They wrapped the wool blankets around their shoulders and huddled by the fire, Gregory leaning against the arm of the leather chair. Kalgrash resumed his perch and picked up his book, setting it on his spiky knees. “Do you want me to tell you some of the stories from this book? I can remember JUST how my father told them to me.”
“Sure,” said Gregory. Brian nodded.
“Hmm. I was just getting to the pictures for ‘The Tale of Sir Roland, Acrophobic Duke of Aquitaine…’”
Kalgrash’s inhuman voice prattled on happily, affecting deep, booming tones or high-pitched, Southern-accented ones as the needs of the stories dictated. The two boys sipped their mulled wine silently and stared at where the troll sat with his head inclined backward on the yellow-stained lace doily. Dim stories passed through their ears of monks who fled the Deepest Pits of Hell in favor of the Shallower Pits of Hell, of Hannibal’s warriors who opted out of riding elephants through the Alps in favor of invading via the lowlands on tortoise-back. Gradually, the two grew tired, and their heads began nodding against the rough, tickly wool of the blankets. As the fire quietly sighed, they fell to sleep entirely, the echoes of Kalgrash’s voice forming strange landscapes in their dreams.
They woke; the fire was mere orange embers. Kalgrash was gone. A frigid wind pattered through the room. Brian rose, dropping the stiff blanket from around him. He stormed up the creaking stairs and yelped from the kitchen. Gregory raced after him.
The thick door to the outside was wide open, and leaves and rain blew in. The table was thrown on its side. Litter was strewn across the hearth and chairs and cabinets—bones and pelts and broken crockery. On the floor, twitching and grumbling, Kalgrash lay in convulsions. “Bitty, bitty, bitty,” he dribbled. “Deeth, deeth…kark, no, no, but don’t come again…no, go away go away tell them to go away!”
“What’s…what’s wrong?” Brian asked timidly.
“Kreek, kreek…but no bye-bye…trith dribble.” He flung his head left and right, blinking blindly.
Brian called, “Kalgrash!” but the troll stared dimly into space and slapped his arms back and forth wildly.
“They’re here! They’re here!” The troll kicked fiercely with his foot, and a tin of buttons and thread upset with a clatter.
Brian stepped over the overturned table and scattered chairs, the wind throwing back his hair. He slammed shut the door. Kalgrash jerked at the noise.
There was a brief period of silence, where only the mythical beast’s muttering could be heard. Shakily, the troll’s gaunt hand reached for an amulet that lay on the floor. Suddenly, he snatched it, gave a shout of, “Ah-HA!” and collapsed entirely into snoring slumber.
The two stood numbly, looking around at the wreckage.
Outside, the wind played about the bridge and forced the river to tumble along at a reckless pace. Inside the troll’s house, Gregory stoked the fires as gray morning drew near.
Brian’s yelp awakened the troll; the boy had been frightened by the scuttling lizard that lived in a woolen stocking cap beneath the woodpile. Kalgrash lay with open eyes, staring at the fire. Suddenly, he leaped to his feet. “GOOD morning!” he sang, grinning widely. Gregory had been slumbering in the chair next to the troll—he looked up groggily, slowly blinking.
“Oh, good morning,” Gregory said.
“Omelettes for breakfast?” suggested the troll, rubbing his spindly hands together vigorously.
“Oh. Sure. Brian loves eggs,” Gregory agreed. “And a big glass of milk.”
“Splendid!” And the troll threw up his hands and bounded up the staircase, down the hallway, and into the kitchen. Brian called from the basement, “I think there’s something living beneath the woodpile.”
The troll shuffled halfway down the hallway to the basement steps. “Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes…I think it eats dried pasta. All of my egg noodles keep disappearing.”
“What should I do?”
“Fish around with your hand under the wood and see if you find some ziti.”
“No, but will it bite?”
“Bite? No, no! It’s just a little round noodle!”
Brian, down below, rolled his eyes and sourly shook his head, then went about gingerly gathering wood in his arms, all the while peering at the hole into which the creature had skittered. His arms full, he walked past the jam shelf and the mushroom colony, and thumped up the steps to feed the fires.
