‘Haven’t seen any girl. Are you sure it was a girl?’
‘Tolerably. Traveling upriver, maybe in a rowboat.’
‘In a cart, actually. They came through here this afternoon. The dwarf driving.’
‘Alone?’
‘No, not alone. There was an old woman in the back, all wrapped up in a dirty shawl. Blind woman, I believe, from the look of her. They stopped long enough to water the horse and drove on. Seemed to be in a hurry.’
‘The old woman!’ cried Escargot, about half baffled.
‘Some old woman, anyway. I can’t say it was the old woman. If I was you, though, I wouldn’t have anything at all to do with this dwarf. He’s from down south, on the coast, they say.’
‘Do they? What’s he doing up this way then?’
The innkeeper shrugged. It seemed to be a subject he wasn’t fond of – part of the fog and the goblins and the dead man in the road. He stood up suddenly, strode across the room, and began to wipe with the side of his hand against the white-washed plaster of the wall. ‘Look at this! Here it is again. I paint and I paint and back it comes, in a day, sometimes.’
‘What is it?’ asked Escargot, squinting at the patchy dark ring that stained the wall.
‘Fungus, I should think. I looked at it under a magnifying glass. It’s little black flowers, sprouting there. Grows right through the whitewash. Nothing will hide it. By next week the plaster will start to soften up, and it’ll gouge right out with your finger. Whole wall will be a mess. It’s part of this here business, is what I think. That and the bugs in the floorboards. And the toads. There’s no end to them. My dog ate one and died, right there on the floor, poor devil. Toad kept right on croaking from inside his stomach. I buried him back of the shed, and I’d swear that late at night I can hear the damned thing croaking still.’
Escargot poured himself another half inch of brandy, entirely at a loss for words.
‘And I’ll tell you something else. There’s things in the river now that come up from somewhere. Things that haven’t been seen since there was nothing but elves and brownies and goblins living hereabouts. Things that died out a thousand years ago. Laslow, down the road, caught a thing in a net last week that was nothing but teeth and scales as big as the palm of your hand. It looked ancient, all black and warty. Tore his net to bits and nearly took his arm off. Things are going back, is what I think. Paint don’t stick to the houses no more. Glass cracks in the windows for no good reason at all. Shingle nails rust through in the night and half the roof’s on the lawn by morning and there’s bugs gnawing at the rafters. Then this fungus – nothing but rot, rot, rot everywhere, and goblins on the road. You saw that. Then there’s ghosts – nothing but howling on the wind, moaning coming up out of the ground wherever anyone’s been buried. There was graves broken open all up and down the road, all of them empty. Grave robbers, was it? Not a bit. There wasn’t nothing in them but skeletons – skeletons that left footprints in the mud when they walked away into the forest. Poor Mrs Cleary, the pie woman. Just like our man in the road tonight ... Heaven alone knows what it was she saw, but I hope I never see the like.
‘What does it mean? It’s like the clock hands are spinning round backward, is what it’s like. Things falling to bits, people moving on. There’s been earthquakes upriver, too – things stirring in the earth, things that been sleeping there for ages, if you ask me. And your man the dwarf. It follows him, is what it doees. There’s a little wind devil of decay at his back. Steer clear of him.’
This last bit struck Escargot as good advice, but he knew he wouldn’t take it. He had something to prove by now, something he couldn’t at all explain or define, something that had to do with Leta and with the marbles and with being hoodwinked more often than he was comfortable thinking about. But it had to do with more than that too – with Annie and with Stover and with running away. That was it. He wasn’t running toward something. And if he turned around now, if he gave into fear, he’d never be able to look back again without despising himself. Besides, how much of the innkeeper’s tale was exaggeration? Half of it anyway. It was late in the evening, and it was a foggy, haunted night, and a man had died shrieking in front of them. Things were bound to look frightful and bleak, weren’t they? He had it on good authority that his dwarf lived below Hightower Village, not on the beach south of Landsend. If he’d been through that very afternoon in a cart, then Escargot would catch up with him tomorrow. The affair, for better or for worse, would end soon enough.
