The Stone Giant (21 page)

Escargot crouched out once again from his hidey-hole and stepped down the dark hall toward the rear of the house. The two had already gone out a rear door. Escargot hurried. There was no point in losing them now. The back door was a windowless wreck, cracked and teetering. Escargot pushed it open slowly and nearly stepped out into empty air. It was fifteen feet to the black mud of the harbor below. A stairs tilted down along the side of the house, supported on stilts, but the stair landing, right beyond the door, had broken away and fallen into the muck below years past, so the door swung out over nothing at all. Escargot jerked it shut to cut his momentum and save himself a certain fall. Then he pushed it open again, more carefully this time, and peered around it to discover that if it was thrown all the way back, he could step across to the floorboards of that part of the landing left whole – or almost whole anyway – and by grabbing the shorn-off bannister, pull himself out onto the stairs.

Leta and the dwarf had disappeared. There seemed to be nothing below him but mud and flotsam and the shadows of canted pilings. Then, fifty feet beyond, moonlight glinted off what had to be the polished brass tip of the dwarf’s stick, and he heard a low curse and the sound of shoes sucking up out of the mud. There they went, scuttling away like crabs beneath the docks and the open, trestled basements of houses. Escargot followed, careful of the mud, stepping from stone to stone and here and there in the footprints of the two in front of him. He’d lost them again. He paused and listened, but he heard nothing. It occurred to him in a rush that he’d been fooled. What if they’d known all along that they’d been followed? What if they’d lured him out into the dark, deserted harborside for the purpose of cracking him on the head? But he had to go on, hadn’t he? If he gave off now he’d curse himself when the sun came up in the morning.

Fifty feet farther along the piers and houses ended abruptly at the edge of a long curve of mudflats that ran up into a seawall. The view was clear for two moonlit miles. No one walked along the mudflats or atop the seawall. He’d lost them. They’d slipped up into the cellar of one of the old canneries they’d passed. That had to be it. But which one? He turned and hurried back the way he’d come, watching the ground. There was only one set of footprints – his own. He hadn’t been paying enough attention. Fine detective he made, racing on blindly while the two of them had merely turned aside and let him blunder past.

There they were – two more sets of tracks, but they turned down toward the sea, not up toward the road. Escargot followed them until there was a muddle of tracks and a long depression in the mud where, quite clearly, the prow of a rowboat had been dragged through. The two had been making for a hidden boat. He listened, cupping a hand to his ear. He could hear, from somewhere to the west, the sound of a tinkling piano and the shouts and cries of revelers in dockside taverns, muted by the darkness and the distance. Closer on, somewhere out on the starlit water, came the sound of dipping oars and the mumble of conversation – Leta and the dwarf, making away up the delta.

Escargot turned and ran, back through the shadows to where the seawall began. He climbed up and looked. There they were, a bobbing bit of shadow on the water, moonlight glinting on the oarwash as the rowboat cut along, not toward the lights of town, but toward the mouth of the Tweet River, as if the two were making away for good and all. He watched until they disappeared into the night, and there was nothing but the far-off piano and the lapping of the rising tide against pier pilings to remind him that it had grown late, and that he was hours of weary walking from his submarine.

He’d follow in the morning. That’s what he’d do. If they
had
flown upriver, then he could easily outdistance them, stopping in at the riverside villages to inquire. People would remember the dwarf, and they’d remember Leta too. Escargot certainly hadn’t been able to forget her, although this last rendezvous made it fairly clear that he should have.

If they hadn’t gone upriver, then he could turn about and return to Landsend. It seemed fairly certain that they hadn’t known they were being followed. Escargot could easily find his way to the abandoned house again. He could return by day and snoop around. Surely there’d be some sort of telling evidence. What it was he hoped to find, however, was a mystery to him. The mystery seemed merely to be the only thing in his life that had any substance to it – his latest destination – and it drew him now as surely as Seaside and the harvest festival had drawn him weeks earlier. It was something he had to settle, it seemed to him, before he could get on to something new.

