Land of Dreams

by James P. Blaylock

  ‘I’m going.’ Jack looked at the clock. It was time. The night was drawing on. He had hours yet, it was true, but if he missed it, there would be twelve wearisome years before he had another chance at it, and the thought of those twelve years made the few hours left to him seem more like minutes ticking past. It must have seemed the same to his father.

  ‘Did he find my mother?’

  ‘He said he knew where she was, now, and what to do about it,’ said Dr Jensen. ‘That’s why he couldn’t wait; he couldn’t risk losing her again.’

  ‘I’m going with you,’ said Skeezix. ‘It was my idea in the first place, you know. Helen was the one with the doubts.’

  ‘I didn’t have any doubts. I knew it was foolery from the start, and I believe it even more now. But you still need a sea anchor. You’re not trustworthy enough, either of you. I’m going with you this time.’

  Jack looked at her doubtfully. He ought to protest: Helen, after all. It couldn’t be risked. He glanced at Dr Jensen, half expecting the doctor to do the job for him, to refuse to let Helen go. Skeezix and he were looking for something, after all – heaven knew, maybe, what it was. But Helen; what was she after? What propelled her? Dr Jensen said nothing, only nodded. Helen moved toward the door, buttoning up her jacket.

  ‘I don’t half understand this,’ Mrs Jensen said. ‘But wherever you’re going, good luck. Come back, won’t you?’

  ‘Either tomorrow or twelve years from tomorrow; sometime,’ said Jack. ‘We don’t altogether understand this either, but we’ll be back.’

  ‘Not through a gopher hole,’ said Helen, as they pushed out into the weather. ‘Don’t look for us in a gopher hole.’

  ‘I’m sure I won’t,’ shouted Mrs Jensen. Silhouetted against the glow of the open door, she waved a handkerchief at them as they hurried out into the windy alley, bound for the bluffs.

  12

  ‘ARE YOU SURE he said the Flying Toad?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure. My memory is longer than that.’ Helen brushed her hair back and pulled her jacket around her. The night seemed to have darkened; it lay now out on the meadows in stark, opaque contrast to the lights of the carnival. The three of them stood in the shadows of the fun house and looked across toward where little buggy-like carts careened along a track, spouting steam like wheeled teakettles, disappearing into the interior darkness of a plywood building scabbed together like a house of cards. ‘Besides, this can’t be coincidence. There’s the Flying Toad itself. That’s the one, just like your father said.’

  They stood in silence for a moment, cold with ocean wind and with anticipation. Jack shivered. They’d looked for Dr Brown but hadn’t found him. Jack expected as much. The doctor wouldn’t have clubbed Jensen and stolen the elixir and then sat around and pondered it. He’d have gone across himself by now.

  An oddly jerky and debilitated lot of men operated the rides and pitched split logs into the beehive oven. What Jack had seen in the face of the man at the Ferris wheel, that hadn’t been hallucination; he was certain of that now. He’d seen things clearly in that moment, because of the elixir. He couldn’t be certain that the carnival workers were the recent inhabitants of the ripped-open graves or of the washed-out crypts along the Eel River, but he’d bet the quarter he had in his pocket on it. They were doing the bidding of another master now; that is to say, if Dr Brown had been the master. Perhaps the carnival was the master. It was an eerie thought – one that disinclined him toward riding on the so-called Flying Toad. There wasn’t anything toadlike about it.

  A big cleated door sprang open every thirty seconds or so to admit another car, accompanied by a drawn-out mechanical shriek, no doubt triggered by the door’s opening. Low laughter sounded, from within, clipped off when the door banged shut, then starting up again when a door on the opposite end opened and a car shot out – propelled, it seemed, by an ocean of windy steam – its occupants screaming with fear and wonder at whatever terrible mysteries they’d glimpsed within.

  Skeezix shoved both Helen and Jack farther back into the shadows. He pointed down the line of tents. A light had been burning in Dr Brown’s tent, but the shadow of the man slumped over the desk within hadn’t been the shadow of the doctor. Now the flag jiggled and flew back. The hunched figure of MacWilt the tavern keeper came out. He wore a robe tied with a rope, like a medieval monk, and he appeared to be shrivelled and bent, as if burdened by the weight of his own evil and the trials of the past days.

