The Disappearing Dwarf (19 page)

The trail of water led away around the starboard cabins. Another clump of weeds lay in a pool of lamplight some twenty feet long beside the bulwark. There was nothing simpler, apparently, than following a man clothed in water weeds who’d just hauled himself out of a river, thought Jonathan. Then the idea of a man clothed in water weeds started to play on his imagination. He saw, shoved into rings along the bulwark, a row of marlinspikes, and he recalled how useful such a device had been months past when he and Ahab had tangled with the two trolls. He yanked one of the things out of its ring and hefted it. He wished he had a brickbat instead, something he wouldn’t have to get too close to use. But a marlinspike was certainly better than nothing when a man was facing down monsters – a marlinspike, that is, and a pair of quick feet.

He stooped along detectivelike toward the second scattering of weeds. The river must be absolutely choked with the things for a swimmer to have hauled so many up with him. On beyond the bunch in the lamplight were more wet footprints leading away. Jonathan stopped momentarily over the pile of weeds and mud. Something bothered him about it. Something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. The weeds were lacey looking things and were black and gray and not green and brown like you would suppose. He bent over and touched a bit of the lacey weeds and found, to his horror, that they weren’t wet – that they weren’t weeds at all. In his hand he held a tattered bit of ancient black cloth, traced along one edge with faded age-grayed lace.

The bits on the deck were the same. They were obviously so. He dropped the cloth as if it were a reptile. How could he have been confounded into believing the stuff was water weeds? And the footprints, he ran his finger across one of them. It wasn’t water at all but was fine gray ash, dry as tomb-dust even in the mist that soaked the deck. Bomb or no bomb, Sikorsky or no Sikorsky, he’d had enough of being on the lookout. As he straightened up he caught a glimpse of a pair of eyes, milky eyes, watching him from the darkness of a recessed doorway not three steps away. There was a whispering in the doorway and the faint cackle of something laughing weirdly to itself, at a joke that no one else could hear or wanted to hear. From the shadows of the doorway, a thin, pale, skeletal hand reached out toward him, beckoning to him with a bent finger. Tattered lace hung round the wrist.

Jonathan was off across the deck in a shot. Never trust a marlinspike when you can trust your feet – that was his motto. But the deck seemed to be heaped with things from the river: glistening piles of weeds and muck and fish, as if the riverboat were a dredger, loaded with debris and bound for deep water. His foot hit a pile of slippery weed – trailing tendrils of rubbery, bulbous leaves and stalks and grass. His legs slewed out from under him and he slid shouting across the stuff. From above him sounded an answering shriek, then another. He rolled to his knees, grasped his club, and found that the shriek was coming from the mouth of a steam whistle near the bellowing stacks.

The ship above him was lit like a carnival. Every lamp blazed and smoked in the fog, and the shadows of running men could be seen darting in and out of doorways, shouting orders. There was a cry from somewhere up toward the bow, and the splash of something hitting the river. Another shriek from the steam whistle was followed by a long booming note from the foghorn. Tremendous wild clouds of steam and smoke poured from the stacks, sailing off to join the fog and the confusion. It was as if the smokestacks had run wild. The escaping steam began to acquire a shape to it, to break up and coalesce again. It seemed to Jonathan that great winged shadows sailed out of the stack and swept away into the night above. As he watched, he realized that it wasn’t smoke and steam that poured through the stacks; it was bats. Thousands and thousands of black, screeching bats, whirling out in a wild cloud. And below them, bathed in lamplight atop the upper deck, stood Miles the Magician. He was surrounded by a universe of sparks and was chanting, shouting, pounding with his staff, supplicating or cursing. His arms were stretched out before him, gripping his staff and pounding the deck –
boom! boom! boom!
– louder even than the scream of the whirring, shrieking bats.

