The Elfin Ship

by James P. Blaylock

  It seemed to Jonathan like an awfully sad thing to say, and he felt like shouting to them that he felt the same way even though he had gone through a pint or two just last night. It was probably just the fog that made it such a gray day.

  By running along close to shore they could just make out the occasional farmhouses that appeared and then disappeared in the mists. They passed the mouth of a little river, overgrown on both sides by a tangle of giant alders hung with wild grape. Both Jonathan and Professor Wurzle remembered the place from the downriver voyage although it had seemed far more cheerful and less forbidding then than it did now with the great trees dripping through the fog. As they passed along thirty feet offshore they heard the growl of a beast – a bear, hopefully, or a moose – and then listened as the creature splashed away up the shallows of the river deeper into the forest.

  It was fortunate that Twickenham had given them a map of the river. Although there was no way to become lost, neither of them were familiar enough with the Oriel to determine how much progress they were making. They recognized an occasional landmark, like the river mouth or an island that passed by slowly off to port, but they had no idea of the distance from one to another. They might be plodding along like snails, or then again they might be sailing like birds.

  Twickenham’s map was a long, rolled-up affair, something like a scroll. Unrolled it was ten or twelve feet long, and it had markings for almost every riverside farmhouse and way station, of every little rapids and sandbar, and even of certain fallen trees and of the skeletal hull of a ruined trawler some twenty miles upriver. They spent most of the morning looking over the map and pointing out landmarks and watching for boats that might have wandered out of the midriver channel in the murk.

  Neither Jonathan nor the Professor liked the idea of being smashed up by a schooner again. They hung lanterns in the bow and stern – something they would have done on their trip downriver had they had any lanterns to hang.

  Jonathan finally rummaged about in the cupboards of the cabin, being careful not to awaken Dooly and Ahab, who were asleep on a bunk, and found the coffee pot, coffee, and a nice little dwarf camp stove – a big tin can filled with heavy, rolled paper and candle wax. Several wicks protruded from the wax, and the whole can sat on a metal frame with a grill atop. There were several other cans of fuel in the cupboard. It was all just the right equipment for brewing up a pot of trail coffee on deck, something that seemed to Jonathan a fairly romantic notion, given the fact that there was a good wood stove which they could have used in the cabin.

  The smell of the ground coffee was perhaps the finest thing either Jonathan or the Professor had experienced to that time. Jonathan wished that Bufo or Yellow Hat were around to compose a poem about it. Considering the number of ghastly love poems that had been written and which seemed fairly clearly to be a waste of everyone’s time, Jonathan couldn’t help but be surprised that coffee hadn’t been thus immortalized. There were certainly plenty of poems about other sorts of drink, although the only verse he could remember went, it seemed to him then, something like, ‘Beer, beer, beer – never fear.’ When he thought about it, it was nothing worth writing down.

  Anyway, the coffee as it brewed smelled so rich and deep that it woke Dooly up. He and Ahab came out onto the deck, Dooly carrying several slices of bread and a toasting fork. The day brightened up a bit and took on more of a merry tone with all of them sipping the strong coffee and toasting the slices of bread from Ackroyd’s bakery.

  The farms along the riverbank were fewer and fewer, and the woods in between were darker and more vast. For the last two hours no boats at all had slid past aside from a single canoe which had appeared to be empty. Jonathan decided too late that he should try to retrieve the canoe, but it had swirled away downriver before they had a chance at it. There was no clearing at all that afternoon. Jonathan thought that the two on the fishing trawler were probably drinking their pint at the Old Mooneye right at that moment and that old Monroe was likely shoving a joint of beef up onto a spit while his wife cleaned potatoes and rolled out crusts for pies. He sipped his coffee and thought for a bit about those pies until he very nearly dozed off.

  But he was awakened abruptly by a voice. ‘I could go for a cup of that coffee.’

  Jonathan looked up at the Professor, who was working the tiller. ‘Have some then. I’ll make a fresh pot.’

  Dooly was looking roundabout him as if he was sure it had been a ghost who had spoken.

  ‘I didn’t say anything,’ said Wurzle. ‘If I drink anymore of your coffee I’ll have the jitters all evening.’

  Jonathan recalled that day out of Twombly Town when Dooly had first made his presence known. His theory concerning talking dogs had seemed a reasonable enough explanation at the time, but it wouldn’t do here because Ahab, although asleep, didn’t care a bit for coffee, and it was unlikely that he’d dream about it one way or another.

