The Chocolate Touch Read online

  Dedication

  For Sheila, Ellen,

  Charlotte, and Desmond.

  Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Most of the time John Midas was a very nice boy. Every now and then, of course, he broke a rule, such as the rule against pretending to be a tiger when his sister, Mary, was supposed to be getting to sleep. Generally speaking, however, he behaved very well.

  He should have behaved better.

  He lived in a comfortable house surrounded by a green lawn and wide-spreading shade trees that were suitable for climbing. His mother was gentle as well as practical. His father, when he didn’t have to hurry to town, spent hours telling John interesting things about baseball, beetles, birds’ nests, boats, brigands, and butterflies.

  John went to school and liked it. His teacher, Miss Plimsole, was fairly easy to get along with, as long as he did careful work. He had received a new, shiny golden trumpet and music lessons as a going-to-school present. Mrs. Quaver, the music teacher, had soon agreed to let him play small parts, a few notes at a time, with the school orchestra.

  Finally, there was Susan Buttercup, who was in his class. Susan had soft yellow curls, round pink cheeks, blue eyes, and one of the best collections of marbles in the neighborhood.

  John should have been completely well-behaved. But he wasn’t.

  He had one bad fault: he was a pig about candy. Boiled candy, cotton candy, licorice all-sorts, old-fashioned toffee, candied orange and lemon slices, crackerjack, jelly beans, fudge, black-currant lozenges for ticklish throats, nougat, marrons gláces, acid drops, peppermint sticks, lollipops, marshmallows, and, above all, chocolates—he devoured them all.

  While other boys and girls spent their money on model airplanes, magazines, skipping ropes, and pet lizards, John studied the candy counters. All his money went on candy, and all his candy went to himself. He never shared it. John Midas was candy mad.

  At lunch one Saturday Mrs. Midas noticed a couple of little red spots on the end of John’s nose. “Look,” she said to Mr. Midas. “John has spots.”

  Mr. Midas leaned forward to look at them. He gravely shook his head and clicked his tongue. John tried to look too. But it is very difficult to see the end of your own nose without a mirror unless you happen to be an elephant with a long nose that you can bend double. When John tried to look at the end of his nose, first with one eye and then with the other, and then with both together, all that he could see was a pink blur. Besides, trying to look at something so close made his eyes ache.

  “I can’t see any spots, Mother,” John said.

  “Well, I can,” Mr. Midas said. “Just because you don’t see a thing doesn’t always mean it isn’t there. Try feeling the end of your nose with your finger.”

  John rubbed his finger over the tip of his nose. It felt a bit rough.

  “It may be measles,” Mrs. Midas said anxiously. She placed her hand on John’s forehead to feel whether he was warmer than usual. “But I don’t think he has a temperature,” she decided.

  “I suspect John has been eating too much candy again,” Mr. Midas said. “Have you been eating candy this morning, John?”

  “Some,” John admitted.

  “What?” Mr. Midas asked.

  “Well,” John replied. “Well . . . I had a few Cream Delights. Susan gave them to me.”

  “Anything else?” Mr. Midas asked.

  “A little Toffee Crunch,” John said.

  “And what else?” Mr. Midas asked, beginning to look cross.

  John’s ears grew red. He knew he wasn’t supposed to eat candy before meals. “Oh, only, er, oh . . . hardly anything else,” he said.

  “John!” Mr. Midas said, and his son recognized the tone. It meant that John had to tell everything.

  It turned out that John had been around to see most of his friends and had managed to get candy from nearly all of them. The list he recited was a long one.

  “No wonder you have spots,” Mr. Midas commented at last. “I think we’d better take John to see Dr. Cranium,” he said to Mrs. Midas.

  Dr. Cranium was a tall, thin man with a bald head and a gray mustache. He looked through his glasses at John and said, “Hmm.”

  “He eats a lot of candy,” Mr. Midas said.

  “He hasn’t been eating his meals properly,” Mrs. Midas said.

