Authors: James P. Blaylock
Land of Dreams
NOVELS
The Elfin Ship
The Disappearing Dwarf
The Digging Leviathan
Homunculus
Land Of Dreams
The Last Coin
The Stone Giant
The Paper Grail
Lord Kelvin’s Machine
The Magic Spectacles
Night Relics
All The Bells On Earth
Winter Tides
The Rainy Season
Knights Of The Cornerstone
Zeuglodon
The Aylesford Skull (forthcoming)
COLLECTIONS
Thirteen Phantasms
In For A Penny
Metamorphosis
The Shadow on the Doorstep
Novellas
The Ebb Tide
The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs
With Tim Powers
On Pirates
The Devil in the Details
Copyright © James P. Blaylock 1987
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Dirk Berger.
Cover design by John Berlyne.
Published as an ebook in the United States by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD.
ISBN: 978-1-936535-60-6
CONTENTS
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
To Viki
and to Lynn, Ron, Tim, and Katy,
who have the right inclinations
Saint-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter XX, which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX, which is hearing the band play in the gardens.
– Robert Louis Stevenson
'An Apology for Idlers’
In which the carnival arrives
I
T HAD ALREADY BEEN
raining for six days when the enormous shoe washed up onto the beach. It was an impossible thing, as big as a rowing boat, with frayed laces trailing a garden of pink hydra and blue-green algae.
It was almost evening, in mid-autumn. The sky was choked with clouds and with spindrift from waves breaking across exposed reefs – vast shadowy breakers that quartered round the headland and drove towards shore like skating hillsides, feeling for the shallows and throwing themselves over in a booming rush so that you could hear them break a quarter of a mile above the village, beyond Edgware farm and beyond the Tumbled Bridge. Along the horizon, like a wrinkled blue ribbon that stretched north from the headland towards the edge of the world, the hem of the sky shone beneath the clouds, looking like old porcelain, watery pale with a mist of rain falling across it.
The shoe lay on the beach and smelled of kelp and wet leather and salt spray. Its tongue had shoved up under the laces and was pointed cockeyed at the sky like the misshapen sail of a fairy-tale boat, and every now and again a wave greater than the last would wash up across the sand in a churning of sea foam and push the shoe a foot or two farther along, until, when Skeezix found it just at sunset, it sat high above the declining tide, as if some wandering giant had left it there and gone home.
It was full of sea water that leaked past the stitching in the soles, but the leather had swelled so much during its voyage that the water leaked out only very slowly, and it would still be mostly full even by morning. Under the threatening sky the water in the shoe was as dark as well water. There was the shimmer of something in the depths, though, the silver-green shimmer offish scales or silver coins; it was impossible to say which without rolling up your sleeve and reaching down into the cold and shadowed water.
Skeezix was what Bobby Wickham called himself and had called himself since he was five years old, ever since he’d seen a picture of an old man in an ostrich-plume hat on the wall of the library. He’d been told it was King Skeezix of Finland, who had, a century earlier, been so famous that now his picture could be found in any good illustrated dictionary. The name had sounded birdlike to him, and the ostrich feather, when he was five, had looked grand as anything. Now, at sixteen, it looked foolish, but the name had stuck and he probably couldn’t get rid of it even if he wanted to.
He peered down into the depths of the water. The sides of the shoe rose almost to his neck. If it was silvery coins that lay within, they were too deep to reach anyway, and only looked like they hovered near the surface because of a trick of the slice of sunlight that glowed for the moment beneath the rim of the clouds above the sea. Skeezix hoisted his tattered umbrella when the breeze freshened and swept a patter of raindrops down the back of his coat collar. The glints of silver winked out, and he could see they had been nothing but the sunlit tails of a school of little fish.
There was no explaining the shoe. It had been on the ocean for a week or so – that was easy to see – but whether it had sailed across from some distant land or had drifted south in the longshore current Skeezix couldn’t guess. Like the enormous spectacles found two weeks ago in the tangled eelgrass of a tidal pool, the origins of the shoe were a mystery. It occurred to Skeezix that he ought to hide it. He ought to drag it behind a heap of rock and driftwood so as to save it for Dr Jensen. The doctor should be the first to see it, to study it. They’d taken the eyeglasses away from Dr Jensen and hung them on the wall of the tavern beside the wonderful two headed dog. The lenses were crusted with salt and sand and dried seaweed, and the brass of the frame was etched with turquoise verdigris as if it were turning into a jewel. They’d scraped the muck from the lenses with a spatula and painted comic eyes on them, so that the glasses seemed to be peering at you from the tavern wall. Right next to them hung the two-headed dog, looking woeful, its fur sketchy and matted.
Skeezix didn’t at all like the idea of it. They’d been making fun – of the sorry dog, of Dr Jensen. There were some things that oughtn’t to be made fun of. Heaven knows they’d made fun of
him
often enough, mainly because he was fat and because he walked on the beach every day, rain or sun. He’d almost given them up –his walks on the beach – when it had begun to seem like the rain wasn’t going to stop.
