Land of Dreams (7 page)

The more Jack thought about it, the more he was willing to admit to this last part.
He
, at least, was in a mood to believe anything. And maybe being in such a mood made commonplace things seem extraordinary. Maybe. The train last night, though: that had been anything but commonplace. The tracks were half wrecked yesterday afternoon. Ties had slid down onto the beach. The iron was etched with rust and twisted by moving earth. They were half wrecked again this morning. You could see them lying crooked in the sun from where the two sat on the bluffs. And yet at midnight a train, pouring steam, had flown atop them, out of the rainy night.

‘Did you hear a train whistle last night?’ Jack asked idly, peering through Jensen’s spyglass at a hulking crab that was just then tramping up out of the sea.

Dr Jensen was silent for a moment. Then he admitted that he had. That was another of the Solstice phenomena – the arrival of the train, but always so late at night that no one actually saw it. Some said that the carnival
was
the train, for there was no evidence that the train ever got beyond Moonvale, and there was nowhere between Rio Dell and Moonvale for the train to turn around. It couldn’t, then, come and go in the night.

Once, years ago, when Dr Jensen and Kettering were students in the university, they’d paid a visit to an old man whom Kettering had met in a Chinatown bar. He was a curious and indefinably malignant old man named Wo Ling, and he claimed to be prodigiously old. It hadn’t sounded like a lie. Kettering had agreed to supply him with laboratory animals, mostly lambs and chickens, although what he wanted the beasts for he wouldn’t say. Jensen hadn’t liked the idea much, but then the idea wasn’t his anyway; it was Kettering’s, and Kettering didn’t ask questions .

The old man had been an engineer in his day – had piloted trains, as he put it, unimaginable trains. But he was tired of it. He lived on the waterfront in a half-abandoned warehouse that he shared with bats and owls and crows. The front rooms were scattered with rusted machinery, the decayed remains of a dismantled carnival that had been stored there years past and left to rust in the ocean air.

A section of roof had caved in and windows were broken and hanging. Blackberry vines and creepers supported tilting walls that were little more than papery termite-eaten husks, and when the wind blew it whistled up through the termite tracks and sounded like the hollow music of a bamboo flute. The man was an alchemist, and he was dying. From the look of him he might already have been dead a dozen times over and brought back to life by some revivifying drug.

They’d wandered through the interior of the ruined warehouse, out into a broad empty room that fronted the harbour and was built on pilings. A train trestle ran along beside it, the cold tide, swirling below and rocky islands floating on the bay, visible through dusty window glass. Fog seemed to have blown in through broken panes and through the ruined roof, for the room was misty with ocean air and the smell of tar and salt spray and drying kelp. There was the sound on the breeze of distant train whistles, although neither Jensen nor Kettering could swear that it wasn’t just wind through the termite caves.

The fog swirling in the room had drifted toward the veiled ceiling to dissipate like steam, and the entire time they stood there, listening and waiting, the ground swell in the bay sighed through the pilings, clattering stones and seashells along the rocky shingle. The combination of steamy fog and ghostly whistling and the perpetual rush and clatter of the ocean filled the air with the uncanny atmosphere of a train depot. Then, although it might have been his imagination, it seemed as if the warehouse were nothing but an enormous museum of steam machines, of locomotives and calliopes and engines, and that the entire structure shook and clattered where it stood, as if through some sort of enchanted metamorphosis it was turning into the very curiosities it housed.

Then the wind had fallen off and the sea calmed and the fog cleared, and once again they stood in an abandoned, decayed warehouse. It was imagination after all. And yet later that week, curiously, when the two had passed along the waterfront in a coach, they couldn’t see the warehouse at all, although the train trestle still stood there, its pilings sunk into the mud of the bay and covered below the tide line with mussels and barnacles and starfish.

Kettering was foolish enough to think that the warehouse had
been
the train, in some curious way, and the carnival too–that it was all one. But then Kettering always had been a sort of mystic. The old man didn’t return to the city while they were there, although Jensen saw him again twelve years later, during the Solstice in Rio Dell, the year old man Pinkerd came back from the dead. He operated the carnival that year – Wo Ling did – but he said he was giving it up. He was tired of it, he said; there were certain conditions that went along with it that he hadn’t the stomach for any more.

