The Stone Giant by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online Page A

too. Aren’t you the lucky one.’
    ‘Would you like to have it?’ asked Escargot, filled suddenly with generosity.
    ‘Oh I couldn’t.’
    ‘Of course you could. Just don’t set it back down. Who knows, perhaps you’ll let me visit it sometime.’
    ‘Anytime you’d like,’ said the girl, smiling and closing the book.
    Escargot nearly pitched over. This is more like it, he thought to himself, remembering Leta’s cool and sensible rebuff on the street just days earlier. He must have had a more pronounced effect on her than he’d thought. Uncle Helstrom nodded and grinned, happy, it seemed, to see his favored niece treated so.
    ‘In a week, then, let’s say, I’ll return this bag of marbles. But I’ll look you up in town, then – won’t I? – and you’ll be in a position to stand me to a glass of ale. Then I’ll do the same for you.’ With that he drew a pocket watch out of his cloak and looked at it with evident surprise. ‘Late, late, late,’ he said, clicking his tongue. ‘We’ve got to be off, haven’t we? Come along, niece. And by the way, by ten o’clock tomorrow morning your man Stover will have heard from me. I’d pay him a visit if I were you and beard him on the issue of the settlement. I think I can guarantee you he’ll see reason.’
    Together the dwarf and the girl stepped out into the night and without a backward glance strode away through the fog, carrying his marbles and his signed Smithers, and leaving Escargot standing in the doorway, conscious of the fact that the three of them had been standing all along, that he had been reduced to such a state that he couldn’t even offer a friend a chair. He looked at his pocketful of gold coins, then picked up his bowl of fish and pitched it out the door and onto the meadow. He’d see Stover in the morning, all right. He’d take a room at Stover’s tavern is what he’d do, and he’d drink up a pint or two of Stover’s ale with Stover’s scowling face to flavor it. And if Stover complained, maybe he’d pop him one on the beezer, just for good measure.
    He lay down on his pine needles, wrapped his blanket around his feet, and pulled his jacket tight, then watched the three candles burn themselves into little heaps of wax. Finally he drifted toward sleep, thinking of Leta and of last laughs, his thoughts swirling together into mist. Hovering within the mist was a vaguely familiar face, watching him, leering, perhaps. Before he could rouse himself enough to identify it, to focus on it, he was asleep, untroubled at last by nightmares.

3
Stover Has His Way
    Escargot awoke to a clear dawn sky. The mists of the night before had fled, the distant hills had shrugged off their mantle of fog, and the sun rose hot and enormous in the east. It was a perfect day for doing nothing, for bathing in the river – a perfect day, that is, if a man had nothing better to do with his time and no better place to take a bath. A man with a pocketful of gold, though, a man who was a friend of Mr Abner Helstrom,
that
man could make better use of his time.
    ‘Time to pitch the bed out,’ Escargot said aloud, and then handful by handful he hauled pine needles out of the little room and scattered them over the meadow. Then he lay his blanket out over the ground, piled all but one of his Smithers books into the center of it, gathered the corners, and heaved the whole thing over his shoulder before setting out toward the river. It seemed, taken all the way around, that it was time to move to better quarters.
    At the river he pulled in his lines, twisting them one by one around a fat stick, securing each hook and shoving the stick in with his net beneath the log. Then he sat in the sun with his back against the log and opened Smithers’
The Stone Giants
. He thumbed through, stopping at each illustration, until he got to the part where the Moon elves and the stone giants battle for power over the land of Balumnia, and the Moon elves, riding in sky vessels, perform