The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  ‘Who will?’ Jonathan was having a difficult time following Zippo’s train of thought. Ideas kept derailing, it seemed to him, before they’d had a proper chance to get up a head of steam.

  ‘The armies,’ Zippo said. ‘Didn’t you just tell me there were armies massing?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ Jonathan responded. ‘Why do you say they’ll be too late? Too late for what?’

  ‘Why, for the siege.’

  ‘What siege was that?’ Jonathan was more concerned with rescuing his friends than with saving Balumnians from a threatened siege, but he had to be patient.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ Zippo asked in surprise. ‘Isn’t that why you’re here?’

  ‘We’re here to rescue the Squire. That’s all. And while we’re at it, we’re taking you along. You aren’t fit for this sort of life. It doesn’t suit you.’

  Zippo remained silent for a moment, thinking. ‘This is tolerably strange,’ he said finally. ‘You say you don’t know anything about the siege. About the goblins and monsters and ghosts and ghouls and such that have been gathering, or of the shadow that’s come over the south coast in the last year.’

  ‘Only rumor,’ Jonathan said. ‘That and what I saw on the river and in the woods last night.’

  To Jonathan’s surprise, Zippo produced his marble bag again. ‘You knew what these were.’

  ‘That’s right. I thought everyone did.’

  ‘Do you know whose likeness is on this coin?’ Zippo held up a gold piece minted in linkman territory.

  ‘That’s King Soot,’ Jonathan said. ‘The Squire’s father. He’s king of the linkmen.’

  ‘What’s a linkman?’

  ‘Something like an elf,’ Jonathan said. ‘Gump and Bufo, who were in the undersea device, are linkmen. Don’t you have any of them here?’

  ‘No, nor marbles either. Where did you say you were from?’

  ‘I didn’t say,’ Jonathan said. He could almost see wheels spinning and lightbulbs blinking on behind Zippo’s eyes.

  ‘My old master, Nimmo the wizard – I studied under him for a year before I met the Dwarf – told me once that there was another world,’ Zippo said slowly. ‘But it didn’t make any sense. He was on his way toward turning into a bird then, and I thought he’d gone spiritual on me. Then when I came here two years later, I saw the Dwarf coming and going through the iron door in the cellar. Do you know about that door?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jonathan said. ‘And you’re right about it.’

  ‘The door disappears,’ Zippo continued, ‘for months at a time. I tried to follow him once but I couldn’t open it. Spells wouldn’t budge it. That’s why I thought you knew about the siege. You understand. I began to suspect that you were from someplace else.’

  ‘Back up a bit!’ Jonathan ordered. ‘What about the blasted siege? Are you telling me that it isn’t a siege against Landsend or Tweet Village or anything?’

  ‘No. I don’t much know what, but it has something to do with where you come from, wherever that is.’

  Jonathan stood there studying for a moment, and any way he looked at it, from up and down or back and forth, it seemed quite likely that he and the Professor and Escargot had made a ghastly error at Hightower Castle six months previously when they had allowed Selznak the Dwarf to bargain for his life and had let him go. They had assumed that they had foiled his plots, reduced him to a minor villain, taken the wind out of his sails. But they hadn’t. Not by a long nose, as Bufo and Gump would say. They’d merely interrupted a broad and elaborate scheme that had gone right on along as soon as Selznak had gained his freedom. If it would have done any good, Jonathan would have kicked himself. But of course that wouldn’t answer. He’d have to kick Selznak instead, and the sooner the better.

  Then it struck him why Selznak had been so desperate to retrieve the Lumbog globe from the Squire. Kidnapping the Squire had been mere deviltry, but taking the globe had been utter necessity. The globe would become, unless something were done quickly, an open door by which Selznak’s creatures could flood into High Valley, probably at first into the dark depths of the Goblin Wood. Sending them through the door in the cellar and, one by one, up the iron ladder wouldn’t have served – that much was obvious. Selznak had to have the globe.

  Zippo stood outside the cell door watching Jonathan ponder. He seemed very nervous – more so all the time. ‘Well?’ he asked finally.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ Jonathan responded. ‘How in the world do I get out of here? Can you find a key? You can palm cards and watches well enough. Steal Selznak’s keys.’

