The Disappearing Dwarf (18 page)

‘Good for him.’ Jonathan liked to see that kind of artistic dedication. ‘Hang Sikorsky.’

The cook nodded agreement. ‘There’s them who would like to. Don’t think they ain’t tried.’

The muffled clang of a bell reached them from somewhere out on the water. It sounded as if it were a long ways off or were being rung from beneath the river itself. But just a moment later a trade barge slipped past not thirty feet distant, lamps lit all up and down the deck. They could see the lamps first, materializing out of the fog like the luminous eyes of a deepwater fish. Then the dark shadow of the barge slid past, seemingly empty. In a moment the whole thing had disappeared.

‘I ain’t so sure though that Sikorsky himself hasn’t got a hand in all this here.’ The cook waved out over the river.

‘You mean in this night business from the south shore you were talking about?’ Jonathan asked.

‘That’s right. That’s more Sikorsky’s style. Horrors and such. He just don’t seem to me to be the type to mess around with infernal devices. Not Sikorsky.’

‘Infernal devices!’ Jonathan said. ‘Is that so?’

The cook looked half-surprised, as if he’d been caught out. ‘I thought you said you’d heard the rumors.’

‘We did,’ Jonathan said. ‘But I guess we didn’t hear half enough.’

‘Well, it’s just been rumors so far. We shouldn’t have put in today on the south shore, though. That was a risk. If Sikorsky wasn’t just talking through his hat, we could be in real trouble.’

‘We’ve got to search the ship then, by golly,’ the Professor said. ‘Time’s wasting.’

The cook shook his head. ‘Nope. The captain doesn’t waste no time. Not where his coffee is concerned. The lads been at it for two hours now. If there’s a device, I reckon they’ll find it.’

The Professor seemed to relax a little at that ‘Not much we can do then.’

‘Not a bit. I’d be on my toes; that’s all. We’ll put in at Landsend in the early morning. You’re paid up here till noon, of course, but if I was you, I wouldn’t stay on board. I’d get my stuff and go.’ With that the cook whacked his pipe against the bulwark, scraped the bowl clean into the river, picked up his pails, and walked away.

‘Encouraging sort, wasn’t he?’

‘Full of good news,’ the Professor agreed. ‘We’d better alert the others. If something goes wrong we’d best have a plan. We’d better agree on a place to meet up again in case we get separated.’

‘Landsend?’

‘That would be best. There must be any number of post offices in a city like that. What do you say about meeting in front of the post office closest to the waterfront. Top of every even-numbered hour?’

‘Good enough,’ said Jonathan, who liked having such plans. They made the future seem a bit more secure.

The two of them stood smoking idly for another ten minutes. There were probably any number of things to talk about, but it seemed, somehow, as if the darkness and fog and the gray river rolling quietly below demanded silence. Jonathan stared down into the water and began to wonder how deep it was and how old such a wide, slow river like that might be. He’d heard that certain species offish lived forever, that they just grew bigger and bigger and bigger and found deeper caves to inhabit. There was no telling, he supposed, what sorts of creatures crept up out of the ocean to dwell in that ancient river, down there among the water weeds. As he gazed at the dark surface, lost in such thoughts, it began to seem to him that he could see shadows beneath the surface of the water – dark shadows that humped up toward the surface, then faded again in the depths. He thought at first that it was a trick of lamplight, but as he watched and as he thought about it, that seemed to be less and less likely. A long gray shadow appeared very near the surface and seemed to be running along beside them. It wasn’t just a patch of darkness, not just a blotch of shoal water or some such thing, but seemed to have shape to it, the angular, undulating shape of a tremendous whale or a finned serpent.

Jonathan turned to ask the Professor if he saw it too. As he did, he saw a spiney black hump out of the corner of his eye, glistening in the lamplit fog, arch up out of the water briefly and disappear. He looked quickly back at it, but the shadow was gone. There was nothing but gray river rolling below.

‘Can you beat that?’ Jonathan asked.

