The Disappearing Dwarf (3 page)

Along the banks of the river, everything was green and moving. Beavers and water rats brushed through the willows and splashed in the shallows past egrets and herons that stalked along on spindle legs with an eye toward fish. Some miles below town they passed the first of the great stands of oak that ran together finally into deep forests. It seemed to Jonathan that the oaks were at once beautiful and ominous and that they held ageless mythical secrets. He had been told as a boy that on Halloween evening oak trees ran blood rather than sap, and that once every hundred years on that same night incredibly old trees in the depths of the woods performed ancient circle dances before an audience of goblins. It didn’t surprise him a bit, in fact, that both elves and goblins lived in the midst of oak woods.

The same trees that had been skeletal and foreboding the previous autumn were clothed now in green, and their great limbs hung out low over the river, shading the still water along the shores. Jonathan lay on his back, barefoot on the deck, watching the intermittent blue sky and green tangle of leaves overhead. He was relatively happy to dawdle along so and smoke his pipe, and he hoped that the trout would ignore his bait for a bit longer. He was struck by the strange thought that it was too bad he hadn’t baited his hook with Talbot’s rubber cheese so as to guarantee his peace, and it occurred to him that perhaps Talbot wasn’t as thick as he seemed. Perhaps he liked the
idea
of fishing more than its generally preferred result. The thought appealed to him; it seemed to take some of the wind out of the trout’s sails.

Just when he thought he could go on so all afternoon, the Professor slumped down beside him on the deck with what appeared to be an old blueprint. ‘Here it is.’

Jonathan raised up onto his elbow and peered at the thing. It seemed to be the dusty old floor plan of some multistoried stone edifice, of a castle perhaps. It didn’t mean anything at all to him. ‘Are you going into real estate?’ he asked the Professor.

The Professor winked at him. It was a wink full of meaning. ‘Both of us have been into this piece of real estate already, Jonathan. And if it wasn’t for the Squire, we’d likely still be there, two heaps of bones.’

Jonathan looked a bit closer at the plans and recognized the great hall on the ground floor with its high trestle ceiling. There was the immense stone chimney and the great windows through which he himself had hurled a wooden bench. It was a drawing of the various levels of the castle on Hightower Ridge, abandoned now by its master, Sclznak the Dwarf. Jonathan was immediately suspicious.

The Professor tried to placate him. ‘I found this drawing at the library in town, of all places. I thought I knew every map and manuscript in there. I was nosing around in Special Collections and there it was, just tossed on the counter in a heap as if someone had brought it in yesterday and had left it there for me. Wonderful luck, really.’

‘So you were studying architecture then, eh?’ Jonathan asked, squinting past his pipe at the Professor.

‘A bit. Lately, though, I’ve been studying the lower levels on this drawing.’ The Professor paused to grab a handful of shelled almonds out of a cloth bag and toss a couple into his mouth. ‘Look at these hallways that run off here from the cellar. They must run away into the earth. And look at this notation.
Cavern of Malthius
it says. Then this one,
Cavern of the Trolls
. Isn’t that something?’

Jonathan tapped his pipe out into the river and admitted that it was indeed something. The Professor pointed to another bit of faded lettering almost lost in a blur of smeared ink. ‘To the
d-o
– ’ the Professor was reading the inscription off letter by letter. ‘What do you suppose that means?’

‘Obviously it used to read, “to the dog,” ’ Jonathan said. ‘Trolls lived in this cavern, a dog lived down here. Probably there was another room for cats and one for pigs and one for curious people like this Malthius chap who showed too much interest in finding out which room was which.’

The Professor smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s not dog, Jonathan; there were at least four letters here.’

‘Dogs then,’ Jonathan countered. ‘An even better reason not to go poking around there, as I see it. Last December, after we spent such a fine evening there, you said you had intentions of returning to do a bit of exploration. I have this feeling that’s where we’re heading right now – into trouble. Into a castle full of trolls and dogs and hobgoblins.’

The Professor nodded. ‘As men of science we have a duty to investigate that tower.’

‘In just two days,’ Jonathan said, ‘I’ve been a man of leisure and a man of science.’