  ‘Are you deaf, mates?’ The voice came again.

  ‘It must be another boat,’ said the Professor. ‘Look sharp.’

  Jonathan stood up to turn up the wicks on the running lights, and he looked off into the fog and listened for the creak of rigging or the slap of water on a hull. But the fog wasn’t as thick as it had been, and there were, quite clearly, no boats within a couple hundred yards of them. It was a puzzle. Jonathan sat down again and stabbed another piece of toast with the fork. He was just smearing preserves on it when, seemingly from atop the cabin, came the following odd song:

  ‘Oh there was a jolly miller

  Who lived upon the sea;

  He looked upon his piller

  And thar he sawr a flea.

  Ho ho, har har, hee hee,

  And thar he sawr a flea.’

  Then, in a trice, the toast was snatched from the end of the toasting fork, and it floated along through the air for a moment before being gobbled up by an invisible mouth.

  The Professor was astonished and started to reach for the oboe gun with which he’d been tinkering before remembering that it wasn’t a gun at all. ‘Watch out there,’ he warned, squinting this way and that. ‘There’s deviltry afoot, and plenty of it.’ Then the Professor’s cap, a battered-looking tweed affair, floated up into the air and settled again on his head, backward.

  Dooly laughed like a hyena and held one hand over his mouth to smother it. ‘Well, Dooly, lad,’ the disembodied voice said. ‘You’ve got a sense of humor for sure. How do you like my cloak?’

  ‘What cloak?’ Dooly asked, looking about himself a bit more furtively now that it was he being spoken to. ‘I don’t see no cloak, sir, begging your honor’s pardon. Are you my old Grandpa?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ said old Grandpa from somewhere above – on the cabin top again, probably. ‘Who did you think I was, Selznak the flaming Dwarf?’

  Jonathan exhaled a lungful of air in one resounding whoosh, and Professor Wurzle put his cap on straight.

  ‘I’ve been here all along, lads, quiet as a mackerel. Didn’t want to make a sound until we were upriver past civilization. No telling who might be lurking about. Still best not to shout, I suppose.’ There was a brief clatter and stomping as Escargot climbed down from the roof of the cabin. ‘Can I use your cup, Professor?’ he asked, and the cup sailed up into the air, dipped itself into the river, and shook itself out. The coffee pot upended and the last of the coffee, black by now as coal dust, poured in a steaming stream into the deep cup. One of the deck chairs creaked and settled and the coffee cup waved in the air.

  ‘I knew you didn’t climb out no window, Grandpa,’ said Dooly. ‘They said you took off and went down the coast.’

  ‘They was fools, Dooly, lad. The innkeeper was dense as that forest yonder. He kept peeking in at the keyhole all night. Thought I was stuffing the towels into my bag I suppose. So I peeked back out at him, I did, and winked. Threw him into the hallway, that wink, and as soon as he crawled back into his room I went out the front door. What kind of fool climbs out a window when there’s
a front door at hand?’

  ‘Hah!’ shouted Jonathan. ‘I knew it. Twickenham set the whole thing up.’

  ‘Almost, lad,’ said Escargot. ‘’Twas me set the thing up. Now this Selznak, you see, don’t like me a bit. We had transactions a while back. And I admit; he got what he shouldn’t have got. But I got myself a few of his creatures, mostly small ones that didn’t amount to a thing but came in handy for trade. But one was a good one, mates. A pig, it was, and lived in a special box. Leastways it looked a pig, excusin’ its nose and its hands. It could sniff out elf silver from a half mile away like one of them mushroom pigs the linkmen keep. I let on that I got him from a bunjo man and kept him pretty secret. We had some luck, I can tell you, up in the White Mountains.’

  ‘What happened to this pig?’ asked Jonathan.

  ‘Died, poor devil. Had to sooner or later. He didn’t have but half of him that was his own; the rest was bits and pieces. Crazy damn thing. Evil, I called it and still do. But it was better off with me than with that damned dwarf. He was setting in to attach wings.’

  ‘Vivisection!’ cried the Professor.

  ‘Then that beast by the river that chewed through the ropes – ’ began Jonathan.

  ‘An abomination,’ said the Professor.

  ‘Didn’t you have one of them once,’ said Dooly. ‘One of them abomi-what-is-its?’

