The houselights dimmed, a piano banged away, and Zippo the magician bent out under the curtain, bowing profusely. He didn’t look much like the mustachioed wizard on the poster. Not only was he considerably shorter and fatter, but he didn’t have nearly the same air of mystery and dark purpose about him. He wasn’t very old, but he wore a bit of a toupee that was parted down the middle and that had been made originally for someone with a head about half the size of Zippo’s. Miles was utterly disgusted and shrank into his seat so as to avoid being identified as one of Zippo’s peers.
The show itself, all in all, wasn’t half-bad. The magician wheeled out a great mechanical fish that was a marvel of glittering scales and glowing glass eyes. From the open mouth of the fish issued a swarm of green butterflies that fluttered about the stage for a bit then out through the door into the foggy evening. After that, shimmering bubbles poured forth, following after the butterflies, and then, peeking through the rush of bubbles, a tiny, winged pig wandered out. Squacking twice, it flapped away between the tables. Jonathan had never seen the like.
Jonathan turned to Miles. ‘This is the real thing!’ Gump and Bufo nodded awed assent. The Professor just harumphed.
‘This is someone shoving odds and ends through the mouth of a clockwork fish,’ said Miles. But if he was unimpressed by Zippo’s methods, he clearly approved of his results, for he put a finger to his lip and nodded up at the stage.
Zippo was hocus-pocusing about, and the mouth of the fish head was clacking shut and opening again, rhythmically, as if getting set to spew forth some new wonder. A little, marble-sized ball drifted out, floating, rising and falling like a leaf in the wind. It hovered momentarily then rose into the air toward the smoky ceiling, expanding as it did. It grew to the size of an apple, then to the size of a man’s head, then bloomed amazingly into an immense paper flower. A shower of golden glitter fell from the mouth of the flower, sparkling like summer rain in the stagelights. The center of the flower was as purple as a midnight sky and was surrounded by a thousand petals of salmon and silver and sea green and luminous turquoise and emerald like an impossible magical rose from the Wonderful Isles or the Kingdom of Oceania.
As everyone oohed and aahed over the hovering flowers, a hundred more of the little round buds drifted slowly out of the yawning mouth of the fish, drifting on slow currents of air. Jonathan started as one brushed past his nose. Another, a dud apparently, fell with a plop into the remains of his gumbo and sprouted there among the sea shells and exoskeletons and crab claws of the unlikely soup. In an instant the air was filled with the weird paper blooms. There were bunches of blue lilacs and clusters of tiny violets. Iris as big as plates slowly changed color, fading from deep crimson and blue to pinks and lavenders. Then, one by one, the things deflated slowly, shrinking away to something resembling a moist purple rubber band and falling lifeless on the floor and tables like unhappy little worms. Somehow the tavern, after the collapse of the wonderful air flowers, seemed sad and empty. Jonathan hauled one of the shreds out of his ale glass and looked it over.
‘Helium buds,’ the Professor said. ‘From the Orient. Very simple, really.’
Miles nodded, but again seemed pleased with the effect of Zippo’s latest trick. Jonathan decided to obtain some of the magical buds – a thousand or two so that he could release a handful any time he chose and never run out.
The show didn’t amount to so much after that. If Zippo had one fault as a performer it was that he tossed off his best act halfway through the evening with the effect of making the rest of the show seem like something of a decline. He wheeled out the advertised pine box and shoved a variety of colorful swords through it and, seemingly, through the body of a woman reclining in the box – a woman who was either sleeping or dead. Then he pulled a variety of animals out of a bottomless hat and shoved each down his pants. Then he took off his shoe and pulled the same crowd out again, dropping them, one by one, into his shirt and retrieving the beasts with a great show of spirit from an immense coat pocket. From there they disappeared into his ear and were hauled out wearisomely from his mouth. The gag, Jonathan realized, could quite conceivably go on all night, and it began to seem as if it would when a catcall or two from the shadows at the back of the tavern dampened Zippo’s enthusiasm. Thereafter, a deck of cards was waved about and shuffled and manipulated, and cards were fished out of the ears of those grinning members of the audience – including Gump – who sat near the stage.