  Zippo held a long iron key aloft. ‘I already have.’

  22

  In the Laboratory

  Jonathan’s heart gave a lunge at the sudden sight of it. ‘Get me out of here, then. Let’s go.’

  ‘What will we do?’ Zippo asked as he fumbled at the lock with the old key. ‘We haven’t any plan.’

  ‘Whenever I have a plan it goes nuts,’ Jonathan told him. ‘Let’s just move.’

  The door clicked open, and Jonathan stormed through it. Abruptly he stopped and started back after the lamp that hung on the wall. Then he decided that he didn’t altogether want to be a beacon, so instead he pulled the torch out of its mooring, yanked the oily, burned debris off the end of it, and wound up with a two-foot length of heavy wood – just the thing for whacking goblins. Together they set out down the dark corridor and up the stairs, Zippo in front.

  ‘First, we’ve got to spring my friends,’ Jonathan said. ‘Especially the bearded man from the submarine.’

  ‘It won’t be easy,’ Zippo replied, creeping along. ‘They’re spread out all over the place.’

  They reached the top of the stairs. Off to the right lay the doorway through which Jonathan and the skeleton troupe had filed hours before. To the left lay a great hall, open and bright as day. It seemed to Jonathan that he’d come to the end of his sneaking about. There was nothing left but to rush in shouting. It always seemed to come to that. Zippo, however, didn’t agree.

  ‘I’ll scout it out. Wait here.’ Zippo stepped into the hall with an air of nonchalance about him. He got about ten feet along when he realized that he was still holding the big iron key in his right hand, the crenelated end of it thrusting through his fingers. He stopped with a gasp, turned, and threw it at Jonathan; the key hit him in the chest, then clanked to the stones below. Jonathan stooped and picked it up, shoving it into his pocket.

  Zippo’s nonchalant air was dashed entirely. He glanced around him furtively, crouching a bit as if by hunkering down and making himself small he’d be less visible. But there were no shouts of accusation – there was no noise at all. No one was about. Zippo waved his arm like a windmill, and Jonathan, hefting his club, crept out of the shadows. Along with Zippo, he hurried across the hall toward another corridor.

  A long stone stairway wound up out of the hall to their right. As they dashed past it, three sharp barks rang out, echoing down the stairwell. Jonathan continued on into the darkness of the next corridor, but there he pulled up short and listened. Once again, he heard barking from upstairs.

  ‘Where’s that coming from?’ he asked, recognizing Ahab’s bark. ‘Are there cells upstairs?’

  ‘No.’ Zippo whispered, shaking his head. ‘All the cells are in the dungeons. There’s a laboratory upstairs and a bunch of little cold rooms that haven’t anything but ghosts in them. The Dwarf spends half the night wandering through them making conjurations and casting spells.’

  Jonathan stood thinking for a moment. ‘A laboratory is it?’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s the case.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at it then,’ Jonathan said decisively. He turned and headed for the stairs.

  ‘Oh no,’ Zippo cried. ‘The Dwarf is sure to be there in the middle of some horrible experiment. He’s a vivisectionist. We mustn’t go into the laboratory. He’ll have no mercy on us!’

  Ahab barked again. Jonathan leaped up the stairs two at a time, an
d Zippo was drawn up after him, both of them winding around and around before emerging onto a landing. Through a dusty window Jonathan had a brief glimpse, as he dashed past, of a distant beach and lines of green, glassy breakers. He became aware just then that his heart was racing along at a gallop and that his breath was shooshing in and out loud enough to alert anyone within earshot that someone had just come dashing up the stairs. Zippo must have been thinking the same thing, for he had pressed both hands over his mouth and was breathing through them in little gasping whistles.

  They simmered down a bit as they stood on the landing, but before too many moments had passed Jonathan led on toward a door that stood open a ways. Growling and barking sounded through the door, and for that Jonathan was glad. The noise would help hide the sound of their breathing and their footsteps on the stone floor.

