The Stone Giant Page 6

  Escargot edged past beneath the window, conscious of the turning blades behind him. It wouldn’t do to have one of them crack him in the head. He pulled himself up on the sill, wafered against the damp, dark shingles, and peered in at the window. A half dozen jack-o’-lanterns burned round the walls. Three witches kneeled on the dirt inside, casting a pair of enormous ivory dice across a carven board. Leta wasn’t among them. Yet Escargot had been certain that it was her voice he had heard above the murmuring. Near the shut door of the mill an iron cauldron sat on a heap of burning kindling. The smoke from the fire mingled with steam from the cauldron, hovering in the air in a pink cloud before condensing and falling back into the cauldron like bloody raindrops. Four broomsticks leaned against the door.

  One of the witches was enormously fat, with a fleshy face that nearly hid her eyes. She crouched there on the floor, an overstuffed, robed doll, her fingers working like pudgy snakes over the tumbling dice. Next to her lay a leather bag – Escargot’s leather bag. Marbles spilled out of the mouth of it.

  ‘Hey!’ cried Escargot in sudden surprise, astonished to see the bag and determined to get it back. The fat witch grinned up at him, as if she were happy that he’d dropped by, as if she’d been expecting him. She plucked up one of the marbles, held it up briefly in the light of a glowing jack-o’-lantern, and flipped it into the cauldron which hissed and smoked and sent a reeking cloud of vapor swirling about the little room, smelling sickeningly of blood.

  Escargot lurched backward, pushing the pumpkin on the windowsill into the room. He heard it thud against the dirt just as one of the vanes swung round toward him, skiving across the back of his head, brushing his ear. The next vane, whipped round in a sudden gust of wind, snatched the back of his coat, and the ragged lattice tangled itself like fingers into his collar and hair.

  Before he had time to cry out he found himself swept around in a broad arc, into the air, following the path of the cat. He clawed at the air behind him, clutching for a hold on the rickety vane. Surely his weight would stop the thing’s turning – either that or simply snap it off. He’d find himself rolling down the hill with a broken neck. He managed to hook one foot into a slat and to grab hold behind his head with his right hand. It wouldn’t be too difficult to disentangle his coat, but he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to do that, not until he was a shade closer to the ground.

  So he held on, the vanes spinning faster as he dropped, then climbed again, the sound of cackling laughter ringing out from within the mill. Wood snapped. His heel broke through the spindly lattice, jammed against another, and snapped through that. His coat ripped and he slumped an inch, his stomach lurching up into his throat. Again the vane crested the top and plummeted toward the meadow. Escargot shouted involuntarily, waiting to smash into the ground. Then he sailed upward again in an increasing rush, as if the wind had turned suddenly into a gale. The fog blew round his face, thinning and evaporating as he spun faster and faster, round and round, the meadow and the woods and the hills and the red glow of dawn racing past in a blurred whirligig. Finally, dizzy and hanging, his jacket crammed up round his shoulders and neck, he swung to a stop at the top of the mill, facing the upper window.

  Crouched on its haunches on the floorboards was the cat. A fat mouse cowered between its paws. The cat batted at the mouse, dropping it, snatching it up in its teeth, peering out suddenly at the dangling Escargot, who watched horrified, understanding that the jack-o’-lantern in the window below had been meant to attract someone – him. The cat seemed to shimmer and waver, to grow and shrink and then, in a blink, it was Leta who crouched on the floorboards, holding in her hands his signed G. Smithers, shredded and stained, the binding hanging by a half dozen stretched threads. Then she was a cat again shaking with silent laughter, the mouse in her teeth. Once again the vanes revolved, and when they came back around there was Leta, grinning at him, red dawnlight reflecting off her eyes. She shimmered once again, metamorphosing into a hunched, cat-like shadow and then into the old, bent woman with milky eyes and hair like cobweb.

