The Stone Giant Read Online Free PDF

and Leta and Stover and the silly fat salamander that Professor Wurzle held in such high esteem. It was entirely conceivable that Twombly Town wasn’t big enough to hold the lot of them. And if Leta
had
left for Seaside, then perhaps it was high time he did the same.
    The evening promised to be cool and wet. The black oaks across the Oriel were dark with dampness and twilight, and already the fog covered the ground around them like a gray, cottony blanket. Escargot sat on a fallen tree, staring across the river into the woods and thinking of nothing. Tied to scattered branches along the tree were heavy fishing lines that angled out into the shadowy water, trailing away downstream in the current. Clumps of waterweeds clung to the lines where they entered the water, and now and then some bit of debris – a tangle of twigs and leaves or a half-submerged piece of driftwood –came floating along to bump into one of the lines, spinning away and taking most of the waterweeds with it.
    The river was rising. It seemed to be hurrying along toward the sea, as if more anxious by the day to arrive at its destination. Escargot had begun to fancy the idea of destinations himself. It struck him that it might as easily be
him
swirling away down the river toward the coast. It seemed to him that he had somehow been wasting his time for years.
    Destinations – that was the secret. It didn’t much matter what they were. There was something frightening about staying overlong in the same place, about ‘settling down.’ You could too clearly see the end, perhaps – all the gray years laid out end to end like paving stones and winding up at a last carved stone standing upright in a weedy cemetery. Movement, Escargot thought, squinting into the dark trees, would somehow bend and twist the path so that a person couldn’t tell finally where he’d started and where he was likely to finish. That was appealing – to be always heading somewhere, bartering a bit along the road in order to stay in tobacco: washing the occasional window if it was absolutely necessary and whistling while you were at it; pinching the odd pie that was cooling on a windowsill, and leaving for it a willow flute or a handful of marbles or a grass basket full of salted fish.
    While the sensible villager huddled in his house at night wondering at the scrape and swish of branches in the wind and half fearing the humped shadows of tangled berry vines out in the dark yard, Escargot would be abroad,
living
among the shadows. It would be
his
feet that would crunch past on the gravel at midnight and cause the villager to sit upright in his bed, listening, shivering, cocking his head. Perhaps he’d sail to Oceania and fall among pirates or tramp downriver to seek out treasure in the Goblin Wood.
    Perhaps – perhaps he’d start by going to Seaside and looking up Leta. That was a good enough destination for the moment. In a week, when Halloween was past and the nights were a bit emptier of enchantment, they would hold the harvest fair in Seaside. Escargot could picture himself among the crowds – bonfires burning in the streets, men and elves and linkmen milling among the Seaside dwarfs, an occasional band of goblins hooting with idiotic laughter and scuttling away down an alley after having terrorized an innkeeper or having pulled the hair of a poor old woman in the street, There would be Leta, little realizing who it was that stood behind her. He’d tap her on the shoulder. She’d turn, surprised. He’d smile and say something to her, something witty. What would it be? He’d have to think about it. That was the sort of moment he’d want to be prepared for; otherwise he’d spend a lifetime regretting having said something foolish.
    Escargot was startled by a splash twenty feet out into the river, and he grabbed the line near his right ear, thinking that a river squid had taken the glowworm on the end of it. The fog had crept higher. Only ghostly branches could be seen