The Disappearing Dwarf (6 page)

When they could no longer hear the thing’s cries, they slowed down a bit. Jonathan had taken the lead, banging along like a blind man with his stick in front, and the Professor simply followed along, one hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. Ahab didn’t seem to need a stick or a hand on anyone’s shoulder, and it was the realization of that that made Jonathan hold up finally. They decided against lighting the torch, knowing that they’d need it later, especially given the possibility of their running into more pits of the sort they’d just clambered out of. Candles wouldn’t do since the small weak flame would keep going out as they traveled. So instead of lighting anything, Jonathan tied a lead to Ahab’s collar, the Professor kept his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder, and the two of them followed Ahab back along the passage until they burst out finally into the great cavern below the trap door. There they lit two candles and discussed further plans.

They decided, in the end, to take the tunnel which, on the chart, led to the Cavern of Malthius. Jonathan speculated that whoever Malthius turned out to be, he would likely be better company than the creatures they’d just visited. The decision, as it turned out, was a good one.

The corridor that led to the cavern was relatively short. They had to stop to re-light the candles four times before they reached it, but when they finally stumbled out of the tunnel into the immense, stalactite-hung cavern, they saw an amazing spectacle.

The cavern was broad and deep with an astonishingly high ceiling. The rays of the sun shone through cracks and fissures above, as if filtering through piles of rock. The ceiling was so riddled with holes and cracks that it was a marvel it stayed up at all. There wasn’t any need for candles. The most amazing thing though was the furniture stacked roundabout. There were piles and piles of it. Immense wardrobes and long dining tables, gray with dust and dark with age, lined the walls. There were trunks spilling over with clothes and there were any number of old chairs, huge carved chairs with rags of tattered leather dangling from green brass studs.

In the dim shadows of one corner stood a collection of stuffed animals, a sort of taxidermist’s wonderland, that looked as if it had stood just so for two hundred years. An elephant with long curving tusks and tufts of wooly hair along his back watched them through green glass eyes. Beside him stood a great long hippo and three crocodiles that had to have been twenty feet from head to tail. There were zebras and antelope and great cats and a weird hollow-eyed buffalo that was almost as big as the elephant. Four white apes stood in a cluster farther back in the darkness. Pushed in among these strange dusty creatures were more chairs and wardrobes and tables and candelabra and such, heaped together in disarray.

The cavern seemed to be the storage room of an ancient natural history museum that doubled as a warehouse for antiquities. Jonathan was briefly troubled by the disquieting thought that all the stuffed beasts were just a hair’s breadth from animation, that perhaps when night fell the old lamps and candelabra would begin to glow and the ruined clavichord would begin to tinkle and harp and the apes would sit round the table to a phantom meal while crocodiles lounged on broken divans.

But all that was unlikely. He and the Professor, thinking of treasures, began rummaging in the scattered trunks, finding for the most part nothing but ancient clothing. In the trunks scattered beneath the fissures in the ceiling, the contents had been reduced to a sort of damp black webby business. But those more sheltered from the weather were in far better shape. There were heaps of sequined dresses, of silks and laces and fine waistcoats and top hats. There was a trunk full of costume jewelry, of rhinestones and glass baubles and false pearls that spilled out over the sides of the trunk and flowed away over the floor. All in all, both Jonathan and the Professor were astonished – not so much by the furniture itself or the trunks of ancient clothing or even by the weird assortment of stuffed animals, but by the combination of the lot of it, hidden away there in a cavern in the earth. It was like something out of a book by G. Smithers.

There wasn’t any treasure to be found, however. Both of them collected heaps of odd finery before stopping to think that it was unlikely that they would find a way to haul the stuff along with them. The idea of leaving it behind was unthinkable, but it was, in the end, the only idea that made any sense. The Professor discovered several trunks of old costumes, enough to outfit a castle full of people for a masquerade. Among the feathered hats and rubber hands was a patchy sort of ape suit, complete from top to bottom. Jonathan slid the mask over his head but then pulled it off again when bits of hair and paper and rubber and leather fell from it.