Jonathan pushed himself to his feet, and as he did, so did a pile of weeds on the deck. He shook his head in disbelief. The thing on the deck shook its head too, droplets of river water and bits of weed spewing off. It slowly began to reassemble itself, pulling in a bit there, bunching up a bit here, undulating and waving in the fog before him like a nest of eels. As it did so, Jonathan was possessed with the uncanny thought that the animate river weeds were not only taking the shape of a man, but that they were taking
his
shape. Horrified, he took a step backward and slipped once again in the river trash on the deck. He caught himself with his left hand as he fell and leaped back onto his feet. It was running he wanted, but running on the slick deck seemed unlikely. Suddenly a wild idea popped into his head – he should dash down to his cabin and have a look inside, just to see if he was in there asleep. Then it struck him that that was just the sort of thing you think up in dreams. But all the thinking didn’t amount to much as the weed thing lurched forward, moaning and rustling at him. Jonathan raised the marlinspike. ‘Take the fight right out of him,’ Jonathan thought. ‘Smack him up.’ But the weed thing must have had similar thoughts, for it raised one dripping arm aloft as if it too held a club in its hand.

It lurched at him again. In the center of the tangled mass that formed its face was a dark, dripping hole, a mouth that moaned and blubbered. River mud dribbled out one side, disappearing into the thing’s weedy body. It lurched again toward Jonathan who backed up a step. He heard his name being called from above, heard the barking of old Ahab and the shouting voices of Gump and Bufo, but he didn’t dare look up. He didn’t have a chance to, in fact, for the weed thing, with a terrible slobbering moan, fell on him, cold and clammy and wet as the river itself.

He slashed out with the marlinspike in a wild effort to smash the thing to the deck. The club pulped into its body, slurped down into it, buried itself in bladdery weeds. Almost simultaneously the weed thing thrashed at Jonathan, whacking him on the side of the head with a tendriled arm, covering him with muddy debris.

He wrenched the club free and thrashed at it again and again, pushing backward all the time, away from the shuffling thing. Suddenly he realized that he was nearing the edge of the deck, that he’d find himself in the river in a moment. The river was surely the last place he wanted to be.

Tendrils of weed wrapped around him. He stumbled and threw the marlinspike down. You can’t beat waterweeds to death with a club, or so it seemed to Jonathan. He began tearing at it with his hands, pulling away bits of weeds, clumps of grass. River mud poured from the thing’s mouth, and Jonathan shoved his hand toward it to shut it off, to keep it out of his face. He grabbed a handful of muddy weeds and tore it away, tore the top of the thing’s head off. As he did, the thought struck him that he was fighting a horror that was partly his own invention, that river weeds weren’t so very much more formidable than cockroaches. So he set in to pull it to bits. In a matter of seconds the thing collapsed in a heap on the deck, nothing but muck from the river.

He hadn’t time to revel much in his victory, for off the starboard side, rowing slowly toward them out of the fog, was a rowboat with two men in it. Acquaintances of his. He stumbled forward and plucked up the marlinspike from among the weeds. He realized that he was wringing wet from a weird and unwelcome combination of river water, fog, and sweat. There was an unnaturally loud scrape and bump as the rowboat pulled alongside. Jonathan decided to ignore it – to leave the headless man for someone else, someone who hadn’t been wrestling weeds. Then he had a better idea. A pile of wooden crates loaded with freight lay against the bulwark. He tried to heft one, but it wouldn’t budge. Two others were just as heavy, but a fourth one, smaller than the others, wasn’t quite as formidable. He pulled it out of the stack and pushed it along the deck.

Six feet or so below him the rowboat bobbed on the river. Its two occupants were still sitting there, in no apparent hurry. Jonathan could hear the whispering breath as it rasped out through the red tear in the eyeless man’s throat. He pulled his crate up by one end, balanced it on the rail, heaved the other end into the air, and sent the whole thing crashing down onto the rowboat and its ghastly crew. He heard a tearing of wood and a fearful screaming. A slat tore loose from the side of the rowboat and came spiraling skyward, spinning past where Jonathan stood at the rail above. It reached the top of its arc and fell toward the river, splashing down beside a grinning head that floated on the water. Wild laughter issued from the thing’s mouth. The oarsman and the body of the other man were gone and so were the pieces of ruined rowboat. It was as if they had sunk away into the depths of the river. The grisly, laughing head fell away astern as Jonathan watched.

Then, distantly, way off on the dark river, muffled in the fog, came the sound of oars scraping through locks. Two men in a rowboat materialized, rowing unhurriedly toward him. One of them had a gash in his neck.

