The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  ‘Thanks,’ Jonathan said.

  The man made a sour face at the woman, but he didn’t say anything. She told him to shut up. Jonathan grinned at him and winked as he helped Mr Quimby up the slope. He thought of telling the man Squire Myrkle’s joke about the ape coat, just to cheer him up, but decided that it could wait. There was no use pressing his luck. As they slid down toward the river road, the man still stood sucking on his pipe, watching the woman haul in the line.

  ‘M-mean b-b-boggers,’ Quimby said.

  Jonathan agreed. ‘Warming up some?’

  ‘A b-b-bit. It’s not half so cold here as it was out on the T-Tweet. Not half.’

  It took about five minutes to get to the farm. The house itself was a big, ramshackle, three story affair. It hadn’t seen fresh paint in a good twenty years. What had once been white wood was almost as gray as the river rock that made up the foundation. There was a light on the second floor. Jonathan decided to knock on the door in order to explain what he and Quimby were doing nosing about. But after he’d pounded away three times and no one answered, he gave up. They found the barn, just as the woman had said. There was wood and kindling enough for a year. Jonathan dragged up two packing crates, set Mr Quimby on one to warm up before the stove, and went off to search for food. All of a sudden he felt incredibly hungry.

  He pulled four apples from a barrel, then poked around and found a salt-encrusted cheese. He peeked through a door at the rear of the barn which led to a smokehouse hung with hams, one of which’ had been partly carved where it hung. Jonathan dug his clasp knife out of his pouch and sliced off a few strips, his mouth watering all the while. The scavenger woman hadn’t mentioned hams, but that had probably been an oversight. Jonathan threw the ham onto the stovetop, and in a minute or so he and the recovered Quimby tore into the food, eating in silence.

  Drier, warm, and full, Jonathan asked finally, ‘Did you see anyone else on the river?’

  ‘Bodies, do you mean?’

  ‘Preferably not.’

  ‘Well no then,’ Quimby replied. ‘I’m afraid not. I caught hold of a cabin door and paddled along till I fell off. Then I washed into a snag and held on there for hours. Seemed like hours anyway. Then our friends in the rowboat came along, towing my cabin door. They would have left me on the snag, I think, if I hadn’t made such a row. Filthy pirates. Hauled me all over the river collecting trash, me ‘most frozen. On the way in, a body came past sprawled across a big plank. It was the cook, I think, although I can’t say for sure. He wasn’t in good shape, but he wore the same striped shirt. They went through his pockets, pushed him off into the river, and took his plank.’ Quimby shook his head at the enormity of it. ‘Dirty boggers,’ he said.

  Jonathan nodded his head, sorry to hear of the cook’s fate but relieved that it wasn’t one of his companions who had been sprawled across the plank.

  ‘Dirty, filthy, scum-eating vipers,’ Quimby said, staring at the fire.

  ‘You said it,’ Jonathan put in.

  ‘Pitiful snipes.’

  ‘Let’s burn their barn in the morning,’ Jonathan suggested.

  ‘What!’ Quimby cried, aghast.

  ‘Let’s teach these people some manners. Show them what happens when they treat the quality so.’

  Quimby was wide-eyed. He knuckled his brow. ‘We can’t do that. I’m a tailor, a haberdasher. I have my reputation.’

  ‘Did you give them a card?’ Jonathan asked, squinting at him.

  ‘Yes, in fact, I did.’

  ‘Then it’s no good.’ Jonathan sounded disappointed. ‘We can’t burn them out. They know who you are.’

  ‘That’s what I’m saying,’ Quimby explained. ‘Don’t even think of it. Put it out of your mind.’

  ‘I’ve forgotten already,’ Jonathan said. ‘It was just a passing thought. I can see now that it was no good.’

  Quimby looked vastly relieved. He yawned. Quimby’s yawning made Jonathan yawn too. He shoved as much wood as he could into the stove and both of them found comfortable patches of straw. Jonathan knew nothing more until sunlight, slanting in through a window, woke him in the morning. He woke Mr Quimby, filled a sack with the rest of the cheese, a bunch of apples, and more strips of ham. Then the two of them pushed along down the river toward Landsend, leaving a gold coin on the back porch for their hosts.

