The Disappearing Dwarf (28 page)

Bufo nodded. ‘Pretty close. Stick candy, though. Is that standard?’

‘In the book!’ Dooly said.

Ahab poked Gump in the side about then and eyeballed the meat that was still dangling from his fingers. Gump dropped it into his open mouth. ‘What book is this, then?’

‘One I found up at Arnold’s.
Treasures East and West
, it’s called.’

‘So how do we get all these wheelbarrows across town?’ Gump asked.

Dooly thought for a moment. ‘We’ll hire a man. We can do that now that we’re rich.’

Bufo nodded. ‘We could. Or we could work them like dog sleds. Advertise for local dogs. A nickel an hour and all the stick candy they can eat.’ Ahab looked mournfully at him, as if he wasn’t keen on the idea, stick candy or otherwise.

‘The Squire’s got an emerald,’ Gump said abruptly. ‘It’s big as a head.’

Dooly’s eyes widened. ‘What kind of head?’

‘Oh,’ Gump said. ‘Just a standard head. It’s a wonder, though – round like a ball. If you look at someone through it your face just spreads out all over.’

Dooly nodded sagely, as if he’d seen a few major emeralds in his day, too. ‘We’ll find some of those tomorrow. Them and rubies. Yes, sir. I seen some treasures myself, you know. Treasures you wouldn’t hardly believe.’

‘I daresay,’ Gump said. ‘Have you seen the Squire’s marble treasure?’

‘No, how many marbles does he have?’

‘About a zillion, maybe more. He’s got most of them in big glass jars. And he’s got a bottomless marble bag from Mr Blump and the other elves. You saw that.’

‘You bet!’ Dooly cried, no doubt remembering the river of marbles that had flowed endlessly out of the bag onto the lawn before the palace in Seaside. ‘They were good marbles, too. Not just cat’s eyes and such.’

That’s right,’ Gump said. ‘The Squire had holes dug in his cellars, and he just lets that bag leak marbles into them. If there were a zillion last week, there’s two zillion this week. He spends hours down there shoveling them around with a rubber spade. He used to tie the bag off at night and untie it in the morning, but then he calculated how many marbles
weren’t
coming out of the bag and he reconsidered. His cellar is just about full.’

Dooly was wide-eyed by the end of Gump’s story, and it took him some time to come up with something to say besides ‘Gee whiz,’ which he said three times. ‘Me and Grandpa saw some treasures coming through the gate, didn’t we, Grandpa?’

‘That’s so,’ Escargot said, beginning to look a bit excited himself.

‘Through the gate?’ Bufo said.

‘Through the door, he means,’ Escargot explained. ‘Under the sea. The western door out by the Wonderful Isles. There’s things out to sea there that would turn you inside out. A man can’t stand too much of it. Drives him wild.’

‘Yeah,’ Dooly said, ‘like those squid-o-pods in the sea shells.’

‘Nautili?’ the Professor asked.

‘That’s it. Big around as breadbaskets, they are. There’s crabs out there that use the empty shells for chests. It’s true. We seen them going through sunken ships and the like. They bring back all sorts of gold and jewels, like crows do, and put the stuff in the squid-o-pod shells – the empty ones, of course. There’s a place, fathoms and fathoms down, where there’s a whole city sunk under the ocean in among sea weeds the size of a forest. And there’s sea shell treasures just laying all over with these crabs just coming and going like ants and nothing but dead men to spend it. I couldn’t believe my eyebones. Pearls the size of billiard balls just tumbling out. And diamonds! They liked to blind me there in the lights of the ship. All of this on the bottom of the sea – whales and sharks and schools of kelp bass swimmin’ past. It was a wonder.’

Jonathan realized that his mouth was agape at the end of Dooly’s tale. He’d never heard anything like it. The Professor gave him a look that seemed to suggest that perhaps, given Dooly’s propensity for telling stretchers, Jonathan’s mouth shouldn’t be open quite so wide. But Jonathan was quite willing – happy in fact – to believe in the sea shell treasures.

‘Can’t a person get at these treasures, then?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Nope,’ Escargot said ‘Too deep. Smash a man to flinders. Pulpify him.’ Escargot looked over toward the Professor for support.

