21
’Possums and Toads
They were away before dawn. It seemed frightfully cold, but there was no ice on the deck and only a very little bit of frost, so it clearly wasn’t as cold as it had been. Jonathan never got on well in the cold and would much prefer stealing watches comfortably in pleasant weather, so he was happy to think that things were warming up some. He hoped it was a trend. The breeze was good, blowing almost straightaway upriver, and they found themselves clipping along past the banks along the Goblin Wood at a quick pace.
The limbs of the great alders that lined the riverbank drooped low out over the water, shadowing the mossy bank and giving the forest a sort of impenetrable look, as if all were darkness within and the forest floor never saw the sun. Long green vines twined along through the trees, and from the tips of the limbs bunches of gray-green moss drooped, dripping moisture from the morning dew. They rounded a bend in the river and surprised a troll attempting unsuccessfully to club a fish. The thing saw the raft while peering between its legs. It was bent at the waist and its nose was an inch or two from the swirling waters of the Oriel. Somehow the upside down view threw the troll into something of a panic, for it stumbled forward waving its arms in circles as if trying to keep its balance, and it tumbled head first into the river. It leaped up immediately in a towering rage. Dooly shouted at it and put his thumbs in either ear and waggled his fingers just to show it that he was one of the boys and had dealt with a few trolls in his day. But the troll immediately broke a limb off a nearby alder and flung it out over the river, managing to smash the thing into the side of the cabin. Dooly threw it back, but it only flew about twenty yards before landing in the river. By then the troll had forgotten all about them and was slamming away at fish again.
Beyond that the banks of the Oriel were empty. No herons waded in the shallows, no beavers or muskrats were busy building nests. Everything was still. ‘Creepy place,’ Jonathan remarked to the Professor.
‘The less movement here, the better,’ replied Wurzle. ‘If it’s activity you want, come at night.’
‘No thanks,’ said Jonathan. ‘This is fine. Just so no one suggests we tie up to the bank and go exploring. Those woods look old enough to be petrified.’
‘It’s a mushroom collector’s paradise,’ said the Professor. ‘I’m going in there some day.’
‘I’ll go too,’ said Jonathan. ‘Let’s plan on it some afternoon about thirty years from now.’
Escargot stayed inside all afternoon. He popped out once in his cloak of invisibility, but was careful not to carry anything around. He explained to the others that he was the ‘trump card’, the ‘ace in the hole’, and that they were too close to Hightower to take any chances. There were likely more than just a few odd silly goblins lurking about, and there was no use stirring things up.
They threw out their anchors below Hightower shortly after dark. Jonathan lit lanterns fore and aft, and the Professor, in order for them to appear very matter-of-fact, sang a couple of old songs in a cheerful sort of falsetto voice. They went to some length to make it appear as if they were simply spending an evening on the river and that nothing at all was going on. Each of them kept a sharp eye out for goblins.
In the distance, rising up out of the dark woods and the swampy lowlands above town, was the craggy peak of Hightower Ridge. Atop the ridge, dim and obscure in the dark of evening sat the castle, known up and down the river simply as Hightower. Pale smoke rose above the stone spires of the tower, and several lights burned here and there within – one in the uppermost reaches of the largest tower that angled up above the rest in gray immensity, almost indistinguishable from the rocky cliffside behind it. The yellow circles of light reminded Jonathan overmuch of eyes, and as he watched the walls of the castle fade into the obscurity of night, the topmost light blinked off, then, a moment later, blinked on again. It looked for all the world as if the thing had winked at him. Although he knew that such a thing was nonsense, he didn’t like the idea anyway and so decided not to take such an interest in the castle. There were other things to occupy his thoughts.
About eleven o’clock he turned the lanterns down and, along with his companions, went into the cabin and set about turning in. They even went so far as to climb into their bunks and lay there in the darkness, none of them able to sleep even if they would have liked to. The hours passed: midnight, one o’clock, two. Finally at about two-thirty Jonathan and Dooly slipped out of the cabin and slid into the seats in front of the paddlewheel. Dooly kept signaling to Jonathan by putting his index finger over his mouth, alerting him, Jonathan supposed, that they were being very quiet indeed. Escargot padded invisibly across the deck and silently hoisted both anchors, then took a seat forward. The Professor took hold of the tiller arm and the raft began making slow progress up the river. Only Ahab stayed inside the cabin asleep, having no stomach for fooling about in the middle of the night.
