Land of Dreams

by James P. Blaylock

  Skeezix pulled himself across the sill, resting his chest on it, trying to swing his legs up. He failed and slid down to the counter, huffing for breath and looking back at the capering Harbin, who stepped forward with his tea strainer, grinning but wary. Skeezix smashed against the wall beneath the sill, ducking a swing that would have wrapped the chain around his neck, and reeled back, shouting out loud and leaping nimbly toward the canisters again.

  Jack put his shoulder against a saltshaker, a ceramic devil-ridden pig. He tilted it off the sill, and it smashed against the countertop a world away from where Harbin still whirled his device, trying for Skeezix one last time and looking over his shoulder at the open drawer, as if he were wondering what to haul out next – a corncob handle or a potato peeler or a honey dipper. Jack toppled another saltshaker off and then another, making noise. He shouted and screamed and leaned out over the flower box to grab up a pebble that filled his hand.

  Harbin turned in a rage and threw the tea strainer at Jack’s legs. The chain wrapped around him, and the strainer whipped past, pulling him off his feet, dragging him over sideways toward the ledge. Jack rolled and sat up, still holding his rock, pitching it into the face of the maniacal Harbin.

  Skeezix slid out from behind the canister and ran square into the villain’s back, knocking him onto his face, then leaping onto his back and vaulting up onto the windowsill. He teetered on the edge, nearly falling. Jack clutched at Skeezix’s doll garments, hauling him back across the sill, toward the window and the flower box and the open expanse of the grassy back yard. He shook off the chain, kicking the tea strainer down onto Harbin’s head, and then pushed another saltshaker down after it.

  There was a shuffling in the other room, a shout, the sound of a book hitting the floor. Jack and Skeezix froze, perched on the windowsill. A man’s voice shouted, ‘That’s it! It’s me!’ And a woman’s voice followed: ‘Hurry!’

  ‘Let out the damned cat!’ shouted someone else – one of the old chess players, maybe, who’d finally heard the cat’s yowling and somehow understood its plight.

  The bearded giant stepped in through the open door, towering above the counter, horrible to look at. The hairs in his beard, neatly trimmed, perhaps, in the eyes of a giant, covered his face like forest undergrowth. His nose was immense, his teeth ridged and broad like weathered slab doors painted ivory. Clamped between them was a pipe with a bowl big around as a tub and glowing like a furnace, the swirling reek of tobacco clouding out of it like fog off a tule marsh.

  The giant reached out and plucked up Algernon Harbin, who shrieked and cursed in terror. Then he set the struggling villain onto the wooden floor, jerking his hand back and shaking it, obviously bitten. He reached across and yanked open the pantry door, then stepped back as the cat leapt out, almost onto Harbin’s back. The cat hissed and batted with its paw, as if it knew the thing on the floor ought to be knocked down, that it was something worse than a rat. Then, with a screech and a snarl and a grisly snapping that made Jack and Skeezix look away, the cat picked its prey up in its teeth and ducked out through the cat door, the last of Harbin’s shrieks diminishing toward the distant bushes.

  The giant turned toward the stove, his face grim. Skeezix nudged Jack and cast him a broad, savage wink, standing very still and with a cockeyed grin on his face. Jack did the same, ready in an instant to bolt for the flower box.

  ‘We eat at Hoover’s tonight!’ shouted the giant. Just like I said.’ The boom of his voice nearly knocked Jack and Skeezix over backward. He pulled his pipe from his mouth suddenly and tapped the ashes out into the soup. Then he twisted off the gas and started back out of the kitchen. He stopped, pulled the open drawer even farther open, and hauled out the empty rat poison box, shaking his head and setting it onto the counter. ‘Soup’s done for,’ he said. He stepped into the doorway, turned, and looked straight toward the window. Jack nearly leapt out. The giant twisted the ring off his finger, grinned in their general direction, and flipped it end over end in the air, catching it, chuckling, and slipping it back on. He turned and strode out.

