Land of Dreams Read online

  After supper Skeezix went out through the window again. He’d catch it from Miss Flees in the morning. She’d keep an eye on his room for sure that night. But so what? What would she do to him, put him on half rations? He could live with Dr Jensen, couldn’t he? Except that would mean abandoning Helen to Miss Flees and Peebles, and he couldn’t do that. She was like his sister. He wasn’t half a block up the hill to Willoughby’s farm when Helen caught up with him.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked. But she knew the answer well enough; there was nothing beyond Willoughby’s farm but redwood groves and meadows choked in berry vines and skunk cabbage.

  ‘Only up to Jack’s.’

  ‘Then where?’

  Skeezix shrugged. He wasn’t certain he wanted a girl along on such a night – not with the storm threatening to break loose again and the sky full of bats and clouds and wind. ‘Just hanging out.’

  ‘You lie as badly as Peebles. You and Jack are up to something. What is it? I’m going to help.’ She pulled her coat around her more tightly and turned the collar up against die wind, which was blowing almost straight onshore and was heavy with misty sea salt.

  Actually, Skeezix was happy enough to have her along. He muttered something about girls out on a night like this, but Helen gave him a look and he shut up about it, grinning at her as if he’d said it just to provoke her, which, of course, was why he had said it. Higher up the hill, the wind blew along in ‘ gusts, kicking up newly fallen leaves as if it meant to sail them into the next county. But the leaves were heavy from days of rain, and they fell almost at once back onto the road and lay there dark and wet and glistening with moonlight. Creeks and rills flowed with muddy water. They’d continue to flow straight through until summer, all of them dropping finally into the Eel River, which, any day now if the rain kept up, would overflow its banks and flood the orchards and farmhouses in the lowlands along the coast. The Eel fanned out into little sandy islets and then disappeared into the ocean above Table Bluffs Beach, some miles up the Coast Road from the cove where Skeezix had found the shoe and where the enormous spectacles had washed up.

  Wild fuchsia bloomed in the shadows of hemlocks and alders along the road, but the startling purple and pink of the blossoms was washed colourless in the shadow. The mossy forest floor was like a saturated sponge, so Skeezix and Helen kept to the road, counting on the leafy carpet that lay upon it to keep mud off their shoes. All was silent but for the occasional patter of rain flurries and the moaning of wind in the top of the forest, and once, when the wind fell off and there was nothing in the air but the drip, drip, drip of water falling from tree branches, they could hear, distant and muted, the crash of breakers collapsing along the shore of the cove behind and below them. There wouldn’t be another high tide until almost morning. The shoe would be safe at least until then – plenty of time, it seemed to Skeezix, for the three of them to haul it away on a cart.

  He didn’t tell Helen about the shoe. She could hear about it when he told Jack. She tried to get it out of him, and that made him happy. Then she quit trying to get it out of him, and that made him happier yet, because he knew she was just pretending to be indifferent. So he shrugged and started talking about whether or not butterflies flew in the rain and, if they did, whether the dust that covered their wings would shed rainwater so they wouldn’t get saturated like wet leaves and end up as a part of the carpet on the roadway. Dr Jensen, he said, once owned a butterfly as big as an albatross that had beautiful aqua-blue wings with silver spots like raindrops in sunshine. Its body, though, was still the body of a bug – and a monstrous bug at that – and you couldn’t stand to look at it, not if you wanted to sleep that night.

  The story was a lie and Helen knew it. Dr Jensen had heard of such a creature – almost everyone had. He’d travelled by rail up to Lilyfield where it had been netted by a butterfly collector, a man named Kettering, with whom Dr Jensen had gone to school. Where it had come from neither of them could say, from some distant land, perhaps, on a wind out of the east. Mr Kettering’s cats got in through an open window one night and shredded the creature’s wings until it resembled a tired kite that had hung through the autumn in the branches of a tree. It wasn’t worth much to anyone after that. All that was left of it, really, was the bug part. Even a scientist like Kettering was repelled by such an enormity.

