The Elfin Ship Read online

  ‘And a dozen candles,’ replied the Cheeser.

  ‘He only wears them for show,’ came a halting voice from behind them. The two turned to see a plump, bearded man in a huge overcoat sitting alone at a littered table.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Professor, addressing the gentleman.

  ‘I say, he only wears them for show.’

  ‘Ah yes. For show. And very elegant they are, those teeth,’ the Professor replied diplomatically. ‘I met a dwarf in Beddlington once who had such teeth. He was an animal trainer. Marvelous man with gibbon apes and orangutans.’

  Jonathan tried to get the attention of the sleeping proprietor as the Professor sat down at the overcoated man’s table and launched into his story of the Beddlington Ape. The sleeper lurched as Jonathan tapped him on the shoulder, then nodded pleasantly, smacked his lips, and toppled off his perch, crashing to the ground, stool and all. ‘What! What! What!’ he shouted in a flurry of bewilderment. The Cheeser felt responsible and hoisted the man to his feet apologetically. None of the several people in the pub, aside from the Professor and his companion, took any notice of the misfortune. The collapsed chair was righted, with no damage, finally, seeming to have occurred. The be-tumbled man stared bleary-eyed at Jonathan, smiled idiotically, and clambered back onto his stool. He closed his eyes and nodded off again.

  ‘Just draw one for yourself,’ said the overcoated man who, it turned out, was named Lonny Gosset. ‘Put five pennies in the can and draw it yourself.’

  Jonathan did and as soon as he tasted the ale he was sorry he’d ever undertaken the venture, for it was flat, tasteless liquid related more closely to the swampy pools upriver than to anything drinkable.

  ‘This is Mr Lonny Gosset,’ the Professor told Jonathan as the Cheeser sat down. ‘He’s a milliner, a hat maker, and he was telling me that business isn’t worth a peach hereabouts.’

  ‘Not a peach,’ assented Lonny Gosset, shaking his head in a befuddled way. ‘Not since that cursed Selznak arrived with his toads and such. Bloody awful beasts abroad on th-the highroad. People moving off downriver.’

  ‘Who is this Selznak?’ asked Jonathan, gazing into his glass of ale and wondering what sort of a fiendish thing Gosset had encountered. He offered some of his ale to the Professor, who looked at it then shook his head. ‘He’s not an altogether nice chap, I gather.’

  ‘Nice chap!’ Gosset almost shouted. ‘A curse is what. A dwarf of some sort from the Forest. Came upriver six months back through Willowood. You heard about Willowood?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Professor.

  ‘And Stooton-on-River?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All gone by the boards. Empty! Things are … abroad in the land,’ Gosset said darkly.

  ‘I don’t like things abroad in the land,’ said Jonathan in a practical tone of voice. ‘Not by half.’

  ‘I’m afraid,’ responded the Professor, ‘that things abroad in the land might not care for you or me much either. Now you know me as a man of science. And you know that I hold with fact. Observation and deduction are man’s most useful tools, Master Cheeser, but I’d have to say, if pressed, that they’re sometimes overshadowed by premonition.’

  ‘I don’t go much for premonitions either. Let’s get the supplies and see what mischief Dooly and old Ahab are up to, shall we?’

  ‘Like a shot,’ said the Professor. The two shook Gosset’s hand and left him muttering darkly beneath his breath about silk hats and things abroad and wretched little beasts.

  They popped into Hobbs’ General Merchandise where they were scrutinized by the owner, old Hobbs, who was whiskered and stuffy-looking and all bound up in buttons and collars and tight fitting, starchy clothes. Jonathan muttered to the Professor that Hobbs’ tailor had the same sense of humor as had the sleeping pub man’s dentist. Although the Professor had to agree, he replied that it was good to see such a staunch and solid member of the community.

  ‘Someone, at least, is bearing up,’ the Professor observed.

  Quick as you please, the two were loaded up and heading raftward, back past the abandoned tack-and-feed store where the party of mice overseen by the blinking toad were still gnawing away at the wall. Jonathan waved his arms and cut a caper or two as if preparing to lunge at them, but Professor Wurzle indicated that it might not be a good idea to go stirring up the local forest denizens. In light of their conversation with Lonny Gosset, the Cheeser had to agree. Both men made away down the road to the harbor where, in the late evening gloom, no raft was to be seen.

