toward the gaping, sword-rimmed pit. Conundrum made a grab to try to save it, but got a jab in the meaty part of his thumb for his efforts, and nearly lost his balance. Razmous caught him by the collar to steady him, then went back to sucking his own throbbing, stinging fingers. They heard a sharp double cry, followed by a small, muffled thud.
They looked down at the small door, which still stood open, spilling out a small trapezoid of yellow light. Razmous knelt and peered into it.
“Do you think…?” Conundrum asked.
Nodding, Razmous said, “Doctor Bothy is much too fat to make this squeeze. So we’ll have to find another way out, once we rescue them.”
Chapter
13
Several dozen small stinging flies buzzed round Doctor Bothy’s head, laughing at him with their tiny, buzzing voices. He blinked awake, squinting into a bright light. After a few moments he realized that the light was only a candle, but it was blinding compared to the darkness of the previous hour.
However, the candle was quite plainly hanging upside down from the ceiling, its flame pointed straight at the ground in blatant defiance of every law of nature. He blinked again, trying to shake the hair out of his face, then he remembered he was bald. The hair was his beard. With that realization, the full horror of his situation rushed at him like a starved gully dwarf, yellow teeth flashing.
It was he who was upside down, bound with hundreds of blackberry vines and dangling by a rope looped over a particularly thick tree root in the ceiling. Dancing round him in the air were several dozen small, naked, fantastically-painted and gossamer-winged beings that seemed right out of a child’s picture album, except that many wore hideous masks carved out of acorn caps and the half-shells of walnuts and pecans. Others brandished tiny, needle-tipped spears from which depended a variety of shrew skulls, hummingbird feathers, dusty gray mouse scalps, and other diminutive-yet-no-less-horrific trophies. Every once in a while, one of the fierce little creatures would fly closer and prod him with the butt of its spear, an action which reminded him all too vividly of a cook testing the doneness of his roast. He glanced up-no, he reminded himself, down-and to his relief saw not a cooking fire smoldering beneath him, but a single yellow candle affixed to the floor in its own pool of hardened wax.
Then again, maybe these tiny creatures were used to cooking their meals over the flame of a candle, he thought with a shudder. He wondered how long it would take him to cook by candle.
“Stop that!” someone shouted.
Doctor Bothy craned his head round and discovered that Sir Grumdish hung nearby, similarly trussed and dangling over a single green candle. He angrily spat his beard from his mouth. This seemed to amuse the creatures to no end. They buzzed merrily around the small, stuffy underground chamber, squeaking, “Monkey talk! Monkey talk! Listen monkey talk!”
“I am not a monkey!” Sir Grumdish spat. Every time he opened his mouth, his beard fell into it.
One of the creatures swooped close and hovered a few inches from the tip of Sir Grumdish’s nose, its wings a blur. It gathered up a fistful of the gnome’s white beard. “Hair… face… monkey!” it cried with glee, then gave Sir Grumdish’s beard a sharp tug. Sir Grumdish bellowed in pain and tried to twist his head away, which only set him to swinging in crazy circles.
“Why are you doing this?” Doctor Bothy asked.
“This is your fault, Bothy!” Sir Grumdish howled. “I hold you to be responsible. I should have let you eat that whole cottage.”
“Please be quiet, Grumdish!” the doctor shouted. “I am trying to establish polite communication.”
“How do you propose to accomplish this miracle?” Sir Grumdish mocked.
The tiny creatures now concentrated on the doctor, buzzing all around his head. They took turns thwacking him on the thighs and belly with their small spear-staves, giggling uproariously at the way the blows rippled across the expanse of his dangling portliness, like waves in a pond. “Cry fat monkey! Fat monkey cry!”
“This is intolerable!” the doctor wailed.
Suddenly, the tiny creatures let off and flew away to the corners of the chamber to hide amongst the roots dangling from the roof or sprouting from the walls. Doctor Bothy tried to turn his head to see what had startled them. Grumdish slowly twirled at the end of his entangling vines, first one way, then the other.
The only thing unusual they saw was a small door in the center of one wall. It was set into an arched frame of rough unmorticed stones. Through the cracks in this door, they noticed a bright white light shining, but a shadow came before it, walking with a slow, purposeful gait toward the door. They also noticed a peculiar scrape-thumping noise, repeated at regular intervals, like a shutter tossed against the side of a house in a storm. As the shadow behind the door grew larger, the odd noise grew louder, until it seemed to be just outside the room. Then, ominously, it stopped. A nervous titter rippled through the room’s occupants, gnomish and otherwise.
The door creaked open, spilling the light brightly across the floor. A cold gust of wind snuffed out the two candles, casting the chamber into startling contrasts of light and shadow. The roots hanging down from the roof took on a horrific aspect, as though they might writhe suddenly to life and reach out to grip and choke the helpless gnomes. The two gnomes cried out in terror, their eyes starting from their heads at the thing that lurked in the open doorway.
Its shadow stretched across the length of the floor and loomed up the further wall. Most like a bear it seemed, standing on its hind legs, but it had a tiny head sunk down between its shoulders, and no neck at all. What was more, it had only one leg. The other was a wooden peg.
As it entered the chamber stump-clumping on its wooden leg, it seemed to diminish in size, if not fearsomeness. They perceived that it was not a bear but a largish badger, but this failed to bring them much comfort, for what difference is it whether a bear or a badger enters your room stumping along on a wooden peg? It seemed to walk with something of a swagger, exaggerated by its false leg, and it carried a small, twisted twig or stick tucked military-fashion under one arm-or foreleg-like a riding crop. It was from the nether tip of this curious wand that the brilliant white light emanated.
The badger strode a few paces into the chamber before stopping and gazing up with hate-filled eyes at the two dangling gnomes. The door, seemingly of its own accord, swung shut and thudded in its frame. The badger then flipped the stick-which was a wand-out from under its arm and stood it on the floor before him, like a staff of office, his small, clawed fists gripping it fiercely. The glow at its tip softened and dimmed until it was no brighter than the flame of a single candle.
“Who are these miserable creatures?” the badger snarled.
“My name is Doctor Bothy,” the doctor gasped after he had got over his astonishment. “And this is Sir Grumdish, a knight of renown.”
The badger thumped his staff/wand on the ground three times, which had the effect of starting a spume of sparks from its glowing end. The sparks fell about him like a shower, and where they settled, they seemed to cling together in a discernible shape or pattern. In moments, they had formed a large chair or throne, which continued to glow and throb with its own light. The badger eased his furry bulk into this amazing piece of furniture.
“Say, you wouldn’t mind lending me your wand, once this is cleared up and we are released?” Bothy said. “I know some folks who’d like to study it for a day or so.”
The badger shouted, “Silence!”
His small but powerful voice tolled like a bell, resounding through the small underground chamber, and Doctor Bothy found that his tongue was suddenly stuck to the roof of his mouth, as though he had been eating hot marshmallows.
“What did we do to deserve this?” Sir Grumdish asked angrily.
“You did criminally bury your nasty haggis in my forest,” the badger said.
“Your forest?”
“
