The Elfin Ship

by James P. Blaylock

  He was hoisting himself into the lower branches, ripping a gaping hole in his shirt as he did, when he became aware of a great silence – a silence broken only by something like the whirring of a thousand sparrow wings and the hum of an army of bees. There, soaring along not twenty feet above the swirling waters of the river was an elfin airship which had dropped so swiftly from the heavens that ragtail ends of clouds were dragged along and were rising skyward like misty bubbles here and there overhead.

  The ship didn’t exactly pursue the trolls, but clearly the beasts were uncommonly afraid of the airship and were making straightaway for the deep woods to avoid it. Ahab met them on the shore and generally raged about growling and woofing until both trolls lumbered off into the shadows of the alders and hemlocks and were gone. After that, Ahab sniffed about, raising a meaningful growl now and again and making an occasional dash in the direction of the forest simply to ensure that the trolls stay put.

  The airship buzzed along upriver traveling only about as fast as a man might walk if he were in a moderate hurry. Jonathan, Dooly, Professor Wurzle – whose leg had become stuck in a crotch of the alder – and even Ahab watched wide-eyed the long, cylindrical ship.

  A row of porthole windows as if built for sightseeing lined either side, and at each window was a grinning elf face, each gazing back at the four along the river as if they were the marvels. The sides of the craft glowed in the late afternoon sun as if lit from within, and the craft’s color was that of a snowflake just as it turns to transparent silver and melts. It was some sort of precious elfin metal, no doubt, mixed high in the White Mountains and laced with enchantment and wind and sleet and glass and precious stones all melted down in a stew. Such, anyway, is how it appeared to Jonathan. The mere presence of the airship itself was enough to keep the company amazed for a week. The ship sported a pair of wings that thrust out from either side and were shaped very like the wings of a large but slender bat. The nose of the craft was translucent green, likely shaped from a monstrous emerald. Within sat another small party of elves, each wearing a pointed cap and gazing puffy-cheeked and pointy-eared through the green window.

  The only markings on the vessel were a smattering of elf runes near the tail around a giant round face with wide goggling eyes. Although the image had ears, the face could have been little else but a comical drawing of the Man in the Moon in one of his most effervescent moods.

  ‘My grandpa knows that man!’ shouted Dooly as the craft began to round a distant bend in the river. And without thinking much about the consequences, he splashed along after the disappearing elves into deep water where he thrashed crazily until Jonathan dragged him to safety.

  ‘My old grandpa!’ cried Dooly.

  ‘Was he in there?’ asked Jonathan.

  ‘No, he’s been away for an age. But that man on the side with his cheeks all loaded up with cherry pits like a jelly man – him and Grandpa were friends.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Jonathan. ‘Then your grandpa was friends with the Moon, I suppose.’

  ‘I bet he was!’ cried Dooly, doubly amazed. ‘He had such a picture on the back of a pocketwatch which he said was give him by a half-dwarf from the east. It was an amazing watch, Mr Cheeser. You bet it was. You could stop it whenever you liked.’

  ‘I’ll be a fried chicken,’ Jonathan said as the two waded chest-deep across the channel to shore. ‘You could stop it, could you?’ But Jonathan wasn’t feeling as flip as he sounded, for he too had seen such a face, and he wasn’t at all sure whether he liked it or feared it or whether his mind might just be playing a trick on him.

  ‘I should hope to shout,’ said Dooly. ‘And once it stopped, so did everything else.’

  ‘Bless my soul.’

  ‘And you could walk about and put people’s hats on sideways and put their spectacles on upside down, and anything you want. Yes, sir. The Widow’s pies weren’t safe when Grandpa was about with his watch with the big face on the back.’

  ‘I should say not. I bet he ate his fill of pies, that grandfather of yours. He must have been the pie king.’

  Oh yes. He was that. Everybody knew him as that up and down the river. Apple pie and a bit of yellow cheese. That was his idea of food. But I shouldn’t mention the cheese.’

  ‘How come?’ asked Jonathan, vaguely suspicious.

  ‘Well he didn’t take much.’

