After a while, the boat puttered to the bank and nuzzled the shore at the foot of a wide stone staircase. Next to it there were two mooring clips like those at the Dark Marina. Cautiously, the two boys rose, and each pulled out a chain, running the links between their fingers as they stretched them to the shore. They clipped the boat into place, then Brian shut off the engine.
Their ears whined and rang in the sudden silence.
“Well,” said Gregory. “Here we are.”
Brian nodded.
“So do we go find out what Snarth is?” asked Gregory.
“Sure,” said Brian.
Gregory nodded and unhooked the lantern from the front of the boat. He muttered, “And you’re the one who’s supposed to be the coward.”
“I’m scared,” Brian admitted.
“Good,” said Gregory. “‘Cause so am I.”
They peered around suspiciously, and began climbing the Steps of Doom. The soles of their shoes scratched dryly over the stone. The shadows wavered. At the top of the stairs, a large archway awaited them, a little wooden doorway in the side. Standing on the top step, Gregory flung his arm forward, holding the lantern bravely into the next cavern. The lantern creaked on its wire and swung slowly back and forth.
The flame illuminated dark, uneven grottos, thin columns of natural stone, uneven floors and, on the other side of the cavern, another natural archway. The two boys blinked, their hearts racing. Brian stepped forward and squinted. His hand rose nervously to the strap of his knapsack, where it hung on his shoulder. No sound stirred the air.
“Well?” said Gregory.
Brian shrugged, still looking into the cavern. They ran their eyes quickly over the surfaces of mottled stone again. Then they heard the snore—it sounded at first like stone ponderously scraping stone. There was a hiss of escaping breath. Then silence again. The two stood perfectly still. A muscle in Gregory’s leg was twitching. Another snore growled through the chamber, then the hiss, then the silence.
The two looked at each other, their eyes wide. Brian licked his lips. He remembered Jack Stimple’s words—nothing protected the two of them, nothing here cared whether they lived or died.
Gregory nodded, a prompt for them to creep forward. He stepped quietly across the threshold into the cavern. Brian followed. The light-haired boy was as silent as a cat as he crossed the vast floor. His companion was as quiet as he could manage. Then they saw Snarth.
He was prone against a boulder. He was maybe twenty feet tall, a huge and warty ogre, eyeless, his thick nose with two huge nostrils dripping over a mouth with two dirty yellow tusks. His massive limbs, draped with muscle and fat, were curled uncomfortably on his belly. He wore a skirt of furs.
The two were very careful. They did not make a sound.
But still, the nostrils began to twitch. The golden hairs in them began delicately to wave. Then the massive head started to rock.
And the beast sat up.
Shaking its head and grumbling, “Mmm, mm, hm…,” the giant crawled to his feet wearily. He sniffed at the air, his hands outspread. The two boys froze with fear. Snarth sighed, then grimaced. He rotated his shoulders a few times, and wriggled both of his huge legs in turn.
Then, with an insane yowl, he leaped across the chamber and tromped on the spot where the boys had been; he stomped vigorously so as to ensure that any life there had been extinguished.
The two boys had thrown themselves through the next archway and down a vast set of stairs as the ogre prepared for his leap. They heard him stomping, they heard his mindless yowling, they could hear his pause and his mucoid sniffing.
As they reached the bottom of the stairs, the flame picked out details of things around them—the side of a house with a steep, steep roof, a house encrusted with some kind of convoluted carving.
Gregory and Brian breathlessly charged down a shoddily cobbled street. Snarth bellowed behind them as he leaped to the foot of the stairs.
“House!” screamed Gregory, and he pulled off to the left, grabbing at Brian’s sleeve as he passed him. The two scurried through the door and through the empty stone chambers within. They stood shivering in a back room that had no windows, the rumble of Snarth’s angry breath echoing in to them as he stooped before the minute doorway.
“This is great,” whispered Gregory. “Superb choice.” And then, as if swearing, he said over and over again, “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
Brian said, “Look. There must be other windows we can crawl out of. On another side of the house.”
Gregory nodded and stepped quickly through to another room, this one bare like the last. They went up a flight of stairs.
In the upstairs rooms, windows looked from gables and walls out to the back of the house—but they were thirty feet off the ground. Gregory leaned out of the casement and twisted around to look upward. He couldn’t see anything above them. The light from the lantern illuminated only the leering gargoyles that perched on every corner, that slithered over every lintel, that squatted on every gable of the house opposite.
Gregory crept to the front window. Below, he could see Snarth standing, his arms crossed impatiently, snorting suspiciously at the air. They could hear his breath, the whine of air through cavernous sinuses and stalagmites of snot.
They waited. The ogre hunkered down and stuck his nose through the door. He stood again, scratching his chin. He paced a few steps to the left, then changed his mind, and paced a few steps to the right.
And then, quick as lightning, he grabbed on to windows and began climbing. He heaved himself upward.
The boys stumbled back; they ran for the stairs. The ogre charged up and started fumbling his blunt fingers around in the room. They threw themselves downward, slamming into walls.
Out the front door. They ran for a side street. Snarth had his arm stuck in the window. He teetered there. Smelled them. Started to yank his arm out.
