Land of Dreams

by James P. Blaylock

  With the rush and whir of the Ferris wheel behind him and the ratchet click of the crank as it rotated the little cars one at a time across the boarding plank, Jack had already begun to feel giddy. He didn’t half like heights, and he didn’t at all like the feeling of falling. There was something in the carnival air, too, some sort of enchantment, that charged it with the uncanny feeling of something pending, as if Jack and his friends, even while they were standing there in the sawdust handing the cup back and forth, were rushing toward something, or perhaps as if something – a train or a sea wave or a leaf-laden autumn wind – was rushing toward them. They waited in line to board the Ferris wheel, neither Jack nor Skeezix feeling anything more than that.

  It seemed to Jack that it took about three quarters of an hour for the Ferris wheel to make a single revolution. They jerked upward, stopped, swung there, then jerked upward again. The little car seemed to sway and buck with every gust of sea wind. Skeezix found the swaying and swinging invigorating, somehow, and he set in to make the most of it, leaning back and forth and hooting with laughter until with each swing it seemed to Jack as if he were about to pitch straight out onto the ant people that milled around miles below. A little iron bar had been closed across their knees. The man operating the wheel had tugged on it and nodded, as if he was satisfied that all was safe and tidy. The bar didn’t amount to anything as far as Jack could see, beyond some sort of vague joke, and so he held on to the structure of the Ferris wheel itself with his right hand, and put his left arm around behind Helen, grinning at her weakly in an effort to make it seem as if he were merely trying to make her comfortable.

  Under better circumstances he would have liked almost nothing better – sitting there like that with his arm around Helen. But he knew he looked pale. He felt pale, if such a thing were possible. He flipped Skeezix on the ear with his middle finger and then grimaced at him behind Helen’s head when Skeezix looked at him accusingly. Skeezix grinned and rocked the car again, giving Jack a heightened eyebrow look, as if he were surprised that Jack wanted even more rocking.

  ‘Hey!’ shouted Helen, and she hit Skeezix on the chest, after which he calmed down, satisfied to make a horrified face every time the car canted forward.

  Helen shouted again. When Skeezix began to complain that he hadn’t done anything, she told him to shut up and pointed out toward the ocean. They’d risen high enough to see over the oaks and alders that lined the bluffs. The ocean was a deep translucent green, like bottle glass. Spindrift flew from the tumbling peaks of little wind waves, and the ground swell humped along beneath, rolling in to break continually along the cliffs and coves, sounding like the booming rush of an express train.

  Out on the sea, tossing on the swell, rode the shoe sailboat of Dr Jensen. It pitched and yawed unsteadily, waves breaking across the toe and laces and threatening on the moment to swamp the boat entirely and send it to the bottom of the sea. Dr Jensen bailed furiously, holding onto the sheet, his hair blowing about his head. The wind billowed the sail, jerking the sheet from his hand, and at first it seemed as if he would go after it, but he didn’t. He gave up on the sail, which flapped and danced in the wind’s eye as if giddy with freedom.

  He bailed with both hands now, his craft lying dangerously low in the water. The wind and current pushed him southeast, back toward the cove where Skeezix had found the shoe two nights earlier. The three on the Ferris wheel watched him anxiously. There was nothing any of them could do to help. It was Dr Jensen’s affair entirely. He could swim, at least, and he wasn’t any more than three hundred yards offshore, and with the current sweeping around toward the cove there … Jack wasn’t half as worried about Dr Jensen’s fate as he was worried about his own just then. He knew that to be uncharitable, but the knowledge didn’t at all change the way he felt, and it was what he was feeling as the car looped around the summit of the arc that made all the difference.

  They plummeted toward the green of the meadow. Jack’s stomach leaped in a giddy rush toward his chest. He crushed at the seat back with his left hand and gritted his teeth, certain that at any moment the car would rock too far forward and he’d slide out into the open air. He pressed himself back against the leather of the seat cushion and held his breath as the car swooped round past the grinning operator, started to rise once again, and then jerked to a stop and hung there. The business of unloading and loading cars began again, and they ratcheted up one lurch at a time toward the summit. Jack’s grip relaxed. He forced a smile and aimed it at Helen, happy in spite of himself to see that her smile was forced too. Only Skeezix seemed to be enjoying himself, although he had lost, apparently, his inclination toward tilting them all out of the car.

