Land of Dreams Page 5

  Only a handful of men worked to assemble the carnival rides, gaunt, pale, wretched-looking men in rumpled, ragged clothes, none of them talking. Two of them knocked together the framework of a wooden arch that spanned the dirt road from the beach, curving down into the weeds and ending there, as if it were a disattached gateway.

  Jack saw MacWilt suddenly, talking to a man he didn’t recognise. The stranger’s back was toward him. He had long, black hair that hung round his shoulders, and the skin of his hands was peculiarly sallow, the white of a fish too long out of water. He wore scuffed boots caked with mud, and he wore a black top coat, which, along with his black hair, gave him the appearance of a great black bird.

  The man turned to scowl at Jack, as if he’d expected him but didn’t half like it that he’d come. The scowl was replaced for a fragment of a second by a look half of recognition and half of surprise, as if he’d been caught out. Then once again there was a scowl, and a malicious scowl at that. Jack nodded and walked past, noting the long bullet scar on the man’s cheek. He kept his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground, as if he were just strolling toward Table Bluffs Beach and had passed the carnival out of necessity, because it was in the way. But he could feel the man’s eyes against his back as he made his way toward the beach trail. Somehow Jack knew that the man was Dr Brown, of the poster. And he knew that he didn’t at all like him.

  Jack stepped around the wooden sheds painted with grinning clowns and gaudy whirling acrobats and impossible, shadowy freaks. The paintings had been wonderful, in their time. But their time had passed many years since, and now they were so faded by rainwater and sunlight that they were just the tired ghosts of paintings. There was an enclosed wagon with a canvas flap for a door. Above the flap were the words Alligator Child, painted long enough ago so that whatever sort of freak lived within couldn’t very likely be a child any more. And beyond the wagon, lying in a heap on the meadow grass, were a half dozen skeletons, dirty ivory in the shadowy daylight, their bones wired together with silver thread.

  The crossbraces and gears and rails stacked round about were rusted and ancient. They’d been painted in the distant past too, but the paint had flaked off, so that what had once been the depiction of a bicycle-riding clown in a pointed hat and ruff collar was now nothing more than a severed head drifting above a nearly spokeless wheel, half the head peeling away in a sheet of dirty blue and pink. Partly built amid the heaps of machinery sat a contrivance that seemed half beehive oven and half steam engine. A calliope lay on its side a few yards off, and between the oven and the calliope, cordwood was stacked shoulder high beside a heap of coal.

  All talk had stopped as he passed, as if they’d been uttering things that weren’t for the ears of an outsider. He found himself scrambling down the beach trail and out onto the sand, with no earthly reason for being there but mightily relieved that he was. The tide was low. He could pick his way around the cliffs by skirting tide pools and clambering over normally submerged reefs until he got to the cove. The only alternative was to hike back up the trail and stroll once again through the midst of the carnival –something he wasn’t inclined to do. He’d wait until it was more of a piece, and he’d take his friends with him.

  Jack didn’t find Skeezix on the beach. He found Dr Jensen on the bluffs with his spyglass and a little leatherbound notebook in which he was keeping count of the crabs. He explained that his counting wasn’t worth as much as it ought to be; numberless crabs had no doubt crept past in the night, and earlier that morning Skeezix had been counting but had boggled it a half dozen times, had started over and then over again, and finally had estimated by multiplying numbers that Dr Jensen hadn’t yet fathomed.

  What did it matter, after all? Jack asked. Dr Jensen shrugged. Maybe it didn’t. When you thought about it, nothing much mattered – did it? – beyond a sandwich and a plate to eat it on. And even the plate wasn’t worth much. Clerks spent their days chasing down numbers and writing them into columns and adding them up and, as often as not, growing agitated at what they found. Well, Dr Jensen chased down numbers too, and his numbers were as good as theirs, better maybe. There hadn’t been a migration of hermit crabs in twelve years. Another opportunity wouldn’t come for twelve more. Dr Jensen was going to make the most of this one, just in case he could make it pay. He’d missed part of the last one, and he’d regretted it since.

