The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  It was a moment before Bufo spotted the three of them standing in the entry hall. ‘Mr Bing!’ he shouted. ‘Professor!’ Ahab trotted across to where Bufo stood carving a roast beef, as happy, it seemed, to see his old friend Bufo as to see the roast beef.

  A wonderful meal was being laid out, and it seemed about twice as wonderful to the three travelers who had, in truth, been eating some fairly sorry jerked beef and hard rolls most of the time along the trail. Aside from the roast, there was a great steaming pudding and heaps of fried potatoes. Bowls of spring fruit lay everywhere.

  The three travelers had just enough time to shake hands all around before being hustled into chairs and handed glasses of wine. There were nine of them there at the table, which was so long that it could have easily sat another nine without anyone being cramped for elbow room. At the head of the table stood an immense chair supported by heavy carved legs – a chair clearly intended for someone of great bulk. On the backrest was the Myrkle coat of arms – a roast goose rampant on a ground of heaped grapes and the back view of a fleeing goblin with his pants afire. It was the strangest such device Jonathan could remember, but it fit the Squire admirably, as did the chair. But alas, there it sat, empty, while the rest of them gobbled the Squire’s food.

  ‘So, Bufo,’ Miles began once the meal had gotten underway. ‘What ho? How stands the investigation?’

  ‘Yes,’ urged Twickenham, who, along with Thrimp, had just recently arrived. ‘This gentleman’s story sounds like stuff to me, begging your pardon, my man. It sounds crazy.’ Next to Twickenham’s chair sat his own pointed, astronomical cap – a cap not unlike the wizard’s but without the ivory head on top and not nearly so tall. The cap, Jonathan decided, was a badge of rank of some nature. The other elves he’d known, including Thrimp, wore pointed hats of varying hues, but without the complex design of stars and moons and planets. It was perhaps an indication of the seriousness of the mysterious doings that both Twickenham and Miles had been sent for.

  ‘We’re not sure,’ Bufo said, waving a hand at the poor footman who, along with the rest of them, was tieing into the roast beef and pudding. ‘This man’s story is peculiar – too peculiar to be a lie, if you ask me. This is the Dwarf’s doing, or I’m a blind man.’

  ‘When was the Dwarf seen?’ Twickenham asked.

  ‘About a week and a half ago,’ Bufo answered, scooping up a handful of fried potatoes. ‘He was served at the inn at Glimby Village. He had his hat and cloak and staff. There was no doubt it was him. And he was asking about the Squire.’

  ‘Why, do you suppose?’ Jonathan asked. ‘What possible gain could there be in harming the Squire?’

  ‘Or kidnapping him,’ Bufo added.

  ‘Ransom?’ suggested the Professor.

  ‘Selznak doesn’t need money,’ Twickenham said. ‘Revenge is more in his line. Revenge or …’ But he didn’t finish the sentence. Instead he thrust a forkful of pudding into his mouth as if to plug it up.

  ‘Or what?’ Stick-a-bush was horrified.

  ‘Nothing,’ Twickenham said.

  ‘Let it go,’ the Professor agreed. ‘There’s no use getting worked up over something like that. What could he do with the Squire anyway?’

  ‘Do with him!’ Stick-a-bush gasped.

  ‘What the devil is that!’ Gump shouted, pointing at the window. Everyone leaped to his feet, and Bufo rushed to the window. There was nothing there, however, but one of the Squire’s truffle pigs, rooting in the flower beds.

  They sat down again. ‘Hey!’ Stick-a-bush exclaimed. ‘Where’s my roast beef? I had an end cut and now I don’t. Now I have this!’ He held up a grisly piece of rare beef that looked as if someone had been at it with a pair of hedge clippers and a set of false teeth.

  ‘Devil’s work,’ Gump said. ‘That must be who I saw at the window. First he got the Squire; then he got your roast beef.’

  ‘You’ve got my roast beef!’ Stick-a-bush hollered, pointing at Gump’s plate.

  ‘And you’ve got mine!’ Gump returned. ‘Fair’s fair.’

  ‘Fair!’ Stick-a-bush cried. ‘I’ll show you fair!’ And he hacked Gump’s pudding to bits with his fork.

  ‘Gentlemen!’ Twickenham shouted. ‘Come now!’

