Land of Dreams (25 page)

The crow was gone, or at least it had disappeared for the moment. That wasn’t good. It certainly hadn’t flown away … He bumped ashore. The stern swung round in the current as he leapt onto the bank and grabbed the trailing painter, hauling the bow high up on the weedy sand. There was nothing to tie up to, save the pepper trees, farther down, but there was no time to tow the boat to them. So he dragged on the bow and then grabbed the rear thwart and lifted the stern entirely up out of the water. The rain had fallen off, but if it started again in earnest, the river could easily rise a foot by morning. It wouldn’t do to let Willoughby’s rowing boat wash into the harbour and drift out to sea with the tide.

In seconds he was hunching along, up the bank toward the rear of the taxidermist’s shop. He could hide inside, if it came to that. He knew which windows weren’t locked like they ought to be. But what if Dr Brown cornered him there, among the dusty animals, all of them going to bits, some of them without eyes? That wouldn’t do at all. The crow might easily be sitting in one of the pepper trees now, watching him.

The thought of it slowed him down. He mustn’t blunder into anything. It occurred to him that he’d been doing too much blundering that day. But the fault wasn’t all his. When he and Skeezix had gone up into the hills they’d had no idea what they’d run into. They could hardly have expected what they’d found.

Jack stopped, listening to the silent night. There was a light on in the taxidermist’s. He and his friends weren’t the only ones, apparently, who knew about unlocked windows. Was it Dr Brown? Probably not; he wouldn’t light a candle to announce his presence, would he? Jack crept forward in a crouch. It could, of course, be a tramp, getting in out of the rain. If Lantz weren’t dead … but Lantz was dead. Rainwater dripped from the limbs of the pepper trees, and vague disembodied noises filtered down from town, from the inns along the High Street. Someone was singing, low and quiet – from inside the shop. Jack cocked his head and listened, half relieved to hear the singing, as if villains wouldn’t be interested in singing.

He edged into the shadows of the three trees. The weeping limbs nearly touched the earth. He couldn’t see much; the windows were too dusty and full of pasted-on newspaper. He’d have to take a closer look. He felt like a conspirator, glancing back down the river to see that he wasn’t followed. There sat his boat, high and dry. He looked once toward the harbour, saw no one, and stealthily took a step forward.

A hand grabbed his elbow. He shrieked and jerked away, but the fingers closed round his arm. Another hand covered his mouth, a hand smelling of musty bird cages and of leather crumbled with age. The forefinger and thumb clawed at his eyes. He bit the hand, but it was like biting rubber. A knee shoved into the small of his back, and the hand let go of his arm and patted at the pocket of his coat.

Jack slammed his elbow back and flailed around to get a look at his attacker. The hand on his face dragged him over backward, and he stumbled and fell, striking behind him with both fists. He jerked free of the hand over his mouth and looked up into the stony face of Dr Brown, who clutched him now by the jacket, hauling up on it so as to pull Jack nearly off the ground. Jack hollered and twisted. He felt the tip of Dr Brown’s stick prod him hard in the ribs. He gasped, hollered again, and sloughed off the right sleeve of his jacket, sliding away through the wet grass, clambering onto a knee and one foot.

There was Dr Brown, his stick raised over his head, a look of loathing twisting his face into something inhuman. Jack lurched halfway to his feet as the stick smashed into his shoulder and rose again for another blow. He hollered, raised his arm to cover his face, and felt someone brush past him even as he heard footsteps rushing up. There was a grunt and a curse as Dr Brown went over backward, striking now at a whitecoated man, weirdly tall, in his stocking feet and sadly undersized clothes. Jack reeled away, grabbing his shoulder. It was a tramp, apparently, come to his aid, and furious, by the look of him.

Dr Brown retreated toward the river, limping along, stopping to chant something over his shoulder. The tall man cursed at him. He knew him – called him Harbin. Jack stepped toward the corner of the building. Perhaps he
hadn’t
been saved by some sort of kind stranger. Perhaps this was a double-crossed conspirator, some old enemy running into Dr Brown by chance. The two stumbled into the river and rolled out into the current, sweeping away down toward the harbour and into darkness. Jack turned and ran, ducking round and onto the High Street, pounding away toward Miss Flees’s and wondering vaguely at the strange smell of tar and wildflowers that seemed to drift along behind him. He was halfway up the block before he realised what the smell was.