  Jack sat on the bluffs for a time, watching the sky out over the ocean. The stars had faded, but the sky was, still a deep evening blue, and the sea, calmer now than it had been last night, was bottle green and rolling beneath an oily ground swell. It looked for a moment as if the sky were flat, like the Surface of the sea, and was a thing of substance, hovering in the air miles overhead. Then, although nothing identifiable had changed, the sky seemed prodigiously deep, as if he were peering into the clearest sort of ocean water and it was only distance that obscured his vision. He had the uncanny feeling that something was hidden from him in the depths of the sea and sky – something pending, something waiting.

  Dr Jensen said he felt that way too, especially at the time of the Twelve-year Solstice. Why they called it a ‘Solstice,’ he couldn’t say, since it seemed to have little to do with the sun. He’d seen two of them since he’d moved to the north coast to open his practice. Each time there’d been the arrival of a carnival – the same carnival, for all he knew. There’d been ceremonies and a festival and a few people had floated baskets of bread and autumnal fruit out onto the ocean and into the longshore current. Fishermen took a holiday, either because they deserved a holiday or because they caught things in their nets during the Solstice that they’d rather not catch.

  The few boats out on the water this morning were newcomers. It was doubtful that villagers would buy their fish even if the fishermen caught something they had the stomach to keep. It was more likely that they’d catch other sorts of oceanic flotsam – things that had been swept out of the east by deepwater tides and had been under the sea so long they’d become hoary with seaweed and worms. Twelve years ago the taxidermist’s son had gone mad after eating Solstice fish, and for days had spoken in the voices of long-dead townspeople. In the moonlight it had seemed as if the boy looked like the corpses of the people whose voices he mimicked, and the taxidermist, whose business never amounted to much in the first place, had put away his glass eyes and stuffing and had set up as a spiritualist in one of the carnival tents.

  But he failed as a spiritualist too, although for the first few hours it seemed as if he’d finally made his fortune. Dead men clamoured to be heard, but it turned out they hadn’t anything more interesting to say when they were dead than when they’d been alive. The entranced son gibbered out a steady monologue of tiresome complaints until he was possessed finally by old man Pinkerd, who’d been struck and killed six years earlier by a wagon driven by a drunken stranger from Moonvale. He wanted the stranger brought to justice, he said. He couldn’t abide any more delay.

  Through the mouth of the boy the old dead man had mumbled about lawsuits but had obviously got the idea confused with the sort of suit you wore, which made it seem to everyone that death turned a man into an idiot. To make the complaint even more foolish, the wagon driver from Moonvale had himself been killed by lightning a week after he’d run over Mr Pinkerd, and so all talk of lawsuits was foolishness. There was speculation about why old man Pinkerd, being dead himself, hadn’t heard about the lightning strike, hadn’t had a chance to confront the stranger from Moonvale himself, beyond the pale, as it were. It was generally agreed upon, by the villagers who were listening to the taxidermist’s son, that it was simply more evidence that dead men didn’t know half as much as they were generally given credit for and were the same sorts of pains in the neck dead that they were alive. There was the same sort of general relief among the audience, in fact, when old man Pinkerd finally ended his ghostly harangue and the taxidermist’s son fell asleep in his chair, as when the old man died six years earlier.

  The
taxidermist’s son had awakened a half hour later to a diminished audience, but by then there were so many ghosts trying to talk at once, and none of them in the mood for answering questions, that the boy had seemed suddenly to go insane and burbled his way up into a rising shriek that ended when the chair he sat in collapsed over backward and he had to be helped to bed.

  Dr Jensen said he’d never seen anything like it before. It was entirely possible that the whole thing had been a hoax. It seemed possible, if you thought about it, that all the strange business of the Solstice was a fake – a matter of suggestion. People expected the dead to speak, and so they heard cryptic messages uttered in the chirping of crickets and the croaking of toads. They accepted without question the arrival of the two-headed dog, which was found dead in the street outside the tavern. Had it appeared six months earlier, heads would have nodded and eyes would have squinted, and it would have been murmured that it wasn’t a two-headed dog at all but a clever fake, got up by the taxidermist in league with MacWilt. During the Solstice, said Dr Jensen, people were ready to believe anything.