  Jonathan could see that this was going to be a fairly typical linkman convention. ‘Here, Stick-a-bush,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the other end of the roast. You can have it. I’m not crazy about it anyway. Too much burned fat for my tastes.’ Jonathan gave Stick-a-bush his end cut and speared a rare slice off the platter. Peace was restored, and Bufo continued. ‘We don’t know anything about motives, but we do know one thing – Selznak stopped at Glimby Village at least an hour after the Squire disappeared. It’s fairly certain that he thought the Squire was up at the hall.’

  ‘This grows passing strange,’ said Miles in the manner of a wizard.

  ‘It does that,’ Bufo agreed. ‘Even more strange is that the Dwarf was seen two nights later by Alf the gardener. He was poking about in the nasturtiums and, says Alf, looking in at the window. “I’m looking for my eyeglasses,” he told Alf – a lie, as we know – and he said he was a friend of the Squire’s. So Alf said the Squire hadn’t been seen for two days, and the Dwarf said it was a lie. But Alf isn’t the type to lie, and Selznak could see that. Alf said Selznak set out across the lawn smoking his pipe like fury and never came back.’

  ‘So Selznak didn’t kidnap the Squire,’ Miles concluded. ‘He didn’t even know the Squire was gone.’

  ‘Or else,’ the Professor said shrewdly, ‘he wanted us to believe all that.’

  Twickenham shook his head. ‘He doesn’t care what we believe. He does what he likes. That’ll be the end of him someday too. That swelled head of his.’

  ‘Then where did the Squire go?’ Jonathan asked, getting back around to the subject.

  ‘He went right through the wall!’ shouted the footman, who had been eating feverishly. ‘Blast me if he didn’t. I’m no madman!’

  ‘Of course not,’ Jonathan insisted.

  ‘Through the wall?’ The Professor shoved his spectacles up onto his nose.

  ‘Through the bleedin’ wall!’ was the answer.

  ‘According to the scientific masters,’ the Professor said, ‘such behavior is unlikely.’

  ‘Blast me!’ cried the man, who was apparently anxious to be blasted. ‘There he was, was the Squire, a-sittin’ in that chair of his in the library. He had that big glass ball of his and was lookin’ at it toward the window. He hadn’t said nothing for an hour. Hadn’t ate no breakfast. I walks in to offer him a piece o’ Mrs Feeny’s peach tart. And I sees him – blast me if I don’t – I sees him get up and walk through a big door in the wall. Then he was gone, and he ain’t been back since.’

  ‘Door in the wall?’ Miles repeated. That doesn’t sound so mysterious.’

  ‘There isn’t any door in the wall of the library,’ Bufo went on. ‘That’s what makes it mysterious.’

  ‘Or a lie,’ said Gump.

  ‘Blast me!’ the footman shouted.

  ‘Let’s have a look at that library,’ the Professor suggested, pulling out a businesslike magnifying glass. ‘There’s been some hocus-pocus here or I’m not Artemis Wurzle.’

  But in the library, as Bufo had promised, there was no door in the wall. There were banks of single casements along two outside walls and stacks and stacks of books along the others. The casement windows were far too small for the Squire to have climbed through. And it was unlikely, all in all, that he would have undertaken such acrobatics anyway.

  ‘Where was this door?’ asked the Professor.

  ‘Yonder.’ The footman pointed toward the shelves of books.

  ‘A secret panel,’ Jonathan said, seeing in this mystery a certain relation to the novels of G. Smithers. The Professor set about removing books and tapping on the walls. Then he left the room and disappeared down the hall, tapping against the wall from the room beyond. He walked back in a moment later.

&nb
sp; ‘There’s no hidden panel,’ he stated emphatically. ‘At least not here. The wall isn’t wide enough for a passage either.’

  ‘There weren’t no panel,’ the footman insisted. ‘There was a door. A big, iron door. It didn’t have no handle – just a big iron door. I saw what I saw. It swung to and the Squire walked through it, quick as you please. And he took his glass ball with him.’

  ‘Then where’s the door?’ Bufo asked, obviously suspicious of the man’s unlikely tale.

  ‘It vanished. Poof!. Blast me if it didn’t. It was there; then it weren’t. Just like that. Magic, I says. And I still says it.’

  ‘Whisky,’ Gump whispered into Bufo’s ear.

  ‘What!’ cried the footman.

  ‘Risky, this venture, I said,’ Gump replied. ‘Too much magic.’

  ‘That’s right,’ the footman said.

  ‘What was this marble?’ Jonathan asked, vague suspicions floating in his head.

