The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  Jonathan turned to ask the Professor if he saw it too. As he did, he saw a spiney black hump out of the corner of his eye, glistening in the lamplit fog, arch up out of the water briefly and disappear. He looked quickly back at it, but the shadow was gone. There was nothing but gray river rolling below.

  ‘Can you beat that?’ Jonathan asked.

  Nothing but silence answered him. The Professor was gone, probably to warn the others about the infernal device business and about the possible post office rendezvous. Jonathan squinted back down into the river, trying to separate the fog from the water and the water from the shadows beneath it. It occurred to him that the weird misty silence roundabout him was not really silence at all. It was more the swish of water and the sound of an occasional distant voice and the moaning of the fog horn and certain unidentifiable night sounds that all meshed together into a sort of pervasive blanket of hushed noise that lay over the boat and the water like the fog. He became slowly conscious of the clip-clop, clip-clop of what sounded for all the world like horses’ hooves clattering along cobblestones, but when he listened sharp for it, strained to hear it, it faded and was gone. It must, thought Jonathan, have something to do with the steam-generating devices, something very simple and easily explained.

  His imagination, he thought, was setting in to play tricks on him. He loaded up his pipe with fresh tobacco and determined to keep a sharp eye out for deviltry. ‘I wish I had my fishing pole and a handful of salted almonds,’ he thought to himself. ‘I’d catch one of these monsters out of the river and pound the daylights out of him, like the lad on the dock did back at the village. Take the fight right out of him.’ That was Jonathan’s way with bugs – detestable bugs, that is, cockroaches, say, or poisonous spiders. They’d always given Jonathan the wee-willies. He’d found, finally, that the best way to deal with them was to fly right in and beat them all to smash. Dead bugs, it seemed, weren’t half so bad as live bugs. There was a world of difference between them. He wondered, as he peered once more into the gloom, if the same thing applied to devils out of the sea. It occurred to him, though, that it didn’t. He was the sort who liked to imagine that the sea was full of monsters. It was the idea of being in there among them that bothered him. That, of course, was the problem as he leaned there against the rail. The riverboat seemed to be hauling him along into some sort of night land, carrying him into the midst of a land full of horrors.

  He heard then what sounded for all the world like the muffled scrape and splash of oars sliding through oarlocks, but again as he listened the sound seemed to fade away. He tried to go back to thinking about hashing up monsters, but when he did, there was the scrape-swish of the oarlocks again and what sounded like urgent whispering – whispering directed somehow at him. He decided to ignore it, and did pretty well, for a few seconds anyway.

  Then, dimly, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a dark rowboat, bobbing on the river, drawing toward him where he stood at the rail. He hesitated for a moment before looking up. Things, all in all, seemed to be taking a bad turn. But he was sure it was there, a rowboat with two men in it – two men who seemed to be whispering to him, strange things, things that didn’t make any sense.

  He looked and the river was empty – no boat and no whispering men. ‘It’s the fog,’ thought Jonathan. ‘They were there but were lost in the fog.’ And sure enough, when he went back to watching the river below, there was the rowboat again, closer now, there in the corner of his eye.

  He continued to stare into the water, not really watching for anything, but aware of the approach of the strange boat and of the scraping of the oars in the locks and the whispering, urgent now and almost understandable. One of the two men in the boat, the one pulling at the oars, had his back to Jonathan; the other faced him, grinning oddly. Dark liquid was splashed across his neck and down his shirt, as if he’d been smeared with oil or had suffered some horrible wound. His eyes were unnaturally dark. He didn’t really seem to have any eyes at all, just hollow sockets above his cheekbones. His hair was an oily tangle that fell down beside fish-white cheeks. He was whispering. No, that wasn’t it. He was gasping for air, and his breath was whistling in and out. The dark smear on his tattered shirt front spread with each breath, and in one horrible instant Jonathan realized that his breath was whistling in and out through a bloody rent in his neck.

