‘Hey!’ cried Escargot, surprised. His cloak and jacket and shirt kept the teeth from reaching his skin, but the whole idea of it was ghastly enough that Escargot picked the little goblin up and threw him spinning into a knot of water-carrying goblins, buckets and bats and snails cascading away across the stone floor of the hall and a general shouting and tumult arising. I’ve had it now, Escargot muttered, and he set his feet, fearing an onslaught. But the goblins howled and raged, beating each other with empty buckets, scratching and biting. Even the fat king, who’d gone back to eating kelp and stick candy and squinting suspiciously past his nose, didn’t seem particularly put out with Escargot’s having misused one of his subjects.
Escargot reached into his shirt on an impulse and drew out the truth charm. It had worked Captain Perry over fairly thoroughly, and it seemed to Escargot that Captain Perry was only a step or two removed from being a goblin himself. It couldn’t hurt, he reasoned, to try it on the goblin king.
The king arose, slowly, staring at the truth charm, like he was setting in to address the multitude before him on a particularly weighty issue, a saddening issue, perhaps, and he knuckled his brow with the back of one filthy hand. He seemed to reel there, remembering past treacheries, past sorrows, and he stepped down onto the floor of the cavern, gabbling suddenly in a rush of nonsensical jabber. He strode back and forth before Escargot, who clutched the truth charm in his hand, hiding it as much as possible. Then, bursting into sudden tears and leaking away like a faucet, he howled and shook his fists at the distance, smoky ceiling, and he stomped his feet as if he’d just as soon pound the whole place to dust as to go on living in it another moment.
The goblins in the hall went back to filling the cauldron and squabbling among themselves, as if that sort of theatrics was entirely in keeping with daily routine. Pitiful lamentations and shrieks were nothing to such creatures, who seemed, in fact, to oppose any other sort of behavior. In moments the king had played himself out. He shook his head and sighed, then sat back down, clapped a particularly fresh-looking hat onto his head, and chomped away at a bulging mouthful of kelp. There hadn’t been much remorse on his part, quite possibly because he wasn’t able to remember anything that had happened longer ago than the week before last. One way or another, Escargot hadn’t understood a word of it. The truth charm was worth nothing here, save, perhaps, to bean the king over the head with when it came down to it.
Escargot was struck suddenly with the hat. He’d seen it before – a flat-brimmed crush hat with a feather. A blue feather. It had been the hat worn by the man in the wagon, the man who’d called him a brigand and chased him with a stick. Around the throne were greasy, recently gnawed bones, any number of them, and behind, in a dim corner half hidden in shadow, was a slumped figure. Escargot couldn’t say for certain that it was a man, or that it had once been a man, because the darkness was too deep there to say that it was anything more than a heap of something– old rags, perhaps. If he’d peered more closely, adjusted his eyes to the shadow, he could have told for sure. But he didn’t. He was suddenly sickened, and the stupid squinting look on the face of the fat goblin, who worked at his teeth again with his sliver, sickened him even more. Come what may, he decided, it would go hard on them when they came for him. It was entirely possible that the poor driver of the cart, with his foolish chin whiskers and his bitten-off pipe, had given Escargot a reprieve, if only a momentary reprieve, by taking the edge off the king’s hunger. The stick candy was dessert. What, or rather who, the next meal was to be seemed monstrously clear.
The king of the goblins grunted suddenly and waved Escargot away, as if he were tired of looking at him, and the little band of goblins that still clustered around hurried him away to a corner, where they left him sitting, unbound, watching the preparations for the coming feast. His thoughts kept coming back around to the slumped whatever-it-was in the shadows and to the basket – his basket – of kelp by the throne and to the self-satisfied dwarf who, by now, was safely gone. He looked around, blinked, stood up, and began to stroll away. Immediately a host of goblins rushed down upon him, gnashing their teeth in such a way that it seemed as if they’d eat him then and there, without salt. He sat back down and they gave up, a shade disappointedly, it seemed to him. Now and then a goblin or a knot of goblins made another rush at him, just for sport, anticipating, probably, that he was going to have another go at escape.