  ‘It was the one he always carried around,’ the footman said. ‘The one he brought back from the wars.’

  ‘From the wars?’ the Professor asked.

  ‘The one he took from High tower,’ put in Gump helpfully. ‘That was the wars as far as the Squire was concerned.’

  ‘The Lumbog globe,’ Jonathan mumbled. ‘Then maybe that’s what …’ He was about to say that perhaps the Dwarf had come looking for the Lumbog globe – the magical glass ball that the Squire had taken for a great marble that previous winter at the Tower.

  But before he could finish, Miles the Magician cut in, ‘Balumnia!’

  ‘Of course!’ Twickenham exclaimed.

  Jonathan and the Professor gave each other a significant look. ‘Balumnia?’ Jonathan repeated in surprise.

  ‘Has to be,’ Miles insisted, assuming that Jonathan and the Professor had grasped his meaning. The door, the globe, Selznak – all the pieces fit.’

  ‘I don’t understand anything,’ Gump said.

  ‘A door right there in the wall!’ the footman repeated, blasting himself up and down.

  ‘Say,’ said Bufo to the footman. ‘Run down to Glimby and give a message to the mayor, will you?’

  ‘Well.’ The footman hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose that’s my job.’

  ‘There’s a fiver in it for you,’ Bufo added.

  ‘Aye aye, sir! I won’t be gone an hour. If I am, you know where I’ll be.’

  ‘Aye,’ Gump murmured under his breath, ‘at the Twisted Pelican.’

  Jonathan watched over Bufo’s shoulder as the linkman wrote a note to the mayor on paper he found in the Squire’s library table. ‘Hark!’ he wrote, ‘the ants go marching dooby-doo.’ And he signed it. ‘A friend.’

  ‘What in the world does that mean?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ Bufo answered. ‘Just having him on a bit. Little lark. Do the mayor some good – keep him on his toes.’

  The footman disappeared with the note, mounting a horse and riding off down the road in the direction of Glimby Village.

  ‘It strikes me that there’s something about all this business that I don’t follow,’ Jonathan said.

  ‘What’s that?’ Miles asked.

  ‘All of it. All I know is what I heard from Escargot, that this globe somehow lets a person fly around the world. It didn’t make much sense to me then, and it still doesn’t.’

  ‘Well,’ Miles said, ‘that’s putting it pretty slack. I’d be surprised if that was all Escargot knew about the globe. There seems to be nothing Escargot hasn’t dabbled in – especially when it comes to the seven Elfin Marvels. Do you know how the Squire came by the globe?’

  ‘He found it in the Tower, in the pantry actually.’

  ‘Where was Escargot?’ Miles asked.

  ‘He was there. He didn’t take much interest in the thing – just let the Squire have it.’

  ‘I was baffled by that very thing,’ the Professor put in. ‘I would have bet the Tomes of Limpus that it was the globe Escargot was after when he agreed so readily to journey upriver with us. And then he just let the Squire have it. Didn’t blink an eye.’

  ‘Perhaps Escargot has his code,’ Jonathan guessed. ‘He’d steal from Selznak, but he wouldn’t steal from the Squire. I think you’re selling him short.’

  ‘You’re all wrong,’ Twickenham cut in. ‘Escargot doesn’t need the globe as long as he has his undersea device.’

  Miles nodded slowly. ‘I had forgotten about the submarine,’ he said. ‘That explains it entirely. One doesn’t need two keys to the same door.’

  Now Jonathan was confused. ‘What does all this mean? What does Escargot’s submarine have to do with the Lumbog globe and what do either of them have to do with doors appearing in the wall of the Squire’s library?’

  Twickenham smiled knowingly. ‘It has to do with the nature of the Squire’s disappearance. He hasn’t disappeared exactly, he’s merely off traveling in a land he didn’t expect to find. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? The Squire doesn’t know where he is – nor how to get back, for that matter. The Squire, as Miles pointed out, has entered the land of Balumnia.’

  Jonathan and the Professor once again shot each other a significant look. There was no mistaking it. Apparently the Squire and the treasure were both, somehow, in the land of Balumnia. Jonathan was struck with a sudden memory, a memory that rather confused the issue for him.

  ‘I once read a book about this Balumnia,’ he said. ‘It must have been twenty years ago. It was a wonderful book by the elf author, Glub Boomp. A fantasy novel.’

  ‘Glub Boomp didn’t write fantasy novels,’ Twickenham put in. ‘He was an historian.’