He was up with the dawnlight, navigating past a low island in the river. Hovels on stilts lined the water’s edge, and a score of fishermen waded in the low water, tossing nets into the departing tide. There were a good two miles of coastline cut by jetties and piers along which Leta and the dwarf could have moored their rowboat. Looking for it in among the quayside bustle would have been futile. There was nothing to do but press on, to assume that they’d been bound upriver and that they hadn’t any intention of returning. Escargot could see, through the periscope, the long, broken-down row of canneries and old houses where he’d lost them two hours earlier. From a quarter mile out to sea some of the houses looked stately and grand, for the broken windows and cracked doors and peeling paint were masked by distance. Farther along lay the new harbor. Fishing boats were docked along the wharves, and hundreds of sailors and laborers scurried like bugs, loading kegs and bales, shouting orders, and generally carrying on.

In ten minutes the harbor was behind him, and the houses and shops along the shore thinned to nothing. Boatyards with skeletal hulks on trestles took their place, and then those too gave in to low marshy tidelands peopled by pelicans and gulls and an occasional dilapidated shack. Beyond rose a range of forested, coastal hills, covered on the lower slopes by houses. Then there was nothing but open land and trees, and the delta funneled down into a real river, broad as a lake. A wide channel cut the river in two at midstream, and it seemed to Escargot, in the glow of the fire-quartz lamps, that the channel was prodigiously deep. He sped up, taking a look through the periscope now and then just in case a village would sweep into view. There was nothing, though, but an occasional farmhouse above the river, with an acre of pasture along either side and now and then a short dock running out into the water.

It seemed futile to stop. It was no more likely that the two had put up at one farmhouse than at another, and although there were boats tied up at the docks, it was impossible to say that they were the rowboat he was looking for. Somehow he had the idea that if the two
had
gone ashore at some house along the river, it would be a particularly gloomy and uninviting sort of house, that the nice, cheerful houses with their happy cattle and smoke from cooking fires lazying up the chimneys wouldn’t agree with the two.

It was late afternoon when he passed the first village. It was on the southern shore, and he’d sailed entirely past it before he spied it through the scope. It wasn’t much of a village, in the shadows of the overgrown forest, only a scattering of houses along the bank, backing up onto what might have been its only real street. Escargot piloted the sub around in a big circle, looking for a place to heave out the anchor. It was almost dusk, and there was a wet smell on the wind, not like rain, but like fog – the heavy, cool smell of misty air. Away off downriver, toward the sea, the horizon was gray and dark, and a roiling bank of low-lying clouds drifted along on an onshore breeze, obscuring the river and its banks. Escargot didn’t know whether to be happy about the fog or to fear it. It would disguise his movements, if it was thick enough, but it would disguise
their
movements too, and all else being equal, they seemed to have rather more of an affinity to the fog than he did.

But there was nothing at all he could do about it, after all; he couldn’t wish it away. So he drifted nearer to shore, casting his anchor in forty feet of water two hundred yards out. He’d have to swim for it, now that his rowboat had been reclaimed, and he didn’t at all like the idea of clambering up onto the shore, wet and with a foggy night falling fast around him. But he daren’t wait for morning either. If he dawdled he’d get nowhere. Either he was on the trail of Leta and the dwarf or he wasn’t, he told himself in no uncertain terms. And if he
was
, then he’d jolly well better get to it. He was ready to plunge into the cold river when he changed his mind.

Captain Perry’s suit – he could don one of the underwater suits and walk ashore, then shrug it off and hide it in the weeds. And if he ran into danger, if the village was as murky and grim as it appeared to be from the river, he could slip back into the suit and walk into the river, leaving danger to rail at him from the shore. Ten minutes later he was on the river bottom, treading along through the weedy silt in his lead shoes.

River water, he found, wasn’t clear like ocean water had been. It was hazy, even in the glow of the fire quartz that ringed his belt. Ten feet away from him lay darkness, despite the sun still being aloft. Escargot hurried along, planting one foot solidly after the other. Waterweeds grew in dark clumps, angling away downriver in the current, and in among them, half buried in the sand, were clusters of river clams, among which strolled crayfish and ghost shrimp. A great slab of some sort of arched stone – pale green marble, perhaps, or mossy granite, glowed in the light of the fire quartz, almost sunk beneath the river bottom and grown over with weeds. Escargot strode along toward it, watching crayfish scuttle out of the light. There were more stones beneath the first, tumbling away into a deep pool, the remnants of some sort of quarry, perhaps.