He waited until such interest died down, then set about priming and loading his pistols. At best he’d get two of them, although given his lack of familiarity with pistols of any sort, it was unlikely that he’d hit anything farther off then ten feet or so. Then, of course, they’d be upon him and would be very unlikely to leave him in peace. He managed to spill powder down the front of his jacket, and he lost the first ball when he dropped it and it rolled away out of sight. Crawling around and searching for it would do nothing but attract attention. The spilled gunpowder, however, gave him hope. He knew nothing about gunpowder except that it was wonderfully explosive. A man with a bag of it might cause some concern in a party of idiotic goblins.
He finished loading the pistols, tucked one back into his belt, and jammed the barrel of the second into a little vein of stiff clay that ran along the cavern wall, twisting the gun and digging it into the clay until the barrel was packed with the stuff. Then he stood up. Immediately a half score of goblins turned toward him, ready at the slightest movement to rush at him tiresomely once again. He nodded at them and waved cheerfully at the goblin king, who had slumped on his throne until most of him was on the floor and only his head, neck, and shoulders were still seated. His face had drooped into a jowly frown, like he was thinking of having been cheated once or having been served up a bloody haunch, perhaps, that was tough and needed another hour’s boiling.
Escargot slowly removed the bag of powder from his coat and opened the top. He shouted and rushed toward the bonfire, bowling goblins out of the way to the left and right. With a wild flourish he pitched the bag end over end into the fire so that the powder spiraled out of it, then dove sideways toward the throne of the goblin king in order to be out of the way of the blast when it came. There was a sparking, he could see, and a breathy little whoosh and a bit of blue flame. That was all.
Goblins stood staring, first at the fire, then at Escargot, understanding even in their cheese-like minds that so much capering and throwing and diving must herald something. But when nothing at all came of it, they advanced upon him, wary this time. The goblin king waved his stick candy and danced atop his throne. Escargot stood up, pulled a pistol out of his belt, calculating and recalculating whether or not he’d gotten the right one, and fired almost point-blank into the half-empty kelp basket, which catapulted backward, throwing its contents over the floor.
The king looked at it in mild surprise, happy, it seemed, with the noise of the thing and the magic that attended it. He peered warily at Escargot, stepped down off his throne, and snatched the pistol. Abruptly he pointed it at Escargot and shouted, ‘Boom!’ then tilted his head warily at the absence of any further development. The lesser goblins stood fearfully roundabout, chattering among themselves, while their king discovered the moving parts of the pistol and set in to experiment with them. He cocked, then uncocked it, peered down the barrel, and shook the whole works at his ear. Then he cocked it again and pulled the trigger, effecting a click when the hammer fell, but little else save general approval from the gathering goblins, who hooted and yowled and fell upon each other tearing and gouging. Escargot pulled the second pistol from his belt and handed it across, smiling broadly. The goblin king snatched it up, cocked it immediately, and yanked at the trigger.
A terrific explosion crashed off the walls of the cavern, sending the goblins into a wild rout and toppling Escargot over backward in surprise. He had hoped to be a bit farther off when the report came. He rolled toward the fire, dropping the remaining, empty pistol. He was up and running straightaway, not waiting to see what had happened to the fa
t king, but sprinting toward the entrance of the cavern, which was choked by maddened and befuddled goblins, who rushed down upon him even as he turned and ran in the opposite direction, deeper into the caves.
He cast off his cloak as he ran through torch-lit halls, deeper and deeper, sliding now and then along scree-slippery declines, tripping and falling and jumping up and step by pounding step leaving his pursuers farther and farther behind. What he’d do if he came upon another crowd of them he couldn’t say. Finally the torches gave out and he ran into darkness. He fell once and then decided to slow down. Then he crept along, one hand on the cave wall, one in front of him, conscious in the sudden darkness that the sound of a river filled the passage.