  The more Jack thought about it, the more he was willing to admit to this last part. He, at least, was in a mood to believe anything. And maybe being in such a mood made commonplace things seem extraordinary. Maybe. The train last night, though: that had been anything but commonplace. The tracks were half wrecked yesterday afternoon. Ties had slid down onto the beach. The iron was etched with rust and twisted by moving earth. They were half wrecked again this morning. You could see them lying crooked in the sun from where the two sat on the bluffs. And yet at midnight a train, pouring steam, had flown atop them, out of the rainy night.

  ‘Did you hear a train whistle last night?’ Jack asked idly, peering through Jensen’s spyglass at a hulking crab that was just then tramping up out of the sea.

  Dr Jensen was silent for a moment. Then he admitted that he had. That was another of the Solstice phenomena – the arrival of the train, but always so late at night that no one actually saw it. Some said that the carnival was the train, for there was no evidence that the train ever got beyond Moonvale, and there was nowhere between Rio Dell and Moonvale for the train to turn around. It couldn’t, then, come and go in the night.

  Once, years ago, when Dr Jensen and Kettering were students in the university, they’d paid a visit to an old man whom Kettering had met in a Chinatown bar. He was a curious and indefinably malignant old man named Wo Ling, and he claimed to be prodigiously old. It hadn’t sounded like a lie. Kettering had agreed to supply him with laboratory animals, mostly lambs and chickens, although what he wanted the beasts for he wouldn’t say. Jensen hadn’t liked the idea much, but then the idea wasn’t his anyway; it was Kettering’s, and Kettering didn’t ask questions .

  The old man had been an engineer in his day – had piloted trains, as he put it, unimaginable trains. But he was tired of it. He lived on the waterfront in a half-abandoned warehouse that he shared with bats and owls and crows. The front rooms were scattered with rusted machinery, the decayed remains of a dismantled carnival that had been stored there years past and left to rust in the ocean air.

  A section of roof had caved in and windows were broken and hanging. Blackberry vines and creepers supported tilting walls that were little more than papery termite-eaten husks, and when the wind blew it whistled up through the termite tracks and sounded like the hollow music of a bamboo flute. The man was an alchemist, and he was dying. From the look of him he might already have been dead a dozen times over and brought back to life by some revivifying drug.

  They’d wandered through the interior of the ruined warehouse, out into a broad empty room that fronted the harbour and was built on pilings. A train trestle ran along beside it, the cold tide, swirling below and rocky islands floating on the bay, visible through dusty window glass. Fog seemed to have blown in through broken panes and through the ruined roof, for the room was misty with ocean air and the smell of tar and salt spray and drying kelp. There was the sound on the breeze of distant train whistles, although neither Jensen nor Kettering could swear that it wasn’t just wind through the termite caves.

  The fog swirling in the room had drifted toward the veiled ceiling to dissipate like steam, and the entire time they stood there, listening and waiting, the ground swell in the bay sighed through the pilings, clattering stones and seashells along the rocky shingle. The combination of steamy fog and ghostly whistling and the perpetual rush and clatter of the ocean filled the air with the uncanny atmosphere of a train depot. Then, although it might have been his imagination, it seemed as if the warehouse were nothing but an enormous museum of steam machines, of locomotives and calliopes and engines, and that the entire structure shook and clattered where it stood, as if through some sort of enchanted metamorphosis it was turning into the very curiosities it housed.

  Then the wind had fallen off and the sea calmed and the fog cleared, and once again they stood in an abandoned, decayed warehouse. It was imagination after all. And yet later that week, curiously, when the two had passed along the waterfront in a coach, they couldn’t see the warehouse at all, although the train trestle still stood there, its pilings sunk into the mud of the bay and covered below the tide line with mussels and barnacles and starfish.

