The Disappearing Dwarf (15 page)

‘Didn’t say why!’ Professor Wurzle exploded. ‘Of course he didn’t say why! He’s cheated this man out of a watch.’

The mopping man nodded and went about his business as if the Professor had commented on the weather or blown his nose. ‘It ain’t the first. Zippo’s a hand when it comes to a deck of cards, but he ain’t much at palming no watch. Mixes things up. Ain’t his fault. A man has to have time to learn.’

‘Well,’ Jonathan said, pretty much resigned to the loss of his watch, ‘he got in a good bit of practice on mine tonight.’

‘Likely stole it.’ The Professor wasn’t quite as philosophic about the whole matter. But then it was fairly clear to both of them that the little mopping man with his bucket of suds couldn’t be held responsible for the lost watch one way or another. So they trudged back up the hallway and bent out under the tapestry to where Gump, Bufo, and Miles sat over cups of coffee. Two full cups sat before Jonathan’s and the Professor’s chairs.

‘Let me guess,’ Miles said. ‘He was gone. Won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon.’

‘Tomorrow night,’ Jonathan said.

‘Tomorrow morning, more likely,’ Miles observed. ‘After the riverboat sails. I saw him drop the wrong watch into the mortar. But I don’t think
he
knew it until after he’d beat it to hash. It’s a good thing his assistant was on her toes. That fooled me for a bit. It probably wasn’t the first time he’s made that mistake.’

‘So we heard from the janitor.’ Jonathan was looking at the cheap, broken, substituted watch. He shook it next to his ear and heard rattling and swishing inside. With his clasp knife he pried the back off. The watch was half-full of sand. There were no works inside at all, not even a gear.

‘It’s the sands of time,’ Gump said as Jonathan poured the contents of the watch case into a little pyramid on the table.

‘Pull out the stem,’ Bufo suggested, not wanting to let Gump outdo him. ‘You can dangle it from the string and use it as an hourglass.’

‘That’s right,’ Gump said, ‘but you could only use it once.’

‘He could fill it up again.’ Bufo sounded irritated.

‘Through that little hole?’ Gump asked.

‘No! He’d take the bloody back off!’

‘Well, he’d still lose a bunch of the sand. It would be all over his shoe. His hourglass would run shorter and shorter. It wouldn’t be worth a dime.’

‘Maybe he’d find some new sand.’ Bufo was exasperated. ‘Scrape a handful out of the Tweet River.’

‘Wet sand,’ Gump said. ‘If he scrapes it out of the Tweet River, it’ll be wet. It won’t run out and it’ll turn the watch green. So there’s your precious hourglass. All a wreck!’

Bufo looked as if he were about to pop. Jonathan gave him the watch. ‘You can have a go at it if you want,’ he said. ‘But it might work better as a coin purse or a weight for a fishing line.’

Bufo plucked a half-dollar from his pocket and seemed pleased to find that it fit neatly into the watch case. ‘I’ll use it as a secret compartment.’ Bufo closed the watch case over the fifty-cent piece. ‘If we’re waylaid by highwaymen they’ll never think of looking inside a pocketwatch for money. I’ll get away with this half-dollar. Put one over on them.’

Gump was in a state. ‘Highwaymen!’ he shouted. ‘Put one over on them! That’s about as smart as the hourglass idea. As if the filthy highwaymen won’t steal your watch along with your purse.’

‘Then I’ll slam them in the head with it.’ Bufo whirled the watch around in a quick little circle on the end of its string. ‘Then I’ll hypnotize the boggers like this.’ And he waved the watch in front of Gump’s face, bouncing it twice off the end of his nose.

‘Mig-weed, mig-weed, mig-weed!’ Gump shouted, purpling and mouthing the words that, more than anything else, would set Bufo awry.

‘Gentlemen!’ said the Professor, who favored dignity above all else.

Gump and Bufo took his hint and settled down, although for the next ten minutes they sporadically made puffy-cheek faces at each other. Bufo insisted upon dangling the watch in Gump’s direction and whispering, ‘Hocus, pocus, mooliocus,’ in the manner of Zippo the Magician.

