The Disappearing Dwarf (32 page)

That struck Jonathan as being very encouraging indeed – just the sort of thing he’d always insisted upon. His faith in Miles doubled, and he barely gave a thought to the strange fact that the girl’s hand was very cold and was dry as dust. For a moment, just as she stepped out into the moonlight, Jonathan had the strange thought that her hair wasn’t blond, as it had seemed to be in the lantern light. It seemed momentarily to be gray, like old ashes in a grate, and her face, rather than being pleasantly thin, appeared skeletal just for the slip of an instant. But once again on the porch in the lantern light, she was young and wispy and there was nothing at all to worry about. Whatever he’d seen, the Professor must have missed, for he was rubbing his hands together and gazing at the company within the cottage.

Almost a dozen people were gathered around a long trestle table laden with the most amazing foods: a tremendous roast goose and heaps of mashed potatoes, tubs of butter, and rich smoking gravy. There were puddings, pies, bottles of ale, jars of cranberry sauce, and plates of biscuits. Over the fire in the hearth was a suspended basket heaped with chestnuts that a lad in leather trousers poked at with a silver fork. Everyone’s plate was piled with food, and at the head of the table were two empty plates and chairs as if they’d been set there specifically for Jonathan and the Professor. Jonathan could see no reason not to make use of them. It was the only polite thing to do.

So the two of them sat down, and for the first time in hours Jonathan felt as if he could relax a bit. It seemed quite possible that they could induce their hostess to let them spend the night there, and then make a fresh start in the morning.

The cottage itself was cheerful and warm with its timber ceiling and great stone fireplace. Dark oak wainscot circled the plaster walls, and bunches of flowers – lilacs and wild iris and columbine – sat in ceramic vases. Lantern light flooded every corner of the room and spilled out across the polished plank floor, illuminating the faces of the happy revelers.

Jonathan half wondered where they’d all come from, the closest towns being a good long way away, but there would be time enough for questions and tale-telling after he’d dealt with the slices of roast goose that were being forked onto his plate.

All of a sudden he remembered Ahab sitting alone out on the road, and he rose and excused himself and speared a slice of goose with which to convince Ahab to be a sensible dog. But before he got halfway to the open door a gust of wind blew it shut with a wild slam, and a shriek of mad laughter rang out behind him. He found himself caught up in cobweb – cobweb that couldn’t have been there a moment before. The lad in the leather trousers was leering at him stupidly, poking with his silver fork at a wire cage full of rats that snapped and popped in the hot fire.

The slice of roast goose, or whatever it actually was, squirmed on the end of the fork in Jonathan’s hand, and he threw it with a shout at the cage of rats as he spun round to face the revelers at the table behind him.

Professor Wurzle’s chair had tipped over backward onto the floor with him still in it, and two goblins pinched at his arms and cheeks nodding idiotically as two ghouls held the struggling Professor down.

On the table there was no roast goose or pudding or pie. A great tray of broken bloody meat lay there instead: undistinguishable, vile meat that made Jonathan suddenly sick. Goblins stabbed hunks out of it with long knives and grinned up at him, motioning for him to have a go at it first. One of them, the biggest goblin, seemed to be about half melted, as if his face were made of soft tallow. The cottage was full of shrieking and cackling and the smell of dust and age. The lilacs and iris were gone and were replaced with dead weeds and grotesque funguses. Ahab barked and howled beyond the door, and Jonathan was for a second undecided whether to let him in or help the Professor out of his scrape. He hadn’t time to think about it much, however, for one of the goblins that had been pinching the Professor’s cheek grasped a knife from the tabletop and had the look about him of a man considering how to best carve a roast.

Jonathan grabbed the nearest chair and smashed it into the goblin’s head. Almost as soon as he did he felt a hot fork spear into his arm. He turned and flailed out at the rat cooker, catching him square on the cheek. His fist skidded across its face, and it was like hitting a lump of clay. Skin and bone gouged away in a spray of black liquid, and the thing, whatever it was, tumbled over, knocking the cage of rats deep into the fire. Goblin laughter shrieked out, and two of the goblins jumped across and pointed and screamed at their companion who lay smoking in the flames, his clothes catching fire and burning with amazing fury.

