The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  The two nodded but didn’t say anything. Jonathan assumed they were thinking about the Squire. He knew how they felt – that nothing much had been accomplished yet. But then it was true that they had run into Quimby and learned a bit about the Squire’s whereabouts. And if, when they got to Landsend, they could find Miles and the Professor, then Jonathan would count them all well off indeed. They wouldn’t have long to wait either, for just about then the driver shouted, ‘About a mile to go, boys,’ and kicked up the horses’ pace a bit, anxious to get into town.

  Landsend wasn’t quite the sprawling seaport city that Jonathan expected. It wasn’t any bigger, in fact, than the city of Seaside on the delta of the Oriel River. And the Tweet, of course, was twenty times the size of the Oriel. Jonathan had assumed that Landsend, then, would be twenty times the size of Seaside, or some such thing. It was impossible for any of them to know much about the city from within their little canvas-covered mail wagon. But Jonathan sat nearest the rear, so he had the best view.

  They couldn’t see the ocean, but the air was tangy with salt. A coastal mountain range rose behind the city, densely forested above houses that climbed a quarter mile or so up the slopes. The wagon swung around and revealed a broad expanse of river delta thick with fishing boats. Along the shore were mud flats and backwaters tangled with exposed roots and shore grasses, and dotted with pools of standing water shining in the afternoon sun. Long thin piers ran out across them and into the brackish waters of the delta. Small boats were tied to some of the piers; other piers were in disrepair, often simply lines of broken pilings that weren’t much good for anything but pelican perches.

  The wagon bounced along past boatyards where the skeletons of half-finished sailing ships sat on great trestled structures and where decaying clinker-built hulls lay scattered about, beyond repair, weeds and wild fuchsias and trumpet flower vines growing through and around them.

  The backwaters and mud flats and boatyards gave way finally to scattered inns and cottages. There were people everywhere: vendors selling ice cream, lemonade, and fresh fruit; groups of shirtless sailors and idlers lounging in doorways; shoppers clumping down the boardwalks; children dashing about and carrying on. It seemed as if every third or fourth building sported a sidewalk cafe, the sort in which you could take an hour and a half over your coffee. Even at four o’clock in the afternoon, an hour that Jonathan would have thought either a bit early or a bit late for lounging about in sidewalk cafes, there were few empty tables.

  Most of the buildings along the street were built of clapboard and shingle. The road was paved with square gray stones worn by traffic, all cut from some dark granitic rock. Wherever he looked Jonathan could see wild foliage. Hibiscus flowers bloomed everywhere – great red and orange and yellow blooms with petals the size of a man’s hand. Purple trumpet flowers and bougainvillaea twined through fences and trellises, and even unkempt yards were a wonder of bright green grass and wild colorful flowers. Landsend was altogether a beautiful sort of place – in a state, thought Jonathan, of colorful and sublime decay.

  It was nicely coincidental that the wagon was hauling them straight up to the post office at the top of the hour. Jonathan barely had time to think ‘What if they aren’t here?’ and feel the first pangs of dread and worry when they rattled to a stop not six feet from where Professor Wurzle leaned against the post of a gaslamp reading some sort of announcement or advertisement. Jonathan thought furiously of clever things to say to him, something subtle and witty and surprising, but Ahab got in before him. Catching sight of old Wurzle, he barked twice and leaped down onto the road, nearly landing on the Professor’s shoes.

  ‘Ahab!’ Professor Wurzle shouted. Then he pushed his glasses onto the edge of his nose and peered over them at Jonathan, Bufo, Gump, and Quimby, who issued, one by one, from the rear of the wagon.

  Jonathan shook his hand, feeling as if he hadn’t seen the Professor for six months. ‘What ho?’

  ‘Oh,’ the Professor responded, ‘not much ho. How about you?’

  ‘Not much ho with us either,’ Gump announced.

  About then, the driver teetered past under the canvas mailbag and a stack of boxes – what Jonathan’s father used to call a lazy man’s load. They all shouted thanks to him, since the pile of debris precluded his shaking hands.

  ‘Where’s Miles?’ Jonathan was sure, somehow, that the Professor would know.

  ‘Down the block.’

  ‘Is he okay?’ Bufo asked.

