The Stone Giant (27 page)

He thought of little Annie, but her face was lost in shadow like the rest, and for a moment he feared he’d strangle with the effort of recapturing it. There it was for a moment. She was smiling, playing with the hem of her little blanket, looking at him through eyes unaware of his weaknesses and his faults. Then she was gone, as if snatched away, and he was left in the weirdly lit street, listening once again to the scattered night noises, above which, so thin and distant as to seem imaginary, he could hear the shrill peep of darting bats and what sounded like goblins banging on copper gongs and an ebb and flow of wind in the sky above that reminded him overmuch of the breathing of the sleeping earth.

He shook his head clear again and turned to look behind him, fearing suddenly that something was crouched there in the darkness, waiting to spring on him. But there was nothing – only a street that stretched away, it seemed, blocks farther than he’d already walked. Smoke poured furiously through chimneys, churning up into the starry sky in billowy, writhing phantoms. The lights of the street behind were dim, as if they’d only that moment blinked on, but as he watched they seemed to brighten and shimmer until, finally, they were abnormally bright, like sunlight reflected off a mirror. He found that as he turned to look this way or that, the lights directly behind him dimmed, and long with them, the noises dimmed too. The piano tinkled into obscurity, just a plink, plink, plink on the night breeze, almost like water dripping into a pan in the sink, and the gay laughter of the revelers in the house he’d passed a quarter of a block down, and that he was facing now, broke out again renewed, as if someone had just that moment gotten round to revealing the punchline of a particularly long and tedious joke.

He stepped into the road, unsure of himself. He was certain that he hadn’t come farther than a block or so into the village, but the lights of the farmhouse he’d passed on the outskirts glowed now as distant as the moon. He turned and started down the long street once more. The piano set in to banging away again, but he seemed to be no closer to the tavern it sounded from than he had been fifteen minutes earlier when, standing on the river road, he’d first heard it.

There was something vaguely familiar about the store he found himself standing in front of. It was closed for the evening, and, squint as he might, he couldn’t make out a thing beyond the dusty, dark windows. The boardwalk he stood on, though—he’d stood there before. He rubbed at the layer of obscuring dust on the glass, uncovering the words,
Beezle’s; Dry Goods and Produce.
He blinked, confused. There was Stover’s six doors up. And there was the Guildhall beyond it, lit like a Christmas cake. He could hear the round, foolish guffaw of Mayor Bastable’s laughter and the clinking of glasses being set down on wooden tables. There was the smell of beer in the air and of chocolate and of lamb stew laced with sage. Above it and around it, spreading through him and filling him up like water seeping into a sandy hole in the bed of a dry river, came the smell of pies cooling on a windowsill. Cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger and hot apples and butter crust filled the night abruptly, washing down a little rise that angled away toward the river. A house sat atop the rise, glowing and cheerful, a fire in the grate, a child’s high laughter riding on the cool evening air.

Escargot set out toward it. He knew that he shouldn’t, that there were things in the night that he couldn’t at all explain, that couldn’t be explained without hauling in enough enchantment to light up a carnival. But that didn’t matter to him. His quest was abandoned. What had it been anyway but a lack of anything better to do? It was
his
house that sat on the hill, and enchantment or no enchantment, he’d see what there was to it. He’d come too far along strange and watery pathways not to see this adventure through to the end. There was something in him that whispered that the night was full of mystery, and that if he searched hard enough, if he could see just right– put on, so to speak, the right pair of spectacles – he could stay there in that enchanted village and let the dwarf and his goblins go to the devil.

The wind was cold atop the rise, and it made the cheery interior of the house seem all the more cheery. This was his wife, in the kitchen. She was whistling – something she was given over to when they’d met but which she’d abandoned in the two years of their marriage. And she was prettier than he remembered, with her hair pulled back in a sort of knot and a swipe of baking flour on her cheek. He pulled his coat around him but the wind cut right through it. The river sat dark and silent and still beyond the trees. Was it the Oriel or the Tweet, he wondered briefly, but he gave off his wondering when he saw, on the sill of the back window, an apple pie leaking cinnamon-laden steam like a tea kettle. He tiptoed toward it. His stomach was suddenly empty – not simply because he hadn’t eaten in hours, but because he hadn’t eaten a pie like that ever. It was the pie he always imagined he might eat, with great slivers of apples in it, heavy with spiced, brown sugar syrup.

