The Stone Giant (26 page)

Muttered voices sounded behind him, but very distantly, and he could hear the echo of gobbled laughter once, followed by a shriek and more laughter. Then there was silence except for the rushing water. The air grew suddenly misty and cool and he stepped along slowly, feeling his way, sure with each step that he would pitch off a precipice or run head-foremost into the end of the passage and find that he was hopelessly lost in the darkness. Above him, he knew, was a rainy afternoon and tree branches blowing in a misty wind and clouds moving in a familiar sky.

The underground river sounded suddenly as if it lay right before him. He bent along, feeling the ground with his right hand and stepping forward in a crouch, determined riot to simply stride into the river and be carried away. He stepped again, his left foot coming down on a round stone, and he found himself sliding suddenly, down and down and down, hands scrabbling at the gravelly slope. With a shout and a hail of pebbles he splashed into the dark river, fighting his way to the surface, coughing and struggling and popping up finally only to be borne under again with a wild whump that somersaulted him like a rag doll and sent him gasping once more for the surface.

He righted himself finally and shot along through the roiling water, cold and breathing hard and cracking his knee as he swirled round a half-submerged rock. Ahead was a growing crescent of light that widened out in moments into the mouth of a cave. He found himself in broken sunlight, tearing between oak trees and alders and hemlocks straight into a snag of tumbled logs and brush, where he clung, puffing and blowing until he realized that he was fearfully cold and growing colder by the moment.

When he clambered down along the stream to the river road a quarter mile below, he was soaked through and through, and what’s more had a stone in his shoe that nearly crippled him. He sat down, finally, on a fallen tree, pulled off his shoes, wrung out his socks, and discovered that the pebble wasn’t a pebble at all. It was a marble – a red marble, slightly out of round and of the color of blood. The idea that it was one of
his
marbles, one of the lot cheated out of him by the dwarf, was farfetched. This was something similar, to be sure, something he’d picked up by accident when he’d been tumbling along down the river.

His rowboat was upriver. It had to be. But how far upriver it was he had no earthly idea. Goblins were probably rowing it up and down at the moment, beating each other senseless with the oars. A sign nailed to a nearby tree insisted that he was in the town limits of Bleakstone Hollow, and below that listed any number of things that he ought not to do, including traffic with goblins, lounge about idly, and tread in flowerbeds. But the village that sidled into view as he wandered around the bend in the road was years removed from the days when it boasted flowerbeds, and as for idling about, there wasn’t anything else to do, really, Bleakstone Hollow being to all appearances utterly deserted. If anyone lived there now it
was
goblins, and it seemed, from the scattered fishbones and river trash in the streets, that such was fairly likely the case, though not a living soul was about. The air was almost void of sound, and the withered trees were as empty of birds or squirrels as they were of leaves. There was the slamming of a shutter somewhere up the street, and the breeze kicked up dust and swirled it round and round, this way and that, pointlessly, like a capering goblin.

Escargot found a suitable stick along the river and took a couple of cuts at the air to see how it felt in his hand. Satisfied, he set out to explore the village. Everything was overgrown and falling to bits. Toadstools sprouted from rotting clapboard on the sides of houses, and even as he stood and looked about him, wondering at the decay, a brick chimney on an old half-collapsed mansion crumbled across the roof in a cloud of mortar dust and shingles. Escargot was certain, for a moment, that someone had pushed it over, but it wasn’t so. It had merely given out, and within days, it seemed, the heap of brick on the weedy sideyard would be lost beneath sprouting vegetation. Windows were boarded up as if people had hurried away to avoid a siege, hoping that they’d return in a better day. But better days, quite clearly, were still a good ways off.

On the very edge of the village lay a three-story farmhouse, fallen to ruin. Atop it, canted over and rusting and twisting in the wind was a weather vane. The mournful creak, creak, creak in the afternoon stillness made the empty village seem twice as empty as it was. There was an inn – two of them, in fact – sitting directly opposite each other on the main street. But neither had seen a customer in a good long time, not a paying customer, anyway, and the skeleton of a horse, its bones picked clean, lay across the threshold of one, as if it’d been too tired to step entirely inside and so had fallen asleep on the doorstep. It was a morbid and silencing thing, that horse, and Escargot decided suddenly that it wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all to hoof it back down the road to his rowboat before dark. The submarine seemed suddenly as hospitable as a firelit parlor. He turned then, and saw, standing ten feet in front of him, Leta, with a ribbon in her hair.

