The Land Of Laughs

by Jonathan Carroll

  The Land Of Laughs

  Jonathan Carroll

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

  Have you ever loved a magical book above all others? Have you ever wished the magic were real? Welcome to The Land of Laughs. A novel about how terrifying that would be.

  Schoolteacher Thomas Abbey, unsure son of a film star, doesn't know who he is or what he wants–in life, in love, or in his relationship with the strange and intense Saxony Gardner. What he knows is that in his whole life nothing has touched him so deeply as the novels of Marshall France, a reclusive author of fabulous children's tales who died at forty-four.

  Now Thomas and Saxony have come to France's hometown, the dreamy Midwestern town of Galen, Missouri, to write France's biography. Warned in advance that France's family may oppose them, they're surprised to find France's daughter warmly welcoming instead. But slowly they begin to see that something fantastic and horrible is happening. The magic of Marshall France has extended far beyond the printed page...leaving them with a terrifying task to undertake.

  Jonathan Carroll

  The Land Of Laughs

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  For June, who is the best of all New Faces, and for Beverly – The Queen of All

  Be regular and orderly in your life like a

  bourgeois, so that you may be violent and

  original in your work.

  – Flaubert

  Part One

  1

  "Look, Thomas, I know you've probably been asked this question a million times before, but what was it really like to be Stephen Abbey's –"

  "– Son?" Ah, the eternal question. I recently told my mother that my name isn't Thomas Abbey, but rather Stephen Abbey's Son. This time I sighed and pushed what was left of my cheesecake around the plate. "It's very hard to say. I just remember him as being very friendly, very loving. Maybe he was just stoned all the time."

  Her eyes lit up at that. I could almost hear the sharp little wheels clickety-clicking in her head. So he was an addict! And it came straight from his kid's mouth. She tried to cover her delight by being understanding and giving me a way out if I wanted it.

  "I guess, like everyone else, I've always read a lot about him. But you never know if those articles are true or not, you know?"

  I didn't feel like talking about it anymore. "Most of the stories about him are probably pretty true. The ones I've heard about or read are." Luckily the waitress was passing, so I was able to make a big thing out of getting the bill, looking it over, paying it – anything to stop the conversation.

  When we got outside, December was still there and the cold air smelled chemical, like a refinery or a tenth-grade chemistry class deep into the secrets of stink. She slipped her arm through mine. I looked at her and smiled. She was pretty – short red hair, green eyes that were always wide with a kind of happy astonishment, a nice body. So I couldn't help smiling then too, and for the first time that night I was glad she was there with me.

  The walk from the restaurant to the school was just a little under two miles, but she insisted on our hiking it both ways. Over would build up our appetites, back would work off what we'd eaten. When I asked her if she chopped her own wood, she didn't even crack a smile. My sense of humor has often been lost on people.

  By the time we got back to the school we were pretty chummy. She hadn't asked any more questions about my old man and had spent most of the time telling me a funny story about her gay uncle in Florida.

  We got back to Founder's Hall, a masterpiece of neo-Nazi architecture, and I saw that I had stopped us on the school crest laid into the floor. Her arm tightened in mine when she noticed this, and I thought I might as well ask then as anytime.

  "Would you like to see my masks?"

  She giggled a giggle that sounded like water draining from a sink. Then she shook her finger at me in a no-no-naughty-boy! way.

  "You don't mean your etchings, do you?"

  I had hoped that she might he half-human, but this dirty little Betty Boop routine popped that balloon. Why couldn't a woman be marvelous for once? Not winky, not liberated, not vacuous…

  "No, really, you see, I have this mask collection, and –"

  She squeezed me again and cut off the circulation in my upper arm.

  "I'm just kidding, Thomas. I'd love to see it."

  Like all tight-fisted New England prep schools, the apartments that they gave their teachers, especially single teachers, were awful. Mine had a tiny hallway, a study that was painted yellow once but forgot, a bedroom, and a kitchen so old and fragile that I never once thought of cooking there because I had to pay all of the repair costs.

