Free The Elfin Ship by James P. Blaylock Page A

overgrown as they flattened out above Hightower. About a mile from town, the countryside became a wide impenetrable morass. Hightower itself, with its cold, stone crenelated walls like the fortress of some somber and ageless wizard, stood atop a prominence that poked above the motionless green of the swamp and looked down and across toward the village that lay along the river.
    Although it didn’t mean much either to Dooly or Ahab, Professor Wurzle was astounded to see white smoke whirling from a chimney lost amid the thrusting towers, many of which were crumbling away slowly. Hightower had the reputation of being curiously old and had been abandoned, or so the Professor insisted, for an age.
    ‘Something afoot,’ the Professor stated.
    ‘I’ll say,’ said Jonathan. ‘Something I’ll just keep my nose out of. There are too many such things afoot for my comfort: trolls not a league beyond Twombly Town, elfin airships having a bank holiday and buzzing up and down the river, Willowood Station lost. I’ll just ask no questions about abandoned castles coming to life, if you please.’
    ‘Well, Jonathan,’ the Professor replied with a profound wrinkling of the forehead, ‘it’s scientific blood that beats in my veins. The blood of the alchemists; and such as we are spurred along by mystery. It’s bread and wine to us, meat and drink.’
    ‘I prefer my meat on a plate, fairly well done – and speaking of wine, a dribble of port tonight to celebrate our arrival at Hightower might do something to take the chill out of the evening air.’
    ‘It might at that,’ the Professor agreed.
    Every so often they passed a lone cabin. Most of them stood up above the marsh on stilts, and the glow of lantern light could be seen through chinks in the weathered plank walls. Great drooping trees bent branches over the tops of the cabins, and drops of moisture plunked perpetually onto roofs carpeted with thick layers of mosses, green and purple in the evening twilight. From one cabin some hundred yards above the river came the
plink, plink, plink
of a tinny banjo, and the sound wafted out over the silent river in such a way as to make the three companions wish they were somewhere else with a good fire at their backs and a rice pudding and beef rib in front of them on a plate.
    They were, all of them realized, a very long way from home.
    But the company, all in all, was a very stiff-lipped bunch. They were vaguely troubled though to observe that about half the cabins they passed seemed empty. In fact, not until they were beyond the fringe of the marsh and below Oldgate Bluffs did there begin to be signs of life.
    The town itself was only modestly awake in an early evening sort of way. A group of school children tromping along the riverside waved and shouted and held up crayfish for the rafters to have a look at. Ahab wandered out of the cabin and barked once or twice cheerily, and one of the boys, no doubt well versed in the biological sciences, pointed at Ahab and shouted something about ‘a hi-yoona with a puff-head.’ The children immediately took up the chorus and went prancing about waving their crayfish. Shouts of ‘Puff-head! puff-head!’ followed the rafters downriver for another quarter of a mile. Ahab took the chiding rather well and didn’t seem at all put out.
    Finally they could see the rocky outcropping that marked the edge of tiny Hightower harbor. Jonathan steered the raft into the quiet bay, and they tied up. Dooly and Ahab had to stay on board although both would have welcomed a stroll through town. It would hardly have done, however, for the entire company to traipse off and leave the raft unattended.
    Jonathan and Professor Wurzle really had little business to transact, the raft being only three days out of Twombly Town. They intended to visit a baker and a butcher, and to purchase a few pounds of coffee, a commodity that had been forgotten. Also, they had to buy a jacket and bedroll for Dooly, who had come