At the top lay another landing that opened on either side onto a long hallway. In front of him and across the back of the landing itself stood a pair of glass doors, thrown back, letting in the warm afternoon breeze. Standing before them, leaning against a balcony rail with his back to Escargot, was a dwarf in a long coat. Smoke billowed above his slouch hat. Escargot walked toward him with a slackening step. The fragrant reek of pipe-smoke wafted toward him on the breeze through the window. It smelled just a bit like the kelp in his basket and just a bit like the ground bones of henny-penny men. The dwarf turned and squinted at him, cocking his head. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth and looked harder. Escargot gaped back, dropping his basket of kelp to the floor. It was Abner Helstrom who stood before him, dressed in tweed trousers and a necktie fixed to a ruffled shirt with a stickpin, the pin crowned by what was either a cleverly carved bit of ivory or a miniature human skull.
10
Along the Tweet River
Escargot couldn’t speak. Nothing in the world could have prepared him for this – not even Smithers. Even if he could speak, what would he say? Would he ask for his marbles back? Would he ask after Abner Helstrom’s niece? The dwarf, it seemed, was no more inclined toward speech than was Escargot, and he returned Escargot’s look gape for gape, puffing furiously on his pipe so that his head was enveloped in smoke.
‘There he is!’ came a voice from up the hall, and two men hurried toward them, the first one being the red-suited doorman, who seemed intent upon pitching Escargot into the road. The man with him wore a similar suit. ‘Is he bothering you, sir?’ asked the doorman of Uncle Helstrom.
‘That’s exactly what he’s doing,’ said the dwarf. ‘He’s got some filthy thing in his basket there, a dead thing, I believe. It smells awfully.’
‘Take the basket,’ said the doorman to his associate.
‘Not a bit of it,’ cried Uncle Helstrom, snatching the basket up from the floor. ‘I’ll just take this myself – as evidence, won’t I? Some sort of kelp, it looks like. Quite conceivably poisonous. I’m a naturalist, you know. I’ll have this analyzed. The hotel will hear from my solicitor within the week. Meanwhile, see this gentleman out.’ The dwarf peered beneath the rags, then looked up and winked at Escargot as the two hustled him toward the stairwell, walking along beside him till he was out the door and on the sidewalk. He headed south on Royal Street toward the harbor, his boat gone, his kelp stolen, and his hopes stove in and sinking in deep water. But the embarrassment at the hotel was forgotten in half a block, and his money and kelp along with it. There were far more pressing and peculiar issues to confound him.
Abner Helstrom, for instance. Thank heaven he had been surprised. That signified, certainly. If he hadn’t been, what then? What if he had expected Escargot to arrive? What would Escargot do then? Life on the sea bottom? There’d be nothing for it but to return to Twombly Town and apply to Beezle for a job washing windows. The expression on the dwarf’s face had been genuine, though. He’d mustered the wink, finally, but it had taken him a good while to come up with it.
All of that, of course, meant that the dwarf hadn’t been expecting such company, and that Escargot had stumbled into a monumental coincidence of some sort. All in all it was a turn for the better. For weeks he’d been in the grip, or so it had seemed, of Uncle Helstrom – harried out of Twombly Town, chased about the streets of Seaside. Now it was Escargot who loomed out of nowhere to confront the dwarf. It must have given him a certain amount of pause, turning around to see Escargot striding toward him. Damnation! If only he’d had a look of determination on his face. If only he hadn’t been so apparently surprised to see the dwarf standing there. If only he’d managed the wink first, for heaven’s sake. But he hadn’t.
This, certainly, wasn’t the end of anything. Things were afoot, it seemed. It was inconceivable that Uncle Helstrom was simply in Balumnia on holiday, and that the marble business and the witch in the alley weren’t part of some big, unfathomable affair. Where had Leta gone? One moment she sat atop the pyre, and the next she vanished. And here was Uncle Helstrom, wasn’t he? Things were afoot all right, and Escargot, no longer in the kelp business, was bound to follow them. He hadn’t anything else to do. He crossed Royal Street to a sidewalk cafe, sat down at a table in the shade, and spent the last of Kreslow’s coins on a pint of ale.
