Land of Dreams

by James P. Blaylock

  The attic seemed to Jack to have gone mad. The air, suddenly, was filled with a sort of swirling mist, like ice crystals in the wind, and in it and around it were the sounds of cats and birds, all cheeping and peeping and meowing as if they were being stirred together in a pan. The hymn singing grew louder, in competition with the cacophony that circled roundabout it. Back in the corners of the attic the shadows lightened to a sort of twilight purple, and in among them there glowed what might have been little stars or hovering fireflies or sparks born spontaneously out of the charged, whirling atmosphere.

  Miss Flees was thrown into abrupt confusion. She waved her wooden spoon and shouted for Peebles. Then she bent in to have a look at the fish and cracked her bony hip against the edge of the table, lurching backward and cursing with the pain of it. The activity in the attic diminished, the air growing suddenly more quiet. It seemed to Jack as if something had slumped, as if the atmosphere had tired itself out and sat down for a rest. The starry recesses of the room faded again into shadow; the cats meowed into silence; the canary trilling fell off with one last tired tweet.

  Miss Flees resumed her crooning, but it was no good. The fish wouldn’t sing. Mrs Langley had fallen mute. Nothing was left but silence, doubly empty in contrast to the jungle of noises that had preceded it. Miss Flees cleared her throat, warbled just a bit, and gave it one last go, but the result was the same – nothing. Two of the candles had flickered out, and Peebles, when he’d been dancing around waving his finger, had kicked through the sugar circle and stepped on the entrails, smashing them flat on the floor.

  In the attic, the ghostly face under the gable was gone. The only sounds when Miss Flees fell silent at last were the wind and the rain and the bubbling of boiling soup. Jack and Skeezix and Helen tiptoed back over to the table, all of them silent. Helen picked up the book and flipped it open, but she paid no real attention to it. Skeezix said, ‘Huh?’ in a half befuddled, half bemused tone, then said to Helen, ‘Who did write the book?’

  Helen shut the book and then turned to stare out of the, window. ‘Viola Langley,’ she said, and gestured at the book as if inviting them to take a look for themselves.

  The streets were dark and wet and silent. Clouds scudded across the deep sky. The moon, two days away from full, peeked past the clouds now and again like an eye carved out of fossil ivory. Moon shadows danced and leaped in the wind like goblins, stretching up the sides of houses and waving their arms over their heads, then melting away to nothing when clouds hid the moon and the streets fell once more into darkness.

  Lantz stepped along through the night, wary of the shadows and wary of the light. There were faces in the whorls of wood grain in the slats of a cedar fence, and there were faces grinning and evaporating in the whirling, moonlit clouds. The hooting of an owl, lost somewhere among the limbs of a leafless oak, chased him from the open sidewalk of the High Street up a narrow twisting alley. There was something lurking in the rain-dark emptiness of the oak, something pending. It was waiting in the alley too. He couldn’t see it, but he was certain it could see him.

  At the same moment that a cloud shadow cast the alley into darkness, he saw the tilted shape of a black scarecrow silhouetted against the whitewashed wall of a lean-to shed, the wind blowing the straw-stuffed arms of the thing back and forth as if they were hinged. He could hear it rustling. He stopped and stood still, waiting, thinking that he heard the sound of wings flapping, of things flying in the night. Suddenly he felt surrounded by pressing shadows, by sprites and hobgoblins and the sliding, sentient wind. The alley bent so sharply ahead that he couldn’t see beyond ten or fifteen feet, but he felt something crouching there in the mud and the cast-out furniture. He turned and ran, the wind at his back.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the scarecrow dance in the sudden wind, jiggling and flailing and tugging at the broomstick that pinned it to the dirt of a weedy garden. Its hat blew off, sailing like a saucer onto the roof of the shed, then tumbling across the shingles and clicking across the pickets of the low stile fence. Lantz ran back out toward the High Street, the xylophone clacking of the hat, the rustling of the straw, the hooting of the owl, and the creaking of the wind all playing through the avenues of his mind like the music of a goblin orchestra.

