Land of Dreams Page 8

  A wind rose off the ocean and blew leaves out of the trees across the street, swirling them away toward the forest. MacWilt’s tarpaulin blew into the air like a hovering spook and enveloped his knees. Jack could hear the echoes of his curses even above the wind, but he paid them no mind at all. The shadows in the sky thickened, swirling, growing angular and sharp – buildings now, with windows and turrets and gables and pitched roofs towering so high above the hills that giants might live in them.

  MacWilt stared through his odd glass, seeming to be oblivious to the piece of canvas sailing off the roof, to the debris that followed – broken stools, mops and buckets, a pair of huge framed oil paintings – all of it leaping on the rain-laden wind, whirling away through the air, and clattering on the cobbles of the street.

  There sounded the crack of breaking glass, as loud and sharp as if a crystal chandelier had fallen against the floorboards of the attic. Jack saw great shards of the outer lens of MacWilt’s telescope fly out, as if exploded from pressure within the keg. The tavern keeper shouted and reeled back, clutching his face, even though the lens he had been peering through hadn’t been the one to shatter. His screams tore through the wind and rain, and he alternately snatched his hands away from his eyes, peering wildly around him, then jammed them against his face again, crying out, stumbling, dropping to his knees finally in a puddle and huddling there in the descending darkness.

  In moments the night had grown black enough so that Jack, Skeezix, and Helen could see only MacWilt’s hunched shade. Toward Moonvale the false sun blinked out as if it were a candle flame, and the city of shadows with it. Thunder pealed, lightning forked across the hills, and the sky was nothing but darkness and rain and wind-lashed trees.

  5

  SKEEZIX STOOD with his mouth open. He shut his eyes and then opened them slowly, as if expecting something to have changed. Helen passed her hands in front of Skeezix’s eyes and snapped her fingers. Then she opened her mouth and mimicked his gape, goggling her eyes. ‘Soup’s on,’ she said, poking Skeezix in the stomach. Her friend blinked and looked around, first at Jack and then at Helen. The smell of cabbage broth drifted up through the vent.

  ‘Soup,’ said Skeezix in a disgusted voice. ‘I won’t eat it.’

  Helen laughed, as if she thought it unlikely.

  ‘What do you suppose ...’ Skeezix began, but his voice trailed off into nothing.

  Helen sat at the table again and began to leaf through the book. ‘I suppose you two had better look at this.’ She pulled the candelabra across the tabletop in order to illuminate the frontispiece. Jack bent over her, unbelieving. There was a drawing of a city in a china-blue sky: narrow towers built of hewn stone, arched bridges stretching over what might be rivers or what might be cloud drift, red clay roofs rising out of thickets of trunkless trees, high windows looking out on meadows that stretched into nothing, into the deep blue mirror of the heavens. It wasn’t the city they’d seen, but it floated in the same enchanted sky, tinted with twilight colours.

  ‘Forget the soup,’ said Jack, pulling up a chair. ‘We can eat at my place later.’

  Uncharacteristically, Skeezix nodded, fetching a chair for himself. ‘Then we can eat again at Dr Jensen’s, after we show him this book and tell him about MacWilt and the glasses.’

  ‘Shut up about food,’ said Helen, ‘and listen to this: “Ours is one of many worlds,” ’ she read, starting at the top of the first page, ‘ “of millions of worlds, unending numbers of worlds, all the same and all different, all of them spinning past each other like the shadows of stars. We fancy ourselves alone in time and space, conceited as we are, and it is during the Solstice that we are reminded of just how inconsiderable we are in the vast eyes of eternity – an insight that should cause us to laugh at ourselves, but doesn’t. The mind, instead, freezes at the thought, and we go clambering after some means of fleeing from the little tract of countryside on which we have mapped our existence. Some of us are successful. Some of us are destroyed.”’

  ‘Some of us are mystified,’ said Skeezix, stepping back across the floor to have another look down the vent.

  ‘You’re mystified about everything,’ said Helen, ‘unless it’s on a plate. This is simple as pie.’

  Skeezix grimaced. ‘I wish it was pie. We all knew that something happens during the Solstice. It’s like during a hot wind; everyone’s on edge. People skulking in alleys and on rooftops. Voices in the night. Villagers babbling in funny languages. And the carnival train on the ruined tracks – where did it come from? What happened to it? What did MacWilt think he’d see? That’s what I want to know. What did he see?’