  ‘From whom?’

  ‘From your old dad, I suppose. He was the Cheeseman back then. Do you remember?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ said Jonathan, who actually remembered very well. He could close his eyes and see his father through a mist of rain coming out through the cheesehouse door with a great wheel of salted goat cheese as he himself had done a hundred times since. Old Amos Bing wore a wide-brimmed hat that rose to a stiff point on top and always had a leather pouch slung from his belt which housed a tiny ivory jar filled with snuff, a half dozen good luck charms, and four coins – possibly from the Oceanic Isles – that had wonderful pictures on them of strange deep water fish. Every time you looked at the coins there was a different fish on each side. You had only to turn the coin over for the pictures to change. And like the jeweled symmetry of a kaleidoscope, the strange fish wavered and reformed as the coins were turned and never, once they were gone, reappeared. Jonathan’s father had told him that as each fish disappeared it found itself in the sea, and that that was why the ocean had so many marvelous creatures swimming in it. At least that was the story told originally by the bunjo man who had traded the coins to Amos Bing. Jonathan sat for hours after that revelation, turning the coins over and over and keeping tally of the hundreds of fish with which he stocked the oceans. Once, as he turned two of the four coins, a face appeared on all the coins instead of a fish, and it smiled and blinked at Jonathan and seemed to be looking around the room trying to ascertain where it was. Jonathan watched in startled silence as the face wavered and rippled as if seen through the haze of a hot August day. Its cheeks swelled and its smile grew until it was just this side of a leer, then it turned into the face that was on the side of the elfin airship – a great, round-faced moon which winked very slowly at Jonathan as if the two of them were in on the same secret. Then it, too, rippled again and was gone with the fish, and the coins became what they were before the face had appeared. Jonathan abandoned his task of calling up new fish and toyed with the coins only rarely in the years since. The face never reappeared.

  Now those same four coins lay in that same pouch tied to Jonathan’s belt. It still contained several good luck charms, most notably a red and black bean he’d been given by another wandering bunjo man from the east, which would sprout and grow in the shape of a house if you planted it, or so the bunjo man insisted. But Jonathan had never planted it and hadn’t, in fact, even looked at the contents of the bag for a long long time. As long as his luck held, he thought, it was better not to go fooling with the charms.

  Jonathan snapped out of his reverie and turned back to Dooly. ‘Was he a big cheese-eater, your grandfather?’ he asked.

  ‘Not so big as he was a pie eater. He ate all kinds of pies, but only ate cheese with apple pie. And he only had to borrow the cheese once when he was down and out. But he left pay, Mr Cheeser. My grandpa always left pay. He told me himself that you could borrow just about anything if you left something in return. Then you could bring back what you took if it wasn’t all ate up and get back what you left. He left something mighty fine for them cheeses though. It was what they call an octopus and it was pickled in a glass jar. It come all the way upriver from the sea with the traders. Grandpa had a batch of such things; he gave one to my old ma, who still has it though she don’t let on in case someone might come to steal it.’

  Jonathan glanced sharply at Dooly and began to speak but thought better of it. Dooly had, no doubt, seen the encased octopus which had sat for years on the Cheeser’s mantel and so had generated the story out of his fancy. But then it was true that Jonathan had never known where his father had actually gotten the thin
g. Dooly seemed to be intent upon having his grandfather embroiled in everything, like a colored thread that begins at one edge of a tapestry and seems to wind along through every scene on the cloth, popping up here and there and disappearing again into the weave only to become visible somewhere else.

  ‘Wish I had that pocketwatch today when them monsters was after me,’ said Dooly. ‘But the conjurer dwarf from the Dark Forest got it. Grandpa was lucky there.’

  ‘How is that?’ asked Jonathan as they drew up to the tree where Professor Wurzle sat looking uncomfortable and pink-faced.

  ‘The thing was a curse. You had to always be winding it. If you let it run down, there was only one man who could start it. If you couldn’t find him, you’d have to walk around with nobody for company and everyone standing like statues. You and me and anyone else would stand still as a tree until the man started it up again.’

