The Disappearing Dwarf (8 page)

‘Disappeared?’ Jonathan shouted, finding it difficult to imagine the Squire disappearing.

‘Gone. I’m on my way there now, but I have to have my cap repaired first. Your man Gosset is working on it. He’s a marvel with caps, they say.’

‘And ape masks.’

‘Well,’ the Professor said, ‘we’re heading your way then.’ He told Miles of their plans to visit the Squire.

‘I’ve got to warn you,’ Miles said, ‘that there’s dirty-work afoot. There may be rough weather ahead.’

They drank their coffee and finished the pie over the rest of Miles’ tale. The Squire, it turned out, had simply disappeared. He had been sitting in his library one moment and the next he was gone – whisked away. It was a mystery and a villainy, Squire Myrkle being, of course, the next in succession to the linkman throne.

Danger or no danger, by the end of the tale they were doubly determined to continue their journey. In fact, they agreed to travel with Miles the following afternoon – just as soon as his magician’s cap had been repaired by Lonny Gosset. Jonathan was anxious to be off, and disliked the idea of moping around all day in the still half-deserted village. He was relieved, since immediate travel would squash any possibility of further exploration of the tower. And he was intrigued by the promise of adventure. But most of all, he was anxious to help out the poor Squire who had, almost single-handedly, delivered him and the Professor from the hands of Selznak the Dwarf and his minion, the Beddlington Ape.

They decided to raft downriver to Willowood Station so as to avoid that part of the river road that ran through the fringes of the Goblin Wood. They would leave their raft in Willowood, rent ponies, and be at Myrkle Hall in a week’s time at most. If they hurried they could be there sooner. A week sounded like a woefully long time, to be sure, but there wasn’t any getting around it. Miles the Magician had sent word into the east to alert the elves of the Squire’s disappearance. There was the ghost of a chance that an elfin airship might at that moment be humming along out of the White Mountains toward the territory, an airship that could sail them to Myrkle Hall in a matter of hours. But the chances of such an airship spotting the three of them on the river or along the river road was slim. They would have to put up with being anxious.

The treasure map was forgotten in the excitement of the evening. Late that night, when Miles retired to his room and Jonathan and the Professor left to sleep aboard the raft in the harbor, they remembered the map and decided to show it to Miles in the morning. But before they had gotten halfway down the street to the harbor they had a change of mind. It seemed to both of them that treasure maps, somehow, weren’t worth their concern under the circumstances, that the Squire’s disappearance rather deflated the importance of treasure and that, given the dangerous nature of their undertakings, they would be wise to roll the map up and ignore it until the Squire was safe. They shook hands on the decision without any regrets.

They met Gosset at the tavern the following afternoon. He pushed in backward through the door wearing a rejuvenated ape mask and carrying the wizard’s obstreperous conical cap. The thing was even taller than Miles’ old cap, and it was a wonder of twirling stars and moons and ringed planets. Atop the pointed spire sat a carved ivory head with two faces, a grinning baby face with puffy cheeks on one side, the leering face of a wizened old man on the other. The cap wasn’t as heavy as it looked. It seemed somehow to be animated, to want to roll and leap about, and the ivory ball on top spun slowly, seemingly of its own accord, the alternate faces blending into one continuous blur of a face – a face that looked weirdly like Miles the Magician.

‘Here we are, then,’ Miles said, taking the hat from the mystified Gosset. ‘This is perfect, sir. Together we’ve made an astonishing cap.’

‘Astonishing!’ Gosset cried. ‘The thing’s alive. Magic, I call it.’

‘Magic and more.’ Miles fitted the cap onto the top of his head. The thing settled over his forehead where it seemed to relax visibly, as if it were home at last. Miles rose and took a few creeping steps across the floor, much to the astonishment of those few villagers who sat about nibbling lunches. Then he leaped once or twice in the manner of a ballet dancer, crouched, spun round, flailed his arms about and did, as a sort of encore, a forward flip that led in the end to a chair being kicked over with a bang.

