Land of Dreams (11 page)

Miss Flees stood just so for a moment longer, then, apparently satisfied, bent back to what it was she’d been I doing before the ruckus started in the attic. Jack wondered what that was. She hunched over a big galvanised tub, looking intently at something within it. Peebles stared along with her, sticking the end of a spoon into the tub and jerking it back out, his shoulders shaking with what must have been suppressed giggles. Miss Flees stood up and stepped across I to lock the door. In the tub, swimming in lazy circles, was the thing from the ocean, the existence of which had kindled such a ruckus earlier that afternoon.

Jack squinted down at the creature. It looked oddly unlike a fish in the gaslight of the kitchen – fleshy and pink and with fins that might as easily be arms – as if it had been built by someone intending to make a human being, then forgetting halfway through and trying to make a fish instead and winding up with heaven knew what. It seemed vaguely possible, now that Jack looked at the creature, that MacWilt’s anger on the dock had been born out of fear, that it hadn’t merely been a reaction to an insult. Jack waved his arm at his two friends, shushing them past a finger in order to keep them quiet. Helen joined him and Skeezix followed, stepping along in slow, enormous steps, his arms held out from his sides, fingers waggling, as if he were mugging the part of a secretive conspirator in a particularly gaudy stage production. He seemed about to burst over his own antics, so Helen gave him a look to shut him up. She had more at stake, after all, than Jack and Skeezix had.

Miss Flees folded open the top of a little bloodstained cloth bag, reached in, and pulled out the chicken parts that Peebles had fetched back from the alley. She seemed half repulsed by them, as if she did not entirely want to do what she was doing. Peebles watched in fascination. He offered the creature in the tub a spoon again. The spoon was jerked out of his hand, and Miss Flees hissed at him. Then the two of them tried to snatch it back out of the bucket, reaching in furtively and pulling their hands back as if they were trying to pick something up off a hot griddle.

Miss Flees finally came up with the spoon; glaring at Peebles, she set it out of reach on the sink. She dimmed the gaslight and lit a half dozen candles that were little more than heaps of black wax. A moaning began – an incantation of some sort. Jack listened. It sounded at first like the wind blowing under the eaves, drifting on the darkness. It was Miss Flees. She stood with her eyes closed, intoning what must have been a song. Then she picked up the sugar bowl, pinched out a heap of sugar, and emptied a trail of it on the kitchen floor in the shape of a circle. She laid the chicken entrails in the centre of the circle and the five black candles at even intervals around the perimeter, chanting all the time. Peebles watched from his stool.

It seemed fearfully dark to Jack all of a sudden. He could hear the wind lashing at the trees out in the night and the rain pattering on the shingles. For a moment he felt as if he were floating above the vent, hovering there with darkness all around him. He forced himself to look at Skeezix, who stood transfixed beside him, his face bent into a curious mixture of fear and curiosity and disgust.

Miss Flees gathered up a scraping of the wax that ran off one of the soft candles, rolled it in sugar, then dragged it across the entrails, which were sticky with half-dried blood. She dropped the marble-sized pellet in the tub. There was a splashing and the noise of the creature slurping against the surface of the water – then silence. Her chanting continued without pause as she prepared another glob of wax. This time, though, she laid the sugary ball on the slats of the table and handed something to Peebles, who didn’t seem to want it, whatever it was. Peebles shook his head. Miss Flees shook hers back at him, but continued to chant, louder now, as if she were yelling at Peebles in the only way open to her. Peebles shook his head again. Miss Flees snatched up his hand, pinioned his arm beneath her elbow, and jabbed at his palm. It was a needle that she’d offered him, but he’d been unable or unwilling to draw his own blood. He winced when the needle struck him, but he didn’t cry out. There was a brief look of hatred in his eyes, and then fascination as he watched droplets of blood fall onto the sugared wax, tinting it deep red in the dim light. Miss Flees dropped the wax ball into the tub, and again the creature consumed it.

Jack could see the thing’s mouth this time as it lashed up out of the shallow water and took the ball at the surface. It swam round and round its tub then, searching frantically, it seemed, for another of the morsels. The chanting diminished, low and whispery now. Joining it, high-timbred and burbling, like the piping of tiny underwater birds, was a second voice – obviously the voice of the thing in the tub. Miss Flees modulated her own chanting, heightening the rhythm so that it seemed to fit within the spaces of the creature’s song.

A third voice joined in. It rose in the darkness of the attic. The rain on the roof seemed suddenly to be beating in time, and this new voice sang what sounded to Jack to be a hymn, the words utterly distinct and yet utter nonsense.

‘Shut up!’ whispered Skeezix.

The singing continued. Miss Flees began to rock back and forth on her heels below. Peebles sat on his stool, eyes shut, holding his thumb against the palm of his hand.

‘Will
you shut up!’ hissed Skeezix at Helen.

Jack wished Helen would shut up too. He didn’t half like what was going on in the kitchen. The smell of the cabbage broth mingled with the perfume of the candles and the thin, coppery smell of blood, all of it swirling up into his face and sickening him. This wasn’t at all like Miss Flees, or like earlier episodes with Peebles. This was something else, something that was causing the dense, wet atmosphere of the attic, of the entire house, to shimmer and shift.