  Helen told Skeezix that he was a fool; Dr Jensen had never owned the butterfly and everyone knew it. In fact, most people wondered if the whole story weren’t a lie. There was an awful lot about Dr Jensen that people wondered about, and that was why almost no one, except people who hadn’t any money, went to Dr Jensen when they were sick or hurt. He could set a bone as well as the next doctor, of course, but he’d set it in an office that looked like a museum – an office full of bins of dried tide-pool animals and moths and beetles and the skins of snakes. And he had the jawbone of a skull on his mantel – a skull that he’d fairly clearly dummied up out of plaster of Paris and dirt, for the thing was the size of a barrel hoop smashed in half and had teeth in it like ivory playing cards. There was a certain amount of suspicion in the village that Dr Jensen’s interest in the enormous spectacles was feigned, and some went so far as to suggest that he’d had the glasses built on one of his trips south and had tossed them into the tide pool himself and then arranged to have them found. Why he would have done such a thing they didn’t know. He was a lunatic, some said, and that was reason enough.

  Skeezix waved his hand at Helen, who had got to him by talking that way about Dr Jensen. He’d been teasing her by avoiding the subject of the night’s mystery, and now she’d got back at him. The doctor had to have the bins full of odd stuff, Skeezix said, in order to sell it down south to the biological supply houses in San Francisco and Monterey, because there wasn’t enough money in doctoring to make it pay – not on the north coast, there wasn’t. Helen said if he cleared the stuff out of his house maybe he’d get a little bit of business from people who didn’t want to hobnob with salamanders and toads when they were getting their tonsils yanked out, and then Skeezix said she didn’t understand anything at all, and after that he wouldn’t talk. They were at Jack’s by then anyway, so Helen gouged him in the side and slugged him on the arm in order to show him she was just kidding. Of course she understood everything. Peebles wouldn’t have – that was certain. But Helen had the right instincts, as had Jack, and Skeezix knew that, and Helen knew that he knew. She’d proven, though, that she could irritate him as easily as he could irritate her, and so things had ended well.

  Jack Portland lived on Willoughby’s farm. No one else lived there except old Willoughby, who had been a friend of Jack’s father – no one else unless you counted the cows and the cats. Skeezix and Helen threw rocks at the shutters high up in the barn loft, and Skeezix called Jack’s name in a sort of shouted whisper. There wasn’t any real reason to be sneaking about like that, since farmer Willoughby would be snoring beside his pint glass by then anyway and wouldn’t care about them even if he weren’t. But the night was dark and windy and full of portent, and Skeezix was anxious that everything be done right.

  After a half dozen rocks the shutters opened and Jack looked out. They could see that a candle burned on the table beside him, and the dark cylinder of his telescope formed a long dancing shadow across his face and the open shutter opposite. He had a book in his hand, and when he saw who it was on the meadow below, he waved the book at them and then disappeared back inside – gone after his sweater and jacket, perhaps.

  In a moment he stood in the window again, hooking the iron hangers of his rope ladder over the windowsill. The tails of the ladder flopped to the ground, and Jack clambered down like a sailor down rigging. In a moment he was on the meadow. He hauled back on the end of the ladder, gave it a wavy sort of toss, and the hooks hopped off the windowsill. The entire ladder dropped onto the grass. Jack rolled it up and then ran around and tossed it in through the barn door, padlocking the big hasp afterwards. Skeezix liked the idea of
Jack’s coming out by the window even though there was a door at hand. And he liked the idea of reading by candlelight. Jack could as easily have used a lantern, of course, but it wouldn’t have been the same. One did things right, thought Skeezix, or one might as well just go to bed. There wasn’t much to be said for common sense – or for anything common, for that matter.

  Skeezix had been right about old Willoughby, who, Jack insisted, wouldn’t be likely to waken until morning and so wouldn’t miss his wagon. In ten minutes they were rattling away down the road, the three of them wedged in together on the plank seat, bound for the cove through the dark and silent night. The sky by then was full of stars, veiled by ragged clouds, like tattered curtains fluttering through the open window of a room inhabited by fireflies.

