The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  Six feet or so below him the rowboat bobbed on the river. Its two occupants were still sitting there, in no apparent hurry. Jonathan could hear the whispering breath as it rasped out through the red tear in the eyeless man’s throat. He pulled his crate up by one end, balanced it on the rail, heaved the other end into the air, and sent the whole thing crashing down onto the rowboat and its ghastly crew. He heard a tearing of wood and a fearful screaming. A slat tore loose from the side of the rowboat and came spiraling skyward, spinning past where Jonathan stood at the rail above. It reached the top of its arc and fell toward the river, splashing down beside a grinning head that floated on the water. Wild laughter issued from the thing’s mouth. The oarsman and the body of the other man were gone and so were the pieces of ruined rowboat. It was as if they had sunk away into the depths of the river. The grisly, laughing head fell away astern as Jonathan watched.

  Then, distantly, way off on the dark river, muffled in the fog, came the sound of oars scraping through locks. Two men in a rowboat materialized, rowing unhurriedly toward him. One of them had a gash in his neck.

  It occurred to Jonathan that there’d be some tired zombies in the morning, and he wondered as he went after another crate whether Balumnian horrors were allowed to put in for hazardous duty pay. Then he wondered why in the world he was wasting crates. He dropped the one he’d been tugging on and set off down the corridor, off to find old Ahab, who – unless there were ghost dogs aboard – was somewhere forward, barking furiously.

  Jonathan was halfway down the companionway when the ubiquitous old woman – knitting, a cat on her lap – appeared before him. She hadn’t been there a moment before; he was sure of it. She cackled with laughter and held her knitting out to him as if it were a pair of mucklucks or a hat. What it was was a tangle of unrelated and variously connected knots looking vaguely like a spider’s nest. And crawling on it, to Jonathan’s horror, were spiders. What had seemed like lumps of yarn were black, bulbous spiders, creeping about on a tangled web.

  Jonathan flung the marlinspike in her face at the same instant that he turned and ran. Cackling laughter chased him out onto the weedy deck once more. Above him, Miles still ripped away, pounding and thudding. Lamps glowed, sparks flew, fog swirled, and the night echoed with a cacophony of shouts, screams, laughter, and the thud of the steam engines. Jonathan raced around to port, hoping as he did that the witch would be off terrifying someone else. Down along the bulwark, charging at him, hooting and waving, came Gump and Bufo, legs pounding. Behind them, reaching and clawing the air, stumbled the man with no head. Behind him, barking and leaping, bounded old Ahab, who, not having as much imagination as some, didn’t give a rap for heads one way or another. It was impossible to say, though, who was chasing whom. Jonathan felt distinctly tired. He felt, in fact, as if he were in some sort of clockwork funhouse from which there was no exit. It seemed likely that this madness could go on all night, that the river had a large enough supply of renewable horrors in it to wear down any opposition. Miles’ counter-spells, majestic as they were, didn’t seem to be accomplishing much. Miles himself, when Jonathan looked up at him one last time, was interrupting his chanting and pounding with wild swings of his staff, as if he were trying to knock something off the deck.

  Jonathan looked about for something to clobber the headless boater with, for Gump and Bufo were almost upon him. He’d wait for them to sail past, then knock the demon over the rail. As he turned to search the deck, he heard the first of three thundering explosions and watched as bits of riverboat sailed skyward on a sheet of flame. He found himself tumbling backward into a heap of coiled ropes. The ship listed to port. Debris rained down around him, and a second explosion bellowed out. He got one last, wild glimpse of Bufo, Gump, Ahab, and the headless man hurtling into the dark river. The third explosion rang out, and the riverboat lurched about, listed farther to port, and swung round sideways on the river. The starboard side loomed over Jonathan’s head like a wall and river water swirled up around him.

  There was nothing for it but to swim. He’d heard that sinking ships drag swimmers down with them, although he’d had no real experience along those lines so couldn’t say for sure. He’d have to ask the Professor when he saw him at Landsend post office. It seemed wise, under the circumstances, to be optimistic.