  Jonathan hugged the wall and eased along toward the open door. When Ahab was momentarily quiet, Jonathan stopped. He could hear low laughter, the sound of someone chuckling to himself. It seemed to him that the laughter was directed at him and Zippo, that someone, the Dwarf obviously, was watching them sneak along and was about to drop a net over their heads or loose an army of goblins on them. But no goblins appeared. Ahab began growling again and Jonathan crept closer, peering into the laboratory through a crack between the door and the jamb. He was afraid that Ahab would sense his presence and give off his growling, but that didn’t happen. Ahab was too busy being angry over having been shoved inside a little cage against the wall.

  Ahab’s cage was one of many. On either side of him were an opossum and a pig, and above him was the biggest toad Jonathan had ever seen, blinking in a toad’s befuddled way. Beneath him were raccoons and badgers and one long-nosed senseless-looking beast that Jonathan couldn’t identify – some sort of Balumnian peccary. None of them had half Ahab’s spirit.

  A long wooden table sat in the center of the room. Above it hung suspended apparatus – coiled devices and tubular complications that led away toward bubbling glass jars steaming and popping along the far wall. Gloomy sunlight filtered in through what must have been a skylight in the roof. Dangling from the ceiling were half a dozen human skeletons in various states of disrepair as if their bones had been systematically removed. On beyond them, against another wall, were immense glass jars filled with a clear greenish fluid. Floating within were bits and pieces of human bodies – hands and feet and internal organs and, in one, a wide-eyed head with black curly hair floating roundabout it. The thing’s mouth was open as if it were trying to scream in horror, and it seemed to be looking right at Jonathan through the crack in the door, just as it had looked at him several nights before when it had been thrust up at him by the ghoul rowing the boat through the fog on the Tweet River.

  Jonathan realized suddenly that he’d been staring for a long time at the head in the jar. Zippo was tugging on his coat, Ahab was again silent, and Selznak’s mocking laughter filled the hallway around them. But still no goblins dashed in; no skeletons lurched out. Instead, as a sort of counterpoint to Selznak’s laughter, came a low throaty chuckle – a jolly sort of laugh, altogether out of place in that room full of horrors. Jonathan peered back in to see Selznak, white-robed and without his familiar hat on, leading poor Squire Myrkle along toward the table in the center of the room.

  The Squire had a faraway look in his eye – the look of a man lost in a pleasant dream. If Selznak hadn’t been leading him by the wrist, the Squire probably would have simply stopped and stood. He’d clearly been mesmerized and was in a state of passivity. Otherwise he appeared unharmed. He hadn’t lost any weight, still looked as if he’d been shoveled into his clothes pyramidally. Jonathan was reminded of Quimby’s Pillar of Hyglea and of his calling for an additional bolt of cloth.

  Selznak made a grand effort to hoist the Squire onto the table, but nothing came of it. Squire Myrkle stood and looked at him with a dreamy grin. He tried again, pushing on the Squire’s shoulders and tugging on his legs, but it was like trying to move a piano. Finally he disappeared from view, leaving the Squire standing there placidly.

  Ahab whimpered in his cage, as if he knew that the poor Squire was about to come to harm. Suddenly Jonathan had a fleeting vision of the Squire rowing without a head through the night fog on the Tweet River. He had hefted his cudgel, motioned to Zippo to follow him, and taken one step across the threshold when he heard Selznak’s voice. He stopped, hidden by the door, and edged back out, taking up his vigil. It would be better, doubtless to lay into the Dwarf once he’d gotten underway on the Squire.

  Selznak strode into view waving a half-peeled banana in the Squire’s direction. Squire Myrkle took it and munched away at it slowly, sitting down as he did so on the low table. Whereupon Selznak pushed him back, heaved his legs up onto the table, and began fiddling among his instruments, selecting a long curved scalpel and holding it up in the sunlight to have a look at its edge.

  The Squire worked his way through the banana and left the peel spread out across his face like a limp squid. Selznak plucked it off and threw it to the floor, then began to probe with his fingers along the Squire’s throat. If ever there was a time to rush in shouting and thrashing, this was it.

  But Jonathan didn’t move. A peculiar voice, just then, issued from somewhere high overhead in the room, a voice that made Selznak look up with a start. It sounded for all the world like someone talking through a speaking trumpet or a long tube, and it said the most peculiar things.

