Authors: James P. Blaylock
Ahead was the carcass of a flatbed wagon with only one wheel, the bed canted over on its axles, facing the alley. He angled across, counting on the mob’s being far enough behind him, and in three leaps pitched his basket over the fence beside the wagon, vaulted up the sloped bed, and flung himself after the basket, coming down in a tangle of fern. He scooped up the basket and scuttled across the lawn, creeping in under vines in a corner where he wheezed for breath, his hand over his mouth, certain that they’d hear through the fence his heart laboring and his lungs inflating. The sound of the mob surged toward him, led by particularly heavy stomping, then surged away again. If he was lucky the alley would wind along for miles. He hunched out from beneath his vines and made for the street, preparing to run again if the owner of the house caught sight of him. He was too winded to think of any lies.
The Vance Hotel loomed above the rest of the Royal Street residences. It was four stories high – a white painted building of cornices and columns and corbels and great mullioned windows wreathed in flowering vines. A man in a tight red suit opened the door for a woman who, despite the warm afternoon, wore a fur coat, and whose husband followed along behind her, his face pinched into a countenance of perpetual condescension. The red-suited doorman shut the door in Escargot’s face, giving him a look that suggested that Escargot was most likely lost.
‘Excuse me,’ said Escargot, realizing all of a sudden that his clothes were a rumpled mess because of the chase. He was sweating, too, after the exertion of it, and his pantleg bore the stains of the ferns he’d slid through. ‘This
is
the Vance Hotel?’
The man stared at him.
‘I mean to say, I’ve need of a room. For the night. Nothing too delicate, you understand. Something with a view, though.’
The man pursed his lips and shook his head, not in such a way that it seemed he was denying Escargot a room, but as if he simply wasn’t in the mood for jokes, however well intended. A gentleman with a pince-nez approached, having stepped out of a hansom cab with a dog the size of a pony. ‘Stand aside, sir!’ said the doorman in a stage whisper. And the man from the cab pushed past, dusting at his sleeve when it brushed Escargot’s basket. The kelp, it seemed, had somehow sloshed itself over the side, past the rags. It had begun to ripen in the heat. Escargot jammed it back in and covered it up, smiling weakly at the doorman and shaking his head. ‘Very nutritional,’ he said, ‘kelp.’ Then, seeing that things had once again gone awry, he turned and strode away down the street.
He stood in the shadows of a shuttered house across the way for an hour before the doorman disappeared, then he sprinted to the hotel before another officious guard took the first man’s place. Inside was a tremendous, high-ceilinged lobby, overgrown with potted plants and carved mouldings and heavy pastel carpets thrown higgledy-piggledy about the marble floors. His basket was almost wondrously odorous, as if he were hauling an overheated tidepool along behind him in a wagon. People turned to scowl at him as he skirted wide of the long counter and headed for the stairs.
The futility of the whole business was apparent. There probably wasn’t anybody at the Vance Hotel who was interested in lilac kelp in the first place. That must have been a lie. And if there was, what then? There must be two hundred rooms in the place. The hotel stretched on for half a block. What in the world, he asked himself, was he doing there besides wasting his time? He could put out to sea tomorrow and collect no end of rare seashells to hawk to perfectly reputable curio shops in the harbor. But here he was chasing down a will-o’-the-wisp that was a product of a man who’d swindled him.
He trudged up the stairs to the second floor. He couldn’t just knock on the door, could he? He’d be out in a moment. He could claim in a surprised tone to have knocked on the
wrong
door if whoever opened it didn’t look like the sort who would be interested in kelp. But what would such a person look like anyway? Like Professor Wurzle, frazzled and rumpled? The third floor loomed into view. He strode across the landing and up the stairs toward the fourth, thinking to get as far away as possible from the lobby.
At the top lay another landing that opened on either side onto a long hallway. In front of him and across the back of the landing itself stood a pair of glass doors, thrown back, letting in the warm afternoon breeze. Standing before them, leaning against a balcony rail with his back to Escargot, was a dwarf in a long coat. Smoke billowed above his slouch hat. Escargot walked toward him with a slackening step. The fragrant reek of pipe-smoke wafted toward him on the breeze through the window. It smelled just a bit like the kelp in his basket and just a bit like the ground bones of henny-penny men. The dwarf turned and squinted at him, cocking his head. Then he took his pipe out of his mouth and looked harder. Escargot gaped back, dropping his basket of kelp to the floor. It was Abner Helstrom who stood before him, dressed in tweed trousers and a necktie fixed to a ruffled shirt with a stickpin, the pin crowned by what was either a cleverly carved bit of ivory or a miniature human skull.