  Jonathan’s first thought was that they somehow reached the wrong harbor. Then it occurred to him for the briefest of moments that there never had been a raft at all, and he felt a strange relief momentarily as if he had awakened to find out that the dark fears of a nightmare had been just that – a dream.

  Suddenly the Professor shouted ‘Foul play!’ and began examining the frayed ends of the trailing ropes that had tied the raft to the dock.

  ‘Dooly wouldn’t have played us foul,’ Jonathan responded. ‘He’s a peculiar enough lad, to be sure, but as trustworthy as either of us.’

  ‘Not Dooly,’ said the Professor, holding the rope end aloft. ‘These ropes have been chewed through. Our raft was set adrift.’

  ‘By the powers!’ cried Jonathan, remembering that old Ahab was aboard. ‘The fiends. It was those mice and the toad. They’ve done this out of spite for us having scattered them on our way into town.’

  The Professor gave Jonathan a sidewise look. ‘Mice and toads don’t do things out of spite. They don’t think up reasons. I fear that our friend Gosset is correct. Something has come upon the land!’

  ‘There you go again. Things “walking abroad” and “coming upon the land”. It’s enough to make a body tired. Our raft, somehow, has come upon the river, and we’ve got to go get it.’ Jonathan began striding back and forth trying to think. But the more he tried, the harder it became. Following the river overland wouldn’t do, for beyond Hightower travel was wretchedly slow and the two of them, even on horseback, if they had horses, would have to pick their way along the treacherous paths of the Goblin Wood: they might never catch up with the raft until Seaside. What they needed, clearly, was an airship full of elves, but such a thing wasn’t to be had. Jonathan furrowed his brow and continued to stride about. The Professor didn’t seem nearly as perturbed.

  ‘We’d better start walking, my boy,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders with an air of finality.

  ‘Where?’ cried Jonathan.

  ‘Why downriver, of course. Dooly must have been napping, but he’ll put in to shore as soon as he finds he’s adrift. There may be precious little sleep for the two of us tonight though if he puts in much below the village.’

  ‘Dooly!’ shouted Jonathan. Of course. He felt a fool. Dooly was on board and would eventually put in to shore. The filthy mice didn’t know they had Dooly on board. Good old stowaway Dooly!

  Then from up the hill toward town in the darkness of the unlit road, the two heard a shout, as if someone was hailing them. A lone figure came jogging down toward the harbor in a wild side-legged run shouting, ‘Ho, Mr Cheeser! Ho, Professor!’ The two on the dock felt their hearts sink as Dooly, out of breath, lurched up and looked with amazement at the empty dockside. ‘The raft is gone!’

  ‘And Ahab on it,’ said Jonathan. ‘We’ll have to walk aways downriver before Ahab puts into shore.’

  Dooly was in a state. ‘Oh, Mr Bing Cheese,’ he almost wept, ‘they said you wanted to speak to me. They said you and the Professor had need of me, so I come right along. I said to myself: if you please, Dooly, says I, don’t hesitate. Bung right along. And I did, but I couldn’t find neither one of you and no one would say a thing when I asked them.’

  ‘Who told you such a thing?’ asked Jonathan, flabbergasted.

  ‘It doesn’t matter now,’ the Professor broke in. ‘We have to go after that raft.’

  ‘We need a canoe, that’s what. A canoe for the three
of us.’ Jonathan looked about, noting several that were tied up in the harbor.

  ‘My old grandpa would find one and would have it too. Borrow it if he had to,’ Dooly chimed in. ‘Like that one there, down along the rocks.’

  ‘We can’t just go stealing a man’s canoe,’ said Jonathan, even as the three of them were heading for it.

  ‘I think we’d best follow the example of Dooly’s grandfather in this case,’ said the Professor. ‘I’ll leave my card, though, here under a rock by this stake, and he can send for some money in pay.’

  In a trice, Dooly, Professor Wurzle, and Jonathan Bing were swirling downriver in the borrowed canoe, paddles dipping furiously, in pursuit of the disappeared raft.

