The Stone Giant Read online

  2

  The Appearance of Uncle Helstrom

  Late one afternoon, three and a half weeks after he’d been pitched out by his wife, Escargot caught sight of himself in the big window in Beezle’s store, and realized with a start that he looked like a tramp, that his jacket was torn and his trousers needed soap. His shirt, which he’d owned long before he’d developed the temporary madness that had led to his getting married, had turned thin. The elbows resembled muslin or, worse yet, spiderweb.

  He was on his way to Wurzle’s lending library. He’d given up pretending that he was only after a book. He had a stack of G. Smithers – all of the White Mountains books he’d traded out of Gilroy Bastable – hidden away in the Widow’s windmill, and hadn’t half read through them yet. He was going to Wurzle’s to find Leta; that’s what he was doing. So far he’d had no success. Just look at me, he thought to himself, staring at his sad reflection in Beezle’s window. A month earlier if he’d looked like that he wouldn’t have cared. Caring wouldn’t have crossed his, mind. He would have prided himself in it, to a degree –laughed at Beezle in his starchy shirt and tie, tiptoeing around mud puddles and dusting off chairs before he sat down. Who in the world did a man like Beezle intend to impress? Grocery shoppers? Old fatheads who complained about spots on the apples and argued about the price of dried beans? A month ago Escargot would have grinned to think about it. He had had no one but his wife to impress, and ... Well, he thought, looking at his ill-shaven face in the store window, perhaps he hadn’t done as well at that as he might have. The door of the market opened and Beezle’s head shoved out, round and grinning and with its pale hair greased up like a fence.

  ‘Theophile,’ said Beezle, half grinning and half saddened, as if he’d seen his friend looking better, perhaps, or as if he didn’t entirely fancy seeing Escargot at all.

  Escargot gritted his teeth. He detested being called by his first name, which no one in the world, apparently, could pronounce. He forced himself to grin at Beezle, though. Nothing would be accomplished by his going about town flying into rages. Heaven knew what rumors had been circulated about his run-in with Stover, especially since Stover was the only one who would have done any rumor circulating. Leta didn’t at all seem to be the sort who would go in for telling tales, even though her version would be closer to the truth.

  ‘I say, old man,’ Beezle said, screwing his face into a wide grin. ‘This is a delicate sort of subject, I know, but I was watching you there in the window a moment ago, and you seemed ... you seemed ... out of sorts, if you follow me.’ With that Beezle looked Escargot up and down as if contemplating the cut of his coat. Escargot waited, befuddled. ‘What I mean to say, don’t you know, is simply this. Would a spot of work help? Sweeping and dusting? Deliveries? This window, it strikes me now, could use a washup.’ His face brightened, as if he were about to say something really clever. ‘It could well be,’ he finished, eyes widening, ‘that half of what you were looking at is the fault of the window, couldn’t it?’

  Escargot began to nod silently, as if in agreement with Beezle’s last comment. But then he shook his head and smiled back. If there was nothing else to be done, at least he could out-smile him. ‘I’m not up to it today, Evelyn,’ he said, deliberately using Beezle’s first name, which was about eight times as foolish as his own. ‘But I’ll keep my eyes open. If I see any of the village lads lounging about, doing nothing, I’ll send them your way. That spot on your tie appears to be strawberry jam, doesn’t it? My wife, bless her heart, used to tell me by the hour about how that sort of thing stains. Soak it in cold water first; that’s what she’d tell you. Then smear soap on the stain before you go after it with the washboard.’

  Escargot tipped his hat and set out, leaving Beezle to study his tie. He was happy enough with the exchange. Beezle had meant well, to be sure. He was just thickheaded – a blessing, no doubt, in a man who set such lofty goals for himself. At least Professor Wurzle wouldn’t rag him about his fallen state. Wurzle seemed to appreciate the art of doing nothing almost as much as did Escargot. The Professor had turned it into a study. He’d pluck up a lot of leaves when he was out strolling in the forest and pretend that the purpose of the stroll was to collect those leaves. Then he’d tack labels on them and put them in a box and mutter now and again about opening a museum of natural history. His lending library was an excuse to sit in a stuffed chair and read and smoke all day.

