The Stone Giant (22 page)

‘Who is it?’ came a voice, then silence.

‘A traveler,’ said Escargot truthfully, but the phrase must have struck the man within as being particularly funny, for immediately there sounded a rush of hollow laughter, and the edge of the curtain fell. Footfalls receded into silence. All remained quiet. Escargot pounded on the door again, but he knew it was useless. Travelers were obviously uncommon thereabouts, after dark on a foggy night anyway. He stepped back out onto the road and strode away deeper into town, looking over his shoulder now and again, and into the shadows of the woods. Water dripped from the tree branches, and somewhere not too distant an owl who-whooed at intervals, sounding uncommonly ghostly and sad.

Most of the houses were dark, some obviously abandoned, and only one had enough lights lit within to seem particularly cheerful – an inn, Escargot was pleased to see, although it was probably just as well that it was dark and foggy, for it seemed to be a close cousin to The Smashed Hat, only further along in decay. Escargot jingled the bell, mildly surprised to find that its clapper hadn’t rusted away.

This time the door was thrown back and a man stood in the doorway with a look on his face that seemed to imply he’d been waiting all evening long for Escargot’s arrival. He grinned like an ape for the space of three seconds; then his grin disappeared, he squinted up his face, and he stepped back and slammed the door in a single, practiced moment. Escargot’s foot, however, caught it before it latched.

‘Get your foot out of my door!’ cried the man, throwing himself against it.

‘No!’ shouted Escargot, pushing the other way.

For a moment they stood toe to toe, one on either side of the door, heaving vainly. But the man within seemed to see that the foot was firmly lodged there and that all the pushing in the world wouldn’t budge it. He might have given off and gone for something to smash at it with, but by then Escargot would have slipped in. ‘What in the devil do you want, pushing into a man’s house at this hour?’ the man demanded, not letting up on the door but peering through the crack to see what manner of ruffian it was who confronted him.

‘Isn’t this an inn, then?’ asked Escargot.

‘Well, yes. It is.’

‘And it can’t be above seven o’clock, can it? I need a room; that’s who I am. I’ve just had a set-to with a party of goblins up the road and I’m about done in. Killed two of them and chased the rest into the river. Nasty little boggers. Wanted to rob me, I think.’

‘Goblins is it!’ cried the man, his mouth falling open.

‘That’s just what it is,’ Escargot lied, assuming that the man might be more hospitable toward someone who had recently thrashed a party of goblins.

‘Did you see anyone on the road?’

‘Not a soul. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of travelers hereabouts, and I don’t blame them. A man is set upon by goblins, and when he gets to the only village between Landsend and who-knows-where they won’t give him a room.’

‘You’ve come from Landsend, then, not Grover?’

‘That’s just what I’ve been telling you. All the way from Landsend, though it isn’t for pleasure. My old aunt’s dying up the river, and I stand to inherit a brewery when she’s gone, if only I arrive to claim it. But at this rate I’ll be dead myself of goblin scratches before I’m halfway there.’

The man stopped pushing quite so hard and blinked out at Escargot. ‘I had an old aunt once,’ he said.

Escargot shook his head. ‘Heaven help old aunts.’ He shook his head some more, ‘Ah, well.’

‘Come along in, then. I can’t offer you much, but it’s dry enough and I keep the rats and bugs off as best I can. I can’t stand bugs. Too many legs. And rats are worse, though not for legs. You see what I mean.’

‘For a fact,’ said Escargot, stepping in and slumping down into a chair. ‘I can’t stand rats myself. Always chewing things up. Chewed up a Smithers novel once – very rare volume.’

‘Smithers!’ cried the man, cheering up. ‘Do you read Smithers then?’

‘I should say I do.’ Then Escargot remembered suddenly where he was and wondered that the Smithers reference had gone anywhere at all. ‘G. Smithers, that is.’

‘Of course, of course. Of Altoona Village.’

‘Brompton Village. My Smithers is from Brompton Village.’

‘Is he?’ asked the man, looking as if he doubted it. ‘Mine’s from Altoona, up the river. Wonderful lot of books he’s written. My favorites are about the Pirate Isles in a magical land beneath the sea. Or at least you get there through the sea if such a thing is possible, which it’s not, I suppose, unless a man is a fish.’

Escargot nodded. ‘Haven’t a pint of ale, have you?’

‘Absolutely. Brew it myself. They used to cart it in from Grover, but the brewery burned and the road isn’t what it used to be, and bit by bit the whole thing’s just fallen apart. I’m expecting a man from up that way. A delegation. Some of us are setting in to do something about all this.’