  2

  THERE WAS ENOUGH MOON to see by, but not to see well. Peebles could make out the dim shapes of cypress trees, bent and contorted like hunched creatures that might easily have crept out of the freshly opened grave before him – the grave he’d dug open by himself, blistering his hands until they bled. The trees bordered the cemetery where it crawled up into the hills, the farthest graves having disappeared long ago under a tangle of berry vines and lemon leaf, their tilted stones lost beneath moss and lichen. There was enough silver moonlight to throw shadows along the ground. The moon hung just above the horizon, and the shadows of more recently set gravestones stretched across the grass in stark black rectangles, making it seem to the boy, when he turned his head just so, that every grave was an open grave and every grave was empty.

  He licked his hand, vaguely enjoying the coppery taste of blood but feeling as if he were part of a nightmare, the sort of nightmare in which you dare not move for fear you might jostle things, perhaps, and be noticed by something you’d rather not be noticed by. But the wind cutting down out of the mountains to the east, slicing across the back of his neck and freezing his fingers, hadn’t at all a nightmare quality to it. You can’t feel the wind in a nightmare, but you could feel this wind; and he wouldn’t wake up in his bed and be able to turn over and see something else when he closed his eyes. There was a thrill in this, though – in the hovering death and darkness.

  He looked uneasily at the cypress trees. He could imagine something menacing in twisted limbs or bent stumps and in the creak of tree branches on the night wind. He couldn’t keep his eyes entirely away, either. They wandered, ever so little. He’d see things out of the corners of his eyes – things that shouldn’t be –and sometimes he had to glance at them straight on, just to know for sure. Here was a jumble of berry vines, almost luminous in the moonlight, that shifted in the wind like some loathsome thing from the deep woods put together out of leaves and sticks, creeping sideways inch by inch onto the open graveyard and sighing in the wind as if it mourned something dead.

  What he feared most was what they’d find in the coffin. The body had been buried for nearly twelve years. He’d heard that the hair of a corpse continues to grow even after the bones are dry and brittle and old. Now and then, when the Eel River rose in flood, it washed open hillside graves, and the skeletons that tumbled out into the muddy current to go clacking away to sea had hair that wisped around the bones of their shoulders and in which was tangled the trinkets they were buried with.

  There was a curse right then and the sound of a spade ringing against iron coffin handles and then scuffing off across pine boards. The man standing waist deep in the grave before him wore a black topcoat with cuffed sleeves. His hair fell dark and oily around his shoulders. Judging from the grey pallor of his bearded face, he might have been dead himself for a week and then dug up and animated.

  The boy, who leaned on a shovel above and half hid his eyes and who was stricken with terror now that the coffin had at last been unearthed, was even more frightened of the man in the grave, whom he despised. Unlike the moon shadows round about them and the sighing of things on the wind, he was a flesh-and-blood horror. Though he was weak, as if he were starving and tired and ill, his eyes were dark and deadly. But he had offered Peebles something – hadn’t he –that would make it worth the terror and more.

  The man cursed again and then hissed something through his teeth.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I said, give me the bar. Are you deaf?’

  Peebles said nothing but picked up an iron crowbar that lay in the damp grass and handed it to the man, who looked back fiercely, as if he’d just as soon kill the boy right there and have done with him. The man bent back to his work, levering the crowbar under the coffin lid. There was the squeak of rusty nails pried loose and the scratch and scrape of the iron bar when the rotted wood of the lid snapped and broke away. The man cursed again and slammed the curved end of the crowbar into the lid smashing and smashing it until the night rang with the blows and the man gasped for breath and there was nothing left of the coffin lid but splintered fragments still fixed by long casing nails to the edge grain of the coffin’s side.

  Peebles looked away as a cloud shaded the moon. The trees above him faded into blackness and the shadows of gravestones slowly disappeared. A drop of rain plinked down onto his hand, which grasped the shovel so hard that it shook. Another drop fell, and then another. In an hour the gravel road out of the cemetery would be a muddy rill that would bog the wheels of their cart in mire, and he’d find himself trudging the two miles home in a downpour. He pushed his glasses up onto his nose, shaded his forehead in an effort to keep the glasses dry, and looked back at the black-coated man, who stood beside the grave now, scowling and grinning in turn, as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be insanely happy or insanely angry.