  Jack and Skeezix had climbed down the bushes, sprinted across the cropped lawn, and ducked under the fence before either one of them felt like speaking. They found themselves on the High Street again, looking across at the harbour. Suddenly the giant world seemed filled with a million perils. A stinkbug big as a dog eyed them from the gutter. A sparrow hawk swooped down to have a look and then swooped up again. They could hear the rustling, padding footsteps of what must have been another cat, stalking beyond the wooden fence they’d just slid under – a fence that rose above them like the wall of a canyon. A cat could scale it in an instant.

  ‘Come on,’ said Skeezix, and he darted out into the road, angling toward the side of the inn.

  ‘Why?’ shouted Jack, following, across the street and into the shadows.

  ‘Why not? Let’s hide until we can figure this out. Until we start to grow. Dr Jensen can wait till it’s safer. He’s not in any rush.’ They rounded the inn, hopping down stone stairs toward the bay, scuttling in behind a heap of wooden crates, breathing hard. Skeezix grinned, obviously proud of himself. ‘He thought we were saltshakers.’

  ‘What?’ asked Jack. ‘Who did?’

  ‘That monster did, after he set the cat on Harbin. Not that Harbin didn’t deserve it. It was our standing there like that that did it, that saved us. I was salt, being the fat one, and you were pepper.’

  Jack rolled his eyes. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What was that gag with the ring?’

  Skeezix shook his head. ‘Damned if I know. And what was Harbin doing there, poisoning innocent people? The giant must have known who he was. Did you see how he just emptied his pipe into the soup like it was nothing, like he was putting in herbs? We’re out of our depth here, is what I think. We stumbled into something that was none of our business. Good thing we did, though; it was all the noise and the fight that brought the giant around. They’d have sucked down the soup otherwise and been dead in their beds.’

  ‘How long do you suppose Harbin’s been here?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Skeezix answered, shrugging and peering out through the slats of the crate. ‘A couple of hours anyway. We ought to start growing fairly soon, as I see it. And when we do, we’d better have some clothes to put on or we’ll find ourselves in trouble. I’m not going anywhere near Elaine Potts under circumstances like that.’

  Jack nodded. ‘We ought to get back down to the river. We could hook some clothes off the clothes-line at the White sisters’ houses. We wouldn’t have to be any bigger than Harbin to yank a couple of pairs of pants out of their clothespins. Then we could drag them into the bushes and wait.’

  ‘Let’s go. We’ve got nothing to do here but crack our heads on the top of these crates.’

  They crept out, straight into the face of a rat sniffing along the crates. It was immense – fat and with short bristly fur and a tail a foot long. Its upper lip flickered up to expose a row of teeth that might have gnawed off Jack’s arm without a terrible lot of trouble. Jack and Skeezix backed away slowly. The rat sniffed after them, curious.

  ‘Back down the ramp,’ whispered Jack. ‘He won’t go near the guy fishing down there.’

  Skeezix nodded, mostly because their back was to the broad wagon ramp that ran down to where the dories put in, and there was no place else to go. It was a sound idea anyway, or at least seemed so until it became clear that the rat didn’t care who was fishing at the end of the ramp; it followed the two down, its tail twitching, ready to leap.

  ‘He’s pig drunk,’ said Skeezix.

  ‘The rat?’ Jack was astonished at the pronouncement.

  ‘The guy fishing. He won’t help. Look at him; he’s about to lose his shoe, dangling it like that from his toe. He’s stinking. The rat knows it; the guy’s probably a permanent fixture around here. They can’t arrest him for vagrancy as long as he carries a fishing pole.’

  Jack looked around him for a weapon: a stick, a sha
rd of glass, anything. The whole place seemed swept, as if they’d sent a man around earlier to make sure that there was no debris in the streets that might tempt a mouse-sized man into violence. But there was something – a fish hook, rusted and old with the eye snapped off. Jack lunged for it, plucking it up and waving it over his head to menace the rat, who stared straight at them through impossibly brown eyes, eyes that didn’t notice the hook or didn’t care. It was a useless weapon anyway.