  But I had sprung for a gallon of some top-of-the-line house paint so that at least the wall that the collection was on would have a little dignity.

  The only outside door to the place opened onto the hallway, so coming in with her was okay. I was nervous, but I was dying to see how she'd react. She was cuddling and cooing the whole time, but then we went around the corner into my bed-living room.

  "Oh, my God! Wha… ? Where did you get… ?" Her voice trailed off into little puffs of smoke as she went up to take a closer look. "Where did you get, uh, him?"

  "In Austria. Isn't it a great one?" Rudy the Farmer was brown and tan and beautifully carved in an almost offhand way that added to his rough, piggy-fat, drunken face. He gleamed too, because I had been experimenting that morning with a new kind of linseed oil that hadn't dried yet.

  "But it's… it's almost real. He's shining!"

  At that point my hopes went up up up. Was she awed? If so, I'd forgive her. Not many people had been awed by the masks. They got many points from me when they were.

  I didn't mind when she reached out to touch some of them as she moved on. I even liked her choice of which ones to touch. The Water Buffalo, Pierrot, the Krampus.

  "I started buying them when I was in college. When my father died, he left me some money, so I took a trip to Europe." I went over to the Marquesa and touched her pink-peach chin softly. "This one, the Marquesa, I saw in a little side-street store in Madrid. She was the first one I bought."

  My Marquesa with her tortoiseshell combs, her too-white and too-big teeth that had been smiling at me for almost eight years. The Marquesa.

  "And what's that one?"

  "That's a death mask of John Keats."

  "A death mask?"

  "Yes. Sometimes when famous people die, they'll make a mold of their faces before they bury them. Then they cast copies…" I stopped talking when she looked at me as if I were Charles Manson.

  "But they're just so creepy! How can you sleep in here with them? Don't they scare you?"

  "No more than you do, my dear."

  That was that. Five minutes later she was gone and I was putting some of the linseed oil on another mask.

  2

  My father used to say whenever he finished making a movie that he'd never do it again as long as he lived. But like most of the other things he said, it was bullshit, because after a few weeks of rest and a fat deal cooked up for him by his agent, he'd go back under the lights for a forty-third triumphant return.

  After four years of teaching I was saying the same thing. I had had my fill of grading papers, faculty meetings, and coaching ninth-grade intramural basketball. There was enough money from my inheritance to do what I wanted, but to he honest, I had no real idea of what to do instead. Correction: I had a very specific idea, but it was a pipe dream. I wasn't a writer, I didn't know the first thing about doing research, and I hadn't even read all the things that he'd written – not that there were that many of them.

  My dream was to write a
biography of Marshall France, the very mysterious, very wonderful author of the greatest children's books in the world. Books like The Land of Laughs and The Pool of Stars that had helped me to keep my sanity on and off throughout my thirty years.

  That was the one wonderful thing that my father did for me. On my ninth birthday – momentous day! – he gave me a little red car with a real engine in it that I instantly hated, a baseball that was signed "From Your Daddy's Number One Fan, Mickey Mantle," and as an afterthought I'm sure, the Shaver-Lambert edition of The Land of Laughs with the Van Walt illustrations. I still have it.

  I sat in the car because I knew that was what my father wanted me to do and read the book from cover to cover for the first time. When I refused to put it down after a year, my mother threatened to call Dr. Kintner, my hundred-dollar-a-minute analyst, and tell him that I wasn't "cooperating." As always in those days, I ignored her and turned the page.

  "The Land of Laughs was lit by eyes that saw the lights that no one's seen."

  I expected everyone in the world to know that line. I sang it constantly to myself in that low intimate voice that children use to talk-sing to themselves when they're alone and happy.