  He’d given up his stick. He walked with his head twisted back so that he had to swivel his eyes around and down in order to see -but he could see; that much was clear. He looked up and down the avenue before him. The few late-night revellers gawked and circled warily around him when they walked past, as if he were a dervish about to run mad. He shuffled toward the three in the shadows, coming their way, it seemed, by chance. Jack could feel Skeezix tense up beside him, ready, probably, to pummel MacWilt into senselessness if he was threatened.

  He passed them by, walking toward the oven and cursing at the men who gathered round it. Jack could see his eyes, glowing in the lamplight. They were grey, like the belly of a catfish too long out of water. It was impossible that he wasn’t blind. It was impossible that Peebles’s finger had sprouted too. It had been Dr Brown’s doing, is what it had been, and now Dr Brown was gone. MacWilt was in charge. The carnival had a new operator, a worthy successor to Wo Ling and Algernon Harbin.

  When MacWilt disappeared around the corner of the fun house, Jack stepped out into the light. Skeezix and Helen weren’t slow in following. Jack couldn’t imagine they were eager, but they knew, as he did, that standing and shivering wouldn’t work any magic. Sliding in through a hinged waist-high gate, they climbed aboard a buggy and waited there. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack watched the rain drizzle down through the light. It was taking an eternity. MacWilt would return and there’d be trouble. They would only have one chance that night.

  They lurched. The wheels creaked into motion, and the buggy shot forward suddenly along its track, rushing toward the still-closed door. It flew open in their faces when it seemed they’d slam against it for sure, and then it swung shut and left them in darkness.

  A light flared beneath an enormous grinning skull, and the body of a man swung out on a boom, into the light, whumping into the fender of the buggy. Helen shrieked. The man’s head flew off, tumbling goggle-eyed across in front of them and whacking with the sound of a split melon into a basket of heads beside the track. The headless corpse swung back into darkness as laughter chattered out, echoing off the plywood ceiling. A suddenly burning candelabra revealed a laughing skeleton, draped with what might have been seaweed or might have been dried flesh. It sat on a high stool, nodding forward as if to pitch bodily into the buggy, and then it was gone too, back into darkness and silence. They clattered on along a black tunnel, into a cold wind, like air blowing out of a musty cellar.

  A light glowed ahead of them. Something was coming up. The ride must be immense, or else cleverly looped around like a maze. There was the facade, suddenly, of a building, standing along the edge of the sea. It was a painted prop, tilted against wooden supports, wound around with the long-dead branches of wild berry vines. Along with it was the smell of fish and tar and sea foam, of steel shavings and dry old leather upholstery and rain-soaked shingles. There were a thousand smells together, and Jack felt compelled to sort them out, to savour each one, except that they were rocketing in through the open door, sliding across wooden floorboards in a rush of oil-tainted steam. A train whistle moaned, sounding rusty and strained and distant through the steam, and then, as if a curtain had been snatched aside, it loomed suddenly in front of them rushing out of the darkness, its lantern throwing glints of light into the evaporating steam.

  Jack threw himself in front of Helen, shielding his face with his arm, hearing Helen shout into his ear. The car spun dizzily, caroming off the rushing train, past car after car of travellers bound for unguessed destinations. Then they s
werved off into the darkness, slamming through a wall built of paper and cobwebs and what seemed to be a billion amber wings of swarming termites. They stopped, ratcheted round once, and shot away again, the train whistle evaporating, giving way to an insect hum and once again the bubbling of nearby laughter.

  At the sound of the laughter, Helen gripped Jack’s arm as if she were going to rip it off. The pressure reminded Jack of why they’d climbed onto the ride in the first place, and he was struck with the strange certainty that if he didn’t do something to change their course – to finish what they’d started – they’d whiz and lurch forever through the dark corridors.

  With his left hand he plucked the bottle of elixir out of his jacket pocket. There was no time left for indecision. He unstoppered it with the same hand that held it, tilted it to his lips, and drank – just a tiny sip. He handed it to Skeezix. It would have been more gentlemanly, perhaps, to give it to Helen first, except that he was half afraid of it – more than half.

