The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  ‘I’d say this was a bit of good fortune,’ the Professor said, ‘but I don’t believe it is. In fact, I’m all of a sudden inclined to agree that I’ve underestimated Selznak all along. All of us have. Even Miles. But then nothing he’s done so far has been half as clever as this.’

  They left the open chests and set out. Clouds were blowing in over the mountains – a summer storm by the look of it – and before they had trudged the length of the alley, lightning zigged across the sky up the coast to the north. Scattered drops of rain began to fall, and Bufo, looking glum and disappointed, muttered something about the indignity of getting soaked after having discovered a joke treasure.

  Jonathan didn’t feel quite so bad about the whole affair. He assumed that the treasure that still lay in the vault beneath the cellar of the old house would go right on along being a treasure until someone hauled it out into the sunshine. That, of course, made up for a great deal. To top things off, he had gotten his watch back and Escargot, once again, was to be a party to the rescuing of the Squire – and, after all, that was what the whole crowd of them had come to Balumnia to achieve. He almost managed to convince himself that a half-hour of rain might be a pleasant change of pace.

  When they stepped out onto Royal Street, Jonathan turned for one last look down the dark alley that stretched away toward St Elmo Square. He stopped abruptly and clutched the Professor’s arm. There amid the scattered and broken chests stood the old woman and her cat, watching them depart through the blur of rain. The black clouds overhead seemed to burst just then, sheets of rain pouring down and obscuring the distant square. Thunder cracked out, rolling and booming like a peal of deep, wild laughter. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the rain let off, and the lot of them stood dripping, peering down the long misty alley at nothing at all.

  19

  The Deep Woods

  Miles wasn’t at the inn. The company sat about, packed and waiting, for two hours. Dooly and Gump and Bufo played cards with Escargot and lost voluminous quantities of jelly beans to him, first at Go Fish, then at Loony Eights, then at Chewn M’Gumm. Escargot kept loaning the jelly beans back out at interest just to keep the game alive, but by two-thirty in the afternoon there were few actual jelly beans left – only a handful of caramel beans that everyone agreed tasted like dirt. All the rest had been eaten, so the winnings were pretty much statistical.

  The game was just petering out for lack of finances when the innkeeper came down the stairs rubbing his face and yawning. He had a bleary-eyed, afternoon-nap look about him. ‘Your wizard was in this morning,’ he said. ‘He was in a frightful hurry. Paid up and shoved off, he did.’

  ‘You must be mistaken,’ the Professor insisted. ‘Shoved off?’

  ‘That’s it. Took right off like a dirty shirt. He left a note for you.’ With that he hurried into his office, then hurried out again with a folded sheet of paper. On it was a brief and cryptic note from Miles: ‘Squire and Dwarf on coast road this morning. Time is precious. Follow me south. Gross evil afoot. Sikorsky and Selznak one and the same. Look to your wits. Beware Zippo.’

  ‘That last bit throws me,’ Escargot said, reading over the Professor’s shoulder. ‘What is Zippo?’

  ‘Who is Zippo, is the question,’ Jonathan explained. ‘He’s the parlor magician who stole my pocketwatch at Tweet River Village.’

  Escargot nodded. ‘Youngish sort of fellow, is he? Slimy looking in a way? Nervous? Uses a mechanical fish?’

  ‘That’s him,’ Jonathan said. ‘You’ve seen him then?’ Escargot nodded again and Jonathan continued. ‘I suspect that he wasn’t the incompetent that we had him pegged for.’

  ‘It sounds as if we’ll find out.’ The Professor was hauling his knapsack onto his shoulder and squaring his glasses on his nose. ‘Let’s buy some food and go. We’re hours behind.’

  Escargot suggested that they strike the coast road at a place called the Thirteen Bridges, a mile or two below town. From there the road ran on for close to a hundred miles before it came to another sizeable village. They hadn’t quite gotten to the door, however, when the innkeeper said suddenly, ‘I wouldn’t go that way myself.’ Everyone stopped and looked at him. He shook his head darkly. ‘Nobody goes south on the coast. Leastways not on foot. Not anymore.’

  ‘Not anymore?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘Not for a year or so. Not since that goblin business at the bridges and the horror at Boffin Beach.’

