The Elfin Ship

by James P. Blaylock

  Soon they found themselves flying above Thrush Haven – nothing more than a section of rocky shoreline, smashed in the winter by long north swells that wrapped around the tip of Manatee Head and made it idiotic to bring a ship of any size within a half mile of shore. Jonathan thought it peculiar that the place was called a ‘Haven’ since it was so clearly the opposite, and neither the Professor nor Thrimp nor any of the linkmen could explain the thing. Although it was a pleasant enough day now that the clouds were far behind, the surf appeared to be running high; waves broke against the mountainous rocks along the shoreline, sending cascades of spray fifty feet into the air. Beyond the surfline, spotted seals sat about in clumps, one now and again sliding off into the water and disappearing, no doubt, in search of a passing fish.

  ‘Tough way to make a living,’ Jonathan pointed out. ‘You’d think those seals would have seen through this “haven” business and moved on long ago.’

  ‘Seals haven’t any sense of irony,’ the Professor said. ‘And they trust anyone – rather like old Ahab here.’

  Ahab’s ears wiggled at the sound of his name. He seemed fairly pleased to be compared favorably with seals.

  The airship zoomed along above the sea but below the tops of the cliffs that rose several hundred feet above the shore. Sea birds by the thousands, nested along the cliff face, were dashing off in all directions, skimming over the tops of the waves and soaring on the breeze.

  ‘Thrushes?’ Jonathan asked.

  ‘Not a one,’ answered old Wurzle, who, as a naturalist, knew about that sort of thing. ‘There aren’t any thrushes this far down the valley. Never have been.’

  ‘I see,’ said Jonathan.

  The airship circled once, and Thrimp pointed out a dark slash at the base of the cliffs. As the surge washed out, it was revealed as the mouth of a long, low cave. Jonathan could see enough to realize that the thing must be sixty or eighty yards long. When the surge whooshed back in, the opening disappeared and only the arched top of the mouth was visible.

  Dooly watched the activity below as if he wished he were back in Twombly Town. Jonathan felt bad about the whole thing. Although he knew that Dooly had not, in effect, betrayed his grandfather, Dooly’s guilty face and general slump made all the logic in the world beside the point. Jonathan half hoped that Old Escargot would be long gone – off stealing emeralds from the jewel elves or trapping nautili and frog fish in the kelp-choked seas south of the Wonderful Isles.

  The ocean disappeared behind them as the airship topped the cliff and settled onto the grasses of the heath beyond. Jonathan half expected the ship to go sliding in, bouncing on rocks and lurching over hillocks, but it simply ceased to hum all of a sudden and sank groundward at a leisurely rate, barely bumping at all when it settled.

  ‘Smooth landing,’ Jonathan said to the Professor, who was crammed against the window so as to get a clear view of their descent.

  ‘That would be the gyros.’ The Professor looked to Thrimp for support.

  ‘Of course it is.’ Thrimp hopped up, then headed off down the aisle toward the hatch. Squire Myrkle bulked out behind Thrimp, squeezing between the seats. He made a sound like bubbling laughter. ‘Thrimp, blimp, gimp, wimp, dimp.’ Thrimp responded in kind, calling over his shoulder, ‘Squire, wire, cauliflyer.’ Then he popped on through to open the hatch and down the stairway onto the meadow. Dooly perked up at the cheerful mood of Thrimp and the Squire. Watching Dooly laugh at all the name calling, it occurred to Jonathan that the Squire and Dooly had the same sense of humor – a very peculiar sense of humor to be sure, but one which seemed to make any situation a bit lighter. That, as far as Jonathan was concerned, was always a good idea.

  It seemed as if Dooly had forgotten for the moment that his grandfather, although no doubt looking forward to seeing his favorite grandson, would frown at the idea of being visited by a party of elves and linkmen intent on persuading him to undertake a difficult and dangerous task. Worse, even, Old Escargot obviously wasn’t hiding from enemies of any sort, but from himself. And Twickenham was determined to change all that.

  What they would accomplish by strolling on the meadow, however, Jonathan couldn’t say. He followed along as Twickenham, urging Dooly along ahead of him, made off toward a stand of blown and bent cypress trees that formed a forest of sorts in a little valley between two grassy hills. Twickenham pointed and gestured while Dooly shrugged repeatedly as if he had an itch between his shoulder blades that he couldn’t reach. Finally Dooly nodded and seemed to slump a bit, whereupon Squire Myrkle patted him on the back and cheered him. Jonathan could never be sure about the Squire, who seemed to be the dimmest sort of good-natured half-wit one moment, then oddly shrewd another. He was a marvelous sight though, hurrying along at the head of the procession, his arms swinging about his body as he lumbered puffing forward on bulky legs.