‘I have to have this,’ he said to the Professor, who himself had found a great, hollow alligator’s head.

‘Wear it when we visit Lonny Gosset. It’ll knock him into the fourth dimension.’

Jonathan smiled. ‘I was thinking that I could wear it about town. People might mistake me for a man of leisure.’

The Professor nodded. ‘It’s possible. Dooly might anyway. Dooly and Beezle. The suit looks a bit like some of the finely tailored garments he sells.’

‘Does it look much like a real ape’s head?’ Jonathan asked, turning to have a look at the heads of the four white apes that stood beyond the elephant. But the apes were almost lost in shadow. In fact, the cavern was growing steadily darker as the sun outside dropped beyond the treeline.

‘Do we want to spend the night in here?’ the Professor asked.

‘No,’ Jonathan replied decisively, looking about him at the shifting shadows of the somber furniture strung with cobwebs and at the glass eyes of the wild array of stuffed animals. ‘Do you think we can get out through one of those cracks in the ceiling?’

‘A snake might if he were fired out of a cannon,’ the Professor said. ‘We’ve got one more tunnel to explore, though. Let’s light the torch and have a go at it. At worst we can make our way back up to the cellar.’

Jonathan agreed to the plan. It made little difference if they explored the tunnels at noon or at midnight. He was fairly sure that he’d rather spend the night tramping through the caves in search of a way out rather than trying to sleep. Such an atmosphere as existed beneath the tower would be bound to have a bad effect on dreams.

‘Let’s bring these two suits,’ Jonathan suggested. ‘We’ll give them to the Squire.’

‘Capital idea,’ the Professor agreed. ‘They’re right up his alley.’

Jonathan found a broad expanse of serviceable cloth and laid it out over the stones of the floor, then he piled the ape and alligator costumes onto the center of the cloth and discovered, finally, that the alligator suit lacked a hand. There seemed to be no point at all in carrying along an unusable suit, so the two of them tore into the costumes until they finally found the hand at the very bottom of a sadly deteriorating trunk. Beneath the rubber alligator hand lay a folded trunk lining – an old, yellowed square of parchment patterned with random lines and faded script. A series of elf runes were visible in one corner. The Professor pulled the parchment out of the trunk while Jonathan dug two candles out of his pack. The heap of ape and alligator parts was quickly forgotten.

‘This appears to be a map,’ the Professor observed, pointing out an arrow in the top right below the word ‘north’. The Professor leaned over the parchment and sniffed at it. Then he held a corner over a candle and eyeballed it closely. In the candlelight glowing through the parchment, the ink appeared to be a dark purplish color, and the Professor announced, to Jonathan’s surprise, that it was octopus ink.

‘This is a pirate map,’ he said decisively. ‘There’s no mistaking it. Who else uses octopus ink? No one. This is the real thing.’

‘It’s pretty old though,’ Jonathan said. ‘This stuff must have been down here for a hundred years.’

This map couldn’t have been,’ the Professor declared. ‘It wouldn’t have lasted any hundred years. Someone hid it here, and I bet I know who it was.’

‘These candles aren’t worth much,’ observed Jonathan as he shook the melted wax of This hand. ‘They’re half gone already. Let’s roll this thing up and get out of here.’

The Professor rolled the map tightly and tied it round with strips of cloth. Jonathan gathered the corners of the cloth on the ground and pulled the whole pile into a bundle, tieing of the top with another cloth strip. The Professor shouldered the pack, and Jonathan slung the bundle ponderously over his shoulder. In the last guttering light of the two candles, they left the strange cavern and once more made their way back to the cellar where, without wasting any time, they lit their torch. In the fuming, sputtering light they strode away after Ahab down the third tunnel toward the Cavern of the Trolls.

The tunnel didn’t slope at all, but seemed to run directly along the ridge which rose above the tower. It occurred to Jonathan that if such were the case, they were farther from the surface with each step they took. Soon, however, the tunnel curved around sharply to the left and angled away in a downriver direction. They trudged on for what must have been a mile, the path neither rising nor falling enough to worry about. It narrowed so at one point that they had to crawl along for twenty yards on their hands and knees, covering their trouser legs with red clay. The Professor heartened to find that the floor of the tunnel was no longer rock, and some twenty yards later he discovered the crooked end of a tree root thrusting through the ceiling.