He peered roundabout. There was Bastable’s house on the next hill, and for a moment he imagined that he saw the mayor’s head, with its unlikely spirally hair, peering out at him past a curtain drawn aside. But he blinked and the face was gone. He turned, reaching, and looked up into the face of his smiling wife, who seemed to be monumentally happy to see him, as if he were the hunter home from the hill and she were the loving wife who’d baked him up a pie. He grinned. He had a lot of apologizing to do.

‘H’lo, Clara,’ he said, taking off his cap.

‘Hello, Theo. Back are you?’

‘That’s right. How’s Annie? Well, is she?’

The back door swung open, creaking on the broken hinge that he’d swore he would fix a month before he set out that day – when was it? – months back. Where had he been bound, anyway? He couldn’t remember any destinations, only that he hadn’t any choice in the matter. But here he was home again, and that was what was important, wasn’t it? Home at last, and an apple pie cooling on the window. There’d be coffee too. He’d make it himself and bring Clara a cup in the cobalt blue mug that she’d bought – when? He couldn’t remember. A long, long time ago, to be sure.

The kitchen was heavy with oven warmth. He slid in behind the table on the leather-covered window seat, glimpsing, out of the corner of his eye, a movement outside, beyond the glass. There was no noise to accompany the movement save, perhaps, just the echo of muffled laughter, but it seemed to him as if someone had been peering in out of the night. He looked out but all was darkness, and up through the darkness he could just make out a wash of stars in the sky. He cupped his hands across the sides of his face to block the light from the room behind him, and he squinted in order to see better. There seemed for a moment to be a pale figure receding into the night, down toward the village. He could hear the tapping of a stick on the road. The tapping terrified him. It seemed to haul his heart up into his throat, and for a moment he couldn’t breathe or speak. But then there was nothing beyond the window but darkness, and the aroma of the pie was like a down comforter on a cold night or a bottle of ale at bedtime. He smiled at his wife and discovered that Annie had crawled up onto the cushion and stood regarding him, half accusingly, half happily. He wanted to say something to her, but he couldn’t remember what it was that so desperately needed to be said, and there was a lump in his throat that made it impossible anyway, so he shrugged and shook his head.

There was the sudden smell of waterweeds in the air. The glow of the gas lamps fell and rose again. The tinkling of the distant piano sprang into sudden clarity, as if it were being played in the living room. For a moment he was certain that he sat alone on a hilltop in the weedy dirt and that a glowing jack-o’-lantern hovered in the air grinning at him where his wife’s face had been a second earlier. Then he was in the kitchen again, sitting by the window.

He was astonished to discover that the outside of his pantleg was dripping wet, and on the cushion beside him lay a clump of tangled waterweeds. Annie had gone. What in the world, he asked himself, brushing the stuff off onto the floor beneath the table. He looked up, hoping that Clara hadn’t seen him sweeping debris onto the floor, but where his wife had stood a moment earlier slicing him out a quarter of pie, Leta now stood, smiling, regarding him slyly, like she’d caught him at some childish, endearing prank. The small hairs on the back of his neck stood up and he jammed himself back into the seat. He fumbled at his chest for his truth charm. He was enmeshed in a web spun of lies and deceptions. Something lay suddenly beneath his hand, and the seat beneath him felt uncomfortably lumpy and strange. When he pulled his hand away and peered at the cushion he could see that what had lain beneath his hand was a bat’s head, dried, its eyes vacant, little teeth grinning out past shrunken gums.

He was suddenly conscious that a cold wind blew through the window behind him, and that his clothes had only half dried since his journey down the subterranean river. The panes of the window were broken now or were missing altogether, and those fragments of glass that were left were covered with such a layer of dust that they were opaque with it. His oiled pine table had become dry branches, broken and scarred and lashed together with brown grass and uneven strips torn from animal hide. Leta grinned at him malevolently, and handed to him a cracked plate on which sat a slice of pie from which had cascaded a little heap of blackened bones and gristle. Escargot slammed to his feet, kicking the table at the blind old woman who materialized suddenly in front of him.

