The Disappearing Dwarf (4 page)

She rose slowly and terribly from the chair, supporting herself on a curiously carved stick, dark with age and use. It looked certain for a moment that she was about to totter very slowly forward onto her face on the porch. She didn’t though; she simply continued to stare ahead of her.

The Professor took his hat off even though she couldn’t appreciate it. He introduced himself and Jonathan politely. It was Jonathan’s idea to make off down the path, but he wasn’t about to go alone, and clearly this was just the sort of thing to fascinate the Professor. The old woman didn’t respond at all to the Professor’s pleasantries. She simply smiled for a moment more, then reached out one withered hand from the midst of the muff of ruined lace, pointed it shakily at the space between Jonathan and the Professor and said eerily, ‘So you’ve come.’

‘Some mistake.’ Jonathan looked at the Professor, then back at the old woman. ‘You’ve got the wrong party. We’re out on a picnic actually. On our way to the waterfall for a swim.’ He motioned to the Professor in a meaningful way. The old woman laughed, or at least tried to, but didn’t sound as if her heart were in it, as if she were approving of Jonathan’s sense of humor. She curled her finger slowly, inviting them up onto the porch, and, as if suddenly becoming animated, she jerked her head to the left and looked Jonathan full in the face, cackling with sudden brittle laughter.

Jonathan was off down the path with Ahab at his heels. He could hear the Professor pounding along behind. With a shudder of horror he heard the screeching of the cat and cackling of the old woman mixed very clearly with what sounded for all the world like the swishing and crackling of old robes and lace, as if the witch herself were following close on.

They ran all the way to the fork, and Jonathan would have abandoned the path to the tower and continued running all the way back toward the harbor if the Professor hadn’t stopped for breath and shouted at Jonathan to do the same.

Bent over, hands on their knees, they both puffed away for the space of a minute. Jonathan listened for the swish of robes or the cackle of laughter, but he couldn’t hear a thing above the pounding of his heart and the sound of his breathing. He determined that, old lady or no, he would whack the devil out of her with his stick if she showed up along the path – and that went double for her cat. ‘That about cooked my goose,’ Jonathan said after a few moments.

The Professor forced out a bit of a laugh. ‘She sure put the fear into you.’

‘Into
me?’
Jonathan mocked. ‘I’ll lay odds you haven’t run so fast in forty years.’

‘You gave me a scare, bolting like that.’

‘It wasn’t me giving anyone a scare. I’m not the sort of chap to give people a scare. You know as well as I do what she is. She was one of the ladies Dooly saw last fall in the moonlight that night, sailing across the sky – she and her cat both probably. If that
was
a cat.’ Jonathan watched the Professor waving a match in the general direction of his pipe bowl, his fingers shaking like sixty. ‘Are you trying to light your pipe or the end of your nose?’ Jonathan asked.

The two of them burst into a fury of wild laughter, and it was a moment before they’d laughed themselves out and set off down the path once again, both Jonathan and the Professor looking on occasion back over their shoulders. They agreed several times not to make the same blunder when they came to the same fork on their return.

In another hour they wound up the steep, rocky ridge to the tower. They hurried along in the shadows of the giant hemlocks that grew along the path, and they avoided sunlit stretches. The fact that it was a warm day had little to do with their keeping to the shadows, although both of them insisted that such was the case. The tower simply seemed to have a pall of evil hanging about it – an atmosphere that had risen over countless years out of the ground itself.

All in all, the shadowy tower had an inhospitable look to it that Jonathan didn’t like any more there in the light of day than he had at midnight months before. Jonathan began to wish he had brought a jacket even though he knew it was as sunny a day as he would ever see.

‘I rather think we’re letting the countryside here get the best of us,’ the Professor observed. ‘We’re expecting some grim thing that we’ve no cause to expect. This isn’t any haunted house, after all.’

‘It’s not?’ Jonathan asked. ‘It must average pretty high as haunted houses go. This whole place seems about as haunted as can be. It feels like the woods are full of goblins.’

‘Nonsense. It’s all your imagination.’