  Jack bumped solidly into something soft. It was the back of the sleeping fisherman. Skeezix hit the man with both fists, effecting nothing. The rat crept forward. Jack spun around, closed his eyes, and shoved the hook through the man’s shirt and into the roll of flesh that sagged over his belt. The fisherman leapt awake, shouting, dropping his shoe into the harbour, waving his fishing pole in a mad, hopping dance.

  The rat was gone. One moment he was there; the next he’d leapt away, disappearing into the crates. The fisherman spied Jack and Skeezix and immediately tried to stomp on them. ‘Rats!’ he cried – an observation that would have been true ten seconds earlier – and he reeled back and forth, shrieking with anger when he stepped on a pebble with his shoeless foot, kicking at Skeezix as he ran toward the water.

  Jump!’ shouted Jack, and he leapt as he shouted, off the little stone kerb that ran along the edge of the ramp and angled down into the water. He landed in the floating shoe, and Skeezix landed on top of him. The shoe listed crazily for a moment, riding up and over a little swell, and then eddied out toward the rowing boats moored in the harbour.

  The fisherman raged on the shore, hopping on one foot. He reached for the escaping shoe with the tip of his pole, slapping the side, trying to turn it about. But the tide had caught it, and his prodding served only to spin it out farther. He cast his hook at it then, thinking to snag it and reel it in. The heavy hook whirled past, chasing Skeezix and Jack back in toward the toe. It snaked in again and again, finally biting into one of the laces. The shoe jerked about, skidding across the top of the water. Jack dashed out and snatched at it, wiggling the hook out, wishing he hadn’t lost his pocketknife. Halfway back to shore he pitched the hook into the water, and the tide picked them up again. The fisherman beat the water with his pole, furious, incapable in his fury of casting into the shoe again. In moments it was lost to him and he knew it. He stood with his hands on his hips and watched it float out toward the open ocean.

  A man in a battered stovepipe hat strode down the ramp toward the fisherman, asking about the shouting, and the fisherman told him, gesturing wildly, about the two tiny men who had stabbed him while he slept and stole his shoe and were sailing it out of the harbour. The hatted man shook his head slowly and walked back up the ramp, stopping at the top to say something but failing, perhaps, to find the words. He walked away up the High Street, leaving the fisherman scratching his head in wonder.

  The tide ran out quickly, swirling around and out the mouth of the harbour, past the headland, skidding up into a southwest swell and disappearing into the broad Pacific. The sun crept down toward the horizon, and a fog was blowing up, stretching along in a vast grey wall a half mile or so out to sea. Jack and Skeezix sat shivering, watching the land slip past, happy for the calm sea. There was the cove and the bluffs, and way down the shore, shimmering in the late afternoon sun, was the placid expanse of the Eel River. A land wind blew, surprisingly warm but cooling quickly as it travelled across the ocean. When night fell, the lacy dolls’ clothes wouldn’t be worth much. They could climb into the shoe to escape the wind, but they’d still have to sit on the ocean-soaked leather of the shoe sole. If the wind freshened, of course, their travels would be at an end. The shoe wouldn’t stand a chop.

  ‘There’s no carnival,’ said Skeezix suddenly, standing up and pointing toward the bluffs.

  ‘You’re right. And it’s still Solstice time too, otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten here.’ He stared at the bluffs for a moment, wondering at their immeasurable height and realising it was the first time he’d seen them from out at sea like that. ‘This is just like Dr Jensen’s voyage, isn’t it?’

  ‘I wish it was,’ said Skeezix. ‘Dr Jensen got pushed in to shore, at least. We’re just drifting farther out, into the fog. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Any time now.’

  It had already begun to happen. Jack untied his belt and then retied it a bit looser. They were growing. A shoe made a fine sort of longboat for mice, and a tolerable rowing boat for rats, but it wouldn’t amount to as much as a washtub for, say, a possum. ‘Long damned way to swim, isn’t it? Even if we were full size.’

  ‘I’m too beat to swim anywhere,’ said Skeezix. ‘And imagine swimming in the ocean during the Solstice. A sardine’s as big as a shark.’

  ‘Don’t mention sharks,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t want to think about sharks.’

