A scream caught in his throat, again as in a dream, and she held out one withered hand and beckoned to him with a skeletal finger, her mouth working soundlessly.
Jonathan shouted. He shouted for all he was worth, understanding, somehow, that noise – loud noise – was the key here. And he was right. She vanished. A wisp of fog rolled across between him and the witch and when it rolled away again she was gone. There was no cat this time. There was nothing at all but the empty, shrouded street.
‘What the devil did you do that for!’ shouted Gump, who was shaking with fear and crouching there at the corner. Bufo had him by the arm, and Miles had thrown himself against the brick wall of a cannery ready to let fly a toasting spell.
Jonathan held his hand up for silence. At first nothing could be heard, just the splash of something on the river and the sound of a door being slammed away off up the street. But then faintly, very faintly, the sound of hollow, cackling laughter came drifting down toward them, as if it emanated from somewhere overhead in the veiled gray sky. The skin prickled up along the back of Jonathan’s neck as the laughing faded and was gone. He wished it was just a matter of waking up from a dream and rolling over, secure in his bed. But this had been no dream – and it was unlikely, all things considered, that he’d sleep enough that night to make it seem like it had been come morning.
10
Cap’n Binky’s Blend
What awoke him next morning was the slap of water against the hull some few inches from his head. It was a sort of swish-splash, swish-splash. Jonathan knew where he was as soon as he awoke – even before he awoke. He’d been having a dream about traveling in a strange land on a mysterious and perhaps haunted riverboat. The dream had been growing increasingly grim. He’d been sitting on the stern watching the silent forest slide by in the twilight when he became slowly aware of a pair of milky-white, opalescent eyes away to his left, against a whitewashed cabin. In his dream he jerked his head around to have a good look at the staring eyes, which filled him with a certain ominous sort of creeping dread, but when he focused on the eyes he could see nothing but the wall of the cabin. As he turned his head away they flickered into focus as do very distant, almost invisible stars.
He tried looking away, but the sense that they were gazing blindly at the back of his head gave him the creeps. He froze, incapable of movement, afraid to turn around and equally afraid not to when Miles the Magician walked up, the head atop his cap whirling wildly. ‘Turn around and look at it,’ said Miles simply. Treat it like a dirty-dog.’
‘Should I?’ Jonathan asked in his dream.
‘That’s what I’d do.’ Miles faded away thereafter like a genie. A little waterfall of sparks revolved slowly in the night air for a moment where his head had been.
Jonathan was struck with the idea that he’d been given that advice once before. He couldn’t quite remember, however, if it had been good advice or bad. He turned and looked at the cabin wall anyway. As he did he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a vague amorphous staring face just disappearing in the twilit gloom. There was nothing, finally, but a whitewashed cabin wall. Just for purposes of finality, Jonathan stepped across to the wall and ran his hand across it, smearing beads of dew into a long, wet streak. Beyond the wall he could hear the swish-splash of water against the hull of the riverboat. There came to him then, in the dream, a feeling of relief, for he realized not only that Miles’ advice had been good advice but that he was involved in a dream and that he actually lay below deck, asleep in his cabin, listening half-consciously to the swish-splash of water on the hull.
And that’s why, when he finally awakened some few seconds after that thought occurred to him in the dream, he knew right where he was. The strange surroundings didn’t confuse him a bit. For a moment though as he listened to the splash of water, he was possessed with the idea that it was, in fact, water gurgling down a drain, perhaps in the kitchen overhead. When it went on, swish-splash, swish-splash, for a time, he began to think that the cooks aboard must have an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. That led him to the unpleasant thought that perhaps they were cooking with river water, and it reminded him of the old joke about his muddy coffee having been ground this morning. That, of course, reminded him simply of coffee and served to roust him out of bed.
