Several years later Escargot reappeared – actually he wandered through several times but rarely stayed – wearing a pair of round spectacles and a tweed suit; he was selling cookbooks door to door. Then he vanished again, and wild and unlikely tales filtered upriver from the sea and down from the White Mountains.
Whenever he took the cloak off it too became visible, and although he wasn’t sure what he had expected, Jonathan was a little bit disappointed in it. In fact there was nothing about it at first glance that would lead anyone to suppose it an elf marvel of any sort. It was white, mainly, although within the wrinkles and folds of material it appeared to be pink. And it wasn’t until they had been three days on the river that Escargot held the coat up in the sunlight streaming through an uncovered window, and Jonathan saw its true colors. The thing shone like a rainbow in the sunlight.
In the sunlight, the cloak became a rippling mass of color, almost alive with it, though it was abruptly still and pale when in shadow. As Escargot’s arm slid down the sleeve, the coat very simply vanished, as did Escargot. Jonathan once again had to be careful not to step on invisible toes and to question seemingly empty bunks and deck chairs before sitting down on them. Cupboards opened and shut, the water jug upended itself into cups that floated about, hovering knives spread peanut butter onto floating slices of bread. All that took a bit of getting used to, as did the disembodied voice that was likely to speak to you when you expected nothing of the sort. But apparently it doesn’t take an overwhelmingly long time to get used to living with invisible people, and, all things considered, everyone got along smoothly. On the third day the voyage became somewhat more arduous because the wind fell off almost entirely. It seemed to Jonathan that it would be pleasant merely to lay about and read a book and wait for things to pick up again. The wind was sure to blow up sometime. But the Professor, insisting that the entire valley was falling to ruin about them, thought it best to crank up the paddlewheel.
Jonathan suspected that what the Professor meant was that he wanted to investigate the workings of the thing which, it turned out, was operated to fairly good effect when two of them pedaled simultaneously. One man, likely, could have made headway alone if he were on a lake and the water were very calm. On a river, however, even a lazy river like the Oriel, the going was more difficult. Together he and Dooly pumped away until the raft was sort of skimming along. Actually, though, it only seemed so in relation to the river water that was streaming past. In relation to the shore, they weren’t doing quite so well. The Professor said they were making about three knots; Jonathan determined that if a man were walking along the river road, he and the raft would keep about even. He started to calculate exactly what that meant in terms of the miles that lay between them and Twombly Town. Then, for fun, he counted the number of times he pedaled in twenty minutes, figuring that they had covered about a mile in that time. It turned out that he and Dooly – or whoever else did any pedaling – would pedal about sixty zillion times before they were halfway home. Just thinking about it was lunacy. When he checked his figures with the Professor, old Wurzle pondered for a time and said that, give or take a billion or so, Jonathan was tolerably close. The best thing he could do, all things considered, was not think about it at all.
But the more Jonathan tried not to think of pedaling along, the more he thought about it, or else thought about not thinking about it, or thought, every fifteen seconds or so, that it had been some time since he had thought about it last and then felt like a fool. The whole thing was maddening. After about twenty minutes he forgot all about not thinking of it and so didn’t. The pedaling itself, once the paddles were slapping easily through the water, wasn’t much of an effort – no more, certainly, than riding a bicycle. When the Professor offered to take over for a spell after an hour or so, Jonathan replied that he was just getting into his stride. Dooly said the same, proud, no doubt, that he was an important member of the crew.
Escargot, invisible atop the cabin, cheerfully volunteered to have a go at it himself, but the Professor pointed out that such a thing might, as he put it, tip their hand. Escargot agreed, but not as quickly as Jonathan had expected. Instead he told them the story of when he had taken a job logging and had to run rafts of logs downriver from the City of the Five Monoliths to Willowood Station. It would have been an exciting job under any circumstances, but to hear Escargot tell it, there was no end of trolls and goblins and wildmen and outlaws who wanted those logs or who simply wanted to run mad for a bit at Escargot’s expense.