  Since I never had any need for pink bunnies or stuffed doggies to ward off night spooks or kid gobblers, my mother finally allowed me to carry the book around with me. I think she was hurt because I never asked her to read it to me. But by then I was so selfish about The Land of Laughs that I didn't even want to share it with someone else's voice.

  I secretly wrote France a letter, the only fan letter I've ever written, and was ecstatic when he wrote back.

  Dear Thomas,

  The eyes that light The Land of Laughs

  See you and wink their thanks.

  Your friend,

  Marshall France

  I had the letter framed when I was in prep school and still looked at it when I needed a shot of peace of mind. The handwriting was a kind of spidery italic with the Y's and the G's dropping far below the line, and many of the letters of the words weren't connected. The envelope was postmarked Galen, Missouri, which is where France lived for most of his life.

  I knew little things like that about him. I couldn't resist some amateur sleuthing. He died of a heart attack at forty-four, was married, and had a daughter named Anna. He hated publicity, and after the success of his book The Green Dog's Sorrow, he pretty much disappeared from the face of the earth. A magazine did an article on him that had a picture of his house in Galen. It was one of those great old Victorian monsters that had been plopped down on an average little street in the middle of Middle America. Whenever I saw houses like that, I remembered my father's movie where the guy came home from the war, only to be killed by cancer at the end. Since most of the action seemed to take place in the living room and on the front porch, my father called the movie Cancer House. It made a fortune and be was nominated for another Oscar.

  In February, the month when suicide always looks good to me, I taught a class in Poe that helped me to decide at least to apply for a leave of absence for the following fall before something dangerous happened to my brain. A normal lunkhead named Davis Bell was supposed to give a report to the class on "The Fall of the House of Usher." He got up in front of us and said this. I quote. " 'The Fall of the House of Usher,' by Edgar Allan Poe, who was an alcoholic and married his younger cousin." I had told them all that several days before in hopes of stimulating their curiosity. To continue. "… married his younger cousin. This house, or I mean this story, is about this house of ushers…"

  "Who fall?" I prompted him, at the risk of giving the plot away to his classmates, who hadn't read the story either.

  "Yeah, who fall."

  Time to leave.

  Grantham gave me the news that my application had been approved. As always, smelling of coffee and farts, he hung his arm across my shoulder, and pushing me toward the door, asked what I was going to do with my "little vacation."

  "I was thinking of writing a book." I didn't look at him because I was afraid his expression would be the same I'd have if someone like me had just said that he was going to write a book.

  "That's great, Tom! A biography of your dad, maybe?" He put a finger to his bps and looked dramatically from side to side as if the walls were listening. "Don't worry about me. I won't tell a soul, I promise. Those things are very in these days, you know. What it was really like on the inside, and all that. Don't forget, though, that I'll want an autographed copy when it comes out."

  It was really time to leave.

  The rest of the winter trimester passed quickly, and Easter break came almost too soon. Over the holiday I was tempted to back out of the whole thing several times, because leaping into the unknown with a project I didn't even know how to begin, much less complete, was not at all inspiring. But they'd hired my replacement, I'd bought a new little station wagon for the trip out to Galen, and the students certainly weren't pulling on my coattails to stay. So I thought that no matter what happened, getting away from the likes of Davis Bell and Farts Grantham would do me good.

  Then some strange things happened.

  I was browsing through a rare-book store one afternoon when I saw on the sales desk the Alexa edition of France's Peach Shadows with the original Van Walt illustrations. The book had been out of print for years for some reason, and I hadn't read it.

  I staggered over to the desk and, after wiping my hands on my pants, picked it up reverently. I noticed a troll who looked as if he had been dipped in talcum powder watching me from the corner of the store.

  "Isn't that a superb copy? Someone walked right in out of the blue and plunked it down on the desk." He had a Southern accent and reminded me of some character who lives with his dead mama in a rotting mansion and sleeps under a mosquito net.

  "Its great. How much is it?"