They crept along for two hundred yards, silent but for the muffled splash of the wheel as it turned. Then they came about in a long arc, and the Professor headed the raft up the mouth of Hinkle Creek. Once shrouded by the trees and brush along the creek bank, Escargot grabbed a pole and pushed the raft away from the shallow water along either bank of the narrow channel. They were well up into the creek – thirty or forty yards – before it became too rocky and overgrown to proceed. Escargot and the Professor tied up, and as Dooly had luckily done that night in Stooton, they dropped both anchors overboard into the shallow water. Then there was nothing left to do but wait until morning.
‘Have we fooled anyone?’ Jonathan whispered when the four of them were back inside the cabin.
‘We haven’t fooled him, if that’s what you mean,’ said Escargot. ‘Or at least if we have, we won’t have for long. There’s nothing that goes on along this stretch o’ the river that he don’t know. Nothing but about me, that is. We’ve got to hope he don’t know about me. He likely won’t care much about you, if you follow me.’
The Professor grunted an ambiguous reply, but Jonathan was pretty sure that what Escargot said was true. Tomorrow would tell. He decided not to think about it, and did instead what he always did when he wanted to sleep but was too restless or excited – he began counting the holes in a huge, imaginary Swiss cheese. He made it to the eighty-second hole before growing drowsy. Then he counted the eighty-third hole four times, then couldn’t seem to remember what came after eighty-three, then forgot all about holes and about Swiss cheese and was lost in sleep. When he woke, the sun was high.
Dooly was still asleep, but Escargot and the Professor were up and about. The cabin door was open, and Jonathan could hear low voices out on deck. He splashed some water on his face, brushed his teeth, and hurried outside without bothering to shave. He figured that either he’d catch up on his shaving in a day or two or would end up locked away in some dungeon where shaving wasn’t required.
The day was overcast and dim, but it wasn’t particularly cold. The forest on either side of the river was overgrown with ferns and vines and little, sprouting trees. The Professor was ashore, hacking at brush with a hand axe, and tossing particularly leafy clumps and branches back up on to the deck. Escargot’s voice, coming, it seemed, from up on the mast, said in a sort of stage whisper, ‘Hand me up one of them branches, mate.’
Jonathan shoved a branch up toward the top of the mast, and it was pulled out of his hand. He watched as the brush appeared to twine itself through the line wrapped around the crossbar. He shoved another in the same general direction, then another and another, until the mast appeared to be more a tree than a mast. Then they went to work on the foredeck, heaping brush about the deck and piling it atop the cabin. It didn’t take too long, finally, to finish the job.
They looked it over from this angle and that, rearranging brush here, adding a bit there, and decided that from the starboard side – that is from the Hightower side – the raft was tolerably well camouflaged while from the downstream side it looked like a pile of r
uined shrubbery heaped about the deck of an ill-hidden raft. But it was the best they could do. Escargot pointed out that there likely weren’t enough townspeople left around to worry about, and that goblins, dim-witted as they are, could be taken in by anything. The Dwarf, of course, likely had better things to do than be off hiking through the underbrush along Hinkle Creek. So the raft was probably as safe and as hidden away as it was ever going to be.
They debated for a bit about whether to hang about the raft all day and wait until sunset to investigate the village, or to set out right off and do a bit of snooping. It seemed safer to wait, but on the other hand it would be far trickier poking around unfamiliar countryside at night. What it boiled down to in the end was that none of them wanted to sit and wait. There was too much anticipation, and that often led to worry and fear, neither of which would be helpful.
