The Disappearing Dwarf

by James P. Blaylock

  On beyond on the rocky beach lay any number of skeletons, slumped in the sand as if they’d been filing along the beach in a line and had been blown over by some great wind, toppled like a line of dominoes. A memory of Zippo the magician and of the foggy night in Tweet River Village flitted through his mind and he thought about the dark magical tapestry before which Zippo had performed. He remembered the lighted windows he’d seen through the mist in the night, windows that hadn’t, he was sure, been a part of any dream. He turned slowly and looked inland toward the road. There beyond it, sitting on the rocky hillside above a gray-green meadow, was an old stone castle, a castle shrouded with the same pall of mystery and evil that hung in the atmosphere around the castle on Hightower Ridge. He realized, just then, where the great iron door in the deep cavern beneath Hightower Castle led, what door it was that he’d whacked against with his stick and shouted funny things at. It was quite possible even, given Selznak’s powers, that the Dwarf himself had been listening at the other side, smiling and nodding with anticipation.

  A light shone in an arched window high in a tower of the castle. A hooded figure stepped in front of the high window, staring out toward the ocean. It seemed to Jonathan that he could see a pair of glowing eyes beneath the hood and that the eyes were looking at him. But he didn’t have more than a moment to wonder at it before he was jerked to his feet like a marionette and he found himself marching in a long line of risen skeletons along a rough path that led across the meadow toward the castle. Rocks crunched beneath his feet, and the salt air off the ocean pinged against his cheek. He was reminded of a holy man he’d met once on the road to the fair, who walked with a rock in cither shoe. He’d seemed half-crippled by it, but he’d told Jonathan that he did it to remind himself that he was alive. It had seemed pretty loony to Jonathan at the time, but it made a certain sense to him now. He was stricken with the fearful certainty that connections with daylight, with sunshine, with the waking world were far fewer than he had ever imagined, that they were nothing more than the crunch of stones beneath his feet and the taste of salt and seafoam on the wind and the cry of wheeling gulls, and were numbered and falling away with each step that he took toward the dark portal that opened at the base of the tower.

  It loomed larger ahead of him. Within, he could sec small fires burning, torches, perhaps, hung on the walls. Then he filed in through the open door, down a long stair into the earth and along a dark, musty corridor where he could see nothing and feared that he’d run into the thing clacking along in front of him or feel a bony hand on his shoulder. But when he stepped once again into pale yellow lamplight, there was nothing before him at all, nor was there anything clacking along behind. There was only a little, empty, bat-haunted cavern and the sound of sliding and clanking metal that turned out, when Jonathan spun around, to be iron bars that had banged shut.

  All in all, Jonathan felt a vast relief. It seemed quite possible that his imagination had played him false, that there was no immediate reason to fill his shoes with rocks after all. Playing out the scene on the tapestry had, he hoped, been Selznak’s idea of a lark. He was relieved too to find that the line of grisly skeletons hadn’t all crowded into the cell with him. Where they’d gone, he hadn’t any idea. He couldn’t even be sure that there had been any skeletons. It was every bit as likely that the Dwarf had spun some magic, made him see things that weren’t there. It was certain that Selznak had uncommon powers in Balumnia, powers that exceeded even those he wielded in the High Valley along the Oriel River. Miles, with his dishes of smoking herbs and spark-throwing cap, seemed to be rather weak tea in comparison. Righting fallen chairs and casting wind-increasing spells were all very impressive in their way, but right at that moment, as Jonathan stood alone in his cold cell, such tricks didn’t appear to amount to very much. He shrugged and looked around the bare, rocky cavern, then stepped across and rattled the cell bars just on the offchance that the locking mechanism was old and unreliable. That wasn’t the case.

  So Jonathan sat down on the dusty, cold floor and waited. One thing was sure: Selznak wasn’t about to let him starve to death. He had far too much imagination for that. After an hour or so of sitting in the dim lamp-lit cavern, Jonathan heard the scrape of shoes and saw the flickering light of an approaching torch – a torch, remarkably enough, carried by none other than Zippo the Magician.

  21

  The Weak Link

  Zippo carried with him a bowl, probably full of gruel, with the end of a spoon sticking out of it and steam rising off the top. The steam alone looked so appetizing to Jonathan that he was ready to eat whatever lay in the bowl even if it was gruel, which, Jonathan had read in G. Smithers, was the preferred food of prisoners and orphans. He wasn’t sure, however, what gruel was – boiled-down oat husks sprinkled with dirt probably.

