The Disappearing Dwarf (30 page)

One by one the lids on the three chests fell back, and as they did a very mysterious thing occurred. The diamonds and the emeralds inside, the rings, gems, and scattered gold coins, seemed to shimmer in the sunlight and ripple like a landscape seen through distant summer heat. Then, bit by bit, they collapsed inward onto themselves, metamorphosing into junk: twisted bits of wire and bent nails, shards of bottle glass, and the bleached skeletons of little peculiar fish. A dead beetle the size of a mouse lay among the scrap in Bufo’s chest. The rusty carcass of an old pocketknife, its broken blade shoved into a cork, sat in Gump’s. Dooly’s chest, which a moment before was filled with rainbow gems, was a mess of iron filings, sand, and the beaten hub of an old buggy wheel twisted through with bent wire coat hangers.

Professor Wurzle reached into his pockets and pulled out two handfuls of gold balls. When he opened his hands in the sunlight, he held a little pile of bottlecaps with dirty cork washers in them. He threw the lot of it disgustedly to the pavement.

‘Goblin gold,’ Escargot said, taking a wild kick at his chest. ‘Enchantment. Nothing but filthy, goblin-enchanted trash.’ He fetched the chest another whack, kicking the side in and cascading a fortune in jeweled necklaces and brooches out onto the cobbles – necklaces that shone for a second in the sunlight and then became fish carcasses and cuttlebones.

The Professor picked up a cuttlebone and scraped a white path across it with his thumbnail. ‘Squids,’ he said. ‘River squids. Miles was right. It was squid ink on the maps, not octopus ink.’

‘Of course it was,’ Escargot laughed out loud. ‘And it took us right in.’

‘I don’t quite follow.’ Jonathan knew nothing more about squid and octopus ink than he had back at Myrkle Hall.

‘Pirates would have used octopus ink,’ the Professor explained. ‘Goblins don’t go out into the ocean. So they make their maps with the ink of river squids to fool people like you and me. It gives them a great deal of amusement, I don’t doubt.’

‘Aye, and another too, whom I won’t name,’ Escargot said, ‘but who was kind enough to let us onto these maps.’

‘Us?’ the Professor said doubtfully.

‘That’s right. I found mine at Hightower Castle last winter while you lads were entertaining Selznak. We’ve been set up, is what I think.’

The Professor shook his head. ‘I don’t believe it for a moment. Not for a moment. He’s not that clever. It’s altogether impossible.’

Jonathan pulled the lid back from his chest, watching the gems within flutter into a heap of trash – dried fish eyes and shining scales that had once covered a great river perch. Scattered across the bottom were handfuls of watch parts: gears, lenses, little nuts and bolts and screws. Nestled in among all of it was a brass pocketwatch – a very familiar looking brass pocketwatch. Reaching in and pulling it out by the fob, Jonathan dangled it in the air. ‘Zippo was a better magician than we thought.’

‘Is that yours?’ asked Bufo, who still had the little half-dollar watch that Jonathan had given him after the magic show at Tweet River Village.

‘The very one.’ Jonathan was mystified. He wound it up and it began to tick away.

‘I’d say this was a bit of good fortune,’ the Professor said, ‘but I don’t believe it is. In fact, I’m all of a sudden inclined to agree that I’ve underestimated Selznak all along. All of us have. Even Miles. But then nothing he’s done so far has been half as clever as this.’

They left the open chests and set out. Clouds were blowing in over the mountains – a summer storm by the look of it – and before they had trudged the length of the alley, lightning zigged across the sky up the coast to the north. Scattered drops of rain began to fall, and Bufo, looking glum and disappointed, muttered something about the indignity of getting soaked after having discovered a joke treasure.

Jonathan didn’t feel quite so bad about the whole affair. He assumed that the treasure that still lay in the vault beneath the cellar of the old house would go right on along being a treasure until someone hauled it out into the sunshine. That, of course, made up for a great deal. To top things off, he had gotten his watch back and Escargot, once again, was to be a party to the rescuing of the Squire – and, after all, that was what the whole crowd of them had come to Balumnia to achieve. He almost managed to convince himself that a half-hour of rain might be a pleasant change of pace.