  “That’s just what I thought,” Dr. Cranium said. “I can tell by looking at him that he eats much too much candy.” The doctor shone a little electric light into John’s right ear. Then he shone it into John’s left ear. Then he shone it in John’s nose. He told John to open wide and say ah. Then he shone the light into John’s mouth. “Much too much candy! Gracious me—he seems to be full of candy!”

  He told John to sit down and relax. Then he picked up a small rubber-headed hammer and gave John a light tap on the right knee, just below the joint. John’s foot gave a weak kick. John giggled.

  “It’s nothing to laugh about,” Mr. Midas said.

  “No, John,” the doctor reproved him. “A healthy little boy who didn’t eat too much candy would kick harder than that.”

  “I’m sorry,” John said politely. “But I can kick harder if you want me to.” He gave a sudden high kick, which knocked the hammer out of Dr. Cranium’s hand. It landed on its rubber head and bounced across the room.

  “John!” exclaimed Mrs. Midas. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Cranium. John, tell the doctor you’re sorry for kicking his hammer.”

  “I’m sorry I kicked your hammer,” John said.

  “I would recommend less candy,” Dr. Cranium told Mr. and Mrs. Midas. “An upset stomach can lead to all sorts of complications.”

  On the way home Mrs. Midas tried to explain to John what she thought the doctor meant by complications. “You see,” she said, “if you put too much of one kind of food in your stomach and not enough of other kinds, it is bad for your whole body, because different parts of your body need different kinds of food. Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” John said.

  “You’ve been eating so much sweet stuff,” Mr. Midas added, “that there isn’t room for eggs and meat and milk and bread and spinach and apples and fish and bananas and all the other things you’re supposed to have to make you grow big and strong.”

  “I like bananas,” John said. “Especially in thin slices covered with chocolate. They’re called Banana Surprises.”

  Mr. Midas looked at Mrs. Midas, and Mrs. Midas looked at Mr. Midas. They both shrugged their shoulders. Sometimes it was hard to make John understand things.

  At home, while Mrs. Midas was busy in the kitchen, Mr. Midas continued to reason with John. “You mean you’d rather eat candy than anything else, and chocolate rather than any other kind of candy?” Mr. Midas asked.

  “Yes!” John assured him. “Oh, yes!”

  “Don’t you think there’s such a thing as enough?” Mr. Midas persisted. “Don’t you think that things are best in their places? I mean, don’t you think there’s a time for spaghetti and a time for roast beef and even a time for pickled herring and garlic toast, as well as a time for chocolate? Or would you rather have chocolate all the time?”

  “Chocolate all the time,” John replied emphatically. “Chocolate’s best, that’s all. Other things are
just food. But chocolate’s chocolate. Chocolate—”

  “I think I understand,” Mr. Midas broke in sharply. “Very well.” He took a deep breath and went on. “John,” he said, “if you can’t understand what sort of diet is really best for you, can’t you at least get it into your head that you make your mother very unhappy when you eat so much candy that you can’t eat anything else?”

  The conversation always seemed to get around to the effect of John’s candy eating on John’s mother. John couldn’t see how it could possibly do her any harm if he ate candy.

  He sat silent for a moment. Then he said, “May I go out and play, please, Daddy?”

  2

  It was Sunday afternoon. The sun was sinking low in the sky, but the air was still quite warm. John was wandering along in the direction of Susan’s house, absentmindedly looking down at the sidewalk, when his eye was suddenly caught by a dully gleaming, silvery gray coin lying right in his path.

  The coin was the size of a quarter. But even as he leaned forward eagerly to pick it up, John noticed there was something strange about it. It did not have a picture of George Washington or a picture of an eagle. On one side there was a picture of a fat boy; on the other side were the letters J.M.—which was funny, John thought, because those letters happened to be his initials.

  Grasping the coin firmly, he ran on toward Susan’s house. She liked to collect things. He thought she might be interested to know that he had the beginning of a coin collection.

