Land of Dreams (15 page)

Peebles strode out from within a tent, staring at his hand and nearly running into Skeezix, who leaped clear as if to avoid touching a poisonous reptile. Neither Jack nor Helen nor Skeezix said anything. The recent events in the alley and in Miss Flees’s kitchen seemed to have made small talk impossible. Speaking turned out to be unnecessary, though. Peebles sneered at the three of them, as if he’d sooner talk to bugs, and then he hurried away toward the Moorish Temple, where the alligator child was advertised. Jack saw, as Peebles hurried away, that his severed finger was partly restored, like the arm of a starfish, and that Peebles peered at it two or three times before he disappeared through the door of the temple.

Jack stepped across to the booth that Peebles had hurried out of moments earlier. He pulled back the canvas door and looked in, seeing in the light of an oil lamp a man bent over a makeshift desk, reading a book with his face a half inch above the page, as if he were straining to see it at all. It took a moment for Jack to realise that it was Dr Brown sitting there, but the lank hair and the bullet scar across his cheek gave him away when he looked up. He grimaced first, then grinned, and asked, ‘Do you want something?’ in a voice that suggested the man’s certainty that Jack indeed
wanted
something, whatever it might be.

He seemed to have fleshed out considerably since Jack had seen him on the bluffs the day before. He wasn’t half so -what? –transparent, maybe, and not half so shrivelled. He was still pale, as if lit with the silver reflected light of the moon rather than with yellow lantern light, and his face was drawn and haggard with lines that expressed unspeakable emotions. He wore his black topcoat and a black cravat, and his hair hung black and oily about his collar and stooped shoulders, and even as he sat placidly smiling, his hunched shadow darkening the canvas behind him, it seemed to Jack as if he might easily be a great feathery crow.

There was a strange litter of debris behind and around him: packing crates heaped with yellowing carnival posters, kegs of iron gears and flywheels and bolts, and toppled stacks of books, all of them old and half ruined, with pages thrust out and covers soiled and torn. A smell of iron filings and gear oil mingled with the musty smell of old damp books and the sawdust that covered the weedy dirt floor to the depth of an inch.

Jack shook his head in answer to the man’s question. He was certain, suddenly, that he was confronting Algernon Harbin, the man his father had shot to death twelve years earlier. There couldn’t be much doubt, all in all, not when you added up everything Dr Jensen and Willoughby had said. And the bullet scar. It made Jack almost glad to see it. By what unholy means the man had contrived to return from the sea and become the proprietor of the Solstice carnival, it was impossible to say, and it didn’t make much difference anyway. Jack knew at once that he didn’t want to kill the man. He didn’t want to kill anyone. He just wanted to be rid of him, that and know what it was the man had come back for.

Jack thought suddenly of the bottle in his pocket, but stopped himself from patting it with his hand. The doctor must have read his fear in his eyes, though, for he smiled at Jack and nodded his head, as if to say, I know. I’ll take it when I please.

Jack backed out into the sunlight. Skeezix and Helen had gone on. He glanced behind him at the Moorish Temple, from which issued the sound of flutes being played to the accompaniment of wailing, and there was Peebles, watching him from behind the door, darting back into the darkness when Jack caught sight of him.

He found his two friends in the shadow of the Ferris wheel. He told them what it was he’d figured out about the supposed Dr Brown of World Renown. Helen said it didn’t surprise her a bit. The only thing that surprised her was that it had taken Jack so long to see it. Skeezix said he didn’t care
who
Dr Brown or anyone else was, not until they cared about
him
. Jack’s problem, said Skeezix, was to think that he was involved in some great plot. Which was all vanity, quite likely. There weren’t any plots, as far as Skeezix could see; that would make things too easy, you could guess everything out. ‘My advice,’ said Skeezix, nodding shrewdly at Jack, ‘is to open that bottle of liquor you’ve been hiding and give each of us a taste.’

Jack shook his head. The idea seemed too risky to him, for reasons he couldn’t entirely put his finger on. The bottle certainly wouldn’t contain poison, after all, else why would he have been given it in the first place? And why would Dr Brown, or whatever his name was, have been skulking around trying to steal it? And is that entirely why it was that Jack had brought the bottle with him, to prevent its being stolen? He could as easily have hidden it in the woods. It would have been safer there than in his pocket, despite what he’d told himself that morning. He’d brought it because somewhere in his mind was the idea of doing exactly what Skeezix suggested they do.