  He swam as strongly as he could about thirty strokes, not breathing, not looking back. When he raised his head for a breath, he saw behind him the bottom of the boat, almost perpendicular to the surface of the water. The great paddlewheel hung upright, half submerged at the stern. In front of Jonathan was fog. He had to trust to providence. He was sure that neither shore was more than a mile distant, so he struck out once again, more slowly now. Soon he was enveloped in mists.

  For several minutes he swam. Then, tiring, he pulled up and began to tread water. He yanked his shoes off, tied them together, and looped the laces through his belt. He felt for his pouch at his waist and found that he hadn’t lost it. He was happy that he’d decided not to leave it in his cabin with his clothes. His money, under the circumstances, was more important than his clothing.

  It began to bother him that he had no idea in what direction he was swimming. At first it hadn’t mattered, but now that he was safely away from the boat, it began to. He had no desire to visit the wooded slopes of the south shore. No desire at all. His quandary lasted about thirty seconds. From somewhere in the fog came the familiar sound of splashing, scraping oars, and dimly, behind him in the mists, Jonathan could see the emergence of the fiddlehead of a rowboat, bobbing toward him. There was the vaguest chance that it wasn’t the rowboat he knew it would be. He lay low in the water, sculling away with his legs so as to keep just far enough away to be hidden from it. He heard the whispering before he got a clear view of the two occupants. Jonathan paddled deeper into the fog and waited for them to disappear. Then he set out once more, this time in the opposite direction.

  When he knew that he’d put a quarter mile between himself and the rowboat, he called out a few times. He whistled and he shouted and, although once he fancied he’d heard a returning whistle, he didn’t hear it anymore. There was nothing to do but swim on and rest and swim on.

  The water was awfully dark. It may as well have been black tea that Jonathan was swimming through. The surface of the river was oily smooth. There wasn’t a breath of wind. The silence was almost complete. There were no steam engines or booming foghorns to add dimension to it – just vast, flat, eerie silence. Jonathan began to listen to the sound of his arms and hands splooshing down into the water. It seemed to him that he could hear the plip-plop of each droplet as it landed, could hear the wash of rising water that his arms pulled from the surface.

  It occurred to him – not suddenly, but as an idea that sort of rose out of his mind and hovered there – that if he could hear his splashing so clearly, so could anyone else. Or anything else. He paused to tread water and rest for a bit. It seemed to him that he remembered the Professor having said that water magnified sound. But he could be wrong. Perhaps it was vision that it magnified. Perhaps those monsters that had surfaced near the boat had been about half the size they’d appeared. He couldn’t remember what the Professor had said – and he was aware, while all this was going through his head, that he didn’t want to remember it. He didn’t want to think about it at all.

  Maybe water appeared to shrink things. Maybe the creature he’d seen in the river was even bigger than it had appeared. But that was impossible. He had no idea how big it was. It had simply been a great, glistening black hump, part of some beast as large as the riverboat itself. Larger maybe.

  Jonathan rested for a moment, sculling slowly with his arms. The fog was still dense around him. He was happy that he didn’t share Dooly’s fear of being locked in closets, for he seemed to occupy a little hollow in the impenetrable gray gloom, a little room with a misty ceiling and walls that ended abruptly at the black water.

  He began to wonder how far below his feet the weedy riv
er bottom actually lay. The cook had said that the boat ran along the deep channel. But how deep was deep? Thirty or forty feet? A hundred feet? Perhaps a thousand feet? Jonathan began to imagine himself treading water with a thousand feet of cold, shadow-haunted river below. He knew that such imaginings were a very bad idea, but there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it. The idea fascinated him, actually, just about as much as it terrified him.

  He pulled his hand out of the water to push the hair from his eyes, and he listened to the splash of droplets around him. He wondered whether the things that were lurking beneath him in the deep water could hear those surface noises.