  They passed nothing along the road except scattered farmhouses. For one ten-mile stretch there were forests and moors, wildly green and overgrown. A couple of hay carts passed, headed in the opposite direction. Alone, Jonathan would have made the trek in hours less time. But it was impossible to abandon Quimby, who, unfortunately, was not built for walks of this nature.

  He held up well for five miles or so, but at around ten in the morning he began to feel the heat. He wore a fairly heavy tweed suit, very apt, no doubt, for the weather along the coast. Inland, however, it was a bit much. He took his coat off, finally, and carried it over his shoulder.

  ‘Tie it around your waist,’ Jonathan suggested. The idea seemed to go against the grain, as if Quimby’s haberdasher instincts revolted at the idea of putting knots in the sleeves.

  ‘I’ll just wear it,’ Quimby said finally, and he pulled it back on. Jonathan noticed that the river water had had a grievous effect on the coat. It seemed, to say the least, to be cut rather tight. The sleeves hung about halfway down Quimby’s forearms. The trousers weren’t much better off; however they’d been cut so full in the first place – all pleated and billowy – that they were still loose enough. They were just a foot or so too short, as if Quimby were on his way to dig clams. Under the circumstances it was hard for Jonathan to understand why Quimby was so fearful of ruining the thing.

  Soon Quimby began to sweat and to appear powerfully-uncomfortable. Jonathan insisted that they rest up, and Quimby agreed. Their rest turned into a forty-minute search for water. They found a good, clean stream back in the woods, but in the process of hunting for it Quimby bent under a ragged tree limb and ripped a big tear along the shoulders of his coat. The tight fit of the thing encouraged the tear, which ran up to the shoulder seam and then sprung the whole back.

  ‘Fits like a champ now,’ Jonathan said. ‘Let those sleeves down a bit, and your reputation is secure. Just don’t turn around.’

  Quimby, however, didn’t understand Jonathan’s tone and thought he was serious. ‘I’ve ruined it!’ he cried, pulling the coat off.

  ‘Bit of thread …’ Jonathan began, but there was no placating Quimby. As a haberdasher he knew a ruined coat when he saw one. It was an open book to him. He threw the coat into the bushes.

  ‘Wait,’ Jonathan said, fishing it back out. ‘Rip or no rip, it’s better than nothing. It might cool off a bit downriver. I’ll carry this a ways.’

  Quimby thanked him, and after he’d sat by the stream for a while without the coat on, he began to look a bit refreshed. It was close to noon before they pushed on. They hadn’t gone far, though, before Jonathan realized that Quimby was walking oddly, sort of rolling along on the sides of his shoes. It turned out that the river water had had the same effect on the shoes as it had on the coat and trousers. Quimby took them off, finally, and hobbled along in his stocking feet. The river road was so dotted with stones, however, that within ten minutes it became clear that that wouldn’t serve either.

  ‘I had an uncle,’ Jonathan said, ‘who used to stretch shoes by filling them up with water and wheat. The wheat would swell up, and puffo: the shoes would fit again.’

  Quimby gave him a look that seemed to suggest that down in Landsend they did things differently. He tried to pull the shoes back on then, but the task was an impossibility. ‘Ruined!’ Quimby cried.

  ‘Is that so?’ Jonathan asked, stopping in the shade of an oak.

  ‘Entirely!’ After dashing one of the shoes to the road in disgust, Quimby threw his arm back as if to launch the second one into the forest. Jonathan snatched it out of his hand.

  ‘Watch this,’ he said, pulling his k
nife out of his pouch and hacking away at the shoes. ‘We’ll turn these into a pair of sandals.’ When Jonathan was finished, Quimby looked uncertain, as if the wet wheat idea had become suddenly appealing. But he found that the shoes fit him, or at least came close enough to fitting him to do the job. He and Jonathan started out once again; the afternoon was wearing on.

  The last five miles took about as many hours as the first fifteen had taken. They rested as much as they walked, and, as the sun was setting and they were still not in sight of any village, Jonathan swore to himself that this was the last time he’d go hiking with any haberdashers. He realized, of course, that he was being a bit unfair to haberdashers, so he decided instead that he’d never go hiking with haberdashers in shrunken clothing.

