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Jarrod Blackwell is an evolutionarily advanced twelve-year-old with godlike powers of creation.  Born in 1857, the son of the magician The Great Blackwell, he astounds audiences with his highly imaginative stage performances.  After the last show, in the dead of night, Jarrod and his father amuse themselves by playing with the monsters the boy creates, called Dark Things.  On the way to a special show, The Great Blackwell is assassinated in an ambush.  Rather than face the uncertain, harsh life of an orphan, Jarrod escapes underground where he creates a new world for himself, which he calls the Root.

One hundred and thirty years later, thirteen-year-old Tony Magellan’s life is as exciting as a young adult’s life can be.  He is part of a creative team consisting of himself and his parents, Jill and Victor Magellan.  Their largest creative effort to date is the development of a carnival amusement called the Horror Box, which features a mechanical, interactive, computer-controlled spiderlike creature named Ophelia.

Jarrod, who can “see” outward from the Root, decides to take the biggest chance of his very long life, and venture outside to make a new friend. One day, while Tony is out conducting a dangerous experiment, Jarrod meets him.  The godlike child appears to be Tony’s age, and reveals his secrets. The two embark on tremendous adventures which range from quick side trips to the Moon in a special craft to death-defying games with the Dark Things.

One day, after a series of accidental missteps, Jarrod is arrested as a runaway and placed into custody. Confined and sedated, the magical boy is unable to apply his own powers to keep himself youthful, and begins to age at an alarming rate. In a daring rescue, Tony frees his new friend, but another misstep takes them on a perilous detour to the country of Iraq. When they finally return to the Root, thinking all is okay, they discover that Tony's parents have also learned Jarrod's secret and are already inside. The adults have inadvertently freed two of the massive Dark Things! All seem doomed until Jarrod is able to summon enough power to engage in one final duel-to-the-death with the fearsome creatures. All but the Dark Things survive, and Jarrod embarks on a new life with his new family.

"This is our spider web game. Usually, we play it out in the dirt. When you tap the base, the arm starts to move. Anywhere the tip touches the frame, it attaches a strand of fake spider web. Then it draws it out until it touches somewhere else, and it keeps going until it makes a pattern. The pattern's never the same twice. The game is to try to guess what the pattern will be and be the first to draw it in the dirt."

The boy tapped the solid gold base, and the arm started to move. At the tip's first point of contact with the inside of the octagonal frame, it attached the beginning of an iridescent red strand. As the arm moved away, the strand elongated, attaching itself to the next point where the tip touched. Delicate ricochets kept the arm moving. It reminded Tony of a spirograph game he had when he was younger. Soon, a pattern began to emerge.

"And this one is just for daydreaming," Jarrod explained, stepping over to the next toy. It looked like a square sieve made of solid gold, one foot on each side and three inches thick. There were one hundred and forty-four holes formed into it, but they didn't go all the way through to the bottom. Jarrod lifted the toy out and set down on the nearby wooden table.

The toy began to make a soft whirring noise. Suddenly, out of each of the holes came a half-inch shimmering whirligig. Each was a small pleated sphere, similar in a appearance to a roof ventilator on a building, mounted on a tiny shaft.

The metallic bubbles rose into the air, slowly and gently dispersing around the room. Soon, they came alive with sparkling lights of every color. Anytime they touched one another or something else in the room, the soft rebounds caused changes in their light patterns as they headed off in new directions.

For the two, it was like being awake in a dream. The light and motion were so pleasantly distracting there was no way they could deliberately think of any one thing. Instead, their minds just wandered, thinking randomly about a lot of different things.