‘Here now!’ the tavern keeper shouted, coming around the end of the bar carrying a rag. ‘Look what’s happened to the chair here.’

‘Pardon me,’ Miles said. ‘How unfortunate.’ He set the ivory ball aspin, shouted something that sounded like a ruined birdcall, and pointed at the upturned chair which rose slowly into the air, settling finally on its feet. ‘There,’ Miles said.

Two diners leaped up and rushed out of the room; a third buried his face in a newspaper. Touchy about wizardry in these parts, aren’t they?’ Miles remarked, sitting down and removing the cap.

‘It’s not surprising,’ Jonathan replied. ‘They’ve seen more than their share of it recently. It’s wonderful the way the cap stays on your head like that, even when you’re capering around.’

‘It’s a proper cap now. A good cap knows its owner’s head and fits it like a cap of snow on a mountain.’

‘I should say.’ Jonathan remembered the cap as it had been six months before, wobbling and falling, and Miles tieing the thing to his chin until he was about to choke.

They bought Gosset a pint of ale and a cottage pie and bid him adieu. It suddenly seemed unjustifiably frivolous to be mooching about over lunch. In half an hour the raft was midriver, spinning along past Hightower Village. They rigged the sails to take advantage of the north wind, and the raft leaped ahead as if anxious to be off downriver.

Miles set up a little pot of smoking herbs and thumbed through a book of incantations for one that would increase the force of the wind. Whether his new cap heightened the power of the spell or whether Miles was simply a very potent wizard was hard to say, but by late afternoon the wind blew straightaway down the river so prodigiously that the hemlocks and alders along the banks began to whip about and the rigging began to whistle and groan. Miles lit a new batch of herbs and worked feverishly to reduce the spell, but in the end Jonathan was forced to reef the sail to avoid ripping it to bits.

It was dark before the wind died down. Since they had made tremendous progress that day, they agreed to sail on through the night keeping watch in shifts. At around four in the morning they rounded a headland and drifted into the long section of dark water that flowed still and eerie past the great expanse of the Goblin Wood. All of the rafters, Ahab included, sat about on the deck watching the dim line of the forested shores and the shifting moon shadows of the oaks on the river.

Several times they saw the flickering of goblin fires and the glowing faces of jack-o’-lanterns through the trees. The faraway gonging of a copper drum told of a goblin revel somewhere in the heart of the Wood. When the sun rose over the hills in the west and the sky was gray with dawn light, two skeletons, jerking along like marionettes, appeared on the river road. A faint clacking and moaning floated out across the waters as the rafters watched in silent dread. Miles finally shouted a toasting spell at them, but the distance must have been too great, for the things disappeared into the shadows of the woods, as if anxious to avoid the rays of the rising sun.

The sun, of course, was as welcome to the rafters as it was unwelcome to the creatures of the Wood. With a pot of coffee and a morning breeze, they once again set sail and hurried along toward Willowood where, the following afternoon, they left the raft moored to a piling and set out overland on hired ponies.

Their trail ran along the river road for a ways, winding beneath hemlocks and oaks and redwoods. The little-used road was green with spring mosses and oxalis, and it would have been an enjoyable thing altogether to simply meander along studying the toads and newts and collecting wild flowers to press. But there wasn’t any time to enjoy the scenery. They rode as hard as they dared all that day and the next, leaving the Oriel behind and climbing into the foothills that rose slowly toward the Elfin Highlands.

The trail seemed to follow the most leisurely, meandering course between the crests of the scattered hills. It didn’t seem to Jonathan to be the straightest or quickest course, and he said as much to Miles.

‘The straightest course often leads to the crookedest ends,’ Miles announced cryptically.

They forded any number of little streams and crossed broad meadows of clover and wild grasses, camping in the evening beneath clear, star-laden skies on the tops of hills away from the dampness of the meadows. Late one evening when they were halfway between the river and their destination, they sat around their campfire chatting about possible reasons for the Squire’s disappearance. None of them could fathom it. The only evidence that Selznak the Dwarf had had a hand in it was based on his being seen in the territory at around the same time. Although that was certainly suspicious, it was little else beyond that. Jonathan pointed that out, but Miles didn’t seem to agree. As the evening wore on, Jonathan began to suspect that somehow Miles was sure Selznak was up to deviltry, that evil forces were stirring in the land, and that their recent routing of the Dwarf from his stronghold on Hightower Ridge had merely caused a temporary calm in a dark and gathering storm.

