Land of Dreams (14 page)

The carnival was lit like a Christmas tree. Jack could almost see the green of meadow grasses roundabout it. He swivelled his telescope toward it, focused, and made out the shadow of someone moving about amid the machinery of the rides, all of which, weirdly, were spinning and whirling and lurching on the firelit meadow. The shadow – Dr Brown, no doubt – strolled here and there, throwing levers, turning great iron wheels, stepping back and shading his face from the issuance of whirlwinds of steam. Two figures beyond him pitched split logs into the beehive oven. It was too dark at first to make them out.

The door of the funhouse opened in a sudden spray of glinting light, and someone wearing an enormous pointed clown hat stood in the doorway for a moment before the door slammed shut in his face. The fire in the oven leaped, the calliope played louder and wilder, the two stood in the firelight, holding an armload of wood each, and seemed to leap and dance in the flickering light. They were both skeletons, animated somehow, in the employ of Dr Brown.

Jack sat back and blinked, then looked again. The oven door had been shut. What he’d taken for skeletons were mere shades now, chopping away at driftwood with axes. He could hear the distant blows ring out above the sound of the calliope. Had they
been
skeletons? It hardly seemed likely. It might very easily have been a trick of moonlight through broken clouds – that and the suddenly leaping fire and the strings of lamps overhead had all mingled to fool him. That had to be the case.

He noticed abruptly that the rides weren’t all empty, not entirely anyway. Someone rode the Ferris wheel. It spun very slowly skyward, counterclockwise, an enormous hoop of lights and a dozen rocking chairs set round it like numbers on a clock. The spokes of the thing and the struts that spaced the spokes were silver-dark against the glow like the web of a spider in moonlight. A shadow sat slumped in one of the chairs, rising from two o’clock to one, one to twelve, dropping to eleven and ten and down and swinging round to rise skyward again. Jack searched for him through the telescope, a strange hollow certainty developing in his stomach. He couldn’t swear it was Lantz, but the stooped figure might easily have been, huddled there at the edge of the little rocking seat. He’d been wandering through the streets, after all, in the darkness. He’s been searching for something. He’d listened to the crow that had landed on his shoulder, and set out toward the bluffs with enough resolve to make him ignore the shouted greetings of his friends.

Jack watched for ten more minutes, until the north wind began to ignore the blanket and the dark rain began to fall again, blowing in through the shutters and against the lens of his telescope. It was getting on toward dawn, time to sleep. The carnival was open and doing business, in a limited way; Jack and Skeezix would have a look at it in the morning, if they could slide out without Helen. She’d probably be in the attic painting and reading Mrs Langley’s book anyway, perhaps shooting the breeze with the old dead woman herself. Jack felt once again for the tiny bottle, then, satisfied, drifted away into sleep, dreaming of Helen and Skeezix and Dr Jensen, but mostly of Helen, all of them adrift in a giant’s shoe on a sea so deeply blue that they might as easily have been sailing through the night sky toward shoals of stars.

‘I
T MIGHT BE HIM.’

‘Changed, though. I caught a glimpse myself, and I wouldn’t have thought it; not just from looking at him.’

‘All of us have. It’s been a few years.’

The voices murmured out of the parlour, carrying into the kitchen but not much farther. They were low and secretive. One belonged to Dr Jensen and the other to Willoughby. Neither could disguise his voice if he tried – not enough to fool anyone –and they weren’t trying here anyway. Jack stood just inside the service porch door, listening. He’d got up early. He couldn’t sleep, not with the mysteries tangling up his thoughts all night. And he’d come inside after a cup of coffee and a hunk of bread and jam. He stood in his shirt sleeves, head cocked, shivering in the morning chill that seeped through the screen door. He’d have shut the kitchen door, but it creaked, and he didn’t, right then, want either of the two in the parlour to know he was there.

‘Twelve years.’ Willoughby paused after saying it, as if studying. ‘Can we know for sure?’

‘No, I don’t suppose we can. We can’t stroll up and
ask
him, after all, can we? It doesn’t really matter much, I suppose. Too many years gone, if you ask me, for any of us to start stirring up the dust. Let it lie; that’s my advice, but keep it from Jack and the others. Jack especially. It wouldn’t do him a bit of good to know.’