‘I’m done in,’ said Escargot suddenly, realizing that the brandy bottle was emptier than it had been and that when the sun came up in the morning it would herald the start of a long, tiresome, and quite possibly dangerous day. The innkeeper led him upstairs to a room that was a far cry from the room he’d enjoyed at The Smashed Hat.
There had been an effort made at keeping things tidy and clean, and the bed, although soft as a sponge, would serve nicely. The innkeeper brought up a plate of cold beef and pickles and bread ten minutes later, and Escargot ate alone, looking out of the window into the fog, and wondering at the leafy vines that had crept in under the sill and were curling around the rusting hinges, as if to jerk the window out of the frame and drop it onto the lawn below. There was a patch of darkness on the wall, a shadow deepening, it seemed, even as he watched, and in the late silence he could hear things gnawing away in the attic above and the sound of distant moaning out over the water, like the wind through tree branches or the sighing of ghosts that wandered about the misty, haunted river. Once, when he awoke hours later, he could hear the faint croaking of toads and the echo of goblin laughter on the wind, and he fell asleep thinking about it, drifting away into a long dream involving his bag of marbles and a pool of what might have been dark water or might as easily have Been blood and him running and running and running from a mountain that was stirring and yawning and rising out of the ground and peering at him through ancient, hollow eyes that had only moments before been dark and empty caves.
He left the inn at dawn. The innkeeper, who was in the midst of packing his own bags, was happy enough to take one of Escargot’s remaining gold pieces, despite its foreign look, and told Escargot that most of the rowboats pulled up along the bank of the river had weeks and months since been abandoned. Escargot wasn’t powerfully anxious to venture back into the river in his underwater apparatus, not since the innkeeper’s story of the black fish.
By the time the mists had burned off it was midmorning, and Escargot slid along somewhere upriver from Grover, which he’d apparently passed in the fog. The dwarf and his companion had the jump on him, and they seemed to be in a hurry. They would have made Grover yesterday evening and might quite easily have pushed on through the night, the ghosts and the goblins and the dark foggy woods bothering them not a bit.
On the north shore, visible in the hazy distance across the vast river, there seemed to be no hint of the haunting that was arising in the deep woods of the south shore. Farmhouses sat amid pastures and fields, with now and then a stand of trees along the riverbank, and scattered villages running along the low-lying shore. Twice he was passed by steamships, broad paddlewheelers making toward the coast along the opposite bank and well out of his way. It struck him that it might be fun to drive along toward one, on the surface and at a good clip. Then, just when the thing began tooting and blowing and things began to fall to bits on deck, drop mysteriously beneath the surface of the river and pass along beneath, surfacing, to their collected horror and wonder, on the farther side. But he hadn’t any time for games, and the idea of it smacked, somehow, of Captain Perry. So he gave off idle thoughts and kept his eye on the river trail, sometimes having a look under the water for a change of pace.
Below the surface all was dim and silty with here and there a little pool of clarity where the water was slack enough to settle out. He glimpsed in one such pool what seemed to be an enormous wheel or a great millstone, cracked asunder and rising out of the black depths. The river bottom ha
d a weird, enchanted atmosphere to it that Escargot could feel right through the walls of the submarine, a dark sort of enchantment that seemed to be held off only by the elf magic that was part of the very bones of his undersea boat, or by the light of the fire quartz glowing through the portholes and the bowlamps.
It was warmer, it seemed, and a little less troubling to navigate on the surface than beneath it. The boat seemed to want to drift toward midriver and farther, as if it were attracted to the north shore, or, perhaps, as if it were repelled by the south shore. But he had to keep an eye on the road. When he found another village he’d pull in and ask after the dwarf. If no one had seen him, he’d wait, and let the dwarf stumble upon him, in a cafe, perhaps, or merely standing beside the road. That would put the wind up him. Precious little winking he’d do then. What would happen would happen. He seemed to be astride a charging horse, running full tilt onto a darkened battleground, and there was nothing to do but hang onto the reins and keep his head down.