  Jonathan couldn’t move. He stood terrified, gazing sightlessly at the water below. Waiting. The rowboat scraped against the hull of the riverboat. The man at the oars reached across, grasped a handful of his companion’s hair, and simply pulled his head off in a spray of blood and a whoosh of escaping air. Then, as if delivering a bag of groceries, he handed the ragged, staring head up toward where Jonathan stood. The head rushed up at him, grinning. Jonathan leaped back against a cabin wall, swinging wildly at the thing and shouting. But when he expected to strike it into the river, he struck nothing at all. His hand whizzed through air and nothing else. The boat was gone along with its two passengers.

  Jonathan stood pressed against the wet, white wall of the cabin. There was nothing at all on the river. Then, faintly, it seemed to him that he could hear the scrape of oarlocks and the faint splash of oars. The sounds seemed to be fading, receding, as if the rowboat, if that’s what it was, was making away slowly toward the south shore through the fog. Then, once again, silence.

  By then, Jonathan was very sure of two things. First, that he was going to launch out and find some company, preferably the Professor, who was generally far too rational to have anything to do with ghastly visions. Second, that he was going to stop at the bar on the way and see what sort of brandy Cap’n Binky had laid in.

  He stepped along down the deck and around into the companionway where he ran into a grim-eyed Miles the Magician, racing along amid his flowing robes and wearing his enormous pointed cap. The ivory head was spinning and spinning. ‘Something’s not right tonight,’ said Miles.

  ‘You’re telling me,’ Jonathan said. ‘There’s headless men on the river rowing boats.’

  Miles looked aghast. ‘Is there?’

  ‘Either that or I’m going loony,’ Jonathan answered. ‘So I hope there is.’

  Miles wiped his forehead with his hand. ‘Headless men? Rowing boats?’ He shook his head. ‘I knew it was bad,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t know it was that bad.’

  ‘I think it’s going to get worse.’

  ‘I do too. I’ve got to get topside. There’s some sort of dark enchantment in the fog that’s so thick that I can hardly breathe. I must work some counterspells. We’re in for it either way, though. Sharp’s the word. Believe everything you see. Everything is real.’

  ‘Good,’ Jonathan said, ‘then I’m not going loony. Where’s the Professor?’

  ‘Aft, last I knew. Be ready for anything. Do you know about the post office?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jonathan shouted at Miles as the magician raced off down the companion way.

  Miles stopped and turned. ‘The old woman you saw in Tweet Village, had you seen her before?’

  ‘I think so,’ Jonathan said. ‘Yes, I’m sure of it. Several times.’

  Miles moaned.

  ‘Why?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘I think she’s aboard,’ Miles said. And with that he flung himself out the door and onto the deck, stamping away forward at a run.

  Jonathan popped along to a glassed-in room, MID-DECK TAVERN a sign read over the open door. There was no one inside, not even a bartender. Jonathan found a bottle of brandy in a rack and poured himself what might be called a double: one for the headless boater and one for the old eyeless woman who, somehow, had set out to plague him – to plague them all, apparently. Then he started to think about the cook’s warning and about Miles’ talk of dark enchantment, and he began to suspect that the night was going to be a grim one. Too much brandy, it was true, might make it seem a bit less grim, but then again it might not. It would do little, in either case, to sharpen him up. And sharp, after all, was t
he word, at least according to Miles. So he took a couple of good sips, just to get something for his money, and set the half-full glass on a shelf behind the bar and put a little paper napkin over it. He hated the idea of an unfinished drink and so vowed that before he went to bed that night, he’d come back and work on it. Then he put a few coins in the change box on the shelf and went back out into the night.

  Three sailors swept past in a businesslike way, looking for bombs, no doubt. Cap’n Binky, up on the bridge, hollered orders at them concerning the boiler room. Jonathan was happy, in a way, that the captain was afflicted with this coffee madness; it explained his frantic and thorough efforts at having the ship searched for Sikorsky’s infernal device. Damn this Sikorsky anyway, Jonathan thought. Here they’d come any number of miles, wandered through magical doors and tangled themselves up with witches and enchanted dwarfs, and if that wasn’t enough, as if they weren’t running into enough trouble, along comes Sikorsky with his bombs and demons. It was enough to give a fellow the pip.