  At once there was a patch of illuminated meadow grass, littered with a basket and crumpled cloth – the remains of a picnic. Jack felt the creakings of vague memories, something suggested by the dilapidated basket, by the yellow checks of the cloth. But they were gone and a light glowed ahead, steamy with rising fog. There was Willoughby’s farm – a miniature of it, or else the farm itself, very distant, with oak leaves piling up across the front porch and an autumn wind slamming the screen door shut over and over again. And then there was a pond, fed by a clear stream, with leaf-stained water and grass growing down its banks. He could sec trout swimming slowly in the rocky depths, and for a moment, just before they plunged again into darkness, he could see his own face painted in the weedy pebbles of the pond floor.

  Glowing windows seemed suddenly to be flashing past them at a prodigious rate, as if they careered along once again beside a train. Darkness slammed down and a howling arose. A clown leered into view, seeming to float in the air, wearing a pointed cap and ruff collar and smeared with whiteface. He turned toward them, as if surprised to see them hurtling at him. Out of the air, out of the darkness, he contrived a bleating lamb and prepared to slit its throat with a billhook, grinning all the while and whistling with the sound of wind blowing under a door. Jack looked away.

  There was the shriek of a train whistle once more, of escaping steam. Skeezix handed the bottle back, and Jack turned with it, thinking to give it to Helen and thinking too that Helen mightn’t have any stomach for it any more. But Helen was gone. He sat alone with Skeezix. They were aboard a train – inexplicably, instantly – chuffing into the arched mouth of an enormous stone depot.

  Jack smashed his eyes shut and then opened them again. He felt for Helen beside him, sure that this was a trick of carnival enchantment. There was nothing beside him but the wood and leather and brass of a train car.

  ‘Am I imagining this?’ asked Skeezix.

  ‘No. Helen’s gone. She didn’t get a chance at the elixir.’

  Skeezix was silent, waiting. Jack watched out of the window, thinking of Helen on that endless carnival ride. It was his fault, wasn’t it, taking his time with the elixir? But what could he do about it now?

  The mouth of the depot drew toward them slowly, although it appeared that the train they were in was rushing along. Through the window he could see stars in the twilight sky, although somehow it seemed as if that sky weren’t very deep, as if it were the cleverly painted ceiling of a vast rotunda. There was fog outside, or steam. Nothing moved and nothing broke the dim monotony of the landscape, if landscape it was. Jack would have expected a town, perhaps, along the tracks – a city, judging from the size of the depot. But there was nothing, not a solitary light, not a shadow. It wasn’t a landscape, certainly, that one could walk through; there wasn’t even a horizon, just a general darkness that paled gradually into the twilight of the sky.

  He felt like a fool. What in the world had he meant by meddling with the elixir? He had thought it was something like fate, like destiny, only he didn’t believe in any such thing. It had been his father, luring him along, and Mrs Langley with her book, and Dr Jensen with his sailboat shoe, and Mac Wilt with his telescope built out of the spectacles of a giant.

  Two hours earlier he had felt as if he understood the whole business clearly. Here was a village full of people capering with excitement at the idea of going across, but none of them actually getting there. It half appeared as if they hadn’t really wanted to cross at all but were consumed with the idea, like a child seeing just how close he could creep to the edge of a precipice without actually tumbling off. Jack had the elixir; he had Mrs Langley’s book; he had a father who’d been across and come back again; he knew where the giant’s clothes had come from; he knew who Algernon Harbin was; he knew about the warehouse in San Francisco. He had a suitcase full of information – plenty, he had figured, for a brief visit to Mrs Langley’s ‘land of dreams’. But now that he was there, he hadn’t any idea on earth of what to do, and his wonder and fear of the misty night outside the train windows was overshadowed only by his desire to be home again, reading by candlelight in the loft and knowing that Helen was safe.

  Skeezix punched him in the shoulder and grinned. We made it, his grin seemed to say. Jack grinned back weakly. He upended the bottle that had contained the elixir, letting one last green drop slip out onto his trouser leg. Skeezix’s grin slumped momentarily. ‘I hope we don’t need more of that to get home,’ he said.