* * *
It was past noon when he saw the ship in the sky. The weather was turning. Clouds, gray and puffy and threatening rain, humped up out of the sea behind him, rolling in to obscure the sun. The pressure seemed to drop, as if the air roundabout him were waiting for something, and off over the forest on the south shore he could hear the rumble of far-off thunder, sounding like the rolling of drums. The sky was lit on the horizon by flashes of lightning, and it seemed that on the heavy air he could feel the ground shudder and heave, as if the arcing tridents of yellow lightning were somehow charging the distant hills with electricity.
He stood with his head through the open hatch, smoking his third pipe of the afternoon. Rain squalls chased each other up the river toward him, and in a moment he’d have to pull the hatch shut and get in out of it. The sky was so low that it seemed to be pressing all the wrinkles out of the river, and it had gone from gray to black, the clouds whirling and charging and threatening, getting ready to burst.
Through them, from out of the sky and slanting in on a ray of the departing sun that shone through a momentary rent in the dark ceiling, came a ship, a three-masted galleon, sails billowing along the mast, its bowsprit heaving on currents of air. It seemed as if the galleon were racing along the sun rays like a log down a chute, little wisps of cloud swirling across its bow like spindrift. Thin and distant on the wind came what sounded like the cries of a sailor in the crow’s nest. The clouds closed behind it, the river of sunlight winked out, and the galleon disappeared behind the tree line, on beyond a distant swerve of the shore.
Escargot puffed at his pipe until it smoked like a chimney. Elves, it seemed to him, were a mixed sort of blessing. They were good to have around; that was sure.
There was rarely a bad one among them, and they traveled in wondrous ways – in airships and sky galleons and gliders – and carried along, as often as not, magical treasures, for no reason beyond having them, to mess with now and then. On the other hand, elves rarely were around, only when something odd was in the wind, when trouble was brewing and had begun to boil over. There was a nagging at the back of his mind – at the front of it, in fact – that whatever trouble had attracted elves had something to do with him. But he didn’t have the foggiest notion how it had anything to do with him.
What he did know was that the rain was serious. Sheets of it seemed to be falling, blown along on gusts of wind, and the clouds had thickened to a solid, gray-black mass, low enough overhead so that it seemed he could reach up and plunge his hand into the murk. He was halfway down the hatch, closing it above him, when he saw a cart, moving along the river road at a canter.
He hurried to the periscope and fiddled it back and forth. The road had run off into the trees on the edge of the woods, and through them he spied it, rattling along at a good clip through the rain. From out on the river, through the haze of rain, it was impossible to say who it was that drove it. It might, surely, be some local farmer driving upriver, but it might as easily be the dwarf, or Leta for that matter. Experience suggested that riverside travelers would be rare, especially in the fog and the rain, and there was no doubt that the two he followed were somewhere about, close enough certainly to make it highly likely that this was them. He’d have to have a closer look.
As he motored upriver, though, the road bent farther inland, hidden much of the time by dense foliage and high, crumbling cliffs that ran with rainwater. One moment the cart appeared, rolling along in plain view, the next moment it blinked away into the shadow of the forest and was gone. Escargot ran along ahead, outdistancing it. He could easily enough pick up a couple of miles on it, break out the rowboat, and be ashore to wait for it on the road, in a cloak, perhaps, and with a hat pulled down over his eyes to shade his face. He’d take along a brace of Captain Perry’s pistols, charged with shot, and fire a round over their heads to show them what a dangerous nest of bugs they’d uncovered.
He put together a speech as he cast the rowboat off into the river and clambered in after it, relishing the idea of the coming confrontation all the more because it was Leta who would witness it. If the old woman sat in the back, of course, it wouldn’t amount to so very much. Leta, though, would make it his grandest moment. Her eyes would shoot open. There he’d be, got up like a highwayman with his cloak and pistols – a desperate highwayman, to be sure. He’d loom up out of the foliage, tossing his cloak back over his shoulder, folding his pistols across his chest. ‘Halt!’ he’d cry, or some such thing – there had to be something better than halt. Avaunt, maybe, or avast. He was a sea captain, after all. But avast would muddle the effect. He could see that. He rowed in long strokes through a drizzle, hoping that the rain would let up long enough for the whole episode to play itself out. If he was all frazzled with rainwater it wouldn’t be half as grand.
