeletons and window and sparrow sleeping in the grass.

But then Danny took it out of his pocket. He held it under the light of the iron fish lamp, and John stepped up next to him in order to get a better look.

The eyes of the moon-faced man on the coin were shut now, as if he had fallen asleep but hadn’t taken his spectacles off. John couldn’t be completely certain that his eyes had been open before, but he thought that they had been. And now, just as he looked more closely at the face, the eyes seemed to move behind their eyelids, like the eyes of a man dreaming.

The little man put his book down and took a magnifying glass out from under the counter. Except for the sound of the wind, it was ghostly silent. The shadows of leaves danced on the window pane and threw shadows across the floor. Through the magnifying glass the little man’s eye was enormous, like a whale’s eye.

“This is just what I want,” he said, nodding at them. “Moon penny. These are very rare. You don’t see one in a thousand years. I had one very much like this but I threw it into a fountain and made a wish. Are you sure you want to spend it?”

Danny didn’t say anything for a moment, as if he had swallowed something and was waiting for it to go down his throat. “Sure,” he said finally.

“I told you to leave it in the fountain,” John whispered.

“Take the marbles,” the little man said. “But it’s only fair to tell you that they aren’t all there; this is only some of them. They used to belong to a man, but he…lost them. Some day maybe he’ll want them back, and then you’ll have to give them up.”

(Chapter 4 continues after illustration)

“No problem,” Danny said. John nodded. It didn’t seem very likely. The little man dropped the moon penny through a slot cut in the top of the iron fish. Several seconds later there was a clank and a rattle of coins, as if the penny had fallen a long, long way, to the bottom of a well, maybe.

“Take the spectacles too,” he said. “You’ve bought the whole package, fishbowl and all. But if you meet the man who lost his marbles, think twice before you give him the spectacles. Don’t mean to alarm you, but they can be used for fell purposes. Like water, you know; you can drink it, and you can drown in it. Do you follow me?”

John nodded again. He didn’t follow a thing. He didn’t want the spectacles, but somehow he had them anyway. Or at least Danny had them. It had been his coin, after all….

“No exchanges, no refunds,” the little man said. He pointed to a sign on the wall. “All Sales Final,” it read.

He picked up his book again and pretended to look at it, but John was pretty sure that he watched them over the top of the pages as they picked up the fishbowl and went out. The wind slammed the door shut, and both of them jumped in surprise. When they turned around to look, the interior of the shop was dark again except for the fish lamp glowing way back in the shadows.

The sign hanging over the door was turned around. The old man painted on it was walking away from them now, carrying his sticks. The moon was asleep overhead. “Closed Up,” the sign read.

Chapter 5: The Treasure Under the House

They parked their bikes under the carport in the driveway. It was nearly noon. Across the street old Mr. Skink was raking dead leaves into a pile on his lawn, and Harvey Chickel, who lived at the end of the block and around the corner, was riding his skateboard up and down the sidewalk. Harvey looked bored, like he was having a terrible time. Being bored was his second favorite thing to do. His first favorite was causing other people trouble.

John knew that Harvey had seen them ride up. Harvey hadn’t waved because he wanted to let them know how bored he was. That meant Harvey hadn’t seen the fishbowl, which was good. Harvey had a problem with stealing things, and he wouldn’t look nearly so bored any more if he had seen it.

The fishbowl felt extra heavy, as if John had been carrying it for ten miles instead of ten blocks. When he was sure that Harvey wasn’t looking, he took the spectacles out of the marbles and put them into his jacket pocket. At once the fishbowl felt about half as heavy, as if the spectacles had been too full of gravity. He wondered if that was scientific. Did gravity make things heavy by filling them up? Or did it just sort of sit on things, and mash them down? He would have to start a gravity chapter in his book.

Carefully, he put the fishbowl down on the porch, hiding it behind a potted plant. Across the street, Mr. Skink paused to light his pipe, and just then the wind picked up his pile of leaves and blew it in every direction. Mr. Skink tried to stop them by waving his bamboo rake around as if he was trying catch butterflies in a net. Harvey Chickel burst into loud laughter and fell off his skateboard onto the grass. He rolled around and beat his hands on the ground.

“It wasn’t that funny,” Danny said. Danny didn’t like Harvey Chickel at all.

Mr. Skink said something to Harvey then, but John couldn’t hear what it was. Harvey stood up and said something back, and then Mr. Skink pointed at him with the stem of his pipe and said, very loudly, “I oughta…” and Harvey rode away on his skateboard before Mr. Skink had a chance to say what he oughta do. When he was half a block farther down the street, Harvey turned around and laughed out loud again, as if he had just then remembered how funny the whole thing was.

A door shut a couple of houses down, and an instant later their friend Kimberly stepped off her front porch. Actually it was the front porch of Mrs. Owlswick’s house, Kimberly’s aunt. Kimberly was a year older than John. She had long blonde hair and dreamy eyes. Her hair was tied into a pony tail with a red ribbon, and for some reason she was wearing a dress.

“Are you looking at her hard enough?” Danny asked. “Maybe you should take a picture.”

“It’s you that should take a picture,” John said.

Smiling, Danny said, “Right.”

Harvey Chickel hadn’t turned the corner toward home, but was skating up and down at the end of the block now. He must have seen Kimberly come out. Go home, John thought, but Harvey sat down on the curb as if he was waiting for something. He flipped his skateboard into the air so that it banged down onto the street. Then he pounded it against the curb a couple times, showing off.

Kimberly carried a red metal box about half as big as a loaf of bread. “Look at what I found,” she said, walking up to John and Danny and holding out the box.

The lid had a picture of a fountain on it, like the fountain in the Plaza. Beyond it sat a house on a hill. The house had diamond-paned windows and smoke curling up out of three chimneys. Flowering vines grew across the porch. On the roof stood a weather vane shaped like a fish skeleton. It pointed toward the rising moon, which was coming up between two hills. Under the picture were the words, East, West, Home’s Best.

“What a great can,” John said, staring at the fish skeleton. “Where did you get it?

“It used to belong to my uncle,” Kimberly said. “I found it under the house, behind where the old window was. Look at all this stuff.”

She opened the lid. Inside was a heap of costume jewelry, with big rhinestones that looked like diamonds and emeralds. There were glass prisms and tiny glass perfume bottles and a glass saltshaker shaped like… a fish.

“You found all that under the house? It’s like a treasure or something,” John said.