They were running through an alley. Found it led right back to Snarth’s cavern. He was thumping down the street toward them.
“There was a door on the other side of the cavern! There was a little door!” Brian screamed.
They crossed the floor of Snarth’s den. Brian was redfaced; he had fallen behind. Gregory had always been better at running. He had won the school marathon. He tugged at Brian. Brian was slow.
Snarth had reached the entrance of the cavern. He leaped.
They were crawling, stooping, and running, tripping…Gregory had found the little wooden door in the wall. “Brian!” he shouted. Brian was there at his side—Brian banged his nose on the edge of the door, his glasses fell—the ogre was right behind them—Brian gasped—but his glasses landed on his crumpled sleeve, and he grabbed them, and went around the door, and felt Gregory pull up on his collar—and he ran forward—and tripped over a stair—and the blunt fingers came scuttling up toward him—and he scrambled on hands and knees upward.
It was a spiral flight of stairs. The hairy arm shot around the bend. Brian and Gregory could hear the soft shuffling of his fingers behind them. They fell over each other, and their packs rattled wildly.
But they were far enough up that he couldn’t reach them.
They crawled on up for ages, gasping for breath, until they heard the angry cries of the ogre far below them. Then Gregory rose and unslung his pack. Brian leaned against the wall, feeling slick sweat prickle in all of his pores, feeling his body shudder at each stampeding heartbeat.
“Okay,” said Gregory, “so it wasn’t a great idea to try to get past Snarth.”
Brian didn’t respond.
“What? Are you mad at me?” said Gregory. “You’re mad at something.”
Brian just said, “We need to figure out how to get around him.”
Gregory nodded, his light hair hanging limply over his eyes, darker than usual with sweat.
He made no cracks.
They kept on ascending the staircase.
They emerged from a splintered door in an old foundation
a few hours later. The foundation, lined with bulging stones, had been filled with spiky bushes and ferns in the summer. The ferns had withered, and the bushes were reduced to crackling skeletons, easy to push aside with a well-placed foot.
The two pulled themselves out of the pit and peered around them in the twilight to get their bearings. They were on the side of the mountain; the ground was steeply pitched. Tall pines crowded thickly around them on the slope, turning dark blue in the falling darkness. A late bat swung above their heads and disappeared into the top of the pines.
Gregory suggested, “We should probably make a campfire and settle down for the night. There’s no way we’ll find our way back to Uncle Max’s or Kalgrash’s in the dark. And we don’t know what’s waiting for us back at Uncle Max’s, anyway.”
“Okay,” said Brian. “Maybe we should move away from the door to the caverns, just in case someone else uses it.” He considered for a moment, staring blankly at his shoe. “We can scuff the pine needles to make sure we can find our way back in the morning. If we want to.”
“Yeah, I’m not particularly looking forward to a walk down all those stairs and another battle with Snarth, myself.”
“Yeah,” said Brian unhappily.
They set off, Brian dragging his foot determinedly to make a dark trail in the dirt. The woods were silent, save for a bit of wind that occasionally rattled branches and set pine needles rustling. Gregory shivered with the cold.
After a while, they came to another clearing. Night had definitely fallen. Many stars were out, although to one side a great bank of softly moonlit clouds obscured them. The two gathered sticks and made a fire; they had learned how during their disastrous stint as Cub Scouts. Most of the time had been spent spelling out the Pledge of Allegiance with alphabet noodles.
The fire going, they heated up some of the food that the servants had packed in their rucksacks. Then they spread out their bedrolls on either side of the flames, crawled in clumsily without taking off their overcoats (it was very chilly), and lay staring up at the sky.
Gregory looked at his friend across the flames. Then he said, “Hey. We’re risking our lives together.” He held up his fist. “This is what friends are for. Thank you.” When Brian didn’t say anything, he continued. “At least we know that normal is out of the question for us now. Suits and nine to five. Now we know we’ll have to really do something with our lives. You can go on to become a famous journalist. I’ll be the world’s first skateboarding bishop.”
Finally, Brian smiled. He said softly, “I guess once you’ve had breakfast with a troll, there’s no going back.”
Gregory nodded. He settled down in his bedroll. “Good night,” he said, and Brian answered, “Good night.”
They both curled up in their blankets, crooking their hands beneath their faces. Whenever a root or a stone became intolerable, they would rustle around until they had eased the ache. The fire dimmed. Once, Brian woke up to see a raccoon staring at the fire, but he faded back to sleep.
Above them, the stars revolved. For a time, they were not the stars of Earth. A second moon rose above the mountain. But in the deepest part of the night it faded and, by dawn, the sky was back to normal.
The two were walking on a path around the mountainside.
“I’m not going back down there,” said Gregory.
“There must be a way past him, though,” figured Brian. “We just have to think how.”
“Sure.”
“Every time we’ve come up against one of those ‘Solve the Riddle’ things, we’ve needed one specific thing to solve the puzzle—like the weathervane and the propeller. Something we knew about that we had to connect with the puzzle.”
“Say, do you think that soup tureen at Uncle Max’s is a panzer tank in disguise?”