So they set out, about eleven or so in the morning, carrying a bit of lunch in a knapsack. Jonathan and the Professor elected to carry truncheons, and Dooly carried what he called his ‘whack-um’ – a paddlelike slab of oak, more of a broken off boat oar than a club. Escargot carried nothing, neither a weapon nor a knapsack, since floating objects would no doubt draw undue attention. He insisted though that Dooly take along a coil of line – apparently an important item in a thief’s line of work.
They set out sloshing along the bank, finding muddy footholds in the shore grasses and clinging to roots and brush. On occasion they hopped along atop rocks for a bit, but the rocks were so slippery that soon there was more than one wet boot among them. Ahab, somehow, pranced along as if he were on the boardwalk at Twombly Town. No clumps of weeds or slippery stone seemed too small for him to balance on. About halfway back down the creek toward the river, Ahab began sniffing along, then thrust his nose into the bushes and disappeared. Jonathan, not wanting to lose sight of the dog, jammed through behind, calling him softly.
He found Ahab trotting down a little grass trail toward the river following a fat raccoon. Jonathan whistled, and Ahab stopped and watched as the raccoon disappeared around a bend. Then he turned and wandered back.
‘What ho, Jonathan,’ came the Professor’s voice from the creek bank on the other side of the brush.
‘There’s a trail here,’ Jonathan replied in hushed tones. ‘Goes toward the river. No one but a raccoon on it.’
A snapping of twigs and parting of bushes indicated that Escargot had pushed his way through to the trail. After him came the Professor and Dooly, hunching along through and pushing branches out of the way. They set off down the trail single file, sort of tiptoeing along stealthily until they sighted the river road ahead of them, winding along beside the banks of the Oriel. Dooly pulled himself up into the lower branches of an oak and managed to clamber high enough up to command a good view of the road and the surrounding woods. The other three hunkered down behind a tangle of brush and waited for Dooly to make a report. The brush seemed to be uncommonly full of spiders to Jonathan, and was still wet with morning dew. They waited five minutes as Dooly edged out onto a limb.
‘What do you see?’ Jonathan called, finally, becoming annoyed with the bugs.
‘A house,’ replied Dooly in a loud whisper. ‘A big old house, Mr Cheeser, and a cart in front. Windows on the ground floor are all boarded up, but it looks like someone’s living there anyway.’
‘How do you know, lad?’ asked Escargot.
‘Because there’s a guy hanging out wash,’ said Dooly. ‘Only it looks as if he’s worn hats all week. That’s all he’s got hanging.’
‘Hats?’ said Jonathan, thinking that somehow the idea of someone having to do with hats around Hightower wasn’t altogether new to him.
‘Gosset!’ said the Professor. ‘Remember that man at the pub, Jonathan, on the way down.’
‘Lonny Gosset,’ said Jonathan. ‘He was at that. Strange he’d be making hats with no one about to wear them. And why in the world would he be hanging them out on the clothesline?’
‘Likely just dyed the lot,’ Escargot suggested. ‘So you know this chap?’
‘I believe we do,’ said Jonathan. ‘And we may be able to count on him. I’ll just climb up into the tree and take a quick peek.’
There, sure enough, hanging hats on a clothesline in a weedy yard hidden from the river by scrub oak and lemon-leaf, was Lonny Gosset the milliner. His hair was considerably wilder than Jonathan remembered, and as he pinned caps and hats to the drooping line he looked furtively over his shoulder every few moments. Dooly and Jonathan watched as an opossum with an amazingly long nose chased into the yard out of the woods. Gosset jumped, flinging an oddly shaped cap – a nightcap, probably – into the air, and dashing across the yard toward the house. The opossum, scouring along on ridiculous little legs, headed him off, dashing between Gosset and the stick that lay against the front stoop and which Gosset seemed intent upon. Gosset stopped and eyeballed the opossum warily as it too stopped and scratched at its nose with one, fingered paw. It was a momentary standoff until, something came hopping from the edge of the woods, something that appeared to be an immense toad. The thing appeared to be too much for Gosset, who edged away toward the door, watching both creatures warily. Suddenly a cackle of laughter, goblin laughter, sounded from the trees beyond the clothesline, and Gosset broke and ran toward the house, slamming the door behind him. The opossum and the toad wandered off and disappeared. As they did, three goblins capered out of the forest, howling and laughing and plucking caps from the clothesline and stuffing them in a sack. Jonathan could see Gosset in the upstairs window, watching as the goblins stole his hats, then pulled down the clothesline and deliberately knotted up the thing, thereafter dropping it down the well. They never stopped hooting and cackling as they went about their mischief, and they fought over who was going to throw the rope into the well, pushing one another down and jabbing one another in the eye. Finally they leaped away into the woods, each wearing one of Gosset’s hats and jabbering like fools.