  They paused in the midst of the stand of cypress, and Twickenham began stomping about with one hand cupped at his ear and prodding and poking with his walking stick as if searching for a buried clam. He thumped, finally, against something hollow and wooden. Then with the help of Bufo and Dooly, he scraped away dirt and brush from atop what turned out to be a trapdoor made of heavy wooden planks, worm-eaten and dark from having been buried. The whole thing was nestled into a hole in the earth. Mr Bufo, a theorist in the manner of the Professor, found two rocks nearly the same size – and shape, in fact – as the Squire’s head; he hauled them over. They set one at each of two corners, and using two oak walking sticks pried away at the heavy door until it popped loose. A dozen hands hauled back the door to reveal a dark passage dug out beneath the twisted roots of the cypress and shored up with heavy timbers. A ladder of sorts led down into the depths.

  ‘Is this it?’ Twickenham asked Dooly.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Dooly answered. ‘Begging your honor’s pardon, sir, but old Grandpa described just such a hole, and it ain’t a goblin hole neither, but leads to the caves.’

  ‘Shall we?’ Twickenham asked the company in general. Everyone nodded and chattered and gathered round the mouth of the hole as Twickenham scrambled down. Each one followed in turn until only the Squire and Ahab remained above, peering down at them grinning. Clearly, when Squire Myrkle stepped onto the first rung, the ladder would be tried fearfully by his weight. It bowed downward, creaking and snapping; those below pushed back deeper into the dark corridor.

  ‘Hold on, Squire!’ Bufo shouted. ‘Don’t come any farther!’

  ‘Here comes the Squire!’ the Squire shouted and lowered himself a bit farther, one leg swinging ponderously back and forth as he groped for the second rung.

  ‘Wait, Squire!’ Bufo shouted again. ‘You’ll break it all to smash, and none of us will get out!’

  The Squire stopped and peered back down into the darkness. ‘The Squire will stand guard outside, with the beast,’ he said, as he crawled out of the hole.

  ‘Me too!’ shouted Stick-a-bush, who scrambled out after him. ‘I’ll keep the Squire company.’

  ‘Me too!’ cried Dooly, charging after Stick-a-bush, but Twickenham latched onto his belt and brought him to an abrupt stop. ‘Maybe I won’t,’ said Dooly, scratching his head. ‘Maybe two guards is enough.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ said Twickenham. With Dooly in tow, he led away downward. A blast of sea air, moist and salty, blew up the tunnel at them. The walls were wet with it and mossy to the touch. Each member of the party hung on to the belt or shirt of the one in front of him so as not to fall behind or take a wrong turning. When Twickenham stopped abruptly, everyone pummeled together like toppling dominoes; Jonathan fell in a heap on top of Bufo and the Professor. There was a general shouting and scuffling, but when things were sorted out, Jonathan marveled at the sight that lay spread out before them.

  15

  Theophile Escargot

  It was a tremendous vaulted cavern, wide and deep enough to house a fleet of ships. Sunlight streamed in from shafts in the rocky ceiling, and great stone pillars angled away
toward the cathedral ceiling a hundred feet overhead.

  Below them and away to the right a path stretched over the stone, chiseled clear here and there and leading past what appeared to be other tunnels cutting away into the cliffs. Directly below was a wide and peaceful lagoon, green and murky within the twilight of the cavern. The mouth of the cavern, which they had seen during their flight along the cliffs, was visible in the distance, a sliver of light which opened to a half circle as the surge ebbed, then closed again to a sliver a minute later. At each surge a glassy swell humped across the face of the lagoon, swishing quietly up onto the rocks some few feet beyond and below where Jonathan stood with the rest of the company.

  Aside from the swish of the rolling surge, the only sound within the cavern was the occasional echoing cry of a sea bird that sailed in and winged around for a few moments within the cavern before either sailing out again or disappearing into one of hundreds of weedy-looking nests clinging to crags and depressions in the walls above.