Nothing but silence answered him. The Professor was gone, probably to warn the others about the infernal device business and about the possible post office rendezvous. Jonathan squinted back down into the river, trying to separate the fog from the water and the water from the shadows beneath it. It occurred to him that the weird misty silence roundabout him was not really silence at all. It was more the swish of water and the sound of an occasional distant voice and the moaning of the fog horn and certain unidentifiable night sounds that all meshed together into a sort of pervasive blanket of hushed noise that lay over the boat and the water like the fog. He became slowly conscious of the clip-clop, clip-clop of what sounded for all the world like horses’ hooves clattering along cobblestones, but when he listened sharp for it, strained to hear it, it faded and was gone. It must, thought Jonathan, have something to do with the steam-generating devices, something very simple and easily explained.

His imagination, he thought, was setting in to play tricks on him. He loaded up his pipe with fresh tobacco and determined to keep a sharp eye out for deviltry. ‘I wish I had my fishing pole and a handful of salted almonds,’ he thought to himself. ‘I’d catch one of these monsters out of the river and pound the daylights out of him, like the lad on the dock did back at the village. Take the fight right out of him.’ That was Jonathan’s way with bugs – detestable bugs, that is, cockroaches, say, or poisonous spiders. They’d always given Jonathan the wee-willies. He’d found, finally, that the best way to deal with them was to fly right in and beat them all to smash. Dead bugs, it seemed, weren’t half so bad as live bugs. There was a world of difference between them. He wondered, as he peered once more into the gloom, if the same thing applied to devils out of the sea. It occurred to him, though, that it didn’t. He was the sort who liked to imagine that the sea was full of monsters. It was the idea of being in there among them that bothered him. That, of course, was the problem as he leaned there against the rail. The riverboat seemed to be hauling him along into some sort of night land, carrying him into the midst of a land full of horrors.

He heard then what sounded for all the world like the muffled scrape and splash of oars sliding through oarlocks, but again as he listened the sound seemed to fade away. He tried to go back to thinking about hashing up monsters, but when he did, there was the scrape-swish of the oarlocks again and what sounded like urgent whispering – whispering directed somehow at him. He decided to ignore it, and did pretty well, for a few seconds anyway.

Then, dimly, out of the corner of his eye, he caught a glimpse of a dark rowboat, bobbing on the river, drawing toward him where he stood at the rail. He hesitated for a moment before looking up. Things, all in all, seemed to be taking a bad turn. But he was sure it was there, a rowboat with two men in it – two men who seemed to be whispering to him, strange things, things that didn’t make any sense.

He looked and the river was empty – no boat and no whispering men. ‘It’s the fog,’ thought Jonathan. ‘They were there but were lost in the fog.’ And sure enough, when he went back to watching the river below, there was the rowboat again, closer now, there in the corner of his eye.

He continued to stare into the water, not really watching for anything, but aware of the approach of the strange boat and of the scraping of the oars in the locks and the whispering, urgent now and almost understandable. One of the two men in the boat, the one pulling at the oars, had his back to Jonathan; the other faced him, grinning oddly. Dark liquid was splashed across his neck and down his shirt, as if he’d been smeared with oil or had suffered some horrible wound. His eyes were unnaturally dark. He didn’t really seem to have any eyes at all, just hollow sockets above his cheekbones. His hair was an oily tangle that fell down beside fish-white cheeks. He was whispering. No, that wasn’t it. He was gasping for air, and his breath was whistling in and out. The dark smear on his tattered shirt front spread with each breath, and in one horrible instant Jonathan realized that his breath was whistling in and out through a bloody rent in his neck.

Jonathan couldn’t move. He stood terrified, gazing sightlessly at the water below. Waiting. The rowboat scraped against the hull of the riverboat. The man at the oars reached across, grasped a handful of his companion’s hair, and simply pulled his head off in a spray of blood and a
whoosh
of escaping air. Then, as if delivering a bag of groceries, he handed the ragged, staring head up toward where Jonathan stood. The head rushed up at him, grinning. Jonathan leaped back against a cabin wall, swinging wildly at the thing and shouting. But when he expected to strike it into the river, he struck nothing at all. His hand whizzed through air and nothing else. The boat was gone along with its two passengers.

Jonathan stood pressed against the wet, white wall of the cabin. There was nothing at all on the river. Then, faintly, it seemed to him that he could hear the scrape of oarlocks and the faint splash of oars. The sounds seemed to be fading, receding, as if the rowboat, if that’s what it was, was making away slowly toward the south shore through the fog. Then, once again, silence.