  ‘I bet he saw his own face,’ said Helen, ‘reflected in the spectacles. Imagine what that would have done to him. Imagine what it would do to you. Look at this and shut up. This is all about legends concerning these “many worlds”, as she calls them –’

  ‘Who?’ asked Skeezix.

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘Who is she?’

  Helen looked up and grinned. ‘Guess.’

  Skeezix shook his head tiredly, as if he couldn’t be, bothered with it. Helen knew that he was bursting to know. So was Jack, but Jack wasn’t as much fun to bait as was Skeezix. Helen acted as if she were satisfied with Skeezix’s pretended indifference. She grinned at him, turned a page, and began to read silently. Jack peered over her shoulder, not half so mystified, in truth, as Skeezix had claimed to be.

  Jack was used to mysteries. He’d known for years that there had been odd circumstances surrounding his father’s death – or disappearance, whatever it was – that had been kept from him, perhaps because Willoughby didn’t entirely understand them himself; perhaps because Dr Jensen thought it safer. And it wasn’t just the bare facts of the business. He’d kept his ears open wide enough to have gleaned a fragment of the story here, a shard of it there. There was no shame in it - at least not in his eyes. That his mother had been loved or sought after by a trio of men, including his father, was nothing to keep hidden. Dr Jensen had been one of those men. So what? Jack had known for years that she’d died four years after childbirth, and that his father had insisted the death was the deliberate doing of a doctor – one Algernon Harbin – who had, along with Dr Jensen, been an abandoned lover.

  The details of the murder on the bluffs at the Solstice carnival were scandalous enough to satisfy an entire village full of gossips, even when they were busy elsewhere – with MacWilt’s monster and the canary gypsy and the taxidermist’s son. Lars Portland had called the murderer out, had shot the villain Harbin in the head, at close range, and had himself been shot through the heart. It was cold-blooded murder in the eyes of the law. But not half so cold-blooded, in Jack’s eyes, as the murder of his mother for the sake of-what? – revenge against her husband? Against her for having rebuffed the dark and clever Algernon Harbin?

  The corpse of the murdered Dr Harbin had disappeared. It was thought that he’d pitched over backward off the bluffs, into the moonlit Pacific. His body had quite likely been borne south on the longshore current, food for fishes and crabs and, finally, for sea birds on the sands of some deserted cove north of San Francisco. The operator of the carnival disappeared with it, and the carnival with him. He was sought for weeks afterwards by the county sheriff although the search could hardly have been carried out with much enthusiasm. Both parties were dead, after all. There was no one left to prosecute. Dr Jensen had been coroner at the time, and he’d buried Lars Portland in the cemetery beside his wife, after coming to conclusions that would have seemed pointless to question.

  Dr Jensen had always seemed to Jack to be the real victim: denied the woman he loved; burying his best friend, who had not been denied that woman. And Jack had suspected for years that Dr Jensen knew more than he let on, that there were remnants of the mystery that had not been buried beneath the last spadeful of dirt in the Rio Deli cemetery. Dr Jensen, he had always supposed, would reveal them in good time, but now it was beginning to seem as if certain of
those revelations were blowing in on the wind, or along the ruined tracks of a years-decayed railroad.

  ‘I give up,’ said Skeezix, grimacing at Helen. ‘You win. You’ve got the book and I haven’t. I won’t wrestle you for it, because you’re a girl and might cry.’

  ‘Because I’d twist your nose, you mean. Forget it. Ask me nice or eat cabbage soup.’

  Skeezix strolled across and plucked up Helen’s braids, one in either hand, dancing them above her head so that their shadows leaped on the wall. ‘This is Perry and Winkle, the battling braid boys, reenacting the battle of the pier,’ he said, making the braids bow to each other and then launch themselves forward, pummelling each other while he made realistic battle noises with his tongue. Helen twisted around in her chair and slugged him twice in the stomach, at which he jerked back, hooking his foot around her chair leg, causing the chair with Helen in it to topple over backward onto the floor in a clatter of knocking and laughing. Helen shoved her hand against her mouth and managed to punch Skeezix one last time before rolling clear of the fallen chair and standing up.

