The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  ‘AH right then,’ the Professor continued, ‘in the light of scientific knowledge, the workings of this door will be made manifest.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Jonathan said. ‘Because in a few hours the light of this whale oil lamp isn’t going to be making anything manifest.’

  ‘You’ve got a point there.’ The Professor waved the lamp in question out toward the chamber. ‘Now that you mention it, we’d best be on our way. One of these tunnels leads to an exit, or I’m a codfish. There’s too much good air in here to suppose this cellar is enclosed.’

  ‘Let’s go then,’ Jonathan urged. Ahab trotted across the floor of the chamber and, wisely, into the mouth of a tunnel that seemed to slope slightly uphill and gave Jonathan the hope that it led out into daylight. They wandered along the passage for twenty yards or so before it leveled off for a hundred yards. The tunnel itself was narrow and high, the roof being out of sight overhead. By stretching out his arms, Jonathan could easily touch both sides. After a bit he began to suspect that the tunnel was sloping very gradually downhill, but it was hard to be sure. The lamp didn’t throw enough light for them to get a good look either up or down. Jonathan called a halt, reached into a little pouch that hung on his belt, and hauled out the little ivory ball with the elf runes on it that he kept for good luck. He laid the ball on the floor of the tunnel, and they watched as it tottered forward and began to roll with increasing speed down the dark corridor. Ahab went nosing slowly after it and Jonathan followed, picking the thing up and putting it back into his pouch.

  The two of them pondered for a moment. Jonathan was for going back, but the Professor was for going on, pointing out that just because the tunnel was running downhill that didn’t mean it would continue to do so. After all, it had started out uphill. Jonathan was pretty sure that the Professor favored going on as much for the sake of scientific pursuit as for finding a way out, but he agreed in the end to follow his lead.

  Soon there was no doubt they were descending, and rapidly so. Down some sections they fairly slid along, and although it seemed foolish to Jonathan, the deeper they descended, the more fascinated the Professor became with the idea of seeing what lay at the bottom of the tunnel. It was impossible to say how deep they were. In the faint twilight of the oil lamp everything looked the same from one step to the next. Nothing but the echo of their footsteps on the stone of the tunnel floor reminded them that time was passing – that and the lowering level of oil in the lamp. There was enough left in the jar for them to refill the lamp twice. So, worse come to worst, they could at least light their way back to the cellar above.

  They stopped to rest, finally, on a heap of stones, and Jonathan held up the lantern to get a look at the rocky ceiling overhead. The pale rays of light shone on fissured granite, shot through with veins of quartz. Clumps of crystals the size of a man’s fingers jutted down here and there, and among them were long spires of amethyst, glowing purple in the lamplight.

  ‘Give me a hand here, Professor.’ Jonathan heaped several of the larger rocks scattered about into a pile and then clambered up onto them in order to reach the ceiling. He stabbed away at the amethyst crystals with his penknife, nicking the blade in the process, but loosening several wonderful pieces. One, a crystal as long as Jonathan’s hand, was marbled with deep swirls of emerald green. He went to work on another, the chip, chip, chip of the blade striking stone echoing off down the tunnel.

  In the flickering darkness of the shadows cast on the roof by the jutting crystals, the tiny hairless head of a little beast, something the size of a rat with blind, pink, lidless eyes, peered out at Jonathan from behind the very crystal he chipped at. Another peeked out from behind the first, and two more stared blindly at him a ways farther on. The first dropped suddenly from its niche in the granite ceiling, spread gauzy batwings, and whirred away into the darkness, a long pointed tail trailing coldly across Jonathan’s forehead. Jonathan shouted and tumbled backward, scattering rocks and thinking only of saving the fragile lantern he was still holding in his left hand. His right shoulder hit the wall of the tunnel and whale oil spewed out of the lamp, burning droplets igniting a spreading pool of it on the tunnel floor. The tunnel, instantly, was alive with light and with the fleshy whirring of a thousand spidery wings as little blind bat things dropped from the ceiling and screeched their way deeper down the tunnel. Ahab raced about up and down the corridor barking, as Jonathan and the Professor crouched next to the pile of stones, brushing at hairless tails. In a moment the tunnel was both silent and dark, the sloshing oil having extinguished the burning wick in the lamp and the pool on the floor having burned itself out.

