Free The Elfin Ship by James P. Blaylock Page B

aboard woefully unprepared.
    As they wound up the road into town, it began to look as if it were some holiday or another, for half of the shop windows were boarded up and signs hung on the doors reading ‘Gone Away’ and ‘Closed for the Season’. It all sounded suspiciously final, as if ‘the season’ would apply to any one of the four as its turn came round.
    The two unexpectedly came upon a large party of mice, of all the strange things, in company with a bug-eyed toad. The mice were busily engaged in chewing a hole through the side of a tack-and-feed store that looked particularly abandoned. The toad sat blinking placidly on a little tuft of moss nearby like a sultan trying to determine whether the labor of his minions was worthy of his attention or whether he ought not to drop off to sleep for an hour or so.
    Professor Wurzle was taken aback at the sight and shouted incoherently at the mice more out of surprise than anything else. When the mice only paused and then returned to their labors, his surprise turned to curiosity, and he went stomping away toward them, an air of the researcher about him. At his approach, the toad shuffled off into the bushes and the mice followed – not in a rout, mind you, but very orderly.
    Professor Wurzle said he’d be darned, and Jonathan said he would too. Then both agreed that something fishy was going on and that the mice were strange sorts altogether. As they reached the center of town, however, things began to take on more of an air of normality. Few people, however, seemed particularly glad to see them, and a few even ducked away furtively down alleys at their approach. But shops were open and doing business.
    A wooden placard clacking on its stays advertised a public house and the Professor suggested they go in to see, as he put it, the lay of the land. Jonathan agreed and said that he’d like to see a mug of ale as well as the lay of the land. The Professor could find no fault with his logic.
    The interior of the pub was not the cheerful sort that people of Twombly Town might boast of. It was littered with scraps of food and assorted bits of trash; a dozen layers of sawdust had been thrown on, one after another, as if the shreds would produce brooms and dust pans and mops and set about cleaning the floor. Instead, the sawdust simply messed about and mingled with the debris and produced a most disagreeable smell. The tavern was dimly lit, to boot – not in a warm and rosy way like Jonathan’s living room, but simply in a bleak way as if candles and oil were running low and the place were too fallen to bits for anyone to bother going after a fresh supply. It was not at all the sort of tavern in which anyone would wish to spend his dinner hour.
    Half the tables were empty, although glasses and dishes lay piled on most. The proprietor was sleeping on a stool behind the counter, his mouth having fallen open to reveal the fact that he had only two visible teeth, square in the center of the top of his gums; both, apparently, were made of solid gold and held in place by a complicated arrangement of tiny wires.
    ‘Man needs a new set of teeth,’ said the Professor to Jonathan as they stood looking about the gloom.
    ‘And a dozen candles,’ replied the Cheeser.
    ‘He only wears them for show,’ came a halting voice from behind them. The two turned to see a plump, bearded man in a huge overcoat sitting alone at a littered table.
    ‘I beg your pardon,’ said the Professor, addressing the gentleman.
    ‘I say, he only wears them for show.’
    ‘Ah yes. For show. And very elegant they are, those teeth,’ the Professor replied diplomatically. ‘I met a dwarf in Beddlington once who had such teeth. He was an animal trainer. Marvelous man with gibbon apes and orangutans.’
    Jonathan tried to get the attention of the sleeping proprietor as the Professor sat down at the overcoated man’s table and launched into his story of the Beddlington Ape. The sleeper lurched as Jonathan