‘This notation here,’ the Professor continued, ‘hasn’t anything to do with dogs. I’m sure of it. It refers to a door, I think.’

‘A door to where? To the center of the earth?’

The Professor perked up at the idea. ‘Quite possibly so, Jonathan. There are theories about it being hollow, you know.’

‘Seems unlikely that a chap could wander into it through a door, though, doesn’t it?’ Jonathan asked.

‘It seems unlikely that toads fly in the Wonderful Isles, or that the elves cast nets in the clouds to gather rain fish.’

Jonathan admitted that all that sounded unlikely too, just as the Professor said. ‘What do you expect to find in the tower, Professor, besides deviltry? Bufo and Gump smashed the Dwarf’s laboratories to bits, and Escargot warned them, away from the upper story. I think we should heed his warning. He knows more about Hightower Castle than either of us.’

‘That’s true,’ the Professor replied, idly tossing an almond across the fifty-odd feet of water that separated them from the shore. It
splupped
into the river just as some sort of great fish, moving too quickly to identify, leaped out of the water and snatched it up.

‘Yoicks!’ shouted Jonathan. ‘I’ve got to get word of this back to Talbot. It’s salted almonds he wants, not lumps of rubber.’

‘As I was saying,’ the Professor resumed, ‘Escargot likely had reasons of his own. He’s a fine fellow – don’t get me wrong – but his motives seem to be suspect as often as not. Maybe there’s something in the upper level he just didn’t want us to sec.’

‘Like what?’ Jonathan asked.

‘Who knows? Some magical device. A treasure maybe.’

‘Then it isn’t too likely that Escargot would have just warned us away from whatever it was and left for the coast. He would have taken it with him.’

The Professor shrugged. About then Ahab woke up, his spot of shade beside the cabin having been chased off by the sun. The Professor tossed him an almond, and Ahab chomped it up with a show of great relish, working the thing back and forth between his teeth as if attempting to get just the right sort of hold on it. He seemed so pleased with the nut that the Professor gave him another one. Jonathan and the Professor could hardly sit and eat the things in front of him, so the three of them finished off the little bag between them.

‘What do you say, then?’ the Professor asked, folding up the wrinkled parchment that he held in his hand.

‘You’re the captain,’ Jonathan said. ‘If you say we put into Hightower Harbor, then I suppose we do. Do you really think there’s any treasure there?’

The Professor shrugged. ‘There could be in a castle like that. There could be treasure anywhere. Sometimes there is.’

Jonathan nodded in agreement. That seemed reasonable, at least in the philosophical sense.

For two days they didn’t see a soul – no lumber rafts or trade barges passed them; they never caught up with the two slouched-hatted fishermen who had spun past in the canoe that first morning. Once late the first evening, just as the sun disappeared beyond the fringe of forest to the west, they saw what might have been either a bear or a troll in the shadow of a tangled oak; it was swatting at fish in the river. Jonathan wished he had Talbot’s tuba just for the sake of seeing whether the instrument would have the effect on the beast that it was rumored to have. He remembered his own run-in with two trolls months before in almost the same spot, and the general amazement of everyone involved – trolls as well as men – at the wild and unlikely behavior of Professor Wurzle’s oboe weapon. ‘Those were the days,’ Jonathan thought, feeling for all the world as if that marvelous adventure had occurred ages ago, back in his wild youth, perhaps.

Everything was so unutterably peaceful along the river, however, that this time no such adventures befell them. They managed to read like whizbangs and smoke any number of pipes of tobacco. On the second morning the trout began to cooperate and they ate fish for lunch and again for dinner. Then Jonathan came up with the bright idea of stirring a bunch of broken trout meat into their scrambled eggs the next morning. After they finished, the Professor remarked that, for himself, he hoped to never see a trout again. Not on a plate at least. Jonathan felt pretty much the same way.

The shores of the Oriel began to stretch out as they approached Hightower Village. Broad green stretches of meadow, alive with columbine and lupine and wild iris, seemed to have pushed the forests away toward the distances. To the cast rose the White Mountains, covered in clouds and mystery, first visible across a stretch of grassy lowlands, then disappearing beyond a stand of towering hemlock or a cluster of mossy alders.

