Land of Dreams (10 page)

‘Will you look at that,’ mused Skeezix, pointing at the tavern, and although he whispered it, his tone was such that Helen stood up from her book and muscled in between her two friends to have a look.

‘A telescope,’ said Jack, half to himself and half to Helen. MacWilt had built a telescope out of a whisky keg and a giant’s pair of glasses. With a rain-soaked rag he began swabbing the paint off the lenses. He went about the business methodically, stopping twice to consult his pocket watch and once to refill his pipe. Then he picked up the brass frames of the glasses and shoved them into the empty barrel, which he rolled away to the edge of the lean-to as if he were clearing the decks and getting down to some really serious work. By the time he was finished the sun hung just above the sea and beneath roiling clouds, threatening to be swallowed on the instant by one or the other. At the same time, impossibly, there seemed to be a sun rising above the Moonvale Hills.

Jack was struck with the notion of sprinting for home. He suddenly wanted his own telescope. MacWilt was setting up to look at something, and Jack wanted to know what it was. But even if he ran all the way, it would take him fifteen minutes in the mud and rain. The sun would set without him. He’d be cheated of discovering Mac Wilt’s secret and would accomplish nothing. And besides, it was moderately possible that the lenses of a commonplace telescope like his own wouldn’t have been ground for work like this. Even if he beat the sun home, he’d probably see nothing from his loft window but a commonplace evening sky, and Helen and Skeezix would have had all the fun of watching MacWilt.

The tavern keeper threw down his rag and set his pipe on the hood of a vent protruding through the roof. Shading his eyes from the waning light, he peered into the end of his keg telescope. He kicked out two of the shims under the rear legs and peered again, hauling the whole contrivance a half inch to the right as if to get exactly the right angle. He pulled out his pocket watch, squinted at it for a long moment, looked about him at the rain as if wondering whether it was lightening, then squinted at the watch again. His head nodded with the ticking seconds.

Toward Moonvale, beyond the clouds that veiled the heavens, stretched a streak of deep blue, a pastel slash of sky that lay upon the hills like a pool of sunlit water. The glowing orange arc of the sun, just a slice of it, shone in the blue, as if it had gone down in the ocean minutes earlier, then run off behind the hills to rise once again, forgoing its journey around the earth.

Above the hills the sky was all mist and sunlight, and stars showing weirdly above the sunlight like fireflies, all of it shivering through the rain, wavering like air above hot pavement. It seemed as if it were an image projected against the sky and would at any moment dissolve into particles and fall with the rain onto the grassy hillsides. Shadows deepened against the blue, lit golden around the edges in the light of the peculiar sun. The shadows formed the vague outlines of buildings, of a city, perhaps, as if somehow the church spires and bell towers of Moonvale were reflected against the sky. Jack had the curious feeling that it wasn’t Moonvale, though; it was the shadow of Rio Dell itself reflected there, rendered enormous by the oblique angle of strange sunlight. The rain slackened. Above it, distant and muted, sounded what might have been the chuffing of a great steam engine, a train, perhaps, rolling in over the hills toward the distant smoky city, the puffs of cloud on the horizon having been blown from its enormous stack.

A wind rose off the ocean and blew leaves out of the trees across the street, swirling them away toward the forest. MacWilt’s tarpaulin blew into the air like a hovering spook and enveloped his knees. Jack could hear the echoes of his curses even above the wind, but he paid them no mind at all. The shadows in the sky thickened, swirling, growing angular and sharp – buildings now, with windows and turrets and gables and pitched roofs towering so high above the hills that giants might live in them.

MacWilt stared through his odd glass, seeming to be oblivious to the piece of canvas sailing off the roof, to the debris that followed – broken stools, mops and buckets, a pair of huge framed oil paintings – all of it leaping on the rain-laden wind, whirling away through the air, and clattering on the cobbles of the street.

There sounded the crack of breaking glass, as loud and sharp as if a crystal chandelier had fallen against the floorboards of the attic. Jack saw great shards of the outer lens of MacWilt’s telescope fly out, as if exploded from pressure within the keg. The tavern keeper shouted and reeled back, clutching his face, even though the lens he had been peering through hadn’t been the one to shatter. His screams tore through the wind and rain, and he alternately snatched his hands away from his eyes, peering wildly around him, then jammed them against his face again, crying out, stumbling, dropping to his knees finally in a puddle and huddling there in the descending darkness.