‘And
we
don’t
know
,’ said Willoughby almost at once, as if he were anxious to agree with the doctor. There was a silence then. Jack wondered who it was they were talking about. He supposed it was his father. Someone had ‘come back’, that much was certain.

‘Anyway,’ continued the doctor after a moment, ‘I saw it down on the bluffs, near where I found the body in the tide pool. There was something awfully strange about that whole business. And then the kids were telling me last night that they’d seen it in town, near MacWilt’s.’

‘It’s been here too. I took a shot at it yesterday afternoon, but it was too far off. But I’ve got my gun by the door there, loaded. I’m ready for it. I don’t think I could shoot a man, not unless I had to. But I could easy enough shoot –’

There was a shuffle of feet and the scrape of chairs being pushed back. Jack turned and shoved out through the screen door, onto the wooden back porch. He vaulted the railing and leaped up the paving stones set into the grass of the back yard leading down to the river. He expected to hear Willoughby’s voice, shouting after him. The idea of skulking and snooping in the kitchen was bad enough; being caught at it would be mortifying. Not that he’d done anything particularly wrong. But he should have made his presence known. He should have walked into the parlour, announced that he’d overheard them, and asked the two men to explain themselves. Even if they’d declined to, he wouldn’t have any less information that he had now.

No one shouted at him. They hadn’t come out the back. He was stepping along behind the barn when he heard the first shot. Then Dr Jensen shouted. There was the sound of running feet, another shout, and a second shot. Jack ran toward the end of the barn, rounded the far corner, and saw Willoughby standing in the pasture with his rifle to his shoulder. Jack’s loft window stood open above. Dr Jensen’s head thrust through it suddenly. He cried, ‘No! Damn it!’ and then saw Jack standing below him. In the distance, flapping almost tiredly over the tops of the oaks that fringed the edge of the pasture, was a solitary crow, cawing shrilly. In an instant it was gone.

‘I’m certain I hit it,’ said Willoughby, turning toward Jack, thinking for a moment that it was Jensen who stood in the shadows of the barn.

‘Why?’ asked Jack, puzzled.

Willoughby grinned suddenly, as if he’d been caught doing something he oughtn’t to do. ‘Almonds,’ he said. ‘The thing’s been eating my almonds. They’ve stripped half the tree. Greedy things, crows.’

Jack nodded. Here was his opportunity to ask a question or two. Dr Jensen joined them, feigning a look of mild surprise to see Jack there, but unable to hide the concern that tugged at the corners of his mouth and eyes. ‘Well,’ he said, running his hand backward through his hair. ‘I can’t hang around here all morning helping you bag crows. There’s too many of them anyway to ever get the job done right. Take it from me. You can kill two dozen crows this morning, and the horizon will be black with them by this afternoon. It’s a scarecrow you want, Willoughby, or a rubber snake wound into the branches. It puts the fear into them, a snake does. I’m on my way now.’ He pulled out his watch and scrutinized it, reminding Jack overmuch of Mac Wilt checking his pocket watch and studying the hills through his telescope.

‘The shoe’s launched, Jack,’ continued the doctor. ‘I hauled it down this morning early. Tide goes in an hour, so I’d better run. I’ll see you, I suppose, in a day or two.’

‘Come back,’ Jack said.

Dr Jensen nodded. ‘I have to. I’ve got promises to keep. But there’s a couple things I’d like to know, a couple things I’d like to see, and I aim to try. I can’t wait another twelve years.’ With that he strode away toward his wagon and left Willoughby and Jack standing on the wet grass.

It hadn’t been his father that the two men were talking about. Jack knew that suddenly, and as soon as he did he leaped away toward the barn door, took the stairs to the loft three at a time, and shoved his hand in under the mattress. His book and candle and cup had been knocked off the nightstand and onto the floor. The wind through the open shutter might have blown them off, but Jack didn’t think so. His bottle was still there. He pulled the shutter closed, retrieved and lit the candle, and hauled out the bottle, twisting of the lid. The barn was filled at once with the odour of the bay at low tide, mingled with the wildflower smell of a windy spring meadow. Not a drop had been stolen. He looked around with an eye toward a safer hiding place, but there were none. He could hide it in the woods, of course, but there was no telling who or what might be watching him if he went outside. He screwed the lid on tight, slipped the bottle into his pocket, grabbed his coat, and set out for the orphanage.