  ‘Safe and sound. We had a remarkably easy time of it, I must say. Hardly got wet at all.’ The Professor greeted Quimby, who stood off to the side a bit, not wanting to push in among the old friends. It was as if his arrival at Landsend had restored him, and he was no longer a wretched soul but was once again a haberdasher with a reputation.

  Quimby bowed slightly. ‘I’ll be thanking you, Mr Bing, and you lads too, for looking after me. I’m not much good at tramping abroad, I’m afraid. Haven’t got the constitution for it.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Jonathan said, patting the man on the back. ‘It was our pleasure. It’s rare that we run into such good company.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Bufo agreed, and Gump nodded assent.

  ‘Well,’ Quimby said. ‘I’ll be off now. I’d show you around the shop, but it’s a bit late for that. It’ll be closed by now, and my keys are in the river. Come round tomorrow, though, and have a good look. Fascinating business, really.’

  ‘It couldn’t help but be,’ Jonathan remarked, although the statement puzzled just about everyone there, including Jonathan, who hadn’t really given the matter much thought. Then everyone shook hands, and Quimby disappeared up the avenue.

  ‘What’s that you have there, Professor?’ Gump asked. That leaflet.’

  The Professor held the thing up for them to have a look at. On the front of the paper was a pen and ink drawing of the face of Squire Myrkle, his cheeks puffed out as if they were loaded with horse chestnuts, his eyes crinkly, cheerful, and enthusiastically befuddled. Below the picture was written in bold printing: ‘Have you seen this man?’ Below that, in smaller letters, was information about what to do if you had seen this man. Above the whole thing was a headline that announced: REWARD!

  Jonathan took the handbill from the Professor, fearing some sort of foul play. ‘Where was this?’

  ‘It wasn’t anywhere. Not yet. But in about thirty seconds it will be hanging from that bubinga on the curbside.’

  ‘You made these up?’

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ the Professor told him. ‘Miles drew them. What we needed were leads. That’s what the detective would say anyway. And the way to get leads is to seek out people who’ve seen the Squire. One of them must know the direction he took when he left town.’

  ‘If he left town, I suppose you mean,’ Bufo said.

  The Professor shook his head. ‘I don’t know. We’ve been going about to inns all day, and he isn’t at any of them. What’s more, he hasn’t been. There aren’t but a couple left, and they’re outside of town on the way to the coast road. But we know he was here, at Quimby’s shop, and we can bet that he wasn’t in any vast hurry, knowing the Squire as we do. So he must have stayed with someone. These handbills will smoke him out.’

  Jonathan remained somewhat dubious. ‘I hate to wait around for the smoking.’

  ‘Where do you propose to go?’ Professor Wurzle asked. ‘North? South?’

  ‘I see what you mean,’ Jonathan said. ‘Let’s all post these things. How many do you have?’

  ‘Only one left after this. We’ve been hanging them everywhere. Unless this is a town full of hermits, we’ll get a response. So we may just as well settle in and wait for it.’

  Everybody agreed that such was the case, even though the idea of ‘settling in’ instantly increased Jonathan’s feelings of helplessness. The handbill idea, however, decreased his fears a bit; he couldn’t see any reason for its not working.

  The Professor pulled out his pocketwatch. ‘We’ve got
to meet Miles in half an hour at the inn.’

  ‘I hope we can get a room,’ Jonathan said. ‘This town is full of people. Must be any number of travelers passing through.’

  ‘Thousands. But that doesn’t matter. We booked your rooms this morning. It was Miles’ idea that the fates can be manipulated through optimism. That if we reserved rooms for the lot of you, you’d show up to claim them.’

  ‘It worked apparently,’ said Jonathan, who liked the idea well enough.

  ‘It was a fine gesture,’ the Professor continued. ‘Typical of Miles. But I’m afraid fate is one of the seven immutables.’

  Jonathan was about to ask him what the other six immutables were, but he held off for a moment and the importance of the question diminished. He wasn’t even sure, in fact, what an immutable of any sort was. It sounded like one of those wiggly little things you see under a microscope. But he knew that was unlikely. The Professor had doubtless been speaking abstractly.