In moments the night had grown black enough so that Jack, Skeezix, and Helen could see only MacWilt’s hunched shade. Toward Moonvale the false sun blinked out as if it were a candle flame, and the city of shadows with it. Thunder pealed, lightning forked across the hills, and the sky was nothing but darkness and rain and wind-lashed trees.

S
KEEZIX STOOD
with his mouth open. He shut his eyes and then opened them slowly, as if expecting something to have changed. Helen passed her hands in front of Skeezix’s eyes and snapped her fingers. Then she opened her mouth and mimicked his gape, goggling her eyes. ‘Soup’s on,’ she said, poking Skeezix in the stomach. Her friend blinked and looked around, first at Jack and then at Helen. The smell of cabbage broth drifted up through the vent.

‘Soup,’ said Skeezix in a disgusted voice. ‘I won’t eat it.’

Helen laughed, as if she thought it unlikely.

‘What do you suppose ...’ Skeezix began, but his voice trailed off into nothing.

Helen sat at the table again and began to leaf through the book. ‘I suppose you two had better look at this.’ She pulled the candelabra across the tabletop in order to illuminate the frontispiece. Jack bent over her, unbelieving. There was a drawing of a city in a china-blue sky: narrow towers built of hewn stone, arched bridges stretching over what might be rivers or what might be cloud drift, red clay roofs rising out of thickets of trunkless trees, high windows looking out on meadows that stretched into nothing, into the deep blue mirror of the heavens. It wasn’t the city they’d seen, but it floated in the same enchanted sky, tinted with twilight colours.

‘Forget the soup,’ said Jack, pulling up a chair. ‘We can eat at my place later.’

Uncharacteristically, Skeezix nodded, fetching a chair for himself. ‘Then we can eat again at Dr Jensen’s, after we show him this book and tell him about MacWilt and the glasses.’

‘Shut up about food,’ said Helen, ‘and listen to this: “Ours is one of many worlds,” ’ she read, starting at the top of the first page, ‘ “of millions of worlds, unending numbers of worlds, all the same and all different, all of them spinning past each other like the shadows of stars. We fancy ourselves alone in time and space, conceited as we are, and it is during the Solstice that we are reminded of just how inconsiderable we are in the vast eyes of eternity – an insight that should cause us to laugh at ourselves, but doesn’t. The mind, instead, freezes at the thought, and we go clambering after some means of fleeing from the little tract of countryside on which we have mapped our existence. Some of us are successful. Some of us are destroyed.”’

‘Some of us are mystified,’ said Skeezix, stepping back across the floor to have another look down the vent.

‘You’re mystified about everything,’ said Helen, ‘unless it’s on a plate. This is simple as pie.’

Skeezix grimaced. ‘I wish it
was
pie. We all
knew
that something happens during the Solstice. It’s like during a hot wind; everyone’s on edge. People skulking in alleys and on rooftops. Voices in the night. Villagers babbling in funny languages. And the carnival train on the ruined tracks – where did it come from? What happened to it? What did MacWilt think he’d see? That’s what I want to know. What
did
he see?’

‘I bet he saw his own face,’ said Helen, ‘reflected in the spectacles. Imagine what that would have done to him. Imagine what it would do
to you
. Look at this and shut up. This is all about legends concerning these “many worlds”, as she calls them –’

‘Who?’ asked Skeezix.

‘Pardon me?’

‘Who is
she?’

Helen looked up and grinned. ‘Guess.’

Skeezix shook his head tiredly, as if he couldn’t be, bothered with it. Helen knew that he was bursting to know. So was Jack, but Jack wasn’t as much fun to bait as was Skeezix. Helen acted as if she were satisfied with Skeezix’s pretended indifference. She grinned at him, turned a page, and began to read silently. Jack peered over her shoulder, not half so mystified, in truth, as Skeezix had claimed to be.