Finally Zippo produced a mortar and pestle and called on the audience to volunteer a pocketwatch. Jonathan, in a sporting mood by then, yanked out his own, recently purchased from Beezle’s market, and handed it up to the taciturn Zippo, who slammed it immediately into the mortar and ground it to dust. A spring or two shot out and bounced on the stage as Zippo worked at the contents of the mortar, displaying it to the shouting audience, finally, as a little ruined heap of bent metal and glass bits and twisted cogs. Jonathan took it gracefully. Clearly this was what was known as prestidigitation, finger flummery. Some valueless old broken watch had gone into the mortar and Jonathan’s watch was surely up Zippo’s sleeve.
Zippo produced a garish handkerchief and waved it over the remains, making spider conjurations at it with his free hand. ‘Hocus, pocus, mooliocus!’ he shouted, and with a flourish of the scarf, revealed the same ground remains that had once been a pocketwatch.
The audience jeered and laughed. Jonathan, still a sport, laughed along with the rest. He noticed, however, that Miles, somehow, didn’t see much humor in the gag. Probably, Jonathan thought, because Miles had little taste for such an obvious parlor trick.
Zippo waved the kerchief over the mortar again and effected the same result. Again he waved the scarf and shouted his mumbo jumbo, and again he uncovered a heap of ruined watch. After the third flourish there was less laughter from the audience; not, it seemed, because they feared the loss of Jonathan’s timepiece, but because the ground-watch gag was quickly becoming as tiresome as the animals-in-the-hat production.
Jonathan’s sporting attitude, in fact, was fading too, and so was Zippo’s enthusiastic flourishing. Then, from behind the tapestry, the pine-box woman pranced out on tiptoe waving a loaf of old bread. Zippo paused, cast the crowd a look of mock surprise, and ripped open the loaf, producing, to everyone’s compound astonishment, a pocketwatch. Cheers erupted from everyone as Zippo put the watch into a little velvet bag and passed it down to Jonathan.
Zippo bowed this way and that, nodding to Jonathan, who slipped the bag happily into his shirt pocket without bothering to look inside. He didn’t, after all, want to call Zippo’s skills into question. All in all, the magician seemed to be as amazing as any Jonathan could remember having seen – outside of Miles, of course, who was a genuine wizard.
Zippo disappeared behind the strange tapestry. As the stage lamps dimmed, the tapestry began to glow. The line of fallen skeletons and the eyes of the hooded creature in the castle window were lit like sea foam in moonlight. The audience, including Miles, gasped in surprised horror as the skeletons, one by one, stood upright and jerked along single file into the dark door of the castle, the thing in the window seeming to fade and disappear into the dark night behind it. When the wall lamps in the tavern were turned up and the audience sat squinting in the smoky room, the tapestry showed an empty rock-strewn night landscape with the castle, its windows and doors dark as pitch, sitting in the foreground.
The general amazement, however, soon faded as the sound of clinking glasses and plates filled the air along with shouts for ale and wine. ‘Well,’ said Jonathan, turning to the Professor. ‘That was first rate.’
‘Indeed,’ the Professor replied. ‘Quite a show. I’m astonished by that last trick with the tapestry. The rest of it was nothing. Very nice, mind you. I don’t mean that it wasn’t very clever and all. But like Miles said, most of it was a matter of shoving odds and ends through the mouth of a mechanical fish.’
‘Most of it,’ Miles said. ‘Let me see your
pocketwatch, Jonathan.’ And Jonathan plucked the little velvet bag out of his shirt pocket and handed the whole works to Miles who dumped the watch out into his hand and looked at it grimly.
‘Yours?’ he asked, dangling a sad-looking brass watch by a piece of twine.
‘No!’ Jonathan shouted, grabbing the watch and examining it. The crystal was cracked across and one of the hands was missing altogether. When he wound the stem he could feel what might have been the crunch and scrape of ruined works grinding against one another.
‘Sold!’ the Professor shouted, slamming his hand onto the table top. Jonathan handed the watch to Bufo and Gump, who were anxious to have a look at it; then he and the Professor, both with the same thought, climbed onto the stage and ducked beneath the tapestry. There was a little chamber beyond the curtain which was empty save for the sword-punctured pine box. A hallway ran off toward the back of the tavern and led to several rear rooms, all of them empty but the last. There a hunched little man mopped morosely at a dirty wooden floor.
‘Where’s Zippo?’ Jonathan asked.
‘Gone out.’