Dooly prompted his grandfather to relate the tale of finding the stick candy treasure, and after a few moments hesitation he did. Jonathan was fairly sure that Escargot was laying it on pretty thick for Dooly’s benefit.
The afternoon passed along into evening, and as the sun went down the wind came up. They gave up their pedaling and sailed for about three hours. The night was so dark, however, that they ran up onto two sandbars, one right after another, and had to pole themselves free. Night travel seemed to be a bad idea, and – as Escargot pointed out – they weren’t in such an incredible rush as all that anyway.
So they threw out their anchors about ten o’clock when they were in the midst of a wide spot in the river – one of those lily-covered, swampy areas that threatened now and again to choke the Oriel entirely. The countryside round-about was particularly low and the floodwaters of the preceding week’s storm still covered the meadows. Thick stands of willow poked through the still waters, and just to be safe, they tied up to a thicket.
Escargot dug around in his bag and came up with a bottle of cream sherry and a bag of walnuts. In the light of one of the lanterns, the four of them sat about on deck chairs cracking walnuts and sipping the sherry which was very good – made across the sea in the sunny Oceanic Isles. Jonathan was surprised to discover that Ahab liked walnuts as well as any of them – even more than Dooly, who simply cracked them for the sport involved and fed every other one to the dog. It was a little cool to be picnicking on deck that late in the evening, but the night was so wonderfully clear and the stars so bright that it would have been a shame not to. When the moon finally peeked up over the hills it was just a little scrap of a moon, only two days away from being nothing at all. Still, it was a friendly sight.
Dooly, still awed by his grandfather’s tales that afternoon, insisted that Escargot ‘spin the yarn’ about when he went to the moon and fell in among sky pirates. The word yarn struck Jonathan as being particularly appropriate, but Escargot’s reaction to Dooly’s request made him wonder a bit. In fact, the old man changed the subject rather abruptly after saying only that it had been ‘quite a time’ and nothing more. Either the sky pirate story was a trifle far over into the realm of the tall tale or else, quite possibly, it involved the theft of the pocketwatch – something that Escargot regretted. Jonathan couldn’t be sure which, but one way or another, no one heard any more that evening about the moon and sky pirates.
Changing the subject wasn’t difficult. Escargot called their attention to several flickering lights moving among the trees upriver on the far side. Jonathan jumped up and blew out the lanterns. They waited in the darkness. The moon didn’t even cast enough light for them to see one another’s faces. Only the rustle of creatures alongshore and the noise of crickets or an occasional frog could be heard. Jonathan found that he was staring at the approaching lights, his eyes wide as saucers in an attempt to make some sense out of the night around him. Dooly started to whisper but Escargot shushed him. For five minutes they sat in silence and watched what had to be sixty or eighty goblins trotting down the river road. They were surprisingly sensible goblins compared to the lot that had attacked the raft. Half a dozen flaming torches lighted their way. Among them were several goblins of tremendous size – easily twice the size, say, of the average elf. Oddly enough, however, it was impossible to say which of them were the big goblins. When they were directly across the river – perhaps fifty or sixty yards away, Jonathan spotted a tremendous thing, a ghastly, p
ale, disfigured goblin more horrible than any of his fellows. But just as Jonathan picked him out of the lot, he seemed to shrink and change and reduce himself to half his size, and the goblin beside him, up until then a sort of nondescript pixie of a goblin, puffed up incredibly, dwarfing his fellows.
‘They’re up to no good,’ whispered the Professor when the party was once again only flickering torchlight through the distant trees. ‘Where do you suppose they’re going?’
‘The first outpost maybe,’ said Escargot.
‘Then they’ll get a warm reception from the keeper,’ said the Professor. ‘He didn’t half like the look of Jonathan, Dooly, and me on our ruined scrap of a raft; imagine what he’ll think of a party of torch-carrying goblins.’
‘They could just as easily be heading for Snopes’ ferry,’ said Escargot.
Jonathan chuckled. ‘In which case, they may well run into the Squire’s party. Bad luck if they do.’