The night was warm, too warm to warrant a fire really, but they had built one anyway for the sake of cheerfulness and because there was good dry wood lying about. Stars glowed overhead in wild profusion. Jonathan had been told once that elfin galleons sailed among the stars casting long golden seines into the reaches of the heavens to fish for star jewels. He hadn’t much believed it at the time, but there, lying beneath the glowing tumble of the Milky Way, it didn’t seem half so unlikely. Stranger things had come to pass.

He was just about to doze off, had just slid down into a curious dreamland in which he and Ahab were rowing a little boat along a river through the stars, when the Professor shook him awake. Miles, Jonathan saw, had clambered onto a jumble of boulders and was peering off through the moonlit night toward a nearby stand of willow that sat at the mouth of a little valley where two hills came together along the path to linkman territory.

Jonathan and the Professor joined him, and together they watched wisps of fog curl up from among the willows as if it were leaking out of the earth. The fog swirled about in the otherwise clear night air, drifting slowly along toward them over the meadow. Jonathan could hear Miles mumbling – casting spells probably – beneath his breath. The cloud of fog drifted nearer until, some forty feet from their camp, it seemed to flatten itself against an invisible wall. The fog whirled and danced for a moment, then set off in a wide circle around their camp, brushing over the tops of the meadow grasses. Jonathan, for just a moment, thought that he could hear the sound of low laughter on the breeze, and the Professor cocked his head just then as if he too heard it. The fog hung about for a moment at the edge of the woods below them, then disappeared into the shadows.

The three of them tramped back down to camp and were astonished to find that the campfire had gone out. It hadn’t just burned down, but was cold, as if it had been out for a week. It appeared to have been blown out, blasted, for sticks and ash were scattered all over the bedrolls.

‘What the devil?’ Jonathan exclaimed. The whole incident seemed inexplicable.

‘Whatever it was, it’s gone,’ the Professor observed.

‘We hope he is,’ Miles said.

‘He?’ Jonathan echoed.

‘Who can say?’ Miles replied. ‘I have my suspicions.’

Jonathan was beginning to develop suspicions of his own. He lay thinking about them for a bit, but he didn’t work things through very far before he was asleep, falling almost at once into the same dream about rowing among the stars. This dream, however, was permeated with an aura of peculiar dread – the sense that he wasn’t out rowing for pleasure, but was being watched and pursued by something that was hiding in the purple, misty darkness behind him. The night was full of such dreams. In the morning, the group was off at sunrise, eating as they trotted along.

For two more days there was nothing to signify that they were in linkman territory, for they passed no farms or cottages and saw no other travelers. Five days after setting out from Hightower Village, however, they awoke to the jingling of cow bells and to the sight of a herd of great hippo-like cattle clomping down along the meadows below them, pursued by two serious-looking linkmen, both of them smoking long cherrywood pipes.

By noon they had passed through three fairly large villages and were told by a wild-eyed linkman with a broad, grinning face that they were some six miles from Myrkle Hall. They lunched on bread and cheese and a flagon of wine, passing all of that back and forth to one another as they rode along. An hour later they swung round a bend in the road and there before them, perched on a distant hill, lay Myrkle Hall – a vast, half-timbered lodge that was a perfect amazement of porticoes and gables and dormers and turrets surrounded by an expensive park, neatly laid out with a winding stream that ambled between rocky pools.

Jonathan could imagine the pyramidal Squire, dressed in his voluminous, suspendered trousers, eating a jolly breakfast on the wide veranda that fronted the hall, and he wondered what sort of villain could have possibly brought the Squire to harm. The answer, of course, suggested itself almost immediately. It must have suggested itself as well to the others, for there, settled in front of the hall, was ah elfin airship.