  They stood blinking at the man, waiting for more information. ‘Horror?’ the Professor asked. ‘What horror was that?’

  The innkeeper gave him a look that implied that the Professor wasn’t quite as bright as he appeared to be. ‘Why the horror,’ he said. ‘There hasn’t been but one. The bloody bones. The Waller party. Hacked to bits. Eaten. Where are you lads from, anyway? There wasn’t nothing but the horror at Boffin Beach in any of the newspapers for weeks. No, sir. I wouldn’t go south on no coast road. Not now, leastways.’

  Dooly’s knapsack dropped out of his hand and clunked to the floor.

  The Professor, however, was looking more determined than ever. ‘Then you’ll be happy to hear that your services won’t be required on the coast road. We’re going down to Boffin Beach and have a bit of a look.’

  ‘Let ‘em mess with us!’ Bufo said stoutly.

  ‘The wimps,’ Gump put in, clapping a hand onto Dooly’s shoulder to pep him up a bit. ‘They’ll sing a sorry tune.’

  On that note of encouragement, they filed out and down the road to the corner grocery before pursuing their way toward the Thirteen Bridges and the mysterious coast road. After about a quarter of a mile, though, Escargot pulled up short and scratched his head. ‘I’ve been thinking that we’re going off half-cocked, mates,’ he said.

  The Professor looked as if he thought Escargot was the one who was half-cocked. After an exasperated pause, he shook his head and started off again. But Jonathan had more faith in Escargot. ‘How so?’

  ‘We could be twenty-five miles down the coast by dark if we were in the submarine, and we could cruise up and down and look for signs.’

  ‘And Selznak could be murdering Miles and the Squire in the woods fifteen miles behind us,’ the Professor said.

  Escargot shrugged. ‘He might be doing his murdering right now. A few of us at least could run far enough ahead to have a look about. We could meet back up at Boffin Beach.’

  Once again Jonathan stuck up for Escargot. ‘I’m for it,’ he said. ‘Half of us can go along in the submarine and half of us on the coast road. Then if One party falls into Selznak’s hands, the other can dash in and rescue them, just like last winter. He won’t half expect us to split up. We can’t even be sure he knows that the submarine is in Balumnia.’

  ‘We saw the old woman at St Elmo’s Square,’ Escargot said, putting a hole in at least part of Jonathan’s argument. ‘But you’re right, lad. Selznak won’t look for us to break up. He’ll think he has us scared witless, cowering together on the road.’

  ‘You know about this Boffin Beach?’ the Professor asked.

  ‘I’m a submarine captain,’ Escargot said. ‘I have charts, maps. I fish for oysters at Boffin Beach. There’s pearl oysters there the size of wagon wheels. I sell them to the elves for beds. There’s an old abandoned castle on the bluffs above, but not much else. I don’t know anything about any horror. That must have happened while I was out to sea.’

  ‘I’ll go with Grandpa!’ shouted Dooly, who didn’t seem to have any desire to travel along the coast road. It was unlikely that he’d run into any ‘goblin business’ under the ocean.

  Bufo spoke up about then. ‘I’m for going along in the submarine, too. They’ve got the jump on us. It’s haste we want now.’ Gump, for once, agreed with him.

  ‘Then it’s settled,’ Jonathan said. ‘The Professor and Ahab and I will hike along the coast road and look for the four of you at Boffin Beach. We’ll probably run down Miles along the way if we try. He might dawdle a bit and wait for us. He w
on’t want to tackle the Dwarf alone.’

  There was general agreement on the issue, and everyone shook hands. Once again Jonathan found himself trudging along the road toward the Thirteen Bridges with the Professor on one side of him and Ahab on the other. ‘It looks as if we’re left to our own devices once again,’ he said.

  ‘Just as well, I think. I’m sorry to lose Gump and Bufo, of course; don’t get me wrong. But there’s an element of stealth lost when a big crowd goes stumbling down the road. I have a feeling that stealth is what we’ll want, just as much as haste. I still don’t trust Escargot. He’s after that globe, but that’s about it. He couldn’t care less about the Squire.’

  ‘I think you’re selling him short,’ Jonathan said, ‘although you’re right about his wanting the globe. We’ll have to wait and see, I suppose.’