Jonathan and Dooly climbed down out of the trees, and Jonathan told the story to Escargot and the Professor. Upon mentioning the opossum, Dooly put in that it was one of them animals which carried its babies around in a spoon. Jonathan remembered seeing in an encyclopedia a picture of three baby opossums on a spoon, but the Professor clearly didn’t for he gave Dooly a fairly puzzled look.
‘Poor bloke’s daft,’ said Escargot. ‘Goes crazy when he sees a ‘possum and a toad. Maybe you can count on him, but he don’t seem like any sort of prize to me.’
‘We have a chance,’ said Jonathan. ‘It’s clear he’s not in league with the Dwarf.’
‘Absolutely,’ said the Professor. ‘And Gosset was a good lad. We can’t abandon him.’
‘I want one of them orange hats,’ said Dooly.
‘Then you shall have one, lad,’ agreed Escargot. ‘Although it strikes me that this is uncommon crazy, hat or no hats.’ And with that, the four of them set out through the woods toward Gosset’s house.
22
A Visit with Lonny Gosset
When they got there a few minutes later, Gosset was bent over the well trying to fish out the lost line. He had one foot planted in the thick, green lawn and the other waving about in the air; his head and shoulders and right arm were thrust down the well.
Very wisely, none of the rafters spoke until Gosset had fished out the rope and there was no danger of frightening him into the abyss which, given his surprise at hearing the Professor’s voice, would surely have occurred. ‘Aaah!’ shouted Gosset, wheeling about and staggering back a step. He held the end of the line in his hand as if it were a weapon and menaced them with it, his teeth chattering like crazy. What he intended to do with the rope was unclear – likely it was the only thing at hand.
‘Mr Gosset, I believe,’ said the Professor, extending a hand. ‘Perhaps you don’t recall having met us.’
Gosset edged around the perimeter of the well and peered at them from the other side. He seemed to be thinking hard, as if wondering wh
ether they were a pack of fresh devils from the woods or were, as they appeared to be, human beings. ‘You know me?’ he croaked.
‘We met at the pub,’ said the Professor. Only a couple of weeks back.’
‘Long weeks,’ said Gosset.
‘They have been that,’ said Jonathan. ‘You said you were a milliner, I believe. And from the look of those caps on the line, you still are.’
Gosset tossed his rope to the ground, seemingly convinced that there was nothing threatening about the rafters. Escargot didn’t make a sound.
‘Bloody hats,’ he said, then paused. ‘Won’t let a man alone.’
‘Hats?’ asked Dooly, astonished at this new fear.
‘Goblins!’ shouted Gosset. ‘They’re a filthy curse. Broke out my windows. Shoved toads into the living room. Howled down the chimney all night. A man can’t sleep with that. They run off my rabbits and poured slime in the well. Now I have to haul water up from the river.’ The three rafters shook their heads and clacked their tongues over it.
‘Foul creatures,’ said the Professor.
‘They are that!’ Gosset shouted a bit loudly. ‘Huh!’ he said, capping it off. ‘But not half so foul as – ‘ he began, then broke off, looking about him as if suspecting the very trees in the forest of listening in. Then he looked shrewdly at Jonathan and the Professor and Dooly, assuring himself, probably, that none of the three were disguised dwarfs. He shrugged and began to coil his rope.
‘As who?’ the Professor asked, and they watched as Gosset’s face grew red as a beet. It looked as if the top of his head were going to turn into a little volcano and he were going to start spouting steam.
The Elfin Ship Page 27