  The four of them and Ahab wandered off along the street, passing bustling cafes and dark, cool pubs. The Professor led them around a corner and up a narrow street that angled away toward the sea. Houses lined either side, two or three stories high, and most of them were faced with balconies fenced by wrought-iron grillwork. Flowering vines crept from pots on the balconies up the sides of the buildings and spilled over the railings. Doorways were framed in green and hung round with trumpet flowers; some shuttered windows were almost hidden behind tangles of vegetation. Doors stood open in more than half the houses, and here and there people sat about on the balconies chatting and watching the street. There were cats everywhere, peeking at them from balconies and from behind potted plants. They gathered in little groups on the sidewalk, passing the time of day, then dashed away hither and thither, across streets and up alleys, off on cat business. Ahab had a look of amazement on his face. Jonathan assumed that he was puzzled to learn of the very existence of such a number of cats. He stopped now and again to study them and was himself studied in return. Ahab had, of course, never held any grudge against cats, and he harbored a philosophy that didn’t allow for the chasing of anything – not just for the thrill of the chase, anyway. Peaceful coexistence was his motto, and the cats seemed to sense it. Either that or they felt safe, surrounded as they were by cohorts. One way or another, Ahab made friends with any number of the cats and seemed to be growing to like Landsend as much as Jonathan.

  They rounded another corner onto a similar street that ran off toward the ocean. An evening onshore breeze blew straight up the middle carrying the tingling smell of salt and tar and cooling things off a bit. At the top of the street stood a collection of dark little shops behind dusty leaded windows. In front of one dangled a sign in oriental letters that read, DR CHAN’S HERBS. Ceramic and glass pots and vials sat on a counter in the window. Open bags of dried flowers were heaped among them: tiny pale lilacs, minute purple orchids, citrus blossoms, rose petals. There were wooden boxes of withered lizards and glass jars containing coiled, pickled serpents and peculiar funguses. All of it was scattered about and dusty. Clutches of dried bats hung from above amid bunches of drying herbs.

  Next to Dr Chan’s was another shop that bore a family resemblance. Before it dangled a sign that read merely, CURIOSITIES. Jonathan wondered how much more curious its wares could be than those of the mysterious Dr Chan. The window was so gray with dust that they had to press up against the pane to see inside. When they did, they were presented with the sight of a hippopotamus head, mouth agape, staring back out at them. In among its teeth sat a small, satisfied-looking pig with his mouth open too. And in the pig’s mouth, peering out as if through a window were the head and shoulders of a mouse. A price tag dangled from one of the hippo’s teeth: Two hundred dollars.

  Gump was much taken with the object. ‘I wonder if the two hundred is for the set,’ he said, ‘or just for the hippo.’

  ‘Probably for the tooth,’ Bufo said.

  ‘Imagine having the likes of that in your dining room,’ Gump continued. ‘How majestic. It reminds me of one of those informative illustrations of the, descent of the beasts from the fishes.’

  ‘It’s not as good a deal as you thought,’ Bufo said, his face pressed against the window. ‘The mouse just took off.’

  Gump squinted in the window again. Just as Bufo had reported, the mouse was gone. But it peeked, suddenly, out of one of the hippo’s ears, then ducked back inside and disappeared entirely, after which a second mouse crawled out of the other ear and jumped down to the floor.

  ‘It’s a mouse hotel!’ Bufo cried. ‘Two hundred dollars for a mouse hotel! They probably refer to it as Hotel Hippo. That suckling pig is the innkeeper.’

  ‘Too bad this place isn’t open,’ Gump said. ‘I’d talk him down fifty or so and buy that thing. I’ve always wanted one.’

  Jonathan pressed on the door, just for fun, as they turned to walk away. It swung open, creaking on its hinges. Everyone stopped and peered in. The shop was dim; no lights burned to brighten it up. It didn’t appear at first as if anyone was there, but just then a deep voice from inside boomed: ‘Are you coming in or not?’

  ‘Of course.’ Jonathan felt somewhat committed, having shoved open the door. Gump, anxious to have a go at buying the stuffed hippo-pig, was at Jonathan’s heels as they entered. The proprietor sat beneath a small window in a far corner, taking advantage of the watery rays of late afternoon sun that slanted through the dust on the window. An enormous book lay open on his lap. In his hand was a magnifying glass. His hair was frazzled, and he wore a dark suit – the same suit, it appeared, that he’d worn for the past month or so. But his tie was neatly knotted and he gave the general impression of being a rumpled intellectual – someone, perhaps, so thoroughly immersed in his studies and investigations that rumpled suits and frazzled hair were pretty much inevitable. Jonathan concluded right away that he was a sort of indoor, ivory tower counterpart to the Professor.