Ahab, oddly, was nowhere about. Jonathan pulled on his trousers and washed up a bit in the bowl and pitcher that lay on a cramped little chest in the corner. The chest and the bunk took up three-quarters of the space in the cabin, and there was just enough left over to allow the door to swing open. Outside it was warm and sultry. The sky was astonishingly blue and the river stretched out for what seemed miles toward the thickly wooded opposite shore. Overhead the sun shone like a great flaming orange. Jonathan reached for his pocketwatch, only to remember that it had been turned into an hourglass by Zippo the Magician the night before. He shaded his eyes and looked up at the sun which stood at about eleven o’clock or so.
‘Hello, Bing.’ The Professor’s voice came from behind him.
‘Professor,’ Jonathan said, ‘it’s morning.’
‘Well it was morning at any rate,’ the Professor observed.
Ahab came trotting around the corner past Professor Wurzle, happy to see Jonathan up and about. He wagged around in a circle for a moment, canting his head this way and that, alert for bugs.
‘I let old Ahab out a couple of hours ago. It seemed to be a good idea.’
Jonathan assured him that it had been. ‘I think I need coffee.’ He and the Professor clumped along forward.
‘Come, the captain has a perpetual pot. He was telling me about it this morning. The first load of grounds went in thirteen years ago. Whoever is on watch is responsible for the pot and has to put in fresh grounds and water whenever it’s within three inches of the bottom. And you should see the coffee beans – big, oily black things that look as if they’d been roasted for about a month. They smell incredible, like burnt jungle mud or something. It’s indescribable.’
‘So you’re telling me that this coffee is thirteen years old?’
‘Some of it is,’ the Professor said. ‘Fascinating idea, really.’
‘And it smells like jungle mud, you say?’
‘Something on that order, yes.’ The Professor nodded. ‘Don’t get the wrong idea, though. The flavor is astonishing.’
‘Does it taste like coffee?’
‘A bit,’ the Professor admitted. ‘It’s been the case, or so the captain tells me, that in an occasional emergency they had to use river water in the brew. The heat, of course, destroys the organismic debris.’
‘Of course,’ Jonathan said, his worst fears having come to pass.
They arrived at the galley about then, and sure enough, screwed to a countertop with carriage bolts big enough to club a man senseless with, was an absolute marvel of a coffee pot.
In fact, if Jonathan hadn’t been prepared for some such thing, he wouldn’t have known entirely what the thing was. There were two pots, actually, sitting side by side. Bridging the two at both the top and bottom were coiled lengths of copper tubing. Suspended overhead was a third chamber with yet another set of tubes spiraling down into both the lower pots. A little valve, shaped like the skinny end of an egg, tooted puffs of steam from the top chamber, dark pungent clouds that lazed along toward an open window some few feet away. There was a strange smell in the air, a not altogether unpleasant smell that seemed to promise river water and hashed-up seaweeds and, as the Professor had stated, burnt jungle mud.
Cap’n Binky himself wound the crank of a glass and wood coffee grinder hanging on the wall. From an open keg he scooped a handful of the blackest, oiliest beans Jonathan had ever seen. The captain caught the grounds in a tin pan. He pulled the top from the upper chamber, fished out a strainer full of wet, steamy grounds, threw the batch of them into a slop pail, and dumped the fresh grounds into the strainer, all the time singing to himself and bouncing his head about in a way that suggested either astonishing s
atisfaction or pleasant lunacy. He sang: ‘Some likes it hot, haaa! Some likes it cold, ho! Some likes it in the pot, twenty years old!’ over and over again, jigging just a bit when he got to the haaa! ho! parts.
Gump, Bufo, and Miles sat round a table in the corner of the galley. Gump made the pinwheel sign around his ear and pointed toward Cap’n Binky when Jonathan nodded to them. Jonathan noted that the three of them all had empty coffee mugs before them and that the Professor was refilling his own from the tap at the base of one of the big pots. Dark swirling liquid burbled out, releasing a fabulous cloud of aromatic steam.
Cap’n Binky rinsed out the pannikin he’d been grinding beans into and hung it on a hook beside the grinder. ‘Cup?’ he asked Jonathan, pointing toward a row of mugs that hung on wooden pegs.
‘Of course.’ Jonathan looked at the Professor to make sure old Wurzle was actually drinking the stuff and not just involving him in some monstrous joke.