When they stepped out onto Royal Street, Jonathan turned for one last look down the dark alley that stretched away toward St Elmo Square. He stopped abruptly and clutched the Professor’s arm. There amid the scattered and broken chests stood the old woman and her cat, watching them depart through the blur of rain. The black clouds overhead seemed to burst just then, sheets of rain pouring down and obscuring the distant square. Thunder cracked out, rolling and booming like a peal of deep, wild laughter. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the rain let off, and the lot of them stood dripping, peering down the long misty alley at nothing at all.

Miles wasn’t at the inn. The company sat about, packed and waiting, for two hours. Dooly and Gump and Bufo played cards with Escargot and lost voluminous quantities of jelly beans to him, first at Go Fish, then at Loony Eights, then at Chewn M’Gumm. Escargot kept loaning the jelly beans back out at interest just to keep the game alive, but by two-thirty in the afternoon there were few actual jelly beans left – only a handful of caramel beans that everyone agreed tasted like dirt. All the rest had been eaten, so the winnings were pretty much statistical.

The game was just petering out for lack of finances when the innkeeper came down the stairs rubbing his face and yawning. He had a bleary-eyed, afternoon-nap look about him. ‘Your wizard was in this morning,’ he said. ‘He was in a frightful hurry. Paid up and shoved off, he did.’

‘You must be mistaken,’ the Professor insisted. ‘Shoved off?’

‘That’s it. Took right off like a dirty shirt. He left a note for you.’ With that he hurried into his office, then hurried out again with a folded sheet of paper. On it was a brief and cryptic note from Miles: ‘Squire and Dwarf on coast road this morning. Time is precious. Follow me south. Gross evil afoot. Sikorsky and Selznak one and the same. Look to your wits. Beware Zippo.’

‘That last bit throws me,’ Escargot said, reading over the Professor’s shoulder. ‘What is Zippo?’

‘Who is Zippo, is the question,’ Jonathan explained. ‘He’s the parlor magician who stole my pocketwatch at Tweet River Village.’

Escargot nodded. ‘Youngish sort of fellow, is he? Slimy looking in a way? Nervous? Uses a mechanical fish?’

‘That’s him,’ Jonathan said. ‘You’ve seen him then?’ Escargot nodded again and Jonathan continued. ‘I suspect that he wasn’t the incompetent that we had him pegged for.’

‘It sounds as if we’ll find out.’ The Professor was hauling his knapsack onto his shoulder and squaring his glasses on his nose. ‘Let’s buy some food and go. We’re hours behind.’

Escargot suggested that they strike the coast road at a place called the Thirteen Bridges, a mile or two below town. From there the road ran on for close to a hundred miles before it came to another sizeable village. They hadn’t quite gotten to the door, however, when the innkeeper said suddenly, ‘I wouldn’t go that way myself.’ Everyone stopped and looked at him. He shook his head darkly. ‘Nobody goes south on the coast. Leastways not on foot. Not anymore.’

‘Not anymore?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Not for a year or so. Not since that goblin business at the bridges and the horror at Boffin Beach.’

They stood blinking at the man, waiting for more information. ‘Horror?’ the Professor asked. ‘What horror was that?’

The innkeeper gave him a look that implied that the Professor wasn’t quite as bright as he appeared to be. ‘Why
the
horror,’ he said. ‘There hasn’t been but one. The bloody bones. The Waller party. Hacked to bits. Eaten. Where are you lads from, anyway? There wasn’t nothing
but
the horror at Boffin Beach in any of the newspapers for weeks. No, sir. I wouldn’t go south on no coast road. Not now, leastways.’

Dooly’s knapsack dropped out of his hand and clunked to the floor.

The Professor, however, was looking more determined than ever. ‘Then you’ll be happy to hear that your services won’t be required on the coast road. We’re going down to Boffin Beach and have a bit of a look.’

‘Let ‘em mess with us!’ Bufo said stoutly.

‘The wimps,’ Gump put in, clapping a hand onto Dooly’s shoulder to pep him up a bit. ‘They’ll sing a sorry tune.’

On that note of encouragement, they filed out and down the road to the corner grocery before pursuing their way toward the Thirteen Bridges and the mysterious coast road. After about a quarter of a mile, though, Escargot pulled up short and scratched his head. ‘I’ve been thinking that we’re going off half-cocked, mates,’ he said.

The Professor looked as if he thought Escargot was the one who was half-cocked. After an exasperated pause, he shook his head and started off again. But Jonathan had more faith in Escargot. ‘How so?’