Abner Helstrom appeared on the sidewalk opposite a half hour later, striding along at a good clip, as if he was on his way to somewhere in particular. Feeling like a detective, Escargot drained his glass, stood up, cast an appraising squint up and down, and followed the dwarf on the cafe side of the street, keeping as much as possible in the shadows, which were long and deep, since the afternoon was fast declining into evening.
The dwarf didn’t appear to be at all worried about being followed. And why should he? He’d have to suppose that Escargot’s sudden appearance was nothing more than coincidence. But coincidence or no, it had put the fear into him. Perhaps, thought Escargot, a man like Helstrom was so full of plots and machinations that he naturally assumed that everyone else was too. Who would be more suspicious of others than a guilty man?
It was night when Abner Helstrom reached the harbor. The sky had been swept clean by a soft wind off the ocean, and a nation of stars shined overhead, crowding each other for space. The sea lay dark and silent with here and there the shadow of a moored boat riding atop it, one or two of which had lights cheerfully aglow in their cabins, as if their owners slept abroad at night. Away east toward the open ocean the long arch of the first of the thirteen bridges shone in patchy lantern light cast from stone lamps atop the bridge.
The harborside was a warren of decaying buildings, clapboard warehouses, canneries, and old, turreted mansions that had seen their day and had been let out to rats and cats and lodgers down on their luck. Many houses sat atop pilings, the sea lapping in beneath them. Running out to sea were brokendown piers, some no more than a dozen or two sinking pilings with here and there a mossy, barnacled timber attached with rusty bolts. The smell of fish and tar and dry seaweed washed across the evening – not a bad smell, altogether, although somehow it lent the creaking darkness of the place a musty sort of soul that made it far more threatening there in the moonlight than it would have been in the light of day.
Escargot hunched along, his hands in his pockets, vaguely unsettled by the neighborhood. He watched the dwarf a half block ahead, and he stopped once, ducking back into the shadow of a decayed stoop when his quarry paused for a moment and turned suddenly around, as if he’d heard the echo of following footsteps. He went on, though, crossing over to Escargot’s side of the street, stopping in front of a tilted, darkened house, and glancing again up and down the road. Escargot watched from his doorway, determined to follow the dwarf into the house, but wishing that he had a candle with him, that and the club he kept promising himself he’d acquire.
He stepped up to the recessed entryway of the building and peered in through the crack where the door had been left ajar. There was no closing it, in fact, since the entire house had sheered sideways over the years, the foundation sinking in the wet, sandy soil of the harborside. There was scarcely a window in the front of the house left unbroken, and what had once been an elegantly carved frieze between floors had been disfigured by years and years of hard weather and salt air and had cracked and fallen away so as to expose here and there darkened wall studs and wood lath. No one, certainly, could be living in the place aside from tramps or criminals.
He listened at the open door. There was the sound of mumbling within – people talking secretly, perhaps, in a nearby room, or as easily, people talking openly farther along, in the second story or in a back kitchen. The door pushed open with hardly a creak, and Escargot stepped in on tiptoe. Moonlight, enough to see by anyway, shined in through dirty windows. The mumbling continued, and then a shuffling of feet.
A ruined stairway angled away into the darkness of the upper floor, and Escargot debated climbing it, but gave t
he idea up. The darkness of the house and its general gloom seemed to make it more sensible to merely crouch into the little alcove beneath the stairs and wait, listening. There was no use blundering into some sort of horrible activity like he’d blundered in among the witches in the Widow’s windmill. Stealth was what he wanted here. He’d think things out this time, and bolt for the door at the drop of a pin.
But crouching beneath the stairs wasn’t worth much either. After a minute or two of listening to his heart beat and of squinting at shadows while wondering whether things weren’t stirring in the darkness, he bent back out, then immediately ducked in again, banging his head on the low ceiling, as he heard, from above him, the sound of footsteps clump, clump, clumping down the stairs. He held his breath, smashing himself back into the darkness. If they passed him, heading toward the harborside of the house, they’d have to turn and look back to see him, and he’d be prepared for that. He’d jump for the front door. He could outrun anyone on such a night as this.