  ‘Mr Zippo!’ Jonathan said heartily when Zippo drew up with his bowl. ‘You’re looking pale, sir.’

  ‘Zippo,’ said Zippo. Just Zippo. No mister. That’s not my real name, you see; it’s just a stage device. My real name is Leopold Streff.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Jonathan said, thinking that somehow Zippo’s name sounded familiar. He looked at him closely. The man was fairly young, as Escargot had pointed out, probably in his early thirties. But he was haggard and drawn as if he hadn’t slept at all well for a month or two, or as if his conscience was tormenting him. His toupee had disappeared. Zippo shoved the steaming bowl through the bars, and Jonathan took it. Inside was some sort of cooked cereal that looked very edible. Something was sprinkled over the top, but it wasn’t dirt. Jonathan determined that it was brown sugar, which, under the circumstances, was an unlooked for but welcome sight.

  ‘So how are you getting on?’ Jonathan asked.

  Zippo shrugged and shook his head in a way that either meant that he wasn’t getting on at all well or that he couldn’t talk about it. Jonathan tried another tack, talking through a mouthful of cereal. ‘Don’t do much performing out here, do you? Doesn’t seem to be much of an audience around beyond goblins and skeletons and ghouls and such. I wouldn’t think that crowd would go in much for magic.’

  Zippo looked as if he were about to burst. ‘Oh they like it well enough,’ he muttered through his teeth. ‘They like to spoil it is what. They like to wreck it. Filthy bunch of devils. He made me put on a show for them. A show in the woods. They …’ he began. ‘They … they ruined it is what. Made fun. They don’t like any thing. Just rip around. They lit my stage on fire.’

  ‘What did he think about it all?’ Jonathan asked. ‘Laughed, I’d warrant. Am I right?’

  But Zippo didn’t answer. He looked at Jonathan for a moment, shook his head, put on a taciturn face, and clumped off down the dark corridor, his torch fizzling. Jonathan sat back down and finished his cereal. There was precious little to do but wait. Wait and think about Zippo.

  At around noon, he returned with lunch. Jonathan was a bit surprised to find such hospitality and to discover in his lunch sack a pleasant assortment of foods: pickles, cheese, black bread, and a tolerably crisp apple. Then he remembered the contents of the Dwarf’s kitchen at High tower Castle – the bottled ale and pickled vegetables and such. That the Dwarf gave such fare away to his prisoners was probably a matter once again of his toying with them. Selznak saw the whole thing as a lark.

  Zippo hung around again without saying much, so Jonathan had another go at him. ‘Quite a show you put on up at Tweet River Village. The best I’ve ever seen. By far. And I’ve seen a few, I can tell you. Yours held it over them all.’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ Zippo asked, brightening a bit.

  Actually Jonathan did think his show had been pretty good, so saying so hadn’t been much of a stretcher. But even if he had exaggerated a bit, absolute truthfulness wasn’t really demanded under the circumstances. Seeing Zippo perk up, Jonathan laid it on a bit thicker. ‘Absolutely,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen such a hand with a deck of cards. And that mechanical fish was a marvel. Too high-tone
d for the crowd at the tavern, if you ask me. You could run that fish in front of princes and kings. That’s how good it was.’

  ‘Well it was rather good, wasn’t it? Don’t think it was his idea either,’ Zippo continued, ‘because it wasn’t. It was mine. I thought the illusion up years ago. Covered a cow skull with hammered sheet copper when I was fifteen and shot strawberries out of its mouth at my friends. The fish idea came later. The cow head was all right, but it wasn’t half mystical enough, if you know what I mean. It was weird, all right, but in an evil sort of way. That wasn’t my idea of magic at all. Not a bit.’

  ‘Oh?’ Jonathan said, taking advantage of Zippo’s insistence. ‘Things change over the years, I suppose.’ He gave Zippo a look he hoped suggested that evil-looking copper-covered cow skulls must be right in his line nowadays.

  ‘That’s not so,’ Zippo said, growing even more indignant than Jonathan would have supposed. ‘That’s not it at all. There’s circumstances.’

  ‘Circumstances?’

  But Zippo wouldn’t budge. He looked as if he were going to clam up and go away again, so Jonathan changed the subject. ‘You’re right about the fish,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing more mystical than a fish with golden scales. Unless it’s something that floats in the air. The bubbles and butterflies were good, but the flowers were perfect. Enchantment is what it was.’