  They swung skyward. There was Dr Jensen again – closer to shore now, still bailing. He was in among the kelp beds; the wind chop had died, and the swell was broad and oily. He’d make it in. Jack was happy about it, but he wasn’t so happy that the doctor’s journey had been in vain. He had rather hoped that Dr Jensen would find what he was looking for.

  Skeezix reached across Helen and tapped Jack on the chest. He pointed off toward the northeast, toward the Moonvale Hills. The twilight sky seemed watery deep, like the sea, and it shone with pinpoint stars that flickered and winked like eyes in a dark wood. It seemed to Jack that he’d never really had a good look at the Moonvale Hills before –never from that height. Willoughby’s farm, it’s true, was on a rise some way above the village, which itself was several hundred feet higher than the bluffs. Add to that the height of the barn loft, and it would seem that he must have viewed the hills from even greater heights a thousand times. Perhaps it was the curious angle of vision here, or perhaps it was that the sea wind had scoured the sky particularly clean and he was simply seeing things clearly for the first time.

  There seemed to be the shadow of a city there again – the same city, it seemed, that MacWilt had been searching for the previous evening. There was the spire of a church steeple, sloped roofs and steep walls, inns and alleyways. It was all merely a darkness against the hilly horizon, like smoke, hovering there in phantom billows. Helen saw it too. It wasn’t the elixir. It sharpened and seemed to set, the smoky shadows turning to stone, shingles and leaves etching themselves into the grey curtain.

  The Ferris wheel soared over the top, and Jack held on and closed his eyes as it swept downward this time. There was no more stopping to let on passengers. They dropped in a giddy rush into the peanut and sawdust smell of the bluffs. Jack opened his eyes. There was no use looking so obviously frightened. He glanced at Helen, who stared straight ahead of herself as if she were studying some distant spot in the landscape. Skeezix looked past both of them in horror, mouth gaping. Jack swivelled around, following Skeezix’s gaze. There was the ride operator with his hand resting on the iron lever. He grinned at them past gumless teeth. His hair hung like seaweed around his shoulders, and the skin of his face was drawn and leathery like the skin of a mummified corpse. He winked. Jack heard Helen mutter ‘Really,’ as if she were half insulted by his being familiar, and as they swung skyward she said, ‘I wish he’d quit giving me that look. I can’t stand that sort of thing.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ Jack said truthfully, understanding that this time Helen hadn’t seen what he and Skeezix had seen.

  There was the city again, sharper now, its streets and alleys defined, windows swung open to let in the thin morning sunlight, the dim shades of what must have been people wending their way through the twisting streets. Jack half recognized the pattern of alleys and roads and streets, the short pier that stretched out into a sea of sky. There seemed to be a cut in the hills now, a valley that opened out into the oak trees of the foothills running down into the sea and into Rio Dell. It became a cobbled road.

  ‘Fancy a road through the woods there,’ said Skeezix with an air of disbelief.

  ‘What road?’ asked Helen.

  ‘There on the meadow, leading into the hills. Are you blind?’

  ‘I don’t see any road,’
said Helen.

  ‘I do,’ said Jack. ‘But I don’t understand it. Maybe we should follow it while we can still see it. Let’s get Dr Jensen from the beach. He’ll come along.’

  But the Ferris wheel spun them dizzily around again. Dr Jensen was out of sight beyond the cliffs. The music of a dozen distant noises played in Jack’s head. He waited for the city to reappear, and it did. It seemed fearfully distant, as if it didn’t really sit on the Moonvale Hills at all, but on some point in space far beyond them, as if Jack saw it through a powerful telescope and that, combined with its enormous size, made it seem close by, as if walking along that cobbled road to its gate was a matter of an afternoon outing.

  The noises of the carnival faded until Jack could hear only the muted echo of the calliope and the distant boom of the oven and the skreek and catch of iron rubbing against iron. He felt as if he were rushing toward something, or perhaps as if something were rushing toward him – a shadow in a dream, a wolf in the woods. It seemed as if he were both the pursued and the pursuer, and he was struck with the wild notion that he was chasing death, closing in on it, swinging toward it in his Ferris-wheel car as it soared again over the top of the little circle of sea air it circumnavigated. The rushing sensation heightened and he could hear the hiss of releasing steam, the clatter and clank of iron wheels, the airy scream of a train whistle that sounded as if it fled toward him across distant wooded hillsides.