He looked around, startled all of a sudden to find himself surrounded by milling people. ‘I don’t know ...’ he said to Skeezix, and Helen nodded her head, as if to say that she didn’t know either. Skeezix, in reply, hastened across to a man selling cider, bought a cup, and stepped back across, grinning at Jack.

‘Nothing ventured ...’ he said, nodding at the cup.

‘Don’t,’ Helen said. ‘There’s trouble in this. Dr Jensen would tell you to pour it down the drain.’

‘Dr Jensen would drink the whole bottle and set sail in a shoe,’ said Skeezix. ‘We’re not asking
you
to be in on this. We’ll scout it out first, and if it’s safe we’ll tell you.’ Skeezix smiled benignly at her and patted her on the shoulder in a fatherly way. Helen immediately slugged him in the arm and said he was an idiot. She wasn’t going, no matter what he said to her. Skeezix insisted that he didn’t
want
her to go. She was like a little sister to him, he said, and must be kept from harm. There were some pony rides, he said, that might interest her, and then he gave her a dime and two nickels, winked, and nodded once again at Jack and the cup. Helen dropped the three coins into the cider and insisted that she
was
going. She wasn’t going to drink any of Jack’s elixir; she was going along sober, to act as a sort of sea anchor when Jack and Skeezix lost their minds.

Jack unstopped the bottle and dribbled a bit into the cider, looking around him guiltily as he did so. There was no sign of Peebles or of Dr Brown. Skeezix wasn’t happy with the small quantity of elixir, though it had stained the brown cider a seaweed green, but Jack wouldn’t add another drop. Better too little than too much, it seemed to him. And in truth, he didn’t want to waste it. He had no idea what it was or how he was intended to use it, or even if anyone
intended
anything at all. Jack and Skeezix shared the cider between them.

With the rush and whir of the Ferris wheel behind him and the ratchet click of the crank as it rotated the little cars one at a time across the boarding plank, Jack had already begun to feel giddy. He didn’t half like heights, and he didn’t at all like the feeling of falling. There was something in the carnival air, too, some sort of enchantment, that charged it with the uncanny feeling of something pending, as if Jack and his friends, even while they were standing there in the sawdust handing the cup back and forth, were rushing toward something, or perhaps as if something – a train or a sea wave or a leaf-laden autumn wind – was rushing toward
them
. They waited in line to board the Ferris wheel, neither Jack nor Skeezix feeling anything more than that.

It seemed to Jack that it took about three quarters of an hour for the Ferris wheel to make a single revolution. They jerked upward, stopped, swung there, then jerked upward again. The little car seemed to sway and buck with every gust of sea wind. Skeezix found the swaying and swinging invigorating, somehow, and he set in to make the most of it, leaning back and forth and hooting with laughter until with each swing it seemed to Jack as if he were about to pitch straight out onto the ant people that milled around miles below. A little iron bar had been closed across their knees. The man operating the wheel had tugged on it and nodded, as if
he
was satisfied that all was safe and tidy. The bar didn’t amount to anything as far as Jack could see, beyond some sort of vague joke, and so he held on to the structure of the Ferris wheel itself with his right hand, and put his left arm around behind Helen, grinning at her weakly in an effort to make it seem as if he were merely trying to make her comfortable.

Under better circumstances he would have liked almost nothing better – sitting there like that with his arm around Helen. But he knew he looked pale. He
felt
pale, if such a thing were possible. He flipped Skeezix on the ear with his middle finger and then grimaced at him behind Helen’s head when Skeezix looked at him accusingly. Skeezix grinned and rocked the car again, giving Jack a heightened eyebrow look, as if he were surprised that Jack wanted even more rocking.

‘Hey!’ shouted Helen, and she hit Skeezix on the chest, after which he calmed down, satisfied to make a horrified face every time the car canted forward.

Helen shouted again. When Skeezix began to complain that he hadn’t done anything, she told him to shut up and pointed out toward the ocean. They’d risen high enough to see over the oaks and alders that lined the bluffs. The ocean was a deep translucent green, like bottle glass. Spindrift flew from the tumbling peaks of little wind waves, and the ground swell humped along beneath, rolling in to break continually along the cliffs and coves, sounding like the booming rush of an express train.