‘Let’s hope that they don’t run into anyone at night,’ said Escargot. ‘There’re too many goblins there to mess with, mates, and they ain’t just out to pour honey into people’s hats.’
‘This is unprecedented,’ said the Professor, lighting his pipe. ‘I don’t like the look of it much.’
‘What is it?’ asked Dooly.
‘Bad business,’ Escargot said to Dooly. ‘In more ways than one.’
Jonathan could ifnagine the squint-eyed look on Escargot’s face: and hoped he was as sure of himself as he sounded. It was more than acting and rough talk that they’d need before the voyage was through.
They decided to keep a watch that night. Escargot volunteered to take the first and was to wake Jonathan at one. The Cheeser would rather have taken the first himself, but the day’s pedaling had done him in, and he felt a bit limp, almost as if he were floating. By one, after only two hours of sleep, he’d be in no shape to stand watch.
But when he was shaken awake, sunlight was pouring in through the cabin window and Escargot was slapping water onto his own face out of the bowl, his cloak of invisibility heaped on his bunk. The smell of bacon and coffee filled the small cabin, and the Professor clanged away with their two frying pans on the cabin stove, waving a fork over the crackling bacon.
‘What time is it?’ asked Jonathan. ‘I missed my watch.’ He swung stiff legs to the floor. His calves and thighs felt as they should after a day of pedaling.
‘I missed mine for a week after I sold the thing,’ said Escargot. ‘Made a sundial out of a squid and it kept better time than my watch. Then I traded it away for that pocketwatch you heard about. Worst move I ever made. Nothing but pain ever come from that blasted pocketwatch. Gettin’ rid of that watch was the second biggest mistake. But I’m going after both of them mistakes now. If I would have kept my squid clock none of this would have come up. Think about it. Could you see all them elves and dwarfs and linkmen and goblins and who knows who else up in arms over a squid clock? It ain’t likely. They’re the craziest-looking things there is.’
Jonathan, by then, was up and testing his muscles. He walked like what one of those squatty-legged cavemen in the Twombly Town Museum must have walked like before he turned into a fossil. It occurred to Jonathan that it was likely that exercise caused fossilization – that it made you stiffer every day until you woke up frozen one morning and had to roll yourself out of bed. But he found that he limbered up fairly quickly. The smell of the coffee and bacon had a good effect.
‘Someone should have woke me up last night,’ said Jonathan. ‘I never could have done it myself.’
Escargot slipped the cloak on and vanished. ‘I didn’t do nothing all day yesterday but talk. You talk too much and you go crazy. It’s proven. Ain’t that so, Professor?’ The Professor nodded, but Jonathan suspected that he was just being polite. ‘So anyway,’ Escargot continued, ‘I figured that if I sat up all night and thought about this and that but didn’t say nothing it’d even itself out. The elves have a saying about that, about what a fine thing silence is. Leads to wisdom, they say. But you don’t have to live among ’em for more than an hour or so to know how much philosophy is worth. Which reminds me; do you know what it was that Blump said to me, just as their ship was a-settin’ sail the other night?’
‘No,’ said Jonathan. ‘I thought Blump set sail before we ever left for Thrush Haven.’
‘Nope,’ said Escargot, ‘they waited around for me. Blump’s a prize. Doesn’t have quite the brains that Twickenham has, but he’s a wit, I can tell you. Here he was, already aboard, sails spreadin’ all up and down the mainmast, and he shouts at me as me and Twickenham are off to the Mooneye. He shouts this, mind you, waving at the Squire all the time so as to call his attention to it. “Why,” he shouts, “did the linkman put a chair in his coffin?” Twickenham was for going on, but I had to hear, so I shrugs up at him. And laughing like a crazy man, he shouts, “So rigor mortis could set in!” Then laughs so hard he collapsed on the bloody deck and two elves had to help him to his cabin, him hootin’ and shoutin’ the damn fool punchline all the way. That’s an elf captain for you.’
‘An undeveloped sense of humor, certainly,’ said the Professor. ‘But I find that any jolliness at all is better than none.’