  ‘We’ll see, all right. Let’s just not make the mistake of depending on him, that’s all. I hope I’m wrong, of course.’

  Jonathan was sure that Professor Wurzle did hope he was wrong. The Professor sometimes fell a bit short when it came to optimism, but Jonathan had rarely known him to be unfair.

  In half an hour they rounded a long curving bend in the road that led out of the city and along tidal flats toward the coast. Fishermen’s huts stood on stilts here and there above the grasses and stiff low brush of the marshy tidelands, and thin dark canals twisted along toward the sea. Some way below town on a bit of a hill lay a gypsy encampment, smoke from cooking fires curling languidly about a circle of wagons covered with tattered canvas. Not far from the road two dark gypsys were fishing for seabirds with kites. Jonathan was tempted to stand and watch for a bit, as now and again a big gull or heron would swoop down and lunge at the bait dangling at the tail of the bird-shaped kite.

  The kites themselves looked nothing like the sea birds they were intended to decoy, and that struck Jonathan as an oversight. But the Professor pointed out that gypsys, being rovers, fished for any of a hundred birds and could hardly be expected to hoist kites enough for all of them. There was a basic bird image, the Professor explained, which pretty much summed up birdness, and it was that with which the gypsys fished.

  The idea fascinated Jonathan, especially since the kites were such a wonderful mixture altogether – a sort of hodgepodge of birddom, as if someone had mixed up a duck with a parrot and a snipe and had tossed in a pelican and an ostrich for good measure. The Professor, however, said that the composite bird was nothing next to the composite mammal, which was a wonder to see and was about the size of a house. There had been rumors at the university, said the Professor, that the taxidermist who had been commissioned to make one for the school of biology had run mad after finishing the thing and had had to be taken away in a cart.

  ‘How about human beings?’ Jonathan asked. ‘Is there such a composite for human beings?’

  ‘Yes,’ the Professor said as they walked along and the fishing gypsys fell away behind them, ‘but it isn’t much to look at. It’s pretty much similar to the dummy in the window at Beezle’s store.’

  ‘The one with the foolish hat and one eye bigger than the other?’

  ‘That’s it. Not much to get excited about, not if you compare it to the bird or the mammal.’

  Jonathan said he’d like to see the composite mammal some day, and the Professor agreed that if they ever got up to the City of the Five Monoliths, they’d pay a visit to the university.

  About then they saw the first of the Thirteen Bridges. The road ran out across the tidelands toward deep water – either the Tweet River or the ocean, it was impossible to say which. The bridge was simply a stone arch that spanned forty feet of water and touched down on a long, sandy islet. From there a longer bridge arched out, touched on its own island, and rose once again. So it went for as far as they could see. The rising and the falling of the gray stones looked like nothing so much as the back of a great serpent or dragon humping up out of the ocean. Jonathan counted the bridges he could make out, but somewhere around the tenth, everything faded and dulled into the salty haze of the sea.

  They passed no one on the bridges. Boats sailed along below and a few rowboats were moored in the shadows, their occupants lowering crab traps into the water near the massive stone foundations. A galleon stood out to sea about a half-mile, perhaps waiting for the tide, which was low enough to expose a good expanse of muddy bank along each finger of the delta. Here and there people with rolled trousers poked in the sandy mud with clamming forks, unearthing plate-sized clams and tossing them into wooden crates or buckets. But all that went on below the bridges. On top there was no one at all besides Ahab, Jonathan, and the Professor – which was a bit disturbing to Jonathan, in the light of the innkeeper’s warning. The Professor, however, pointed out that if there were no sizeable villages for a hundred miles down the coast, then there would be little reason for traffic on the road. Besides, in midweek it was unlikely that picnickers or idle travelers would be out and about. The weekend would doubtless tell a different story. Jonathan agreed, but mostly because he wanted to agree and not so much because he thought the logic sound.

  The sixth bridge was a tremendous span of stones that hung in the air without a thought for gravity. The center of the span was fifty or sixty feet above what must have been the main channel of the Tweet River running deep and dark beneath them. The Professor pointed upriver where a long sand and rock spit formed something of a breakwater a half-mile or so distant. Canted over and three quarters sunk at the end of that breakwater was the hulk of the Jamoca Queen.