  ‘Str-a-aw-ber-r-ry pie,’ came the voice, stretching the words out like a ghost might do if it were setting in to haunt someone. ‘Choc-o-late fudge! Ro-o-oast goose! Che-e-e-se!’ Selznak looked about frantically.

  ‘Who is it!’ he shouted. ‘Who’s there! Zippo, if that’s you I’ll turn you into a scumfish!’

  Zippo moaned and clutched Jonathan’s elbow. For a moment there was silence. Then, again from overhead came the words ‘Roly-poly pudding! Peaches and cre-e-e-eam!’ Selznak threw his scalpel to the ground and stomped about in a rage, looking up into the ceiling above. Jonathan hunkered down and squinted up into the air, wondering why such things were being uttered and why they sent Selznak into such a rage. He spotted the source of the voice at just about the same time as Selznak did. There, poking out from between iron balusters that supported a railing along an open alcove above, was the open end of a dark cone.

  ‘Du Bois!’ Selznak shouted, shaking his fist. ‘You’ll pay for this intrusion. You’ll wake up with the head of a duck! I swear it.’

  But Miles, who was speaking through the end of his conical cap, paid Selznak little heed. ‘Prime ribs of beef!’ he crooned. ‘Au jus!’ Yorkshire pudding! Creamed corn and deviled eggs. Hot coffee and cinnamon rolls! Apple pie!’ At the mention of apple pie, Squire Myrkle sat up on his table and looked around. Selznak hopped about making a vain effort to stuff cotton into the Squire’s ears. ‘Pay him no mind!’ the Dwarf shouted. ‘I command it! Hocus pocus!’ Selznak waved a pocketwatch in front of the Squire’s face, frantically trying to put him under again.

  Squire Myrkle plucked the pocketwatch from the Dwarf’s hand and shoved it away into the pocket of his Quimby coat.

  ‘Veal cutlet!’ Miles shouted from above. ‘Bailey-bob stew! Gumbo! Fried potatoes! Pineapple upside-down cake!’

  Selznak gave up his efforts, raced over to a long, apparatus-loaded table, and began working at a vial of white powder. He dipped the head end of a stuffed newt into it, then shaking it to and fro and mumbling, he advanced toward the Squire. Jonathan hadn’t any idea what the powder was, but he didn’t like the look of it a bit, so he pushed open the door with a slam-bang and jumped into the room yowling and shaking his cudgel.

  ‘Bing!’ the Squire cried, heaving himself off his table and standing there woozily looking about him. ‘The Squire will eat now. The Squire has been promised amazing foods.’

  Jonathan hadn’t any time to discuss food. He dashed across and pulled open Ahab’s cage. Free at last, the dog leaped barking toward Se
lznak whom he very apparently didn’t much like. The Dwarf advanced upon him waving the stuffed newt and grinning. Squire Myrkle, catching sight of the plump newt, lumbered that way too, yanking his cap down over his forehead and swinging his arms ponderously.

  Jonathan grabbed Ahab by the collar and dragged him back out of the way of the sprinkling dust that hovered in a little cloud before the Dwarf. ‘Zippo!’ Jonathan shouted. ‘Zippo!’ But Zippo was nowhere about. Jonathan left the Dwarf to the Squire and pulled Ahab out toward the door. He yanked the key out of his pocket, dropped it, scrabbled around for it on the floor, and found it. Then he thrust it into Ahab’s mouth, hoping fervently that he wouldn’t swallow it. Ahab spit it out and looked at it. ‘Bring this to the Professor!’ Jonathan shouted holding Ahab’s nose between his hands and putting the key back into his mouth. ‘To the Professor!’

  Ahab turned and bounded out of the room in a terrible hurry – off, Jonathan hoped, to find Professor Wurzle.

  Jonathan turned back toward Selznak and the Squire. Squire Myrkle had wrested the newt from the Dwarf, and he held it by the tail, shaking it in Selznak’s direction, laughing all the while. Selznak was making a grand effort to get out his way and to avoid being dusted. It soon became evident why. The Squire suddenly gave off his sprinkling and yawned widely, then slumped to the floor in a heap.