  His house in the woods had slid down the hillside. Seven days of rain had turned the ground to mud, and the shack had set out toward the sea in a rush. His stuffed beasts had gone with it, squawking and mewling and screeching, their eyes dark with fear and wonder. Lantz had fought to save them, but in the slick mud and the pounding rain and the darkness he could do nothing at all.

  Perhaps there’d be something left of them when the sun rose. They might easily have pulled up short along the bluffs and be waiting for him there, near the carnival. But probably not. In two or three days they would wash up along the mudflat beaches of San Francisco Bay like a drowned zoo. People with their trouser legs rolled, poking after razor clams at low tide, would find them there in a litter of glass eyes and cotton stuffing, kelp snails and periwinkles.

  Lantz could see it. He could close his eyes and see it as if it were painted on a canvas the size of a barn wall. But he couldn’t think about it; he couldn’t, step by step, trace their strange odyssey: washing down the hill, teetering on the edge of the crumbling bluffs, roiling in the sea foam of a breaking h wave, and drifting out into the current, entangled in kelp and flotsam. He could picture only bits and pieces of it that flickered across the evening hallways of his imagination like fragments of a landscape glimpsed through a telescope held wrong end to.

  He shut his eyes and there they were, all of them moving swiftly in the darkness of an oceanic trench, sweeping south on a deepwater current. There was the ostrich and the elk head, the stray dog and the fish with its mouth gaping and rows of neat teeth like clipped-off bits of piano wire; there was the ape with patchy fur, and there was the bit of plywood I with sixteen shrews pinned to it, all of them lined up in ranks and swirling now past a surge of seashells and tube worms t and coral fans that waved and bowed in the shifting tides.

  He found he was outside MacWilt’s tavern. He’d just drifted there, awash himself The night seemed to draw him along, as if it had in mind for him a destination he couldn’t quite fathom. He looked up at the attic window, imagining that he could see himself looking back out, and for a moment he could. He heard the high trilling of two score of tiny birds, and he could smell the musty odour of their uncleaned cages and of spilled birdseed and gunnysacks and the mess of shredded potatoes and onions and bacon that cooked on the stove top.

  He was thin, and his clothes hung on him like the clothes of the scarecrow that had chased him from the alley. He had years ago ceased to care about food. There were pine nuts and blackberries and mushrooms to eat. There was Mrs Jensen now and again. He could trust Mrs Jensen. He heard music on the wind that blew off the ocean and across the bluffs. It was carnival music, and there in the west where the clouds were breaking he could see what might be winking stars or what might be the lights of the carnival, like a thousand lit candles glowing above the sea.

  There was a light on in the tavern. Lantz crept to the window and peered past the edge of muslin curtains at the interior. There was MacWilt cracking his knee against a wooden chair. He cursed, then stepped back and tried to kick the chair, but he was wide of the mark, and he nearly fell over backward with the effort. His eyes were bandaged with a rag, and he felt his way around his own tavern like a blind man, pushing over stools, pounding his fist against the bar top, shrieking horribly.

  Lantz couldn’t fathom it. Why had Mac Wilt wrapped a rag around his head? Lantz put his face to a cracked pane of glass and started to say something, then stopped when he couldn’t think of anything to say. He blew through the broken pane, making a sound like wind under a door, watching MacWilt’s head swivel round, his mouth springing open in sudden surprise. Lantz chattered like a squirrel and then made a noise like water burbling down a drainpipe. Mac Wilt shouted hoars
ely and swept a half dozen glasses off the countertop with his forearm. He shrank toward the wall, feeling with both hands, his head swivelling from side to side as Lantz whistled through the cracks, like a canary now, high and thin and distant.

  ‘Look there!’ Jack cried, standing up from the book and pointing out the window. Someone was peering into the window of the tavern. In the darkness Jack couldn’t at all make out who it was, but as the person moved away, around the building and onto the side street, Jack saw that it was Lantz, lanky and dressed in rags and walking with his odd, shuffling sort of sideways gait.

  Skeezix was already lifting the trapdoor. Jack and Helen followed him down, slipped into one of the bedrooms and out the window. Peebles had gone out a half hour earlier, still holding the rag to his finger and skulking away toward the bluffs, looking roundabout himself as if suspicious that he was being watched, which, of course, he was.