  Jonathan, rummaging in his bag, found wooden matches and a candle. By the light of the candle, he refilled and lit the oil lamp. He blew the candle out and shoved it back into his pack along with all the amethyst and quartz crystals he had chipped loose. ‘What were those things, Professor,’ Jonathan asked. ‘Bats?’

  ‘Not bats that I’ve ever seen. I’ve come across blind cave bats before, but nothing like those critters – nothing with tails. These looked like bats that had gotten mixed up with ‘possums. Probably one of Selznak’s experiments.’

  Jonathan grimaced. ‘I don’t care much for Selznak’s experiments. In fact, they give me the creeps. Let’s get out of here. This tunnel isn’t going anywhere but down.’

  ‘I believe,’ the Professor said, ‘that we’re in the tunnel that leads to the door. I have to see that door.’

  ‘Or dogs. Or pinks bats. Or some other horrible thing. I’m about ready to have a look at the door on Hightower Tavern myself.’ Upon mentioning Hightower Tavern he remembered the four bottles of ale he had in the pocket of his knapsack, but a wet spot on the canvas seemed to promise trouble. Sure enough, two of the bottles had burst in the fall. He pulled chunks of glass out of the sack and dropped them into cracks and crevices in the rock walls. He uncorked the other two bottles, handing one to the Professor, who wasn’t at all unhappy to see it.

  The ale was sharp and dry, just the thing under the circumstances. Jonathan was in the middle of pointing out that Selznak could have made a fortune as a brewer when he noticed that Ahab was gone. He and the Professor set out down the tunnel at a brisk pace, assuming that if he’d gone back up, they’d find him for certain on their return.

  Forty yards along, the tunnel took a sharp turn to the right, then ended at the mouth of a pit that dropped straight as a stone into the depths of the earth. At the brink of the pit, sniffing along, was old Ahab.

  ‘End of the line,’ Jonathan told the Professor in a relieved sort of tone.

  ‘Not at all,’ the Professor replied. ‘Look here.’ He pointed at what appeared to be iron rungs set into the stone walls of the pit. ‘And look at this.’ He ran his hands over long gashes cut into the rock. ‘This has all been hacked out. Widened, probably.’

  ‘So it has.’ Jonathan wondered whether the Professor was actually considering climbing down an ageless iron ladder into a dark pit a mile beneath the earth. ‘What sort of lunatic hauled a pick down here to break rocks, do you suppose? It reminds me of those Eastern madmen who carve whole cities into a walrus tusk. Takes them a lifetime.’

  ‘No one dragged a pick down here.’ The Professor ran his hands over the gashes in the rock. ‘They dragged it up here. Look at these marks. They were chopped in from below. Something crawled up out of this pit from below.’

  ‘Great,’ Jonathan said. ‘Selznak’s ancestors, no doubt.’

  ‘Well we’ve got to find out.’ Whereupon the Professor dropped a stone into the void. It struck after just a couple of seconds, exciting the Professor no end, but alerting Jonathan to the sad fact that he was about to follow the Professor deeper yet into the earth.

  ‘I’ll climb to the bottom of this pit,’ Jonathan agreed, ‘if the ladder goes that far. But that’s it. If the tunnel goes on beyond as it has, I won’t follow it. We’ve used almost half our oil, and we’re a good two hours farther away from getting out of her
e than we were in the cellar. In ten minutes we’d better be heading back there.’

  ‘Done,’ the Professor called, swinging a foot into the abyss. Jonathan ordered Ahab to stay put and clambered after the Professor, climbing down slowly with the lantern slung over his arm, its wire handle resting in the crook of his elbow. It was about twenty feet to the bottom of the pit. From there, the tunnel ran on.

  ‘This is it,’ Jonathan said. ‘This tunnel could go on for a hundred miles.’

  ‘Shine the lantern on ahead,’ the Professor said, paying no attention to Jonathan’s observation. ‘I think we’re here.’ And when they held the lantern out they could see, vaguely, something that looked like a door – a great, arched iron door sealing off the tunnel. ‘The door!’ the Professor shouted, striding up to it. ‘I knew there was a door.’