It was midnight before they left. There was nothing much to do aboard the riverboat but sleep, so they’d made the most out of their evening at the tavern. Outside the fog was gray and thick. There was almost no breeze, so the fog hung in the air, wet and cool, muting the sounds of the evening. Streetlamps glowed weirdly through the suspended mists. The posts below the lamps were obscured by the fog, and the lamps themselves seemed to be floating there in the still, damp air, casting their pale rays like cloudy little moons. Their footsteps clacked on the cobblestones of the street, and the melancholy tinkling of a piano sounded from behind them, some remnant of an evening’s entertainment in what must have been, by then, an almost empty tavern.

A riderless horse clip-clopped past, appearing some few yards ahead in the mists then disappearing as abruptly, the sounds of his hooves striking cobbles receding slowly into the distance.

The five of them stopped for a silent moment on a street-corner to read a faded and peeling street sign just to make certain they were going back along the same streets they’d taken earlier. It seemed to Jonathan to be a lonesome sort of night – romantic enough, all in all, but one that gave him a desolate kind of feeling and reminded him that he was far away from Twombly Town and the High Valley. The silence and the fog seemed to him to be almost the same thing, as if the fog were visible, hovering silence, and it occurred to him that the white and plodding horse that had come and gone in the mists wasn’t actually going anywhere; was some sort of night shade that wandered up and down the damp avenues pursuing the sound of his own clacking hooves.

He became aware, as he stood there by the street sign for what seemed like a strangely long time, of a distant tap, tap, tapping – of a stick striking pavement or cobblestones. The tapping grew louder, approaching, and the lot of them stood without speaking beneath the peeling wooden street sign in the diffuse light of the oil lamp, waiting for whatever it was that approached. All else was silence.

The tapping grew in volume, tap, tap, tap, and then changed abruptly to a hollow wooden thudding as whoever it was that was walking there, shrouded in fog, thumped across a section of boardwalk; then there was a moment of silence, then the tap, tap, tap, once again of a walking stick on cobbles. The musty river fog seemed to whirl about them, although there was still no breeze, and Jonathan pulled his cloth jacket tighter and peered into the lamplit fog.

A dark shape grew out of the obscurity and angled across the street before them – a dwarf in a slouch hat and black cape, tapping along with a brass tipped walking staff. His face was hidden in the shadow of his hat, and he smoked a long, strange pipe, the bowl of which glowed through the darkness and emitted clouds and clouds of vapors that rolled about and twisted and seemed to Jonathan to flee away into the air like the shadows of great bats. But there was no smell of tobacco, only of waterweeds and rotting tree roots and of deep rivers rolling toward the sea. Somehow, none of that surprised Jonathan. Anything else, in fact, would have.

The dwarf and his glowing pipe and his clacking staff faded into the darkness and were gone. Jonathan turned toward the Professor but could see from the look on his face that there was little that needed saying. Gump and Bufo looked as if they’d witnessed a hanging. Miles had a particularly grim and calculating look on his face. They set out as one down toward the street that ran along the waterfront, Bufo and Gump first and Jonathan behind. He was torn, as they stepped along, between the urge to glance back over his shoulder and the urge to cut and run, screaming, back to the dock. He had the terrifying sensation that a withered hand was at each moment descending toward his shoulder, and he fancied he could hear the sound of rustling skirts and labored breathing not a foot behind him. He feared turning to look as much as he feared not looking, and although he insisted to himself that it was all a matter of imagination, he knew it was not – that someone, or something, had made up the sixth member of their company.

If, he thought, they could reach the waterfront – if they could turn the corner into the open market, whatever it was, he was sure of it, wouldn’t follow. It would evaporate in the mists, vanish like the rest of the shadows in the dim, foggy evening.

As if in a dream, the corner seemed to be receding, growing more distant as they approached it. It was probably a trick of the fog and the oil lamps and the silence and of the whisk and scrape behind him. He turned and cast a look over his shoulder to break the spell. Behind him, rustling along the cobbles in black robes and ragged gray lace was the old woman from the shanty in the swamp, feeling her way along with her hands before her, clutching at the air, filling the space that Jonathan had filled a moment before, staring at him with milky, sightless eyes.

A scream caught in his throat, again as in a dream, and she held out one withered hand and beckoned to him with a skeletal finger, her mouth working soundlessly.