There was Abner Helstrom, carrying his stick now. Escargot could see his pant cuffs and the shod tip of the stick and his pointed shoes as the dwarf waited in the hallway for someone else coming along after him. Escargot knew who it would be before he heard her speak. It had to be Leta, even though her appearance there in Balumnia after her strange odyssey in Seaside made little apparent sense. But it was she, following along down the hallway in the wake of her uncle. They seemed to be in a sizable hurry – quite likely a fortunate thing, since it had seemed to Escargot that the witch had been able to sense his presence in past encounters. Perhaps their haste veiled her powers. But why the haste? Escargot grinned. They were hunted all of a sudden, weren’t they? Despite the dwarf’s winking, he feared that Escargot was a more powerful nemesis than he’d given him credit for. He must wonder how in the world Escargot had come to Balumnia. How in the world, for that matter, had the dwarf gotten there?
Escargot crouched out once again from his hidey-hole and stepped down the dark hall toward the rear of the house. The two had already gone out a rear door. Escargot hurried. There was no point in losing them now. The back door was a windowless wreck, cracked and teetering. Escargot pushed it open slowly and nearly stepped out into empty air. It was fifteen feet to the black mud of the harbor below. A stairs tilted down along the side of the house, supported on stilts, but the stair landing, right beyond the door, had broken away and fallen into the muck below years past, so the door swung out over nothing at all. Escargot jerked it shut to cut his momentum and save himself a certain fall. Then he pushed it open again, more carefully this time, and peered around it to discover that if it was thrown all the way back, he could step across to the floorboards of that part of the landing left whole – or almost whole anyway – and by grabbing the shorn-off bannister, pull himself out onto the stairs.
Leta and the dwarf had disappeared. There seemed to be nothing below him but mud and flotsam and the shadows of canted pilings. Then, fifty feet beyond, moonlight glinted off what had to be the polished brass tip of the dwarf’s stick, and he heard a low curse and the sound of shoes sucking up out of the mud. There they went, scuttling away like crabs beneath the docks and the open, trestled basements of houses. Escargot followed, careful of the mud, stepping from stone to stone and here and there in the footprints of the two in front of him. He’d lost them again. He paused and listened, but he heard nothing. It occurred to him in a rush that he’d been fooled. What if they’d known all along that they’d been followed? What if they’d lured him out into the dark, deserted harborside for the purpose of cracking him on the head? But he had to go on, hadn’t he? If he gave off now he’d curse himself when the sun came up in the morning.
Fifty feet farther along the piers and houses ended abruptly at the edge of a long curve of mudflats that ran up into a seawall. The view was clear for two moonlit miles. No one walked along the mudflats or atop the seawall. He’d lost them. They’d slipped up into the cellar of one of the old canneries they’d passed. That had to be it. But which one? He turned and hurried back the way he’d come, watching the ground. There was only one set of footprints – his own. He hadn’t been paying enough attention. Fine detective he made, racing on blindly while the two of them had merely turned aside and let him blunder past.
There they were – two more sets of tracks, but they turned down toward the sea, not up toward the road. Escargot followed them until there was a muddle of tracks and a long depression in the mud where, quite clearly, the prow of a rowboat had been dragged through. The two had been making for a hidden boat. He listened, cupping a hand to his ear. He could hear, from somewhere to the west, the sound of a tinkling piano and the shouts and cries of revelers in dockside taverns, muted by the darkness and the distance. Closer on, somewhere out on the starlit water, came the sound of dipping oars and the mumble of conversation – Leta and the dwarf, making away up the delta.
Escargot turned and ran, back through the shadows to where the seawall began. He climbed up and looked. There they were, a bobbing bit of shadow on the water, moonlight glinting on the oarwash as the rowboat cut along, not toward the lights of town, but toward the mouth of the Tweet River, as if the two were making away for good and all. He watched until they disappeared into the night, and there was nothing but the far-off piano and the lapping of the rising tide against pier pilings to remind him that it had grown late, and that he was hours of weary walking from his submarine.