  That seemed unlikely to Jonathan, who vaguely remembered stories about amazing lands beneath the sea and horrible dark woods infested by cannibals and goblins and werewolves. The tales hadn’t sounded much like history to him, but then he’d only been twelve or so at the time. Still, unlikely or not, here were Twickenham and Miles insisting that the Squire, somehow, was off in the land of Balumnia. And if Balumnia were real enough to hold the Squire, it was a very real world indeed.

  ‘The Lumbog globe,’ Twickenham said, ‘has certain powers. To the uninitiated it affords wonderful dreams – much as Escargot had promised. To the knowledgeable it’s a key, figuratively speaking, to a Balumnian door.’

  ‘A Balumnian door?’ The Professor was a bit more skeptical of all this business than was Jonathan.

  ‘Just so,’ Twickenham continued, warming to his subject. ‘A door into Balumnia.’

  ‘Like a closet door?’ the Professor asked, ‘or a cupboard door? That seems fairly unlikely, doesn’t it?’ Obviously the Professor wasn’t convinced. ‘Strange sort of a land, isn’t it? Fancy walking into it through a door rather than sailing to it on a ship.’

  ‘That’s possible too,’ Miles continued. ‘There’s a door beneath the ocean, the western door. It’s somewhere out toward the Wonderful Isles, hundreds of fathoms beneath the swells. The islanders thereabouts catch some of the most wonderful beasts: butterfly fish and winged cod and periwinkles the size of your head. There are said to be chambered nautili that live in the passage itself that produce song bubbles – music so wonderful that when the bubbles burst on the surface of the sea, dolphins gather by the thousands and weep.’

  The Professor sat there open-mouthed, looking as if about half of him suspected that Miles was having him on.

  ‘And that, of course, is why Escargot didn’t need the globe,’ Twickenham explained. ‘At least he didn’t need it enough to steal it from the Squire; not as long as he had his submarine.’

  ‘Then we will need a submarine too,’ Jonathan said. ‘We’ve got to find Escargot and borrow his.’

  ‘Not so,’ Miles replied. ‘The undersea door is, as I said, the western door. In the White Mountains lies the eastern door. In the north, beyond the City of the Five Monoliths, there’s another door. The southern door we won’t mention.’

  ‘And it’s just as well,’ Twickenham added.
‘Doors are much like people. There are good doors and evil doors – doors that would better remain shut. The Lumbog globe is a floating door, and somehow the Squire stumbled upon its secret.’

  ‘Selznak must have been after the globe then,’ Jonathan reasoned.

  ‘Almost certainly,’ Twickenham answered. ‘Two Elvish Wonders were taken from him: the pocketwatch and the globe. The watch was quickly beyond his grasp. The globe, however, was a different matter. We’d be fools, though, to suppose that only his desire for the globe spurred him on. The Squire, I believe, has reason to fear for his life.’

  ‘The fog on the heath!’ Jonathan cried. ‘That was him – the Dwarf.’

  ‘Of course,’ Miles said. ‘He was heading back upriver, toward the southern portal.’ They told Twickenham of the little fog that had hung about on the meadow along the trail and had, somehow, snuffed their campfire.

  ‘That’s just like something he’d do,’ Twickenham said, ‘snuff your campfire. He was on the trail of the Squire, all right.’

  ‘Then we’d best be off on that trail ourselves,’ Jonathan suggested. ‘Poor Squire. He doesn’t know where he is or why he’s there. He’s probably confronted right now by singing squids, and the Dwarf’s after him with an eye toward turning him into a winged toad or something.’

  ‘Well,’ said Gump, sticking in his two cents worth, ‘we don’t have to worry about any squids. The Squire would just eat the things. I’ve seen him eat squid sandwiches that would turn your head. They were marvels. And he wouldn’t care if they sang either; he’d eat them anyway. A singing sandwich is right in the Squire’s line.’

  Everyone laughed at the image of Gump’s singing sandwich, but they didn’t laugh long. There were plans to be made, bags to be packed. It had become something of a race. The only bit of hope lay in the supposition that Selznak, though he might well enter Balumnia ahead of them, would have no more idea of the Squire’s whereabouts than they had. Jonathan was beginning to feel like one of the detectives in a G. Smithers novel. He considered the idea of buying a tweed suit and cap and magnifying glass like the Professor’s. But then he recalled that emulating a G. Smithers character often brought about undesirable ends, so he gave up the idea.