  It began to look as if they would spend the night in the woods. There was a bit of food left in Jonathan’s sack – enough ham and cheese to make him wish there were more, and one shrunken apple. If it came to sleeping by the roadside, they would be both powerfully uncomfortable and hungry. Jonathan’s own shoes and clothing had, somehow, been spared the sort of shrinking that Quimby’s had suffered, probably because he bought them big in the first place and washed them a couple of times in hot water to shrink them to size before wearing them. He had always had a deep-rooted suspicion of high-toned clothes like Quimby’s; they were too delicate. They might as well be made out of paper. If it came to sleeping in the woods or by the side of the road, Quimby would be in poor shape, and that rather bothered Jonathan. It had taken everything Quimby had just to hike the fifteen or eighteen miles from the farmhouse. A night in the open would be his ruin. It would be a matter of Jonathan’s staying up all night feeding the fire just to keep warm – feeding the fire and listening to his stomach growl.

  A creaking and rattling behind them made both Jonathan and Quimby turn, Quimby no doubt hoping even more than Jonathan that the hay cart which rattled along toward them on the road would give them a lift into the village. Given the number of peculiar people Jonathan had run into since climbing through the door into Balumnia, he half expected to see a mumbling lunatic driving the cart. But that wasn’t the case at all.

  They didn’t even have to shout or wave or plead. The man in the cart simply reined up, tipped his hat, and said, ‘Going into the village?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Jonathan said. ‘We thought we’d be there by sundown, but it doesn’t seem like we’ve got much of a chance.’

  ‘No chance at all.’ The driver pulled his hat off and ran his fingers through his hair. ‘It’s six or eight miles more at least. Take you half the night.’ He grinned at Quimby in his clamdigger trousers and aerated shoes. Quimby had the look of a man who’d given up hope. ‘Climb aboard,’ the driver said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder at the heap of hay in the back. There wasn’t half enough room on the little seat up front.

  Jonathan didn’t wait for the man to change his mind. He hoisted himself over the wooden slats of the bed of the cart, doing his best not to dump loose hay all over. Quimby, however, couldn’t get aboard. He took a couple of little leaps at the cart, set his foot on a wheel spoke, slipped off, and wound up sitting in the road. The driver very cheerfully climbed down and gave him a boost as Jonathan heaved from above. Quimby burrowed into the hay, thanking them profusely. Within minutes of their creaking away once again, he was sound asleep.

  14

  The Strawberry Baron

  The sky turned red, then gray, then deepened to a twilight blue. Stars began to blink on, first one by one, then in batches. Jonathan wondered whether they were the same stars that shone above Twombly Town. They certainly appeared to be. He liked the idea that Mayor Bastable, right then, might well be looking up at those same stars and thinking about him. There was the Big Dipper and the Seven Sisters, and as the night grew darker the Milky Way became visible, stretching off through the heavens. The familiar stars and the cheerful round-faced hay cart driver began to cheer him up considerably.

  He learned along the way who owned the various local farms, how long they’d lived where they lived, and what they grew. There was one, a farmer named Streff, who was known, according to the driver, as the Strawberry Baron because he had acres and acres and acres of strawberries. Strawberry barges freighted his produce up and down the Tweet, and people five hundred miles up, in Sunnybrae and Ferndale, knew who the Strawberry Baron was.

  All that made Jonathan think of his own strawberry crop. Mayor Bastable was probably tieing into a bowl of those strawberries right at that moment. He determined that if they found the Squire – when they found the Squire – he’d tell him about the fabulous Strawberry Baron. Squire Myrkle would, no doubt, insist on coming down to meet him and shake his hand. Strawberry Barons were right in the Squire’s line.

  Jonathan wondered what effect he’d have on the driver if he mentioned Sikorsky. It might be safe to reveal that he’d been aboard the steamship and that it had been blown up by Sikorsky, but then again it might not be. There was the ghost of a chance, who could say, that the driver was somehow allied with Sikorsky; was one of his minions. But that was unlikely. The driver seemed to be too cheerful, too full of the right impulses. Given the standard reaction to the mention of Sikorsky’s name, however, Jonathan decided not to risk bringing him up. If he were alone he would have. The worst that could happen would be that he would put the fear into the driver and find himself walking again. It was Quimby, though, who would suffer from it. And besides, Jonathan determined, he was quite likely leaving Sikorsky country anyway and would be shut of him forever. Good riddance, too!