Muttered voices sounded behind him, but very distantly, and he could hear the echo of gobbled laughter once, followed by a shriek and more laughter. Then there was silence except for the rushing water. The air grew suddenly misty and cool and he stepped along slowly, feeling his way, sure with each step that he would pitch off a precipice or run head-foremost into the end of the passage and find that he was hopelessly lost in the darkness. Above him, he knew, was a rainy afternoon and tree branches blowing in a misty wind and clouds moving in a familiar sky.
The underground river sounded suddenly as if it lay right before him. He bent along, feeling the ground with his right hand and stepping forward in a crouch, determined riot to simply stride into the river and be carried away. He stepped again, his left foot coming down on a round stone, and he found himself sliding suddenly, down and down and down, hands scrabbling at the gravelly slope. With a shout and a hail of pebbles he splashed into the dark river, fighting his way to the surface, coughing and struggling and popping up finally only to be borne under again with a wild whump that somersaulted him like a rag doll and sent him gasping once more for the surface.
He righted himself finally and shot along through the roiling water, cold and breathing hard and cracking his knee as he swirled round a half-submerged rock. Ahead was a growing crescent of light that widened out in moments into the mouth of a cave. He found himself in broken sunlight, tearing between oak trees and alders and hemlocks straight into a snag of tumbled logs and brush, where he clung, puffing and blowing until he realized that he was fearfully cold and growing colder by the moment.
When he clambered down along the stream to the river road a quarter mile below, he was soaked through and through, and what’s more had a stone in his shoe that nearly crippled him. He sat down, finally, on a fallen tree, pulled off his shoes, wrung out his socks, and discovered that the pebble wasn’t a pebble at all. It was a marble – a red marble, slightly out of round and of the color of blood. The idea that it was one of his marbles, one of the lot cheated out of him by the dwarf, was farfetched. This was something similar, to be sure, something he’d picked up by accident when he’d been tumbling along down the river.
His rowboat was upriver. It had to be. But how far upriver it was he had no earthly idea. Goblins were probably rowing it up and down at the moment, beating each other senseless with the oars. A sign nailed to a nearby tree insisted that he was in the town limits of Bleakstone Hollow, and below that listed any number of things that he ought not to do, including traffic with goblins, lounge about idly, and tread in flowerbeds. But the village that sidled into view as he wandered around the bend in the road was years removed from the days when it boasted flowerbeds, and as for idling about, there wasn’t anything else to do, really, Bleakstone Hollow being to all appearances utterly deserted. If anyone lived there now it was goblins, and it seemed, from the scattered fishbones and river trash in the streets, that such was fairly likely the case, though not a living soul was about. The air was almost void of sound, and the withered trees were as empty of birds or squirrels as they were of leaves. There was the slamming of a shutter somewhere up the street, and the breeze kicked up dust and swirled it round and round, this way and that, pointlessly, like a capering goblin.
Escargot found a suitable stick along the river and took a couple of cuts at the air to see how it felt in his hand. Satisfied, he set out to explore the village. Everything was overgrown and falling to bits. Toadstools sprouted from rotting clapboard on the sides of houses, and even as he stood and looked about him, wondering at the decay, a brick chimney on an old half-collapsed mansion crumbled across the roof in a cloud of mortar dust and shingles. Escargot was certain, for a moment, that someone had pushed it over, but it wasn’t so. It had merely given out, and within days, it seemed, the heap of brick on the weedy sideyard would be lost beneath sprouting vegetation. Windows were boarded up as if people had hurried away to avoid a siege, hoping that they’d return in a better day. But better days, quite clearly, were still a good ways off.
