The Disappearing Dwarf Read Online Free PDF Page A

sounded for all the world like the swishing and crackling of old robes and lace, as if the witch herself were following close on.
    They ran all the way to the fork, and Jonathan would have abandoned the path to the tower and continued running all the way back toward the harbor if the Professor hadn’t stopped for breath and shouted at Jonathan to do the same.
    Bent over, hands on their knees, they both puffed away for the space of a minute. Jonathan listened for the swish of robes or the cackle of laughter, but he couldn’t hear a thing above the pounding of his heart and the sound of his breathing. He determined that, old lady or no, he would whack the devil out of her with his stick if she showed up along the path – and that went double for her cat. ‘That about cooked my goose,’ Jonathan said after a few moments.
    The Professor forced out a bit of a laugh. ‘She sure put the fear into you.’
    ‘Into
me?’
Jonathan mocked. ‘I’ll lay odds you haven’t run so fast in forty years.’
    ‘You gave me a scare, bolting like that.’
    ‘It wasn’t me giving anyone a scare. I’m not the sort of chap to give people a scare. You know as well as I do what she is. She was one of the ladies Dooly saw last fall in the moonlight that night, sailing across the sky – she and her cat both probably. If that
was
a cat.’ Jonathan watched the Professor waving a match in the general direction of his pipe bowl, his fingers shaking like sixty. ‘Are you trying to light your pipe or the end of your nose?’ Jonathan asked.
    The two of them burst into a fury of wild laughter, and it was a moment before they’d laughed themselves out and set off down the path once again, both Jonathan and the Professor looking on occasion back over their shoulders. They agreed several times not to make the same blunder when they came to the same fork on their return.
    In another hour they wound up the steep, rocky ridge to the tower. They hurried along in the shadows of the giant hemlocks that grew along the path, and they avoided sunlit stretches. The fact that it was a warm day had little to do with their keeping to the shadows, although both of them insisted that such was the case. The tower simply seemed to have a pall of evil hanging about it – an atmosphere that had risen over countless years out of the ground itself.
    All in all, the shadowy tower had an inhospitable look to it that Jonathan didn’t like any more there in the light of day than he had at midnight months before. Jonathan began to wish he had brought a jacket even though he knew it was as sunny a day as he would ever see.
    ‘I rather think we’re letting the countryside here get the best of us,’ the Professor observed. ‘We’re expecting some grim thing that we’ve no cause to expect. This isn’t any haunted house, after all.’
    ‘It’s not?’ Jonathan asked. ‘It must average pretty high as haunted houses go. This whole place seems about as haunted as can be. It feels like the woods are full of goblins.’
    ‘Nonsense. It’s all your imagination.’
    ‘I just don’t have your optimism,’ Jonathan said, as the two of them struck out across the grassy expanse between the forest and the door of the tower. With Ahab following, they scuttled along, both of them hunched over and hurrying as if they sensed they were being watched by something – something in the very air that surrounded the tower.
    The door swung heavily in on its hinges, opening to reveal the cobbled floor of the great hallway and the stone fireplace that took up most of the wall perpendicular to the door. There in the fireplace lay a heap of cold ashes, and before it lay the pile of bleached bones used by the terrible Selznak as fuel. On the floor were scattered the strange remnants of their encounter that past fall: the stuffed snake Squire Myrkle had poked into the Dwarf’s ear and the gnawed turkey bone that had so overwhelmed the skeleton. There was an empty tankard and a few human