  There was, however, no handle on the door. Nor was there a keyhole. There was just a great iron slab of a door. No cracks were visible anywhere around the perimeter and no hinges showed along either side. The Professor thumped on it, but his fist striking it didn’t make any more of a sound than if he had struck the smooth granite of the tunnel wall.

  ‘Yes, this is the door,’ the Professor whispered as if fearing that something crouched listening beyond.

  Jonathan was struck with the humor of the situation – the Professor’s obvious delight at having found an iron slab at the end of a tunnel. He rapped on the door with the end of his stick. ‘Hello, monsters!’ he said, putting his ear to the door. ‘Hello, monsters!’ came an answering echo which made both of them jump and took some of the life out of Jonathan’s lark.

  ‘I hear something,’ the Professor whispered. ‘Listen!’ The two of them held their breath and heard a faint sloshing sound away off in the darkness. Suddenly the glow of the oil lamp seemed feeble and the circle of light around them seemed to shrink. Jonathan shouldered his club like a ball bat, waiting in horrified anticipation for the door to creak open. The sloshing sounded more loudly off to their right in the darkness of what might well be a tunnel parallel to their own. A faint, damp, fetid breath of wind touched their faces and a pale tentacle arced out of the darkness and dropped between them, feeling the ground roundabout as if searching for something. It wasn’t difficult to guess what.

  Jonathan quelled an urge to slam at the thing with his club as he and the Professor edged back along the wall toward the ladder, both of them watching in horror as a second and then a third tentacle followed the first. A heaving and sloshing sounded from the darkness.

  The Professor was up the ladder first, moving wonderfully fast for a man of his age. Jonathan was close behind, just far enough back so as not to be kicked in the face. He felt, just when the Professor reached the summit, a rubbery tentacle brush along his pant leg, tickling his bare leg above his sock.

  It seemed to take an hour for the Professor to hoist himself over the rim – enough time anyway for whatever it was below to snake a cold tentacle around Jonathan’s calf. Jonathan shouted, nearly losing his hold on the rough iron rung of the ladder. He kicked his leg uselessly, unable to detach the thing which seemed to be feeling about as if trying to determine what manner of prey it was that had stumbled into its lair.

  ‘The lamp!’ the Professor shouted.

  Ahab barked furiously and capered back and forth before the mouth of the pit.

  ‘Throw the bloody lamp at it!’ the Professor yelled. And Jonathan, not waiting for a third invitation, slid the lamp down his arm into his hand and flung it down into the darkness below. There was a flash of burning oil and a weird ululating howl followed by slapping and sloshing and the release of Jonathan’s leg. Jonathan hauled himself out like a sprung jack-in-the-box, and, before groping away down the darkness of the corridor, turned with the Professor to watch the thrashing of the thing below. It seemed to be all head with pink, blind protruding eyes like the pink bat things. Its long slash of a mouth twitched and slavered and it slammed itself with mottled blue tentacles in a seeming effort to extinguish the fire which it could feel but couldn’t see. Behind it, down the tunnel from where it had come, shone a dozen sets of pale eyes glowing in the firelight. Jonathan and the Professor decided to leave.

  When they could no longer hear the thing’s cries, they slowed down a bit. Jonathan had taken the lead, banging along like a blind man with his stick in front, and the Professor simply followed along, one hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. Ahab didn’t seem to need a stick or a hand on anyone’s shoulder, and it was the realization of that that made Jonathan hold up finally. They decided against lighting the torch, knowing that they’d need it later, especially given the possibility of their running into more pits of the sort they’d just clambered out of. Candles wouldn’t do since the small weak flame would keep going out as they traveled. So instead of lighting anything, Jonathan tied a lead to Ahab’s collar, the Professor kept his hand on Jonathan’s shoulder, and the two of them followed Ahab back along the passage until they burst out finally into the great cavern below the trap door. There they lit two candles and discussed further plans.

  They decided, in the end, to take the tunnel which, on the chart, led to the Cavern of Malthius. Jonathan speculated that whoever Malthius turned out to be, he would likely be better company than the creatures they’d just visited. The decision, as it turned out, was a good one.