  He realized just then, with a lurch of deep dread, that the river wasn’t entirely dark after all. Away to his right there was a faint plop of something breaking the surface of the water. Within the widening swirls the river seemed even darker just for a moment, as if the shadow of a cloud had passed over it, as if a massive turtle or a great finned ray had floated there momentarily, then sank away once again into the depths. The mist seemed to lighten around him, and he looked up to see, of all things, the moon, floating there above a break in the swirling fog. The break closed, the fog darkened, and Jonathan told himself that the shadow on the river had been caused by that one moment of moonlight. But moonlight, of course, doesn’t cause swirls and ripples. Clearly it was time to be pushing on – no use dangling there in the water like bait.

  Just as he pushed forward and drew back his arm for a stroke, he felt something very smooth and slippery slide across the top of his foot. He yanked the foot in, thrashed in the water to face whatever it was that had come up out of the depths, and saw, almost on the surface, the angular black shadow of a great triangular fin, undulating very very slowly, moving away from him, disappearing into the murk.

  Jonathan splashed away across the water. He kicked his feet about ten times as hard as was useful or necessary, possessed by about a dozen simultaneous fears. Uppermost was the fear that he had been swimming aimlessly, in circles. That he had found his way back around to the south shore. That the river saw to it that anyone on it at night would find himself cast up there amid dark forests and zombies and goblins. That at any moment he’d feel the slippery touch of some deep-water creature. That the thing, whatever it was, a tremendous bat ray probably, was merely tasting him, and that in a second, as he thrashed his way toward nowhere, he’d see a great shadow surfacing, feel the thing slam into him and carry him away down into the weedy basement of the river. Mixed with all those dark fears was the wild idea that if he ever reached shore, if he made it to Landsend and found the Professor, he’d have old Wurzle invent a rubber cheese suit for him to wear while swimming in the Tweet River. But then it struck him that this would be a waste of time. There wasn’t a chance in five million that he’d ever again swim in the Tweet River – this was his last such swim, one way or another.

  He forced himself to look straight ahead. If there were any more shadows in the river, he didn’t want to know. He was tiring quickly. The rush of fear had sent him along wonderfully well, but the burst had drained him, and his arms were quickly becoming useless. As far as he could tell, he was no closer to shore than he had been. It felt as if his sodden pants weighed about fifty pounds and that his shoes, strung through his belt, were full of sand.

  He decided to stop again to rest, to take his chances with the shadows and to get rid of his shoes and kick off his trousers. He’d keep his belt. His jacket he’d pitched away a half hour before. When he pulled himself upright and kicked his feet, he found himself standing in sandy slime. Before him, not twenty feet away, was a muddy bank.

  13

  S. N. M. Quimby, Haberdasher

  Jonathan slogged out across the river bottom and up onto the bank that looked far muddier than it actually was. He climbed to the top with little difficulty. The fog began to clear along the shore although it still hung thick out over the river. He saw that the river flowed across from his right to his left as he stood on the muddy bank facing it. So he’d made it. He was on the northern shore. The moon shone clearly through scattered high fog. There was still scarcely any breeze, something Jonathan was thankful for. The cool night air against his wet skin gave him a case of the shivers.

  The land roundabout looked hospitable enough. Lights from a handful of farmhouses dotted the distant landscape. It was late, perhaps nearing midnight, but not so late that Jonathan couldn’t find some sort of warm spot to spend the night. Pulling on his shoes, he climbed down the embankment to the river road and sloshed along it for a hundred yards or so. Then it occurred to him that he’d be wiser to hike along the top of the embankment, mud or no mud, so as to have a view of both the river and the road. It seemed certain that wreckage from the ruined riverboat would float ashore and that others besides himself would have swum for it.

  By and by he began to see bits and pieces of wreckage on the river – planks of wood, a ruined cot from one of the cabins, kitchen debris – all of it bobbing along placidly yards from shore. When he glimpsed the first bit it seemed to Jonathan that he should do something – swim out and salvage it or something. But then he determined, of course, that there would have been no point in it. More than anything else he hoped that Gump or Bufo or the Professor or Miles would come paddling along, them and old Ahab.