  They didn’t want to surprise Lantz. If they slid up behind him without warning he’d be gone. So they stood in the shadows across the street and watched. Lantz bent over something that lay beneath a kerb tree. He reached down and picked it up with both hands. It was a piece of MacWilt’s telescope, of the giant lenses. The shard was almost as big as Lantz’s head.

  The moon came out just then, lighting the street. Lantz held the glass up to his face and peered through it, looking straight across at his three friends. Jack waved, feeling foolish, startled at the way Lantz’s face was suddenly magnified through the glass. His eye seemed to swell to the size of a plate. There was a rustling above them in the trees and the flapping of heavy wings. An enormous crow soared out of the branches, circled once above the top of the tavern, and then landed on the cobbles of the road, not six feet from where Lantz stood. Jack stared at it. It was the same crow; it still carried its stick.

  Lantz regarded the crow through the glass, jumped just a bit as if startled, and then peered over the top of it as if to make sure of something. The crow hopped toward him, then flapped awkwardly up and onto his shoulder, scrabbling precariously there and seeming to whisper into Lantz’s ear. The boy stood still, listening, then pitched the piece of glass into the weeds as if it were a piece of rubbish, turned on his heel, and set off up the High Road, leaving his uncertain friends behind. The crow soared away, winging toward the bluffs, which were lit now by the lights of the carnival.

  Jack hurried across and found the glass in the weeds, but when he looked through it he could see nothing magical at all, nothing but the faces of Helen and Skeezix, who looked to be tiny and distant, about a mile away on a hilltop. It must have been the peculiar convex surface of the lens that accounted for it, and for Jack’s face seeming to them to be the enormous moon face of a leering giant.

  PART TWO

  Through the loft window

  6

  THEY FOUND DR JENSEN at work on the shoe. It was coming on to nine o’clock, and he was in the carriage house caulking scams. He’d rigged a mast through the laces and fitted a tiller across the heel. He planned to sail it, he said. There seemed to Jack a dozen easier ways to obtain a boat: there were half a dozen small sailboats in the harbour that might be rented by the day, and there were skippers aplenty, especially during the Solstice, who had nothing very much better to do than hire themselves out.

  Dr Jensen wasn’t interested merely in sailing in a ‘boat’. He couldn’t much stand sailing, in fact, although he’d done a good bit of it on San Francisco Bay as a boy. When he’d got older he’d got colder too, and he would enjoy the ocean now from the shore; he didn’t have to go out on it. It was going sailing in the enormous shoe, he said, that particularly appealed to him. There was no telling where a man might end up. He would sail tomorrow. The tide fell at nine in the morning, and he intended to be on it, so to speak. He didn’t know when he was coming home, but he undertook to believe that with the strange weather and seas, and with the coming of the Solstice, it wouldn’t be a long voyage. Mrs Jensen wasn’t going along, but she understood his going and wouldn’t stand in the way. Jack and Skeezix and Helen nodded, although Jack, for one, wasn’t entirely satisfied with the doctor’s logic. It seemed to imply something more than it actually said.

  Helen showed the doctor Mrs Langley’s book. He wasn’t particularly surprised. He warned them about taking too great an interest in it, though, and said it might be best if they considered it the stuff of fairy tales, and nothing more.

  Jack scratched his head at that, but he didn’t say what he might have said in regard to the sailboat shoe. He regarded Dr Jensen, with his caulk and his overalls and his unlikely boat, and said, ‘It seems like everybody’s going somewhere ‘ all of a sudden, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Oh?’ said the doctor.

  ‘Well, maybe they’re not going somewhere, absolutely, but they’re up to something. There’s a sort of something in the air, isn’t there? Like right before an electrical storm, only it’s been going on all week, and it’s getting – what? Not worse, more so – or something like that.’

  ‘Very mysterious,’ muttered Dr Jensen, smearing away at the shoe sole, seeming to pay little attention to what Jack had to say. Either that or he simply didn’t think much of it as a subject.

  Jack told him about Miss Flees and the monster from the sea. Dr Jensen shook his head, half in disgust. The news of Mrs Langley’s appearance, though, and her joining in with the conjuring seemed to interest him, but only for a moment. Then he shrugged and bent back to his work.