  Peebles peered into the grave, imagining the gumless teeth, the empty sockets, the wisps of greyed hair, the dusty and worm-eaten clothing slumped across the xylophone curve of rib cage. It was a horrifying thought, to be sure, but it was fascinating too. Something in him loved the idea of death and decay. He’d found a book once on a high shelf in the village bookshop, and in it were sketches of instruments of torture and of dead men hanging from gibbets. He’d torn the pictures out and kept them, fearful they’d be found and hating the people who might find them because it was their fault – wasn’t it? – that he had to live in fear of being discovered. Those were just pictures, though, and what lay in the grave, dead these long years, wouldn’t be a picture.

  He bent closer, relishing the anticipated shock of horror. What he saw was a disappointment. The skeleton lay buried beneath scattered debris. And it hadn’t any webby, overgrown hair. The flesh had returned to dust, and even the bone seemed to be crumbling, so that the skeleton lay in mouldering pieces, like an instructive illustration from an archaeology textbook.

  What lay in the coffin was simply too thoroughly dead to be frightening. There was no rotted flesh, no grinning zombie, just the slowly vanishing remains of a man long dead and forgotten, lying beneath a heap of books and glassware as if beneath the earthquake-tumbled contents of a room set up for alchemical study. There were broken sheets of tinted isinglass and a half-dozen conical beakers. There were fragments of rolled copper and a length of glass tubing shoved in among the rest like a spear. There was a crockery jar big enough to hold a severed head, and in it was the cracked bust of a fierce-looking bearded man, whose jaw and left ear had been broken away. Scattered throughout were long-necked, unlabelled wine bottles.

  The man in the topcoat crouched at the edge of the grave, silent now and stroking his chin. Peebles edged closer, gaping at the lumber in the cracked coffin and tugging his coat closer around his shoulders to keep out the rain. The moon appeared again like a lamp suddenly unveiled, and moonlight shone for a moment off the curved glass of a heavy, almost opaque bottle that was still half full of some dark liquid. The man leaned in and plucked out a book that seemed to have been bent by dampness. The pages were glued together, and the outside cover pulled away from the spine, as if worms, having reduced the corpse to a papery hulk, had gone to work on the leather binding. On the first page of the book
, scrawled across the top in black ink, was the inscription To Lars Portland, from Jensen and then the month and day of a year twenty-five years past.

  The book tumbled out of the pale hands and fell into the grave, sliding down the dirt incline and jolting to a stop against the half-filled bottle. ‘What are you gaping at!’ cried the man, turning toward the face of the boy, who read over his shoulder. Peebles stumbled back, catching his heel on the spade that he still held, falling over backward onto the wet grass. The man laughed low in his throat and shook his head; then he reached again into the grave, hauled out the bottle, sniffed at it, and threw it end over end into the night.

  He plucked out the skull next and peered, at it intently, thumping his finger against the top of the thing’s cranium. The brittle bone splintered under his nail, as if it were a termite-eaten husk of wood. He took it between his two hands and shredded it, letting the brittle teeth clatter down into the grave, and then he threw the fragments in after it. ‘Dead a thousand years,’ he muttered, and then he shook, as if from a chill.

  The cemetery was lit just then by lightning through clouds, and with the boom of thunder that followed came a sudden downpour. The man arose without a word and slouched tiredly around the grass, tramping on graves with his boots and pulling his hat over his forehead. The boy watched for a moment, then sprang up and grappled with the shovels and crowbar and with a heavy pick, dragging the lot of them along in the man’s wake until he caught up. The man struck him in the face with the back of his hand, tore the muddy tools out of his hands, and flung them away. Then, looking at the cowering boy, he said, ‘What do we want with stolen tools?’ as if his explanation would justify his hard treatment, and he helped the boy roughly into the cart before climbing in himself and taking up the reins. They clattered away toward the Coast Road, a peal of wild laughter howling away behind them on the wind; then the sound of a racking cough followed the laughter, with a string of curses to bind it all together. The graveyard, in moments, lay empty and dark beneath the cloud-veiled moon, and the rain beat down onto the moss and grasses and pooled up until it ran in little rivulets down the hill toward the sea, some of it edging into the mouth of the freshly opened grave and pouring over onto the strange litter of glass and books and bones and alchemical debris like a rising tide of seawater submerging the curious inhabitants of a long-evaporated tide pool.