Out on the sea, tossing on the swell, rode the shoe sailboat of Dr Jensen. It pitched and yawed unsteadily, waves breaking across the toe and laces and threatening on the moment to swamp the boat entirely and send it to the bottom of the sea. Dr Jensen bailed furiously, holding onto the sheet, his hair blowing about his head. The wind billowed the sail, jerking the sheet from his hand, and at first it seemed as if he would go after it, but he didn’t. He gave up on the sail, which flapped and danced in the wind’s eye as if giddy with freedom.

He bailed with both hands now, his craft lying dangerously low in the water. The wind and current pushed him southeast, back toward the cove where Skeezix had found the shoe two nights earlier. The three on the Ferris wheel watched him anxiously. There was nothing any of them could do to help. It was Dr Jensen’s affair entirely. He could swim, at least, and he wasn’t any more than three hundred yards offshore, and with the current sweeping around toward the cove there … Jack wasn’t half as worried about Dr Jensen’s fate as he was worried about his own just then. He knew that to be uncharitable, but the knowledge didn’t at all change the way he felt, and it was what he was feeling as the car looped around the summit of the arc that made all the difference.

They plummeted toward the green of the meadow. Jack’s stomach leaped in a giddy rush toward his chest. He crushed at the seat back with his left hand and gritted his teeth, certain that at any moment the car would rock too far forward and he’d slide out into the open air. He pressed himself back against the leather of the seat cushion and held his breath as the car swooped round past the grinning operator, started to rise once again, and then jerked to a stop and hung there. The business of unloading and loading cars began again, and they ratcheted up one lurch at a time toward the summit. Jack’s grip relaxed. He forced a smile and aimed it at Helen, happy in spite of himself to see that her smile was forced too. Only Skeezix seemed to be enjoying himself, although he had lost, apparently, his inclination toward tilting them all out of the car.

They swung skyward. There was Dr Jensen again – closer to shore now, still bailing. He was in among the kelp beds; the wind chop had died, and the swell was broad and oily. He’d make it in. Jack was happy about it, but he wasn’t so happy that the doctor’s journey had been in vain. He had rather hoped that Dr Jensen would find what he was looking for.

Skeezix reached across Helen and tapped Jack on the chest. He pointed off toward the northeast, toward the Moonvale Hills. The twilight sky seemed watery deep, like the sea, and it shone with pinpoint stars that flickered and winked like eyes in a dark wood. It seemed to Jack that he’d never really had a good look at the Moonvale Hills before –never from that height. Willoughby’s farm, it’s true, was on a rise some way above the village, which itself was several hundred feet higher than the bluffs. Add to that the height of the barn loft, and it would seem that he
must
have viewed the hills from even greater heights a thousand times. Perhaps it was the curious angle of vision here, or perhaps it was that the sea wind had scoured the sky particularly clean and he was simply seeing things clearly for the first time.

There seemed to be the shadow of a city there again – the same city, it seemed, that MacWilt had been searching for the previous evening. There was the spire of a church steeple, sloped roofs and steep walls, inns and alleyways. It was all merely a darkness against the hilly horizon, like smoke, hovering there in phantom billows. Helen saw it too. It wasn’t the elixir. It sharpened and seemed to set, the smoky shadows turning to stone, shingles and leaves etching themselves into the grey curtain.

The Ferris wheel soared over the top, and Jack held on and closed his eyes as it swept downward this time. There was no more stopping to let on passengers. They dropped in a giddy rush into the peanut and sawdust smell of the bluffs. Jack opened his eyes. There was no use looking so obviously frightened. He glanced at Helen, who stared straight ahead of herself as if she were studying some distant spot in the landscape. Skeezix looked past both of them in horror, mouth gaping. Jack swivelled around, following Skeezix’s gaze. There was the ride operator with his hand resting on the iron lever. He grinned at them past gumless teeth. His hair hung like seaweed around his shoulders, and the skin of his face was drawn and leathery like the skin of a mummified corpse. He winked. Jack heard Helen mutter
‘Really
,’ as if she were half insulted by his being familiar, and as they swung skyward she said, ‘I wish he’d quit giving me that look. I can’t stand that sort of thing.’