Jonathan shouted. He shouted for all he was worth, understanding, somehow, that noise – loud noise – was the key here. And he was right. She vanished. A wisp of fog rolled across between him and the witch and when it rolled away again she was gone. There was no cat this time. There was nothing at all but the empty, shrouded street.

‘What the devil did you do that for!’ shouted Gump, who was shaking with fear and crouching there at the corner. Bufo had him by the arm, and Miles had thrown himself against the brick wall of a cannery ready to let fly a toasting spell.

Jonathan held his hand up for silence. At first nothing could be heard, just the splash of something on the river and the sound of a door being slammed away off up the street. But then faintly, very faintly, the sound of hollow, cackling laughter came drifting down toward them, as if it emanated from somewhere overhead in the veiled gray sky. The skin prickled up along the back of Jonathan’s neck as the laughing faded and was gone. He wished it was just a matter of waking up from a dream and rolling over, secure in his bed. But this had been no dream – and it was unlikely, all things considered, that he’d sleep enough that night to make it seem like it had been come morning.

What awoke him next morning was the slap of water against the hull some few inches from his head. It was a sort of
swish-splash, swish-splash
. Jonathan knew where he was as soon as he awoke – even before he awoke. He’d been having a dream about traveling in a strange land on a mysterious and perhaps haunted riverboat. The dream had been growing increasingly grim. He’d been sitting on the stern watching the silent forest slide by in the twilight when he became slowly aware of a pair of milky-white, opalescent eyes away to his left, against a whitewashed cabin. In his dream he jerked his head around to have a good look at the staring eyes, which filled him with a certain ominous sort of creeping dread, but when he focused on the eyes he could see nothing but the wall of the cabin. As he turned his head away they flickered into focus as do very distant, almost invisible stars.

He tried looking away, but the sense that they were gazing blindly at the back of his head gave him the creeps. He froze, incapable of movement, afraid to turn around and equally afraid not to when Miles the Magician walked up, the head atop his cap whirling wildly. ‘Turn around and look at it,’ said Miles simply. Treat it like a dirty-dog.’

‘Should I?’ Jonathan asked in his dream.

‘That’s what I’d do.’ Miles faded away thereafter like a genie. A little waterfall of sparks revolved slowly in the night air for a moment where his head had been.

Jonathan was struck with the idea that he’d been given that advice once before. He couldn’t quite remember, however, if it had been good advice or bad. He turned and looked at the cabin wall anyway. As he did he saw, out of the corner of his eye, a vague amorphous staring face just disappearing in the twilit gloom. There was nothing, finally, but a whitewashed cabin wall. Just for purposes of finality, Jonathan stepped across to the wall and ran his hand across it, smearing beads of dew into a long, wet streak. Beyond the wall he could hear the
swish-splash
of water against the hull of the riverboat. There came to him then, in the dream, a feeling of relief, for he realized not only that Miles’ advice had been good advice but that he was involved in a dream and that he actually lay below deck, asleep in his cabin, listening half-consciously to the
swish-splash
of water on the hull.

And that’s why, when he finally awakened some few seconds after that thought occurred to him in the dream, he knew right where he was. The strange surroundings didn’t confuse him a bit. For a moment though as he listened to the splash of water, he was possessed with the idea that it was, in fact, water gurgling down a drain, perhaps in the kitchen overhead. When it went on,
swish-splash, swish-splash
, for a time, he began to think that the cooks aboard must have an inexhaustible supply of fresh water. That led him to the unpleasant thought that perhaps they were cooking with river water, and it reminded him of the old joke about his muddy coffee having been ground this morning. That, of course, reminded him simply of coffee and served to roust him out of bed.

Ahab, oddly, was nowhere about. Jonathan pulled on his trousers and washed up a bit in the bowl and pitcher that lay on a cramped little chest in the corner. The chest and the bunk took up three-quarters of the space in the cabin, and there was just enough left over to allow the door to swing open. Outside it was warm and sultry. The sky was astonishingly blue and the river stretched out for what seemed miles toward the thickly wooded opposite shore. Overhead the sun shone like a great flaming orange. Jonathan reached for his pocketwatch, only to remember that it had been turned into an hourglass by Zippo the Magician the night before. He shaded his eyes and looked up at the sun which stood at about eleven o’clock or so.