It was daybreak; time to set off.
As the troll glared at the griddle, scratching the pan back and forth over the woodstove’s burner, he apologized: “Oh, I’m sorry about the evil spirits last night. I didn’t know that they were coming by, or I would have put up my protective amulets.”
Gregory had entered the kitchen and slouched next to the troll with his hands slumped in his pockets. “What exactly happened last night?”
“What? When the evil spirits came?”
“Yes. When we found you in that fit.”
The troll righted himself and quirked an eyebrow. “Pardon?”
“You were in a fit. Rolling around on the floor. It looked like you’d knocked the kitchen apart. Beastie Betty Crocker goes berserk.”
“Hmm?”
“You were in the kitchen, after we fell asleep.”
“Well, the demons came, all of them, and…I guess they left me like that. But I thought I remembered…well, hmm…odd, odd, odd! Couldn’t you hear it? They were screaming and shouting? You must have heard! Zabbindathel was singing ‘Last Train to Lyonesse.’ Bad, bad, ve-he-he-he-ry bad!” he reported, shaking his head.
The boys uprighted the table and picked up the worst of the wreckage. They talked about where various things should be replaced. They threw away piles of smashed clay.
When Brian and Gregory were seated, Kalgrash slid their bowls to them across the table (the plates were mostly broken). Brian blinked nervously at the omelette, and even more so at the bowl of milk (the cups had been broken as well) that was deposited before him.
“Eat up!” said Gregory cheerfully, and plunged his fork vigorously into the steaming egg.
“Is something wrong?” asked Kalgrash through a mouth of pasty rabbit’s pelt and omelette. “Can I get you something else?”
“Oh, no…no,” protested Brian quickly.
Gregory smiled and exclaimed, “Well, good! Chow down! Soup’s on!” and again launched into his food, chewing happily.
After a few minutes of this, it came to the surface that Brian was allergic both to milk and eggs, a revelation that Gregory treated with overwhelmed astonishment. Brian had ham and cider for breakfast.
“So where are you off to today? Going to try to get back into your uncle’s house?”
“Are you kidding?” said Gregory. “Not if it had a drive-through window and to-go bags of free money.”
“Do you think Prudence is safe?” Brian asked.
Gregory twisted his lips around, considering carefully. After a minute, he said, “I don’t know. I hope so. What Uncle Max said makes sense. She would only be in danger as long as we were there. Otherwise, the Thussers don’t have anything against her.”
“So you want to keep going?” asked Brian.
Gregory thought for a minute. “Time’s running out,” he said. “Who knows where Jack Stimple is.”
“We have the propeller now,” said Brian. “We can head down the underground river. What do you think?”
Gregory nodded. “Sounds like a good idea to me.”
After breakfast, they gathered their packs from the floor. They thanked their host, and he thanked them for saving him from his swoon. When they left him, he was rummaging around in a wooden chest to find a hammer and some nails.
They shook the troll’s hand, and set off for their day’s adventures. It was still raining lightly; however, the two suspected they would spend most of the day underground, anyway.
After a long silence as they walked, Brian said thoughtfully, “It was strange, that fit he had last night.”
“Ya. Evil spirits, I guess.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“No. I slept like a log.”
“Me, too. They sure weren’t there when we woke up. They must have thrown him into that fit.”
“Kalgrash is sort of hyperactive, anyway.”
Brian glanced at Gregory. “He sort of reminds me of you, actually.”
“Oh, thanks.”
“No, no, I’m not kidding.”
“What do you mean?”
“He bounces around and makes jokes.”
“I don’t bounce.”
“You make jokes.”
“I don’t bounce. I can’t believe you’re saying I bounce.”
Brian didn’t say anything else. They kept on walking.
The two reached the folly at around nine o’clock. The stone was stained a dreary gray by water; the mosaics were now almost entirely obscured again by blackish mud. The boys heaved the plug out from the center of the floor and peered into the chilly chasm beneath.