Jack was used to mysteries. He’d known for years that there had been odd circumstances surrounding his father’s death – or disappearance, whatever it was – that had been kept from him, perhaps because Willoughby didn’t entirely understand them himself; perhaps because Dr Jensen thought it safer. And it wasn’t just the bare facts of the business. He’d kept his ears open wide enough to have gleaned a fragment of the story here, a shard of it there. There was no shame in it - at least not in his eyes. That his mother had been loved or sought after by a trio of men, including his father, was nothing to keep hidden. Dr Jensen had been one of those men. So what? Jack had known for years that she’d died four years after childbirth, and that his father had insisted the death was the deliberate doing of a doctor – one Algernon Harbin – who had, along with Dr Jensen, been an abandoned lover.

The details of the murder on the bluffs at the Solstice carnival were scandalous enough to satisfy an entire village full of gossips, even when they were busy elsewhere – with MacWilt’s monster and the canary gypsy and the taxidermist’s son. Lars Portland had called the murderer out, had shot the villain Harbin in the head, at close range, and had himself been shot through the heart. It was cold-blooded murder in the eyes of the law. But not half so cold-blooded, in Jack’s eyes, as the murder of his mother for the sake of-what? – revenge against her husband? Against
her
for having rebuffed the dark and clever Algernon Harbin?

The corpse of the murdered Dr Harbin had disappeared. It was thought that he’d pitched over backward off the bluffs, into the moonlit Pacific. His body had quite likely been borne south on the longshore current, food for fishes and crabs and, finally, for sea birds on the sands of some deserted cove north of San Francisco. The operator of the carnival disappeared with it, and the carnival with him. He was sought for weeks afterwards by the county sheriff although the search could hardly have been carried out with much enthusiasm. Both parties were dead, after all. There was no one left to prosecute. Dr Jensen had been coroner at the time, and he’d buried Lars Portland in the cemetery beside his wife, after coming to conclusions that would have seemed pointless to question.

Dr Jensen had always seemed to Jack to be the real victim: denied the woman he loved; burying his best friend, who had not been denied that woman. And Jack had suspected for years that Dr Jensen knew more than he let on, that there were remnants of the mystery that had not been buried beneath the last spadeful of dirt in the Rio Deli cemetery. Dr Jensen, he had always supposed, would reveal them in good time, but now it was beginning to seem as if certain of those revelations were blowing in on the wind, or along the ruined tracks of a years-decayed railroad.

‘I give up,’ said Skeezix, grimacing at Helen. ‘You win. You’ve got the book and I haven’t. I won’t wrestle you for it, because you’re a girl and might cry.’

‘Because I’d twist your nose, you mean. Forget it. Ask me nice or eat cabbage soup.’

Skeezix strolled across and plucked up Helen’s braids, one in either hand, dancing them above her head so that their shadows leaped on the wall. ‘This is Perry and Winkle, the battling braid boys, reenacting the battle of the pier,’ he said, making the braids bow to each other and then launch themselves forward, pummelling each other while he made realistic battle noises with his tongue. Helen twisted around in her chair and slugged him twice in the stomach, at which he jerked back, hooking his foot around her chair leg, causing the chair with Helen in it to topple over backward onto the floor in a clatter of knocking and laughing. Helen shoved her hand against her mouth and managed to punch Skeezix one last time before rolling clear of the fallen chair and standing up.

During the melee Jack had picked up the book, and so Helen slugged him too and took it back. Skeezix hooted with laughter,
Triumphing
through his fingers. A voice sounded from below. ‘Who is that?’ it shrilled - the voice of Miss Flees. ‘Is that you, Bobby? Are you in the attic? Who’s in the attic? I’ll find out! Come down out of there! Is it you, Helen?’ There was a pause as Miss Flees listened. Skeezix, Jack, and I Helen stood still, barely breathing, but grinning at each other. Jack crept across and looked down through the vent. There was Miss Flees below, holding a wooden spoon in her hand, with her head cocked sideways. Peebles was there, sitting atop a stool.

Jack motioned to Helen and winked, and Helen – very softly, almost birdlike – began to mimic the high, windy voice of. Mrs Langley the attic ghost, reciting, as the ghost often did, snatches of romantic poetry about dead lovers and ruined lives. Her voice rose and fell in the still attic. There wasn’t a sound from below. Miss Flees stood as before with her head tilted and listening. Helen abruptly shut up and gave Skeezix a fierce look, as if to advertise what she’d do to him if he didn’t contain his laughter.