He’d follow in the morning. That’s what he’d do. If they had flown upriver, then he could easily outdistance them, stopping in at the riverside villages to inquire. People would remember the dwarf, and they’d remember Leta too. Escargot certainly hadn’t been able to forget her, although this last rendezvous made it fairly clear that he should have.
If they hadn’t gone upriver, then he could turn about and return to Landsend. It seemed fairly certain that they hadn’t known they were being followed. Escargot could easily find his way to the abandoned house again. He could return by day and snoop around. Surely there’d be some sort of telling evidence. What it was he hoped to find, however, was a mystery to him. The mystery seemed merely to be the only thing in his life that had any substance to it – his latest destination – and it drew him now as surely as Seaside and the harvest festival had drawn him weeks earlier. It was something he had to settle, it seemed to him, before he could get on to something new.
He was up with the dawnlight, navigating past a low island in the river. Hovels on stilts lined the water’s edge, and a score of fishermen waded in the low water, tossing nets into the departing tide. There were a good two miles of coastline cut by jetties and piers along which Leta and the dwarf could have moored their rowboat. Looking for it in among the quayside bustle would have been futile. There was nothing to do but press on, to assume that they’d been bound upriver and that they hadn’t any intention of returning. Escargot could see, through the periscope, the long, broken-down row of canneries and old houses where he’d lost them two hours earlier. From a quarter mile out to sea some of the houses looked stately and grand, for the broken windows and cracked doors and peeling paint were masked by distance. Farther along lay the new harbor. Fishing boats were docked along the wharves, and hundreds of sailors and laborers scurried like bugs, loading kegs and bales, shouting orders, and generally carrying on.
In ten minutes the harbor was behind him, and the houses and shops along the shore thinned to nothing. Boatyards with skeletal hulks on trestles took their place, and then those too gave in to low marshy tidelands peopled by pelicans and gulls and an occasional dilapidated shack. Beyond rose a range of forested, coastal hills, covered on the lower slopes by houses. Then there was nothing but open land and trees, and the delta funneled down into a real river, broad as a lake. A wide channel cut the river in two at midstream, and it seemed to Escargot, in the glow of the fire-quartz lamps, that the channel was prodigiously deep. He sped up, taking a look through the periscope now and then just in case a village would sweep
into view. There was nothing, though, but an occasional farmhouse above the river, with an acre of pasture along either side and now and then a short dock running out into the water.
It seemed futile to stop. It was no more likely that the two had put up at one farmhouse than at another, and although there were boats tied up at the docks, it was impossible to say that they were the rowboat he was looking for. Somehow he had the idea that if the two had gone ashore at some house along the river, it would be a particularly gloomy and uninviting sort of house, that the nice, cheerful houses with their happy cattle and smoke from cooking fires lazying up the chimneys wouldn’t agree with the two.
It was late afternoon when he passed the first village. It was on the southern shore, and he’d sailed entirely past it before he spied it through the scope. It wasn’t much of a village, in the shadows of the overgrown forest, only a scattering of houses along the bank, backing up onto what might have been its only real street. Escargot piloted the sub around in a big circle, looking for a place to heave out the anchor. It was almost dusk, and there was a wet smell on the wind, not like rain, but like fog – the heavy, cool smell of misty air. Away off downriver, toward the sea, the horizon was gray and dark, and a roiling bank of low-lying clouds drifted along on an onshore breeze, obscuring the river and its banks. Escargot didn’t know whether to be happy about the fog or to fear it. It would disguise his movements, if it was thick enough, but it would disguise their movements too, and all else being equal, they seemed to have rather more of an affinity to the fog than he did.
But there was nothing at all he could do about it, after all; he couldn’t wish it away. So he drifted nearer to shore, casting his anchor in forty feet of water two hundred yards out. He’d have to swim for it, now that his rowboat had been reclaimed, and he didn’t at all like the idea of clambering up onto the shore, wet and with a foggy night falling fast around him. But he daren’t wait for morning either. If he dawdled he’d get nowhere. Either he was on the trail of Leta and the dwarf or he wasn’t, he told himself in no uncertain terms. And if he was, then he’d jolly well better get to it. He was ready to plunge into the cold river when he changed his mind.
The Stone Giant Page 16