The Disappearing Dwarf (22 page)

‘If you want to put up in the village,’ the driver said, ‘this is about it. There’s a boarding house two blocks up, but the owner’s a grouch who serves boiled potatoes and grass soup for breakfast. I’d steer clear of it. This place is the right sort – good food and drink and feather beds.’

Jonathan invited the man in for a glass of ale, but he couldn’t be budged. He had a ways to go, he said, before he got home, and he was late already. So Jonathan rousted Quimby out of a sound sleep and helped him down. They watched the haycart as it toppled and creaked its way into the village and the darkness.

‘I can hardly move,’ Quimby said. ‘I’m stiff as a post. What I need, more than anything in the world, is a hot bath. That and six years sleep.’

‘I need supper,’ Jonathan replied. Since the driver’s mention of the ale and the food at the inn, the little strips of ham and cheese in his bag had begun to grow less appealing. The shrunken apple, nutritious as it might be, reminded him of a monkey’s head. He shared the whole works among a half dozen cats that hung about the front of the inn. The monkey-head apple didn’t attract the cats much either, so Jonathan pitched it into an adjoining field. It seemed to him reasonably likely that some animal would wander into it sooner or later – a cow or squirrel or gopher or some beast that, unlike people and cats, held old apples in high esteem.

They pushed in through the doors of the inn and booked two rooms for the night from a lad in enormous spectacles who read a thick book behind a wooden counter. Jonathan cocked his head sideways to read the title on the volume. He had always been compelled to discover what it was that anyone he met was reading. Often he could tell by the look of the cover that the book wouldn’t be worth a thing. Usually if the cover were right – dark and old looking with gold or red lettering – the story inside would prove comparable. A proper book cover held great promise as far as he was concerned. This was just the right sort. There was a painting on the front of a great sailing ship, full-rigged, water spraying from the bow waves, and painted sails billowing as the ship slanted past a rocky desert isle. The title read:
Great Days of Piracy in the Flappage Islands.

The mention of pirates suddenly reminded Jonathan of their treasure map, and with a start the thought struck him that the map had probably gone down with the ship. The Professor hadn’t, after all, had it with him when he was on deck that evening. The map would have been in his cabin. Squids were probably poring over it at that moment, down on the river bottom.

Jonathan began to regret the loss of the map. Then it occurred to him that he hadn’t stopped to regret the loss of the Professor yet, or of any of the others either. That, of course, wasn’t due to any lack of feeling; he was simply convinced that it was bad form to mourn for someone who mightn’t be dead yet. The same, he decided, went for treasure maps.

The lad took their money, gave them each a room key, and went back to the Flappage Islands after directing them down a hallway and to their right where they could, he said, get food and drink. The sound of chairs scraping and glasses tinkling met them in the hall. Tobacco smoke rolled out of an open double door about halfway down. There was, quite apparently, a merry crowd at the inn, for Jonathan heard the sound of laughter and of poetry being recited – familiar poetry, in fact, recited by voices he’d heard before. Followed by Quimby, he walked into a big common room set with tables and chairs and with a big fire burning in a wide hearth. A dog barked twice and raced across toward them. It was old Ahab, cutting capers and bounding back and forth. He tore up to Jonathan, tried to stop at his feet but slid into him instead. Then he raced off a few feet, leaped once or twice into the air in the manner of a frog, and raced back at him again.

‘Hullo, old Ahab,’ Jonathan said, scratching him on the head. ‘This is Mr S. N. M. Quimby, Haberdasher.’ Quimby patted Ahab on the head too. No one else in the room paid them any attention. Everyone was busy watching Gump, who stood on a chair near the fireplace reading poetry from a batch of connected sheets. Bufo sat at a table next to Gump’s chair, listening in a satisfied way. That meant, Jonathan knew, that the poem was a collaboration. If it had been Gump’s effort entirely, Bufo wouldn’t have been half so satisfied. He’d be itching to tell Gump exactly why the poem was ludicrous.