Just ahead of them, the tunnel began to drop away, and the two debated in the flickering torchlight whether to follow it or return to where they had found the tree root and dig their way out. Neither, however, was in a digging mood, so they pushed on, following the twistings of the corridor as it wandered along through the earth. Jonathan realized all of a sudden that he was monstrously tired. The costume on his back seemed to be weighing more by the moment, and he began to consider the wisdom of just putting the suits
on
. But the idea of the two of them tramping through subterranean tunnels dressed as an ape and an alligator seemed a bit on the ludicrous side, so he abandoned it.

The tunnel widened just then into a cavern about half the size of the Cavern of Malthius. The Professor whispered that this must be the Cavern of the Two Trolls. And though they knew that whatever trolls might have inhabited it a century before would have long since moved on, both of them trod along stealthily, squinting into the dark recesses ahead of them. They found themselves, finally, at the opposite end and saw in the distant reaches of the tunnel that stretched out before them a bit of light shining in the darkness. There was no mistaking it. Two hours earlier they would have assumed it was sunlight and popped right along toward it. But Jonathan’s pocketwatch said it was almost eight o’clock in the evening. The sun had been dropping swiftly an hour before. The light, moreover, seemed to shrink and grow and dance on the walls of the cave, very much like the light of a flickering campfire – the fire, perhaps, of a pair of trolls or a company of goblins or a band of robbers.

It wouldn’t do to make their presence known before discovering what exactly lay ahead, so they smothered the torch. Then, by the light of a single candle, they untied the bundle of costume parts and crawled into the things. Jonathan shoved the expanse of cloth into the backpack and pulled the ape mask over his head. The Professor did the same with the alligator head. Sweating inside the suit, Jonathan shouldered his pack, and the two of them went creeping away down the tunnel toward the fire, Ahab following along behind. The cackle of crazy laughter echoed up the tunnel, and Ahab growled in reply. Then came the ragged piping of a goblin flute and the hollow thud of a copper gong being struck with a stone mallet. From the shadows of the tunnel they watched the party of goblins that sat about the fire roasting fish. One kept shoving fish carcasses into the sprigs of stuff that passed for hair on his neighbor’s head. The second goblin, unhappy at having his hair combed with fish carcasses, fetched the prankster a great smack with what appeared to Jonathan to be a river squid, flailing at him until the squid was reduced to parts. Then the two of them fell to poking and punching each other, to the huge delight of their several companions.

‘Let’s rush at them,’ Jonathan whispered through his ape mask. The Professor nodded ponderously, and together they rushed howling at the little band of goblins. The two involved in the fish war rolled about on the cave floor, biting and scratching, and obviously assuming that this new howling was simply jolly shouts of approval from their companions. Their fellows, however, left off their cackling at the sight of the approaching ape and alligator now sailing at them out of the darkness. Then the lot of them shrieked and bowled away down an adjacent tunnel. The two warriors rolled into the fire, scattering burning sticks. The one who’d been so free with the fish bones leaped up, his ragged shirt in flames, and dashed off. He was followed close on by his opponent, and their shrieks died away finally in the distance.

Jonathan and the Professor lost no time in shedding the costumes and bundling them up once again in the makeshift bag. Both noticed, almost at once, that a cool, fresh breeze was blowing along the tunnel. Fifty feet farther along they saw the deep blue-purple of the night sky beyond the dark arch of the cave mouth, and they emerged finally into the warm evening, midway up the steep slope of an oak-covered hill.

Some mile or so to the north rose the stone tower atop Hightower Ridge. Below it they could see the pinpoints of light shining through shanty windows in the swamps and the dark line of the Oriel winding slowly along the floor of the valley. Directly below them shone the lights of Hightower Village and, Jonathan was quick to point out, of Hightower Tavern where there were hot meat pies and poached salmon as well as bottles of ale.