“Great,” said Gregory. “Nothing stopping us now.” He fumbled along the wall for the lantern on the peg. “Nothing stopping us from going down right now.” He held the lantern by its wire handle in his mouth and scrambled around with his packet of matches until one was lit. He muttered, through the wire, “Nothing stopping us from strolling right into whatever death pit waits for us.” He touched the match to the lantern’s wick, then held the lamp out in front of him. They descended into the cavity, carefully supporting themselves with the dank walls. “Nothing to stop us from being minced or ground up. Nothing to stop us from being drowned, burned, electrocuted, yanked apart, drilled…” The words became tinnier and tinnier, became lumps of echo without any sense. The day brightened as noon drew on. No sound came from below. A squirrel scampered across the floor of the pagoda and bounced his nose off the displaced stone plug a few times. Uninterested, she scurried off. Evening fell, and the wind picked up once again.
As darkness finally painted everything blue, an emaciated figure wrapped in a voluminous black cloak stalked up to the cavity, clicked his forked tongue, and swooped down upon the stone, slamming it back into place. Dissatisfied, he glared around the folly and finally set about scraping the leaves back into place again over the mosaics with his long, clawed foot. As he walked off, he muttered to himself in a grating, inhuman voice, “Untidy. Untidy…”
The wind tickled the leaves behind him.
The boat sat where it had the other day. It knocked gently against the bank in response to some imperceptible current. The two approached it carefully. “Have you ever driven a motorboat before?” inquired Gregory.
“I’ve steered my uncle’s sometimes,” said Brian. “But I don’t see any way to steer this boat. Unless we turn the whole motor by hand.”
“We may have to.” Gregory stepped onto the boat. It rocked briefly, until he stumbled into a sitting position on one of the seats. The flame in the lantern bobbed and flickered, sending reflections from the brass fittings whirling about the walls. “Well, get in.”
Gregory rose to a stoop and helped Brian step in. “Now,” said Brian. “We’ve got to put in the propeller.”
“All right. You want to try that?”
Brian nodded. “Sure.” Bending over so as not to rock the boat, he stepped to the back of the tiny craft and set down his pack to root around for the iron pinwheel. He drew it out of the bag and stood peering into the water, leaning with one arm on the rim of the boat. Gregory joined him.
“Here, do you want me to take your coat?” offered Gregory.
“Yeah.” Brian stood and worked his way out of the tweed cloak, draping it over his friend’s arm. He rolled up his shirt sleeves, then leaned forward again, got down on his knees, and dipped his hands into the frigid waters. “Shoot, it’s cold.” He carefully inserted the rod into the engine, screwing up his face in pain as he groped in the dark water. Gregory held the lantern closer.
“Have you got it?” he asked encouragingly.
Brian nodded and withdrew his arms. Shivering, he quickly daubed them dry with his coat. He pulled down his sleeves and fixed the cufflinks, then took his coat from Gregory. “It’s in. It clicked. I guess we’re ready to go, if this thing is really going to go anywhere.”
Gregory said, “Before we go on, why don’t we look at the game board to see if it’ll tell us any more, now that we found a solution to the propeller problem.”
“Good idea,” said Brian.
Gregory pulled out the ancient board, noticing that the strip of fabric that connected the two halves was becoming distinctly wobbly and frayed. He pried the boards open and inspected the game. “More spaces,” he said. “We have two routes. Down the river that way is something called the Grinding Falls, where there’s a box that says, ‘Solve Riddle—Lose turns until Falls have been passed.’ The other direction, we’ll go through some cavern and across Lake Gwarnmore, then we go down the Taskwith Canal…and then we get to…oh, wonderful, yeah, the Steps of Doom, here, next to Snarth’s Cavern, where we either solve a riddle or lose the game.”
“Didn’t we hear that name Snarth before?”
“‘Snarth’? Well, I mean, it’s a common enough name—”
“No, no, no! The Club of Snarth, outside!”
“Hm, you’re right,” muttered Gregory. “That’s great. That’s really wonderful… Well…” He scowled. “Which direction do we want to point the boat in? Snarth or falls?”