He had to row downriver to find enough shore to run the boat onto, and then scramble up the muddy bank to the road, listening all the while to the sound of the approaching cart. There it was, a moment behind him, clattering along. A great oak grew twisted and gnarled half into the road. It would be the work of a moment to clamber up into it and drop like an ape into the cart itself as it lumbered past beneath, and he brandishing his pistols and laughing, as if he’d been toying with them all along. He grinned, picturing it. But there wasn’t enough time for dropping out of the sky. The tree would be slick with rain and he might twist his ankle anyway, and here came the cart, around a bend, the cantering horse splashed with mud.
Escargot stepped out from behind the tree, shouted an oath, and aimed a pistol into the air, firing off such a blast of spark and brimstone that it nearly deafened him. The horse half reared, slewing around and running his flanks against the steep, cutaway hillside that walled the opposite edge of the road. The cart skidded sideways, its driver’s face set in a grimace of fear and surprise, half at the sight of the gun-waving Escargot, half, it seemed, at the idea of the cart rolling down the brush-covered bank into the river. It wasn’t the dwarf.
It was a terrified man in chin whiskers and with a long, clay churchwarden pipe in his mouth. Even as the cart jerked to a shuddering halt, one wheel against the oak, the man bit through the stem of the pipe, and it dropped like a stone into his lap. He slapped at it wildly, trying to knock the wad of burning tobacco off his trousers, but watching Escargot all the while to see what he might do.
‘I got nothing!’ he shouted, trembling, giving up on the tobacco. His teeth chattered like marbles shaken in a bag.
Escargot was horrified. He lowered the pistol. The man has bit through his pipe, he said to himself sadly – all on account of nonsense. ‘I say,’ he started, but the man yowled and leaped up.
Surprised, Escargot raised a pistol involuntarily, to gesture at the man, to wave him back into his seat. But the man danced there inexplicably. It was the burning tobacco, Escargot realized. He hadn’t scared the man witless, after all. He saw suddenly the pistol in his own hand and lowered it again, tucking it away beneath his coat and then fumbling to
do the same with the other one. The man found the tobacco and dusted it onto the roadway, sitting down again in trembling silence. ‘You’re Jack the Lad, ain’t you?’ he said, eyes wide, cocking his head.
Escargot wanted suddenly to say yes. That, certainly, was who he would have liked to be at the moment. But saying so would lead to complications, so he shook his head. ‘Sorry about this,’ he said weakly, grinning a little. ‘I took you for someone else.’
The man stared at him and quit quivering and chattering. ‘You ain’t Jack the Lad?’
‘No, I’m Escargot, the sea captain. I took you for a dwarf, I’m afraid. That is to say ...’
‘A dwarf!’ interrupted the man, squinting now and frowning. ‘Yer a blind beggar, aren’t you? I got three feet on any dwarf I ever seen. I have half a mind to thrash you. Look at my pipe!’ He pulled the bitten-off stem out of his mouth. There was about an inch of it left.
‘Nasty shame,’ Escargot admitted. The rain was setting in again – not so hard this time, but steady and solid. ‘Here.’ Escargot reached into his cloak to pull out one of his two remaining coins. It would half break him, literally, to give it to the man, but circumstances called for it. And it would go some way toward teaching himself a lesson too, about masquerading around waving pistols and ducking out from behind trees to surprise innocent men. ‘Here,’ said Escargot, handing it up.
The man took it and bent his head even more in evident puzzlement. ‘You’re paying me?’
‘The least I can do. Buy yourself a pipe and a fill of tobacco. And a pint of ale too, to keep off the damp. Forgive me this little treachery. It wasn’t what it seemed.’
‘What’s this?’ asked the man suddenly, peering at the coin. ‘This ain’t money. This is some sort of joke, isn’t it? What’s your game, giving me such a fright like that?’ He pitched the coin contemptuously into the woods and made as if to scramble down onto the road. ‘I’m a bit tired of this, I am,’ he cried, working himself up. His horse capered back a step or two, driving the cart behind it as if to give his master room. Escargot stepped back toward the oak tree, thinking about the disappearance of half his fortune.
The Stone Giant Page 18