On the first day of heavy rains he’d slipped out of the orphanage window at dawn, after having lain awake most of the night listening to the rain drum on the tin roof and rush and gurgle through the gutters, and he’d spent the morning rummaging in tide pools under his umbrella. He collected a pail full of brittle stars, which Dr Jensen could ship south to the city, and by ten or eleven it made little difference that he carried the umbrella, for he was soaked with rain and seawater despite it. He had built a fire of driftwood under the cavern in the hillside, and he sat watching the rain fall all afternoon through a veil of smoke, stringing seashells on line pulled from the ribs of the umbrella.
Dr Jensen would want the shoe. Heaven knows what he’d do with it, but he’d want it, if only to study it. He’d wanted the spectacles very badly, but the tavern keeper, a man named Mac Wilt, who had a crooked nose and one eye screwed almost shut because of some wasting disease, wouldn’t give them to him. He would hang the spectacles on the wall of the tavern, he’d said, and Dr Jensen could hang himself. What would MacWilt do with the shoe? Make a planter box of it, probably, out in front of the tavern, then let it go up in weeds out of spite.
The sea swallowed the sun at a gulp just then, and the cvcning beach fell into shadow. Skeezix slipped his hands beneath the weathered shoe sole and lifted. It was like trying to lift a house. He’d have to bail the water out of the shoe before he could even think of moving it, and even then it might be futile unless he had help. His stomach was beginning to growl too, and he felt suddenly that if he didn’t cat he was going to faint. The little bit of lunch he’d brought along hadn’t lasted him past noon. He’d had nothing to eat since. He would eat at the orphanage – for what it was worth – then slide out and eat again at the doctor’s. Somehow he wanted nothing more than hot potatoes with butter and salt on them, about ten, all steaming on a plate with the butter pooling around them. He’d get cabbage soup and bread again at the orphanage, but there were worse things to eat. He’d eaten raw mussels once when Dr Jensen had gone south for three days; he could still remember the slimy liver texture of the things and the pier-piling flavour. He would have starved then, probably, if Elaine Potts, the baker’s daughter, hadn’t come through with doughnuts. Good old Elaine; she was gone now, though, on holiday down south, and wouldn’t be back for a week. She’d miss the Solstice entirely.
Hunger overwhelmed him like a silent rushing wave, and he found himself clambering up the slope towards the Coasts Road and the railroad tracks and the village beyond. Nightfall would hide the shoe. No one would find it in the dark, least of all MacWilt, who would be busy pouring ale into pitchers and scooping up coins until well past midnight anyway. The shoe was safe enough. From the hilltop along the road it looked like nothing more than an oddly shaped tide pool. He’d eat, then hunt up Jack Portland. Jack would help him with the shoe. They’d come back after it that night, and the two of them would haul it up to the doctor’s house on a wagon, and old Jensen would answer the door in his nightshirt and cap, Mrs Jensen at his elbow. It would be nearing dawn. He and Jack would be ragged and wet from having worked all night at saving the shoe, and while the doctor went out in lantern light in the pouring rain, wearing his slippers, Mrs Jensen would hurry them in and give them cookies and coffee and cheese and pickles and slices of pie.
Skeezix loved to think about food, especially when he was hungry. Around four every afternoon he daydreamed about meals he’d sometime eat, and he had sworn, years earlier, that one day he’d travel from one end of the world to the other, eating in every café and inn along the way. He’d eat two desserts, too; if he was going to be a fat man, he’d be a good one. Halfway measures weren’t worth dirt when it came to food.
When he got there, the village was dark beneath the clouds and the coastal trees. Living rooms and parlours were cheerful with fires burning in grates. Smoke tumbled up out of chimney pots. Skeezix trudged along through the wet, up a cobbled alley that wound along parallel to the High Street. Through lit windows he could see families already eating dinner around wooden tables – sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers all gobbling away at mashed potatoes and pot roast and slivered apples with cinnamon. He could remember his own mother’s face if he tried, but he didn’t very often try. He couldn’t remember, though, ever having sat around a table like that and eaten with his family. He’d had no family, not really.
Now he had Jack and Helen – and, of courśe, Peebles and Lantz. Jack didn’t live in the orphanage; he lived with Mr Willoughby up the hill. Jack was in love with Helen, although he wouldn’t let on that he was, even to his best friend, Skeezix. Helen did live at the orphanage and had lived there at least as long as had Skeezix. What she felt about Jack she kept a mystery, which no doubt confounded Jack.
Skeezix didn’t like Peebles. Nobody did, really, except perhaps Miss Flees, who ran the orphanage, or at least came as close as anybody did to running it. Peebles ‘kept her informed’. That was what she was always saying: ‘Peebles will keep me informed.’ And then she’d squint up her eyes like she had a sand grain in them and nod her head very slowly. Peebles had a nose like MacWilt’s nose – like someone had yanked on it with pliers –and he was always after Miss Flees to be after Skeezix not to eat so much.