  During the melee Jack had picked up the book, and so Helen slugged him too and took it back. Skeezix hooted with laughter, Triumphing through his fingers. A voice sounded from below. ‘Who is that?’ it shrilled - the voice of Miss Flees. ‘Is that you, Bobby? Are you in the attic? Who’s in the attic? I’ll find out! Come down out of there! Is it you, Helen?’ There was a pause as Miss Flees listened. Skeezix, Jack, and I Helen stood still, barely breathing, but grinning at each other. Jack crept across and looked down through the vent. There was Miss Flees below, holding a wooden spoon in her hand, with her head cocked sideways. Peebles was there, sitting atop a stool.

  Jack motioned to Helen and winked, and Helen – very softly, almost birdlike – began to mimic the high, windy voice of. Mrs Langley the attic ghost, reciting, as the ghost often did, snatches of romantic poetry about dead lovers and ruined lives. Her voice rose and fell in the still attic. There wasn’t a sound from below. Miss Flees stood as before with her head tilted and listening. Helen abruptly shut up and gave Skeezix a fierce look, as if to advertise what she’d do to him if he didn’t contain his laughter.

  Miss Flees stood just so for a moment longer, then, apparently satisfied, bent back to what it was she’d been I doing before the ruckus started in the attic. Jack wondered what that was. She hunched over a big galvanised tub, looking intently at something within it. Peebles stared along with her, sticking the end of a spoon into the tub and jerking it back out, his shoulders shaking with what must have been suppressed giggles. Miss Flees stood up and stepped across I to lock the door. In the tub, swimming in lazy circles, was the thing from the ocean, the existence of which had kindled such a ruckus earlier that afternoon.

  Jack squinted down at the creature. It looked oddly unlike a fish in the gaslight of the kitchen – fleshy and pink and with fins that might as easily be arms – as if it had been built by someone intending to make a human being, then forgetting halfway through and trying to make a fish instead and winding up with heaven knew what. It seemed vaguely possible, now that Jack looked at the creature, that MacWilt’s anger on the dock had been born out of fear, that it hadn’t merely been a reaction to an insult. Jack waved his arm at his two friends, shushing them past a finger in order to keep them quiet. Helen joined him and Skeezix followed, stepping along in slow, enormous steps, his arms held out from his sides, fingers waggling, as if he were mugging the part of a secretive conspirator in a particularly gaudy stage production. He seemed about to burst over his own antics, so Helen gave him a look to shut him up. She had more at stake, after all, than Jack and Skeezix had.

  Miss Flees folded open the top of a little bloodstained cloth bag, reached in, and pulled out the chicken parts that Peebles had fetched back from the alley. She seemed half repulsed by them, as if she did not entirely want to do what she was doing. Peebles watched in fascination. He offered the creature in the tub a spoon again. The spoon was jerked out of his hand, and Miss Flees hissed at him. Then the two of them tried to snatch it back out of the bucket, reaching in furtively and pulling their hands back as if they were trying to pick something up off a hot griddle.

  Miss Flees finally came up with the spoon; glaring at Peebles, she set it out of reach on the sink. She dimmed the gaslight and lit a half dozen candles that were little more than heaps of black wax. A moaning began – an incantation of some sort. Jack listened. It sounded at first like the wind blowing under the eaves, drifting on the darkness. It was Miss Flees. She stood with her eyes closed, intoning what must have been a song. Then she picked up the sugar bowl, pinched out a heap of sugar, and emptied a trail of it on the kitchen floor in the shape of a circle. She laid the chicken entrails in the centre of the circle and the five black candles at even intervals around the perimeter, chanting all the time. Peebles watched from his stool.

  It seemed fearfully dark to Jack all of a sudden. He could hear the wind lashing at the trees out in the night and the rain pattering on the shingles. For a moment he felt as if he were floating above the vent, hovering there with darkness all around him. He forced himself to look at Skeezix, who stood transfixed beside him, his face bent into a curious mixture of fear and curiosity and disgust.