  "Oh, well, you see, it's already sold. It's a rare one. Do you know why it's not around anymore? Because Marshall France didn't like it and refused to let them reprint after a certain time. Now, he was a strangey, that Mr. France."

  "Could you tell me who bought it?"

  "No, I've never seen her before, but you're in luck, because she said she'd he in to pick it up" – he looked at his wristwatch, which I noticed was a gold Cartier – "around now, eleven or so, she said."

  She. I had to have that book, and she was going to sell it to me, no matter what the cost. I asked him if I could look at it until she came, and he said that he didn't see why not.

  As with everything Marshall France had written, I fell into the book and left the world for a while. The words! "The plates hated the silver, who in turn hated the glasses. They sang cruel songs at each other. Ping. Clank. Tink. This kind of meanness three times a day." The way all of the characters were so completely new, but once you'd met them you wondered how you'd ever gotten along without them in your life. Like the last pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that go right in the middle.

  I finished and quickly went back to passages that I'd particularly liked. There were a lot of them, so when I heard the bell over the front door ring and someone come in, I tried to ignore whoever it was. If it was she, it could end up that she wouldn't sell it and I wouldn't have another chance to see the book again, so I wanted to eat as much of it as I could before the big showdown.

  For a couple of years I collected fountain pens. Once when I was at a flea market in France I was walking around and saw a man in front of me pick up a pen from a seller's table and look at it. I saw immediately from the white six-pointed star on its cap that it was a Montblanc. An old Montblanc. I stopped in my tracks and started a chant inside of me: PUT IT DOWN, DON'T BUY IT! But it did no good – the guy kept looking more and more intently at it. Then I wanted him to die right there on the spot so that I could pull it out of his lax hand and buy it myself. His back was still to me, but my loathing was so intense that it must have pierced him somehow, because all of a sudden he put the pen down, looked fearfully over his shoulder at me, and scurried aw
ay.

  The first thing that I saw when I looked up from the France book was a nice denim-skirted fanny. It had to be her. PUT IT DOWN, DON'T BUY IT! I tried to cut my look straight through the denim and skin underneath all the way to her soul, wherever it was. GO AWAY, LADY! I WHAMMY YOU TO GO AWAY AND LEAVE THIS BOOK HERE HERE HERE!

  "The gentleman over there is looking at it. I didn't think that you'd mind."

  I suddenly had this wild romantic hope that she would be lovely and smiling. Lovely and smiling because she had the world's best taste in books. But she was neither. The smile was only partly there – a little confusion and beginning anger mixed together – and her face was pretty/plain. A clean, healthy face that was raised on a farm or out in the country someplace, but never in the sun that much. Straight brown hair but for a small upward flip when it reached her shoulders, as if it were afraid to touch them. A sprinkle of light, light freckles, straight nose, wide-set eyes. More plain than pretty the more you looked at her, but the word "healthy" kept going through my mind.

  "I wish you hadn't."

  I didn't know which one of us she was talking to. But then she marched over and pulled it out of my hand like my mother catching me with a dirty magazine. She brushed the light-green cover twice, and only then did she look directly at me. She had thin, rust-colored eyebrows that curved up at the ends, so that even when she was frowning she didn't look too mad.

  The dealer came dancing up and whisked my beloved out of her hands with a "May I?" and moved back behind the desk, where he started wrapping it in beige tissue paper. "I've been right here on this corner for twelve years, and sometimes I've had quite a few Frances, but usually it's a drought with him, just an absolute desert drought. Certainly Land of Laughs in the first edition is easy enough to find, because he was so popular by then, but The Green Dog's Sorrow in a first or any edition is as hard to find as the Hydra's teeth. Say, listen, I think I have a Land of in the back of the store if either of you'd be interested." He looked at us, eyes atwinkle, but I already had a first that I'd paid a fortune for in New York, and my opponent was digging around for something in her handbag, so he shrugged off the No Sale and went back to wrapping. "That'll be thirty-five dollars, Ms. Gardner."