  Then there was the whirling meadow again, the thousands of people like splashes of paint on a canvas. Jack watched for the ride operator, hoping he wouldn’t see what he saw before but far too curious, too caught up in his journeying, to look the other way. The man was gone. Dr Brown stood in his place, Skeezix’s empty cider cup in his hand. He seemed to be sniffing at it, his eyes half squinted shut. He looked up, nodding at Jack as their car tilted past.

  They lurched to a stop, one car back from the platform. The sounds of the morning meadow returned in a rush. Jack shook the muddle out of his head. The Ferris wheel revolved a notch, then stopped again. Dr Brown was emptying the cars. He paused for a moment and ran his finger around the bottom of the cup, licking the liquid slowly, savouring it, studying it. He pulled on the lever and up they went. Then again.

  The city in the hills had begun to dim. The road wasn’t a road any longer. It was a stream bed lined with polished stones. The water in it seemed to evaporate, all at once, and the rocks in the stream bed were white in the sun. Then they were dust that faded into the green of winter hillsides. The car teetered at the very top of the wheel. Skeezix didn’t seem interested in rocking it, or in foolery of any sort.

  There was a shout from below, and in a moment, before any of the three of them could make out what had happened, the masses of people milling about the carnival had shifted and moved toward the bluffs. Those at the front of the crowd broke into a run. People shoved and hollered. Some stood still and shook their heads. Jack heard someone call for a rope, and a half dozen people disappeared over the edge of the cliff, climbing down toward the sea.

  Dr Brown levered them down another notch. Jack could see the top of his oily head and the sloppily tied bandage around his arm. He was watching the cliffs too; that was clear. Passengers clambered off and set out in the wake of the rest of the crowd. The rope was brought. A man tied it to a tree, and a hundred hands helped him fling it over the edge of the cliff. Someone climbed back up. The Ferris wheel dropped. Jack wanted to pull his legs in, as if he were dangling them off the edge of a low pier into a shark-infested lagoon. He imagined withered hands clutching at his feet; he could picture the pale face of Dr Brown, swinging up onto a level with his own, then towering above him as he sat with his legs pinioned by the bar across his knees.

  Dr Brown had set the cup down. His hand fell from the lever and he took a few steps toward the cliffs as if contemplating something. The people in the car below Jack shouted at him to let them down too, but he seemed not to hear them.

  ‘Look!’ cried Helen, pointing away up the coast. There, trudging wearily along toward the carnival, up the dusty Coast Road toward the arched mouth of the carnival, was Dr Jensen.

  Jack hoorayed with joy. Skeezix pounded him one on the arm, easily as happy as Jack for reasons he couldn’t entirely explain. Dr Brown jerked around and looked back at them, as if he were suspicious that they might have disappeared, and then he turned and looked up the Coast Road himself, past the lines of canvas tents and plywood lean-tos. He seemed to slump just a bit and he ground his fist into his hand. Then he limped away toward his tent, leaving four Ferris-wheel cars full of complaining people behind.

  The next ten minutes were a confusion of tangled activity. Jack climbed down from the car. Skeezix wouldn’t. He’d wait, he said. But the comparatively solid scaffolding of the Ferris wheel attracted Jack, who had had enough by then of dislocated swinging. He waved at Helen from the ground, as if to tell her that everything was all right. He’d let them all down, one at a time. She waved back while Skeezix grimaced at him, screwing up his face and thumbing his nose. Jack hauled on the lever, surprised to see a shower of rust flakes scatter across his shoe. The first cart creaked down and two girls jumped off, immediately racing away toward the cliffs. He pulled on the lever again. It seemed to need oil; it was bent and stiff. The carnival wasn’t as fresh and tidy as he’d thought it to be; it was old and tired, and the atmosphere of gaiety and colour was a figment – an illusion built of calliope music and paint and milling people.