The captain handed him a steaming cup. Jonathan hesitated over whether to ask for sugar and cream. It struck him that it would be like asking for ketchup to pour over roast duck à l’orange in a high-toned restaurant. Just the sort of thing that is bound to set the cook wild. Besides, what good could yesterday’s cream and sugar do to thirteen-year-old coffee? So Jonathan decided to plunge right in. He slurped up a big gulp of the stuff as Cap’n Binky watched, eyebrows arched.
The Professor had been correct. The stuff was astounding, incredible – like nothing he’d tasted before, and that was saying quite a bit. He was no slouch himself when it came to brewing coffee, and he had, years before, been at Brompton Village at the food fair when Leo MacDermott and his brother had brewed up a pot of the fabled Jamoca Blue. Cap’n Binky’s blend, however, held the aces. It was so rich as to be almost creamy, and there were a hundred unidentifiable flavors in it. Just when he’d come to the conclusion that it was almost chocolaty, he couldn’t find any chocolate at all. And when it seemed, after the second sip, to resemble one of those dark stouts made with burnt barley, that flavor disappeared too, only to be replaced with the unmistakable essence of strange spices.
‘This is the finest thing I’ve tasted,’ Jonathan told the waiting Binky; as he took another sip, the faint promise of weedy river water appeared momentarily. Not in such a way that when he drank it he thought, this tastes like river water, but as a sort of strange, half-lost memory of wide, deep, cool rivers that mingled somewhere deep in his mind with the waters of the sea.
‘Second cup?’ Cap’n Binky asked.
‘Please.’
‘Don’t take a third,’ the Professor whispered. ‘At least not until the effects of the first have worn off.’ He gestured toward a table where a man sat before an empty cup. He had a mystical look in his eye, as if he were contemplating great things, solving unfathomable mysteries. Before him on the table, next to the empty cup, sat a little stuffed beanbag toad, a foolish lumpy grin painted on its face.
The man poked the toad once in the snout. ‘Are you a fish?’ he asked it, and he waited a moment for an answer. ‘Are you a fish?’ he asked again, giving the thing a poke on the nose.
‘Too many cups of coffee,’ whispered the Professor to Jonathan. ‘An hour ago he was as sane as you or I. He bought that toad back in Tweet River Village for his daughter. Told us all about it. Somewhere around the fourth cup he went into a trance and began to speak to the toad about the seven mysteries.’
‘Did it reply?’ Jonathan asked.
‘Not yet. It hasn’t said a word.’
Jonathan looked at Cap’n Binky, who shrugged his shoulders as if to indicate that there was nothing surprising about the man’s reaction. ‘Give me another thirteen years and I’ll make him fly,’ the captain said.
Jonathan decided to be careful with the coffee. He didn’t care whether the beanbag toad was a fish or not.
‘Cap’n Binky is writing a book about coffee secrets,’ the Professor told him. ‘It’s a marvelous thing, about a million words long. Maybe longer.’
The captain pulled out a high stack of manuscript from a cubbyhole beneath the counter. The title page read Coffee Making as a Fine Art by Captain Eustacio Binky, and below that was painted a ceramic-looking cup filled with a multicolored, swirling business that was supposed to be a symbolic pictorial representation of Cap’n Binky’s brew. ‘This is the first volume.’
‘My land.’ Jonathan hefted the several hundred pages of laboriously handwritten manuscript. ‘This must be the inside word.’
‘The last word,’ the captain said, winking at them. He shoved the manuscript back into its hidey-hole.
Jonathan and the Professor wandered over to where their three companions sat. The coffee mystic still asked the beanbag toad if it was a fish, and seemed in no wise disappointed in receiving no answer.
‘If you ask me,’ Gump said when Jonathan and the Professor had arranged themselves at the table, ‘I still think this is a land full of madmen. We haven’t met a sane one yet. At least I can’t think of any.’
Everyone nodded in agreement. It pretty much seemed to be true, after all.
‘We’re just on a streak,’ Jonathan assured him. ‘It goes that way sometimes.’