  Although he was in the habit of going over to Susan’s by the same route once or twice almost every day, this afternoon John found himself turning left where he usually turned right.

  I always go the same way, he thought. This time, for a change, I’m going a new way.

  He didn’t stop to consider that you cannot go east by going west, unless you go all the way around the world.

  Only two blocks along the unfamiliar street, John came to a small corner store. It was a neat red-brick building with two big show windows. They were full of all sorts of candy. Susan was immediately, absolutely forgotten. John pressed his nose against one of the windows. He was imagining the taste of the chocolate-covered almonds and chocolate fudge on the other side of the glass when he noticed a man in a white apron standing behind the counter and beckoning to him. John was surprised. He hadn’t expected the store to be open on Sunday.

  “Don’t just stand there in the doorway, John,” the man called heartily. “Come on in and get some fresh, sweet, creamy chocolate. There’s a special sale today.”

  How did the man know his name? John wondered. He couldn’t remember ever having seen the store before.

  The storekeeper saw John hesitate. “The chocolate I use in my kitchen comes direct from the heart of Africa,” he said. “I use none but the finest ingredients. And my recipes—! Well, I bet you’ve never had chocolates like mine before. Come on in.”

  “Thank you,” John replied, walking to the counter. “But you see the trouble is . . . well. . . .”

  “No money?” the storekeeper asked. “No money whatsoever? What’ve you got there in your right hand?”

  John had forgotten the old coin in his hand. “Oh,” he said, “this is part of my coin collection. I mean,” he added more honestly, “I’m going to save this coin and then get some more to make a collection.”

  “Let me have a look at it,” the storekeeper said. He looked briefly at the coin. “Aha!” he exclaimed.

  “Is it any good?” John asked, his hopes suddenly rising.

  “Very good,” said the storekeeper. “In fact, it’s the only kind of money I accept. But I don’t suppose that you’d want to spend it on a box—”

  “A whole box?”

  “I imagine you’d rather keep this for your coin collection than spend it on chocolate, wouldn’t you?”

  “Oh, no!” John said. “Chocolate any day!”

  “Go ahead then. Help yourself,” the storekeeper said, pointing to a heavily laden show table piled high with large cellophane-wrapped candy boxes, all exactly alike.

  “You mean I can have one of these?” John asked, his eyes round with surprise. The candy boxes were as big as the ones his father always brought home at Christmas time.

  “Just help yourself,” the storekeeper assured him. “That is, unless you think it might be better to ask your mother first.”

  “She wouldn’t mind,” John said hastily, and blushed.

  The storekeeper winked knowingly. “I’m sure she won’t,” he agreed. “Not in the long run, anyway.”

  John tucked one of the large boxes under his arm, declined the storekeeper’s offer to wrap it as a gift, thanked him, and hurried out of the store before there could be any question of anyone’s changing his mind.

  The storekeeper smiled as he watched his customer hurrying away down the street.

  John decided that it might be sensible to enter his house quietly by way of the kitchen. With the large candy box hidden behind him, he let himself in by the back door and crept up the kitchen stairway on tiptoe toward his own room on the top floor. Just as he was about to round the corner on the second floor to continue his way upstairs, he had to stop for a moment while his father walked by, coming along the hall from the bedroom telephone.

  “That was Mrs. Buttercup on the phone,” Mr. Midas called to Mrs. Midas, as he walked down the front stairs. “She said she was sorry John hadn’t been able to get over to play with Susan this afternoon. But it was a good thing in a way, she thought, because Susan’s already so excited about her birthday party tomorrow. I wonder where John can have got to.”

  As soon as the second floor was quiet again and John knew there was no danger that his candy box would be seen, he hurried silently up to his bedroom, pushed open the door, and slid the box under the bed. Then he walked heavily down to the living room.

  “Well, there you are,” said Mrs. Midas. “We couldn’t imagine where you had been. What have you been doing?”

