The Disappearing Dwarf (31 page)

‘How about human beings?’ Jonathan asked. ‘Is there such a composite for human beings?’

‘Yes,’ the Professor said as they walked along and the fishing gypsys fell away behind them, ‘but it isn’t much to look at. It’s pretty much similar to the dummy in the window at Beezle’s store.’

‘The one with the foolish hat and one eye bigger than the other?’

‘That’s it. Not much to get excited about, not if you compare it to the bird or the mammal.’

Jonathan said he’d like to see the composite mammal some day, and the Professor agreed that if they ever got up to the City of the Five Monoliths, they’d pay a visit to the university.

About then they saw the first of the Thirteen Bridges. The road ran out across the tidelands toward deep water – either the Tweet River or the ocean, it was impossible to say which. The bridge was simply a stone arch that spanned forty feet of water and touched down on a long, sandy islet. From there a longer bridge arched out, touched on its own island, and rose once again. So it went for as far as they could see. The rising and the falling of the gray stones looked like nothing so much as the back of a great serpent or dragon humping up out of the ocean. Jonathan counted the bridges he could make out, but somewhere around the tenth, everything faded and dulled into the salty haze of the sea.

They passed no one on the bridges. Boats sailed along below and a few rowboats were moored in the shadows, their occupants lowering crab traps into the water near the massive stone foundations. A galleon stood out to sea about a half-mile, perhaps waiting for the tide, which was low enough to expose a good expanse of muddy bank along each finger of the delta. Here and there people with rolled trousers poked in the sandy mud with clamming forks, unearthing plate-sized clams and tossing them into wooden crates or buckets. But all that went on below the bridges. On top there was no one at all besides Ahab, Jonathan, and the Professor – which was a bit disturbing to Jonathan, in the light of the innkeeper’s warning. The Professor, however, pointed out that if there were no sizeable villages for a hundred miles down the coast, then there would be little reason for traffic on the road. Besides, in midweek it was unlikely that picnickers or idle travelers would be out and about. The weekend would doubtless tell a different story. Jonathan agreed, but mostly because he wanted to agree and not so much because he thought the logic sound.

The sixth bridge was a tremendous span of stones that hung in the air without a thought for gravity. The center of the span was fifty or sixty feet above what must have been the main channel of the Tweet River running deep and dark beneath them. The Professor pointed upriver where a long sand and rock spit formed something of a breakwater a half-mile or so distant. Canted over and three quarters sunk at the end of that breakwater was the hulk of the
Jamoca Queen.

As each bridge fell away behind them, so did the city of Landsend; by the time they crested the thirteenth, Land-send was itself lost in haze, a sort of shimmering ghost city disappearing in the late afternoon sun. They came out into the ocean breeze atop a sandy hill that fell away steeply toward a rock-dotted strand. Green breakers tumbled along the length of the beach, and the low sun shining beyond them glowed through the pale walls of the waves, turning the sea-green water to a clear pale emerald. All the ocean noises, the crashing and hissing and rushing and the crying of the seabirds, sounded to Jonathan like very wonderful but lonesome music and made him wish for the thousandth time that he lived by the sea so that he could listen to it every day.

But there was no time to stand and gape at the ocean, not if they intended to catch up with Miles. Some quarter of a mile farther along they passed a crossroads that led away east toward the forest. An arrow on a cut-stone marker pointed inland, and below it were the words
GROVER – 38 MILES
. Another arrow pointed north toward Landsend, and another south toward Persimmon Village, some ninety-seven miles distant.

After that the road ran up and down over sandy, grassy hills, the sea crashing on the one side, grasslands running away toward wooded mountains on the other. There was nothing particularly threatening or gloomy about the countryside, nothing that reminded Jonathan of goblins or of the sort of horrors that inhabited the woods along the Tweet River. It was all quite simply deserted.