The Professor was up and out of his chair by then and looking for something to hit. But none of the goblins and ghouls offered him any resistance. Two goblins danced atop the table, stomping and kicking at the bloody feast and slavering and whacking each other with chewed bones. About then, a black cat crawled out from beneath a chair and leaped up onto the tabletop, and Jonathan realized who it was the girl on the porch had reminded him of when she had stepped into the moonlight. He had been a fool not to see it; they had both been fools. Only Ahab had any sense. Then Jonathan noticed that Ahab was no longer barking and growling outside the door and that the lanterns round the walls began growing dimmer and dimmer and that the fire in the hearth was dying and shrinking. Beside it, smiling crookedly, staring through milky eyes, was the old woman of the swamp, of Tweet Village, of St Elmo Square.

Jonathan was suddenly shoved from behind, shoved toward the door by the Professor, who, in a rage, took a wild swipe with a chair at the witch. The chair broke into kindling wood against the wall, and the witch, her posture unchanged, still smiling vaguely and staring, stood some few feet farther away. Neither Jonathan nor the Professor had any desire to discuss the phenomenon. Jonathan tore the door open, and the two of them stumbled out into the night, shrieks and howls of laughter following close on. The door slammed shut and they were once again on the coast road.

Behind them, all was strangely silent. When they turned and looked back, there was no longer any cabin in the clearing, only bits of stone from an old crumbled foundation and another heap that might once have been a chimney. Beyond there were trees – great, wide trees that grew close together in a line, the shadowy places between them seeming like dark doorways through which, in the far distant shadows, dots of fires glowed, winking and blinking in the night. Ahab was nowhere around.

Jonathan whistled and called. There was little need of secrecy. All the calling and whistling, however, didn’t accomplish a thing. Both Jonathan and the Professor knew that they’d find Ahab when they found the Squire and Selznak and Miles. It seemed tolerably certain to Jonathan that they were on the verge of doing just that. They were being toyed with; there could be no doubt. The disappearance of Ahab was more such toying – or at least that’s what Jonathan hoped. He started toward the tunnels through the trees, thinking that perhaps Ahab had somehow gone that way. Although the Professor shook his head doubtfully, he went along. But the tunnels themselves led into utter darkness, and no shred of moonlight illuminated the blackness. There was nothing, in fact, to indicate that anything at all lay beyond, except the flickering of distant fires and the faraway piping of willow flutes.

Jonathan whistled tentatively into the trees, then shouted. Again there was no response, no sign of Ahab. It was far more likely, if Ahab had somehow wandered off on his own, that he’d gone farther down the coast road. After twenty minutes of futile searching and whistling, that’s just what Jonathan and the Professor did.

Within fifteen minutes they were out of the woods and trekking along a beach in the moonlight. With no trees to break the sea wind, the air had grown more chill, but both Jonathan and the Professor were sure they’d far rather freeze the night away in the open than spend it in the woods hobnobbing with goblins and witches and ghouls.

A fog was blowing in off the ocean, and although through occasional clear patches they could still see the rolling of ghostly breakers and the splashing foam luminous in the thin light of the moon, off to their left the land was almost entirely obscured. It was clearly time to call it a night. They scooped out a good-sized depression in the sand behind several great rocks that blocked most of the wind. Jonathan lay for a moment watching the dark water appear and then disappear in the fog farther down the beach. It occurred to him that a campfire would be nice under the circumstances. Almost as soon as the thought wandered through, he fell away into a deep sleep and began to dream that he had one, but it was small and cold and needed heaps and heaps of wood.

He kept waking up with cold feet every half-hour or so. When he did, he thought again how nice a fire would be and told himself in no uncertain terms to get up and build one. Then he’d begin to imagine again that he had, but that it was an uncooperative fire that didn’t care a bit about keeping anyone warm but fizzled and popped and smoked and languished while he puffed and dropped twigs on it. He began to dream that there were other fires burning roundabout, away off up the beach, fires that danced and crackled until he set out to find them, then snapped away into darkness making him lurch awake to find that he hadn’t started a fire at all, not even a smoldering little sad fire, but that his feet were still damp and cold and that it didn’t seem to be any closer to morning than it had been a half-hour before.