  Kettering was foolish enough to think that the warehouse had been the train, in some curious way, and the carnival too–that it was all one. But then Kettering always had been a sort of mystic. The old man didn’t return to the city while they were there, although Jensen saw him again twelve years later, during the Solstice in Rio Dell, the year old man Pinkerd came back from the dead. He operated the carnival that year – Wo Ling did – but he said he was giving it up. He was tired of it, he said; there were certain conditions that went along with it that he hadn’t the stomach for any more.

  Dr Jensen’s story didn’t clarify things much, and when Jack told the doctor about the train last night, the doctor shrugged. There you are,’ he said, as if that explained things well enough, and he went back to watching his crabs – the occasional stragglers that were left. He seemed disinclined to talk. Skeezix appeared then, eating a doughnut and wild with excitement. Something had been caught by one of the fishermen, had entangled itself in his net in shallow water. Skeezix wouldn’t say what it was. He shook his head and grinned and puffed up the beach trail behind Jack, both of them hurrying toward the village to see it. Dr Jensen stayed behind, studying the sea through his glass.

  4

  THE VILLAGE SHOPS CLUSTERED along the High Street where it wound up the hill and eventually up to Willoughby’s. There was a grocery and two inns, a barber and a hardware store, MacWilt’s tavern, the open market, a store that sold cast-off furniture and crockery, Potts’s bakery, and the taxidermist’s shop. This last, of course, had been locked up for years and the windows dusted with grime. Streets and alleys ran off at angles, some dead-ending a half block down, some winding up and away into the hills past outlying farms, then turning into logging roads or just petering out into trails that disappeared into orchards and woods.

  The ocean itself pushed in behind the High Street when the tide rose. When it fell again it left mud flats and eelgrass behind, dotted with oyster beds and with mussels clumped along pier pilings and rocks. The ribs of decayed rowing boats thrust up out of the mud. Beside them sat tethered boats, gone aground when the tide fell, waiting for it to rise again. The open market, which was nothing, really, but a dozen pineboard shacks with tin and copper roofs, sat on the broken remains of an old pier that ran out into the mud of the bay. The pier had been longer once, and at the end of it had been what passed for a fashionable restaurant. But that was forty years ago, when Rio Dell had been more prosperous and when the old Flying Wizard still ran the coast route to Moonvale and Sunnybrae and Crescent City. Two thirds of the pier had finally canted over into the soft silt of the bay and twisted itself apart. The restaurant – condemned a year and a half earlier – had smashed to kindling wood. Over the years, it had been piece by
piece carried out with the tide. Fishing boats still docked along what was left of the ruined pier, and the fishermen themselves lived either on their boats or in the shacks of the market.

  It seemed now as if half the town milled about the market. Jack caught sight of Miss Flees skulking along with a net bag full of cabbages, and Skeezix insisted they were severed heads and not cabbages at all. Almost no one was intent on buying anything. It was late in the morning for that sort of thing; most of the greengrocers had hauled their carts home an hour since. People were intent on something else. Jack saw MacWilt’s hat wagging along beside one of the fish shacks, and then he saw the hat sail off, like someone had shoved a firecracker under it. The crowd roundabout the foot of the pier broke into raucous laughter, and people farther back on the edge pushed in to see what the row was about. Skeezix slipped in among them, disappearing from Jack’s view.

  In a moment he heard Skeezix whistle but couldn’t see him. Skeezix whistled again. There he was, on top of the balcony that ran along the side of the Harbour Inn. There was a door leading onto the balcony from the interior of the inn, though it had been nailed shut years earlier when a sleepwalking traveller had strolled out at dawn and pitched over the railing onto the street. You could climb up the copper drainpipe, though, and pull yourself over. In the summer Jack and Skeezix slept up there sometimes, climbing up silently in the darkness and watching the village, waiting for the moon to rise out of the midnight sea, listening to the trill of canaries from the room above the tavern across the street. They’d be chased off if anyone saw them up there during the day, but everyone was too busy making fun of MacWilt. The laughter sounded forced, though; it had an icy, hollow edge to it – as if maybe what they were laughing at hadn’t ought to be laughed at, but, like idle hands occupied with twiddling fingers or twirling hair, laughing gave them something to do with their voices.