Helen and Skeezix pressed themselves against the wall of the house, trusting to unpruned junipers and berry vines to hide them from the street. They’d put away Miss Flees’s lantern, then sneaked back around in order to see in through the window. Helen hadn’t told Skeezix about the other window she’d looked through that day; there’d be time enough for that revelation when they met Jack.

Miss Flees sat alone in the candlelit parlour, a tablecloth thrown over the library table that she used to sit at when she had séances. She daintily spooned up cabbage broth, tapping her mouth with a crumpled bit of cloth in between mouthfuls. Skeezix was half fascinated by the idea that Miss Flees not only ate the cabbage broth she served them but seemed to relish it, fishing in it for stray pieces of the flabby bacon she flavoured it with. Tonight it was only the first course, though.

He could see through the half-open door that joined the parlour and the kitchen. Miss Flees had her back to it, which was just as well. She wouldn’t want to see what it was that Peebles was doing to her pie, Skeezix was fairly sure of that. If there was one thing that was certain to Skeezix, it was that before Peebles spiralled down into whatever loathsome pit he was digging for himself, Skeezix would tweak his nose. He’d throttle him, is what he’d do. What Peebles had needed years ago was a fist in the face. It wasn’t enough that Peebles lived in a world of self-built misery and meanness, and in the end would scuttle his own ship. Skeezix would kick a hole in it to move the job along. There was no use taking a chance with Peebles.

Heaven knew what was in the pie he was sawing away at in the kitchen. Solstice fish surely wasn’t the only loathsome thing. There were sure to be herbs and meats in it that no human being ought to cat, even Miss Flees, if she qualified as human. Skeezix had become convinced, though, that Miss Flees indeed knew what it was she was eating. Her tiresome efforts with the bloody chicken and the rigamarole on the floor had accomplished nothing more than the loss of Peebles’s finger and the singing of hymns by a dead woman. She had got no closer to her goal than MacWilt had when he looked through the telescope. Skeezix wondered if Miss Flees would get off as easily as MacWilt. Were there worse things than being blinded and then set adrift in an open meadow? Well, she was doing it to herself, chasing down her sad destiny like a racehorse jockey.

There was a noise on the street – footsteps, running. Skeezix grabbed Helen’s arm and yanked on it, stooping behind a juniper. They parted the foliage and looked out. It was Jack, in a terrible hurry. He slowed down when he drew up to the orphanage, darting in to hide behind an adjacent bush. He had no idea they were there. He peered around him, looking at the sky as if he expected to see something. Skeezix could guess what it was.

Helen picked up a pebble and reached back to throw it, thinking, clearly, to hit Jack with it and silently alert him to their presence. Skeezix stepped out from behind his bush, got in the way of the flying pebble, and poked Jack in the small of the back. Jack gasped and pitched forward, sprawling across his bush. He seemed to be strangling. Helen rushed up and hit Skeezix in the shoulder, then thwacked him on the earlobe with her middle finger.

‘Ow!’ cried Skeezix in a hoarse sort of a shouted whisper. He covered his mouth and lurched away, laughing. Jack had recovered and stood up, staring in shocked surprise, first at Helen and then at Skeezix, who quit his lurching, swallowed hard, and hunched his shoulders. ‘I couldn’t help myself. It was too easy. I can’t resist temptations when it’s that easy to give in. You should know. You’ve seen me at Potts’s bakery.’

‘You look like hell,’ said Helen, grimacing at Jack. He smoothed out his hair and tugged his coat straight, wincing as pain shot across his shoulder. Helen put a hand on his arm. ‘You’re hurt.’

‘It’s nothing,’ said Jack. ‘I’m okay. Just a … bruise, let’s say. Nothing at all.’ He winced again, as if the pain had decided to return, but the wince actually had more to do with the sudden thought of his flopping atop the bush like a fool with Helen watching. He’d fix Skeezix for that – feed him a bologna sandwich with the meat cut out of a piece of purple rubber.

‘Hsst!’ Skeezix whispered at them, back at the window. He windmilled his right arm a couple of times, and Jack and Helen crept over toward him, all three of them taking up the old position again.