The house roundabout was a ruin of dust and cobweb and fragments of furniture and fishbones. There was the smell once again of waterweeds and of burnt bone. The fog was rising along the ground outside when Escargot broke through the hanging back door at a run and found himself not on the hill opposite Mayor Bastable’s house, but once again on the main street of Bleakstone Hollow, running now toward the distant farmhouse that marked the edge of the village. He could see the weather vane atop a high gable spinning and spinning and spinning in the wind. Lights brightened and dimmed around him, and as a counterpoint, the suddenly mad piano music and the laughter and talk and night noises of the town rose and fell with the lights, all of it caught up in the dark, inside-out rhythms of enchantment.

There ahead on the road stood a horse and cart, tethered to a hitching rail. Uncle Helstrom stood beside the horse and puffed merrily on his pipe, surprised, it seemed, to see Escargot leaping toward him like a man chased by ghosts. The dwarf widened his eyes and took his pipe out of his mouth. ‘Quick!’ he cried, ‘the wagon!’ And with a single tug he pulled loose the line that tethered it and gestured broadly to the puffing Escargot, who leaped into the cart, shook out the reins, whipped up the horse, and clattered away upriver in a panic. He’d drive the horse all the way to Landsend if he had to – to Seaside if the horse could swim. It was wood plank he was sitting on, sure enough, not stitched up bats, and the horse that pulled the cart was a flesh and blood horse that seemed every bit as anxious as he was to quit the haunted village.

The cart clattered and careered up the road, hammering over stones, creaking and bouncing and threatening with each swerve and jerk to crack to fragments. Escargot realized as he bounced along and clutched at the bare wood of the seat back behind him that he wasn’t driving the cart. The horse was running away with him, wild with fear. He hauled back on the reins to slow the beast down. Lying slack in his hands were two broken straps of rotten leather. The horse plunged along, snorting and blowing and dragging the cart beneath the low, overhanging limbs of riverside oaks. Escargot slid onto the floorboards, hanging on, tree branches flailing across his head and back.

He was aware suddenly of the weird and heavy smell of fish, like the odor of a broken bottle of cod liver oil. A snatch of idiot laughter accompanied it, and, amazingly, instead of branches dragging across him, he found himself pummeled by small kicking feet. He hauled himself partway up from the floorboards as the lurching cart pitched him this way and that. A half score of goblins, raged and screamed above him. Two sat on the seat, kicking him with wild glee and abandon. Two others sat astride the galloping horse, their little, taloned hands curled into the horse’s mane. In the back of the cart rode a half dozen more, who raged and jabbered and gobbled out snatches of giddy laughter.

The wagon bounced toward the top of a hill, and as Escargot hauled himself up along the footrail, shoving both goblins across the seat with one hand, he could see the river stretching out like a broad, black ribbon far below to the left. On his right the hillside angled away, a mass of tangled brush and grasses, hurtling past as the wagon crested the hill and rolled headlong into the decline. The horse stumbled, trying to control its headlong flight, and the wagon seemed to rush up upon it suddenly.

The goblins astride the horse pitched off with a shriek. Escargot, his feet set on the floorboards and his hands gripping the footrail, threw himself after them, rolling and tumbling through the brush. He found himself lying stunned and scraped against the bole of a great tree. His jacket was shoved up around his shoulders and neck, and his right pantleg hung in tatters, as if someone had been at it with a scissors.

He shrugged his shoulders, just to see if they’d shrug, and he heard, at that very moment, a cracking of wood and yowling of goblins somewhere below in the night, followed by the sound of galloping hooves that receded into silence. A brief spurt of goblin laughter followed. He steadied himself against the tree, wiggling his arms and legs one after another. He seemed to be a wonder of scrapes and bruises, and blood ran freely along his calf and into his sock, but nothing, as far as he could tell, would prevent his limping back down to the river and searching out his rowboat. Goblins, apparently, were intent on either his capture or his death or both, and if they could find something to laugh about after their charge down the hill, then they were still dangerous opponents, and might come lurking back around in order to find him.