‘I just don’t have your optimism,’ Jonathan said, as the two of them struck out across the grassy expanse between the forest and the door of the tower. With Ahab following, they scuttled along, both of them hunched over and hurrying as if they sensed they were being watched by something – something in the very air that surrounded the tower.

The door swung heavily in on its hinges, opening to reveal the cobbled floor of the great hallway and the stone fireplace that took up most of the wall perpendicular to the door. There in the fireplace lay a heap of cold ashes, and before it lay the pile of bleached bones used by the terrible Selznak as fuel. On the floor were scattered the strange remnants of their encounter that past fall: the stuffed snake Squire Myrkle had poked into the Dwarf’s ear and the gnawed turkey bone that had so overwhelmed the skeleton. There was an empty tankard and a few human rib bones and the bottom half of a skull. Nothing had been altered. No one had, apparently, been in the tower; the dwarf hadn’t returned. The long window opposite the door had a gaping hole. Despite the breeze blowing in through the broken window, a good layer of dust, smeared with the tiny footprints of rats, sat on the sill. Below the sill lay a dozen human bones – the legs, feet and pelvis of the skeleton who had almost found its way out to freedom. Outside in the dirt and weeds lay the rest of him, the skull yellowed and staring up toward the sun overhead.

All of this skeleton business didn’t serve to make the interior of the tower any more homey, but it did remind Jonathan that he and his friends had, once before, dealt fairly handily with a similar assortment of horrors. He hefted his stick and supposed to himself that what he had done once, he could do again. Then he recalled his wild flight from the old woman on the porch and decided wisely that vanity, more often than not, turns men into fools.

There was nothing to suggest, then, that the tower was occupied by anything other than the pall of evil that even the winds blowing in through the open window couldn’t disperse.

‘Where shall we start?’ Jonathan asked, looking at his pocketwatch. ‘There’re five floors above and your caverns and cellars and dog rooms below. Where does the treasure lie?’

‘I’d say below, despite Escargot’s warnings about the upper story.’ The Professor was unrolling his parchment on the floor. ‘It’s standard practice, according to the authorities, to bury the stuff, not to haul it upstairs.’

That seemed reasonable to Jonathan. ‘It’s after noon,’ he said, shoving his pocketwatch back into his pocket. ‘We’d better be out of here by four o’clock if we want to make it through the fens before the sun goes down. I want to eat dinner on the raft and not at some pleasant shanty in the swamp.’

The Professor nodded. ‘Agreed. You keep an eye on the time.’ With that he set out toward the winding stairs that led to both the upper and lower reaches of the castle. The way to the cellar was blocked by a wooden trap door made of heavy oak planks. Attached to it was a chain that angled up into a sort of pulley-crank device. The chain and crank were as rusty as if they’d been out in the rain for a year, and had a look of disuse about them. Jonathan threw his weight into the wooden arm of the crank, but the thing just sat and stared at him. He tapped at it with his stick, and chips of rust flew off, dusting the stone stairs with red bits of iron. The Professor and Jonathan both leaned into it, but with no better result. Then Jonathan whacked it with his staff, raising a spray of rust, but not noticeably loosening the thing.

The Professor pondered for a moment. ‘We could melt lard all over it,’ he said, snapping his fingers. ‘Oil the thing up. If we keep on banging on it with your stick we’ll just bend the devil out of it.’

‘You’re right,’ Jonathan agreed. ‘When we were here last, the Squire and Bufo found a pantry upstairs. There was a roast turkey there at the time, so Selznak must have done a good bit of cooking. There’s sure to be lard around somewhere.’

So the two of them, followed by Ahab, climbed back up the stairs to investigate the pantry. They didn’t find any lard, but they did find a bottle of whale oil which would do just as nicely and wouldn’t have to be heated. They also discovered in a dark, cool hole beneath the floor, racks of bottled ale, laid down long before by Selznak. Jonathan shoved four bottles into his knapsack along with an oil lamp, ajar of oil, and a handful of wooden matches. They discovered a cupboard full of what had once been loaves of bread but which had become little greenish-brown petrified lumps, too thoroughly dried out and reduced even to be of interest to mice. There were jars of pickled mushrooms and eggs and peppers, but several had burst and spewed juices and debris over the rest of the jars. Neither Jonathan nor the Professor had any desire to have a go at the contents of those jars that hadn’t burst.

