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CHAPTER 1
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.
A light glowed ahead, bobbing slowly on the path as if someone carried a lantern toward him. He wasn't certain he wanted to meet anyone, lantern or no lantern. But it wasn't lantern light; it was flames – a halo of weird fire dancing round the head of a waist-high, wizened little man. Beside him stood another, grinning, his hair standing up in a frizzle of thin spikes. Both were thin, almost skeletal, and wore clothes which hung from them like sacks. Both had sharpened teeth – not fangs or canine teeth, but flat, slab-like teeth that had been filed to points.
'Goblins,' Escargot said, half aloud, and knew, as he said it, that more of the little men had stepped out of the woods behind him. The one with the flaming hair stretched his eyes until they seemed to be round as plates. He extended a thin, clawed finger and said, 'Give us.'
Escargot cocked his head. 'Certainly,' he said, supposing they meant the squid. It was better not to argue with goblins, after all, better not to get all clawed up saving a few squid when the river was full of them. Catching them was half the fun anyway. He opened his creel, pulled two of the squid from the bed of wet grass that lay within, and tossed them to the goblins. The creatures watched stupidly as the squid flopped onto the trail and sat there in the dirt.
The goblin with the burning head looked at Escargot in amazement, then leaped on the squid, poking his fellow goblin in the ear with his finger and pushing him against the trunk of an oak. A flurry of steps sounded on the path behind Escargot, and three more goblins, gabbling like raccoons, rushed past, throwing themselves onto the first goblin, who swatted at them defiantly, half a squid protruding from his mouth. He held the other in his hand, and as the quickest of his brethren rushed upon him, he flailed at the creature with the rubbery squid, effecting nothing but the squid's ruination. He champed down on the squid in his mouth, razoring it in half with his filed teeth, the protruding bit falling onto the road and vanishing beneath all five of the shrieking goblins, two more of whom had managed, in the struggle, to catch fire. Escargot tiptoed past. There was no weapon like a squid, apparently, for defeating a party of goblins. For good measure he pitched three more of the leggy beasts in among them, then took to his heels, dodging round bends that appeared suddenly in the fog, leaping over a fallen tree that he'd remembered from the journey out four hours earlier.
The gabbling receded behind him, and he slowed to a walk, gasping in lungfuls of fog, looking over his shoulder and listening between breaths for the sound of pursuit. It wouldn't do to stop. This was no time to rest; he had a quarter mile of woods to get through before he'd be onto the relative safety of the meadow. The meadow was close to the lights of town, and goblins, like wolves or trolls, hadn't any use for towns.
A twig snapped above him. He lurched and sprawled forward, tumbling onto the roadway, yanking at the thing that had landed suddenly on his back. It shrieked inhumanly into his ear, gabbling out a continual stream of gibberish. The goblin's tiny hands were around his throat, scrabbling after something, tugging at the drawstring of Escargot's pouch. The little devils were trying to rob him! It hadn't been squid at all they were after. He rolled toward the river, crushing the little man beneath him, half dislodging the thing as it whooped and gibbered. It peered around into his face, grinning past pointed teeth, eyes whirling like pinwheels. Escargot got a hand round the goblin's neck and jerked the thing loose. He grabbed its skinny leg with his other hand, hefted it over his head, and threw it headlong into the river.
His pouch was safe. His creel, however, was a ruin. The spindly willow basket was crushed almost flat, and the head of one doleful-eyed squid had been forced out through a split in the bottom. Escargot snatched the creel open, yanked out the half dozen flattened squid that remained, and scattered them over the path, leaping away toward the village as the first party of goblins rushed toward him, their flaming heads advertising their appearance like beacons. Escargot pounded along for all he was worth, his creel and fishing pole tossed away into the river grasses. Within five minutes he was clear of the woods and free of goblins. The fog was lightening with the morning, and he could smell on the breeze the smoke of pruning fires and chimneys from the village ahead.
The church bell rang six when he trudged up the path to his house, thinking to slip in at the back door and have a go at falsifying the utterly obvious evidence that his wife would find, at any moment, in the kitchen. He found the back door padlocked. A note On the front door invited him to leave and not to return. There was no use pounding and railing; his wife had gone to Stover, who knew about morality and the law both.
For a week he slept by day in the abandoned Widow's windmill. By night he fished and wandered through the autumn streets, holding imaginary coversations with his wife and developing the suspicion that she was never going to give him the satisfaction of actually carrying on one of those conversations. Protestations through the locked windows effected nothing. His wife was gone far more often than she was in.
On more than one night, very late, when the fog had risen and obscured the oaks and the hemlocks that ran down out of the foothills and lined the road, Escargot slouched along, hands in his pockets, and fancied that he heard in the distance someone coming along toward him, tapping along the road with a stick, feeling his way through the fog. The sound seemed to be carried on a breath of cool air. Always it faded into nothing, as if the stroller were walking away from him, an odd thing altogether. For whoever it was hadn't passed him; the tap, tap, tap of the stick on the road simply started up out of the mists and echoed its way into nothing.
Escargot told himself it was a woodpecker of some nocturnal variety, tapping holes in the bark of trees to hide acorns. But he didn't half believe it. And more than once he heard the titter of laughter somewhere off in the fog. It was as if someone were laughing at him, an unsettling notion altogether, and one which led him to keep an eye out for goblins, although it did seem unlikely that any of the little men would leave the darkness of the woods. There was no good in being careless, though, it had already been made very clear to him that goblins wandered by night farther up the Oriel River valley than most villagers liked to believe.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Stone Giant"
by .
Copyright © 1989 James P. Blaylock.
Excerpted by permission of Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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