Land of Dreams Read online

  The laughter died and was replaced by MacWilt’s cursing. Jack could easily see why. In a wooden tub, sloshing with sea water in front of a fisherman’s shack, swam a finny sort of creature with great popping-out eyes. It looked as if it had been netted deep in an oceanic trench, and that the lessening pressure of its ascent had started to explode it, to pop its eyes out like corks out of a toy gun.

  It flopped there, sucking in great gulps of water through its undulating gills as if there wasn’t enough ocean in the little tub to satisfy it. Along its sides shone scales the size of half dollars, glinting like overlapping rainbows in the sunlight. It had something very much like a neck, odd as it seemed to Jack, and fins that might as easily have been hands. Its tail, though, was the tail of a fish, and it whumped against the bottom of the tub in a steady rhythmic motion, as if it were trying to pound out a coded message. It struggled suddenly, thrashing sideways and flopping up on edge, and then hooked its ventral fins over the side of the tub as if labouring to throw itself into the murky waters of the bay.

  The fisherman who had caught it flipped it back into the tub and told it to stay there. He called it a sport and wondered past a drunken grin whether such a thing had ever before been filleted in the village of Rio Dell. There wasn’t as much laughter, apparently, as he would have liked. A little knot of fishermen standing nearby and smoking pipes shook their heads – not in answer to his question but with the air of washing their hands of the whole dark business. They were old-timers. They hadn’t even taken their boats out that morning. It was better to wait a week or so, until the ocean got back onto an even keel and the strange flotsam stirred up by Solstice storms settled back into the shadows of submarine grottoes and stayed there.

  Jack gouged Skeezix in the side with his elbow and pointed at the crowd. There in the shadows stood Miss Flees, her hair swept back out of her face and clutched with a strip of ribbon. She smiled blankly, as if it were expected of her, and she cocked her head and fluttered her eyelids in rapid little blinks in a sort of parody of flirtatiousness, all the time staring at the thing in the tub. No one spoke to her, although every now and then she turned her head and widened her eyes as if she’d just seen an old friend coming along toward her through the crowd. Once she cast a little trifling wave in the direction of the street, but both Jack and Skeezix could see that there was no one there. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the fish for long, though.

  ‘Did it sing?’ shouted someone from the edge of the crowd.

  ‘Did it sing! You should have heard it!’ The fisherman tipped the creature back into the tub again but jerked his hand back quick, as if he’d been bitten. He grinned weakly and shrugged, sucking on his finger. ‘’Course it sung. I caught him on the junk line, but he wasn’t after the bait. I snagged him, is what I did, when I was reeling it in. He was drifting in towards the harbour on the tide. Thought it was a damned jellyfish at first.’

  ‘It don’t look like a jellyfish to me,’ said Potts, the baker, wiping flour onto his apron.

  ‘That’s because you ain’t a fisherman,’ shouted the man who’d asked about the singing. ‘It would have looked like a jelly roll to you.’ With that he laughed like he was going to collapse, but no one else laughed much at all, which made him mad. He coughed once, then turned to the woman standing next to him and said in a stage whisper, ‘Spitting image of Wilt, ain’t it?’ then burst into laughter again.

  Mac Wilt, who had been eyeing the creature as intently as Miss Flees had, spun round and took a step toward the man, who straightened up with a jerk and squinted at the tavern keeper. ‘You shut up,’ said Mac Wilt, giving him a dark look.

  The man snickered, cast a wink at the woman beside him, and reached out to flip Mac Wilt’s hat off his head again. The hat somersaulted into the air, landing neatly in the tub, to the vast amusement of most of the crowd. The fish thing thrashed beneath the hat, cascading water out onto the pier. ‘Can you beat that!’ cried Mac Wilt’s tormentor. ‘It’s wearing its daddy’s hat!’