  A gibbous moon crept out from behind a swirl of cloud and seemed to smile down on them as they sped on their course. Its pale shape reflected on the water in front of the canoe, and they seemed to be racing along in pursuit of it, the only bright spot ahead in the dark night. The shores along either side became forested once again, and vague shadows crept along the fringes. Jonathan looked over his shoulder, but because of the bend of the shore and the thickness of the forest there was no sign of Hightower Village. In truth, it might not have been there at all except for the dim light in the windows of the tower on the ridge in the murky distance. Even from where he sat on the cold river, Jonathan could see what must have been the red glow of embers churning from the great chimney and the gray phantasmal shapes of the swirling smoke. The night seemed to grow colder as he watched, but the certainty that they were leaving such a strange place rapidly behind helped to offset his dread. He dipped his paddle earnestly into the water and turned his face toward the retreating silver moon.

  6

  Fog Along the Goblin Wood

  Long into the night it was dreadfully still as the three companions canoed wearily in the moonlight. After an hour’s hectic dipping, they wisely decided to work in shifts, one of them resting for a quarter of an hour while the other two paddled on apace.

  Overhead, the heavens hung thick with stars, each a bright jewel in the night sky. Their cold light, however, seemed to make the air even more chill. Frost had already begun to form its tiny crackling patterns on the shore grasses, and most of the wild things in the forests were giving serious thought to whether they ought not to bolt the burrow door, throw an extra quilt or two on the bed, and nod off for a good, four-months’ sleep.

  Jonathan, relatively warm in his heavy coat and fur cap, had similar thoughts. But Twombly Town and the cheese-houses and the chair with the stag’s head carved on the seat might as well have been on the moon; they seemed as distant. Though merely a journey of several days upriver, it was as if they were in some comfortable foreign land away over the seas.

  In his weariness, Jonathan’s head kept slumping, his chin almost bouncing against his chest. But each time just as sleep would overcome him, it would be his turn to take up a paddle. Once he managed to fall solidly asleep and began to dream of the round-faced man of the four coins holding out a wedge of green cheese on a glowing platter while a great wooden clock behind him chimed the hours and paintings of the sun and moon on the clock face spun dizzily, lopping off the days as if they were seconds. But when Jonathan reached for the cheese, a wrinkled face peeked out from behind the swinging pendulum in the clock and a hand leaped forth and snatched the cheese from the plate. The wedge of cheese turned just then to a tiny heap of dust and blew away across a long, pockmarked, empty plain, and Jonathan lurched awake with a shout to find himself once more on the wide river.

  Dooly was, in truth, the only one of the three who didn’t appear to be tired. Jonathan and Professor Wurzle had to force him to give up the paddle now and again for a rest, and it seemed that he grew more energetic as the air grew colder. To the horror of his two companions, he continually stood atop a thwart to get a better view of the river ahead. The canoe rocked crazily each time and caused the Professor to launch into a discussion of gravity and the other six major forces, especially those of toppling and upending.

  ‘It’s nearly midnight,’ the Professor observed, consulting his own pocketwatch.

  ‘It seems like twice that to me,’ said Jonathan, immediately wondering exactly what he meant by it. ‘But the odd thing is we haven’t yet come upon the raft.’

  ‘Dangerously odd,’ the Professor agreed. ‘Should have caught up to it an hour ago. Given the rate of river flow and a double paddle dip increase. Let me calculate for a moment here. Two, aught, aught, carry the five, round off for decimalia –’ The Professor gazed shrewdly at Jonathan. ‘Even given an hour’s head start, it shouldn’t have been more than four hours ahead of us. We should have overtaken the raft two hours back.’

  Jonathan was struck with a grim thought. ‘What if it drifted ashore and we passed it?’

  ‘If you please, sir,’ Dooly put in, ‘I been keeping a powerful lookout along shore, your honors, and I didn’t see no raft yet. Maybe I’ll just clamber up here atop the thwart and have another go at it.’

  Jonathan and Professor Wurzle grasped either side of the canoe and held on, expecting momentarily to be catapulted into the cold river.

  ‘Sit down there, Dooly!’ shouted the Professor.

  ‘Yes, sir, Mr Wurzle, sir. Right away, sir. Bless me, sir, I was all come over with a fit, sir, and forgot about what you said back there about the twirl of the land and the ‘petual spins of this and that.’

  ‘Quite all right, Dooly. Try to remember next time.’

  ‘If we did pass it,’ Jonathan said, ‘say if it was in the shadows or something, then we’d have to paddle upriver to fetch up with it again.’

  ‘You’re very right,’ said the Professor. ‘That’s a fact which, right now, in itself, isn’t as frightful as it might become.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘As it will be, let’s say, two or three hours from now when we’re twice as far downriver.’

