Authors: James P. Blaylock
The Stone Giant
ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK
NOVELS
The Elfin Ship
The Disappearing Dwarf
The Digging Leviathan
Homunculus
Land Of Dreams
The Last Coin
The Stone Giant
The Paper Grail
Lord Kelvin’s Machine
The Magic Spectacles
Night Relics
All The Bells On Earth
Winter Tides
The Rainy Season
Knights Of The Cornerstone
Zeuglodon
The Aylesford Skull (forthcoming)
COLLECTIONS
Thirteen Phantasms
In For A Penny
Metamorphosis
The Shadow on the Doorstep
NOVELLAS
The Ebb Tide
The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs
WITH TIM POWERS
On Pirates
The Devil in the Details
Copyright © James P. Blaylock 1989
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Dirk Berger.
Cover design by John Berlyne.
Published in the United States by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc. in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD.
ISBN 978-1-936535-64-4
CONTENTS
To Viki, Johnny, and Danny
and to old Ahab, that rare and enviable dog
Escape at Bedtime
The lights from the parlour and kitchen shone out
Through the blinds and the windows and bars;
And high overhead and all moving about,
There were thousands of millions of stars.
There ne’er were such thousands of leaves on a tree,
Nor of people in church or the park,
As the crowds of the stars that looked down upon me,
And that glittered and winked in the dark.
The Dog, and the Plough, and the Hunter, and all,
And the star of the sailor, and Mars,
These shone in the sky, and the pail by the wall
Would be half full of water and stars.
They saw me at last, and they chased me with cries,
And they soon had me packed into bed;
But the glory kept shining and bright in my eyes,
And the stars going round in my head.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
At Stover’s Tavern
River fogs were by no means uncommon along the Oriel. When October came and the nights grew cool and wet, mist would rise along the river and creep ashore, stealing along the edge of the meadow, past the Widow’s windmill, seeping between scattered houses at the edge of the village and down Main Street. The Guildhall and the market and Stover’s Tavern would disappear behind a gray shroud, and nighttime noises – the footfalls of a late traveler, the hooting of an owl, the slow creak of tree limbs in the breeze – would sound unnaturally loud and ominous.
Anyone who had any sense, of course, would be abed, with their windows closed and curtains drawn, and the embers of the evening fire burning low and cheerful in the grate. There was something heavy and strange about a river fog, something that suggested it was the work of enchantment and not of nature. It was the sort of thing that was awfully fun to read about in books, expecially if you had a glass of something at hand – ginger beer or a spot of good port – and if the fire hadn’t burned down yet, and if the clock was ticking away low and comfortable on the mantel, reminding you that it was getting on time for bed.
But almost no one in Twombly Town would give you ten cents actually to be
out
in the fog – not after dark, anyway. It wasn’t so much that there was anything in particular to be afraid of; it was that there was
nothing
in particular to be afraid of. Nothing but the humped shape of a bent tree with a limb hooked down over the road, looming dimly through the mist as if it were waiting there just for you, as if it were going to clutch at you and snatch off your hat. There were autumn leaves, drifting ground-ward, floating like paper boats on the wet night air and ridden, or so said the old stories, by henny-penny men in beards and hats and with enormous round eyes. There was the occasional traveler, out and about for no good reason at all, who would appear up the road like a ghost, slowly growing more distinct as he drifted toward you, but with his face veiled by mist. And you would wonder if he had any face at all as you listened to his footsteps, clump, clump, clump, echoing off the darkness and the moonlit fog. No, it was best to be indoors, reading in the lantern light, smoking a cheerful pipe.
The rising sun would burn the mists away, and by noon there would be nothing of the fog left but dew on the meadow grasses and scattered leaves. In the distance would loom a pale cloudbank that lay low against the mountains, watching. There would be no enchantment involved anymore, just the solid scrape of your neighbor in a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, hoeing weeds among turnips and string beans. Amos Bing would clatter past in a cart full of cheeses, bound for town, reining up at the crossroads so as not to hit young Beezle, who, on his bicycle, pedaled a carton full of groceries toward the Widow’s house on the hill. Twombly Town, like all sensible villages, was mostly a daytime place. At night it slept.
All of that was irksome to Theophile Escargot. He much preferred the nighttime with its mystery and portent, when no one could say what mightn’t be lurking just over there, beyond that copse or at the edge of that patch of shadow. If a man slept by day he had little time to work. That was a satisfying notion to Escargot. And he needn’t be bothered to make tiresome small talk about the weather or radishes or the lamentable state of the river road between Twombly Town and Monmouth. So, unlike his fellows, he was fond of being abroad by night and abed by day – a fondness which led him into difficulty with his wife.
There were other things that led him into difficulty with his wife, especially his taste for pies. Apple pie was his favorite and lemon meringue next. Then came pumpkin and cherry and peach and blackberry and raspberry and apricot and sweet potato and just about anything at all, although he drew the line at salmonberry, which had an unnatural color and the flavor of thin soap. He could tolerate it with ice cream, but alone it wasn’t worth eating. Unlike other foods, there was no right-time-of-the-day for eating pies, according to Escargot. And there is where he got into trouble with his wife. It was the last, in fact, of a long series of gettings-into-trouble.