  The air seemed suddenly to have a serrated edge to it. No one cared that Mac Wilt was being insulted, and most of the crowd hoped it would come to blows. It felt to Jack as if storm clouds were blowing in and the pressure were dropping. He heard something on the freshening wind, but he couldn’t identify the sound – a sort of tootling, a faraway music, rising and falling in the breeze, muddled up with a distant booming, like waves, perhaps, breaking in the cove. Skeezix started to say something about Miss Flees, but Jack shushed him and told him to listen. He tilted his head. Skeezix seemed to hear it too. A calliope, that’s what it was. Jack clumped along the boards of the balcony towards the street, until he could see round the corner. It was coming from out on the bluffs, from the carnival. He could see a distant slice of meadow between the tavern roof and the chimney of the bakery – the curve of a little grass-covered hill that ran down toward the bluffs and the sea. Edging up above it, turning round and round in cadence with the slow whistling of the steam-driven calliope, was the top arc of the Ferris wheel, its cars empty but moving.

  MacWilt had retrieved his wet hat by the time Jack rejoined Skeezix, who was grinning with delight and pointing at the two glowering men. MacWilt shook a fist in the other man’s face. ‘Don’t you meddle with me! I’m warning you!’

  ‘I won’t meddle with you, I’ll put you in that there tub!’

  ‘You’ll live to regret it, if you try! And you won’t do no more than try.’

  The other man reared back and cast MacWilt a look that was intended to topple him over. ‘I come from down south. If you ever been down there you’d of heard of me. You’d lick my boots if you knew who I was.’

  ‘Who are you?’ shouted a voice from the crowd, and everyone laughed.

  The man turned around and looked, as if he was sorry he couldn’t discover who’d said it and take care of him too.

  MacWilt spat into his hands and rubbed them together. Then he took his wet hat off and punched his fist into the crown, straightening it out. He put the hat back on and said, ‘My advice to you is to go back down south, before you run into a world of trouble. I ain’t a man to be meddled with.’ Then he dusted his hands together, as if he’d taken care of his end of the conversation.

  The other man swelled up and stepped forward a pace, balling up his fist. ‘I’ve chewed up bigger men than you and used them as bait,’ he said. ‘I’ll tear your lungs out, is what I’ll do. Just as quick as that!’ And he snapped his fingers in MacWilt’s face.

  ‘There ain’t nothing I’d like better –’ MacWilt began, but he was interrupted when someone in the crowd reached out and pushed MacWilt’s opponent in the small of the back, catapulting him forward into the tavern keeper.

  ‘Too much talk!’ somebody shouted, and the core of an apple flew out of the shadows and struck the man in the side of the face. MacWilt, seeing his chance when the man turned to curse at whoever had thrown the apple core, hit his opponent in the back of the head. But he overreached himself and toppled forward, clutching at his hat, and the man spun round and swung wildly at the air, a good foot over MacWilt’s head.

  The force of the swing threw him against the fisherman’s shack, knocking the tub sideways and dumping the now quiet creature onto the pier in a cascade of seawater. The fisherman shouted and went groping along after the slippery creature, wary of getting bitten again but fearful he’d lose it into the bay. MacWilt rushed in at the man from down south, who calmly knocked his hat off again with a single blow that he brought down onto MacWilt’s head. Jack could hear the rattle of MacWilt’s teeth as his mouth slammed shut and his chin jammed against his neck.

  In moments both men rolled and struggled on the pier, clutching each other, gouging and hitting. The crowd pressed back to give them room. They rolled back and forth, accomplishing nothing until they heaved up against the fisherman’s shack. The fisherman himself, abandoning the flopping creature from the tub when it slid, finally, off the edge of the pier and was gone, sailed in to pummel
both of them with his fists. ‘Damn it!’ he shouted. ‘You –’ But before he’d got the words half out, the shack canted over and collapsed in a ruin of rotted boards. ‘By God!’ he cried, infuriated now, and he grabbed MacWilt by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt and pitched him into the bay. The other man leaped up cursing, waving his fists in a sort of windmill frenzy and inviting everyone there to step up and take his turn. So the fisherman very calmly and deliberately knocked him down, then dragged him off the edge of the pier too.

  The crowd cheered the fisherman. Then they cheered MacWilt, who hauled himself out of the water, dripping mud and weeds and still, miraculously, holding onto his hat. The fisherman, on his hands and knees, looked over the edge of the pier into the mud below, trying to find his escaped fish – if a fish is what it was. His creature was gone, back into the bay. The other fishermen, looking as if nothing they’d seen was worth remarking on, peered into their pipe bowls and shook their heads.