Brian reasoned through it. “Losing the game is worse than losing a turn. That’s what we’ve seen. For example, Gelt the Winnower was more dangerous than Kalgrash. For Kalgrash, we were just stuck until we got an answer. With Gelt, he’d kill us.” Brian considered, gripping the sides of the boat. He said, finally, “So I vote we go for Snarth.”
Gregory looked startled. “What?”
“I think that the more difficult puzzles lead to the most direct route,” said Brian. “The more we risk, the faster we go. And we’ve wasted a lot of time.”
“Did someone take an idiot pill?”
“We’re running out of time. We have, what, a couple of days, maybe?”
Gregory frowned and drummed his fingers on the seat. “You really want to?”
“How are we going to win, otherwise?” asked Brian.
“Okay,” said Gregory. “Okay.”
“This is the most direct route.”
“Sure. To our butts in the fry-o-lator,” Gregory muttered. “I know you’re right, but I wish there was a route that involved complementary chocolates and a lawn chair.”
“We’re running out of time,” said Brian. “Whoever those people are, they’ll be in exile forever if we don’t win.”
“All right,” said Gregory. “Okay. You’re right. Let’s detach these mooring things.” They unclipped the chains from the shore and dropped them rattling into the hull of the boat. Slowly, the skiff drifted away from the rocky shore. “Turn the boat upstream,” said Gregory, “if that’s the way we’re going.” He waited, raised an eyebrow, and asked, “That’s really the way you want to go?”
Brian thought long and hard about it. He steeled himself. Finally, he said, “It’s strategy.”
Gregory nodded, and they pushed off so the nose of the boat was pointing upstream. Gradually, they drifted backward.
“Well, Skipper, pull the lever,” suggested Gregory.
Brian grasped hold of the lightning bolt lever and pulled it. The engine roared to life. The bronze elephant heads bobbed up and down, and the ivory glittered and spun. Behind the propeller, the water boiled. “I hope this is really what you want to do,” yelled Gregory over the noise.
The boat steered itself. After puttering out into the middle of the stream, it headed against the current, under one of the arches. Gregory leaned forward and placed the lantern on the hook provided at the prow of the boat, and then sat back to survey the sights.
The boat chugged through a murky tunnel, the engine mercilessly loud in the confined space??
?the boys had to block their ears with their fingers. They drifted onward, turning as the tunnel turned, as if some invisible hand guided their journey.
The tunnel eventually widened out and, simultaneously, the noise of the engine grew softer, dimming to a subdued purr. The lantern creaked on its peg. The water dribbled past the prow of the boat. Through depths and deeper depths of darkness they drifted, past acres of stone and water.
They passed the front of a house that was carved into the sheer wall. Tall, slim windows were blocked by rusted iron gratings. The arched door was half-sunken in the river, opening out on steps that lay unevenly beneath the water. A mooring column rose from the river. “Like Venice,” whispered Gregory, and Brian nodded.
The river widened into a vast lake—Lake Gwarnmore—a lake so wide and dark that even when Gregory rose and held up the lantern, squinting to see the shore, they could discern nothing but darkness. Gregory sighed, hung up the lantern, and sat again.
At one point, they thought they perceived other boats on the lake. They seemed to hear the trickling of water from oars and the splash of rowing. They both scrambled to their feet and stared around, straining to hear through the rumble of the motor. They thought they saw, across the glossy water, the flash of a wet surface, the glitter of metal.
Brian grabbed the lever and flung it upward. The motor chugged spasmodically and halted. They sat for a while, frozen and aching, until finally the silence in the cavern became even more worrisome than the noise had been. Brian pulled the lever, and they continued on their way.
It seemed to take ages to cross the lake. Although Brian still gazed around him at the chilly shadows, Gregory gave up and inspected the herringbone pattern of his knickerbockers.
Finally, they glimpsed a new wall ahead of them, this time featureless except for a towering, ornately carved archway, vines tangled with pointy-eared cherubs and sprigs of laurel. “Wow,” exclaimed Gregory quietly. The skiff passed through the mammoth arch, into a narrower passage. Heavy lanterns—huge, grimy globes on complex iron frameworks—projected from the walls. They passed windows and doors.