Soon the sun fell away into the sea, however, and the shadows of the hills and occasional trees grew longer and the ocean grew darker and colder. For another hour they trudged along until finally it was so utterly dark that when the road wandered into a very thick and quiet woods, they could barely make out the trail ahead of them. The distant sound of crashing waves had disappeared, and glimmers of moonlight shone away to their left between the leaves of forest trees. The path farther on was stippled with pale silver that winked on and off as branches overhead blew in the wind. Around them were the biggest trees Jonathan had ever seen, gnarled and twisted and stooped as if they’d seen some heavy weather. Limbs thrust out wildly and mingled together overhead in a tangled ceiling that swayed in the wind, now letting in a thousand shafts of moonlight, then casting deep shadows across the forest floor.

So dense and forbidding were the woods on both sides, that the idea of tossing down the knapsacks and trying to sleep was unthinkable. It was only eight o’clock anyway, according to Jonathan’s recovered pocketwatch, and it seemed far more sensible to travel along for another two or three hours, if only to tire themselves out to that point at which they felt positively like shutting their eyes.

So they trudged along by the intermittent light of the moon. Keeping to the path, finally, even when it was lost in deep shadow, was an easy enough thing. Ahab could be depended upon for that. It wound a bit here and there, but it took no sudden turns, and there were no crossroads to confuse the issue. Several times they crossed what might have been game trails, little overgrown paths that led away into the wild depths of the wood, but there seemed to be no reason to investigate them.

Around ten-thirty, Jonathan was starting to feel like getting a bit of sleep. The woods had, if anything, gotten deeper and darker and more musty and ancient. The branches no longer blew overhead; they were quiet and still. Jonathan suspected that the path had been running inland and that the woods were sheltered from the sea breeze by hills. The moon was three-quarters full, sailing higher in the sky amid scattered stars, but only occasionally did threads of moonlight manage to find the forest floor.

They stopped to rest more and more often – every ten minutes or so – and their rest stops grew longer each time, the two of them sitting in a slump and considering tiredly the merits of staying the night in the woods. But each time they did, it seemed to them that a coast road, if it had any sense, would quite likely follow the coast, and that another half-hour or forty-five minutes must surely bring them back around to open, brighter country. So they stood up finally after their rest and plodded wearily along, ignoring the darkness around them and pretending not to hear the rustlings of the night creatures scrabbling in the undergrowth along the path.

Jonathan’s mind, without him giving it leave to, kept wandering around to a point where it began thinking of trolls and of bears and of the sorts of shadows that inhabited the Goblin Wood below High tower. But he knew, of course, that he wasn’t in the Goblin Wood. He was in Balumnia, and Balumnia mightn’t have any trolls at all, or any bears either for that matter. It had headless men in rowboats instead.

He commanded himself not to think of such things. He made an effort instead to picture the flowers that grew in the elf moss around Twombly Town that spring, and to remember their deep pastel colors that reminded him of painted Easter eggs or of the violets and pinks and deep greens of distant mountains at sunset. But as beautiful as all those thoughts were, hunched trolls and parties of shrunken goblins insisted on creeping in and spoiling things. The forest became gloomier and gloomier, and shadows deeper and more threatening.

He found himself suddenly stumbling into the Professor, who had stopped inexplicably in the middle of the road. ‘What?’ Jonathan asked, even though the Professor as yet hadn’t said anything.

‘Shhh
!’ the Professor whispered, pointing through the trees toward a flickering light, a fire of some sort, that danced in a clearing a hundred yards or so off the road. A little trail wound away toward it. It was a peculiar sort of fire that leaped and shrank and threw sudden splashes of light into the shadows of the trees beyond it. It seemed to move weirdly about, flaring up here, then dying away, then leaping up again some few yards off to the left or the right or deeper into the trees. It didn’t at all seem to be the sort of fire that Jonathan fancied investigating.