  Miss Flees gathered up a scraping of the wax that ran off one of the soft candles, rolled it in sugar, then dragged it across the entrails, which were sticky with half-dried blood. She dropped the marble-sized pellet in the tub. There was a splashing and the noise of the creature slurping against the surface of the water – then silence. Her chanting continued without pause as she prepared another glob of wax. This time, though, she laid the sugary ball on the slats of the table and handed something to Peebles, who didn’t seem to want it, whatever it was. Peebles shook his head. Miss Flees shook hers back at him, but continued to chant, louder now, as if she were yelling at Peebles in the only way open to her. Peebles shook his head again. Miss Flees snatched up his hand, pinioned his arm beneath her elbow, and jabbed at his palm. It was a needle that she’d offered him, but he’d been unable or unwilling to draw his own blood. He winced when the needle struck him, but he didn’t cry out. There was a brief look of hatred in his eyes, and then fascination as he watched droplets of blood fall onto the sugared wax, tinting it deep red in the dim light. Miss Flees dropped the wax ball into the tub, and again the creature consumed it.

  Jack could see the thing’s mouth this time as it lashed up out of the shallow water and took the ball at the surface. It swam round and round its tub then, searching frantically, it seemed, for another of the morsels. The chanting diminished, low and whispery now. Joining it, high-timbred and burbling, like the piping of tiny underwater birds, was a second voice – obviously the voice of the thing in the tub. Miss Flees modulated her own chanting, heightening the rhythm so that it seemed to fit within the spaces of the creature’s song.

  A third voice joined in. It rose in the darkness of the attic. The rain on the roof seemed suddenly to be beating in time, and this new voice sang what sounded to Jack to be a hymn, the words utterly distinct and yet utter nonsense.

  ‘Shut up!’ whispered Skeezix.

  The singing continued. Miss Flees began to rock back and forth on her heels below. Peebles sat on his stool, eyes shut, holding his thumb against the palm of his hand.

  ‘Will you shut up!’ hissed Skeezix at Helen.

  Jack wished Helen would shut up too. He didn’t half like what was going on in the kitchen. The smell of the cabbage broth mingled with the perfume of the candles and the thin, coppery smell of blood, all of it swirling up into his face and sickening him. This wasn’t at all like Miss Flees, or like earlier episodes with Peebles. This was something else, something that was causing the dense, wet atmosphere of the attic, of the entire house, to shimmer and shift.

  ‘It’s not me,’ whispered Helen.

  Jack and Skeezix both looked at her. They’d assumed that she’d been impersonating Mrs Langley, still playing a joke o
n Miss Flees. But she wasn’t. She was silent and staring. Before them, back in the dusty recesses of a low shadow-hidden gable, there seemed to be a grey veil dangling in empty air. It was visible despite the darkness, hovering there like the city of shadows they’d seen above the Moonvale Hills. It swirled and congealed and formed itself into a face – the face of an old woman, turned sideways and staring against the dark wall. Long grey hair stood away from her head, and her eyes focused unblinking on nothing at all. Her mouth opened and shut like the mouth of a wooden puppet as she sang along with Miss Flees and the thing in the bucket. What it was she was singing, Jack couldn’t make out. Part of him made an effort to listen to it; part of him wanted very badly to be anywhere else on earth.

  Miss Flees herself appeared to be horrified. Her enchantment, whatever its purpose, was working to some inconceivable end or another, but the thought of a voice from the attic made her uneasy. Peebles listened intently to it, though. His eyes were half shut, as if he were studying the results of Miss Flees’s conjuring. He’d got hold of the spoon again, and he tapped it idly against his knee, in time to the weird rhythms. He bent over the tub, glanced at Miss Flees, whose eyes were shut with concentration, and tentatively poked the end of the spoon at the fish creature. It ceased its canary singing, lashed up out of the tub, and buried its teeth into Peebles’s finger, thrashing and banging its tail until, amid Peebles’s shrieking, it dropped back into the tub and lay there.

  Peebles slid from his stool, waving his hand and groaning. His little finger was bitten off. Miss Flees, coming up out of her trance, stared fixedly for a fraction of a second and then slapped Peebles with the back of her hand. Peebles stopped his capering and stood still, his finger dripping onto the floorboards. Then, very deliberately, he wrapped a tea towel around it, turned mechanically, and walked from the room, his face ghastly white in the candle glow.