‘The devil he did!’ the Professor shouted, who was, in truth, even more worked up than Jonathan. ‘Where did he go?’
‘Don’t know.’ The man slopped a mop full of soapy water onto the floor and swished about in it. ‘Just ran out after the show. Didn’t say why. Said he’d be back tomorrow night.’
‘Didn’t say why!’ Professor Wurzle exploded. ‘Of course he didn’t say why! He’s cheated this man out of a watch.’
The mopping man nodded and went about his business as if the Professor had commented on the weather or blown his nose. ‘It ain’t the first. Zippo’s a hand when it comes to a deck of cards, but he ain’t much at palming no watch. Mixes things up. Ain’t his fault. A man has to have time to learn.’
‘Well,’ Jonathan said, pretty much resigned to the loss of his watch, ‘he got in a good bit of practice on mine tonight.’
‘Likely stole it.’ The Professor wasn’t quite as philosophic about the whole matter. But then it was fairly clear to both of them that the little mopping man with his bucket of suds couldn’t be held responsible for the lost watch one way or another. So they trudged back up the hallway and bent out under the tapestry to where Gump, Bufo, and Miles sat over cups of coffee. Two full cups sat before Jonathan’s and the Professor’s chairs.
‘Let me guess,’ Miles said. ‘He was gone. Won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Tomorrow night,’ Jonathan said.
‘Tomorrow morning, more likely,’ Miles observed. ‘After the riverboat sails. I saw him drop the wrong watch into the mortar. But I don’t think he knew it until after he’d beat it to hash. It’s a good thing his assistant was on her toes. That fooled me for a bit. It probably wasn’t the first time he’s made that mistake.’
‘So we heard from the janitor.’ Jonathan was looking at the cheap, broken, substituted watch. He shook it next to his ear and heard rattling and swishing inside. With his clasp knife he pried the back off. The watch was half-full of sand. There were no works inside at all, not even a gear.
‘It’s the sands of time,’ Gump said as Jonathan poured the contents of the watch case into a little pyramid on the table.
‘Pull out the stem,’ Bufo suggested, not wanting to let Gump outdo him. ‘You can dangle it from the string and use it as an hourglass.’
‘That’s right,’ Gump said, ‘but you could only use it once.’
‘He could fill it up again.’ Bufo sounded irritated.
‘Through that little hole?’ Gump asked.
‘No! He’d take the bloody back off!’
‘Well, he’d still lose a bunch of the sand. It would be all over his shoe. His hourglass would run shorter and shorter. It wouldn’t be worth a dime.’
‘Maybe he’d find some new sand.’ Bufo was exasperated. ‘Scrape a handful out of the Tweet River.’
‘Wet sand,’ Gump said. ‘If he scrapes it out of the Tweet River, it’ll be wet. It won’t run out and it’ll turn the watch green. So there’s your precious hourglass. All a wreck!’
Bufo looked as if he were about to pop. Jonathan gave him the watch. ‘You can have a go at it if you want,’ he said. ‘But it might work better as a coin purse or a weight for a fishing line.’
Bufo plucked a half-dollar from his pocket and seemed pleased to find that it fit neatly into the watch case. ‘I’ll use it as a secret compartment.’ Bufo closed the watch case over the fifty-cent piece. ‘If we’re waylaid by highwaymen they’ll never think of looking inside a pocketwatch for money. I’ll get away with this half-dollar. Put one over on them.’
Gump was in a state. ‘Highwaymen!’ he shouted. ‘Put one over on them! That’s about as smart as the hourglass idea. As if the filthy highwaymen won’t steal your watch along with your purse.’
‘Then I’ll slam them in the head with it.’ Bufo whirled the watch around in a quick little circle on the end of its string. ‘Then I’ll hypnotize the boggers like this.’ And he waved the watch in front of Gump’s face, bouncing it twice off the end of his nose.
‘Mig-weed, mig-weed, mig-weed!’ Gump shouted, purpling and mouthing the words that, more than anything else, would set Bufo awry.
‘Gentlemen!’ said the Professor, who favored dignity above all else.
Gump and Bufo took his hint and settled down, although for the next ten minutes they sporadically made puffy-cheek faces at each other. Bufo insisted upon dangling the watch in Gump’s direction and whispering, ‘Hocus, pocus, mooliocus,’ in the manner of Zippo the Magician.