  But when Escargot arrived at the library, the Professor wasn’t, in fact, reading and smoking. He was out with a net after salamanders, said his young assistant. Escargot wondered aloud if the assistant had, perhaps, seen the young lady who was so fond of Smithers books. Not for a week, said the youth, grinning at Escargot as if the two of them shared an unspoken joke. Rumor had it she’d left town. Old Stover, they said, had fired her, and she’d gone back to Seaside. She had been renting a room over the tavern and had left the same night as the altercation. The young man winked familiarly at Escargot, then seemed to take a long look at him, as if suddenly noticing something that he hadn’t seen a moment before. Escargot straightened his shoulders abruptly and gave the youth a sidewise glance.

  ‘Did she say she was going back to Seaside?’

  ‘Now how would I know?’ asked the youth, bending over the counter to have a look at Escargot’s shoes. ‘She didn’t say nothing to me, did she? Though that don’t mean she wouldn’t have. She said plenty to me before.’

  ‘Did she,’ said Escargot flatly, shaking his head and turning to leave. He was suddenly tired of trekking around town in worn-out clothes and with nothing to do but carry on maddening conversations with whomever he was unfortunate enough to bump into. That was one of the drawbacks of having no real business to attend to. If he were Beezle, pedaling groceries up the hill, he could shout incoherencies at people without offending them. He’d be respected because he was busy. Being busy was a virtue; being idle was a vice. That was one of life’s vast mysteries.

  On the way out the door he nearly bumped into Professor Wurzle, who everyone referred to as ‘the Professor’ even though he was only three years out of the university and had never been, as far as Escargot could tell, a teacher of any sort. Escargot himself had attended the university, for a time anyway. It gave one – what was it? – a certain respectability when one was pursuing a monied wife. Wurzle carried in either hand a fat salamander, speckled and wide-eyed.

  ‘Look at these specimens!’ he cried happily at Escargot.

  ‘Very nice indeed.’

  ‘First of the season, sir. First of the season. You don’t get many of this stature, not east of the mountains.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you do,’ said Escargot, stopping for a moment to admire the beasts. Then, almost under his breath, he asked, ‘Haven’t seen Leta around, have you? The dark-haired girl who reads Smithers?’

  ‘Who?’ asked Wurzle, wrinkling up his forehead. Then he looked hard into the face of one of the salamanders, as if it had been the salamander that had spoken to him, or as if he suspected that the creature knew the answer to Escargot’s question.

  ‘I already told him all there is to know!’ shouted the young man from within the store. ‘He don’t want nothing but trouble!’

  ‘Say,’ said Wurzle, brightening up. ‘I’ve built a cage for these two that I’m rather proud of – potted plants, little caverns, bit of a pond. Care to take a look at it?’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Escargot, backing off down the boardwalk, ‘but I’ve got to be off. Got to check the lines before dusk. Perhaps later?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said the Professor, already stepping into the library and looking again into the face of his salamander. ‘Anytime at all. I’m always here, or at least the boy is.’ His voice evaporated as the door swung shut behind him. Escargot trudged away down the street, heading for the harbor, watching the toes of his shoes kick up little sprays of pebbles, his mind revolving and yet thinking about nothing in particular, but lost in a salad of thoughts about his daughter an
d his wife and Beezle’s window and Leta and Stover and the silly fat salamander that Professor Wurzle held in such high esteem. It was entirely conceivable that Twombly Town wasn’t big enough to hold the lot of them. And if Leta had left for Seaside, then perhaps it was high time he did the same.

  The evening promised to be cool and wet. The black oaks across the Oriel were dark with dampness and twilight, and already the fog covered the ground around them like a gray, cottony blanket. Escargot sat on a fallen tree, staring across the river into the woods and thinking of nothing. Tied to scattered branches along the tree were heavy fishing lines that angled out into the shadowy water, trailing away downstream in the current. Clumps of waterweeds clung to the lines where they entered the water, and now and then some bit of debris – a tangle of twigs and leaves or a half-submerged piece of driftwood –came floating along to bump into one of the lines, spinning away and taking most of the waterweeds with it.