  Skeezix grinned at Jack. This was just the sort of thing Skeezix liked – bullies beating each other up. The two boys leaned on the railing, both of them animated by excitement and by the unspoken determination to stay on the balcony until they were chased away. The crowd was breaking up. The second man slogged out of the bay and strode away in disgrace when he found that his lady friend had abandoned him. After ten steps or so he turned and stared back at the dispersing crowd as if there was one last thing he intended to say to them, but that it was powerful language and might confound them. Then he made as if to shake his fist, but a roar of laughter at his expense made him think better of it. In ten minutes there was no one on the pier but fishermen, mending nets and coiling junk lines and drinking beer out of tin cups. The fisherman who’d lost his catch had put back out in his dory. Jack could see him hauling on the oars with a passion, disappearing around the little swerve of shore that angled out to form the mouth of the harbour.

  Just then, as the street fell into an early afternoon quiet, Miss Flees hurried out from under the pier, cutting across the mud toward the stand of overgrown pepper trees that had consumed the back yard of the abandoned taxidermist’s shop. Both boys watched, knowing she’d been lurking under the pier this last half hour. She carried a wet burlap sack clutched against her frog-coloured dress, as if whatever was in the sack might make a noise and give her away. And it seemed to Jack for a slice of a moment as if he could hear the twitter of small birds on the air, mingling with the whispered exhalations of the calliope and the screams of wheeling gulls.

  Jack and Skeezix grew tired of sitting on the balcony. They’d watched the street below for a while, but nothing much was going on. The villagers had already had a day’s worth of excitement and had gone back to work. Old Mrs White hung sheets out to dry in the back yard of her house beyond the taxidermist’s, and Skeezix insisted that they were corpse shrouds and would inflate with the night wind, haunting the countryside until morning. They weren’t though. Maybe they’d be more when the moon rose above the mountains at midnight, but at the moment they were only sheets, not worth anything at all in the way of entertainment – even imaginary entertainment. Then Mrs Barlow’s dog ran through one of the sheets and yanked it out of its clothespins, and that was pretty good, though it only lasted a minute. After that there was nothing for a long time. A half hour passed, and they heard MacWilt yell a couple of times. Then he smashed out of the tavern and hung the CLOSED sign on the door. For a moment it seemed that something would come of MacWilt’s raging that would serve to enliven the afternoon, but actually MacWilt rarely did anything but rage, and so his antics were simply tiresome.

  They decided, finally, to stroll up to the orphanage and find Helen, who was sure to be up in the attic painting ‘views’, as she called them. She wouldn’t tolerate interruptions in the morning, but now it was well after noon. Maybe they’d bring her something to eat in order to make the interruption seem worthwhile. They’d make fun of her paintings, of course, although they had admitted to each other any of a number of times that the paintings really were very good. Jack couldn’t get over that Helen could make a brush or a pencil or a piece of charcoal do whatever she wanted it to do. She could make the cheekbones of a face look like cheekbones, with shadows and glints exactly where they ought to be; or, even better, where you wouldn’t have expected them to be, so they’d lend the face a surprising expression, and you couldn’t quite define what it meant or exactly where it came from.

  Jack had tried his hand at it. Helen owned a tablet of enormous sheets of paper, and a wooden box too. It was very intricately built, this box, and full of slivers of charcoal and pastel chalk and tubes of oil paints half squeezed out. There were fifty brushes in it: fat, squat brushes made of sand-coloured hairs; long, tapered brushes, only a couple of strands thick at the ends and suitable, maybe, for painting eyelashes; and any number of conical, fluffy-looking brushes for daubing on skies. The paint box seemed magical to Jack, and the big grainy sheets of paper were full of promise. It seemed it must be true that, like magical amulets, the box and the paper would enchant his hand into cooperating, into painting what it was he saw in his mind.

  So once, with Helen’s encouragement and advice, he painted a tree that looked almost like a tree, especially if you stood across the room and squinted or, better yet, crossed your eyes so that there were two trees run together; then it had what Helen had called an ‘intriguing sense of dimension’. Skeezix suggested that it would be even better if you were blind, so it could have an intriguing sense of anything you wanted. Jack gave up on trees and painted a face, but with the eyes tilted, like a stiff wind had blown them haywire, The nose, to his great despair, turned out to be on sideways, even though it had seemed to him as if he were painting it on straight. Also, there wasn’t enough forehead on the face, which gave it an inexplicably idiotic look, and its ears stood away on either side like Christmas ornaments. Skeezix had been wonderfully happy with it, pointing out tirelessly what it was that made Jack ‘unique’ among artists. There hadn’t been any magic in the box or in the paper. The magic was in Helen.