  ‘Are you looking for anything in particular?’ the man asked as he adjusted a pair of thick glasses on his nose.

  ‘No,’ Jonathan said. ‘Just browsing.’

  ‘Actually,’ Gump interrupted, gazing nonchalantly about him, ‘I’ve been thinking of buying a really first-rate hippo head. Something to hang on the wall in the dining room. They’re a dime a dozen this time of the year, of course, but good ones, nice fat toothy ones, are rare in any season.’ Then Gump pretended to notice the head in the window, and with a critical air he wandered over to have a look at it.

  Ahab stood with Professor Wurzle before several strange bins along the wall. Each was filled with bones, some loose, some connected. One bin was labeled Fish, another Birds, another Mammalia, and a fourth Man. And sure enough, neatly divided between each were the correct sorts of bones. Ahab didn’t appear to be sure whether to be attracted to them or disgusted. They seemed far too dusty and dry to be worth chewing; a good stick would have more flavor. They fascinated Jonathan and the Professor though.

  Old Wurzle gingerly plucked out a fish skeleton and examined it. Its head was enormous, at least two-thirds the size of the entire body. The fish must have been little more than a swimming head. ‘Some sort of pompano,’ the Professor observed, putting it back and rooting among the bones in the next bin. He uncovered a bird skull as long as Jonathan’s arm, the grinning mouth of which was dotted with sharp teeth. Beneath it was a cheesecloth bag of hummingbird skulls, about sixty or eighty of them, like a bag of marbles.

  ‘These would be fun to own,’ Jonathan said, poking around among the tiny skulls.

  ‘For what purpose?’ the Professor asked. ‘I didn’t think you had much interest in the scientific arts.’

  ‘Well I don’t, really. They’d just be good to sort of have, if you see what I mean. Like Gump’s hippo head.’

  Clearly the Professor didn’t see anything in it. ‘I really hope he doesn’t succeed in buying that thing.’

  ‘I know,’ Jonathan said. ‘Imagine trying to lug it about with u
s. We’d have to arrange to have it stolen.’

  In the other bins were no end of rib bones and skulls and feet strung together with silver wires. Above the bins on a shelf was a line of little stuffed crocodiles flanked on either side by stacks of dusty old books. Supporting the books were two carious glass jars, jars that both the Professor and Jonathan saw at the same time. Their reactions were identical.

  ‘Escargot!’ Jonathan exclaimed.

  ‘Has to be. Look at this.’ And he upended a fallen placard that was meant to be tacked beneath the jars. Squid Clocks Available, it read.

  ‘You don’t suppose he’s round about now, do you?’

  The Professor shook his head. ‘No, I don’t. These jars have a year’s worth of dust on them.’

  ‘If he were just here in his submarine,’ Jonathan said, ‘we’d have a way out of this cheap hotel.’

  ‘And if find the Squire,’ the Professor said, ‘and if we interfere with the Dwarf’s machinations and survive. Too many ifs, Jonathan. It would be best not to anticipate anything. Wish for the worst and you’ll never be disappointed. I read that once in a sea story. It makes sense.’

  ‘I suppose so. But that philosophy doesn’t appeal to me much. Let’s just ask the gentleman about Escargot.’

  Gump’s attempts to coerce the proprietor into cutting the price of the hippo head had, apparently, gone awry. ‘It can’t be done,’ the man was saying as Jonathan and the Professor joined them. ‘Not even for four hundred.’

  ‘Four hundred!’ shouted Bufo, who was rummaging in a sack of shrunken heads. ‘Gump, you’re a lunatic. You haven’t got four hundred.’

  ‘You could loan me a bit.’

  ‘Loan you a bit? What are we going to do for food, eat hippo soup? And what about the poor mice who are living in there? Would you take their home away?’

  ‘I can’t sell it at any price,’ the rumpled man stated flatly. ‘It’s promised. I’ve already taken half the money down. I think I can get my hands on the head of a wildebeest, though.’