‘We could be twenty-five miles down the coast by dark if we were in the submarine, and we could cruise up and down and look for signs.’

‘And Selznak could be murdering Miles and the Squire in the woods fifteen miles behind us,’ the Professor said.

Escargot shrugged. ‘He might be doing his murdering right now. A few of us at least could run far enough ahead to have a look about. We could meet back up at Boffin Beach.’

Once again Jonathan stuck up for Escargot. ‘I’m for it,’ he said. ‘Half of us can go along in the submarine and half of us on the coast road. Then if One party falls into Selznak’s hands, the other can dash in and rescue them, just like last winter. He won’t half expect us to split up. We can’t even be sure he knows that the submarine is in Balumnia.’

‘We saw the old woman at St Elmo’s Square,’ Escargot said, putting a hole in at least part of Jonathan’s argument. ‘But you’re right, lad. Selznak won’t look for us to break up. He’ll think he has us scared witless, cowering together on the road.’

‘You know about this Boffin Beach?’ the Professor asked.

‘I’m a submarine captain,’ Escargot said. ‘I have charts, maps. I fish for oysters at Boffin Beach. There’s pearl oysters there the size of wagon wheels. I sell them to the elves for beds. There’s an old abandoned castle on the bluffs above, but not much else. I don’t know anything about any horror. That must have happened while I was out to sea.’

‘I’ll go with Grandpa!’ shouted Dooly, who didn’t seem to have any desire to travel along the coast road. It was unlikely that he’d run into any ‘goblin business’ under the ocean.

Bufo spoke up about then. ‘I’m for going along in the submarine, too. They’ve got the jump on us. It’s haste we want now.’ Gump, for once, agreed with him.

‘Then it’s settled,’ Jonathan said. ‘The Professor and Ahab and I will hike along the coast road and look for the four of you at Boffin Beach. We’ll probably run down Miles along the way if we try. He might dawdle a bit and wait for us. He won’t want to tackle the Dwarf alone.’

There was general agreement on the issue, and everyone shook hands. Once again Jonathan found himself trudging along the road toward the Thirteen Bridges with the Professor on one side of him and Ahab on the other. ‘It looks as if we’re left to our own devices once again,’ he said.

‘Just as well, I think. I’m sorry to lose Gump and Bufo, of course; don’t get me wrong. But there’s an element of stealth lost when a big crowd goes stumbling down the road. I have a feeling that stealth is what we’ll want, just as much as haste. I still don’t trust Escargot. He’s after that globe, but that’s about it. He couldn’t care less about the Squire.’

‘I think you’re selling him short,’ Jonathan said, ‘although you’re right about his wanting the globe. We’ll have to wait and see, I suppose.’

‘We’ll see, all right. Let’s just not make the mistake of depending on him, that’s all. I hope I’m wrong, of course.’

Jonathan was sure that Professor Wurzle
did
hope he was wrong. The Professor sometimes fell a bit short when it came to optimism, but Jonathan had rarely known him to be unfair.

In half an hour they rounded a long curving bend in the road that led out of the city and along tidal flats toward the coast. Fishermen’s huts stood on stilts here and there above the grasses and stiff low brush of the marshy tidelands, and thin dark canals twisted along toward the sea. Some way below town on a bit of a hill lay a gypsy encampment, smoke from cooking fires curling languidly about a circle of wagons covered with tattered canvas. Not far from the road two dark gypsys were fishing for seabirds with kites. Jonathan was tempted to stand and watch for a bit, as now and again a big gull or heron would swoop down and lunge at the bait dangling at the tail of the bird-shaped kite.

The kites themselves looked nothing like the sea birds they were intended to decoy, and that struck Jonathan as an oversight. But the Professor pointed out that gypsys, being rovers, fished for any of a hundred birds and could hardly be expected to hoist kites enough for all of them. There was a basic bird image, the Professor explained, which pretty much summed up birdness, and it was that with which the gypsys fished.

The idea fascinated Jonathan, especially since the kites were such a wonderful mixture altogether – a sort of hodgepodge of birddom, as if someone had mixed up a duck with a parrot and a snipe and had tossed in a pelican and an ostrich for good measure. The Professor, however, said that the composite bird was nothing next to the composite mammal, which was a wonder to see and was about the size of a house. There had been rumors at the university, said the Professor, that the taxidermist who had been commissioned to make one for the school of biology had run mad after finishing the thing and had had to be taken away in a cart.