The Stone Giant Read Online Free PDF Page B

across the water. The docks in Twombly Town Harbor were invisible fifty yards distant, and the evening was silent and still. The muted hooting of an owl drifted like a disembodied voice out of the woods. There was nothing on any of the lines.
    Out over the river, sculling along some four or five feet above the water and angling in toward where Escargot sat on his log, a spiney, round-headed fish glowing like a lantern swam leisurely through the foggy air. It drew up to within five feet of him before blinking and changing course. ‘Fogfish!’ whispered Escargot, slowly standing and peering round for his net. There was something odd about the fog – about the heavy, lazy nature of it, about the way it seemed to have crept out of the forest instead of having risen from the river. It felt like enchantment, the product of the season, of the approach of Halloween. Fogfish never appeared in a common fog. Escargot was certain of that much.
    Two minutes earlier he couldn’t have sworn that fogfish ever appeared at all. You heard stories, of course, stories told on the same late and festive evenings that produced tales of great river squid that dragged fishing boats to a watery doom in the Oriel River delta above Seaside, tales of mermaids in the shallows off Monmouth Point and of drowned sailors who piloted ghostly sloops far beneath the surface of the river, hauling along toward unknowable destinations. There were stories that the Oriel River was the magical counterpart of another vast river in a faraway and magical land. When the night was particularly full of misty enchantment, or so the stories went, boats and fish and heaven knew what sorts of deepwater creatures wandered out of one river and into the next.
    G. Smithers was full of such stuff – tales of a land known as Balumnia, illustrated maps tracing just such a river, a river strangely like the Oriel with similarly situated towns and a vast haunted woods not at all unlike the Goblin Wood that stretched along the river south of Hightower Village. Escargot had always had curious notions about G. Smithers and his maps. Professor Wurzle had insisted that Smithers, living in Brompton Village on the Oriel itself, would naturally have used a river he was familiar with as a model. All writers, insisted Wurzle, were bound by the familiar, by what they knew. They were slaves to it. But Professor Wurzle was too full of what passed for common sense to satisfy Escargot. There was nothing commonsensical about fogfish.
    Escargot crouched on the bank, clutching his net. All was silent but for the occasional, distant tap, tap, tap of something, of a woodpecker, perhaps. Night had drifted in with the fog, and both had thickened until the dark river disappeared, all but the still water along the bank at Escargot’s feet. The glow of another wandering fogfish shone briefly offshore like a windborne jack-o’-lantern, then another drifted past, even farther out, slanting briefly in, then disappearing with a muted splash into the river.
    Minutes passed, one by one, Escargot listening in the silent night, watching, thinking that even the dirt floor of the Widow’s windmill and the sorry little heap of late berries and pickled fish that awaited him there had begun to look awfully warm and cozy. There were nights to be out and about in, it seemed to him suddenly, and there were nights to leave alone. He yanked one last time on his lines, then turned toward the meadow, thinking to hide his net in a hollow beneath the log.
    Before him, revealed by suddenly thinning mist, stood an old woman, bent with age, her eyes the color of moonlit fog. She leaned on a crooked stick, looking at nothing. Then she turned slowly and hobbled away into a dense wall of gray, disappearing utterly. The tapping began again, closer this time, each tap just a fraction sharper and clearer than the last, as if it were the tapping of a blind man feeling his way across cobbles. The breeze stirred the meadow grasses,