They watched Dr Jensen from the cavern in the bluffs. His sailboat shoe rounded the headland, appearing and disappearing beyond rolling seas. He seemed to be making almost no headway, sailing against the current, blown toward shore by the winds. The little boat rose atop a feathery crest, then sank again in the trough; even the tip of the mast dipped out of sight for a time. Then it appeared again, rolling across the next swell before it was gone.

They watched for over an hour, eating bread from the bakery and drinking coffee. The shoe tacked back and forth still, a half mile out. It made almost no headway. By nightfall Dr Jensen wouldn’t have sailed beyond the mouth of the Eel. He’d spend the night hobnobbing with floating skeletons. It occurred to Jack that if you could so easily sail there – to wherever it was that Dr Jensen was bound – half the village would have been on the ocean days ago. The doctor assumed, quite likely, that it was the particular
sort
of boat you used that made the difference, just like Mac Wilt and his telescope lens. And there was probably truth to the idea, but apparently not enough truth to overcome the wind and tide.

Jack and Helen and Skeezix wandered up to the Coast Road when the coffee and bread were gone. Dr Jensen would have to take care of himself The carnival was alive with villagers. It seemed like half of Rio Dell was there, along with no end of people from Moonvale and Scotia. There was fresh paint on the plywood sides of the fun houses and on the iron framework of the thrill rides, or at least there was a newness and freshness to it that Jack hadn’t been able to see when the debris of the carnival had lain yesterday in the wet meadow grass. The wooden arch over the road was papered with posters, a sort of kaleidoscope of carnival images, almost sinister in their profusion.

The bicycle-riding clowns and the top-hatted skeletons grinned out once again from where they were painted. There was the smell of fresh sawdust in the air, of engine oil and burning cedar logs and coal, of greasepaint and barbecued duck. Booths sold beer and skewered meats and hot oranges, and it seemed uncannily like the carnival was enormous, that it stretched away up and down the coast and across the meadows toward the distant smoky village. Here was a paint and plywood structure of two-dimensional domes with the words
MOORISH TEMPLE
painted over a curtained doorway; there was a covered wagon bearing unspecified
CURIOUS FREAKS
. Lean-tos and tents dotted the bluffs, and in among the people filing in and out of them, paying ten cents to see a creature half fish and half man or a bird with the head of a pig, were Miss Flees and the Mayor’s wife, MacWilt’s nephews, the fisherman who’d had ill luck on the pier the previous day, and even old MacWilt himself, his eyes bandaged, tapping his way into the heart of the carnival with a stick.

No end of people shouldered their way through milling crowds, and on the otherwise silent ocean air Jack could hear the flap of canvas and the creak of iron rubbing against iron and the thunder of fire in the great oven, all of it against the hum and roar of what might have been thousands of laughing and chatting voices.

Calliope music underscored the rest, steamy and wild and seeming to pipe out in time to the turnings and cavortings of the carnival rides, each of which flew and swung and rotated in symphony with all the rest. Skeezix tried his hand at knocking down iron milk bottles with a baseball, but he had no luck. Helen won a rubber pig with a look of surprised grief on its face by pitching three dimes onto a plate. Jack kept his money, but not because he was cheap. He had his eye on the Ferris wheel. He couldn’t seem to pay attention to anything else. Lantz, of course, no longer rode it – if it had been Lantz. It might as easily have been someone else – testing it, perhaps. It certainly ran well enough now. The rust and grime that had coated it the previous day had been scrubbed away. It was painted gaudy colours, and the little swings jerked up and around, their occupants pointing away down the coast, catching a glimpse, perhaps, of church steeples in Moonvale or of the tower of the grange building down the coast in Ferndale.

It seemed to be twilight, as if it were six in the evening rather than an hour before noon. Jack glimpsed stars in the dim purple sky, although they seemed to flicker and vanish and might easily have been the tiny lamps strung overhead from one end of the carnival to the other, which were still lit, despite its being midday. There were a half score of booths occupied by fortunetellers and by people who claimed to speak to the dead, and from one or two came the plaintive, wheedling voices of the dead themselves, demanding attention, asking after unfinished business, complaining about the sorry accommodations of the hereafter.