  12

  Things from the River

  He didn’t find the Professor aft. He found no one at all aft. What he found, actually, was what appeared to be long trailing tendrils of water weeds and a great quantity of river water slopped about the deck, as if someone, or something, had climbed over the bulwark out of the river, covered with stuff. Jonathan looked around furtively, expecting at any moment to see some shambling horror dash out of the shadows. But all was silent. The thought struck him that Sikorsky, or, more likely, one of Sikorsky’s cohorts might have climbed aboard intending treachery. But if he had, it was a mystery to Jonathan why he would wriggle about in the river weeds first, especially if he carried with him the rumored infernal device. It was no use being on the lookout and not following up such obvious leads. He could, of course, go up and alert Cap’n Binky and leave the dangerous work to him, but by then the damage might be done.

  The trail of water led away around the starboard cabins. Another clump of weeds lay in a pool of lamplight some twenty feet long beside the bulwark. There was nothing simpler, apparently, than following a man clothed in water weeds who’d just hauled himself out of a river, thought Jonathan. Then the idea of a man clothed in water weeds started to play on his imagination. He saw, shoved into rings along the bulwark, a row of marlinspikes, and he recalled how useful such a device had been months past when he and Ahab had tangled with the two trolls. He yanked one of the things out of its ring and hefted it. He wished he had a brickbat instead, something he wouldn’t have to get too close to use. But a marlinspike was certainly better than nothing when a man was facing down monsters – a marlinspike, that is, and a pair of quick feet.

  He stooped along detectivelike toward the second scattering of weeds. The river must be absolutely choked with the things for a swimmer to have hauled so many up with him. On beyond the bunch in the lamplight were more wet footprints leading away. Jonathan stopped momentarily over the pile of weeds and mud. Something bothered him about it. Something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. The weeds were lacey looking things and were black and gray and not green and brown like you would suppose. He bent over and touched a bit of the lacey weeds and found, to his horror, that they weren’t wet – that they weren’t weeds at all. In his hand he held a tattered bit of ancient black cloth, traced along one edge with faded age-grayed lace.

  The bits on the deck were the same. They were obviously so. He dropped the cloth as if it were a reptile. How could he have been confounded into believing the stuff was water weeds? And the footprints, he ran his finger across one of them. It wasn’t water at all but was fine gray ash, dry as tomb-dust even in the mist that soaked the deck. Bomb or no bomb, Sikorsky or no Sikorsky, he’d had enough of being on the lookout. As he straightened up he caught a glimpse of a pair of eyes, milky eyes, watching him from the darkness of a recessed doorway not three steps away. There was a whispering in the doorway and the faint cackle of something laughing weirdly to itself, at a joke that no one else could hear or wanted to hear. From the shadows of the doorway, a thin, pale, skeletal hand reached out toward him, beckoning to him with a bent finger. Tattered lace hung round the wrist.

  Jonathan was off across the deck in a shot. Never trust a marlinspike when you can trust your feet – that was his motto. But the deck seemed to be heaped with things from the river: glistening piles of weeds and muck and fish, as if the riverboat were a dredger, loaded with debris and bound for deep water. His foot hit a pile of slippery weed – trailing tendrils of rubbery, bulbous leaves and stalks and grass. His legs slewed out from under him and he slid shouting across the stuff. From above him sounded an answering shriek, then another. He rolled to his knees, grasped his club, and found that the shriek was coming from the mouth of a steam whistle near the bellowing stacks.

  The ship above him was lit like a carnival. Every lamp blazed and smoked in the fog, and the shadows of running men could be seen darting in and out of doorways, shouting orders. There was a cry from somewhere up toward the bow, and the splash of something hitting the river. Another shriek from the steam whistle was followed by a long booming note from the foghorn. Tremendous wild clouds of steam and smoke poured from the stacks, sailing off to join the fog and the confusion. It was as if the smokestacks had run wild. The escaping steam began to acquire a shape to it, to break up and coalesce again. It seemed to Jonathan that great winged shadows sailed out of the stack and swept away into the night above. As he watched, he realized that it wasn’t smoke and steam that poured through the stacks; it was bats. Thousands and thousands of black, screeching bats, whirling out in a wild cloud. And below them, bathed in lamplight atop the upper deck, stood Miles the Magician. He was surrounded by a universe of sparks and was chanting, shouting, pounding with his staff, supplicating or cursing. His arms were stretched out before him, gripping his staff and pounding the deck – boom! boom! boom! – louder even than the scream of the whirring, shrieking bats.