‘All what?’ asked Escargot, looking around.

‘The whole lot of it: goblins, the road gone bad, the things in the river. Don’t at all know what we can do, though, but a man has to start somewhere and there’s a party up in Grover that has taken it all on. I sent up for information, but there aren’t more than two or three left in this village who’ll rally round, I’m afraid. Most have gone the way of the rest of it, if you follow me. The mayor went stark staring mad last month and tried to hang himself with his own suspenders. Now we don’t even
have
a mayor. We’ve
got
to organize.’

Escargot nodded. ‘Organization. That’s the ticket, all right. Haven’t forgotten that ale, have you? And a cold joint, if you’ve got it. Even a bit of cheese. Or a pie. Do they go in much for pies hereabouts?’

‘Used to,’ said the man, ‘but Mrs Cleary’s place – that’s the woman who made the pies and sold them through Parker’s store – has all gone to smash since the old lady ... Hark!’

Escargot cocked an ear toward the road. In the distance came the muted sound of a wagon clattering along – wildly, it seemed – and the neighing of a horse. Both men leaped to the door, and the innkeeper threw it open, stepping out into the foggy night. He stepped back in and fetched out a lantern, trimming the wick until lantern light shone off the hovering mists. The road was swallowed up to the east and west, and only a ghostly, hovering light in the second-story window of the house next door gave any indication that there was a village roundabout.

The clattering seemed to crack through the mist, growing louder and wilder, and a shrieking could be heard above the neighing and thundering of the horse. Through the curtain of fog, looming suddenly into clarity, rattled a runaway wagon, pulled by a spooked horse with eyes wide open like plates, his mouth lolling. Escargot and his host leaped aside before the horse trod both of them into the muck of the roadway, and the wagon careered past, its driver hunched over on the seat, his legs entangled in a mess of straps and reins and bucklers, and he clinging like a bug to the rails of the wagonbed behind him while a goblin sat astride his back, tearing at his hair. Six more goblins rode behind, shrieking and hooting and slapping at each other and tugging out tufts of their own sparse hair as if to mimic the antics of their cousin in front. There was the smell of raw fish in the air and the reek of dirty goblins, and one of the little men, grinning past filed teeth, threw a handful of gnawed fish carcasses at Escargot and the innkeeper as the wagon lunged past.

Then, half out of sight again in the mists, the wagon slewed around sideways, the wheels skidded along the road, and it slammed against a pair of hitching posts that stood before a boarded up stable. One wheel cracked to bits, spokes spinning off into the night. The wagon tilted and went over in a cacophony of shrieking and flying goblins. The horse, freed suddenly from its bonds, bolted east along the river, the pounding of its hooves and the clattering of trailing tackle giving way in a moment to silence. The wagon wheels still spun like dervishes atop the fallen cart, and the goblins, strewn like autumn leaves, picked themselves up and raced away into the foggy woods, howling with lunatic laughter, as if they’d accomplished exactly what it was they’d set out to accomplish.

Escargot raced across to where the driver lay in a heap, rolled up against the wall of the stable. He seemed to be tangled up – contorted into all manneŕs of unnatural positions. He flopped over onto his back, his eyes wide and staring, his mouth pried open as if in the midst of one last silent shriek. Escargot shook him. The innkeeper listened at his chest. ‘Dead,’ he said slowly.

‘Dead?’ asked Escargot, not wanting to believe what was so clearly written on the man’s face.

The innkeeper nodded, goggling at Escargot and looking roundabout slowly, as if wary that the goblins might still be nigh, waiting, perhaps, to pounce on their backs and clutch at their throats with their fishy little hands.

‘Scared to death,’ muttered Escargot, closing the man’s horrible staring eyes. ‘We can’t leave him here in the fog. They’ll take him for sure. We can’t have that.’

‘We’ll bring him to the inn. I’ll ride to Grover in the morning if this damned fog lifts. And I’m not sure but what I might stay there. This is the corker, this is. Poor bogger. Coming down at night was the mistake. Up in Grover they don’t half know how bad it is down here. Lift his legs. He’s light, this one is. They’ve scared the stuffing right out of him.’

With that the two hauled the man across the road and into the open door of the inn. It seemed to Escargot that fog had crept in while they were outside, and that the room was heavy with mist and cool, dark air. He wished that the innkeeper had thought to shut the door. They put the dead man on a low table in the larder, and covered him with a sheet fetched from the linen closet.