  The corridor that led to the cavern was relatively short. They had to stop to re-light the candles four times before they reached it, but when they finally stumbled out of the tunnel into the immense, stalactite-hung cavern, they saw an amazing spectacle.

  The cavern was broad and deep with an astonishingly high ceiling. The rays of the sun shone through cracks and fissures above, as if filtering through piles of rock. The ceiling was so riddled with holes and cracks that it was a marvel it stayed up at all. There wasn’t any need for candles. The most amazing thing though was the furniture stacked roundabout. There were piles and piles of it. Immense wardrobes and long dining tables, gray with dust and dark with age, lined the walls. There were trunks spilling over with clothes and there were any number of old chairs, huge carved chairs with rags of tattered leather dangling from green brass studs.

  In the dim shadows of one corner stood a collection of stuffed animals, a sort of taxidermist’s wonderland, that looked as if it had stood just so for two hundred years. An elephant with long curving tusks and tufts of wooly hair along his back watched them through green glass eyes. Beside him stood a great long hippo and three crocodiles that had to have been twenty feet from head to tail. There were zebras and antelope and great cats and a weird hollow-eyed buffalo that was almost as big as the elephant. Four white apes stood in a cluster farther back in the darkness. Pushed in among these strange dusty creatures were more chairs and wardrobes and tables and candelabra and such, heaped together in disarray.

  The cavern seemed to be the storage room of an ancient natural history museum that doubled as a warehouse for antiquities. Jonathan was briefly troubled by the disquieting thought that all the stuffed beasts were just a hair’s breadth from animation, that perhaps when night fell the old lamps and candelabra would begin to glow and the ruined clavichord would begin to tinkle and harp and the apes would sit round the table to a phantom meal while crocodiles lounged on broken divans.

  But all that was unlikely. He and the Professor, thinking of treasures, began rummaging in the scattered trunks, finding for the most part nothing but ancient clothing. In the trunks scattered beneath the fissures in the ceiling, the contents had been reduced to a sort of damp black webby business. But those more sheltered from the weather were in far better shape. There were heaps of sequined dresses, of silks and laces and fine waistcoats and top hats. There was a trunk full of costume jewelry, of rhinestones and glass baubles and false pearls that spilled out over the sides of the trunk and flowed away over the floor. All in all, both Jonathan and the Professor were astonished – not so much by the furniture itself or the trunks of ancient clothing or even by the weird
assortment of stuffed animals, but by the combination of the lot of it, hidden away there in a cavern in the earth. It was like something out of a book by G. Smithers.

  There wasn’t any treasure to be found, however. Both of them collected heaps of odd finery before stopping to think that it was unlikely that they would find a way to haul the stuff along with them. The idea of leaving it behind was unthinkable, but it was, in the end, the only idea that made any sense. The Professor discovered several trunks of old costumes, enough to outfit a castle full of people for a masquerade. Among the feathered hats and rubber hands was a patchy sort of ape suit, complete from top to bottom. Jonathan slid the mask over his head but then pulled it off again when bits of hair and paper and rubber and leather fell from it.

  ‘I have to have this,’ he said to the Professor, who himself had found a great, hollow alligator’s head.

  ‘Wear it when we visit Lonny Gosset. It’ll knock him into the fourth dimension.’

  Jonathan smiled. ‘I was thinking that I could wear it about town. People might mistake me for a man of leisure.’

  The Professor nodded. ‘It’s possible. Dooly might anyway. Dooly and Beezle. The suit looks a bit like some of the finely tailored garments he sells.’

  ‘Does it look much like a real ape’s head?’ Jonathan asked, turning to have a look at the heads of the four white apes that stood beyond the elephant. But the apes were almost lost in shadow. In fact, the cavern was growing steadily darker as the sun outside dropped beyond the treeline.

  ‘Do we want to spend the night in here?’ the Professor asked.

  ‘No,’ Jonathan replied decisively, looking about him at the shifting shadows of the somber furniture strung with cobwebs and at the glass eyes of the wild array of stuffed animals. ‘Do you think we can get out through one of those cracks in the ceiling?’

  ‘A snake might if he were fired out of a cannon,’ the Professor said. ‘We’ve got one more tunnel to explore, though. Let’s light the torch and have a go at it. At worst we can make our way back up to the cellar.’