The Disappearing Dwarf by James P. Blaylock Page B

the footman insisted. ‘There was a door. A big, iron door. It didn’t have no handle – just a big iron door. I saw what I saw. It swung to and the Squire walked through it, quick as you please. And he took his glass ball with him.’
    ‘Then where’s the door?’ Bufo asked, obviously suspicious of the man’s unlikely tale.
    ‘It vanished.
Poof!
. Blast me if it didn’t. It was there; then it weren’t. Just like that. Magic, I says. And I still says it.’
    ‘Whisky,’ Gump whispered into Bufo’s ear.
    ‘What!’ cried the footman.
    ‘Risky, this venture, I said,’ Gump replied. ‘Too much magic.’
    ‘That’s right,’ the footman said.
    ‘What was this marble?’ Jonathan asked, vague suspicions floating in his head.
    ‘It was the one he always carried around,’ the footman said. ‘The one he brought back from the wars.’
    ‘From the wars?’ the Professor asked.
    ‘The one he took from High tower,’ put in Gump helpfully. ‘That was the wars as far as the Squire was concerned.’
    ‘The Lumbog globe,’ Jonathan mumbled. ‘Then maybe that’s what …’ He was about to say that perhaps the Dwarf had come looking for the Lumbog globe – the magical glass ball that the Squire had taken for a great marble that previous winter at the Tower.
    But before he could finish, Miles the Magician cut in, ‘Balumnia!’
    ‘Of course!’ Twickenham exclaimed.
    Jonathan and the Professor gave each other a significant look. ‘Balumnia?’ Jonathan repeated in surprise.
    ‘Has to be,’ Miles insisted, assuming that Jonathan and the Professor had grasped his meaning. The door, the globe, Selznak – all the pieces fit.’
    ‘I don’t understand anything,’ Gump said.
    ‘A door right there in the wall!’ the footman repeated, blasting himself up and down.
    ‘Say,’ said Bufo to the footman. ‘Run down to Glimby and give a message to the mayor, will you?’
    ‘Well.’ The footman hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose that’s my job.’
    ‘There’s a fiver in it for you,’ Bufo added.
    ‘Aye aye, sir! I won’t be gone an hour. If I am, you know where I’ll be.’
    ‘Aye,’ Gump murmured under his breath, ‘at the Twisted Pelican.’
    Jonathan watched over Bufo’s shoulder as the linkman wrote a note to the mayor on paper he found in the Squire’s library table. ‘Hark!’ he wrote, ‘the ants go marching dooby-doo.’ And he signed it. ‘A friend.’
    ‘What in the world does that mean?’ Jonathan asked.
    ‘Nothing,’ Bufo answered. ‘Just having him on a bit. Little lark. Do the mayor some good – keep him on his toes.’
    The footman disappeared with the note, mounting a horse and riding off down the road in the direction of Glimby Village.
    ‘It strikes me that there’s something about all this business that I don’t follow,’ Jonathan said.
    ‘What’s that?’ Miles asked.
    ‘All of it. All I know is what I heard from Escargot, that this globe somehow lets a person fly around the world. It didn’t make much sense to me then, and it still doesn’t.’
    ‘Well,’ Miles said, ‘that’s putting it pretty slack. I’d be surprised if that was all Escargot knew about the globe. There seems to be nothing Escargot hasn’t dabbled in – especially when it comes to the seven Elfin Marvels. Do you know how the Squire came by the globe?’
    ‘He found it in the Tower, in the pantry actually.’
    ‘Where was Escargot?’ Miles asked.
    ‘He was there. He didn’t take much interest in the thing – just let the Squire have it.’
    ‘I was baffled by that very thing,’ the Professor put in. ‘I would have bet the
Tomes of Limpus
that it was the globe Escargot was after when he agreed so readily to journey upriver with us. And then he just let the Squire have it. Didn’t blink an eye.’
    ‘Perhaps Escargot has his code,’ Jonathan guessed. ‘He’d steal from Selznak, but he wouldn’t steal from the Squire. I think you’re selling him short.’
    ‘You’re all