The Disappearing Dwarf Read Online Free Page A

of Professor Wurzle’s oboe weapon. ‘Those were the days,’ Jonathan thought, feeling for all the world as if that marvelous adventure had occurred ages ago, back in his wild youth, perhaps.
    Everything was so unutterably peaceful along the river, however, that this time no such adventures befell them. They managed to read like whizbangs and smoke any number of pipes of tobacco. On the second morning the trout began to cooperate and they ate fish for lunch and again for dinner. Then Jonathan came up with the bright idea of stirring a bunch of broken trout meat into their scrambled eggs the next morning. After they finished, the Professor remarked that, for himself, he hoped to never see a trout again. Not on a plate at least. Jonathan felt pretty much the same way.
    The shores of the Oriel began to stretch out as they approached Hightower Village. Broad green stretches of meadow, alive with columbine and lupine and wild iris, seemed to have pushed the forests away toward the distances. To the cast rose the White Mountains, covered in clouds and mystery, first visible across a stretch of grassy lowlands, then disappearing beyond a stand of towering hemlock or a cluster of mossy alders.
    Lilies bloomed in the slack water along the banks, and among the floating leaves and the tangled roots swam a company of pond turtles and frogs, clambering up onto lily pads as big around as a plate, then sliding off again with a splash into the placid waters. The meadow gave way finally to swamps and fens scattered with the twisted shapes of long dead trees and occasional stands of alder and cottonwood that had managed to find a hillock high enough to keep their roots out of the surrounding waters.
    That section of shore was dark and murky and cheerless, even on a fine day in the spring. Even the wild flowers that sprouted here and there in the swamps appeared to Jonathan to be doleful sorts of things, sad bits of color cast about in the gloomy stretches of swamp.
    The Professor took the long view – saw the whole business through different eyes. There were no end of snakes and bugs and biological wonders afoot in the swamps, and at night in the summer, the lowlands burned with the tiny fires of a million glowworms, a jar full of which would work as well as any lantern to light a traveler’s path. The Professor’s talk of bugs and worms, however, did not do too much to change Jonathan’s attitude. Nor did the craggy shadows of Hightower Ridge improve it much, for there, jutting up from the rocky crest, were the granite walls of Hightower Castle. It was impossible to say where the gray cut-granite of the tower walls began. It looked as if the tower had sprouted from the ridge itself and that there had never been a time that the tower was anything but a partial ruin. It seemed as ageless as the dim stones of the broken land roundabout it. To the Professor, the tower was a mystery; to Jonathan it was more of a curse. His only consolation was that its most recent occupant, Selznak the evil conjuror dwarf, had been chased away upriver. An empty tower seemed a bit less foreboding than a tower occupied by an evil dwarf – but not much less.
    It was relatively early in the morning when they sailed into Hightower Harbor, still fairly quiet and empty. Only a few people had returned since Selznak’s disappearance. Jonathan was relieved to see, however, that the windows of the boathouse were no longer boarded up and that some half dozen children were trapping crayfish along the banks. At least the village wasn’t wholly deserted as it had been that past winter.
    Jonathan and the Professor decided to waste no time poking around town, but to trudge along the path through the swamp immediately and investigate the castle. They agreed to return to the raft before nightfall to avoid sleeping in the tower and upsetting any resident ghosts or demons.
    They packed a lunch and set out carrying a rope, a lantern, a torch, and a dozen candles. Each brought