  The shoe bobbed lazily on the swell as the sun set. They drifted into the first of the swirling fog and into darkness at the same time. The wind turned, feeling cold and damp, slanting out of the south, up the coast. The two of them crawled back into the toe, lying down with their heads toward the heel so that when it came time they could pull themselves out. Certainly they’d wake up before they were squeezed senseless by the shoe. Knowing that there was nothing they could do about what would surely come, and too tired to worry about things they couldn’t avoid, they untied their belts and lay in silence, listening to the ocean lap at the sides of their craft and watching the misty evening drift into misty night until they fell asleep shivering.

  14

  WITH A SUDDENNESS that made her gasp, Helen found herself alone in the little cart, whirring along through the weird darkness. For a slip of a moment she thought that Jack and Skeezix had flown out, or were snatched out, or had never been there in the first place and she was dreaming and would wake up.

  Then she knew, in a rush. They’d gone across without her. They hadn’t been quick enough with the bottle of elixir. Part of her was relieved, but only for an instant. If she’d been somewhere else – back in the attic, say, or at Dr Jensen’s – and not hurtling along through this black carnival ride, the relief would amount to more.

  She slid to the middle of the cart, where Jack had sat, but slid back again almost at once. There was something safe about being on the edge of the seat. She’d always felt like that, preferring the edge of the sidewalk to the middle of it, the edge of a sofa to the centre. Maybe it was because she felt she could get out quicker that way, or maybe it was because it was lonely being all alone at the centre of something.

  The wheels clacked. Little musty breezes stirred her hair. Cobwebs brushed her face. When Jack and Skeezix had vanished, she’d thought she had heard the sound of a distant train, and she’d smelled salt air and tar and the odour of mussels and barnacles clinging to pier pilings. Now there was nothing but silence and darkness and musty air, like in a cellar, and a light, dim and distant but rushing up at her along the corridor.

  She gripped the iron bar across her knees and bit her lip. The cart slammed into the circle of light, and there, sitting on a kitchen stool, stroking the fur of what appeared to Helen to be a dead cat, sat Peebles, grinning at her. She shut her eyes and was past him, into the pleasant darkness again. Laughter hooted somewhere ahead, and there was the sound of a blade thunking against a chopping block and then a cry that gurgled into nothing. Double-time music burbled out and then abruptly shut off. A door slammed, ‘Helen!’ whispered a voice, away off in the recesses of the darkness.

  She careened around an S-shaped bit of track, lurching from side to side. A light blinked on and she found herself hurtling toward a wall, painted with a likeness of the carnival itself, centred around the smoking oven. Jerking skeletons fed bleached bones into the smoking, open mouth of the thing, and just before she ducked her head and curled up in anticipation of smashing into it, steam hissed out in a rush, pouring over her, smelling horribly of hot ground bone.

  Then she was outside, still moving, aware that the c
arnival was empty and half dark. She felt suddenly sleepy and exhausted. She could easily lie across the seat and close her eyes. She was drained, was the truth of it, from the excitement of the Solstice, from the too-long day, from the shock of finding herself alone and Jack gone. There was the entrance again, the slab door opening, slowly – a black tunnel into which she was falling, as if down a well toward the soft and steamy centre of the earth.

  Peebles rattled along in his cart, directly behind Helen. He gnawed at his finger, liking the feel of the rubbery flesh. The numbness in it was spreading along his arm, just as Dr Brown had promised it would. Shortly, though, when the carnival had finished with Helen, the numbness would be gone. He smiled to think about it. He liked the idea of living at the expense of people like Helen. He hadn’t had a taste, so to speak, of Lantz. Helen was his first.

  He’d dealt handily enough with Miss Flees, who’d been tiresome. She was beneath him, whining away all the time, looking like a mess, mothering him. The Solstice pie had done the trick. She’d been stark, staring mad before she’d gone across. It was a pity he hadn’t any chance to deal with Jack and Skeezix too, but he’d get at them through Helen. And he’d be back, of course. Then they’d see – all of them. The only real regret was that he shared the carnival with MacWilt, but he’d work on that too. He didn’t need partners.