The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  He looked from the map to Dooly, then from Dooly to the map and back again, scowling more fiercely with each turn of his head and idly smearing at the goop on the front of his shirt with a fork. ‘Maps is it?’ he asked finally, more of Dooly than anyone else. ‘It’s come to this, then?’

  Dooly launched into a series of elaborate hand signals. He scratched his ear wildly, pointing over his shoulder toward the stairs with an extended thumb while raising and lowering his eyebrows. Then he winked hugely. Gump and Bufo, as a lark, set in immediately to follow Dooly’s example. First Bufo began winking both eyes together, over and over. Then Gump thumbed his nose cheerfully back at Bufo and crossed his eyes. The Professor, looking up from his map in the middle of their histrionics, could make nothing of it at all. Jonathan shrugged at him and shook his head. Escargot, however, nodded suddenly at Dooly and peered across to have a closer look at the Professor’s map.

  Gump and Bufo continued making faces at each other, wiggling their ears, puffing out their cheeks and flapping their clasped hands around like bats. The innkeeper, coming in to clear away plates, caught Bufo in the act of shoving a finger into each ear, swelling his cheeks, clamping his eyes shut, and hissing through pursed lips as if he were acting the part of an exploding fizz bomb.

  ‘Is your friend all right?’ the innkeeper asked as he picked up Gump’s plate and silverware.

  ‘No,’ Gump said. ‘He’s having a fit. The sea air has an effect on his brain pan.’

  Bufo opened his eyes at the sound of the innkeeper’s voice and made a weak pretense at having been merely smoothing down his hair. ‘Good food, this,’ he said in a stalwart, knowing tone. ‘My compliments to the chef. Very superior.’

  ‘Thanks,’ the innkeeper said, giving him a look. ‘Are you feeling better?’

  ‘Tiptop.’ Bufo took a deep breath or two and thumped on his chest. ‘This fellow here, though, seems to have cast a dollop of gravy onto the front of his shirt.’ He pointed at Escargot, who by then had gotten round to dabbing at the stain with the corner of a cloth napkin.

  ‘Would you like a bit of soap, sir?’ the inkeeper asked.

  Escargot stared hard at Bufo, who had begun to lecture Gump about facial muscles. ‘No,’ Escargot said slowly, ‘I’m saving this for lunch tomorrow.’

  Jonathan was afraid that Escargot wasn’t in the mood for larks, and he decided that a quick change of subjects was necessary. It turned out otherwise, however, for Escargot promptly forgot both his shirt and Bufo and turned once again to the Professor. ‘Have you tried this map out yet?’

  ‘Yes we have. It’s worthless.’

  ‘There was no treasure?’

  ‘There was no way to find the treasure,’ Jonathan put in. ‘The map is only half-complete. They might as well have written a note on a post card: “Look for a treasure in Landsend.” ’

  ‘Is that so?’ Escargot asked. ‘It’s none of my business, of course, but just for the sake of curiosity, where did you lads find this map? It wasn’t in Balumnia, I’ll warrant.’

  ‘No,’ said the Professor, ‘it wasn’t.’

  ‘And you’ve had it for about six months now, waiting for a chance to use it.’

  ‘Nope,’ Jonathan told him, ‘we haven’t had it two weeks, but you’re pretty much correct anyway, if I follow your drift. Two weeks ago the Professor and I went back to Hightower Ridge to have a look around. That was before we heard about the Squire. We found this in the cellar. When the Squire disappeared into Balumnia, we had the opportunity to try the map out. But as I said, nothing came of it.’

  Escargot sat for a moment thinking. ‘I’m not sure I like all this happenstance. I get suspicious when things fall out in patterns. But maybe I’m foolish. Maybe I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth here.’

  ‘A horse?’ Dooly asked.

  ‘That’s just a saying, lad.’

  ‘Oh,’ Dooly said. ‘A saying. Of course.’

  Escargot excused himself and went off up the stairs. When he popped back down, he had a map – the seeming twin of the one in front of the Professor. When the maps were laid out side by side, however, they were clearly different. Although they concerned the same area, the configurations of streets weren’t the same. Those streets which appeared on Escargot’s map were absent on the other. And the alleys and cross streets that hadn’t appeared on the map belonging to Jonathan and the Professor were plainly inked in on Escargot’s map. It didn’t take but a moment to figure it all out. The Professor laid one map atop the other, grasped them along either side, and held the superimposed maps in the air in front of a lamp.

