The Stone Giant (10 page)

He spent the late afternoon walking, savoring the idea of having no place to go, of finding himself on a street corner with no earthly reason to turn right rather than left. A man on foot might travel six miles in a day, if he was leisurely: stopping here to sleep for an hour in the sun, dawdling there over a glass of ale. On horseback he could do better, of course. But he might easily ride past that spot of sunshine, or feel less inclined to climb down and open his book. And what did it matter if he wandered along six miles of coastline in a day or if he hurried past twenty? He hadn’t seen
any
of it yet. He was getting a grip on this business of time; that’s what he was doing. And here on the sunset streets of Seaside, faced with doing nothing, or, rather, with doing anything in the world he pleased, it seemed to him that never before had he felt so certain that he had time by the neck.

The events of the past weeks had been trying, to be sure. And if he was given the chance to have it all back again –his house, his wife, Annie, Twombly Town, his net and lines still hidden beneath the log along the river – he’d jump for it. Or at least for some of it. He could always buy new fishing tackle, though. There was a rock reef running out into the ocean just below Seaside – he’d seen it when he’d paused on the rise above the city two hours earlier – that would be full of some fairly amazing pools and channels. Heaven knew what sorts of fish he’d find there. As for Annie ... That was behind him now.

Before him stretched a long avenue full of dancing people. A trio of dwarfs tooted on long horns, and an elf in a pointy cap fiddled away at an enormous stringed instrument that emitted a flurry of rising and falling notes. The music set the entire street mad, and even the tall houses that tilted away overhead seemed to be swaying and jigging in time. The sun dropped toward the seawall, faster and faster as it was chased out of the sky by evening, and the orange-red glow of sunset seemed to set the street afire. Foghorns moaned offshore, distant and lonesome when the music fell, as if to remind the revelers of something they’d been working hard to forget. And then a flurry of ascending notes swallowed the low sigh of the foghorns, and the street swept once again into dance.

Around a distant corner, already partly invisible in rising fog, bobbed a dozen enormous wooden puppets at the head of a capering procession of people. The heads of the things were painted and leering, and they bowed and swiveled and canted over to peer in a wild rush into second-story windows and balconies. Escargot pushed up onto the sidewalk along with the dancers to let the procession pass, and he watched in fascination the clacking wooden jaws of the things and the flapping ears and revolving eyes. Dwarfs and elves hunched inside, working furiously to manipulate arms and legs and to squeeze away at inflated bladders that squeaked out a ceaseless oratory of inhuman speech, utterly random and wild, but seeming in the early evening mists to signify some deep, portentous thing. Escargot fell in behind the throng, clapping and stamping and hooting and surrounded almost immediately by countless revelers including the four musicians, who continued to toot and fiddle as if abandoned to madness. People danced roundabout, and in half a minute Escargot found himself dancing with them, finding and abandoning partners in a blind rush of music and lights and the bursting of firecrackers.

They angled up toward the palace, the procession growing by the moment and stretching away finally almost to the seashore. People appeared from doorways carrying sheafs of wheat and corn bound in red ribbon. An enormous cornucopia clattered up a parallel avenue, appearing and disappearing across the ends of alleys and cross streets. In its upturned mouth was a strange collage of pumpkins and squashes and scarecrows knitted out of corn husks, all of it tangled into what seemed to be the legs of tumbled furniture: broken, upturned chairs and smashed tables, and the carcass of a grandfather clock, built for a giant, that thrust crazily through the tangle. The dying sun reflected off the cracked glass of the moonfaced clock, and it seemed to Escargot that the hands of the clock whirled around and around as if years were spinning away in moments.

The procession danced beneath an arched bridge made of cut stone that wheeled around into a high, crenellated wall, and for the space of five minutes the cornucopia vanished. When it hove once again into view, there, among the throng that danced behind it, was Leta. He was certain of it.

He pushed along toward the sidewalk, jumping and craning his neck to see. An enormous woman with a feathered hat grabbed him by the wrists and whirled him away. He yanked loose, bumped against a trio of circling pipe players, and nearly went down. ‘Here now!’ cried one, hopping for a moment and grabbing the toe of his shoe. Escargot shouted an apology to the wind as he leaped into a brief clearing. He sprinted toward a tiny cobbled alley, pushing through an almost solid, writhing mass of revelers who blew in time on paper flutes. In a moment the way was clear. There was just enough sun left. In five minutes he’d have to trust to torchlight to illuminate the crowds, and the task of finding Leta would become monumental.