  ‘Then let’s either turn the canoe about or put into shore and discuss the matter,’ Jonathan said, feeling a bit lost.

  ‘I could almost be sure, sir, that the good dog and his craft aren’t in no shadows. My eyes go right through shadows like they weren’t there at all. No, sir, I believe we’d best plunge on, as my grandpa said. He used to say a poem to me what ended so: “Plunge on, plunge on, plunge on, da-dah, da-dah, da-dah, “ it went, or something like that.’

  ‘Your grandfather was what they call a sage, Dooly,’ said the Professor. ‘But do we trust to Dooly’s eyes and to his grandfather’s da-dahs, or do we beat back upriver? I’m inclined, given the scientific facts of the matter, to turn her about like you say.’

  ‘Yiii!’ howled Dooly, waving his paddle aloft.

  ‘It’s not as bad as all that,’ the Professor began, but Dooly continued to wave and point skyward. ‘The moon, the moon!’ he cried.

  Jonathan, startled by Dooly’s shout, saw nothing but the round white ball, glowing as ever, floating in the darkness and encircled by stars. The tail end of a tiny dark cloud obscured a chunk on the lower edge for a moment but disappeared into the night, leaving the moon’s surface unbroken. ‘Do you have to shout so, Dooly?’ asked Jonathan, worked up, in truth, by his fears that the raft and Ahab were now behind them. And as if to make matters worse, wisps of fog came floating out over the river just then from the pond-dotted downs along shore.

  ‘Fog,’ said Jonathan to no one in particular. ‘We’ll lose our way in the fog.’ And it suddenly felt to him as if it was very late at night indeed.

  ‘There it is again!’ cried Dooly, pointing. ‘Them’s no clouds. No, sir. Witches is what it is, and not just one but a fleet. There’s witches across the moon!’

  The Professor sputtered. He was more concerned, as was Jonathan, with the fog wisps that were beginning to blow out over the river and with the curtain of it that rose from the downs like a gray cloak. But he could see, as Dooly said, dark shapes in the sky. Silhouetted against the circle of the moon as if cut of black satin were th
e figures of three conical-capped witches. Dark robes trailed out behind like the tattered sails of ghost ships adrift in the sky. To Jonathan’s amazement, each was astride a long broomstick, a thing he’d heard about but, of course, had never believed. Shrill cackling laughter wafted down on the night wind, and as the three witches passed across the face of the moon into darkness two more appeared, and three after them. When the fog finally enfolded the canoe and only gray mist could be seen, the grim laughter continued to clatter earthward like a fall of icicles.

  Dooly groaned, his head in his hand. ‘Old grandpa knew those ladies,’ he said. ‘Yes, sir. And I don’t imagine I want to. He come upon them once in the wood. In the Goblin Wood, in fact, if my memory serves – which wouldn’t make it far off, would it, Professor?’

  ‘Less than half a league, Dooly.’

  ‘Aye, grim luck. They was having a sort of thing in the woods. And there was goats there with two heads and a bubblin’ pot and there wasn’t one of ’em that didn’t have a big sickle – ’

  ‘And I think we’d best keep the story for another time. For the daylight, let’s say,’ said Jonathan.

  Dooly was hunched up in the bow. The memory of his grandfather’s story was something he shouldn’t have ferreted out, not just then.

  ‘Well now,’ said Jonathan, ‘we’re in a pickle. Do we come about?’

  ‘If we can’t see the shore, Jonathan,’ said the Professor, ‘then we can’t know whether we’re making headway, marking time, or losing ground. We certainly can’t paddle upriver in a fog.’

  ‘Perhaps the fog will lift.’ But Jonathan knew it wouldn’t, even though a good breeze was springing up at their backs. The fog was thick as a shroud and there were fewer clear patches all the time.

  Laughter still rang strangely in the distance – laughter broken by an occasional shriek like the wail of a banshee. Although the eerie sound waxed and waned as if at the mercy of the winds, the three in the canoe seemed to be drawing nearer to it. All three paused in their paddling and listened, eyes peering widely into the murk ahead. Distant chanting, buried amid the clamor of laughs and shrieks and mingled with the occasional thudding gong of a great club whacked against an iron kettle almost drowned the sporadic barking of a terribly upset dog.