  Jack and Skeezix wandered along now, kicking stones, taking the long way around. As they drew abreast of the mouth of a skinny little alley – Quartz Lane, it was called -they heard the wild clucking and squawking of a chicken. ‘Dogs,’ Skeezix said, and turned up the alley, meaning, Jack supposed, that dogs were worrying the chicken – something Skeezix wouldn’t stand for. Jack picked up a rock in either hand, and Skeezix picked up a stick, and the two of them trotted around the first bend, past a wooden fence covered with blooming passionflower vines. The alley was full of trash pitched over back fences: old straw ticks, cracked wagon wheels, garden tools that had broken and gone to rust. There was a stuffed chair that housed a nation of bugs and, beside it, a half dozen paint cans tilted on edge and spilling dirty paint that had dried months since.

  It didn’t sound like a dog to Jack. There was no growling, only the frantic clucking of the chicken, cut off, just then, in a screech that made both boys leap down the last few yards of alley and tear aside the tangle of vines from before a sort of little alcove between two tilting fences. There, kneeling amid brown leaves and crumpled newspaper, Peebles hacked away at the now dead chicken with a keyhole saw, pinning the bird to the dirt with his left hand. He jerked around and gaped at Jack and Skeezix, sweat standing out on his forehead, his eyes wide. He’d managed to haggle the chicken apart along its breastbone and seemed to be trying to empty its organs into a little cloth sack rolled open next to his knee.

  Neither Jack nor Skeezix spoke. Neither could believe what he saw. Peebles rocked back onto his feet and shuffled farther into the recesses of the alcove, stuttering out a jabber of syllables that were nonsense in the stillness of the alley. He goggled in fear at Skeezix, who couldn’t find any appropriate words but, instead, cocked his arm and swung his stick at a point an inch above Peebles’s head, smashing it into a wooden fence rail. Then he threw the stick down as if it were a serpent. ‘What
–’ he said, then stopped, staring as Peebles, who, cowering away from him, jammed the chicken parts into the bloody sack and shoved the sack beneath his jacket. Jack stepped backward into the alley and Skeezix followed, treading on Jack’s feet.

  Peebles crept out, with such loathing and mortification on his face that it looked as if he’d just as soon have been cutting up the two friends and dropping their entrails into a sack. Skeezix’s desire to hit him – to do something to punish him – was replaced by a wondering terror at the act. What did it mean, Peebles killing the chicken? Was he going to eat it? Had he stolen and killed the chicken for Miss Flees? Was this lunch? Why the business with the keyhole saw? Why commit the deed in the shadows of a dusty alley? There was a perverse quality to the thing that made both Jack and Skeezix quail, perhaps because they didn’t entirely understand it. Neither was surprised, though. In fact, as they watched him jog away toward the High Street carrying his bag, it seemed to both of them that they’d always half expected that sort of thing from Peebles.

  They walked in silence to the orphanage. There seemed to be nothing to say about the incident. Making jokes about it didn’t work. It was another one of Peebles’s secret activities to add to the list, along with his burning himself on the palms of the hands with candle flames and his collecting snippets of human hair. They slid in through Skeezix’s window, stepped into a narrow closet off the hallway, and climbed a set of steeply angled stairs up into the cobwebby darkness. Counting the steps, Jack held one hand out in front of him, feeling for the door in the ceiling. There it was. He stopped and Skeezix banged into him, grabbed his elbow, and nearly hauled both of them down backward. Jack shushed him and tapped three times on the wooden panel, waited for an instant, and tapped again twice. There was an answering tap and the scrape of a wooden swivel latch being slid back. Light shone suddenly around the perimeter of the panel as it swung open, Helen’s face framed beyond it. Jack and Skeezix climbed up into the middle of the attic, where the gable raised the roof high enough to stand without cricking your neck.