Peebles had brought in the pie. Miss Flees seemed to be delighted with it, and yet at the same time she looked at it sceptically. She squinted at Peebles and asked him something, but the three outside caught almost none of it, except the name ‘Dr Brown,’ uttered twice. Peebles nodded, a wide theatrical nod intended to convince Miss Flees utterly. She sat half up and drew a thin dark book out from where she’d been sitting on it. Then she waved Peebles back into the kitchen, as if she were suspicious that he’d try to get a glimpse of the book, and she read it carefully, pressing her nose almost against the book and swivelling her head back and forth to follow the lines of print.

She looked up at the window – straight at them. Skeezix, Jack, and Helen slid out of sight, then crouched there silently, waiting for Miss Flees to start shouting. There was nothing. With all the candles lit around her, she hadn’t seen them. When they peered through the window again the book was gone, and she’d forked up a piece of the pie and was diligently scraping off the crust. She blew on it to cool it.

Peebles watched from behind the kitchen door, a look of malevolent wonder on his face, as if he was certain something curious was going to happen to Miss Flees but didn’t at all know what it was. She touched her tongue to the pie, barely tasting it. Her face screwed itself into a heap, and she seemed to gag slouching back into her chair and resting there, thinking. Then she lifted the fork again, and, with the same face she occasionally used to try to stare down Skeezix and Helen, she stared at the bit of cooked flesh dangling from the end of the fork. They could see the muscles in her face tighten. She jammed her eyes shut, held her nose, opened her mouth, and shoved the morsel in, chomping away at it with a forced will. Her eyes sprang open as she swallowed it, and she lurched for her water glass, knocking it over onto the cloth. She stood up, clutching the table, and went after the rest of her soup, picking up the bowl and draining it at a gulp, then staggering back and kicking over her chair.

‘Mr Peebles!’ she croaked, turning around. But Peebles was gone. He’d left her alone. She stumbled toward the kitchen, calling him, her voice whistling weirdly, like the voice of a bird. ‘Mr Peebles! You!’ she whistled, then clutched at the swung-open door to steady herself. She seemed to recover a bit. She straightened and shook her head. Then she straightened some more until she stood like a post, her neck stretched unnaturally long.

‘She’s got a fishbone in her throat,’ whispered Skeezix. Neither of his friends responded. They watched her reel around toward the table then, striding away toward it like a woman hypnotised. Her mouth opened and shut like the mouth of an eel, and she emitted little flurries of canary song in lip-quivering rushes. She lurched forward, falling over her downed chair. The book she’d been reading tumbled from her bodice, straight into the fish pie. She stood up, reeling, seemed to reach for the book, but plucked out a handful of pie instead and shoved it into her mouth, swallowing it almost without chewing. Then she spun away around the parlour like a dervish, warbling and shrieking and utterly mad.

There was Peebles again, in the living room now, hidden behind a stuffed chair. He watched Miss Flees spin and sucked methodically on his unnatural finger. When the book tumbled into the pie he half stood up, as if he would grab for it, but he settled again when it was clear that Miss Flees hadn’t any interest in it any more. She clearly hadn’t any interest in anything on earth.

A sudden crack of thunder seemed to rattle the house. Rain washed across the night sky in a sheet. The candles around the parlour dimmed and flared, as if blown by winds, and a vast shadow fell obliquely across street and lawn, as if it were cast by a swiftly opening door. Fireflies, thousands of them, rose in a cloud from the suddenly shadowed bushes and rushed skyward like a swarm of backward-shooting stars.

Jack, Helen, and Skeezix fled from the window toward the back yard. Something cold in the shadow pushed them like a vast, compelling hand, and they tumbled together against the shingled wall of the carriage shed, pressing against it, watching through the distant half-lit window. Miss Flees stood like a swamp bird, skinny and still, unmoving, waiting. She shimmered like ocean water stirred by wind and then was gone along with the candle flames, all of them blinking out in an instant. Jack fancied that he saw the angular shadow clipped off, as if the door that had opened had suddenly closed. He huddled under the eaves of the carriage house, the water running off the roof in a line that soaked his shoes. He expected that Miss Flees was still standing in the dark room, that it had only been the candles going out that had made her seem to disappear.