  Jack shrugged, as if to say the die was cast and there wasn’t a frightful lot they could do about it.

  Skeezix grinned again. ‘Who cares?’ he said. ‘What do we have to lose?’

  Jack immediately thought of a half dozen things he had to lose. They quite likely wouldn’t have seemed so valuable to him yesterday, but now … ‘I could draw you up a list.’

  There were other people in the train car, lots of them. Jack didn’t recognise anyone. Most of them appeared calm enough, some of them anxious, some of them vaguely frightened, as though, like Jack, they wished suddenly that they weren’t there. One man three seats up twirled his hair. A woman across from him talked incessantly, explaining to an old gentleman how it was she’d come across – something to do with a basket of eel eggs and a salt shaker full of dust that had blown in on the Solstice wind that she’d strained out of the air with a sieve made of fishbones and the hair of dead men. The old man looked straight in front of him, nodding now and then. When she left off finally he nodded at his smouldering pipe and winked at her. Jack saw her tilt her head forward, look into the pipe bowl, and recoil with horror. She stood up and lurched toward a different seat, casting a look of revulsion at the man, who shrugged, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and fell asleep.

  The depot loomed ahead. It had to be miles away, given the rate of speed at which they were rushing upon it. But perspective, somehow, was muddled. It seemed to Jack to be a painted prop again, not a real depot at all, suspended in front of the moving train, racing along at a parallel speed like a tin rabbit in front of a greyhound. And then they were there, suddenly and without warning. They steamed into the cavernous mouth of the building and were swallowed up, instantly seeming to be deep inside, with the arched darkness of the entry portal a half mile behind them.

  There were no end of trains, pulling in and out, running along beside them, now braking to a stop as they rushed past, now abruptly angling off onto side tracks. Dim violet lamps burned in the steamy distances. Whistles blew. Clouds of vapour whirled up from beneath them, dissipating in the darkness overhead. People walked along beside the tracks, between trains, and up and down companionways leading to upper and lower levels that Jack could only guess at. Some of the people walked with a purpose, hurrying toward a destination. Others looked around them, puzzled, getting in the way, leaping with startled surprise at a rush of steam or the shriek of a train whistle. Vendors hawked hot potatoes and coffee and souvenir hats from wheeled carts. ‘Last chance!’ one man shouted, waving a little pennant ove
r his head. ‘Time’s wearing on!’

  ‘I could use a roll and coffee,’ said Skeezix as the train lurched to a stop, rolled forward twenty feet, and stopped again.

  Jack watched the people milling outside. ‘I could use a map,’ he said.

  A porter in a blue cap and striped jacket stepped up and opened the door of the train car, peering in at them and grinning. The woman who’d sieved the Solstice wind stood up and rushed toward the open door, gesturing back toward the old pipe-smoking gentleman, goggling in the face of the porter. ‘That man should be arrested,’ she announced. Then she gave the old man a last withering look and stepped out onto the platform. People rose and began to file out, Jack and Skeezix following along behind.

  Another train eased up alongside theirs and stopped. Jack stopped to regard the passengers – the same mixture of troubled, anxious faces and calm, experienced travellers. One woman wept and another patted her shoulder. A hurried-looking man in an overcoat held his hat and stood in the aisle, as if he were late for an appointment. A merry-looking couple sat side by side, chatting amiably, the man gesturing roundabout and out the window as if he were a seasoned traveller, had been through it any number of times, and was explaining their condition to the woman – who hadn’t been, but who trusted her companion entirely.

  Jack was struck suddenly with the familiar look of the man. His clothes were ill-fitting, as though they were borrowed and he’d done his best to make them work. There was something in the high cheekbones and the sandy hair and in the depth of the man’s smile – what was it? Jack had seen him before, and recently. He glanced at the woman. ‘No!’ Jack said, half under his breath, in surprise rather than denial. He slid between the seats, pressing up against the window, fumbling with the latch. The woman wore a black and red velvet dress. Her thick black hair fell about her shoulders, half hiding a gold necklace from which hung a rectangular green stone, a cut emerald. She was his mother, and the man was his father. Jack had seen him for an instant on the riverbank behind the taxidermist’s shop when he’d been saved from Dr Brown.