  ‘ Partners again.’ Escargot smiled.

  ‘I should say.’ The Professor seemed this time to be genuinely happy about tossing in with Escargot. Gump, Bufo, and Dooly began pointing at the map and debating what tools to bring along.

  ‘We’ll need shovels,’ Bufo said.

  ‘And picks!’ Gump cried.

  ‘And wheelbarrows!’ Dooly shouted. ‘About ten of ‘em. That should do for starters.’

  Gump snatched a chunk of gristly meat from Jonathan’s plate in order to feed it to Ahab before the innkeeper returned to finish clearing the table. He paused, however, and said to Dooly, ‘Ten of them?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Dooly insisted. ‘They’re in the book.’

  ‘But will ten be enough, is what I mean.’

  Dooly reconsidered. ‘No. We’ve got to have an abundance. Two at least just for diamonds. Let me calculate this.’ Dooly pulled at the fingers of his left hand. ‘Grandpa,’ he asked, ‘how many wheelbarrows of diamonds do you reckon we’ll find?’

  ‘Plan on six.’ Escargot was studying the two maps along with Jonathan and the Professor.

  ‘Six, then. And three for pearls, three for rubies, five for em’ralds, two for jewelry and gold, and a dozen or so for stick candy. What is that, about thirty?’

  Bufo nodded. ‘Pretty close. Stick candy, though. Is that standard?’

  ‘In the book!’ Dooly said.

  Ahab poked Gump in the side about then and eyeballed the meat that was still dangling from his fingers. Gump dropped it into his open mouth. ‘What book is this, then?’

  ‘One I found up at Arnold’s. Treasures East and West, it’s called.’

  ‘So how do we get all these wheelbarrows across town?’ Gump asked.

  Dooly thought for a moment. ‘We’ll hire a man. We can do that now that we’re rich.’

  Bufo nodded. ‘We could. Or we could work them like dog sleds. Advertise for local dogs. A nickel an hour and all the stick candy they can eat.’ Ahab looked mournfully at him, as if he wasn’t keen on the idea, stick candy or otherwise.

  ‘The Squire’s got an emerald,’ Gump said abruptly. ‘It’s big as a head.’

  Dooly’s eyes widened. ‘What kind of head?’

  ‘Oh,’ Gump said. ‘Just a standard head. It’s a wonder, though – round like a ball. If you look at someone through it your face just spreads out all over.’

  Dooly nodded sagely, as if he’d seen a few major emeralds in his day, too. ‘We’ll find some of those tomorrow. Them and rubies. Yes, sir. I seen some treasures myself, you know. Treasures you wouldn’t hardly believe.’

  ‘I daresay,’ Gump said. ‘Have you seen the Squire’s marble treasure?’

  ‘No, how many marbles does he have?’

  ‘About a zillion, maybe more. He’s got most of them in big glass jars. And he’s got a bottomless marble bag from Mr Blump and the other elves. You saw that.’

  ‘You bet!’ Dooly cried, no doubt remembering the river of marbles that had flowed endlessly out of the bag onto the lawn before the palace in Seaside. ‘They were good marbles, too. Not just cat’s eyes and such.’

  That’s right,’ Gump said. ‘The Squire had holes dug in his cellars, and he just lets that bag leak marbles into them. If there were a zillion last week, there’s two zillion this week. He spends hours down there shoveling them around with a rubber spade. He used to tie the bag off at
night and untie it in the morning, but then he calculated how many marbles weren’t coming out of the bag and he reconsidered. His cellar is just about full.’

  Dooly was wide-eyed by the end of Gump’s story, and it took him some time to come up with something to say besides ‘Gee whiz,’ which he said three times. ‘Me and Grandpa saw some treasures coming through the gate, didn’t we, Grandpa?’

  ‘That’s so,’ Escargot said, beginning to look a bit excited himself.

  ‘Through the gate?’ Bufo said.

  ‘Through the door, he means,’ Escargot explained. ‘Under the sea. The western door out by the Wonderful Isles. There’s things out to sea there that would turn you inside out. A man can’t stand too much of it. Drives him wild.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Dooly said, ‘like those squid-o-pods in the sea shells.’