Ahead, winding up the hill, labored the cornucopia, flanked by scores of marchers clad in great circular masks, painted like rouged baby faces, all of them whirling round like tops, revealing at one moment a hideous grin, at the next a weeping frown, and amid them, looking hither and thither as if lost, stumbled Leta. Escargot shouted. He waved his arm. But she was oblivious to him. She couldn’t conceivably hear him above the noise. She angled away to the right, disappearing for a moment behind the lurching cornucopia, then appeared again, stepping into the gloom of an alley, running now, as if pursued. Escargot followed. It was impossible that she was running from him. She couldn’t know he was there.

In the shadow of the alley he slowed. He could hear footfalls ahead, scraping against cobbles. But the sun was gone and the alley was shrouded in ocean mist. He had forgotten in his haste and in his desire to see a familiar face that Leta wasn’t what she seemed. He recalled, suddenly, the sight of her in the windmill, crouched on her haunches like a great cat and changing with the rising sun into the stooped, blind crone. And his ruined Smithers – he recalled that too. Their paths, he reasoned in a sudden fit of courage, seemed destined to cross; they might just as well cross now, while he was the pursuer and not the pursued.

The alley curved down the hill, past countless overgrown backyards, and evening slipped by the moment into night. The fog thickened. Escargot slowed, then stopped and listened. The sure tread of Leta’s footfalls had been replaced by the dim, measured swish and scrape of someone walking slowly, almost wearily – toward him now. He took a step back, quelling the urge to cut and run. He’d see this out, he told himself. Come what may he’d wrestle with these devils so that he could get on with things. He couldn’t have them continually popping up at him out of every alley he passed.

The fog before him swirled and parted, as if stirred by an unfelt breeze, and out of it, looming toward him, shuffling along slowly and inexorably, hunched the witch, leaning on her stick and twisting her head back and forth as if she knew someone were there, watching her. Escargot smashed himself against a fence and waited.

A clatter of footfalls arose in the fog, as if a company of people were running toward them down the alley. Shouts rang out. Escargot stepped along into the shadow of an entryway, feeling for the knob with his left hand. It was unlocked. If it came to it, he’d slip the door open, enter the house, and lock the door after him. He’d be pitched out, for sure, as a drunken reveler, but better that than ... what? He didn’t at all care to find out.

The old woman shuffled along past him, hurrying, it seemed, tapping the cobbles with her stick. The lace of her shawl hung like wet cobweb and the bones of her cheeks and forehead seemed to twitch with anticipation. The shouts and footfalls grew louder, and the lights of wavering torches hovered in the fog. Then Uncle Helstrom appeared, running out of the mist, pursued by a torch-carrying mob that waved hayforks and coils of rope. In his mouth burned his curved pipe, packed, no doubt, with the smoking, brittle bones of henny-penny men.

Uncle Helstrom, chased! Here was an interesting turn. But then it was clear that no one was chasing the dwarf. They were following him, pursuing the old woman. They closed in on her, snarling and yelling and shoving. She croaked a single protest before they were upon her. She was borne down, tied, then hoisted onto the shoulders of two men, who, at the urging of the dwarf, hauled her along at the head of the mob, up the alley toward the festivities. Her stick clattered to the cobbles and was trod to fragments by a hundred stamping feet. Escargot followed, awash with surprise and confusion.

The cornucopia had been pulled into a great square. Above sat the palace, its gray stone half lost in the hovering fog. The light of countless torches danced and flickered, and the streets, running off away from the square like spokes from the hub of a wheel, were packed with people, pushing forward, dancing in time to foggy rhythms that were the strangely melodic product of a thousand separate musicians. Escargot elbowed along behind the mob from the alley as the crowd parted before them. They were destined, it was clear, for the center of the square, and it had begun to dawn on Escargot why that was. He didn’t at all like it.