  The river was rising. It seemed to be hurrying along toward the sea, as if more anxious by the day to arrive at its destination. Escargot had begun to fancy the idea of destinations himself. It struck him that it might as easily be him swirling away down the river toward the coast. It seemed to him that he had somehow been wasting his time for years.

  Destinations – that was the secret. It didn’t much matter what they were. There was something frightening about staying overlong in the same place, about ‘settling down.’ You could too clearly see the end, perhaps – all the gray years laid out end to end like paving stones and winding up at a last carved stone standing upright in a weedy cemetery. Movement, Escargot thought, squinting into the dark trees, would somehow bend and twist the path so that a person couldn’t tell finally where he’d started and where he was likely to finish. That was appealing – to be always heading somewhere, bartering a bit along the road in order to stay in tobacco: washing the occasional window if it was absolutely necessary and whistling while you were at it; pinching the odd pie that was cooling on a windowsill, and leaving for it a willow flute or a handful of marbles or a grass basket full of salted fish.

  While the sensible villager huddled in his house at night wondering at the scrape and swish of branches in the wind and half fearing the humped shadows of tangled berry vines out in the dark yard, Escargot would be abroad, living among the shadows. It would be his feet that would crunch past on the gravel at midnight and cause the villager to sit upright in his bed, listening, shivering, cocking his head. Perhaps he’d sail to Oceania and fall among pirates or tramp downriver to seek out treasure in the Goblin Wood.

  Perhaps – perhaps he’d start by going to Seaside and looking up Leta. That was a good enough destination for the moment. In a week, when Halloween was past and the nights were a bit emptier of enchantment, they would hold the harvest fair in Seaside. Escargot could picture himself among the crowds – bonfires burning in the streets, men and elves and linkmen milling among the Seaside dwarfs, an occasional band of goblins hooting with idiotic laughter and scuttling away down an alley after having terrorized an innkeeper or having pulled the hair of a poor old woman in the street, There would be Leta, little realizing who it was that stood behind her. He’d tap her on the shoulder. She’d turn, surprised. He’d smile and say something to her, something witty. What would it be? He’d have to think about it. That was the sort of moment he’d want to be prepared for; otherwise he’d spend a lifetime regretting having said something foolish.

  Escargot was startled by a splash twenty feet out into the river, and he grabbed the line near his right ear, thinking that a river squid had taken the glowworm on the end of it. The fog had crept higher. Only ghostly branches could be seen across the water. The docks in Twombly Town Harbor were invisible fifty yards distant, and the evening was silent and still. The muted hooting of an owl drifted like a disembodied voice out of the woods. There was nothing on any of the lines.

  Out over the river, sculling along some four or five feet above the water and angling in toward where Escargot sat on his log, a spiney, round-headed fish glowing like a lantern swam leisurely through the foggy air. It drew up to within five feet of him before blinking and changing course. ‘Fogfish!’ whispered Escargot, slowly standing and peering round for his net. There was something odd about the fog – about the heavy, lazy nature of it, about the way it seemed to have crept out of the forest instead of having risen from the river. It felt like enchantment, the product of the season, of the approach of Halloween. Fogfish never appeared in a common fog. Escargot was certain of that much.

  Two minutes earlier he couldn’t have sworn that fogfish ever appeared at all. You heard stories, of course, stories told on the same late and festive evenings that produced tales of great river squid that dragged fishing boats to a watery doom in the Oriel River delta above Seaside, tales of mermaids in the shallows off Monmouth Point and of drowned sailors who piloted ghostly sloops far beneath the surface of the river, hauling along toward unknowable destinations. There were stories that the Oriel River was the magical counterpart of another vast river in a faraway and magical land. When the night was particularly full of misty enchantment, or so the stories went, boats and fish and heaven knew what sorts of deepwater creatures wandered out of one river and into the next.