  The jacket ripped one last time, and Escargot jerked downward, the vane warping with his weight. He lurched sideways for a handhold, his heel skidding through brittle slats. He fell, banging against the blade below and sliding along it before tumbling down onto the meadow. Then he was up and running. He angled across toward the river road and the comfortable lights of Twombly Town aglow in the distance. He had no desire to look back, perhaps be turned to stone, but ran straight on to Smeggles’ door, pounding away on it until old Smeggles, his white hair in a frazzle and he wearing a nightshirt and cap, threw the door open with a curse.

  ‘It’s tomorrow,’ gasped Escargot. ‘Give me my money.’

  4

  The Smashed Hat

  Before his head stopped whirling, Escargot was miles down the river road, cantering along on an uncooperative horse he’d bought too hastily and for too much money. The woods on his right were solemn and dark, the ground beneath the oaks and hemlocks covered with red-brown leaves and rotted stumps. The sun drifted in the sky as if it were tired and heavy and about to plummet into the river, and slow clouds sailed across in front of it now and again, casting the afternoon into deep shadow.

  Escargot was hungry. Even the pickled fish he’d tossed onto the meadow – when was it, only the night before last? – had begun to appeal to him. He stopped twice to gather berries, but it was late in the season, and most that were left were withered or small – good, perhaps, for warding off starvation, but they did little for simple hunger. There were mushrooms aplenty sprouting from the decaying vegetation of the forest floor, and if he’d had a little butter, maybe, and garlic ... But he hadn’t any butter, any more than he had the urge to nibble the funguses raw. What he wanted was steak and potatoes, or a meat pie and a bowl of gravy.

  For weeks he’d thought of leaving Twombly Town for a dozen reasons. And here he was being chased out, or at least it seemed so, and chased out hungry to top it off. When he finally began to consider it, it made little sense. It was every bit as possible that he was being chased into something. That was the result of all the chasing, anyway. The witches had done a first-rate job of frightening him off, but where had he fled? – straight down the river in the wake of the dwarf and the old woman, or Leta, or both, or all three. It had become a confused mess.

  Something in him couldn’t believe that Leta was a witch, that she and the old blind woman were one and the same. But what he’d seen through the window rather argued in that direction. It might quite likely be vanity, he thought, that explained his doubts. He’d obviously rather believe that he hadn’t been the victim of a hoax, that Leta’s rare but wpnderful attentions had been genuine.

  He carried with him a thrown-together bundle of clothes and supplies, bought with a bit of the house money. He’d given his Smithers books to the Professor. Escargot had come across him early in the morning in town. He’d been downriver, the Professor had, collecting waterweeds for his aquaria, and had discovered clumps of homunculus grass in a little backwater two miles below the village. Not a lot of it, to be sure, but some half dozen of the sprouts had gone to seed, and through the papery walls of the seed pods could be seen the first vague outlines of polywog-like henny-penny men. Wurzle had gathered enough to study, and then, on the road, had bumped into a curious dwarf in a slouch hat. The dwarf had paid handsomely for the homunculus grass and had insisted facetiously that he intended to grind up the little men inside and smoke them in his pipe.

  Professor Wurzle displayed a bag of gold coins, which he offered to trade Escargot for the Smithers books. But Escargot was fairly sure that the coins, once removed from the bag, would be of use to no one but Stover, who might relish the exercise involved in tramping on bugs. So he gave the books to the Professor on loan, all but The Stone Giants, and rode away toward Hightower, feeling that the morning air was still too full of enchantment for him to sit idle. He overtook no one on the river road, and by late afternoon he joggled along, sh
ifting from side to side on the saddle and thinking dark thoughts.

  If he rode hard enough he could be in Seaside for the harvest festival. He would find nothing there, quite likely, to solve any mysteries, but it was enough just to have a destination. He no longer had a home. That much had been made very clear to him. When he got back to Twombly Town – if he got back to Twombly Town –little Annie wouldn’t know who in the world he was. It had been a matter either of stealing her away or letting her go. Letting her go had been wisest. Of course it had. There was no doubting it, was there? The open road was no place for a child, a baby. And as for her becoming a creature of nature and learning to tell time by the wind, it might just as easily be true that creatures of nature were ignorant and dirty and had twigs in their hair. A child needed a school and playmates and a story before being tucked up in bed. That was the truth of it, wasn’t it?