  The whole quiet vista was something close to awesome; it silenced all of them. But perhaps most awesome of all was the weird ship that floated at anchor off a sandy spit halfway around the lagoon and at the end of the path across the rocks. It was an astonishing craft, obviously built either by elves or by one of the tribes of marvel men in the Wonderful Isles – built by someone, anyway, who knew what such devices ought to look like. It was a spiraly affair, with odd, seemingly senseless crenelations and spires and a series of what might be taken for arced shark fins down the center of its back. On a foggy night the thing would certainly resemble a sea monster more closely than a ship, for it had several round portholes at the front, two of which, on either side of its pointed nose, glowed from some inner light and looked for all the world like eyes. On the sides were protruding fins, shaped like the fins of an enormous tide pool sculpin. Seawater to the rear of the vessel seemed to be churning and bubbling, and a whoosh of water shot out of the end every minute or so.

  ‘That’s old Grandpa!’ Dooly said. ‘Sure enough and no doubt. That’ll be his undersea device there.’ Dooly pointed proudly toward the submarine. Twickenham, followed close on by the rest of the company, hopped across a couple of rocks and climbed along up the path until he reached a little rocky peak from where they could see the entirety of the beach off which the device was moored. The beach sloped away into the mouth of another cavern, and hustling through the cavern’s mouth came Theophile Escargot, perhaps the most noted thief and adventurer in the land, carrying an armload of goods which he piled into a canoe. He pushed the canoe into the lagoon, produced a paddle from beneath the thwarts, and dipped away stiffly toward the submarine.

  ‘He’s onto us!’ said Twickenham. ‘And he’s going to run.’

  ‘Not Grandpa,’ said Dooly. ‘He said he’d wait until December for me.’

  But it was clear that Escargot was in a huge hurry, for he made the little canoe skate over the surface of the lagoon. Dooly leaped ahead of the rest of them and charged down the path toward the beach shouting.

  ‘Grandpa!’ he shouted when first setting out. Then just ‘Whoooo!’ and ‘Hey!’ as he pounded along, moving too quickly to bother with any actual words.

  Old Escargot, shoving odds and ends through an open hatch, turned to see who was making such a fuss, paused, caught sight of the rest of the party clambering down the path. Without more than a moment’s hesitation he climbed down into the submarine. The hatch slammed shut, two or three blasts of water shot out behind, and the whole craft sank bubbling away beneath the waters of the lagoon.

  Dooly stood on the sand, waving slowly at nothing, puzzled, probably, that old Grandpa had disappeared so completely. ‘He must not have recognized me, Mr Bing. He thought I was a ghost or goblin or something. Maybe I shouldn’t have made such noises.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s the case, Dooly,’ Jonathan agreed.

  ‘He seemed in a powerful hurry to get away.’

  ‘That he did.’ Jonathan looked back up the beach. In the mouth of the little cavern lay a heap of supplies. A fire crackled within a pit encircled by stones; an odd fish, half-cooked, hung spitted over the fire.

  ‘Left in the middle of lunch,’ Jonathan said, ‘and without half his supplies.’

  ‘The old scoundrel,’ said Bufo, shaking a fist at the empty lagoon. Near the mouth the surge ebbed and two spiraling towers were briefly visible cutting along through the swell. ‘Hah!’ Bufo shouted as they disappeared, the submarine passing away into the open sea. ‘I’ll compose a poem about this treachery! An epic’ Bufo stomped around, possessed by the muse.

  Jonathan could see that Dooly was making a grand effort not to cry. ‘Why don’t we talk about treachery some other time,’ he said to Bufo. ‘It won’t do us any good now anyway.’

  Bufo looked at Jonathan, then at Dooly. ‘I believe you’re correct.’ He followed Twickenham and Thrimp and the Professor over to where the fish was still roasting to pieces. Its underside was charred and going to bits, but the top side was barely done. The Professor, idling about while Twickenham picked through Escargot’s abandoned supplies, turned the spit.

  Jonathan sat on a rock and picked up a hermit crab as it scuttled past, big as a fist. The crab poked its head out of its seashell, looked at Jonathan, then pinched him on the finger. Jonathan shouted and pitched the thing into the lagoon, although he was immediately sorry he had, afraid that the crab might have suffered in some way. It occurred to him that it was foolish to go about picking up crabs if you didn’t want to get pinched.

