Land of Dreams (24 page)

‘Relax,’ said Helen. ‘She likes you. She told me so. She likes Jack, too. Jack isn’t hurt, is he?’

Skeezix shook his head. ‘I got there in time. Jack was lucky.’

‘I’m sure he was,’ said Helen. ‘Anyway, I’ve got to get these clothes down to the cove, the sooner the better.’ Then in a whisper she said, ‘I don’t think he’s going to come, actually. He’s been away years now. But she’s such a dear old thing; I want to do it just to satisfy her.’

Skeezix nodded. He could see the value in that. ‘Smells like someone’s cooking something awful.’

And it did. There was a rotten, fishy sort of odour coming up through the vent – clearly not cabbage soup. The two of them stepped across and peered through. There was Peebles, rolling out dough on the wooden counter. The bucket that had held the strange fish still lay on the table, empty now but for two inches of bloody ocean water. The fish lay beside it, flayed and hacked and boned. A heap of its little fingerlike fins lay alongside the muck cleaned out of the fish, into which had been shoved the creature’s severed head, eyes open and staring.

Helen turned away, sickened. There was something in the cut-off fins that reminded her of – what? Peebles’s regrown finger. That was it.

‘Look at this!’ whispered Skeezix.

‘I can’t. It makes me sick.’

‘He’s making up a pie, a fish pie! Good God! He thinks he’s going to feed us Solstice fish!’ He walked over to where Helen sat at the table. ‘Let’s go down there right now and make
him
eat it. Raw. Every bit of it, guts and all. What in the world do you suppose would happen to him? I bet he’d become immune to gravity, float right up into the sky until the thin air exploded him. He’d rain down over the village like -’

‘Shut up, will you? Enough about guts.’

‘Of course,’ said Skeezix. ‘Let’s go down and see what’s up. We’ve got to meet Jack anyway in a couple of hours, and we might as well haul these duds out to the cove first. No telling when this naked Jimmy will reel up out of the weeds.’ He scooped up the clothes and headed for the trapdoor.

Miss Flees met them in the hallway. She had a distant, glazed look in her eyes, as if all the conjuring and chasing after magic had tired her out. Her eyes were red-rimmed, and she smelled of wine. She stopped them by putting her arm across in front of them. ‘Where are
you
going?’ she asked.

She’s been drinking, thought Skeezix; he grinned at her and widened his eyes. ‘In to eat.’

She stared at them both, as if she were trying to think of something to say – some reason that Skeezix’s answer wouldn’t do. She stood just so, reeling slightly, then nodded. ‘Watch yourselves. You two are a
little bit
too high and mighty these days. Coming and going at all hours. Lying. What do you do up in that attic?’

‘I talk with Mrs Langley,’ said Helen, looking straight into her face. ‘Mrs Langley threw Peebles down the stairs today. I asked her to do that.’

Miss Flees stiffened. She knew about Peebles and the stairs. She’d have to; Peebles had cried and shouted enough. Helen had heard him carrying on during her conversation with Mrs Langley.

Helen kept at her. ‘Peebles tried to burn the house down two hours ago; do you know that?’

Miss Flees jerked herself upright, trying to paint a proud look onto her face, but succeeding only in sort of pinching together her mouth and chin. She licked the palm of her pawlike hand and touched her hair with it. ‘Young Mr Peebles is an intellectual,’ she said. ‘You two wouldn’t know about that. Children like him are often frail. They’re … prodigies. That’s what they are, prodigies, and it’s not for the likes of you to judge them. We understand each other, Mr Peebles and I.’

‘I’m certain you do,’ said Helen. ‘Birds of a feather, I suppose. You were a prodigy too, weren’t you? Wasn’t that what you were telling us?’

‘Well,’ said Miss Flees, shrugging, ‘I won’t say I wasn’t, in my time.’

‘You much be a very fortunate lady. I was telling Skee – Bobby here that I envy people of genius like you – the things they might accomplish.’

‘Envy is a sin, of course. In this case I can understand it, though.’ Miss Flees seemed to have gone blank, as if someone had reached into her head and switched off the bulb.