  ‘That’s it exactly,’ Zippo said, cutting in. ‘Enchantment. Wonder. Marvel. Those are the sorts of things I’m after. The card tricks are okay. They surprise people, I suppose, but they don’t fill them full of wonder, if you follow me. There’s minor sorts of magic involved, but there isn’t any enchantment.’

  ‘That’s it entirely.’ Jonathan once again had to rework his opinion of Zippo. It was seeming more and more odd to him that he would be in league with the Dwarf. He suspected that Zippo’s cooperation with Selznak wasn’t entirely voluntary or else was a product of his vanity – that without Selznak he’d have no access to magical tapestries or winged pigs or helium buds. ‘You know who loves that sort of thing? Jonathan asked. ‘Squire Myrkle, that’s who.’ He expected Zippo to react somehow, half-figuring that at the mention of the Squire’s name he would put on his taciturn face and leave. But that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, he started to cry.

  It was a very strange sight, Zippo boo-hooing there; it took Jonathan by surprise. ‘Poor Squire!’ Zippo cried.

  ‘What’s happened to him!’ Jonathan shouted, leaping toward the door as if to grab Zippo and shake him.

  ‘Nothing,’ Zippo, startled, fell back a step or two. ‘Nothing, yet.’ With that he shook his head sadly and reached into his pocket, pulling out a little leather bag. He untied the thong around the mouth of the bag, upended it over his palm, and poured out a dozen or so marbles. The rainbow swirls of the colored glass threw glints of light in the glow of the torch. ‘Look at these,’ Zippo said.

  Jonathan took a closer look, supposing that the marbles weren’t quite as ordinary as they appeared. They were pretty marbles, to be sure, shot through with ribbons of lavender and emerald and orange, but beyond their beauty as marbles, there was nothing about them that explained Zippo’s obvious sense of wonder. ‘Do you know what these are?’ Zippo asked.

  ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Marbles. That’s what the Squire called them.’

  ‘Did he? He gave you these marbles then?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Are these the first marbles you’ve ever seen?’

  ‘Why yes,’ Zippo said, seemingly puzzled by the question. Suddenly Jonathan was struck with a strange thought.

  ‘Don’t children play with marbles, then, in Balumnia?’

  ‘Where?’ Zippo asked, giving Jonathan a strange look.

  ‘Never mind. Why did you say, “Poor Squire,” when I mentioned him? What’s Selznak been up to?’

  ‘Who?’ Zippo shoved the marble bag back into his pocket. ‘I’ve got to be getting back. He won’t like it if I’m away too long. He doesn’t entirely trust me. No one does.’ Zippo sniffled and pulled the torch out of its niche in the wall and started off down the corridor.

  ‘Help me save the Squire,’ Jonathan called after him. ‘Save yourself!’ But Zippo disappeared. Jonathan sat back down and nibbled his lunch, kicking himself for forgetting that Zippo might well not know that he lived in the land of Balumnia nor that Sikorsky was really Selznak under an assumed name. It was equally likely, of course, that Selznak was really Sikorsky under an assumed name. One way or, the other, he’d probably managed to confuse Zippo no end. It was astonishing to discover that there were no marbles in Balumnia, although it really didn’t surprise him that Zippo was so taken with them. Jonathan had always thought that marbles, which were, after all, invented by elves, contained some nature of enchantment. It occurred to him that Escargot was missing a bet. He could make a fortune selling marbles in Balumnia and forget about foraging for sea lemons and cephalopods and fish carcasses.

  By and by, Jonathan began to grow sleepy. He hadn’t slept worth a fig that night, and there was nothing much else to do anyway, so he lay down on the flattest part of the floor he could find and shut his eyes. He discovered after a moment, however, that the floor was lumpier than it had seemed at first, and he wiggled about and curled this way and that and worked at being comfortable for a half-hour before he dozed off.

  A noise ruined his nap – a ‘psst!’ whispered by someone anxious to wake him. He pushed himself up and saw Zippo standing outside the bars, looking back over his shoulder. He knew that he couldn’t have slept more than an hour – not even long enough to feel particularly muddled. So it couldn’t be dinner time already. Besides, Zippo hadn’t any food with him. He held nothing but his sputtering torch and looked like a man who wanted to talk – like a conspirator, in fact.