By then, Jonathan was very sure of two things. First, that he was going to launch out and find some company, preferably the Professor, who was generally far too rational to have anything to do with ghastly visions. Second, that he was going to stop at the bar on the way and see what sort of brandy Cap’n Binky had laid in.

He stepped along down the deck and around into the companionway where he ran into a grim-eyed Miles the Magician, racing along amid his flowing robes and wearing his enormous pointed cap. The ivory head was spinning and spinning. ‘Something’s not right tonight,’ said Miles.

‘You’re telling me,’ Jonathan said. ‘There’s headless men on the river rowing boats.’

Miles looked aghast. ‘Is there?’

‘Either that or I’m going loony,’ Jonathan answered. ‘So I hope there is.’

Miles wiped his forehead with his hand. ‘Headless men? Rowing boats?’ He shook his head. ‘I knew it was bad,’ he said, ‘but I didn’t know it was that bad.’

‘I think it’s going to get worse.’

‘I do too. I’ve got to get topside. There’s some sort of dark enchantment in the fog that’s so thick that I can hardly breathe. I
must
work some counterspells. We’re in for it either way, though. Sharp’s the word. Believe everything you see. Everything is real.’

‘Good,’ Jonathan said, ‘then I’m not going loony. Where’s the Professor?’

‘Aft, last I knew. Be ready for anything. Do you know about the post office?’

‘Yes,’ Jonathan shouted at Miles as the magician raced off down the companion way.

Miles stopped and turned. ‘The old woman you saw in Tweet Village, had you seen her before?’

‘I think so,’ Jonathan said. ‘Yes, I’m sure of it. Several times.’

Miles moaned.

‘Why?’ Jonathan asked.

‘I think she’s aboard,’ Miles said. And with that he flung himself out the door and onto the deck, stamping away forward at a run.

Jonathan popped along to a glassed-in room,
MID-DECK TAVERN
a sign read over the open door. There was no one inside, not even a bartender. Jonathan found a bottle of brandy in a rack and poured himself what might be called a double: one for the headless boater and one for the old eyeless woman who, somehow, had set out to plague him – to plague them all, apparently. Then he started to think about the cook’s warning and about Miles’ talk of dark enchantment, and he began to suspect that the night was going to be a grim one. Too much brandy, it was true, might make it seem a bit less grim, but then again it might not. It would do little, in either case, to sharpen him up. And sharp, after all, was the word, at least according to Miles. So he took a couple of good sips, just to get something for his money, and set the half-full glass on a shelf behind the bar and put a little paper napkin over it. He hated the idea of an unfinished drink and so vowed that before he went to bed that night, he’d come back and work on it. Then he put a few coins in the change box on the shelf and went back out into the night.

Three sailors swept past in a businesslike way, looking for bombs, no doubt. Cap’n Binky, up on the bridge, hollered orders at them concerning the boiler room. Jonathan was happy, in a way, that the captain was afflicted with this coffee madness; it explained his frantic and thorough efforts at having the ship searched for Sikorsky’s infernal device. Damn this Sikorsky anyway, Jonathan thought. Here they’d come any number of miles, wandered through magical doors and tangled themselves up with witches and enchanted dwarfs, and if that wasn’t enough, as if they weren’t running into enough trouble, along comes Sikorsky with his bombs and demons. It was enough to give a fellow the pip.

He didn’t find the Professor aft. He found no one at all aft. What he found, actually, was what appeared to be long trailing tendrils of water weeds and a great quantity of river water slopped about the deck, as if someone, or something, had climbed over the bulwark out of the river, covered with stuff. Jonathan looked around furtively, expecting at any moment to see some shambling horror dash out of the shadows. But all was silent. The thought struck him that Sikorsky, or, more likely, one of Sikorsky’s cohorts might have climbed aboard intending treachery. But if he had, it was a mystery to Jonathan why he would wriggle about in the river weeds first, especially if he carried with him the rumored infernal device. It was no use being on the lookout and not following up such obvious leads. He could, of course, go up and alert Cap’n Binky and leave the dangerous work to him, but by then the damage might be done.