Skeezix gritted his teeth at Helen, as if he could hardly stand it and at any moment would say what he meant. Saying what he meant wouldn’t hurt anything much, of course. He’d done it before. Miss Flees couldn’t pitch him out because she’d lose the little bit of income the village paid her, and besides, Skeezix had too many friends, including Dr Jensen. So did Helen. That in itself was maddening. But saying what he meant would end in shouting, and shouting would end in Miss Flees ordering them out, and that wouldn’t do any good, because what they wanted was to see what it was that Peebles was up to.

‘Peebles is cooking something nice, isn’t he?’ asked Helen, placating Miss Flees, who smiled broadly, showing off her tilted teeth.

‘I’m sure he is. There’s nothing for you children, though. Perhaps you could eat out. Our Mr Peebles says there isn’t enough to go around. He’s making me a pie. He won’t let me into the kitchen. “His little surprise,” he says, and that’s just like him, isn’t it?’ She shook her head, thinking of her dear Peebles.

Skeezix grinned. So that was the way it was. Peebles was going to feed
her
the Solstice fish. And she’d be too addlebrained to know what it was she was eating. Or maybe, heaven help her, she
did
know, was going to eat it on purpose. Things were getting desperate indeed. He’d give anything to watch, but from the look of Peebles, messing around in the kitchen, Miss Flees wouldn’t begin to shove it down for another forty-five minutes. Maybe they could get down to the cove and back by then. He nodded at Helen and gestured toward the front room, toward the door. She nodded back, and both of them pushed past Miss Flees and set out.

‘What’s that bundle of clothing?’ the woman asked after them, suspicious suddenly. ‘You can’t steal those clothes!’

‘There’s a naked man on the beach,’ said Helen over her shoulder. ‘These are for him. It’s Mrs Langley’s husband, come home from the wars. Save some dinner for him.’ And with that they were through the door and gone. They could hear Miss Flees sputtering as the door slammed shut. She’d have no idea what to make of talk like that. Having no sense of humour herself, she couldn’t recognize it in others. She’d understand everything literally, and it would confound her. Just as well, Helen thought. In the last couple of hours she’d somehow come to the conclusion that such people deserved what they got, although it was a bit much that Miss Flees had got Peebles. Almost no one deserved Peebles.

The tide was up, washing very nearly across the entire beach. The strip of sand that lay exposed was littered with kelp and seashells and driftwood and flotsam out of the ocean. Rain had fallen and had wetted things down pretty thoroughly, but it had let up again and now the night was dark and windy beneath a cloud-hung sky. Skeezix carried a lantern that he’d got from Miss Flees’s shed. He and Helen stood beneath the trestle, looking at shadows and wondering what, exactly, to do with the clothes. Somehow simply leaving them there seemed foolish – as if they were leaving an offering to a sea god that both of them knew didn’t exist, or if he did exist, wouldn’t show up to claim the gift.

Skeezix set the lantern on a high shelf of cut stone beneath the trestle and began poking around beneath it. Rocks were tumbled and heaped there, the cracks between them jammed with weather- and ocean-worn debris – broken mussel shells and sticks and tangles of dried seaweed. ‘We can hide them here,’ Skeezix said. They’re sheltered enough from the rain, so they’ll stay dry, except that the fog will get at them. A really high tide will get them too, but there’s nowhere else as good, not if Mrs Langley wanted you to leave them at the cove.’

‘That’s what she said.’ Helen pulled rocks loose, letting them roll down onto the sand. Little beach bugs scurried away, and a big red crab scuttled back into the shadows, eyeing them warily. ‘Here, what’s this?’ Helen reached down into the rocks, half expecting to be pinched or bitten. A bit of blue material lay just visible in the light of the lantern, wedged under two round stones. They both pulled stuff clear, levering one big rock loose with a stick and jumping back as it thumped onto the sand.

Helen got a hand on the cloth and pulled, tearing a chunk away and hauling it out. It fluttered in her hand – a piece of shirt, maybe, with the button still attached. ‘Darn it,’ said Helen. ‘I didn’t mean to rip it. Let’s get it out of there. I’ve got this curious suspicion.’ And the two of them pawed through the rock pile until the cloth was exposed. It was a shirt, just as Helen thought. Beneath it were trousers, neatly folded, and lying across the top of a pair of shoes with socks stuffed inside them. Helen looked into the collar of the shirt, and there, scrawled in ink, was the name.
J. Langley.

