The Disappearing Dwarf Read online

  Part of him, however, suspected that if one were to be a gentleman adventurer or a man of the world he’d best be born to it – that it was some sort of natural talent. If he were to assume such a role he’d probably develop a mysterious and unfortunate likeness to a gibbon ape. In truth, his adventures of the past fall hadn’t made him feel any different at all; he still woke up in the morning good old Jonathan Bing, the Cheeser. But then, all things considered, he wasn’t altogether dissatisfied with such a fate.

  He envied the Professor in a mild way, though, bustling around there on the docks that quiet morning, the sun creeping up over the hills to the east. The Professor didn’t care a bit for adventures or for becoming anything at all. He was content to be off searching for a peculiar species of river clam or calculating the changes of color in the rainbow ice floes in the Mountains of the Moon. Science was enough for the Professor. More than enough in fact. He never ran out of wonders to investigate.

  The new day was already warm. A breeze was blowing down the valley and it felt how Jonathan imagined a trade wind should feel. It had the smell of summer blossoms on it and the musty, weedy smell of the river. There was just enough breeze to blow his hair up out of his eyes and to rustle the leaves on the oaks. The wind would be at their backs on the way downriver – an advantage, certainly, if they were concerned with time. But then that was just about the last thing Jonathan was concerned with, so he determined not to hoist the sail anyway. He and Ahab picked their way along the path that ran through the meadow past the Widow’s windmill. It was rough going because through some marvel of nature about a billion little toads had hatched out in the night and were making off across the meadow to determine the lay of the land. Jonathan and Ahab had to look sharp to avoid stepping on any. He paused to scatter a handful over Ahab’s back in order to give the critters a lift down to the river. Also he wanted to see the Professor’s face at the sight of the toad-laden dog; his mind would be a furor of theses and speculations.

  The river wound away around a distant bend, its glassy surface broken only by an occasional little eddy or the swirl of a fish. The shore grasses were jeweled with dew that gleamed in the new sun. It was the sort of day that made Jonathan determined to get up with the sun henceforth, just for the sake of the morning. Such ideas, of course, would evaporate as quickly as the dew on the grass, and the idea of sleeping until noon would be every bit as appealing to him by late evening as the idea of rising early was to him there on the meadow.

  He poked along after Ahab and finally clomped out onto the wharf. Just for the fun of it, he checked the trout lines that Talbot had tied along one of the wide joists that supported the dock. It was Talbot’s habit to check the lines each morning about seven before settling in to make cheese. There were, invariably, no trout on the lines. Talbot had begun by using lumps of old cheese as bait – not a bad idea at all – but the cheese had fallen so quickly to bits that the hooks went unbaited for about twenty-three hours out of every twenty-four. He had determined, finally, that yellow lumps of rubber would work as well as cheese and found that the rubber could be depended upon to stay on the job and not wander off. The result, however, was pretty much the same. The Professor said that it was likely, at least from the scientific angle, that lumps of yellow rubber affected fish in pretty much the same way that tubas affected bears and goblins, and that Talbot would do well to study the situation a bit more before putting too much faith in rubber cheese.

  There were about a half dozen trout, actually, nosing about in the water. They seemed to be gathered around one of the floating rubber cheeses, looking at it as if mystified. As Jonathan watched, one of the trout swam off into the shadows and then came back with two of his friends who, along with the rest of the trout, hovered about, eyeballing the false cheese. The Professor walked over to sec what it was that so captivated Jonathan.

  These trout seem to be studying Talbot’s rubber cheese,’ Jonathan said. ‘I wonder if their concern is scientific or philosophic’

  ‘Almost certainly philosophic,’ the Professor replied. They’re coming to conclusions about the nature of such a beast as would dangle lumps of rubber beneath a dock.’

  ‘They can only conclude, then,’ Jonathan said, ‘that we’re a race of lunatics. They’ll score our significance in terms of dangling rubber cheese. Perhaps we should drop a book down on a string, or dangle some symbol of technology like a compass or a marble or a bar of soap.’

  ‘That would just make matters worse. They’d wonder why we worked up such marvels, then dumped them into the water.’

  About then, from the green depths of the river, a school of long, rubbery river squid came undulating along, scattering the trout in a half dozen directions. They had great round protruding eyes and a dozen tentacles that trailed along behind. They paused momentarily near the surface, took a look about, then disappeared into the depths, leaving Talbot’s rubber cheese dangling forlornly there in the current.

  There must be a whole world of stuff going on down there that we don’t know anything about,’ Jonathan observed. ‘It would be strange to live in that sort of green and shifting light. Too many shadows for my taste.’

  ‘I’m not sure I agree.’ The Professor walked back across to the raft. ‘I’m at work on a set of plans for a device much like Escargot’s. A subsurface boat. Imagine what you’d see.’

  The two of them idled along for another half hour, then cast off and angled out into mid-river. Two men in slouch hats, smoking pipes and trailing fishing lines, spun past in a canoe. They disappeared around a distant swerve of the shore. Jonathan watched Twombly Town grow smaller, and he saw, finally, before he too rounded that bend, young Talbot, tuba and all, coming along down the path toward the wharves in order to check his lines. Talbot waved at them from afar, and as the raft swirled away out of sight of the village, one echoing mournful note from the mouth of Talbot’s tuba reached them, a sad and distant farewell.

  Jonathan was immediately homesick in the warm silence of the morning, not as cheerful and full of expectations as he had hoped to be. The Professor broke the silence by banging the coffee pot about and by clattering together pots of butter and jam. When he cut into a loaf of fresh bread, the smell of coffee and bread seemed to Jonathan to be the smell of life itself. Never one to fly in the face of anything as significant as life, he ripped into a big hunk of bread smeared over with apple butter. Then he tossed back a cup of coffee, the combination of coffee and bread effectively scattering the morose mood he seemed to have slipped into. He decided, in fact, to throw out a line of his own and catch a couple of those trout who had been making mock of Talbot’s rubber cheese. By the end of breakfast, Twombly Town might as well have been about a thousand miles behind them, and it seemed to Jonathan as if the future held great undefinable promise.

  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.

  3

  The Shanty in the Swamp

  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 toweri
ng 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.