  ‘Zippo!’ Jonathan called. ‘What ho?’ He decided that he might just as well make a show of being cheerful. Zippo had the look of a man who might spook easily, lose his conspiratorial air and run off in the dark. In fact, he could hardly hold himself still. He thrust his torch from one hand to the other and back again and craned his head about and back and forth, as if he expected someone to come sneaking along the dark corridor after him.

  ‘Dinner time?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘What?’ Zippo was taken by surprise. ‘No, not yet. I …’ and he stopped and stood there quaking. ‘I thought you might want something.’

  ‘A pillow would be nice. That and some lemonade. And if you have any G. Smithers novels lying about, bring one of those too.’

  ‘Shhh!’ Zippo hissed. Jonathan shushed and listened for a moment but he heard nothing. ‘This is no time to be frivolous,’ Zippo said, peering back over his shoulder once again for good measure. ‘We’re in terrible danger here.’

  ‘We are?’ Jonathan sounded surprised. Then, in a rush of sudden certainty, Jonathan remembered where he’d heard Zippo’s name. ‘You say you used to shoot strawberries out of the mouth of a copper cow?’

  ‘What?’ Zippo asked, surprised again at the change of subject. ‘That’s right. Strawberries.’

  ‘You must have had plenty of them, eh? Don’t they call your father the Strawberry Baron?’

  ‘How do you know about my father?’ Zippo asked, startled.

  ‘It’s a long story,’ Jonathan explained. ‘He was very kind to some friends of mine, and he’s keen on having a go at the Dwarf. I’m going to trust you here, because I can see that you’ve come to your senses. You’ve got a chance to end all of this foolishness. Your father, along with Cap’n Eustacio Binky, are financing an armed excursion across the Tweet River and south to the coast. Their armies are massing right now. They’re not in the mood for quarter, either, I can tell you.’

  Zippo’s eyes became as big around as melons in the torchlight and were filled with a mixture of surprise and joy and fear. Jonathan disliked having to dabble in hearsay, since Zippo so obviously hung on his every word.

  ‘Did he mention me?’
Zippo asked, his face full of hope.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘My father. The Strawberry Baron. Did he say anything about me?’

  ‘Of course he did,’ Jonathan said, warming to his subject. ‘Of course. He carried on about you. Told a long story about the prodigal son who comes back after wayward years and is welcomed by his father. Very touching, really, the idea of someone coming round in the end.’ Once again Zippo was momentarily lost in tears. Jonathan felt awful. For one wild moment he was possessed by the idea of denying it all – of revealing that he knew nothing about the Strawberry Baron but a few snatches of rumor and that it was quite possible that Zippo would be rewarded with a poke in the nose if he went home. But the truth now, he quickly saw, wouldn’t serve. It wouldn’t solve Zippo’s dilemma nor would it get him and the Professor and, he hoped, old Ahab out of their scrape. There would be time later to repair any damage, even if he himself had to hunt up the Strawberry Baron and tell him the story of the prodigal son.

  Zippo wiped his eyes and seemed to buck up a bit, as if something had lit the fires of dauntlessness within his soul.

  ‘He’s taken your friends.’ Zippo announced suddenly.

  ‘Taken them!’ Jonathan cried. ‘What friends?’

  ‘Why the ones in the undersea boat,’ Zippo said. ‘The old wild man and the two elves and the boy with the whirling eyes. Goblins brought them in a half-hour ago. It must have been a savage battle. They were moored right off Boffin Beach, poking around.’

  ‘Looking for me,’ Jonathan said. ‘How about the wizard? Did he catch the wizard?’ Jonathan decided that since he’d invited Zippo to be a turncoat he might just as well trust him.

  Zippo didn’t know anything about any wizard. The old woman had lied last night in the forest. Miles hadn’t left them any message. She knew nothing about Miles. Was afraid of him probably. Miles was at large! A bit of hope surged through Jonathan, but it evaporated again quickly as Zippo’s torch, guttering in its niche in the wall, flared up twice like a dying star and winked out. Zippo trembled visibly as if the dead torch were some sort of omen, as if it hadn’t actually burned out but had been snuffed out purposefully. Jonathan remembered the scattered campfire and the laughter in the fog that night a week past on the outskirts of linkman territory, and he half expected that the little oil lamp burning behind him would sputter out too. But it didn’t. When Zippo saw that there wasn’t any immediate danger of being plunged into darkness he settled down again. ‘They’ll be too late,’ he said, knuckling his brow.