‘That’s right,’ Bufo said. ‘I was on a streak once. I remember one summer when I saw the Squire in six different places on the same day. Seemed like every time I walked out a door he was walking in. And he kept telling me this joke about a man who crossed a mink and an ape. Heck of a coat, he said, but the sleeves were too long. Then he’d bend over and wave his arms around to give the idea of a man dressed in such a coat. After I saw him the third time he didn’t bother with most of the joke. He just came past and said “sleeves were too long!” Then I saw him again, down in the village it was. He says, “Much too long,” and shook his head and made the ape arms. Then, that evening, I passed him on the road, I was going up towards Winkums in a little horse cart and he was walking along amongst the greengrocers filching plums and such. “Squire!” I shouted. The Squire never said a word. He just swung into his imitation of a man in an ape coat. He didn’t leave off either. Went right on humping along the road there. Funniest thing I ever saw. It sure knocked the socks off the greengrocers, I can tell you.’
‘They’d heard the joke?’ Jonathan asked.
‘No,’ Bufo said, ‘I don’t suppose they had. It was the Squire creeping up and down the road that set them off. That sort of thing doesn’t happen every day. It’s a rarity, if you ask me.’
‘I dare say.’ The Professor was peering into his coffee cup as if expecting to see something grand in there. The rest of the company had been silenced by Bufo’s story. It was fairly clear, though, that Gump was working his brain bones to come up with something that could match it.
‘Are you a fish?’ the Professor asked of his coffee cup.
The suddenness of it nearly made Jonathan choke. Miles leaped up in horrified surprise. Bufo snatched the Professor’s coffee cup away before he had a chance to drink any more. ‘Pitch water on him!’ Gump shouted.
‘Wait!’ the Professor cried. ‘It was a little joke! Just a gag. A lark. I know it’s not a fish.’
‘Are you sure?’ asked the man who still sat at his table and poked at the beanbag toad. ‘I could have sworn that this was. Every ounce of my being told me that this was a fish. I had to be sure, somehow. I must have sounded like a fool. Did I?’
‘Not at all,’ Miles insisted, always the diplomat.
‘I could see that this was no bloody fish. But then again it seemed like it was, like it had to be. Do you follow me?’
‘Of course,’ Miles said. ‘Of course.’
‘Good.’ The man shoved the toad beneath his coat. ‘I have a reputation to maintain, don’t I?’
Gump winked at Bufo across the table. ‘That’s correct. What sort of a reputation is it?’
The man seemed perplexed. ‘He’s still coming out of it,’ the Professor whispered.
‘What do you mean?’ the man asked Gump
. ‘How can you know I have a reputation and not know what it is?’
It was a fair question, but Gump was stuck. Bufo, satisfied that Gump’s detective work was once again on the verge of going awry, jumped in. ‘We can see that you are a man of parts, sir.’
‘Parts is it!’ he shouted working himself up.
Miles leaned across and whispered to Jonathan: ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t mention Sikorsky now.’
Jonathan shook his head.
‘Your clothes,’ Gump said. ‘Such a fine suit with those round lapels and all. Very good cut, it seemed to me. You can tell a man by his clothes.’
‘You appreciate fine suits, do you? Allow me to introduce myself: S. N. M. Quimby, haberdasher. I’m from Landsend. I was up at Tweet River Village on business.’
‘Glad to meet you,’ the Professor said heartily. And he introduced the rest of the company one by one.
‘Where are you lads from?’ Quimby asked. Then without waiting for a reply he said, ‘I could go for another cup of that coffee.’
‘Would that be wise?’ the Professor asked.
‘Maybe not,’ Quimby replied, reaching into his coat and patting the beanbag toad. ‘Where did you say you were from?’
‘We didn’t,’ Jonathan said.
‘Oh, yes. Well I’ve always said that if a man can recognize a good suit of clothes, he hadn’t really got to be from anywhere. Do you follow me?’
‘Right down the line,’ Jonathan answered quickly, hoping that Quimby wouldn’t press the issue. Actually, the only two place names he could recall from the map were Tweet River Village and Landsend. And he didn’t know half enough about either of them to pretend he was from there.
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