But then who could say that it wasn’t Miles up to some sort of enchantment, or that it wasn’t Selznak himself working mischief over one of his strange fires fueled with dried bones? The Professor stooped and picked something up off the road, then dropped it again, throwing it down as if he’d inadvertently grabbed hold of a dead toad. That wasn’t far from the case. On the path lay a dried bat. The Professor was about to kick it into the bushes when Jonathan stopped him by picking the thing up. Through the bat’s ears was a bit of string tied in a loop.

‘This came from Dr Chan’s,’ Jonathan said, dangling the bat at arm’s length. ‘Didn’t he say that Miles had been in to buy herbs and bats?’

‘Yes, he did.’ The Professor studied it for a moment, then said, ‘We’ll have to take a closer look at that fire.’

Jonathan tossed the bat away. He couldn’t think of anything else to do with it. If Gump were along he’d work it into some useful object – put a candle on its head or turn it into a door pull. But that sort of thing didn’t appeal to Jonathan, not right then. So the two of them crept along the little trail with Ahab between, Jonathan wishing he had an ape suit to hide in, and all of them ready to turn and run at the sound of a broken twig. They were halfway to the fire when they heard a willow flute being played very poorly. There was no melody to it, just an idiot piping followed by low, cackling laughter. They stopped where they were and waited. Whatever sat by the fire was certainly not Miles. Firelight sprang up against the bole of a great tree beyond, throwing across it the shadow of a stooped figure tearing at something with its teeth, a great beef bone, perhaps, or a turkey leg. The sound of slavering and crunching could be heard dimly, and once again the willow pipes started up, this time accompanied by the senseless pounding of a copper gong.

Jonathan realized just then that there were other fires lit in the woods, any number of them, flickering through the darkness. They blinked out, then popped up again, far away like the lights of fireflies, then frightfully close, spawning leaping shadows on the ancient trees.

Without a word the three of them turned and sneaked back out toward the road. Jonathan had the sudden terrible feeling that the road wouldn’t be there, that they would wander in the woods all night waiting for the sun to rise, but that the sun would no more brighten the deep shadows than did the threads of broken moonlight. He thought he heard a rustling along the path behind him, the padding of feet and the swishing and brushing of limbs. Then the piping of the willow flute stopped abruptly. It struck him that it was time to run, and he was about to suggest as much to the Professor when he found himself stumbling out onto the coast road, and then dashing off south in the wake of his two companions. The whole short adventure seemed to have given both of them a second wind, and they struck off south, determined to find their way out of the forest if they had to walk until dawn.

After a half-mile or so, the road widened and the trees thinned, and they trudged out into a clearing bathed in watery moonbeams. In it sat a cottage. It was a very cheerful cottage under the circumstances, its windows lit and its door ajar and the sound of laughter and gaiety tumbling out into the night – not goblin laughter either, but the sounds of people enjoying themselves.

A girl stood in the open doorway watching the road, and when Jonathan and Ahab and the Professor stopped in amazement at the edge of the clearing, she waved and seemed very happy to see them.

Jonathan at first wasn’t sure that he was happy to see her, not right then. But it occurred to him that she was very pretty standing there on the porch in the lantern light. Her hair was long and blond, and she had a thin, young figure. Wispy was the only word he could think of right off to describe her as she stood there in a lace dress. She waved at them again. ‘Come along,’ she called in a cheerful voice that chased most of Jonathan’s suspicions away.

The smell of roast goose wafted out through the open windows, and it was that more than anything else that convinced them to have a look inside. Ahab, however, didn’t want to go. He lay down growling, smack in the middle of the road, and wouldn’t budge. Jonathan hauled on his collar and reasoned with him but wasn’t having any effect. So after a moment he gave up, deciding to come back outside later and entice Ahab in with a bit of roast goose.

Those inside the house were having a good time indeed, laughing and singing and clanking cutlery about and banging plates. The girl on the porch stepped off and took Jonathan’s hand. ‘The wizard said to watch for you,’ she said, smiling. ‘He was along earlier but he hurried away again. He said to tell you that things are never as bad as they seem.’