  Dooly, who still stood near the water’s edge, began to shout and dance. ‘Hooray! Hooray!’ He pointed out toward the water. Jonathan jumped up, and the others stormed across the sand toward him, for, surfacing amid a flurry of bubbles and steam, was the undersea device, Old Escargot was clearly visible within, working a complexity of controls. The thing motored into shallow water, and an anchor splashed out from the stern. As the hatch shot open, a grizzled head popped through.

  ‘Grandpa!’ Dooly yelled. Old Escargot, smiling as if he were just pulling into port after a fairly successful fishing trip, shouted, ‘Dooly, lad!’ He waved heartily.

  The man wasn’t at all what Jonathan expected or remembered. For the last ten years he’d been nothing more than a rumor, a shadow around Twombly Town, known to everyone but well known by no one. Somehow Jonathan expected a dapper sort of gentleman thief – someone who looked a bit like the Professor perhaps, or like a retired schoolteacher. But Escargot more closely resembled a madman or a pirate or someone who had been off digging for buried treasure in the White Mountains for a year. His beard was simply grizzly and gave him the look of a fanatic. His hair should have been cut months before; it was swept back away from his face to some extent as if he were standing in a stiff wind. His eyebrows were on the bushy side. He wasn’t a particularly large man, was small in fact, but the spectacular appearance of his face made him look larger. Jonathan was fairly sure that any self-respecting person would take one look at him and think, ‘There’s a man who’s up to no good,’ and set about locking doors and patting his back pockets to see if his wallet were secure.

  Escargot stood looking at them from the open hatch. ‘Would one of you gentlemen be so kind,’ he said, ‘as to fetch my canoe there and paddle her out? I’d swim, to be sure, but the water this time of year doesn’t agree with me. A bit cold, you see.’

  Fifty feet down the strand lay the abandoned canoe, which had washed ashore on the swells. Since no one else made a move toward it, Jonathan stepped along, pushed off, and paddled out to the submarine. He grabbed hold of a protruding bit of metal alongside a brass ladder, holding on until Escargot climbed aboard; the little canoe tilted dangerously, then righted itself.

  ‘What ho,’ called Escargot, winking at Jonathan as he paddled ashore. ‘Didn’t I know your father, lad?’

  ‘That’s so,’ said Jonathan. He knew, as Bufo had pointed out, that Escargot was treacherous, although that certainly sounded like a harsh wor
d. It wasn’t, on account of that, easy to make small talk. Escargot, however, didn’t seem overmuch concerned with the problem.

  ‘He was a good man,’ Escargot continued. ‘We did a bit of trading, him and me. He made a good cheese.’ Escargot smacked his lips appreciatively.

  The canoe bumped ashore, and an embarrassed silence ensued. No one knew quite what to say. Twickenham, after all, was the one among them who was running the show. Bufo looked as if he were stewing, and the Professor looked pretty much the same. Dooly, however, capered up as if to hug Old Escargot, stopped, then thrust out a hand. Escargot shook it. ‘You’re looking fit, lad. You’ve brought along some friends, I see. Mr Twickenham,’ he said, and shook hands with the elf. ‘And Artemis Wurzle, if my eyebones don’t deceive me. It’s been a while, sir.’

  The Professor, disgruntled, shook hands anyway and admitted that it had been a while.

  ‘You’ll excuse my appearance,’ Escargot said, ‘but I’ve been living at the Haven here for the last two months. Haven’t felt much need for the social graces. Didn’t expect any visitors, you see.’

  Twickenham nodded. ‘Dooly here has been telling us that perhaps you did, that you had reason to believe that trouble was brewing up along the river. That you and he might take a bit of a cruise to the Isles.’

  ‘Yes, that’s so. It is at that,’ said Escargot, who seemed a trifle uncomfortable. ‘Trouble you say? Upriver?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Twickenham. ‘A certain dwarf – Selznak his name is – has gotten hold of something he shouldn’t have.’

  ‘It’s come to that, has it?’ asked Escargot.

  Twickenham seemed to be considering his words carefully before speaking. He might succeed by being stern, or then again he might not. He might be patriotic or he might appeal to Escargot’s sense of duty. But he wasn’t sure Escargot had any sense of duty or that he cared a penny for patriotism of any sort. There was the possibility that he could use Dooly, so to speak, to persuade Old Escargot to cooperate, but the idea likely seemed distasteful. It turned out, however, that Escargot needed no persuasion at all.