  In a moment his friends stood beside him. Skeezix fell to his knees and kissed the ground theatrically. Dr Jensen waved at them, then cut across the meadow toward the crowds lining the cliffs. The mass of people parted. The rope was hauled in like an enormous fishing line. A body was tied to the other end, the rope looped under its arms. It bumped over the edge of the cliffs and across the grass and wild-flowers. Dr Jensen set out at a run. Jack bolted along with Helen, and Skeezix puffed along behind them.

  ‘It’s Lantz!’ Helen shouted.

  Jack knew she was right. The buzz of the crowd diminished. They caught up with Dr Jensen. The meadow fell silent but for the calliope and the oven, like the sounds of the blood coursing through the veins of the empty carnival. There sounded from overhead the cawing of a crow, and Jack looked up to see the distant black bird above them in the sky, circling once out over the sea and then doubling back, dwindling in the east.

  8

  ‘THERE WAS A SLIDE last evening,’ one man was saying, shaking his head and talking past his pipe. It was Dawson, the vintner. ‘Lots of the boy’s trash down there, caught up among the rocks and scrub. Stuffed birds and such. He was in among ‘em. Fell, I guess, along with his shack. Must have washed him right down the hill while he slept. Dirty shame, that’s what I say. He didn’t have but one oar in the water, but he was all right. Better than some I could name.’

  With the help of two other men Jack didn’t know, Dawson laid Lantz’s body beneath an oak. The vintner had been the first to see him there, tangled in the roots and branches of cliffside brush. He pulled his pipe out of his mouth with one hand and dusted his trousers with the other, shaking his head. ‘White as a fish, ain’t he?’ There were murmurs of assent.

  The statement, though, didn’t half describe the ghostly pallor of Lantz’s skin. It was almost transparent, and it seemed to Jack, who had pushed to the front of the crowd with Dr Jensen, that he could see the yellow-white outline of Lantz’s skeleton through the veil of silvery flesh. Dr Jensen lifted Lantz’s head and parted his hair. He shook his own head. Lantz’s shirt was torn, although that didn’t suggest much, since Lantz seemed to have preferred torn, lacy-thin shirts and trousers to the newer clothes that Mrs Jensen left for him. He was scraped and cut from his tumble down the bluffs, but the papery-white skin, although chafed and torn and dirty, was bloodless. Here and there, mostly on his fingers and across his forehead, his skin seemed grey, as if the flesh beneath it were faintly charred.

  ‘It ain’t hardly natural, is it?’
asked the vintner half under his breath. ‘Rain washed all the blood off but didn’t touch the dirt.’ Dr Jensen looked at him and shook his head again minutely. The crowd gaped and craned their necks, trying to assess exactly how awful the tragedy had been so they could tell the story appropriately later. Most of those to the rear, who had tired of leaping and asking futile questions, had gone back to the carnival, and when Dr Jensen threw his coat over the body and Dawson the vintner jogged off to get his wagon, people drifted away in twos and threes until only a half dozen remained. Peebles was there. Jack hadn’t seen him in the crowd, but he’d no doubt been there all along, watching. He continued to peer at the corpse, as if he could see it through the coat, and he rubbed his hands together nervously until he noticed that Skeezix was staring in horror at his newly sprouted finger.

  He cast Skeezix a withering look and started to speak.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Skeezix said.

  ‘I’ll –’ began Peebles.

  Skeezix rushed at him, slamming him in the shoulder with his open palm and grabbing a handful of his jacket. Peebles reeled and then jerked up straight as Skeezix brought his free hand back, fist clenched.

  Dr Jensen leaped in, caught Skeezix around the shoulders, and hauled him away. Peebles followed, his jacket still clutched in Skeezix’s fist, his arms flailing, a look of terror in his eyes. He made a mewling sound which sickened Jack -not the sound of honest fright but of something cracked, broken, demented. Jack would gladly have seen Skeezix hit him. There was something in Peebles’s regard for Lantz’s corpse that oughtn’t to have been there. Jack felt like hitting something himself, and Peebles was the closest thing worth hitting. There had been something in Peebles’s eyes that had suggested he’d had a hand in Lantz’s death. Lantz hadn’t slid down any cliff in the night. He’d been pushed, maybe, but he hadn’t slid. He’d been in town and at the carnival. Dr Jensen knew that. Peebles knew that. Jack was sure that Peebles knew a great deal.