‘Well, I’ll be,’ said Skeezix, wondering at it. ‘I wonder when –’

‘Twelve years ago.’

‘She was dead last Solstice, wasn’t she?’

‘She got someone else to do it, like she did me.’

‘Who? How do you know?’

Helen gave him a look. Here was a chance to play one of her trump cards. ‘Lars Portland, Jack’s father.’

‘No. You’re making that up.’

‘So don’t believe me. /
don’t care
. Believe what you want. Revel in ignorance, prodigy.’

Skeezix made his cabbage-broth face at her, then reached into the rocks and yanked out one of the shoes. ‘Look here,’ he said, pulling the sock out of it. A rock had been shoved into the shoe along with the sock, to weight it down, perhaps. Under the rock was a bit of paper, folded very neatly. There was writing on it in a shaky hand, the ink lightened and spidery from years of misty air. Skeezix held it to the lantern.
Three
, it said simply. There was nothing else on the paper.

‘It beats me,’ said Skeezix, turning the paper over and back again.

‘Not me.’ Helen took it from him. ‘These have been here longer than I thought – twenty-four years. I’d bet on it. She said he’d been gone five times and had come back twice. These were left at the third Solstice, after he’d been and gone a couple of times already. He never came back after them, cither.’

‘Look inside the shoes you brought.’

Helen did. There were rocks inside. Mrs Langley had been thorough, leaving nothing to her courier except the burying of the clothes. Under the rock in the right shoe was a folded paper.
Five
, it read.

Skeezix nodded, satisfied with himself. ‘She’s keeping count.’

‘She wants him to know that she’s been faithful, that she hasn’t missed a year. It’s very romantic, isn’t it?’

‘It’s nuts,’ said Skeezix. ‘Where’s four, do you think?’

‘Someone’s taken them. That’s obvious. No telling when. That’s pretty rotten, unless it was Jimmy. But Mrs Langley would know if Jimmy’d come back. He would have gone to her. They were that way, very faithful.’

Skeezix shook his head. ‘They were nuts. I bet number one and number two are down there someplace. Do you want to find them?’

‘They aren’t there. He came back the first time through a gopher hole. Didn’t I tell you that? Listen next time, smart aleck. Then the second time he came back by way of the cove, but there weren’t any clothes here. Mrs Langley was here herself, by accident.
She
found him that time, luckily.’

Skeezix nodded. ‘Put the clothes back in. If he
does
come, all of them ought to be there. If she was keeping count for him, we’d better not mess it up. It’s touching, really, isn’t it? Like something out of a penny romance magazine. Very artful. Makes your heart go, doesn’t it?’

‘You’re a jerk. Let me put the clothes in.
You’ll
mess it up.’ A gust of spindrift-laden wind blew up the beach as they laid the last of the rocks over the clothes. Helen shoved bits of shell and wood into the cracks and scattered weedy sand over it all; then the two of them backed away, swishing out their footprints with a clutch of kelp so it wouldn’t look like anybody’d been messing about there. The wind and tide would no doubt do it for them before the night was up, but somehow it seemed to both of them that, all things considered, they couldn’t be too careful with the whole business. More was going on than any of them had suspected earlier that day. They turned their backs on the cove and headed toward the lights of town.

Doctor Jensen’s crab

J
ACK SLUMPED
, deadly tired all of a sudden and almost hopeless. Small as the river was, as it neared the harbour it did nothing but get broader. Trees overhung it on both sides, but even if he rowed in toward shore and stayed there he’d be seen easily enough from the air. And he’d probably just tangle himself up in thickets anyway. There was nothing to do but put his back into it and go. In five minutes he’d be in town, come what may. If it came down to it, he’d lay odds on his being able to elude almost anyone in town. There wasn’t a street or an alley he didn’t know. He’d played hide-and-seek in his time across every inch of it, from the harbour to Dr Jensen’s.

He passed the first riverside house – old Mr Dingley’s tumbledown mansion with its tilted dock and grassy, sloped rear yard. Then two more houses: the White sisters’, sitting side by side. On a sudden impulse he brought the rowing boat around and in toward shore. The current drove him on down, past another half dozen houses.