  ‘More than one,’ said Escargot. ‘But that’s why I’m here, see. No one but me has been in that bloody tower. And I swore I’d never go back, not for all the goblin treasure in the Wood. Not for a bucket of troll gold.’

  ‘So why are you going back?’ asked Jonathan. ‘You could have been half way to the Isles by now.’

  ‘Well,’ said Escargot ponderously, ‘that I could. But I could go to the Isles come spring, too. Me and Dooly could go in the submarine. What’s a few months more or less? And I wouldn’t give it to them to say that Theophile Escargot, Gentleman Adventurer, ran when the fight started. No, sir. If this dwarf cuts up rough – and he will, mark me – then I’ll be there to speak to him, I will, and not in no Wonderful Isles.’

  ‘Hooray!’ shouted Dooly. ‘We’ll smack ’em, won’t we, Grandpa?’

  ‘Aye, Dooly. Rough and ready, that’s us in a nut.’

  ‘You haven’t heard anything, I suppose, of the Lumbog globe?’ asked the Professor.

  ‘The which?’ asked Escargot.

  ‘The globe that was stolen from the elves a hundred years back, maybe more,’ the Professor explained. ‘It was pure crystal – elf crystal, not just soda glass – and big around as a melon. I haven’t seen it, but I was told that clouds swirl through it and it was deep blue like the night sky. And there was a silver moon inside and stars all around. There was magic of a sort in it when you set it up in front of a lighted window. Those stars and moon started to swing round inside and the clouds blew about, or seemed to, and whoever gazed into it would find himself within the globe and could sail through space along with those stars to wherever it was he wanted to go. And your man Boomp, Jonathan, wrote most of his books after talking to old Lumbog up in the city of Couch. They say the old glassbiower was three hundred years old by then and had been to places no one else had ever been nor ever will be either. I didn’t believe a bit of it,’ said the Professor, trying to qualify things, ‘but I thought I’d ask whether or not you’d gotten wind of the story.’

  ‘Interestin’,’ said Escargot. ‘Seems like I have heard of it, now that you mention it. Seems I heard that some dwarf has it now.’

  ‘I thought maybe you had,’ said the Professor. ‘This Selznak has quite a collection of elf marvels. More than his share, no doubt.’ The Professor seemed as if he were going to give Escargot a look, but then he wasn’t at all sure where Escargot was, so he didn’t.

  ‘Why didn’t this Lumbog make more?’ asked Jonathan.

  ‘He tried,’ answered the Professor. ‘He and every other glassbiower. That paperweight you bought in Seaside – that was a copy; I’m sure of it. But the original was a mistake. Even old Lumbog didn’t know what happened. Got the fire too hot maybe, or spilled elf dust into the glass by mistake, or sloshed ale into it and didn’t know, or any of a thousand things.’

  ‘Well,’ said Escargot after a long pause, ‘if old Selznak gets this cloak he’ll have the three major elf marvels then. Those elves are pretty loose with their marvels, aren’t they? You can steal ’em blind one moment and they’re handing you a magic cloak the next. Sounds like there’s a moral in there somewhere. Either that or a lot of stupidity.’

  ‘I suppose we’ll find out before long,’ said the Professor, ‘one way or another.’

  Jonathan realized at that point that they’d been talking to a phantom. He decided he wanted to know more about that cloak. ‘What sort of cloak is this then, anyway?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s what Twickenham called “the cloak of invisibility”. The cloak, mind you, not a cloak. Fits a bit tight on me, but it must be like a tent on an elf. Watch this.’ The three of them stared as the coffee cup hovered in the air for a moment then disappeared. Then, as abruptly as the cup had gone it appeared again. The cup finally settled on the cabin roof, and a second later a cigar appeared in the air. Then it disappeared and a pair of spectacles hovered about, opened up, and sat atop the bridge of an invisible nose. ‘I need these things to read,’ said Escargot about the spectacles. ‘This getting old is bad business. You don’t get any more wise; you just fall apart.’

  ‘But where did all that stuff go, Grandpa?’ asked Dooly, slow to catch on when the glasses finally disappeared.

  ‘Into the blasted cloak. It’s really more of a coat than a cloak as far as I can tell. It has sleeves at least. And it isn’t warm worth a damn – like having nothing at all on. I’d appreciate it if you could see clear to giving me the spare bunk inside boys, if you would. I most froze up here this morning. Twickenham said I wasn’t to come down too soon, and who am I to argue with Twickenham? Never argue with an elf who gives you a cloak of invisibility, that’s my motto, and so far it hasn’t steered me wrong.’