‘The ale,’ said the innkeeper, shaking suddenly as if a chill had swept up his spine. ‘Maybe a bottle of brandy wouldn’t be amiss.’

‘Not at all amiss,’ said Escargot, slumping in his chair. And in a moment there were glasses out and the two men sipped in silence, each of them glancing out the window into the swirling fog, half expecting to see some new horror – a leering goblin face or a lurching, hooded skeleton – appear suddenly in the weeds and peer back in at them.

‘So you say it hasn’t always been so, living on the south shore of the river?’ asked Escargot finally.

‘No, not at all. This village was a fine place to live, once. There’s always been goblins about, of course, and a man wouldn’t want to travel much in the deep woods beyond the hills. There’s been trolls and sprites since before any of
us
settled here, but they kept to the woods, mostly. There was the occasional cow disappeared and fishbones in the well and such, but nothing like now. And it’s moved in toward Grover, too, a sort of darkness drifting up from the coast.’

Escargot nodded and stared into his brandy glass. He didn’t too much care for local peculiarities, beyond an idle curiosity about why fishermen sailed north out of the delta and why the south road over the bridges hadn’t any travelers on it. But none of that
really
concerned him, after all. ‘Haven’t seen a dwarf come through along with a girl, have you? Very pretty girl, with black hair. He might have given his name as Helstrom. Devious fellow; some sort of magician, maybe.’

The innkeeper peered at him for a moment as if he was pondering something, as if the question struck him as particularly strange. ‘I’ve seen your dwarf for sure, more than once.’

‘And the girl,’ asked Escargot. ‘Have you seen the girl?’

‘Haven’t seen any girl. Are you sure it was a girl?’

‘Tolerably. Traveling upriver, maybe in a rowboat.’

‘In a cart, actually. They came through here this afternoon. The dwarf driving.’

‘Alone?’

‘No, not alone. There was an old woman in the back, all wrapped up in a dirty shawl. Blind woman, I believe, from the look of her. They stopped long enough to water the horse and drove on. Seemed to be in a hurry.’

‘The old woman!’ cried Escargot, about half baffled.

‘
Some
old woman, anyway. I can’t say it was
the
old woman. If I was you, though, I wouldn’t have anything at all to do with this dwarf. He’s from down south, on the coast, they say.’

‘Do they? What’s he doing up this way then?’

The innkeeper shrugged. It seemed to be a subject he wasn’t fond of – part of the fog and the goblins and the dead man in the road. He stood up suddenly, strode across the room, and began to wipe with the side of his hand against the white-washed plaster of the wall. ‘Look at this! Here it is again. I paint and I paint and back it comes, in a day, sometimes.’

‘What is it?’ asked Escargot, squinting at the patchy dark ring that stained the wall.

‘Fungus, I should think. I looked at it under a magnifying glass. It’s little black flowers, sprouting there. Grows right through the whitewash. Nothing will hide it. By next week the plaster will start to soften up, and it’ll gouge right out with your finger. Whole wall will be a mess. It’s part of this here business, is what I think. That and the bugs in the floorboards. And the toads. There’s no end to them. My dog ate one and died, right there on the floor, poor devil. Toad kept right on croaking from inside his stomach. I buried him back of the shed, and I’d swear that late at night I can hear the damned thing croaking still.’

Escargot poured himself another half inch of brandy, entirely at a loss for words.

‘And I’ll tell you something else. There’s things in the river now that come up from somewhere. Things that haven’t been seen since there was nothing but elves and brownies and goblins living hereabouts. Things that died out a thousand years ago. Laslow, down the road, caught a thing in a net last week that was nothing but teeth and scales as big as the palm of your hand. It looked ancient, all black and warty. Tore his net to bits and nearly took his arm off. Things are going back, is what I think. Paint don’t stick to the houses no more. Glass cracks in the windows for no good reason at all. Shingle nails rust through in the night and half the roof’s on the lawn by morning and there’s bugs gnawing at the rafters. Then this fungus – nothing but rot, rot, rot everywhere, and goblins on the road. You saw that. Then there’s ghosts – nothing but howling on the wind, moaning coming up out of the ground wherever anyone’s been buried. There was graves broken open all up and down the road, all of them empty. Grave robbers, was it? Not a bit. There wasn’t nothing in them but skeletons – skeletons that left footprints in the mud when they walked away into the forest. Poor Mrs Cleary, the pie woman. Just like our man in the road tonight ... Heaven alone knows what it was she saw, but I hope I never see the like.