Dr Jensen’s story didn’t clarify things much, and when Jack told the doctor about the train last night, the doctor shrugged. There you are,’ he said, as if that explained things well enough, and he went back to watching his crabs – the occasional stragglers that were left. He seemed disinclined to talk. Skeezix appeared then, eating a doughnut and wild with excitement. Something had been caught by one of the fishermen, had entangled itself in his net in shallow water. Skeezix wouldn’t say what it was. He shook his head and grinned and puffed up the beach trail behind Jack, both of them hurrying toward the village to see it. Dr Jensen stayed behind, studying the sea through his glass.

T
HE VILLAGE SHOPS CLUSTERED
along the High Street where it wound up the hill and eventually up to Willoughby’s. There was a grocery and two inns, a barber and a hardware store, MacWilt’s tavern, the open market, a store that sold cast-off furniture and crockery, Potts’s bakery, and the taxidermist’s shop. This last, of course, had been locked up for years and the windows dusted with grime. Streets and alleys ran off at angles, some dead-ending a half block down, some winding up and away into the hills past outlying farms, then turning into logging roads or just petering out into trails that disappeared into orchards and woods.

The ocean itself pushed in behind the High Street when the tide rose. When it fell again it left mud flats and eelgrass behind, dotted with oyster beds and with mussels clumped along pier pilings and rocks. The ribs of decayed rowing boats thrust up out of the mud. Beside them sat tethered boats, gone aground when the tide fell, waiting for it to rise again. The open market, which was nothing, really, but a dozen pineboard shacks with tin and copper roofs, sat on the broken remains of an old pier that ran out into the mud of the bay. The pier had been longer once, and at the end of it had been what passed for a fashionable restaurant. But that was forty years ago, when Rio Dell had been more prosperous and when the old Flying Wizard still ran the coast route to Moonvale and Sunnybrae and Crescent City. Two thirds of the pier had finally canted over into the soft silt of the bay and twisted itself apart. The restaurant – condemned a year and a half earlier – had smashed to kindling wood. Over the years, it had been piece by piece carried out with the tide. Fishing boats still docked along what was left of the ruined pier, and the fishermen themselves lived either on their boats or in the shacks of the market.

It seemed now as if half the town milled about the market. Jack caught sight of Miss Flees skulking along with a net bag full of cabbages, and Skeezix insisted they were severed heads and not cabbages at all. Almost no one was intent on buying anything. It was late in the morning for that sort of thing; most of the greengrocers had hauled their carts home an hour since. People were intent on something else. Jack saw MacWilt’s hat wagging along beside one of the fish shacks, and then he saw the hat sail off, like someone had shoved a firecracker under it. The crowd roundabout the foot of the pier broke into raucous laughter, and people farther back on the edge pushed in to see what the row was about. Skeezix slipped in among them, disappearing from Jack’s view.

In a moment he heard Skeezix whistle but couldn’t see him. Skeezix whistled again. There he was, on top of the balcony that ran along the side of the Harbour Inn. There was a door leading onto the balcony from the interior of the inn, though it had been nailed shut years earlier when a sleepwalking traveller had strolled out at dawn and pitched over the railing onto the street. You could climb up the copper drainpipe, though, and pull yourself over. In the summer Jack and Skeezix slept up there sometimes, climbing up silently in the darkness and watching the village, waiting for the moon to rise out of the midnight sea, listening to the trill of canaries from the room above the tavern across the street. They’d be chased off if anyone saw them up there during the day, but everyone was too busy making fun of MacWilt. The laughter sounded forced, though; it had an icy, hollow edge to it – as if maybe what they were laughing at hadn’t ought to be laughed at, but, like idle hands occupied with twiddling fingers or twirling hair, laughing gave them something to do with their voices.

The laughter died and was replaced by MacWilt’s cursing. Jack could easily see why. In a wooden tub, sloshing with sea water in front of a fisherman’s shack, swam a finny sort of creature with great popping-out eyes. It looked as if it had been netted deep in an oceanic trench, and that the lessening pressure of its ascent had started to explode it, to pop its eyes out like corks out of a toy gun.