His wife, a thin woman with elbows like broken sticks, believed in
slices
of pies, in the evening, and only after dinner had been dutifully consumed. If dinner was made up largely of brussels sprouts and boiled tongue – if it wasn’t, in other words, dinner at all, but was a sort of joke dinner mucked up in the interests of health – then the pie would stay in the locked pantry, the key hanging on a piece of heavy thread around his wife’s neck while Escargot poked at the sprouts with a fork, imagining the ghastly sour taste of the things, and staring sorrowfully at the pink and horrible tongue which seemed always on the verge of looking up at him and saying tsk, tsk, tsk. If Escargot was absolutely honest, he wouldn’t be able to swear that there hadn’t been moments when he felt the passing urge to grab that key and give the thread a bit of a twist.
But it had never come to that. His wife, he was certain, baked the pies to torment him, parsing out little slivers now and then to remind him of something. He couldn’t, however, figure out what that something was. More often than not her pies were bound for church socials or camp meetings, to be consumed by any number of utter strangers. So and so, she would boast, ate
three
slices, and Escargot, who had missed out on the meeting because of a stomachache or a twisted shoulder, would miss out on the pie, too. So and so, it would turn out, had eaten the
last
three slices. Why, wondered Escargot, could another man eat multiple slices of pie with impunity, could turn it into a virtue, in fact, when Escargot’s eating a single slice was at best something to be tolerated. It made him dizzy to think about it.
One night, after nearly two years of it, he pried the door off the pantry and ate a whole pie along with a cup of heavy cream. He could imagine his wife squinting at him as he poured the cream over the pie, commenting idly on his waistline, shaking her head sadly but with the air of someone bearing up. Mr Stover, she would say, would find the behavior appalling. Gluttony is what it was, and Mr Stover had told his congregation about gluttony more than once. Mr Stover held meetings in the Guildhall every Tuesday night – more often if there was particular need for it. Escargot had resisted his wife’s insistence that he attend in order to be clarified and uplifted. Besides Stover, only one man in the village was known to attend, and there was little doubt that he came only for the sweets. Escargot, despite his perpetual yearning for a slice of pie, had never been desperate enough to attend revival meetings for the sake of it.
It was one o’clock in the morning when he put the fork down. He laid the empty pie pan in the sink and filled it with water. It wouldn’t do to let the remains harden on the pan; he was in for a tough enough time in the morning as it was. There was no sense in enduring a lecture on common kitchen courtesy to boot. Then, bucked by the pie and the excitement of having pinched it, he decided to take a stroll along the river. Perhaps he’d get in a couple of hours of night fishing. She’d awaken sometime early in the morning and find him gone, and the business with the key on the thread wouldn’t seem half so clever to her. I’ll show her, he thought to himself, stuffing two bottles of cold ale into his knapsack and pulling on a coat.
On his way out he poked his head into the baby’s room, thinking to himself that if she were five years older he’d take her along, teach her a bit about fishing by lantern light. He saw little enough of her as it was. His wife, it seemed, was worried that he might be an ‘influence.’ If Annie had been awake, Escargot thought, she’d have helped him eat the pie.
She’d
have seen the virtue in it. But she wasn’t awake, of course; she was asleep and had wiggled half out of the covers. So Escargot tucked her in before he tiptoed out.
By five o’clock in the morning, just before dawn, he had six brace of river squid in his sack and was fairly well satisfied with himself. He strolled along up the river road, past the woods that ran in a dark line along the meadow. The fog hovered dense and cool and with a sharp, metallic, morning smell that was worth having stayed awake for. Water dripped from the limbs of overhanging oaks, a drop now and then plunking down onto his neck. He pulled his coat tighter and quickened his pace, suddenly weary. Bacon and eggs and half a pot of coffee would go a long way toward reviving him. If he was lucky, he realized, his wife wouldn’t have awakened in the night at all, wouldn’t know he’d been gone, wouldn’t yet have discovered the missing pie, the wrecked pantry door. Perhaps he could have a go at fixing the door, claim that he’d risen early and found it hanging, the pie gone, a window pried open. He’d pitch a half dozen jars of canned fruit under the house for good measure, to make it look as if the thief had filled his sack from the larder.
A rustling in the woods hurried him along. Probably just a rabbit, he thought, glancing over his right shoulder. Ten feet into the trees the fog thickened so as to hide everything but a few ghostly trunks, pale and twisted, with now and then a limb thrust out over the road, springing out of the mist, its few remaining leaves heavy with water. The rustling sounded ahead of him, closer to the road. There it was again, behind him now. On his left lay the riverbank; behind him lay deeper woods. All around was the impenetrable murk, masking the night noises. Why he’d gone so far downriver to fish he couldn’t at all say – he’d been drunk, to a degree, on pie and cream. Twombly Town was a mile ahead of him, still sleeping in the early morning darkness.