Twice when he awoke and looked for signs of approaching dawn, he thought for a moment that he saw shapes – shadows in foggy moonlight – moving very purposefully and stealthily along the strand. There seemed to be a moaning on the breeze like wind through the chinks around an ill-hung and drafty door or like the sound of distant ghosts flitting through the night air lamenting their fate. The far-off pounding of copper gongs accompanied the moaning, and once, just for a moment, Jonathan could quite distinctly hear low, chattering laughter as if it too were carried along the wind. It seemed to be emanating from the very fog that hung suspended in the night around them.

Once, shortly before dawn, he awoke sleepily and opened his eyes just for a moment. Above him and off inland beyond the coast road, there shone for a time a light glowing in the mists like a lit window in a high tower. But just when he blinked awake enough to take any real notice of it and to decide to awaken the sleeping Professor, the fog swirled and thickened in the night air and the lights faded and were gone. Again there were shadows around him in the dim night – shadows of things creeping on the sand and the misty vision of a human skeleton jerking along through the dark, clacking like bamboo wind chimes in the thick wet mist, then fading and disappearing into the gray.

Jonathan was hard-pressed finally to say whether he was sleeping or waking at any particular moment. He determined as he lay there, not really trying to sleep but just waiting for the sun, that it made precious little difference anyway, so he resolved to keep his eyes shut and wait. He understood, or so it seemed to him there on the beach, that although he had assumed he’d come to Balumnia in pursuit of the Squire, in actuality he’d simply been waiting – waiting for Selznak to work his evil, to spin his web. Like it or not, he was entangled finally in that web, and his waiting was almost at an end.

Then the sun rose. Or at least the night began to fade into day. With it faded some of his fears, and it began to seem reasonable that he’d done a lot of dreaming during the night – very strange dreaming to be sure, but dreaming nonetheless. It began to seem, in fact, that he’d had enough waiting, that it was time to be off on the hunt.

He rolled over in the cold sand to say as much to the Professor, but the Professor wasn’t there. Instead, slumped against the gray, weedy rock, its chin on its chest, was a yellow, ragged-looking skeleton, crumbs of peeled, antique skin hanging here and there from a hollow cheek and an ivory shoulder blade.

Jonathan lurched forward and attempted to scramble to his feet. He shouted for the Professor, since it was the Professor he most wanted to see. But his shout was carried away on the wind and was gone. He found that he
couldn’t
scramble to his feet. It was as if he
were
entangled in a web and could thrash about as much as he liked, but that the more he thrashed the less headway he’d make.

On beyond on the rocky beach lay any number of skeletons, slumped in the sand as if they’d been filing along the beach in a line and had been blown over by some great wind, toppled like a line of dominoes. A memory of Zippo the magician and of the foggy night in Tweet River Village flitted through his mind and he thought about the dark magical tapestry before which Zippo had performed. He remembered the lighted windows he’d seen through the mist in the night, windows that hadn’t, he was sure, been a part of any dream. He turned slowly and looked inland toward the road. There beyond it, sitting on the rocky hillside above a gray-green meadow, was an old stone castle, a castle shrouded with the same pall of mystery and evil that hung in the atmosphere around the castle on Hightower Ridge. He realized, just then, where the great iron door in the deep cavern beneath Hightower Castle led, what door it was that he’d whacked against with his stick and shouted funny things at. It was quite possible even, given Selznak’s powers, that the Dwarf himself had been listening at the other side, smiling and nodding with anticipation.

A light shone in an arched window high in a tower of the castle. A hooded figure stepped in front of the high window, staring out toward the ocean. It seemed to Jonathan that he could see a pair of glowing eyes beneath the hood and that the eyes were looking at him. But he didn’t have more than a moment to wonder at it before he was jerked to his feet like a marionette and he found himself marching in a long line of risen skeletons along a rough path that led across the meadow toward the castle. Rocks crunched beneath his feet, and the salt air off the ocean pinged against his cheek. He was reminded of a holy man he’d met once on the road to the fair, who walked with a rock in cither shoe. He’d seemed half-crippled by it, but he’d told Jonathan that he did it to remind himself that he was alive. It had seemed pretty loony to Jonathan at the time, but it made a certain sense to him now. He was stricken with the fearful certainty that connections with daylight, with sunshine, with the waking world were far fewer than he had ever imagined, that they were nothing more than the crunch of stones beneath his feet and the taste of salt and seafoam on the wind and the cry of wheeling gulls, and were numbered and falling away with each step that he took toward the dark portal that opened at the base of the tower.