  ‘And what man might that be?’ asked Jonathan. For some reason he knew the answer to his own question as soon as he asked it.

  ‘It was the man on the elf airship,’ said Dooly. ‘The same one as was on the pocketwatch, like I told you.’

  Dooly, Jonathan, and Ahab looked up at the Professor lodged in the tree. ‘Up in the tree, are you, Professor?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘Yes, I am. The opposite pressures exerted by these angling limbs seem to be holding my leg in sway.’

  ‘Does he mean he’s stuck?’ asked Dooly.

  ‘I believe he does,’ replied Jonathan. ‘Why don’t you climb up there and untangle the Professor and the elf gun, and we’ll be on our way before the trolls come back.’

  Dooly did, and the company set out briskly for the raft. Dooly found a chain of several links on the shore and kept it, for it had, very apparently, belonged to one of the trolls who had lost it when fleeing. And although it was greasy and smelled abominably, Dooly intended to nail it to the mast as a trophy. They set out as evening fell and didn’t anchor for the night until they had put several long miles between themselves and the forest of the trolls.

  5

  Ahab Adrift

  The company spent most of the next two days rafting downriver to Hightower Village. They breakfasted the second morning on bread which had already begun to look a trifle greenish about the top and opened a jar of strawberry preserves with a layer of paraffin over it. Professor Wurzle graciously pointed out that the wax kept certain ‘things’ from getting in. Organoids he called them. Dooly understood him to mean bugs and determined that the lid of the jar, if it wasn’t twisted on by a fool, would keep out any bug he’d ever seen. The wax therefore, said Dooly, was placed in the jar to be chewed on. And a dabble of jam on it, as there was bound to be, made it tolerably good.

  About five miles upriver from the village the alder and hemlock forests began to thin, and wide meadows full of columbine and skunk cabbage and lupin rolled away toward the White Mountains in the east. Rivulets tumbled along across the meadows and rolled on beds of smooth stones down into the Oriel where tall stilt-legged waterfowl plunged through the shallows. The meadows, fresh and green at first, became boggier and overgrown as they flattened out above Hightower. About a mile from town, the countryside became a wide impenetrable morass. Hightower itself, with its cold, stone crenelated walls like the fortress of some somber and ageless wizard, stood atop a prominence that poked above the motionless green of the swamp and looked down and across toward the village that lay along the river.

  Although it didn’t mean much either to Dooly or Ahab, Professor Wurzle was astounded to see white smoke whirling from a chimney lost amid the thrusting towers, many of which were crumbling away slowly. Hightower had the reputation of being curiously old and had been abandoned, or so the Professor insisted, for an age.

  ‘Something afoot,’ the Professor stated.

  ‘I’ll say,’ said Jonathan. ‘Something I’ll just keep my nose out of. There are too many such things afoot for my comfort: trolls not a league beyond Twombly Town, elfin airships having a bank holiday and buzzing up and down the river, Willowood Station lost. I’ll just ask no questions about abandoned castles coming to life, if you please.’

  ‘Well, Jonathan,’ the Professor replied with a profound wrinkling of the forehead, ‘it’s scientific blood that beats in my veins. The blood of the alchemists; and such as we are spurred along by mystery. It’s bread and wine to us, meat and drink.’

  ‘I prefer my meat on a plate, fairly well done – and speaking of wine, a dribble of port tonight to celebrate our arrival at Hightower might do something to take the chill out of the evening air.’

  ‘It might at that,’ the Professor agreed.

  Every so often they passed a lone cabin. Most of them stood up above the marsh on stilts, and the glow of lantern light could be seen through chinks in the weathered plank walls. Great drooping trees bent branches over the tops of the cabins, and drops of moisture plunked perpetually onto roofs carpeted with thick layers of mosses, green and purple in the evening twilight. From one cabin some hundred yards above the river came the plink, plink, plink of a tinny banjo, and the sound wafted out over the silent river in such a way as to make the three companions wish they were somewhere else with a good fire at their backs and a rice pudding and beef rib in front of them on a plate.