  He began whistling when he saw the first of the wreckage drift past. He knew that Ahab could hear him whistle from a long way off, and he was certain that if Ahab were within whistling distance, he’d find his master by hook or crook. Jonathan went on whistling at intervals, trudging along toward a farmhouse that fronted the river road some mile or so away. He stopped now and again to survey the river, and once when he did, he realized that a light glowing on the river side of the road hadn’t anything to do with the farmhouse as he had thought. Someone had a lamp set up atop the bank to cast light out along a strip of deserted shore. Several big pieces of debris sat in the lamplight. Jonathan hurried along toward it.

  When he was almost upon it, a long rowboat pulling for shore appeared on the dark river. Jonathan had lost some of his fondness for rowboats, but this one was something of a welcome sight. In it sat three people, all of them with securely attached heads. One was a man, another a woman, the third was S.N.M. Quimby, Haberdasher, looking colder and wetter by far than Jonathan felt.

  Jonathan slid down the bank and stood waiting. The woman rowed in long, powerful strokes, and the boat fairly hummed across the water. The man, bearded and wearing a hat, smoked a pipe and contemplated deeply. Jonathan shouted at them to let them know he was there and reached out for the painter that the man handed toward him. He set his feet, gave the line a yank as the woman hauled one last time on the oars, and the prow slid scrunching up onto shore. He looked about for something to tie it to and found only a large cabinet which, he supposed, would do as well as anything. As he looped the painter around a corner post he realized with a start that the cabinet had come out of the galley, that a few hours before it had been connected to Cap’n Binky’s complex coffee machinery. There were the holes through which the carriage bolts had slid to hold the works on – four smooth holes that might have been drilled a week before. There was no indication that the coffee apparatus had been yanked off or blown off or anything else. It had to have been very carefully removed. Jonathan hoped that it had been Cap’n Binky, and not Sikorsky, who had removed it.

  ‘Mr Quimby,’ Jonathan said, extending a hand to help the tailor out of the boat. ‘Watch out for the mud here. It’s a bit slick.’

  Mr Quimby shook with cold, his teeth clacking together. ‘Ooh-ooh-ooh,’ he chattered, nodding faintly to Jonathan. He held his arms out to the side, monkeylike, away from his body, and his hands shook uncontrollably. Jonathan noticed a big bulge on the inside of his coat.

  ‘Your beanbag toad has come through, Mr Quimby,’ he said, trying to cheer things up.

  ‘Oog,’ the haberdasher replied.

  The smoking fellow gave him a look, not understanding Jon
athan’s reference to the toad. ‘Been swimmin’?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Jonathan replied truthfully. ‘Anyone else out there? There were twenty people aboard at least.’

  ‘Would we have left ‘em if we’d seen ‘em?’ the woman asked. It was a logical thing to say, but it fell into the sourpuss category. She began hauling on a line that was tied to the stern of the rowboat. A collection of odds and ends was tied along the rope: a wooden chair, a cabin door, two kegs, and any number of other goodies. The line stretched out into the river.

  ‘Unless you want to lend a hand,’ the man said to Jonathan as he watched the woman haul in the pieces bit by bit, ‘you might just as well shove.’

  Jonathan, however, wasn’t so easily put off. ‘Where can a man dry himself out around here?’

  Neither of the two answered.

  ‘We’ll gladly p-pay,’ stuttered Quimby, groping in his suit for his wallet.

  Jonathan was on the verge of saying that he’d freeze before he’d pay them a cent, but he hesitated for Quimby’s sake, and it was just as well that he did.

  ‘Up the road at the farm.’ The woman nodded vaguely downriver. ‘There’s a barn in back with a wood stove. There’s dry wood, matches, barrels of apples in the back, and a couple of kegs of cheese. Put your money on the back porch in the morning when you leave. Something fair. We’ll still be out. Chance like this don’t come often. Next village is twenty miles down.’