Escargot couldn’t speak. Nothing in the world could have prepared him for this – not even Smithers. Even if he could speak, what would he say? Would he ask for his marbles back? Would he ask after Abner Helstrom’s niece? The dwarf, it seemed, was no more inclined toward speech than was Escargot, and he returned Escargot’s look gape for gape, puffing furiously on his pipe so that his head was enveloped in smoke.
‘There he is!’ came a voice from up the hall, and two men hurried toward them, the first one being the red-suited doorman, who seemed intent upon pitching Escargot into the road. The man with him wore a similar suit. ‘Is he bothering you, sir?’ asked the doorman of Uncle Helstrom.
‘That’s exactly what he’s doing,’ said the dwarf. ‘He’s got some filthy thing in his basket there, a dead thing, I believe. It smells awfully.’
‘Take the basket,’ said the doorman to his associate.
‘Not a bit of it,’ cried Uncle Helstrom, snatching the basket up from the floor. ‘I’ll just take this myself – as evidence, won’t I? Some sort of kelp, it looks like. Quite conceivably poisonous. I’m a naturalist, you know. I’ll have this analyzed. The hotel will hear from my solicitor within the week. Meanwhile, see this gentleman out.’ The dwarf peered beneath the rags, then looked up and winked at Escargot as the two hustled him toward the stairwell, walking along beside him till he was out the door and on the sidewalk. He headed south on Royal Street toward the harbor, his boat gone, his kelp stolen, and his hopes stove in and sinking in deep water. But the embarrassment at the hotel was forgotten in half a block, and his money and kelp along with it. There were far more pressing and peculiar issues to confound him.
Abner Helstrom, for instance. Thank heaven he had been surprised. That signified, certainly. If he
hadn’t
been, what then? What if he had
expected
Escargot to arrive? What would Escargot do then? Life on the sea bottom? There’d be nothing for it but to return to Twombly Town and apply to Beezle for a job washing windows. The expression on the dwarf’s face had been genuine, though. He’d mustered the wink, finally, but it had taken him a good while to come up with it.
All of that, of course, meant that the dwarf hadn’t been expecting such company, and that Escargot had stumbled into a monumental coincidence of some sort. All in all it was a turn for the better. For weeks he’d been in the grip, or so it had seemed, of Uncle Helstrom – harried out of Twombly Town, chased about the streets of Seaside. Now it was Escargot who loomed out of nowhere to confront the dwarf. It must have given him a certain amount of pause, turning around to see Escargot striding toward him. Damnation! If only he’d had a look of determination on his face. If only he hadn’t been so apparently surprised to see the dwarf standing there. If only he’d managed the wink first, for heaven’s sake. But he hadn’t.
This, certainly, wasn’t the end of anything. Things were afoot, it seemed. It was inconceivable that Uncle Helstrom was simply in Balumnia on holiday, and that the marble business and the witch in the alley weren’t part of some big, unfathomable affair. Where had Leta gone? One moment she sat atop the pyre, and the next she vanished. And here was Uncle Helstrom, wasn’t he? Things were afoot all right, and Escargot, no longer in the kelp business, was bound to follow them. He hadn’t anything else to do. He crossed Royal Street to a sidewalk cafe, sat down at a table in the shade, and spent the last of Kreslow’s coins on a pint of ale.
Abner Helstrom appeared on the sidewalk opposite a half hour later, striding along at a good clip, as if he was on his way to somewhere in particular. Feeling like a detective, Escargot drained his glass, stood up, cast an appraising squint up and down, and followed the dwarf on the cafe side of the street, keeping as much as possible in the shadows, which were long and deep, since the afternoon was fast declining into evening.
The dwarf didn’t appear to be at all worried about being followed. And why should he? He’d have to suppose that Escargot’s sudden appearance was nothing more than coincidence. But coincidence or no, it had put the fear into him. Perhaps, thought Escargot, a man like Helstrom was so full of plots and machinations that he naturally assumed that everyone else was too. Who would be more suspicious of others than a guilty man?