‘The pounding of the engines!’ Gump shouted. ‘The smoking of the stacks! The hush of evil curling fog! The shrieking of the bats!’ In these last two lines he let his voice drop to a stage whisper and strung the
s
on bats out about a half mile. Thunderous applause erupted from the dozen or so travelers who sat about the hall, most of it prompted by Bufo, who had leaped to his feet at the close of the poem and clapped wildly. It sounded to Jonathan as if it had been a good poem – lots of activity in it. He wasn’t sure he approved of the attempt to rhyme stacks with bats, although that may well have been what one of his old teachers had called half-rhyme. In any case, no one else in the room seemed to object.

Gump looked up from his pages of poetry and saw Jonathan and Quimby standing in the open doorway. ‘Bing!’ Gump cried, and he whacked Bufo on the back of the head. Bufo, of course, shouted ‘Hey!’ himself, and took a poke at Gump, but he was too late. Gump was already clambering down and making off toward Jonathan. Bufo quickly followed after.

Everyone shook hands and slapped about for a moment. Jonathan was afraid that Bufo and Gump would poke fun at Quimby’s suit, but they didn’t. Bufo started to once or twice – or at least so it seemed to Jonathan – but his sense of diplomacy won out and he kept quiet. He and Gump did a good bit of winking at each other as they walked toward their fireside table, and Gump, nudging Bufo, hiked his trousers up around his calves and looked woeful for a moment. Quimby didn’t notice a thing, however, so no harm came of it. Bufo and Gump, Jonathan could see, were in fine form.

Neither one of them had eaten yet either, so they all ordered a big steak and mushroom pie and glasses of ale before they started to talk. Then Jonathan asked the two about Miles and the Professor.

‘Haven’t seen them,’ Gump said.

‘Hide nor hair,’ Bufo added. ‘We were running along toward you there with the most incredible monster after us.’

Jonathan nodded. ‘I met him – the man with no head.’

‘That’s the one,’ Gump said. ‘No head. Can you beat that? How in the world could he see where he was going? That’s what I asked myself right off. Fancy a man with no head. Who was he anyway?’

‘Some demon from the river,’ Jonathan answered. The cook told us that the south shore of the river was haunted, that ghosts and such come out of the forest at night. I guess he was right.’

Bufo grimaced into his ale glass. ‘Right as rain. I saw some things last night that would pickle a fish. There was this old woman with white eyes who came past singing – more like croaking actually. We were up on the second deck smoking a pipe and making up a poem called “Poor Squire Lost” – I’ll read it to you in a minute – and here she comes, walking along with a basket in her hands. She stops and gives us a look, and her eyes were just paste.’

‘Balls of milk,’ Gump put in.

‘It was horrible. Anyway, off comes the lid of the basket, and what’s inside? This headless man’s head. All bloody and ragged and awful. At least I suppose it was his. It must have been; they couldn’t run that same gag off on too many people.’

‘So she
hands
it to me,’ Gump cut in.

‘What in the world did you do?’ Quimby asked, a look of terror on his face.

‘I knocked the bloody thing into the river,’ Gump said. ‘Right out of her filthy hands.’

Bufo gave him a look. ‘You thrashed about and screamed is what you did. You didn’t
mean
to knock anything into the river. I never saw any such dance before. It was grand. Gump looked like one of those wiggle puppets the elves make. What a sight. There he is, flailing along, and
whump
! he whacks this bloody head into the Tweet.’

‘That wasn’t it at all,’ Gump said, heating up. ‘I just slammed it right out of her hand. And talk about wiggle puppets and being scared out of their wits, what
did you
do but shoot off down the deck like a bloody comet, hooting and shouting.’

‘That’s because I saw the headless man coming up from a rowboat,’ Bufo explained. ‘Here he was out looking for his head – that’s what I figured – and you’re pitching it into the drink. Was he going to be mad or what? You don’t just treat a man’s head so.’

‘You do if it isn’t attached to him!’ Gump shouted. ‘You do if some old marble-eyed lady is waving the thing in your face. The whole mess of them are lucky I didn’t get riled. They’d have sung a sorry tune, head or no head.’

Bufo screwed up his face and waved his hands briefly in a show of horrified flailing, miming Gump’s assault on the witch. Gump didn’t see anything funny in it and seemed as if he were about to pop, so Jonathan broke in to cool things off.

‘So this fellow chased you down the deck?’