  They were, all of them realized, a very long way from home.

  But the company, all in all, was a very stiff-lipped bunch. They were vaguely troubled though to observe that about half the cabins they passed seemed empty. In fact, not until they were beyond the fringe of the marsh and below Oldgate Bluffs did there begin to be signs of life.

  The town itself was only modestly awake in an early evening sort of way. A group of school children tromping along the riverside waved and shouted and held up crayfish for the rafters to have a look at. Ahab wandered out of the cabin and barked once or twice cheerily, and one of the boys, no doubt well versed in the biological sciences, pointed at Ahab and shouted something about ‘a hi-yoona with a puff-head.’ The children immediately took up the chorus and went prancing about waving their crayfish. Shouts of ‘Puff-head! puff-head!’ followed the rafters downriver for another quarter of a mile. Ahab took the chiding rather well and didn’t seem at all put out.

  Finally they could see the rocky outcropping that marked the edge of tiny Hightower harbor. Jonathan steered the raft into the quiet bay, and they tied up. Dooly and Ahab had to stay on board although both would have welcomed a stroll through town. It would hardly have done, however, for the entire company to traipse off and leave the raft unattended.

  Jonathan and Professor Wurzle really had little business to transact, the raft being only three days out of Twombly Town. They intended to visit a baker and a butcher, and to purchase a few pounds of coffee, a commodity that had been forgotten. Also, they had to buy a jacket and bedroll for Dooly, who had come aboard woefully unprepared.

  As they wound up the road into town, it began to look as if it were some holiday or another, for half of the shop windows were boarded up and signs hung on the doors reading ‘Gone Away’ and ‘Closed for the Season’. It all sounded suspiciously final, as if ‘the season’ would apply to any one of the four as its turn came round.

  The two unexpectedly came upon a large party of mice, of all the strange things, in company with a bug-eyed toad. The mice were busily engaged in chewing a hole through the side of a tack-and-feed store that looked particularly abandoned. The toad sat blinking placidly on a little tuft of moss nearby like a sultan trying to determine whether the labor of his minions was worthy of his attention or whether he ought not to drop off to sleep for an hour or so.

  Professor Wurzle was taken aback at the sight and shouted incoherently at the mice more out of surprise than anything else. When the mice only paused and then returned to their labors, his surprise turned to curiosity, and he went stomping away toward them, an air of the researcher about him. At his approach, the toad shuffled off into the bushes and the mice followed – not in a rout, mind you, but very o
rderly.

  Professor Wurzle said he’d be darned, and Jonathan said he would too. Then both agreed that something fishy was going on and that the mice were strange sorts altogether. As they reached the center of town, however, things began to take on more of an air of normality. Few people, however, seemed particularly glad to see them, and a few even ducked away furtively down alleys at their approach. But shops were open and doing business.

  A wooden placard clacking on its stays advertised a public house and the Professor suggested they go in to see, as he put it, the lay of the land. Jonathan agreed and said that he’d like to see a mug of ale as well as the lay of the land. The Professor could find no fault with his logic.

  The interior of the pub was not the cheerful sort that people of Twombly Town might boast of. It was littered with scraps of food and assorted bits of trash; a dozen layers of sawdust had been thrown on, one after another, as if the shreds would produce brooms and dust pans and mops and set about cleaning the floor. Instead, the sawdust simply messed about and mingled with the debris and produced a most disagreeable smell. The tavern was dimly lit, to boot – not in a warm and rosy way like Jonathan’s living room, but simply in a bleak way as if candles and oil were running low and the place were too fallen to bits for anyone to bother going after a fresh supply. It was not at all the sort of tavern in which anyone would wish to spend his dinner hour.

  Half the tables were empty, although glasses and dishes lay piled on most. The proprietor was sleeping on a stool behind the counter, his mouth having fallen open to reveal the fact that he had only two visible teeth, square in the center of the top of his gums; both, apparently, were made of solid gold and held in place by a complicated arrangement of tiny wires.

  ‘Man needs a new set of teeth,’ said the Professor to Jonathan as they stood looking about the gloom.