It was night when Abner Helstrom reached the harbor. The sky had been swept clean by a soft wind off the ocean, and a nation of stars shined overhead, crowding each other for space. The sea lay dark and silent with here and there the shadow of a moored boat riding atop it, one or two of which had lights cheerfully aglow in their cabins, as if their owners slept abroad at night. Away east toward the open ocean the long arch of the first of the thirteen bridges shone in patchy lantern light cast from stone lamps atop the bridge.
The harborside was a warren of decaying buildings, clapboard warehouses, canneries, and old, turreted mansions that had seen their day and had been let out to rats and cats and lodgers down on their luck. Many houses sat atop pilings, the sea lapping in beneath them. Running out to sea were brokendown piers, some no more than a dozen or two sinking pilings with here and there a mossy, barnacled timber attached with rusty bolts. The smell of fish and tar and dry seaweed washed across the evening – not a bad smell, altogether, although somehow it lent the creaking darkness of the place a musty sort of soul that made it far more threatening there in the moonlight than it would have been in the light of day.
Escargot hunched along, his hands in his pockets, vaguely unsettled by the neighborhood. He watched the dwarf a half block ahead, and he stopped once, ducking back into the shadow of a decayed stoop when his quarry paused for a moment and turned suddenly around, as if he’d heard the echo of following footsteps. He went on, though, crossing over to Escargot’s side of the street, stopping in front of a tilted, darkened house, and glancing again up and down the road. Escargot watched from his doorway, determined to follow the dwarf into the house, but wishing that he had a candle with him, that and the club he kept promising himself he’d acquire.
He stepped up to the recessed entryway of the building and peered in through the crack where the door had been left ajar. There was no closing it, in fact, since the entire house had sheered sideways over the years, the foundation sinking in the wet, sandy soil of the harborside. There was scarcely a window in the front of the house left unbroken, and what had once been an elegantly carved frieze between floors had been disfigured by years and years of hard weather and salt air and had cracked and fallen away so as to expose here and there darkened wall studs and wood lath. No one, certainly, could be living in the place aside from tramps or criminals.
He listened at the open door. There was the sound of mumbling within – people talking secretly, perhaps, in a nearby room, or as easily, people talking openly farther along, in the second story or in a back kitchen. The door pushed open with hardly a creak, and Escargot stepped in on tiptoe. Moonlight, enough to see by anyway, shined in through dirty windows. The mumbling continued, and then a shuffling of feet.
A ruined stairway angled away into the darkness of the upper floor, and Escargot debated climbing it, but gave the idea up. The darkness of the house and its general gloom seemed to make it more sensible to merely crouch into the little alcove beneath the stairs and wait, listening. There was no use blundering into some sort of horrible activity like he’d blundered in among the witches in the Widow’s windmill. Stealth was what he wanted here. He’d think things out this time, and bolt for the door at the drop of a pin.
But crouching beneath the stairs wasn’t worth much either. After a minute or two of listening to his heart beat and of squinting at shadows while wondering whether things weren’t stirring in the darkness, he bent back out, then immediately ducked in again, banging his head on the low ceiling, as he heard, from above him, the sound of footsteps clump, clump, clumping down the stairs. He held his breath, smashing himself back into the darkness. If they passed him, heading toward the harborside of the house, they’d have to turn and look back to see him, and he’d be prepared for that. He’d jump for the front door. He could outrun anyone on such a night as this.
There was Abner Helstrom, carrying his stick now. Escargot could see his pant cuffs and the shod tip of the stick and his pointed shoes as the dwarf waited in the hallway for someone else coming along after him. Escargot knew who it would be before he heard her speak. It had to be Leta, even though her appearance there in Balumnia after her strange odyssey in Seaside made little apparent sense. But it was she, following along down the hallway in the wake of her uncle. They seemed to be in a sizable hurry – quite likely a fortunate thing, since it had seemed to Escargot that the witch had been able to sense his presence in past encounters. Perhaps their haste veiled her powers. But why the haste? Escargot grinned. They were hunted all of a sudden, weren’t they? Despite the dwarf’s winking, he feared that Escargot was a more powerful nemesis than he’d given him credit for. He must wonder how in the world Escargot had come to Balumnia. How in the world, for that matter, had the
dwarf
gotten there?