  ‘Mrs Langley been unusually active lately?’ he asked casually, wiping his hand on his overalls and looking up at Helen.

  Helen nodded. ‘In fact, yes. You can’t shut her up sometimes. Usually if I talk back to her she’ll be happy and quiet down. She’ll be carrying on, say, about a pink dress or a Thanksgiving turkey, and I’ll say that the dress is very beautiful or the turkey was the best I’ve eaten. Then there’ll be nothing, like she’d been worrying about the dress or the turkey, but she’s satisfied now, heaven knows why. This past week, though, she’s been moaning and talking in a rush. And there’s the sound of cats, too, meowing around the attic. I think there’s more than one – maybe three or four.’

  ‘Do tell,’ said Dr Jensen, lighting his pipe. ‘Cats, is it? Ghost cats?’

  Helen shrugged. ‘I haven’t seen any live ones up there.’

  ‘There’s graves ripped open along up toward Moonvale,’ said Dr Jensen, and he gave them all a look, as if he was suddenly willing to talk about the mysteries they’d been referring to, but it was a very serious business and required a careful choosing of words. ‘You’ve heard that?’

  All three of them shook their heads.

  ‘And one out at Rio Dell Cemetery. You ought to know about that one, Jack, if you don’t already.’

  Jack widened his eyes. There was only one reason that Dr Jensen would say such a thing. ‘My father’s grave?’

  The doctor nodded, puffing on his pipe and squinting at Jack. He gave up on his boat entirely for the moment. The conversation had come round to a point at which it required all his attention. ‘I had a look, early this morning. I would have told you out on the bluffs, but I wanted to look at the graves up near Moonvale first. This isn’t the first time such a thing has happened. If you read far enough in Mrs Langley she’ll tell you about it – glorifying it just a little bit, like she does. She didn’t see anything wrong with meddling with the truth if it made for a better yarn. But it’s the truth we want here, and as I said, I’d have given it to you earlier if I’d figured it out. I went up to the farm this evening on purpose to find you, but Willoughby said you’d been gone all day.

  ‘Those graves up toward Moonvale weren’t robbed. They were half washed out by the Eel, and if the rain keeps up there’ll be dead men out to sea by morning. A few weren’t opened by the river, though. At least I don’t think they were. I think the corpses stood up and walked away.’

  Skeezix laughed hollowly, as if he were half embarrassed to laugh but found the idea silly enough to deman
d it. Jack didn’t laugh at all. The grisly notion of his father’s corpse having walked away from Rio Dell Cemetery wasn’t any laughing matter. Dr Jensen must have read the look on his face, though, for he held his hand up and shook his head. ‘Your father’s grave was dug up. That’s the difference. The bones are still in it.’

  The idea of bones didn’t appeal to Jack at all, but he was relieved anyway. ‘Why?’ he asked, certain, somehow, that Dr Jensen knew the answer.

  The doctor shrugged, puffed a half dozen times on his pipe, paused to tamp and relight it, then said, They aren’t your father’s bones.’

  Jack stood silent.

  ‘I filled that coffin, Jack, and the bones I put in it belonged to a man who should have been dead years earlier. His bones were turning to dust when I was laying him out, and I had to toss in a heap of your father’s junk to weight it right.’

  ‘You’re telling me my father’s not dead?’

  ‘Nope. I’m not telling you anything of the sort. Only that he’s not buried in that coffin. He might be dead, or he might not. This might be his shoe I’m caulking here.’

  ‘He wasn’t shot?’

  ‘Oh, he was shot, all right, but not bad. Harbin shot him in the arm. Your father shot Harbin in the face. I wish I could say it was self-defence. No, that’s a lie. I don’t care at all about self-defence. Harbin deserved to die, if any man does. Worse than that. I’m not sure that he didn’t get worse in the end. They didn’t find his body. You heard that. He went off the bluffs into a high sea. It was the Solstice, of course, and it wasn’t any different from this one: rain and wind for a week; tides running too high one day, too low the next; storm surf out of the north falling off flat in an hour and then an hour later kicking back up again. There was that little bunch of houses out near Ferndale washed away in the night. No end of people drowned. They found those bodies – every one of them. But they never found Harbin, even though they looked up and down the coast for a week.’