‘Selznak seems to have done all right for himself here,’ Jonathan said, shouldering his pack. ‘He was a regular gourmet, eating pickled eggs and mushrooms and roasting turkeys. Too bad he had to be such an evil sort. You wouldn’t think that anyone who had such an appreciation for food would go about terrorizing people so. Somehow I can’t imagine Selznak eating anything at all. Plates of dirt, maybe, or webs, but not bottled ale and roast turkey.’

The Professor nodded. ‘I know what you mean. He wasn’t the sort of person to
like
anything, food included. He must have fought pretty hard against appreciating any of it.’

‘That’s right.’ Jonathan sighed happily as they once again reached the bottom of the stairs. ‘If he hadn’t, some of the pleasure of eating all this stuff might have leaked out and ruined him.’

Jonathan twisted the top from the jar of whale oil and trickled a bit over the moving parts of the crank and pulley. He joggled the crank and poured some more on. Then he leaned out over the door itself and poured a bit along the chain and onto the iron ring that it passed through. He was careful to keep the oil off the handle of the crank itself so that he could get a good grip on the thing. When there was as much oil dribbled on as seemed to be sensible, he capped the jar and put it back into his pack next to his lantern.

The Professor tapped at the crank to loosen it, and the thing moved ahead a quarter of an inch. Then he tapped the other way and moved it back. After a few moments of tapping and jiggling, Jonathan gave it a heave, and the rusty chain dragged and rattled through the ring. The heavy door creaked open, its hinges screaming as if protesting at being awakened. Below was impenetrable darkness. The stairs curved down and away to the left out of sight. A cold blast of musty air blew up the stairwell at them, rushing anxiously out of the darkness toward sunlight and freedom. Jonathan cocked his head and listened, although he didn’t give much of a thought to what he was listening for. He had the vague idea that if he heard anything at all he’d trip the catch on the pulley, slam the trap, and leave town. But there was nothing but silence below – not even the scuttling footsteps of rats.

‘What are you listening for?’ the Professor asked. The moaning of ghosts?’

‘I suppose I am at that,’ Jonathan said. ‘And I suppose that’s why you’re whispering.’

The Professor, vaguely surprised to find that he had indeed been whispering, spoke up bluffly. ‘Hello,’ he shouted down into the darkness. ‘It’s just me, the taxman! That’ll scare the daylights out of them,’ he said to Jonathan. ‘Not that there’s much daylight down there left to scare.’

Jonathan rummaged again in his pack, coming up with the lamp, the torch, and the candles he and the Professor had brought along. ‘This torch is too smoky,’ he said. ‘Let’s use the lamp instead and save the torch and the candles.’

‘Good idea.’ The Professor twisted the wick up in the lamp as Jonathan lit it. Light stabbed out into the darkness below, but it didn’t do much more than make everything else seem that much more black. Ahab peered past Jonathan and the Professor and growled down the stairs. Jonathan had a high regard for Ahab’s instincts, and he felt a bit like growling at the darkness below himself, just to let whatever was there know that he carried, as his friend Dooly would have aptly put it, a whackum stick. With the glowing lantern held at arm’s length, the three of them descended the stairs that spiralled downward into what turned out to be a surprisingly deep cellar. Jonathan stepped slowly from tread to tread as if the stairs were about to crumble to bits. Actually, however, they were solid as rock and seemed to be hewn out of the ridge itself.

At the base of the stairs was a broad, open chamber with tunnels running away into the earth on three sides – one toward each of the Professor’s various caverns, likely. Jonathan clumped down onto the stone floor below the final stair, and the floor, oddly, emitted a hollow thud. Behind them sounded a metallic click and the confused ratchet clatter of a banging cog and a chain rattling through an iron ring. The heavy trap door banged down, the hollow
whump
blowing a gust of air down the dark spiralling stair and into Jonathan’s upturned face.