  Jonathan pushed himself to his feet, and as he did, so did a pile of weeds on the deck. He shook his head in disbelief. The thing on the deck shook its head too, droplets of river water and bits of weed spewing off. It slowly began to reassemble itself, pulling in a bit there, bunching up a bit here, undulating and waving in the fog before him like a nest of eels. As it did so, Jonathan was possessed with the uncanny thought that the animate river weeds were not only taking the shape of a man, but that they were taking his shape. Horrified, he took a step backward and slipped once again in the river trash on the deck. He caught himself with his left hand as he fell and leaped back onto his feet. It was running he wanted, but running on the slick deck seemed unlikely. Suddenly a wild idea popped into his head – he should dash down to his cabin and have a look inside, just to see if he was in there asleep. Then it struck him that that was just the sort of thing you think up in dreams. But all the thinking didn’t amount to much as the weed thing lurched forward, moaning and rustling at him. Jonathan raised the marlinspike. ‘Take the fight right out of him,’ Jonathan thought. ‘Smack him up.’ But the weed thing must have had similar thoughts, for it raised one dripping arm aloft as if it too held a club in its hand.

  It lurched at him again. In the center of the tangled mass that formed its face was a dark, dripping hole, a mouth that moaned and blubbered. River mud dribbled out one side, disappearing into the thing’s weedy body. It lurched again toward Jonathan who backed up a step. He heard his name being called from above, heard the barking of old Ahab and the shouting voices of Gump and Bufo, but he didn’t dare look up. He didn’t have a chance to, in fact, for the weed thing, with a terrible slobbering moan, fell on him, cold and clammy and wet as the river itself.

  He slashed out with the marlinspike in a wild effort to smash the thing to the deck. The club pulped into its body, slurped down into it, buried itself in bladdery weeds. Almost simultaneously the weed thing thrashed at Jonathan, whacking him on the side of the head with a tendriled arm, covering him with muddy debris.

/>   He wrenched the club free and thrashed at it again and again, pushing backward all the time, away from the shuffling thing. Suddenly he realized that he was nearing the edge of the deck, that he’d find himself in the river in a moment. The river was surely the last place he wanted to be.

  Tendrils of weed wrapped around him. He stumbled and threw the marlinspike down. You can’t beat waterweeds to death with a club, or so it seemed to Jonathan. He began tearing at it with his hands, pulling away bits of weeds, clumps of grass. River mud poured from the thing’s mouth, and Jonathan shoved his hand toward it to shut it off, to keep it out of his face. He grabbed a handful of muddy weeds and tore it away, tore the top of the thing’s head off. As he did, the thought struck him that he was fighting a horror that was partly his own invention, that river weeds weren’t so very much more formidable than cockroaches. So he set in to pull it to bits. In a matter of seconds the thing collapsed in a heap on the deck, nothing but muck from the river.

  He hadn’t time to revel much in his victory, for off the starboard side, rowing slowly toward them out of the fog, was a rowboat with two men in it. Acquaintances of his. He stumbled forward and plucked up the marlinspike from among the weeds. He realized that he was wringing wet from a weird and unwelcome combination of river water, fog, and sweat. There was an unnaturally loud scrape and bump as the rowboat pulled alongside. Jonathan decided to ignore it – to leave the headless man for someone else, someone who hadn’t been wrestling weeds. Then he had a better idea. A pile of wooden crates loaded with freight lay against the bulwark. He tried to heft one, but it wouldn’t budge. Two others were just as heavy, but a fourth one, smaller than the others, wasn’t quite as formidable. He pulled it out of the stack and pushed it along the deck.