The Disappearing Dwarf Read Online Free PDF

rib bones and the bottom half of a skull. Nothing had been altered. No one had, apparently, been in the tower; the dwarf hadn’t returned. The long window opposite the door had a gaping hole. Despite the breeze blowing in through the broken window, a good layer of dust, smeared with the tiny footprints of rats, sat on the sill. Below the sill lay a dozen human bones – the legs, feet and pelvis of the skeleton who had almost found its way out to freedom. Outside in the dirt and weeds lay the rest of him, the skull yellowed and staring up toward the sun overhead.
    All of this skeleton business didn’t serve to make the interior of the tower any more homey, but it did remind Jonathan that he and his friends had, once before, dealt fairly handily with a similar assortment of horrors. He hefted his stick and supposed to himself that what he had done once, he could do again. Then he recalled his wild flight from the old woman on the porch and decided wisely that vanity, more often than not, turns men into fools.
    There was nothing to suggest, then, that the tower was occupied by anything other than the pall of evil that even the winds blowing in through the open window couldn’t disperse.
    ‘Where shall we start?’ Jonathan asked, looking at his pocketwatch. ‘There’re five floors above and your caverns and cellars and dog rooms below. Where does the treasure lie?’
    ‘I’d say below, despite Escargot’s warnings about the upper story.’ The Professor was unrolling his parchment on the floor. ‘It’s standard practice, according to the authorities, to bury the stuff, not to haul it upstairs.’
    That seemed reasonable to Jonathan. ‘It’s after noon,’ he said, shoving his pocketwatch back into his pocket. ‘We’d better be out of here by four o’clock if we want to make it through the fens before the sun goes down. I want to eat dinner on the raft and not at some pleasant shanty in the swamp.’
    The Professor nodded. ‘Agreed. You keep an eye on the time.’ With that he set out toward the winding stairs that led to both the upper and lower reaches of the castle. The way to the cellar was blocked by a wooden trap door made of heavy oak planks. Attached to it was a chain that angled up into a sort of pulley-crank device. The chain and crank were as rusty as if they’d been out in the rain for a year, and had a look of disuse about them. Jonathan threw his weight into the wooden arm of the crank, but the thing just sat and stared at him. He tapped at it with his stick, and chips of rust flew off, dusting the stone stairs with red bits of iron. The Professor and Jonathan both leaned into it, but with no better result. Then Jonathan whacked it with his staff, raising a spray of rust, but not noticeably loosening the thing.
    The Professor pondered for a moment. ‘We could melt lard all over it,’ he said, snapping his fingers. ‘Oil the thing up. If we keep on banging on it with your stick we’ll just bend the devil out of it.’
    ‘You’re right,’ Jonathan agreed. ‘When we were here last, the Squire and Bufo found a pantry upstairs. There was a roast turkey there at the time, so Selznak must have done a good bit of cooking. There’s sure to be lard around somewhere.’
    So the two of them, followed by Ahab, climbed back up the stairs to investigate the pantry. They didn’t find any lard, but they did find a bottle of whale oil which would do just as nicely and wouldn’t have to be heated. They also discovered in a dark, cool hole beneath the floor, racks of bottled ale, laid down long before by Selznak. Jonathan shoved four bottles into his knapsack along with an oil lamp, ajar of oil, and a handful of wooden matches. They discovered a cupboard full of what had once been loaves of bread but which had become little greenish-brown petrified lumps, too thoroughly dried out and reduced even to be of interest to mice. There were jars of pickled mushrooms and eggs and peppers, but several had burst and