In the light of day, they could see that a well-worn path rambled away in either direction from the old cellar. They randomly chose a branch and began marching resolutely down it. Surrounded by the dark fir trees, the boys were protected from much of the frigid wind that muscled its way between the swaying treetops.
They had traveled for about an hour, recognizing nothing, getting nowhere, high up on the mountain when, in the midst of a gully edged by boulders, the path ended abruptly at a sign reading TURN BACK. Do NOT ENTER.
“This is a little shabby,” Gregory complained. “You’d think that with hundreds of miles of forest, they could at least manage to hide things better than this.”
Brian peered past the boulders and into the woods. “Do you want to leave the path?”
“Sure.”
“But what happens if we’re found out?”
“I dunno. We get mangled.”
The boy strode off toward the forest, stepping up onto the rocks. Brian followed him.
Forging their path was difficult: Branches scraped them, hidden rocks tripped them (Brian especially), and dirt gave way beneath their shoes.
Eventually they broke out of the wood. Large boulders lay about, lime-green with lichen, surrounded by thick blueberry bushes. Gregory scrambled up onto one of the boulders and turned around to survey the land above the trees. “Brian, come look!” Brian stepped up to his side.
Above the pines, they could see the land that lay around the mountain far below.
Hills rose and fell, the trees painted in impossible colors; in the distance, great blue mountains towered from the patchwork earth. Small dips where creeks ran, a few browning pastures, an occasional black roof or white steeple—these were the only features that broke the continuous expanse of glowing forest.
They could see the places they had wandered in the course of the week, laid out almost as clearly as on the gameboard. The mansion, with its lawns around it, smoke curling from its chimney; the Ceremonial Mound, rising dark, far, far below; the Crooked Steeple and the ruined Grendle house; the woods; the bridge; and the River of Time and Shadow, which ran under a distant road, past Gerenford Green, joining other rivers until, in the blue distance, it flowed through mill towns and suburbs and under highways and led, eventually, to the distant city the boys called home, and from there, into the sea.
They stood there several minutes, watching the distant trees sway in the breeze.
The clouds drifted across the crisp sky.
They felt the wind all around them.
An hour later, they were far above the tree line. The climbing was getting harder. There were wide granite faces all around them.
That is when they came upon a door in the stone.
On the door, there was a brass sign that read WEE SNIGGLEPING.
“Eh,” said Gregory. “Isn’t that cute.”
Brian stepped up to the door and knocked.
There was a pause of a few seconds before the latch handle snapped up and the door opened. A little man stood there, shorter than either of them—a bald little man, dressed in a red vest and skewed round glasses. His ears were distinctly pointed. He had on a hat made of owl feathers, dried swamp flowers, and pipe cleaners.
“Yes, hello,” he said, looking impatiently from one boy to the other.
Brian ventured, “Um, we were out walking and we, we got a little lost, and thought you might help us find the way.”
“Hmm! The ‘way’ to what? A refreshment stand? You’re on a mountaintop. Top of a mountain. Hmm? Savvy?”
Gregory cleared his throat. The man glanced up at the boy, one elfin eyebrow cocked suspiciously. Gregory said, “You’re Sniggleping, then?”
“Yes.”
“An elf.”
“Close enough.”
Gregory simply nodded. “Yup,” he said.
There was an awkward silence for everybody. Gregory tried to fill it by wearily clapping his hands together.
Sniggleping inquired, “You’re not playing the Game, are you?”
“Yes,” said Brian.
“You are. I see. You’re playing.” The elf-man rapped his knuckles angrily against the door frame. He turned and walked back into his hous
e. “Come in,” he said. “You’re out of bounds. The Thusser will be having an absolute fit.” The door was still open. Brian followed him, with Gregory tailing close behind, hands jammed in his pockets, head bowed down so his light hair swung before his eyes.
Sniggleping’s peculiar apartment was one room on two levels, with a small flight of stairs leading to the loft. The place was a shambles, crammed with great cogwheels and boxes of bolts, wrenches and hammers and hack-saws, huge leather portfolios of diagrams, half-constructed engines of brass and ivory, welding tools wired to dismantled lightning rods, crystal balls of various sizes, obsidian pentagrams and, over the mantel, some sort of stuffed beast that either had one leg too many or one leg too few, depending on how you counted them. The two stood uncomfortably while the wizened elf gabbled nonsense syllables into the horn of an Edwardian telephone.
Brian glanced at one of the plans that lay on the table. Snarth the ogre was drawn upon it, colored in full, grue-some detail, with all the warts marked. Arrows jabbed at particular features on the monstrous body, labeled in the illegible runic language. A windup key was drawn protruding from his back.
Sniggleping slammed down the phone and turned to them. “Right. That’s that.”
“We should probably go,” said Brian. “We’re sorry for getting off the path.”
“Stay here,” said Sniggleping. “Talk.”
“No,” said Brian. “We should—”
“Talk.”
“Okay,” said Gregory. He moved over to examine the diagram of Snarth more closely. “What are these diagrams for?”
“By ‘talk,’ I meant about something else, like boating or sleet.”
“These look like Snarth,” said Gregory.
“All right, get away from those!”
“What are they?”
“Nothing.”