She peered at him as if in wonder. She didn’t grin eerily or cackle with laughter or turn into a cat. She seemed quite simply astonished. ‘You,’ she said, then stopped.

Escargot swallowed hard. He hadn’t expected this. He’d hoped for it, true enough – half because he’d been pursuing her out of love, and half because he wanted to say a few things to her while he
wasn’t
, for once, hanging from the vane of a windmill. That’s right,’ he said now, yanking himself together and wondering suddenly what he must look like – unshaven, his clothes wet and rumpled, his hair awry. He was half tempted to blurt out that he’d become a submarine captain, that he’d traveled, that he’d found treasures and lost them again, that he’d become, in short, a sort of Smithers hero, and all of that in under a month.

But he’d be working hard to impress a witch, wouldn’t he? – a witch who’d gone a long way toward delivering him to a nest of goblins, who, by this time, would have eaten him right up if he hadn’t given them the slip. ‘Where’s my Smithers book?’ he asked instead, feeling foolish.

‘Heaven help us,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You’ve gone mad too.’

Too? Madness isn’t what I call it. I don’t know if you’re twenty-five or a hundred and twenty-five and I don’t care, not anymore. But I want what’s mine, and I’ve come up this river to get it—the marbles, the book; I’d be asking for my basket of kelp, too, but I’ve shot holes through it and the goblins can have it, for all I care.’

‘What in the world,’ she said, seeming to shiver with cold, ‘are you talking about?’ And with that she burst into tears, cried for the space of ten seconds, then twisted off the tap and quit crying.

Escargot regarded her warily, looking roundabout himself, suspicious that the dwarf uncle might just then be stepping out from behind a building, packing his pipe with henny-penny men. He thought for a moment and said, ‘I don’t understands bit of this – nothing except that I’ve come to the end of it, or will soon.’

‘I wish I could say the same,’ she said, wiping at her eye, ‘at least about that last. What’s that?’

‘Nothing,’ said Escargot, pulling out the truth charm. This was no time for guessing at anything. If there were tales being told here, if he’d wandered once again into the soup, then someone was going to get a crack on the head with a stick. He tossed the charm into the air and caught it. ‘Recognize this thing, do you?’

‘No,’ she said, looking suddenly up the river where the sun was settling in for the night. The clouds had broken up and flown, and only a few scattered puffs clung yet to the sky. She seemed suddenly frightened, as if she weren’t at all anxious for the sun to set.

‘You’ve seen it before, I daresay.’

‘I haven’t seen any such thing before. Who
are
you, anyway, prowling about the streets here with a stick in your hand? I wasn’t at all unhappy in Twombly Town until I ran into you and your magicians and witches.’

‘My magicians and witches? You’re a fine one to talk, after that business at Stover’s – taking my side and all. What was that but the worst sort of hypocrisy?’

‘Hypocrisy!’ she cried, beginning to weep again. There was almost no light left. Shadows had disappeared. The sky, it seemed, was moonless and dark and the dim shadows of bats could be seen reeling among the rooftops and the trees. Leta stood still, as if listening, and then, as Escargot watched, she very slowly disappeared, until there was nothing before him on the street but a wraith and something that sounded like a moan, then, very distant, a fall of brittle laughter and the tap, tap, tap of a stick on the road.

Escargot had started to run before he thought of running. But while he was running he did a bit of thinking, or rather realizing, and what he realized was that he’d been holding the truth charm in his hand while Leta had talked. She’d been telling the truth. Perhaps, he thought, the charm didn’t work on witches. But then why shouldn’t it? And then why would the dwarf have been so obviously frightened at the idea of his pulling it out of the bag that night on the meadow? Perhaps its powers were weakened out of doors. But they hadn’t been—had they?—on the day that Captain Perry and his men had watched their treasure sink in the sea. He slowed to a walk. Something was dead wrong. He’d somehow never convinced himself that Leta was evil. She was up to
something
, for sure, or rather, someone was up to something with her. But that business in Stover’s tavern and the talk on the street afterward – that hadn’t been a put up job.
Why
all the rigamarole with Stover if she was a witch? How had she hidden it so well for so long and then been so completely incapable of hiding it since? It didn’t wash. He stopped, took another couple of cuts at the air with his stick, and turned around to look again at the village.