  Or was the truth of it that Escargot didn’t entirely want her? He’d never make it to Seaside in time for the festival if Annie was riding along. And where might his travels take him after Seaside? To the Wonderful Isles? Into the White Mountains? There was business to be done – that was the truth of it, and Annie wouldn’t be an asset to business. Escargot wished there weren’t quite so many truths. The more there were, the more boggled up things got.

  So the idea of a destination had become solid, had become more substantial to him than the idea of his home on the hill above the village, which had, in the past weeks, already begun to change like goblin gold into something hazy and unfamiliar. His only real link with Twombly Town were the Smithers books he’d loaned Professor Wurzle. Someday he’d have to come back after them. And when he did, he would wear an eyepatch and a beard and be dressed in exotic rags and a cocked hat, and he’d look up Annie and see how she was getting on.

  For the moment, though, it was Seaside that attracted him. There, if nothing else, he might get some glimpse of just how much of G. Smithers’ account of the festivities was accurate. He couldn’t imagine that they really burned witches. That sort of thing was hardly likely. But then any number of things that were hardly likely had come to pass in the past month.

  Sometime after four in the afternoon the air grew chill and the shadows long and deep and a wind blew up off the river cold enough to set Escargot’s teeth chattering. A road sign announced that he was twenty miles yet outside Hightower Village, and that a mile inland, on the road to McVicker, lay an inn. ‘Lodging at The Smashed Hat’ the sign read, and below it, dangling from brass hooks, was an ill-carven broad-brimmed hat with a hatband painted around its dented-in crown. The inn it advertised was a mile out of the way. The alternative, though, was to spend the night on the ground – hungry, and with one eye open all night for goblins.

  Escargot yanked on the reins and trotted away up the trail, telling himself that at the very least he’d get a bed and a bottle of ale for his trouble. When he clopped up to the inn at sunset he found that he couldn’t throw his leg over the horse to climb down. Both his legs had apparently petrified during the ride. He nodded seriously at the waiting stable boy, a pudding-faced youth in an altogether suit and with feet the size of pot lids. He had an unpleasant, frowning countenance, like he just that moment remembered the time he’d drank a glass of turpentine by mistake, thinking it was soda water.

  Escargot made an effort to throw his right leg back over the horse. It was impossible. His right leg, like his left leg, had gone stiff. He leaned off over the lawn until the gravity hauled him down.

  The stable boy smirked and nodded, as if he’d expected some such thing. The horse stepped forward with an eye toward a patch of clover in the lawn. Escargot sat up, feeling very foolish. ‘I wouldn’t get round behind her if I was you,’ said the boy, holding the horse by the bridle.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Escargot, wondering how he was going to ‘get round’ anywhere ever again. He was stiff as yesterday’s fish and convinced that he’d have to eat supper that night standing up.

  ‘Don’t get round behind her, where she can kick you.’

  ‘Kick me? Why on earth would she want to kick me?’

  ‘They kick for sport, horses do.’ And with that the boy patted the horse on the side of the head, happy, perhaps, with an animal that kicked for sport. ‘She’d kick you right in the ear, and you’d be deader’n a corpse.’

  Escargot crept a few feet across the grass. It felt as if he’d just bounced down a hillside on his rear end. ‘Why don’t you just lead her around to the stable then, my man, instead of across in front of me like that?’

  ‘There wouldn’t be nothing you could do about it neither. Can’t persecute a horse.’

  ‘You mean prosecute,’ said Escargot. ‘Just take the thing away. That’s what you’re paid for, isn’t it? Or are you the lad that hands out advice on the lawn?’ He stood up, shakily and out of patience, and dusted off his knees, then hauled his bags off the horse and slung them over his shoulder as the horse and the stable boy disappeared toward the back of the inn.