  G. Smithers was full of such stuff – tales of a land known as Balumnia, illustrated maps tracing just such a river, a river strangely like the Oriel with similarly situated towns and a vast haunted woods not at all unlike the Goblin Wood that stretched along the river south of Hightower Village. Escargot had always had curious notions about G. Smithers and his maps. Professor Wurzle had insisted that Smithers, living in Brompton Village on the Oriel itself, would naturally have used a river he was familiar with as a model. All writers, insisted Wurzle, were bound by the familiar, by what they knew. They were slaves to it. But Professor Wurzle was too full of what passed for common sense to satisfy Escargot. There was nothing commonsensical about fogfish.

  Escargot crouched on the bank, clutching his net. All was silent but for the occasional, distant tap, tap, tap of something, of a woodpecker, perhaps. Night had drifted in with the fog, and both had thickened until the dark river disappeared, all but the still water along the bank at Escargot’s feet. The glow of another wandering fogfish shone briefly offshore like a windborne jack-o’-lantern, then another drifted past, even farther out, slanting briefly in, then disappearing with a muted splash into the river.

  Minutes passed, one by one, Escargot listening in the silent night, watching, thinking that even the dirt floor of the Widow’s windmill and the sorry little heap of late berries and pickled fish that awaited him there had begun to look awfully warm and cozy. There were nights to be out and about in, it seemed to him suddenly, and there were nights to leave alone. He yanked one last time on his lines, then turned toward the meadow, thinking to hide his net in a hollow beneath the log.

  Before him, revealed by suddenly thinning mist, stood an old woman, bent with age, her eyes the color of moonlit fog. She leaned on a crooked stick, looking at nothing. Then she turned slowly and hobbled away into a dense wall of gray, disappearing utterly. The tapping began again, closer this time, each tap just a fraction sharper and clearer than the last, as if it were the tapping of a blind man feeling his way across cobbles. The breeze stirred the meadow grasses, swirling clouds of fog into a little wind devil.

  Then, in a wink, as if she had appeared out of the vapors, out of the breeze itself, Leta stood before him on the meadow. Beside her stood a dwarf in a slouch hat and carrying a staff, a broad grin on his face. In his mouth was a long pipe. Thick smoke, strangely aromatic, curled from it, disappearing at once into the fog. The smoke was heavy with the curious smell of waterweeds and river mud and the dusty odor of powdered, dry bone. The dwarf winked slowly and put a finger to the brim of his hat.

  Escargot found that he couldn’t speak. Here was Leta, on the one hand, miraculously restored to the village, and here was a night full of portent and mystery on the other
, a night of blind old ladies strolling along the river road, of dwarfs in slouch hats winking and grinning and smoking odd pipes. He found that despite the wet air his lips and throat were dry. He croaked out a hello, which made Leta smile, as if she thought it was funny that she had surprised him there on the meadow.

  ‘I’d like to introduce my uncle to you,’ she said, gesturing at the dwarf. ‘Mr Abner Helstrom, of Hightower Village. I’ve been downriver, staying with him.’

  ‘Glad to meet you, sir,’ said Escargot dubiously, shaking the cold hand of the dwarf. He patted his pocket, suddenly wishing for the company of a familiar lit pipe.

  ‘Like to try a pipe full of my blend, Mr ... what was it again?’

  ‘Escargot. Theophile Escargot, sir, at your service.’ He grinned at Leta while waving away the open pouch of tobacco that the dwarf thrust in his direction. ‘Too exotic for my tastes, I’m afraid. I have common tastes in tobacco. Very common.’ He looked into the open mouth of the pouch, just as the dwarf pushed it shut, and was certain he saw curling up out of the tangled leaves either the tiny tentacle of an octopus or the pink tail of a pig. He couldn’t say which. The dwarf winked at him and patted him on the arm. Then, leading him by the elbow, the little man set off up the meadow, angling across toward the windmill. Leta followed along behind.

  ‘My niece tells me you’ve fallen on hard times.’

  ‘Tolerably hard times,’ said Escargot, wondering why on earth his troubles would concern this winking uncle. Maybe Leta had more of an interest in him than she’d let on. That was it. He was suddenly certain of it. Her abrupt disappearance and now her return – what could it mean but that she’d been disturbed by his bad luck? He turned and smiled at her. She smiled back and nodded, as if having read his thoughts. ‘A man has to bear up, though,’ said Escargot staunchly, pushing open the plank door of the windmill.