August rifled through his old desk’s many cubbies and drawers, all stuffed with the kind of household junk that accumulates, gathering dust for decades: yellowing bills and invoices, tarnished sports medals, rusted hatpins, and solitary playing cards.

“I’m certain I saw…,” he mumbled. “Aha! Here it is.” August withdrew a plastic net bag containing a collection of random marbles and, opening it, withdrew the largest.

It was a beauty, the size of an apricot. The vivid amber glass with a swirl of jet-black at its center reminded August of an alligator’s eye. Marbles this enormous, he knew, were sometimes referred to as “toe breakers,” for the damage they might cause if carelessly dropped on one’s foot.

Before him, August placed a rigid, vertical wire, with a large coil at bottom to serve as a stand. Using mounting glue, he adhered the huge marble to a smaller loop at the top of the wire.

The wire stand was twisted and painted brown to resemble a string. In reality, it supported the heavy glass marble, but it appeared to dangle from it, the end trailing on the ground.

To support the illusion of weightlessness and flight, August had added a boy-sized skeleton with unusually large, round eyes. A tiny paper butterfly perched upon its head. The skeleton boy’s fist tightly gripped the “string,” and his feet were inches above the tabletop. The model was clearly designed to suggest the boy was being carried off by an orange balloon, to some unknown place and adventure—a party perhaps.

August sat back to admire his creation and the light refracting through the amber marble. It was his best model to date, surpassing even the clown Kevin in detail and beauty. Lately, you see, he had had plenty of spare time to work on it.

One solitary butterfly, the “intruder within,” had revealed to Hydrangea that the front door had been opened, and worse, that her nephew was…outside! She had discovered him bounding up the porch steps, trailed by a flurry of airborne monsters.

The woman had promptly declared herself “unraveled as a porcupine’s sweater!” and withdrawn (with the front-door key) to her bedroom, where she had spent two days weeping and torturing lace handkerchiefs. All homeschooling had been suspended, and other than frequently preparing trays of fortified tea, August had been left to his own devices.

Given the fragility of Hydrangea’s condition, August had decided it best to keep the encounter with the boys at the gate to himself. It would be easier on his aunt’s nerves, he thought, to process one out-of-the-ordinary occurrence at a time.

But Hydrangea’s recuperation was about to be roughly terminated.

A sudden, jarring, metallic jingle resounded throughout the hollow spaces of Locust Hole, causing August to jump violently. He rushed to the staircase landing, from where he could see the hallway below. Hydrangea stumbled from her room, disheveled, wild-eyed, and ashen.

“What is that sound?” hissed August.

“Why…I,” stammered Hydrangea, flustered and confused, “I believe it’s the doorbell!”