Lilies bloomed in the slack water along the banks, and among the floating leaves and the tangled roots swam a company of pond turtles and frogs, clambering up onto lily pads as big around as a plate, then sliding off again with a splash into the placid waters. The meadow gave way finally to swamps and fens scattered with the twisted shapes of long dead trees and occasional stands of alder and cottonwood that had managed to find a hillock high enough to keep their roots out of the surrounding waters.

That section of shore was dark and murky and cheerless, even on a fine day in the spring. Even the wild flowers that sprouted here and there in the swamps appeared to Jonathan to be doleful sorts of things, sad bits of color cast about in the gloomy stretches of swamp.

The Professor took the long view – saw the whole business through different eyes. There were no end of snakes and bugs and biological wonders afoot in the swamps, and at night in the summer, the lowlands burned with the tiny fires of a million glowworms, a jar full of which would work as well as any lantern to light a traveler’s path. The Professor’s talk of bugs and worms, however, did not do too much to change Jonathan’s attitude. Nor did the craggy shadows of Hightower Ridge improve it much, for there, jutting up from the rocky crest, were the granite walls of Hightower Castle. It was impossible to say where the gray cut-granite of the tower walls began. It looked as if the tower had sprouted from the ridge itself and that there had never been a time that the tower was anything but a partial ruin. It seemed as ageless as the dim stones of the broken land roundabout it. To the Professor, the tower was a mystery; to Jonathan it was more of a curse. His only consolation was that its most recent occupant, Selznak the evil conjuror dwarf, had been chased away upriver. An empty tower seemed a bit less foreboding than a tower occupied by an evil dwarf – but not much less.

It was relatively early in the morning when they sailed into Hightower Harbor, still fairly quiet and empty. Only a few people had returned since Selznak’s disappearance. Jonathan was relieved to see, however, that the windows of the boathouse were no longer boarded up and that some half dozen children were trapping crayfish along the banks. At least the village wasn’t wholly deserted as it had been that past winter.

Jonathan and the Professor decided to waste no time poking around town, but to trudge along the path through the swamp immediately and investigate the castle. They agreed to return to the raft before nightfall to avoid sleeping in the tower and upsetting any resident ghosts or demons.

They packed a lunch and set out carrying a rope, a lantern, a torch, and a dozen candles. Each brought along an oaken walking stick, not so much for support along the trail as for warding off goblins or clobbering a possible troll. The trail wound in and out through clumps of moss-hung trees, seeming to take the long way around. Three times they came upon forks and decided on each occasion to follow that fork that steered them in the general direction of the tower. That seemed to work well twice.

Some few minutes after following the third fork, however, they found themselves before an old stilted shanty with plank walls. Weedy mud had at one time plugged the chinks in the walls, but had long since fallen to bits. Little was left to keep the north wind out. A ruined porch with a stile railing slanted across the front, and on it sat a wizened woman who appeared to be so incredibly old that she was more a bag of dust and dry bones than flesh and blood. Her face was lined so deeply that it seemed to Jonathan that she could have profited as much as the walls of the shanty from an application of mud. She sat in the ruins of an armchair staring out through apparently sightless eyes. Jonathan didn’t like the look of her by half, nor of a bundle of what appeared to be dried bats that hung over the door. She was dressed in black. Faded lace hung in tatters round her collar and sleeves. A cat sat beneath her chair, idly batting at a long shred of lace that dangled in front of it.

Jonathan and the Professor stood silently for a moment, both of them prepared to tiptoe off back down the path toward the fork where they’d gone astray. Ahab watched the cat, black as a moonless night, but didn’t mutter any sort of greeting. He seemed to like the look of it about as much as his master did. The cat wandered out from beneath the chair and hopped up onto the tilting porch railing, staring down placidly at the three of them. The old woman stirred and fingered the lace on her sleeve. She smiled slowly with her mouth, but her eyes didn’t move. Jonathan noticed with horror that she hadn’t any color in her eyes, that they were the same dead milky gray over all, like the belly of yesterday’s fish. It was as if they’d been drained over long years of their color and sight, and the old woman had faded like a lizard on a rock to become part of the general colorless murk of the swamp.