From the shadow of the palace stepped four of the wooden puppets that had led the revelers earlier in the evening. One, quite clearly, was intended to be a dwarf, with a waggling beard and an axe in its belt. Another was an elf, thin and grinning and in a pointed cloth cap. A third was a jolly, longlegged linkman, a basket of summer fruit on his back. The fourth was a man in leather boots and a shop coat and spectacles. Appearing behind them, its cornsilk hair afire, a goblin jerked along, its eyes opening and shutting as it bent forward at the waist and then straightened again, bowing to the assembled masses.

The first four plucked long torches from the palace wall and lurched toward the cornucopia, which, as Escargot drew closer, seemed to be almost rectilinear – all angles and joints like a weirdly winding stairway that led to a spiral cavern full of strange autumnal debris. The torches dipped and rose, spilling burning oil onto the dry and brittle wood. The goblin puppet reached into the tangle and wrenched at a great wooden chair built of tree branches. Scores of pumpkins cascaded out onto the roadway, breaking open and scattering candies and coins across the square. People shouted and scurried. A hatch midway back in the side of the cornucopia fell open on hinges, spilling no end of stuffed pumpkins and spraying the night with elf-stars that burst into momentary light when they struck the ground and bounced.

In moments the wooden hulk of the cornucopia was aflame. The goblin puppet straightened, and looked about itself through oddly lit glass eyes. It seemed to see the blind witch, bound, mute, and held up as an offering. It stooped, plucked the witch out of the hands of the cheering crowd, and set her atop the enormous chair as if she were a stuffed doll. The witch’s head swiveled, empty eyes regarding the flames. Escargot slid between hooting men so that he stood directly before the pyre. The flames crept upward, and the hem of the witch’s dusty robe sparked and flickered. Her face was lit in a horrid glow that made it seem as if the milky glaze of her blindness evaporated, and for one repellent moment she gazed down at Escargot through sighted eyes, eyes full of weary despair and longing.

Escargot staggered back. Smithers hadn’t lied. Not a bit. Everything had been there: the lurching puppets, the torchlight, the odd, enchanted music piping in the fog, the burning sheaves of wheat, the upturned, firelit faces of countless people watching half in wonder, half in fear. Smithers had seen all of it, all but one, last, inexplicable horror: the witch seemed to shimmer behind the curtain of heat, to fade and then grow distinct again, until staring down at him, ringed by fire, sat Leta, bound and helpless.

Escargot leaped. He hadn’t thought about leaping; he simply leaped, grabbing hold of an iron-shod cartwheel and clambering up toward the fire. The heat staggered him. Someone grabbed his foot from below, and he looked back and kicked the man in the face. He jerked loose and pulled himself onto the underside of the cornucopia itself, reaching into the gathering flame. Yanking himself forward and grappling for a foothold, he hauled himself up until he got an elbow over the edge, inches away from one of the front legs of the chair. Above him dangled a leg –Leta’s leg. He reached for it, shouting incoherently into the flames, grabbing an ankle. He lurched upward to get a better grip and felt himself grasped from behind. The wizened, bespectacled face of the shopkeeper puppet looked into his own, and from behind it came a disembodied voice that shouted, ‘Give off!’ then ‘Let go, will you!’

It was someone inside, yelling at him. Escargot held onto the ankle. If they hauled him off they’d haul her too. The lot of them would smash into the street, but that was better than letting Leta incinerate. ‘Pull!’ he shouted into the puppet’s face, and then he felt himself falling, carrying with him a single, smouldering shoe.

He landed on a mass of flailing people, and for a moment he lay trapped beneath the torso of the puppet. He could hear the dwarf inside cursing him and pounding on the wall of his temporary prison. The cornucopia burned above him. In the wild glow it was impossible to say what sat in the chair, but it seemed, just as two chair legs slumped into the burning mass of debris, that there was nothing at all in the chair but an almost transparent, leathery bag of wind encircled by a halo of flame. Then the ropes that had bound the witch fell slack and the chair was empty.

Escargot was suddenly free of the puppet. He leaped up, hoping that in the general melee he wouldn’t be recognized, but he found himself peering into the down-bent face of the goblin puppet, its hair by now burnt to a frazzle. It reached for his neck with hands that seemed to be constructed of wired-together human bones, and in the split second that it took for him to shake off this new horror and run, he saw, peering out at him through the thing’s open mouth, the grinning face of Uncle Helstrom.