That’s correct,’ Professor Wurzle said. ‘It accounts for the strange shapes of deep-sea fish. Lord Piedmont attributes undersea pressures to the effects of the moon. Pinkum’s theory has to do with the weight of the waters. I myself hold with Pinkum, although Lord Piedmont is more colorful.’

‘Well that settles it, then,’ Bufo said. ‘We won’t go swimming for any squid-o-pod treasures, not with Pinkum and Lord Piedmont against us.’

Conversation slackened about then, and Jonathan began to feel as if he’d walked up and down the road all day. It was nearly nine o’clock, early enough yet to catch eight good hours of sleep and still be up at dawn. The Professor and Escargot followed his example when he excused himself, and the three of them headed up to their rooms, leaving Gump, Bufo, Dooly, and Ahab making excited plans below.

The next morning found them once again on the street. Miles hadn’t yet returned. Jonathan and the Professor made a pact to be back at the inn by noon and to drag Bufo and Gump along with them, even if it meant abandoning the treasure. Finding the Squire, after all, was their first concern.

But there didn’t seem to be much to worry about. The map was nearly as accurate as a map could be, and it led them straightaway into old, narrow, cobbled streets and between ancient houses, all packed in side-by-side and tilting away overhead. They would have appeared to be ruins but for the flowering vines and dangling orchids that sprouted from chinks in the walls and from depressions in crumbling cornices and window ledges. The deterioration clearly wasn’t the result of abandonment so much as of age, for most of the houses were occupied, and the streets were swept and clean.

They topped a small hill and cut down a long alley which led them finally to a dead-end bit of unpaved street. A faded sign hung from the plaster wall of a tumbled house directly opposite the mouth of the alley;
ST ELMO SQUARE
it read.

In contrast to the streets they’d just come along, St Elmo Square seemed thoroughly deserted. Windows were broken and gaping, and tattered lace curtains blew silently through them here and there, out into the morning breeze. Stoops had caved in and collapsed from age; slates from crumbling roofs lay broken in the street. A menacing silence hovered thick in the air, as if the square and the buildings that fronted it were not only abandoned, but had been for years and years so that the silence had had time to gather and thicken and deaden and turn to gloom.

Jonathan strained to hear something – anything that would convince him he hadn’t gone deaf. It dawned on him with a grim suddenness that there weren’t even any cats about, not one. Ahab seemed to sense the same thing, for instead of dashing out to have a look around, he sat still at Jonathan’s feet and waited. Everything, in fact, seemed to be waiting.

Jonathan wished that Escargot would come up with some of his bluff talk, or else that Gump and Bufo would see something in the atmosphere to argue about. Instead, shattering the silence like a knock against a window in the night time, came the slamming of a door behind them. Everyone whirled at once. Twenty or thirty yards down the alley they saw the receding figure of a bent old woman, hobbling along on a stick and followed by a very black cat.

Escargot muttered something under his breath, but Jonathan didn’t catch it. Reaching the far end of the alley, she turned and stared back at them, a small hunched figure standing with her head tilted slightly to one side, as if she were listening to the wind. Then she vanished. She just blinked away like one of Zippo’s playing cards.

‘What was the meaning of that?’ the Professor asked. ‘Has she been following us?’

‘I don’t think so,’ Escargot answered, still squinting down the alley toward where the old woman had vanished. ‘I think she was waiting for us.’

‘Impossible. No one knew about the maps but us.’

Escargot shook his head. ‘So we think. Just like we think we know why we’re here.’

‘In this alley?’ Bufo asked. ‘We’re after treasure. And we better find it too, after all this.’

‘I didn’t mean in the alley,’ Escargot muttered ominously, ‘but I’m with you about the treasure. We’re doing too much standing about. Let’s find what we came for and get out of here.’

Everyone loosened up a bit at that and set in to examine the maps. The silence that hung so thickly broke apart and was replaced by the sounds of shuffling feet and rustling paper and voices. Gump and Bufo began to argue about how to hold the map – about which way was up. Dooly said that they couldn’t go wrong as long as they remembered that north was always straight ahead. It didn’t take long, however, to set things right. Little faded boxes on Escargot’s map corresponded quite clearly to the houses on the square. An X scrawled through one of those boxes hinted that the treasure, whatever it might be, lay in a half-ruined house not fifty steps distant.