  Escargot stepped across toward the inn itself, a tall house full of eaves and gables and balconies. It sat almost sideways on the weedy lawn, and one corner had slumped across a crumbling and sunken stone foundation. The entire house seemed to be tilting toward the river, and the windows and doors all sat askew in their frames so that the wind whistled merrily past them above and below. Tattered curtains hung across most of the windows, and even from below on the lawn they appeared to be so dirty that it seemed likely they hadn’t been washed in twenty or thirty years, probably around the time the place had gotten its last coat of paint. A faded sign hung across the front of the porch; The Smashed Hat,’ it read – an oddly appropriate name for the place.

  There was something about it that ran counter to the cozy, ivy-covered inn that Escargot had pictured. If there were any other travelers at the inn they kept themselves well hidden. They certainly weren’t sitting in the willow chairs on the porch – possibly because the chairs hadn’t any seats to sit on, just a few rotten fragments of willow cane.

  The bell on the front porch had no clapper in it, but the door itself was ajar, so Escargot, after shouting a hello through the crack, grabbed the rusted doorknob and gave it a push. The door was jammed against the sill and wouldn’t budge. He pushed again, rattled the knob, and shouted, then gave the door a half dozen kicks on the bottom of the stile where it had jammed, inching it forward a scrape at a time until it sprang inward with a lunge. Standing at the foot of a stairway that tilted steeply away overhead was an almost chinless man in a white apron. He wore a ragged and thin little mustache that looked as if it had been bought at a fire sale.

  ‘Here now,’ he said, grimacing at Escargot, ‘we don’t want none of that.’

  ‘Door was stuck and the bell didn’t work. I hollered, but I guess no one heard.’

  ‘I heard, didn’t I? Here I am, standin’ here in front of you. This ain’t the city, friend.’

  ‘Pardon me?’ asked Escargot, feeling embarrassed for having kicked the door.

  ‘I say this ain’t no rush, is it? This ain’t no bow and scrape. This is the country, isn’t it? I’m a poor man.’

  ‘That’s right. Sorry and all that. No rush at all. Not a bit of it.’

  ‘All right, then,’ said the man in the apron. ‘Want a room, do you?’

  ‘And some supper, if I could.’

  ‘Supper too, is it?’

  ‘Both,’ said Escargot, looking around him at the disheveled interior of the inn. Dust coated everything, including the man in the apron. On second look, the man was coated in baking flour, and he held a dough-covered spoon in his hand. Escargot looked at the spoon favorably. ‘Mixing up dough, are you? Making a pie perhaps?’ He smiled at the man. There was no use being belligerent about the whole affair. The man was right, anyway. Here they were miles from anywhere. It wasn’t like in town where a person could trot over to Beezle’s market for a new bell when the clapper fell out from rust. This was the country, the open road.
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  ‘A pie?’

  ‘That’s right – with the dough and all. I thought maybe a pie ...’

  ‘Rats,’ said the man, looking at the spoon, then back at Escargot. ‘I’m mixing up a batch of poison flour to use as bait. I can’t stand rats.’ He shook suddenly, as if he’d had a quick chill. ‘Walls are full of rats. They ate the corner off the porch, ate my chairs. There’s nothing they don’t eat, including you and me.’

  Escargot nodded slowly, looking around him once again. ‘Forget the pie. Anything at all will do for supper. Don’t have a spare bottle of ale, do you?’

  ‘Not a one, more’s the pity. Not a one. There’s cider, though, if you’re a cider man. Traveling far?’

  ‘Seaside for now. And cider is fine. I’ll just put my bags away, perhaps, before I eat.’

  ‘Care to deposit any valuables in the vault? It’s the safest thing. No telling who might put up at an inn like this. Lonesome road and all. You can have my affidavit on anything you put in. Safe as a baby.’

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ said Escargot. ‘Is there anyone else besides me staying here? The road seems to be empty.’

  ‘Not another living soul. That’s just what I mean. It’s not hardly safe to travel anymore, is it, not with the goblins and all. And highwaymen. They just hung three of ‘em up at McVicker last Tuesday, but that ain’t half the gang. Who knows but what you ain’t one of ‘em? That’s why I have the vault. The way I see it, if you put your valuables in my vault, then you won’t leave with mine. But a man who don’t want to take advantage of such a thing, he might be one of your thieves, gone in the morning along with the silver. Do you follow me?’