  As each bridge fell away behind them, so did the city of Landsend; by the time they crested the thirteenth, Land-send was itself lost in haze, a sort of shimmering ghost city disappearing in the late afternoon sun. They came out into the ocean breeze atop a sandy hill that fell away steeply toward a rock-dotted strand. Green breakers tumbled along the length of the beach, and the low sun shining beyond them glowed through the pale walls of the waves, turning the sea-green water to a clear pale emerald. All the ocean noises, the crashing and hissing and rushing and the crying of the seabirds, sounded to Jonathan like very wonderful but lonesome music and made him wish for the thousandth time that he lived by the sea so that he could listen to it every day.

  But there was no time to stand and gape at the ocean, not if they intended to catch up with Miles. Some quarter of a mile farther along they passed a crossroads that led away east toward the forest. An arrow on a cut-stone marker pointed inland, and below it were the wordsGROVER – 38 MILES. Another arrow pointed north toward Landsend, and another south toward Persimmon Village, some ninety-seven miles distant.

  After that the road ran up and down over sandy, grassy hills, the sea crashing on the one side, grasslands running away toward wooded mountains on the other. There was nothing particularly threatening or gloomy about the countryside, nothing that reminded Jonathan of goblins or of the sort of horrors that inhabited the woods along the Tweet River. It was all quite simply deserted.

  Soon the sun fell away into the sea, however, and the shadows of the hills and occasional trees grew longer and the ocean grew darker and colder. For another hour they trudged along until finally it was so utterly dark that when the road wandered into a very thick and quiet woods, they could barely make out the trail ahead of them. The distant sound of crashing waves had disappeared, and glimmers of moonlight shone away to their left between the leaves of forest trees. The path farther on was stippled with pale silver that winked on and off as branches overhead blew in the wind. Around them were the biggest trees Jonathan had ever seen, gnarled and twisted and stooped as if they’d seen some heavy weather. Limbs thrust out wildly and mingled together overhead in a tangled ceiling that swayed in the wind, now letting in a thousand shafts of moonlight, then casting deep shadows across the forest floor.

  So dense and forbidding were the woods on both sides, that the idea of tossing down the knapsacks and trying to sleep was unthinkable. It was only eight o’clock anyway, according to Jonathan’
s recovered pocketwatch, and it seemed far more sensible to travel along for another two or three hours, if only to tire themselves out to that point at which they felt positively like shutting their eyes.

  So they trudged along by the intermittent light of the moon. Keeping to the path, finally, even when it was lost in deep shadow, was an easy enough thing. Ahab could be depended upon for that. It wound a bit here and there, but it took no sudden turns, and there were no crossroads to confuse the issue. Several times they crossed what might have been game trails, little overgrown paths that led away into the wild depths of the wood, but there seemed to be no reason to investigate them.

  Around ten-thirty, Jonathan was starting to feel like getting a bit of sleep. The woods had, if anything, gotten deeper and darker and more musty and ancient. The branches no longer blew overhead; they were quiet and still. Jonathan suspected that the path had been running inland and that the woods were sheltered from the sea breeze by hills. The moon was three-quarters full, sailing higher in the sky amid scattered stars, but only occasionally did threads of moonlight manage to find the forest floor.

  They stopped to rest more and more often – every ten minutes or so – and their rest stops grew longer each time, the two of them sitting in a slump and considering tiredly the merits of staying the night in the woods. But each time they did, it seemed to them that a coast road, if it had any sense, would quite likely follow the coast, and that another half-hour or forty-five minutes must surely bring them back around to open, brighter country. So they stood up finally after their rest and plodded wearily along, ignoring the darkness around them and pretending not to hear the rustlings of the night creatures scrabbling in the undergrowth along the path.

  Jonathan’s mind, without him giving it leave to, kept wandering around to a point where it began thinking of trolls and of bears and of the sorts of shadows that inhabited the Goblin Wood below High tower. But he knew, of course, that he wasn’t in the Goblin Wood. He was in Balumnia, and Balumnia mightn’t have any trolls at all, or any bears either for that matter. It had headless men in rowboats instead.