There had once been a front porch on it supported by cut stones. The whole thing had slumped at one end so disastrously, however, that the pillars at either side had canted over until they had fallen into a heap, carrying a little gabled porch roof with them. Old weather-decrepit remnants still hung by twisted nails, but it looked as if one good storm would pull them loose and scatter them among the ruins that lay in the weeds and dirt.

After picking their way across the debris, getting into the house was a snap. There wasn’t any door, just one crusty green strap hinge, bent and dangling from the jamb. Rats scurried away out of sight as the group clomped in onto the floorboards. Everything was still and silent, the only movement being a line of floating dust motes that hovered still and lonely in a single ray of sunshine slanting in down the stairwell through a gaping hole in the roof.

‘What do you expect?’ Escargot asked suddenly, his voice echoing through the still air. ‘Ghosts?’

The noise made everyone jump, and Escargot laughed his slow, ‘Har, har, har,’ piratical laugh, as if wandering into ruined houses under mysterious circumstances were meat and drink to him. He pointed across toward a shut closet door. ‘Look into that closet there, Dooly lad. I’ll have a go at the kitchen. We didn’t sail out here from the Isles to stand around and gawk at a bunch of busted-up furniture.’ With that he kicked the remains of an overturned wooden chair out of his way and strode off. Dooly didn’t move. He just stood and looked at the closet as if it were a goblin nest.

Professor Wurzle stepped across, grasped the door handle, and yanked it open with a no-nonsense tug. With a quick creak of squeaking hinge, the door swung to, and a skeleton, yellow and decaying and dressed in tatters, pitched out onto the floor. The Professor leaped back out of the way, surprised to find that he was holding the loose doorknob in his hand. He stared down at the fallen thing for a moment, a look of amazement on his face, then threw the doorknob into its ribcage; brittle bones crackled and spun away. Dooly began to laugh wildly, whooshing and shouting. Bufo kicked the skeleton’s skull loose, knocking off a toothy jawbone. The rest of the skull rolled toward the stairs, hung for a moment on the edge, then bounced down into the darkness of the basement.

‘Look here!’ Gump cried, bending over and pointing. On the floor were a half-dozen scattered glass marbles.

Escargot raced in, supposing, perhaps, that Gump was exclaiming over a discovered bit of treasure. He stopped and looked down at the marbles. ‘I hope that ain’t all of it.’

Gump shook his head. ‘They were in the skeleton’s mouth. When Bufo kicked the jawbone loose, they spilled out. I saw them.’

‘In his mouth!’ Professor Wurzle was astonished. ‘Jonathan, you’re the one among us who reads pirate books. Is there any precedent for this?’

Jonathan thought for a moment. ‘Not that I remember. I seem to recall having read about a pirate captain named Beetle-brow who did some astonishing things with bugs, but nothing about marbles. Unless …’ Jonathan began.

‘Unless what?’ the Professor asked.

‘Nothing,’ Jonathan said. ‘Nothing at all.’

Bufo stared at him wide-eyed. ‘Unless these are the Squire’s marbles, you meant to say. He’d have had some with him.’

Gump, anticipating him, cried, ‘But whose mouth were they in?’ He looked down at the skeleton in disbelief. ‘You kicked his head down the stairs!’

Escargot yanked the skeleton up by its shoulder blades and dangled it in front of Gump. The thing was half again Gump’s size. ‘It’s not the Squire,’ Escargot said, casting the skeleton back into the closet. ‘The Dwarf wouldn’t waste the Squire on a prank like this.’

The Professor cleared his throat meaningfully.

‘Look here.’ Escargot pulled an old rusty cutlass out of the closet. ‘This is pirates we’re dealing with all right. If they want to put marbles in dead men’s ‘mouths, that don’t matter to us. Things don’t have to work the same way in Balumnia.’ Escargot tossed the cutlass back into the closet along with its owner. ‘Dooly,’ he said, ‘come along with me. We’re going downstairs.’

Bufo peered down into the darkness where the skeleton head had disappeared. ‘Why downstairs and not upstairs?’