‘We were leading him your way,’ Bufo said. ‘Setting a trap, you might say. We figured to run him past and you could brain him.’

‘I was ready to,’ Jonathan said truthfully. ‘But then all of a sudden the bombs started going off, and I ended up in a pile of ropes watching the lot of you sail out over the river. I was afraid you’d had it.’

Gump nodded. ‘So were we. There we were, paddling around in the fog. The spook who chased us never came up. Couldn’t hold his breath, I suppose, without any nose. Then a big slab of cabin wall floated by, big as a raft nearly, and we all got on board. It was colder than Christmas, I can tell you, but better that than drowning in some haunted river.’

The mention of the haunted river made Jonathan remember the shadows and the shapes that had hovered about him in the water that night. ‘You’re right about that,’ he said. ‘The Tweet is no place to take a swim.’

‘So we just floated down the river,’ Gump continued. ‘Must have been hours. It didn’t seem like we were going very fast, just kind of lazying along. By and by the fog started to break up, and early in the morning all of a sudden we could see the shore, not very far off at all. We tore a couple of planks off our wall, which was pretty beat up anyway, and paddled like sixty until we got there.’

‘Anyway, you wouldn’t believe where we wound up,’ Bufo said. ‘We climbed over this embankment and found ourselves in strawberry heaven. Nothing but strawberry vines with berries as big as your fist for about sixty miles around. And coming along the road was this amazing man dressed like a king with a straw hat on and a pink shirt that was all-over ruffles. “I’m the Strawberry Baron,” he says. “Who are you?” Not snooty, mind you, but very gentlemanly. So we introduce ourselves …’

‘And he bows very seriously.’ Gump wasn’t about to let Bufo get away with the whole story. ‘He asks us if we might be gentlemen off the riverboat. “We are,” says we. That’s exactly it. He knew that, of course, because we were still pretty wet and we’d floated up on a piece of cabin wall. But he was very formal. Took nothing for granted. “Come along,” he says, and we climbed up into his buggy and went off down the road to his mansion and ate about a quarter of a ton of strawberries and cream.’

‘And guess who was there,’ Bufo asked.

‘I give,’ Jonathan said.

‘Cap’n Binky, that’s who. Him and the Strawberry Baron are pretty thick, it turns out. They’re both food wizards in their way. Part of some sort of club.’

‘Whatever became of his coffee?’ Jonathan asked, relieved to hear that Cap’n Binky had survived the blast.

‘He had it right there with him. The whole works – coffee and pot and everything. Even his book. Not a scratch. It turns out that he was ready for trouble. He’d unbolted the pot, kegged the coffee, and crated the lot of it up and shoved it into a lifeboat. Got away clean. Rescued a few people too, by the way. He didn’t just cut out. He said that he would have gone down with the ship except for the coffee. “Art first and morality to top off on.” That’s what he shouted when he pulled away.’

‘Is he here?’ Jonathan asked. ‘At the inn?’

‘No. He stayed on for a bit with the Baron. We set out early on the milk wagon and decided to put up here for the night. We were planning to rendezvous at the post office tomorrow.’

Jonathan nodded. ‘Me too.’ Then he told them his story: how he met up with Quimby, and about the cook’s being dead, and about walking the twenty-some miles downriver and getting a ride on a hay cart and passing the lands of the very same Strawberry Baron, who had been so hospitable.

‘And something else,’ Bufo said, pouring the last of the ale into Jonathan’s glass. ‘It looks like rough weather ahead for Sikorsky.’

‘That’s a pleasant thought,’ Jonathan said. ‘What sort of rough weather?’

‘The Baron’s got up a bunch of men, an army, local farmers and villagers and such,’ Gump put in. ‘This riverboat business broke the camel’s back. They’ve had enough. There must have been two hundred or so in little tents in the strawberry fields. Cap’n Binky has them hopping. They were all for setting out in boats that morning, but the Baron wouldn’t hear of it. Slow and easy, that’s the Baron.’

By this time Quimby was asleep in his chair, snoring like a bulldog.

‘So it’s Landsend for us tomorrow, then,’ Jonathan said. ‘How far do you suppose it is?’

‘Twenty-five miles,’ Gump replied. ‘That’s what the Baron said anyway.’