  ‘I dare say.’ The Professor, who, Jonathan suspected, actually thought Escargot a trifle glib, smiled. Jonathan didn’t mind a bit though. He rather liked Escargot’s attitude. Confidence, in fact, was just what he himself could have used a bit more of. He wondered, however, whether or not Escargot was as untroubled about returning to Hightower Ridge as he seemed. If he was, then he was an altogether astonishing grandfather indeed.

  They ran along after dark, not wanting to miss any of the breeze that was still being very cooperative. They were well above any section of the river that was likely to be frequented by boats of any sort, and the Oriel was still broad enough and lazy enough so that they hadn’t any fear of rocks or bad water. Late in the evening they hit stretches of river free of fog, and in the glow of the laternlight felt safe enough to press on, the Professor at the tiller and Jonathan sitting forward.

  But by midnight both of them were done in. As it grew later it seemed less profitable to push along. By twelve-thirty if someone had offered Jonathan a choice between eight hours sleep and a treasure map, sleep would have won hands down.

  ‘I’ve had it, Professor,’ he said, stretching and pulling his coat tighter. ‘Let’s throw out the anchors right here and call it a night.’

  But there was no response from the Professor, only a fairly revealing snore. Jonathan turned and saw that his friend had fallen asleep, his head slumped forward onto the tiller arm. The raft was still maintaining a rather straight course, although the wind had fallen off somewhat. It was a simple thing to reef the sails and heave out both anchors, one on either side of the raft. The raft was on its way back to Seaside when the starboard anchor dug in and the bow swung round, almost pointing the raft downriver. The port anchor caught a moment later and the raft lay still as a pond lily in slack water. Jonathan wished he had a snag to tie up to. He could imagine himself waking up several hours later only to find that the raft had broken loos
e and drifted halfway back to Seaside. But, being seafaring dwarfs, they likely knew a bit about anchors, though the only way to find out whether the anchors were trustworthy was to try them. At last he blew out the running lights and then almost immediately wished he hadn’t. The sliver of moon above gave off almost no light, and the night was so utterly dark that he stumbled over the deck chairs on his way to the stern.

  He rousted the Professor out of a sound sleep and the two bent in through the cabin door and collapsed into their bunks.

  18

  Corned Beef and Cabbage

  The second day out was as uneventful as the first. More so, in fact, for the coastal fog finally cleared up and the sun favored them with a visit during the afternoon. Escargot felt it best that he keep his cloak on all the time, day and night, just in case they were visited by some creeping thing from the river or in case one of the crows that occasionally flew over was somehow a minion of the terrible Dwarf.

  Jonathan quite preferred it that way. Enough mysterious occurrences had taken place already on the downriver voyage to satisfy any desire for adventure that he might have had. Besides, he and Dooly and the Professor amounted to nothing more than bystanders. If it were known that Escargot was aboard, who could say what sorts of terrible times might lay ahead?

  So Escargot only took the cloak off to wash up. Oddly enough, it wasn’t until he pulled his arms out of the sleeves that he suddenly appeared, as did the cloak, looking altogether normal. Even one arm in a sleeve was enough to remove him and the rest of his clothes entirely from sight. Escargot was as grizzly as he had been on the day they found him at Thrush Haven. He explained he was ‘cultivating an image’ and hoped to pass as a pirate come the following April. The wilder a pirate looked, it seemed, the more highly he was regarded in certain circles.

  Jonathan had always thought of Escargot as an old man – probably because Dooly constantly referred to him as ‘Old Grandpa’ – but he thought that the man couldn’t be as old as all that, though it was hard to tell. His hair was black as a tunnel, and although there was a fleck or two of gray in his beard, there wasn’t enough to bother about. When Jonathan had first seen Escargot, years before, he had seemed something of a dandy. His beard – probably more of a goatee than a beard – had been trimmed neatly. He had worn a top hat, carried a cane with a silver knob atop and was never seen around town in the daytime without a tie with a stickpin stuck through it. He affected a cultured speech then, not the seaworthy tone he was using lately. It was a bow here and a ‘Good day to you, sir,’ there and a prithee this and that whenever possible. Considerably younger at the time, Jonathan had been greatly affected and had even tried to act the same way. Eventually, however, he determined that he himself was destined to be no more than Jonathan Bing, and that anything else was foolishness.