The Magic Spectacles Read Online Free PDF

shreds of paper and who knows what-all kinds of tiny stuff left on the wooden floor. John held his jacket by the neck, gave it a flourish like a magician’s cape, and whipped it back and forth through the air, a couple of inches above the floor. As quick as winking, dust and debris swirled into the air, sand and craps shot away under the bed and dressers. Like magic, the floor was clean. He bowed, dropping his jacket onto his bed.
    There were three books that wouldn’t fit into the bookcase, so Danny stuffed two of them into his shirt drawer and said that he was through too. “I’ll read this one,” he said, and then flopped down on his bed and opened the third book.
    John sat down on his own bed and stared out the window. Someday someone would invent a robot to clean bedrooms. Once he and Danny had built one out of tin cans tied together with string, but it wouldn’t stand up. Because of that they had called it “the sleeping robot” for a while, but then Harvey Chickel had stepped on its head and smashed it. After that they called it “the dead robot” until it was left outside in the rain and got rusty and their father threw it away.
    The house was quiet now, with only the sound of the wind whispering outside. It was a late-afternoon sort of quiet, lonesome and still, and it reminded John of being in the curiosity shop that morning. The whole room was washed in underwater colors from the sunlight shining through Mrs. Owlswick’s window.
    The spectacles lay on the windowsill where John had put them an hour ago. He had forgotten all about them. The watery light shone through them, too, and reflected from the wooden floor in green, over-lapping circle.
    Something seemed to be moving through the spectacles light, like dim pictures on a movie screen. There were leafy tree waving in the wind and the shadow-shapes of distant hills. Specks of dust floated through the light like drifting autumn leaves. Then clouds moved across the sun outside, and the green light dimmed and was gone.
    (Chapter 7 continues after illustration)

John picked the spectacles up and put them on in order to look out the window. And what he saw through the window was curious – as curious as anything that had happened so far that day.
    The wall of their bedroom seemed to be gone. The toybox, the desk, the window curtains had disappeared, and there was only Mrs. Owlswick’s window floating in the air. The bedroom had vanished around it. He could still catch a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye if he looked sideways past the edge of the spectacles. But
through
the spectacles there was nothing but the window, floating there.
    And beyond it, as if the window were a framed picture, was a meadow full of wildflowers. The whole street had disappeared: the front porch, the lawn, the sidewalk, Mr. Skink’s house – all of it was gone. Instead, on beyond the meadow, there was a woods with a stream running out of it. The sky was blue, with only a couple of clouds drifting through it like windblown fog, and the full moon sailing among the cloud like a ship at sea.
    A house with three chimneys sat above the woods and the meadow on a distant, lonesome hill. John could just make out the weather vane on top. It was shaped like the skeleton of a fish

Chapter 8: Through the Bedroom Window
    John took the spectacles off, blinked his eyes hard, and looked carefully at the lenses. Maybe there was something painted on them….
    There wasn’t. They were the pale green color of water in a sunlit well, but they were perfectly clear.
    He put the spectacles back on and took another look through the window Beyond the far-off house were mountains, bending around and falling away toward a big wash of blue-green, that might be the sky or might be the sea. The moon hung in the sky over the house, and smoke from one of the chimneys rose past it like cloud-drift. The world through the window was almost round, as if it sat on the inside of a very clear marble or on the