  ‘Nautili?’ the Professor asked.

  ‘That’s it. Big around as breadbaskets, they are. There’s crabs out there that use the empty shells for chests. It’s true. We seen them going through sunken ships and the like. They bring back all sorts of gold and jewels, like crows do, and put the stuff in the squid-o-pod shells – the empty ones, of course. There’s a place, fathoms and fathoms down, where there’s a whole city sunk under the ocean in among sea weeds the size of a forest. And there’s sea shell treasures just laying all over with these crabs just coming and going like ants and nothing but dead men to spend it. I couldn’t believe my eyebones. Pearls the size of billiard balls just tumbling out. And diamonds! They liked to blind me there in the lights of the ship. All of this on the bottom of the sea – whales and sharks and schools of kelp bass swimmin’ past. It was a wonder.’

  Jonathan realized that his mouth was agape at the end of Dooly’s tale. He’d never heard anything like it. The Professor gave him a look that seemed to suggest that perhaps, given Dooly’s propensity for telling stretchers, Jonathan’s mouth shouldn’t be open quite so wide. But Jonathan was quite willing – happy in fact – to believe in the sea shell treasures.

  ‘Can’t a person get at these treasures, then?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘Nope,’ Escargot said ‘Too deep. Smash a man to flinders. Pulpify him.’ Escargot looked over toward the Professor for support.

  That’s correct,’ Professor Wurzle said. ‘It accounts for the strange shapes of deep-sea fish. Lord Piedmont attributes undersea pressures to the effects of the moon. Pinkum’s theory has to do with the weight of the waters. I myself hold with Pinkum, although Lord Piedmont is more colorful.’

  ‘Well that settles it, then,’ Bufo said. ‘We won’t go swimming for any squid-o-pod treasures, not with Pinkum and Lord Piedmont against us.’

  Conversation slackened about then, and Jonathan began to feel as if he’d walked up and down the road all day. It was nearly nine o’clock, early enough yet to catch eight good hours of sleep and still be up at dawn. The Professor and Escargot followed his example when he excused himself, and the three of them headed up to their rooms, leaving Gump, Bufo, Dooly, and Ahab making excited plans below.

  18

  St Elmo Square

  The next morning found them once again on the street. Miles hadn’t yet returned. Jonathan and the Professor made a pact to be back at the inn by noon and to drag Bufo and Gump along with them, even if it meant abandoning the treasure. Finding the Squire, after all, was their first concern.

  But there didn’t seem to be much to worry about. The map was nearly as accurate as a map could be, and it led them straightaway into old, narrow, cobbled streets and between ancient houses, all packed in side-by-side and tilting away overhead. They would have appeared to be ruins but for the flowering vines and dangling orchids that sprouted from chinks in the walls and from depressions in crumbling cornices and window ledges. The deterioration clearly wasn’t the result of abandonment so much as of age, for most of the houses were occupied, and the streets were swept and clean.

  They topped a small hill and cut down a long alley which led them finally to a dead-end bit of unpaved street. A faded sign hung from the plaster wall of a tumbled house directly opposite the mouth of the alley; ST ELMO SQUARE it read.

  In contrast to the streets they’d just come along, St Elmo Square seemed thoroughly deserted. Windows were broken and gaping, and tattered lace curtains blew silently through them here and there, out into the morning breeze. Stoops had caved in and collapsed from age; slates from crumbling roofs lay broken in the street. A menacing silence hovered thick in the air, as if the square and the buildings that fronted it were not only abandoned, but had been for years and years so that the silence had had time to gather and thicken and deaden and turn to gloom.

  Jonathan strained to hear something – anything that would convince him he hadn’t gone deaf. It dawned on him with a grim suddenness that there weren’t even any cats about, not one. Ahab seemed to sense the same thing, for instead of dashing out to have a look around, he sat still at Jonathan’s feet and waited. Everything, in fact, seemed to be waiting.

  Jonathan wished that Escargot would come up with some of his bluff talk, or else that Gump and Bufo would see something in the atmosphere to argue about. Instead, shattering the silence like a knock against a window in the night time, came the slamming of a door behind them. Everyone whirled at once. Twenty or thirty yards down the alley they saw the receding figure of a bent old woman, hobbling along on a stick and followed by a very black cat.