On the very edge of the village lay a three-story farmhouse, fallen to ruin. Atop it, canted over and rusting and twisting in the wind was a weather vane. The mournful creak, creak, creak in the afternoon stillness made the empty village seem twice as empty as it was. There was an inn – two of them, in fact – sitting directly opposite each other on the main street. But neither had seen a customer in a good long time, not a paying customer, anyway, and the skeleton of a horse, its bones picked clean, lay across the threshold of one, as if it’d been too tired to step entirely inside and so had fallen asleep on the doorstep. It was a morbid and silencing thing, that horse, and Escargot decided suddenly that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all to hoof it back down the road to his rowboat before dark. The submarine seemed suddenly as hospitable as a firelit parlor. He turned then, and saw, standing ten feet in front of him, Leta, with a ribbon in her hair.
She peered at him as if in wonder. She didn’t grin eerily or cackle with laughter or turn into a cat. She seemed quite simply astonished. ‘You,’ she said, then stopped.
Escargot swallowed hard. He hadn’t expected this. He’d hoped for it, true enough – half because he’d been pursuing her out of love, and half because he wanted to say a few things to her while he wasn’t, for once, hanging from the vane of a windmill. That’s right,’ he said now, yanking himself together and wondering suddenly what he must look like – unshaven, his clothes wet and rumpled, his hair awry. He was half tempted to blurt out that he’d become a submarine captain, that he’d traveled, that he’d found treasures and lost them again, that he’d become, in short, a sort of Smithers hero, and all of that in under a month.
But he’d be working hard to impress a witch, wouldn’t he? – a witch who’d gone a long way toward delivering him to a nest of goblins, who, by this time, would have eaten him right up if he hadn’t given them the slip. ‘Where’s my Smithers book?’ he asked instead, feeling foolish.
‘Heaven help us,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You’ve gone mad too.’
Too? Madness isn’t what I call it. I don’t know if you’re twenty-five or a hundred and twenty-five and I don’t care, not anymore. But I want what’s mine, and I’ve come up this river to get it—the marbles, the book; I’d be asking for my basket of kelp, too, but I’ve shot holes through it and the goblins can have it, for all I care.’
‘What in the world,’ she said, seeming to shiver with cold, ‘are you talking about?’ And with that she burst into tears, cried for the space of ten seconds, then twisted off the tap and quit crying.
Escargot regarded her warily, looking roundabout himself, suspicious that the dwarf uncle might just then be stepping out from behind a building, packing his pipe with henny-penny men. He thought for a moment and said, ‘I don’t understands bit of this – nothing except that I’ve come to the end of it, or will soon.’
‘I wish I could say the same,’ she said, wiping at her eye, ‘at least about that last. What’s that?’
‘Nothing,’ said Escargot, pulling out the truth charm. This was no time for guessing at anything. If there were tales being told here, if he’d wandered once again into the soup, then someone was going to get a crack on the head with a stick. He tossed the charm into the air and caught it. ‘Rec
ognize this thing, do you?’
‘No,’ she said, looking suddenly up the river where the sun was settling in for the night. The clouds had broken up and flown, and only a few scattered puffs clung yet to the sky. She seemed suddenly frightened, as if she weren’t at all anxious for the sun to set.
‘You’ve seen it before, I daresay.’
‘I haven’t seen any such thing before. Who are you, anyway, prowling about the streets here with a stick in your hand? I wasn’t at all unhappy in Twombly Town until I ran into you and your magicians and witches.’
‘My magicians and witches? You’re a fine one to talk, after that business at Stover’s – taking my side and all. What was that but the worst sort of hypocrisy?’
‘Hypocrisy!’ she cried, beginning to weep again. There was almost no light left. Shadows had disappeared. The sky, it seemed, was moonless and dark and the dim shadows of bats could be seen reeling among the rooftops and the trees. Leta stood still, as if listening, and then, as Escargot watched, she very slowly disappeared, until there was nothing before him on the street but a wraith and something that sounded like a moan, then, very distant, a fall of brittle laughter and the tap, tap, tap of a stick on the road.
The Stone Giant Page 20