They were enormous, immovable, as if they’d been the base of a monumental bridge, one that had spanned the river and had been built, perhaps, by giants. Surely no men had cut the things, and if they had, no amount of horses and equipment could have moved them. The edges were softened as if from ages of erosion, and the stones seemed to be deeply carved with great, rectilinear runes in which river moss grew in such profusion that the runes stood out from the pale green background as if they’d been painted on. Escargot gouged into the moss with his finger, sinking in up to the third knuckle. Fish darted in and out from beneath the great heap of stones, which, piled up as they were, formed deep, black caverns that Escargot himself could have crept into, if he had a mind to. But he didn’t. There was something about the stones, their prodigious age, perhaps, their having sat unmoving for so long on the bottom of this tremendous dark and deep river, that hurried Escargot shoreward. If he’d been Professor Wurzle, interested in curiosities for the sake of science and history, he might have stayed to investigate further. But he’d dawdled long enough as it was, and so he strode straight on into shallow water, looming up out of the river some fifty yards down from the first of the houses in the village.

The fog had crept along into the trees overhead, impaled, it seemed, on the branches, and already the ground was wet with it and spongy underfoot. It was possible, thought Escargot, that there would be some value in merely wandering into the village clothed in his underwater suit and seashell helmet, just to give the villagers an odd thrill. But one of them might merely beat him silly with a branch, supposing him a monster, and question him afterward.

So he pulled off the suit, rolled the helmet, aerator, and belt up in it, and stowed it beneath a heap of brush along a little bit of bank that had collapsed and fallen toward the river. He looked up and down afterward, anxious all of a sudden that someone might at that moment be watching him, but there was no one in sight, nothing but the lowering fog and the darkness and the shadowy forest. The village itself was obscured by mist.

He set out up the road that ran along the bank. It wasn’t much of a road, actually, just a little dirt trail along which a cart might drive if it was a particularly small cart. There weren’t any signs of carts having been driven there, though, nor were there any footprints, even though the dirt of the trail was soft enough. Bushes and vines grew across it, in fact, as if it were halfway toward disappearing, and Escargot had the curious feeling that somehow he hadn’t ought to be walking there, that no one walked there except, perhaps, goblins.

The log wall of the first house loomed up out of the mist before him, a shutter over a second-floor window slamming closed with a bump that yanked at his stomach. It swung open again, then whumped closed. It was the breeze blowing it, bang, bang, bang, and it seemed as if there was no one in the house to secure it. Creeping vines covered most of the wall and had climbed along onto the roof, tangling themselves into the bricks of the chimney and forcing themselves under shingles. It seemed at first as if no lights shone from within the house, but when Escargot passed on the road he could see the flickering flame of a burned down taper on the mantel, casting a weary glow over a man who sat reading beneath, his chin in his hand.

Escargot stopped in front of the house and considered. He didn’t at all like the village. There was something wrong about it, as if it were the sort of place above which the night sky would be a bit too thick with bats, or where strange ceremonies involving blood and gold were carried out in the shadows of leafless oaks. But it was exactly the sort of place that would appeal to the witch and the dwarf. It had the same atmosphere that the meadow had been charged with on the night that the witches had met in the Widow’s windmill. Dark enchantment is what it was, that sighed on the breeze and settled in with the fog, and crept up the sides of houses to work the shingles loose and the shutters open.

He stepped up onto the porch and knocked hard at the door. This was no time to be timid. If he was making a mistake, he might just as well make a bold one. Through the window he could very clearly see the man’s head jerk, as if someone had yanked him up by the hair. Even in the feeble candlelight there could be seen on his face a look of startled terror, as if he’d imagined all along that there would come a knock at the door on just such a night as this, and here it was at last. He reached for the candle and with his fingers snuffed it out as he rose from the chair. The room was plunged into darkness. Escargot heard a rushing of footsteps along the floorboards, and he stepped back off the porch into the weeds, certain that the door would fly open and he’d be confronted by a madman. Instead there came the sound of a bolt being thrown, then another, then of a bar banging into place. The soft creaking of floorboards followed the bang, and the tattered curtains in the window moved just a bit.