‘I thought the joke was pretty good,’ said Jonathan, who was repeating it to himself so as to remember it to tell Gilroy Bastable. Dooly, who wandered in in search of breakfast, asked, ‘Who was it who set in?’
‘Rigor mortis,’ Escargot explained.
‘Was he some kind of elf or something?’
The Professor tried to explain, but it made the joke incredibly foolish. He finally gave up and told Dooly that it didn’t make any difference anyway, that it had to do with being stiff.
‘Then he must have set in last night,’ said Dooly, ‘because I can’t hardly walk.’
The Professor said that, on the contrary, Dooly could hardly walk, but his explanation of the grammatical arcana involved was no more successful than his scientific explanation of rigor mortis. They all forgot about it while they ate breakfast.
‘Where can I get one of these squid watches?’ Jonathan asked Escargot.
‘I’ll make you one. If we were at Seaside I’d have one this afternoon. We’ll have to fish for river squid here, though. And you don’t catch many of ’em. Tricky bunch of swabs. And they have too many legs too. You have to compensate.’
‘I had a snail clock once,’ said Jonathan. ‘It worked pretty well except when it snowed.’
‘Never heard of a snail clock,’ said Escargot.
‘I made it up,’ said Jonathan. ‘I can only use it at home. At about five in the morning there’s about six hundred snails out on the lawn, all of them going somewhere. Eating grass and such. You have to be careful not to step on them. Then at six-thirty there’s only about twenty left, and they’re all heading for the bushes before the sun comes up over the top of the house. By seven-fifteen there’s usually only one left. I think he’s sort of a village idiot snail, though, because he’s likely to be out any time of day. He mucks the clock up a bit, actually. Then at night they do it all over again in reverse.’
‘Not too accurate, Jonathan,’ said the Professor.
‘It’s good for a break now and then,’ said Jonathan, supporting the snail clock. ‘Being accurate gets tiresome.’
‘Getting up early enough to use the bloody clock is what would be tiresome,’ Escargot put in. ‘I’ll make you a squid clock, Bing; they work day and night.’
Out through the window they could see trees swaying in the morning breeze. It wasn’t as good a breeze as it might have been, but they popped along and raised the sails anyway, tacking away slowly upriver in the cool morning sun.
For two days they traveled along just so, pedaling now and then when the wind gave off, poling their way through shallows, and all in all making fairly steady headway. That same afternoon they sighted smoke downriver on the Highland shore. It was a great billow of dark smoke that dimmed the sky to the east for hours �
�� a forest fire possibly or perhaps a barn fire. In the evening a second billow of smoke appeared some miles distant from the first, but by nightfall it had vanished. There was little doubt among the rafters that the fires and the goblin party were somehow related. Jonathan had to agree with the Professor that there wasn’t time to dawdle, that the high valley likely was falling to ruin.
But there was nothing they could do about any fires downriver. One night passed and then another, and by the morning of the sixth day out of Seaside they neared the remains of Little Stooton – which looked, oddly enough, as if it had decayed even farther in the past couple of weeks. Great tendrils of creeping vine covered the houses along the shore, snaking in and out of windows and prying shingles from roofs. Lamps or candles seemed to be glowing dimly within the shadowy recesses of a few of the houses, but that, perhaps, was a trick of the sunlight that still shone off and on through a darkening sky. A thin wisp of smoke rose from one chimney, striking the rafters as being altogether odd. They had no idea whether the smoke – or the lamps, if they were lamps – were a good or bad sign – if that meant that Little Stooton hadn’t been entirely abandoned or if, on the other hand, the village were being resettled by goblins. The Professor said he’d like to find out; he was horrified by the idea of goblins living in abandoned homes. Escargot told him that he had heard of stranger things, that it wasn’t uncommon, in fact, to come across just such a thing in the deep woods. Both Jonathan and Escargot, however, saw no value in stopping simply to satisfy their curiosity, and the Professor finally agreed.
The Elfin Ship Page 24