  Escargot muttered something under his breath, but Jonathan didn’t catch it. Reaching the far end of the alley, she turned and stared back at them, a small hunched figure standing with her head tilted slightly to one side, as if she were listening to the wind. Then she vanished. She just blinked away like one of Zippo’s playing cards.

  ‘What was the meaning of that?’ the Professor asked. ‘Has she been following us?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Escargot answered, still squinting down the alley toward where the old woman had vanished. ‘I think she was waiting for us.’

  ‘Impossible. No one knew about the maps but us.’

  Escargot shook his head. ‘So we think. Just like we think we know why we’re here.’

  ‘In this alley?’ Bufo asked. ‘We’re after treasure. And we better find it too, after all this.’

  ‘I didn’t mean in the alley,’ Escargot muttered ominously, ‘but I’m with you about the treasure. We’re doing too much standing about. Let’s find what we came for and get out of here.’

  Everyone loosened up a bit at that and set in to examine the maps. The silence that hung so thickly broke apart and was replaced by the sounds of shuffling feet and rustling paper and voices. Gump and Bufo began to argue about how to hold the map – about which way was up. Dooly said that they couldn’t go wrong as long as they remembered that north was always straight ahead. It didn’t take long, however, to set things right. Little faded boxes on Escargot’s map corresponded quite clearly to the houses on the square. An X scrawled through one of those boxes hinted that the treasure, whatever it might be, lay in a half-ruined house not fifty steps distant.

  There had once been a front porch on it supported by cut stones. The whole thing had slumped at one end so disastrously, however, that the pillars at either side had canted over until they had fallen into a heap, carrying a little gabled porch roof with them. Old weather-decrepit remnants still hung by twisted nails, but it looked as if one good storm would pull them loose and scatter them among the ruins that lay in the weeds and dirt.

  After picking their way across the debris, getting into the house was a snap. There wasn’t any door, just one crusty green strap hinge, bent and dangling from the jamb. Rats scurried away out of sight as the group clomped in onto the floorboards. Everything was still and silent, the only movement being a line of floating dust motes that hovered still and lonely in a single ray of sunshine slanting in down the stairwell through a gaping hole in the roof.

  ‘What do you expect?’ Escargot asked suddenly, his voice echoing through the still air. ‘G
hosts?’

  The noise made everyone jump, and Escargot laughed his slow, ‘Har, har, har,’ piratical laugh, as if wandering into ruined houses under mysterious circumstances were meat and drink to him. He pointed across toward a shut closet door. ‘Look into that closet there, Dooly lad. I’ll have a go at the kitchen. We didn’t sail out here from the Isles to stand around and gawk at a bunch of busted-up furniture.’ With that he kicked the remains of an overturned wooden chair out of his way and strode off. Dooly didn’t move. He just stood and looked at the closet as if it were a goblin nest.

  Professor Wurzle stepped across, grasped the door handle, and yanked it open with a no-nonsense tug. With a quick creak of squeaking hinge, the door swung to, and a skeleton, yellow and decaying and dressed in tatters, pitched out onto the floor. The Professor leaped back out of the way, surprised to find that he was holding the loose doorknob in his hand. He stared down at the fallen thing for a moment, a look of amazement on his face, then threw the doorknob into its ribcage; brittle bones crackled and spun away. Dooly began to laugh wildly, whooshing and shouting. Bufo kicked the skeleton’s skull loose, knocking off a toothy jawbone. The rest of the skull rolled toward the stairs, hung for a moment on the edge, then bounced down into the darkness of the basement.

  ‘Look here!’ Gump cried, bending over and pointing. On the floor were a half-dozen scattered glass marbles.

  Escargot raced in, supposing, perhaps, that Gump was exclaiming over a discovered bit of treasure. He stopped and looked down at the marbles. ‘I hope that ain’t all of it.’

  Gump shook his head. ‘They were in the skeleton’s mouth. When Bufo kicked the jawbone loose, they spilled out. I saw them.’

  ‘In his mouth!’ Professor Wurzle was astonished. ‘Jonathan, you’re the one among us who reads pirate books. Is there any precedent for this?’

  Jonathan thought for a moment. ‘Not that I remember. I seem to recall having read about a pirate captain named Beetle-brow who did some astonishing things with bugs, but nothing about marbles. Unless …’ Jonathan began.