Before him, a half mile up the road, lights blazed in Bleakstone Hollow. Smoke tumbled from chimney pots as if suppers were being cooked, and there was the plinking of piano keys on the wind, as if through the open door of a tavern. He stood in the road for a full minute, his heart thumping noisily, before he set out.

The empty silence of the afternoon had given way to an unnaturally loud evening. It wasn’t that there were noises on the air that oughtn’t to be there, only that the sounds of slamming doors and shouted greetings, the creak of wagon wheels and rusted gate hinges, the plinking of an out-of-tune piano, and the tossing of tree branches in the wind were somehow strange. Each one was clear and distinct, and Escargot could tell at once exactly what sort of a noise each was. Here was the neigh of an unseen horse; there was the disembodied crunch of foot-steps on gravel. It reminded him of the time that Beezle had produced a play in the Guildhall, and Escargot, to please his wife, had undertaken to provide sound effects, thundering on a piece of sheet metal one moment and drumming out raindrops on a board the next. It hadn’t the sound of an authentic storm, but was a sort of piecemeal effort put on to fool a willing audience. The noises roundabout him now were strangely similar to that, as if they weren’t real noises at all, but were enchantment, conjured up one after another, side by side, instead of tossed together in a salad of sounds like real noises.

He sidled along the street, looking over his shoulder as often as he looked ahead. Through one window he saw a family gathered around the dinner table, and the smell of roast beef and pudding, followed by happy laughter, wafted through the lit window as if there were no window there at all. Through another window was a parlor with a fire burning in the hearth and shelves and shelves of books behind leaded bookcase doors. He could see the back of a man’s head nodding over a volume, and on a table beside the man’s easy chair sat a pint glass half drank. Another cottage, with geminate windows, and painted bright white, rang with the shouts of merrymakers, a dozen of them at least. Escargot could see them milling about a sort of dining room, dipping hot punch out of a wooden bowl.

The lights burned silver, like moonlight. They hadn’t the yellow glow of gas lamps or candles, although it struck him suddenly that his memory of clean and well lighted places was hazy and dim, as if he had to wander far and wide through the corridors of his memory to glimpse such a place at all. His own house was veiled in hazy muslin, deep in the shadows of his mind, and although he squinted, he couldn’t quite bring it into focus.

He tried, though. There was the kitchen with the table made of oiled pine slats pushed up against the square bay window with its window seat covered with – what was it? – leather? Or tweed? It was leather. He could just picture it. He pressed his eyes shut with the effort. Suddenly it was unspeakably important that he picture it. It was dark, latigo leather. He’d covered the cushion himself with a piece cut out of a half hide he’d bought from a tanner up in Monmouth. He’d left the brand on, a circle with a moon on it, even though the leather around it was stretchy and thin. There it was. He could make it out now, way back there in an antechamber of memory, like a piece of furniture in an otherwise empty house. Something seemed to be odd about it, though, that cushion by the window. Abruptly he could see it absolutely clear, as if he’d removed a pair of fogged spectacles. It was all stitched together and moldy and stained up like the hides of bats with the heads left on and knitted up into a vest for a goblin king.

Escargot shook his head and reeled back against a tree. He blinked out the vision of the window seat. He’d suddenly pictured the goblin king sitting there, gnawing on a bone, He watched the horrible face dissolve away in the night air. He suddenly couldn’t say with any certainty that the stove in his kitchen had stood opposite the pantry or that loaves of bread had been kept in a drawer or in a bread box. Both, it seemed. He could vaguely remember the smell of a bread drawer, with its scattered crumbs in the bottom and new loaves just bought that morning from the baker’s. But he couldn’t quite see it, any more than he could see his Smithers collection lined up one book after another, or his pipe collection, all forty-six of them. Stover was probably smoking them now.