  “Oh, just sort of playing around,” John said.

  John usually took a long time to put his things away and undress and bathe and get ready for bed, for he thought sleeping was a waste of time. But this evening he started yawning long before his usual bedtime.

  “Ho, hum. Ho-o-o, hum-m-m. Sleepy,” John announced.

  “All right,” said Mrs. Midas, “you’d better be getting to bed. Time for your tonic.”

  John’s tonic came in a bottle. It had been prescribed by Dr. Cranium. John had to drink a big spoonful every night to make up for all the vegetables and fruit that he left on his plate at lunch and dinner. The tonic tasted like soap, mud, glue, ink, and paint. It tasted horrible.

  Much to Mrs. Midas’s surprise, John ran ahead of her to the dining-room cupboard where the tonic and the tonic spoon were kept. By the time she got there he had already filled the spoon. Then, without any coaxing, he emptied it into his mouth.

  “Ugh!” John spluttered. “Oof! Baw!”

  “That’s a very good boy,” Mrs. Midas said. “Now why can’t you be sensible and eat up your nice dinner that way? If you’d only stop eating so much candy, you’d be able to eat your meals properly and you wouldn’t need to take the tonic.”

  Soon John was scrubbed and in his pajamas and in bed, ready to be tucked in for the night. Mrs. Midas sat on the bed and stroked his forehead for a moment. Then she leaned forward and kissed his cheek. John, pretending that he was very sleepy, shut his eyes and began breathing deeply.

  When Mrs. Midas rejoined Mr. Midas in the living room, she said, “I’ve never known John to be so good about going to bed before. He went to sleep in no time.”

  A few seconds after the bedroom door had closed behind his mother, John leaped to the floor, got down on his hands and knees, and felt under the bed for the candy box. He soon had it on the pillow and set to work unfastening it. First he took off the thin outer sheet of cellophane. Then he lifted off the lid. Then he removed a sheet of cardboard. Then he pulled off a square of heavy tin
foil. Then he took out a layer of shredded paper.

  As the wrappings piled up around him, John became rather anxious. At last he came to a small central ball of cotton batting, and there, right in the middle, was a little golden ball. He picked at the ball with his fingernail and peeled away the gold paper, revealing a tiny piece of plain chocolate. It was the only piece of chocolate in the whole box.

  Deeply disappointed, John nevertheless put it into his mouth. He had never tasted a chocolate quite like it. It was the most chocolaty chocolate he had ever encountered.

  3

  The birds were chirping in the tree outside John’s window, and the sky beyond was deep blue. The bedroom door opened a few inches. “Hey, sleepy!” Mrs. Midas called. “Everyone else is up!”

  John put on his bathrobe and slippers and ambled to the bathroom. His sister, Mary, was still brushing her teeth, and he had to wait until she finished.

  “Come on, Mary,” he said a little crossly. “Don’t take all morning.”

  “Here you are,” Mary said, handing him the toothpaste tube.

  While Mary soaped her face, John squeezed a little of the toothpaste onto his brush. The paste was pink. John made a face at his toothbrush. It didn’t seem fair that he should have to brush his teeth with stuff that tasted just like his tonic. “A stinky taste,” he called it.

  John opened his mouth and pushed in the end of the toothbrush. As soon as it touched his front teeth, he noticed a delicious sweetness in his mouth, a taste of the best kind of chocolate. He pushed the brush to and fro, and the taste seemed to grow stronger. He removed the brush. The bristles were brown.

  “What kind of toothpaste is this?” John asked.

  Mary was drying her face. “The same kind,” she answered. “It says on the tube.”

  “Blanco-Dent,” John read. It was the same kind they had always had.

  “Why’s it chocolate-flavored this time?” he asked. “Boy, it’s good!”

  “Silly!” Mary said. “Course it isn’t chocolate!” She hung up her towel and swished out of the bathroom.