It was midnight before they left. There was nothing much to do aboard the riverboat but sleep, so they’d made the most out of their evening at the tavern. Outside the fog was gray and thick. There was almost no breeze, so the fog hung in the air, wet and cool, muting the sounds of the evening. Streetlamps glowed weirdly through the suspended mists. The posts below the lamps were obscured by the fog, and the lamps themselves seemed to be floating there in the still, damp air, casting their pale rays like cloudy little moons. Their footsteps clacked on the cobblestones of the street, and the melancholy tinkling of a piano sounded from behind them, some remnant of an evening’s entertainment in what must have been, by then, an almost empty tavern.
A riderless horse clip-clopped past, appearing some few yards ahead in the mists then disappearing as abruptly, the sounds of his hooves striking cobbles receding slowly into the distance.
The five of them stopped for a silent moment on a street-corner to read a faded and peeling street sign just to make certain they were going back along the same streets they’d taken earlier. It seemed to Jonathan to be a lonesome sort of night – romantic enough, all in all, but one that gave him a desolate kind of feeling and reminded him that he was far away from Twombly Town and the High Valley. The silence and the fog seemed to him to be almost the same thing, as if the fog were visible, hovering silence, and it occurred to him that the white and plodding horse that had come and gone in the mists wasn’t actually going anywhere; was some sort of night shade that wandered up and down the damp avenues pursuing the sound of his own clacking hooves.
He became aware, as he stood there by the street sign for what seemed like a strangely long time, of a distant tap, tap, tapping – of a stick striking pavement or cobblestones. The tapping grew louder, approaching, and the lot of them stood without speaking beneath the peeling wooden street sign in the diffuse light of the oil lamp, waiting for whatever it was that approached. All else was silence.
The tapping grew in volume, tap, tap, tap, and then changed abruptly to a hollow wooden thudding as whoever it was that was walking there, shrouded in fog, thumped across a section of boardwalk; then there was a moment of silence, then the tap, tap, tap, once again of a walking stick on cobbles. The musty river fog seemed to whirl about them, although there was still no breeze, and Jonathan pulled his cloth jacket tighter and peered into the lamplit fog.
A
dark shape grew out of the obscurity and angled across the street before them – a dwarf in a slouch hat and black cape, tapping along with a brass tipped walking staff. His face was hidden in the shadow of his hat, and he smoked a long, strange pipe, the bowl of which glowed through the darkness and emitted clouds and clouds of vapors that rolled about and twisted and seemed to Jonathan to flee away into the air like the shadows of great bats. But there was no smell of tobacco, only of waterweeds and rotting tree roots and of deep rivers rolling toward the sea. Somehow, none of that surprised Jonathan. Anything else, in fact, would have.
The dwarf and his glowing pipe and his clacking staff faded into the darkness and were gone. Jonathan turned toward the Professor but could see from the look on his face that there was little that needed saying. Gump and Bufo looked as if they’d witnessed a hanging. Miles had a particularly grim and calculating look on his face. They set out as one down toward the street that ran along the waterfront, Bufo and Gump first and Jonathan behind. He was torn, as they stepped along, between the urge to glance back over his shoulder and the urge to cut and run, screaming, back to the dock. He had the terrifying sensation that a withered hand was at each moment descending toward his shoulder, and he fancied he could hear the sound of rustling skirts and labored breathing not a foot behind him. He feared turning to look as much as he feared not looking, and although he insisted to himself that it was all a matter of imagination, he knew it was not – that someone, or something, had made up the sixth member of their company.
If, he thought, they could reach the waterfront – if they could turn the corner into the open market, whatever it was, he was sure of it, wouldn’t follow. It would evaporate in the mists, vanish like the rest of the shadows in the dim, foggy evening.
As if in a dream, the corner seemed to be receding, growing more distant as they approached it. It was probably a trick of the fog and the oil lamps and the silence and of the whisk and scrape behind him. He turned and cast a look over his shoulder to break the spell. Behind him, rustling along the cobbles in black robes and ragged gray lace was the old woman from the shanty in the swamp, feeling her way along with her hands before her, clutching at the air, filling the space that Jonathan had filled a moment before, staring at him with milky, sightless eyes.
The Disappearing Dwarf Page 11