It occurred to Jonathan that there’d be some tired zombies in the morning, and he wondered as he went after another crate whether Balumnian horrors were allowed to put in for hazardous duty pay. Then he wondered why in the world he was wasting crates. He dropped the one he’d been tugging on and set off down the corridor, off to find old Ahab, who – unless there were ghost dogs aboard – was somewhere forward, barking furiously.

Jonathan was halfway down the companionway when the ubiquitous old woman – knitting, a cat on her lap – appeared before him. She hadn’t been there a moment before; he was sure of it. She cackled with laughter and held her knitting out to him as if it were a pair of mucklucks or a hat. What it was was a tangle of unrelated and variously connected knots looking vaguely like a spider’s nest. And crawling on it, to Jonathan’s horror, were spiders. What had seemed like lumps of yarn were black, bulbous spiders, creeping about on a tangled web.

Jonathan flung the marlinspike in her face at the same instant that he turned and ran. Cackling laughter chased him out onto the weedy deck once more. Above him, Miles still ripped away, pounding and thudding. Lamps glowed, sparks flew, fog swirled, and the night echoed with a cacophony of shouts, screams, laughter, and the thud of the steam engines. Jonathan raced around to port, hoping as he did that the witch would be off terrifying someone else. Down along the bulwark, charging at him, hooting and waving, came Gump and Bufo, legs pounding. Behind them, reaching and clawing the air, stumbled the man with no head. Behind him, barking and leaping, bounded old Ahab, who, not having as much imagination as some, didn’t give a rap for heads one way or another. It was impossible to say, though, who was chasing whom. Jonathan felt distinctly tired. He felt, in fact, as if he were in some sort of clockwork funhouse from which there was no exit. It seemed likely that this madness could go on all night, that the river had a large enough supply of renewable horrors in it to wear down any opposition. Miles’ counter-spells, majestic as they were, didn’t seem to be accomplishing much. Miles himself, when Jonathan looked up at him one last time, was interrupting his chanting and pounding with wild swings of his staff, as if he were trying to knock something off the deck.

Jonathan looked about for something to clobber the headless boater with, for Gump and Bufo were almost upon him. He’d wait for them to sail past, then knock the demon over the rail. As he turned to search the deck, he heard the first of three thundering explosions and watched as bits of riverboat sailed skyward on a sheet of flame. He found himself tumbling backward into a heap of coiled ropes. The ship listed to port. Debris rained down around him, and a second explosion bellowed out. He got one last, wild glimpse of Bufo, Gump, Ahab, and the headless man hurtling into the dark river. The third explosion rang out, and the riverboat lurched about, listed farther to port, and swung round sideways on the river. The starboard side loomed over Jonathan’s head like a wall and river water swirled up around him.

There was nothing for it but to swim. He’d heard that sinking ships drag swimmers down with them, although he’d had no real experience along those lines so couldn’t say for sure. He’d have to ask the Professor when he saw him at Landsend post office. It seemed wise, under the circumstances, to be optimistic.

He swam as strongly as he could about thirty strokes, not breathing, not looking back. When he raised his head for a breath, he saw behind him the bottom of the boat, almost perpendicular to the surface of the water. The great paddlewheel hung upright, half submerged at the stern. In front of Jonathan was fog. He had to trust to providence. He was sure that neither shore was more than a mile distant, so he struck out once again, more slowly now. Soon he was enveloped in mists.

For several minutes he swam. Then, tiring, he pulled up and began to tread water. He yanked his shoes off, tied them together, and looped the laces through his belt. He felt for his pouch at his waist and found that he hadn’t lost it. He was happy that he’d decided not to leave it in his cabin with his clothes. His money, under the circumstances, was more important than his clothing.

It began to bother him that he had no idea in what direction he was swimming. At first it hadn’t mattered, but now that he was safely away from the boat, it began to. He had no desire to visit the wooded slopes of the south shore. No desire at all. His quandary lasted about thirty seconds. From somewhere in the fog came the familiar sound of splashing, scraping oars, and dimly, behind him in the mists, Jonathan could see the emergence of the fiddlehead of a rowboat, bobbing toward him. There was the vaguest chance that it wasn’t the rowboat he knew it would be. He lay low in the water, sculling away with his legs so as to keep just far enough away to be hidden from it. He heard the whispering before he got a clear view of the two occupants. Jonathan paddled deeper into the fog and waited for them to disappear. Then he set out once more, this time in the opposite direction.