  They passed two farms, by and by, then topped a rise and came in sight of a long lake dotted with islands. The lake stretched away between hills, and the driver told Jonathan that it was called Lowland Lake because it wasn’t a lake so much as a big section of lowlands that were fed with overflow from the Tweet River.

  Clusters of cottages dotted the grassy shores. Sailing boats and rowboats and canoes were thick beside long docks. The water was dark and silent and dotted on the surface with glints of starlight. The moon was just then climbing in the sky behind them, and the first faint rays of moonlight shone on the near edge of the lake. On a little sandy beach a campfire burned, and next to it a man sat on a wooden chair, fishing.

  ‘Out after catfish,’ the driver said, nodding toward the lone fisherman. The light attracts them. There’s big catfish in Lowlands Lake. Thirty or forty pounds is nothing. My old man hooked one off Narrow Island – that’s the big, long island out there about half a mile – that towed him and his boat clear across the lake. Fed half the village when he finally got it in. He just skinned it and started in selling steaks at twenty cents a pound. There was six weeks wages in that fish, easy. I never been so sick of catfish in my life. I never did like it anyway.’

  ‘I’m with you,’ Jonathan said. ‘You know what I think it tastes like? White paint, that’s what. You know how white paint smells? That’s just how catfish tastes. Makes me feel like I’m eating a paint cutlet.’

  The driver agreed with him. ‘That’s it exactly. Dirty boggers, eating mud and slime all day long. And ugly too.’

  Not five minutes after they passed the fisherman they reined up in front of a three-story farmhouse, all stone and shingles and big mullioned windows. A sign hung in the yard that read, LOWLANDS INN – BED AND BREAKFAST.

  ‘If you want to put up in the village,’ the driver said, ‘this is about it. There’s a boarding house two blocks up, but the owner’s a grouch who serves boiled potatoes and grass soup for breakfast. I’d steer clear of it. This place is the right sort – good food and drink and feather beds.’

  Jonathan invited the man in for a glass of ale, but he couldn’t be budged. He had a ways to go, he said, before he got home, and he was late already. So Jonathan rousted Quimby out of a sound sleep and helped him down. They watched the haycart as it toppled and creaked its way into the village and the darkness.

  ‘I can hardly move,’ Quimby said. ‘I’m stiff as
a post. What I need, more than anything in the world, is a hot bath. That and six years sleep.’

  ‘I need supper,’ Jonathan replied. Since the driver’s mention of the ale and the food at the inn, the little strips of ham and cheese in his bag had begun to grow less appealing. The shrunken apple, nutritious as it might be, reminded him of a monkey’s head. He shared the whole works among a half dozen cats that hung about the front of the inn. The monkey-head apple didn’t attract the cats much either, so Jonathan pitched it into an adjoining field. It seemed to him reasonably likely that some animal would wander into it sooner or later – a cow or squirrel or gopher or some beast that, unlike people and cats, held old apples in high esteem.

  They pushed in through the doors of the inn and booked two rooms for the night from a lad in enormous spectacles who read a thick book behind a wooden counter. Jonathan cocked his head sideways to read the title on the volume. He had always been compelled to discover what it was that anyone he met was reading. Often he could tell by the look of the cover that the book wouldn’t be worth a thing. Usually if the cover were right – dark and old looking with gold or red lettering – the story inside would prove comparable. A proper book cover held great promise as far as he was concerned. This was just the right sort. There was a painting on the front of a great sailing ship, full-rigged, water spraying from the bow waves, and painted sails billowing as the ship slanted past a rocky desert isle. The title read: Great Days of Piracy in the Flappage Islands.

  The mention of pirates suddenly reminded Jonathan of their treasure map, and with a start the thought struck him that the map had probably gone down with the ship. The Professor hadn’t, after all, had it with him when he was on deck that evening. The map would have been in his cabin. Squids were probably poring over it at that moment, down on the river bottom.

  Jonathan began to regret the loss of the map. Then it occurred to him that he hadn’t stopped to regret the loss of the Professor yet, or of any of the others either. That, of course, wasn’t due to any lack of feeling; he was simply convinced that it was bad form to mourn for someone who mightn’t be dead yet. The same, he decided, went for treasure maps.