The Disappearing Dwarf by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

Jonathan speculated that whoever Malthius turned out to be, he would likely be better company than the creatures they’d just visited. The decision, as it turned out, was a good one.
    The corridor that led to the cavern was relatively short. They had to stop to re-light the candles four times before they reached it, but when they finally stumbled out of the tunnel into the immense, stalactite-hung cavern, they saw an amazing spectacle.
    The cavern was broad and deep with an astonishingly high ceiling. The rays of the sun shone through cracks and fissures above, as if filtering through piles of rock. The ceiling was so riddled with holes and cracks that it was a marvel it stayed up at all. There wasn’t any need for candles. The most amazing thing though was the furniture stacked roundabout. There were piles and piles of it. Immense wardrobes and long dining tables, gray with dust and dark with age, lined the walls. There were trunks spilling over with clothes and there were any number of old chairs, huge carved chairs with rags of tattered leather dangling from green brass studs.
    In the dim shadows of one corner stood a collection of stuffed animals, a sort of taxidermist’s wonderland, that looked as if it had stood just so for two hundred years. An elephant with long curving tusks and tufts of wooly hair along his back watched them through green glass eyes. Beside him stood a great long hippo and three crocodiles that had to have been twenty feet from head to tail. There were zebras and antelope and great cats and a weird hollow-eyed buffalo that was almost as big as the elephant. Four white apes stood in a cluster farther back in the darkness. Pushed in among these strange dusty creatures were more chairs and wardrobes and tables and candelabra and such, heaped together in disarray.
    The cavern seemed to be the storage room of an ancient natural history museum that doubled as a warehouse for antiquities. Jonathan was briefly troubled by the disquieting thought that all the stuffed beasts were just a hair’s breadth from animation, that perhaps when night fell the old lamps and candelabra would begin to glow and the ruined clavichord would begin to tinkle and harp and the apes would sit round the table to a phantom meal while crocodiles lounged on broken divans.
    But all that was unlikely. He and the Professor, thinking of treasures, began rummaging in the scattered trunks, finding for the most part nothing but ancient clothing. In the trunks scattered beneath the fissures in the ceiling, the contents had been reduced to a sort of damp black webby business. But those more sheltered from the weather were in far better shape. There were heaps of sequined dresses, of silks and laces and fine waistcoats and top hats. There was a trunk full of costume jewelry, of rhinestones and glass baubles and false pearls that spilled out over the sides of the trunk and flowed away over the floor. All in all, both Jonathan and the Professor were astonished – not so much by the furniture itself or the trunks of ancient clothing or even by the weird assortment of stuffed animals, but by the combination of the lot of it, hidden away there in a cavern in the earth. It was like something out of a book by G. Smithers.
    There wasn’t any treasure to be found, however. Both of them collected heaps of odd finery before stopping to think that it was unlikely that they would find a way to haul the stuff along with them. The idea of leaving it behind was unthinkable, but it was, in the end, the only idea that made any sense. The Professor discovered several trunks of old costumes, enough to outfit a castle full of people for a masquerade. Among the feathered hats and rubber hands was a patchy sort of ape suit, complete from top to bottom. Jonathan slid the mask over his head but then pulled it off again when bits of hair and paper and rubber and leather fell from it.
    ‘I have to have this,’ he said to the Professor, who himself had found a