It flopped there, sucking in great gulps of water through its undulating gills as if there wasn’t enough ocean in the little tub to satisfy it. Along its sides shone scales the size of half dollars, glinting like overlapping rainbows in the sunlight. It had something very much like a neck, odd as it seemed to Jack, and fins that might as easily have been hands. Its tail, though, was the tail of a fish, and it whumped against the bottom of the tub in a steady rhythmic motion, as if it were trying to pound out a coded message. It struggled suddenly, thrashing sideways and flopping up on edge, and then hooked its ventral fins over the side of the tub as if labouring to throw itself into the murky waters of the bay.

The fisherman who had caught it flipped it back into the tub and told it to stay there. He called it a sport and wondered past a drunken grin whether such a thing had ever before been filleted in the village of Rio Dell. There wasn’t as much laughter, apparently, as he would have liked. A little knot of fishermen standing nearby and smoking pipes shook their heads – not in answer to his question but with the air of washing their hands of the whole dark business. They were old-timers. They hadn’t even taken their boats out that morning. It was better to wait a week or so, until the ocean got back onto an even keel and the strange flotsam stirred up by Solstice storms settled back into the shadows of submarine grottoes and stayed there.

Jack gouged Skeezix in the side with his elbow and pointed at the crowd. There in the shadows stood Miss Flees, her hair swept back out of her face and clutched with a strip of ribbon. She smiled blankly, as if it were expected of her, and she cocked her head and fluttered her eyelids in rapid little blinks in a sort of parody of flirtatiousness, all the time staring at the thing in the tub. No one spoke to her, although every now and then she turned her head and widened her eyes as if she’d just seen an old friend coming along toward her through the crowd. Once she cast a little trifling wave in the direction of the street, but both Jack and Skeezix could see that there was no one there. She couldn’t keep her eyes off the fish for long, though.

‘Did it sing?’ shouted someone from the edge of the crowd.

‘Did it sing! You should have heard it!’ The fisherman tipped the creature back into the tub again but jerked his hand back quick, as if he’d been bitten. He grinned weakly and shrugged, sucking on his finger.
‘’Course
it sung. I caught him on the junk line, but he wasn’t after the bait. I snagged him, is what I did, when I was reeling it in. He was drifting in towards the harbour on the tide. Thought it was a damned jellyfish at first.’

‘It don’t look like a jellyfish to me,’ said Potts, the baker, wiping flour onto his apron.

‘That’s because you ain’t a fisherman,’ shouted the man who’d asked about the singing. ‘It would have looked like a jelly
roll
to you.’ With that he laughed like he was going to collapse, but no one else laughed much at all, which made him mad. He coughed once, then turned to the woman standing next to him and said in a stage whisper, ‘Spitting image of Wilt, ain’t it?’ then burst into laughter again.

Mac Wilt, who had been eyeing the creature as intently as Miss Flees had, spun round and took a step toward the man, who straightened up with a jerk and squinted at the tavern keeper. ‘You shut up,’ said Mac Wilt, giving him a dark look.

The man snickered, cast a wink at the woman beside him, and reached out to flip Mac Wilt’s hat off his head again. The hat somersaulted into the air, landing neatly in the tub, to the vast amusement of most of the crowd. The fish thing thrashed beneath the hat, cascading water out onto the pier. ‘Can you beat that!’ cried Mac Wilt’s tormentor. ‘It’s wearing its daddy’s hat!’

The air seemed suddenly to have a serrated edge to it. No one cared that Mac Wilt was being insulted, and most of the crowd hoped it would come to blows. It felt to Jack as if storm clouds were blowing in and the pressure were dropping. He heard something on the freshening wind, but he couldn’t identify the sound – a sort of tootling, a faraway music, rising and falling in the breeze, muddled up with a distant booming, like waves, perhaps, breaking in the cove. Skeezix started to say something about Miss Flees, but Jack shushed him and told him to listen. He tilted his head. Skeezix seemed to hear it too. A calliope, that’s what it was. Jack clumped along the boards of the balcony towards the street, until he could see round the corner. It was coming from out on the bluffs, from the carnival. He could see a distant slice of meadow between the tavern roof and the chimney of the bakery – the curve of a little grass-covered hill that ran down toward the bluffs and the sea. Edging up above it, turning round and round in cadence with the slow whistling of the steam-driven calliope, was the top arc of the Ferris wheel, its cars empty but moving.