‘It’s not me,’ whispered Helen.

Jack and Skeezix both looked at her. They’d assumed that she’d been impersonating Mrs Langley, still playing a joke on Miss Flees. But she wasn’t. She was silent and staring. Before them, back in the dusty recesses of a low shadow-hidden gable, there seemed to be a grey veil dangling in empty air. It was visible despite the darkness, hovering there like the city of shadows they’d seen above the Moonvale Hills. It swirled and congealed and formed itself into a face – the face of an old woman, turned sideways and staring against the dark wall. Long grey hair stood away from her head, and her eyes focused unblinking on nothing at all. Her mouth opened and shut like the mouth of a wooden puppet as she sang along with Miss Flees and the thing in the bucket. What it was she was singing, Jack couldn’t make out. Part of him made an effort to listen to it; part of him wanted very badly to be anywhere else on earth.

Miss Flees herself appeared to be horrified. Her enchantment, whatever its purpose, was working to some inconceivable end or another, but the thought of a voice from the attic made her uneasy. Peebles listened intently to it, though. His eyes were half shut, as if he were studying the results of Miss Flees’s conjuring. He’d got hold of the spoon again, and he tapped it idly against his knee, in time to the weird rhythms. He bent over the tub, glanced at Miss Flees, whose eyes were shut with concentration, and tentatively poked the end of the spoon at the fish creature. It ceased its canary singing, lashed up out of the tub, and buried its teeth into Peebles’s finger, thrashing and banging its tail until, amid Peebles’s shrieking, it dropped back into the tub and lay there.

Peebles slid from his stool, waving his hand and groaning. His little finger was bitten off. Miss Flees, coming up out of her trance, stared fixedly for a fraction of a second and then slapped Peebles with the back of her hand. Peebles stopped his capering and stood still, his finger dripping onto the floorboards. Then, very deliberately, he wrapped a tea towel around it, turned mechanically, and walked from the room, his face ghastly white in the candle glow.

The attic seemed to Jack to have gone mad. The air, suddenly, was filled with a sort of swirling mist, like ice crystals in the wind, and in it and around it were the sounds of cats and birds, all cheeping and peeping and meowing as if they were being stirred together in a pan. The hymn singing grew louder, in competition with the cacophony that circled roundabout it. Back in the corners of the attic the shadows lightened to a sort of twilight purple, and in among them there glowed what might have been little stars or hovering fireflies or sparks born spontaneously out of the charged, whirling atmosphere.

Miss Flees was thrown into abrupt confusion. She waved her wooden spoon and shouted for Peebles. Then she bent in to have a look at the fish and cracked her bony hip against the edge of the table, lurching backward and cursing with the pain of it. The activity in the attic diminished, the air growing suddenly more quiet. It seemed to Jack as if something had slumped, as if the atmosphere had tired itself out and sat down for a rest. The starry recesses of the room faded again into shadow; the cats meowed into silence; the canary trilling fell off with one last tired tweet.

Miss Flees resumed her crooning, but it was no good. The fish wouldn’t sing. Mrs Langley had fallen mute. Nothing was left but silence, doubly empty in contrast to the jungle of noises that had preceded it. Miss Flees cleared her throat, warbled just a bit, and gave it one last go, but the result was the same – nothing. Two of the candles had flickered out, and Peebles, when he’d been dancing around waving his finger, had kicked through the sugar circle and stepped on the entrails, smashing them flat on the floor.

In the attic, the ghostly face under the gable was gone. The only sounds when Miss Flees fell silent at last were the wind and the rain and the bubbling of boiling soup. Jack and Skeezix and Helen tiptoed back over to the table, all of them silent. Helen picked up the book and flipped it open, but she paid no real attention to it. Skeezix said, ‘Huh?’ in a half befuddled, half bemused tone, then said to Helen, ‘Who
did
write the book?’

Helen shut the book and then turned to stare out of the, window. ‘Viola Langley,’ she said, and gestured at the book as if inviting them to take a look for themselves.

The streets were dark and wet and silent. Clouds scudded across the deep sky. The moon, two days away from full, peeked past the clouds now and again like an eye carved out of fossil ivory. Moon shadows danced and leaped in the wind like goblins, stretching up the sides of houses and waving their arms over their heads, then melting away to nothing when clouds hid the moon and the streets fell once more into darkness.

Lantz stepped along through the night, wary of the shadows and wary of the light. There were faces in the whorls of wood grain in the slats of a cedar fence, and there were faces grinning and evaporating in the whirling, moonlit clouds. The hooting of an owl, lost somewhere among the limbs of a leafless oak, chased him from the open sidewalk of the High Street up a narrow twisting alley. There was something lurking in the rain-dark emptiness of the oak, something pending. It was waiting in the alley too. He couldn’t see it, but he was certain it could see him.

At the same moment that a cloud shadow cast the alley into darkness, he saw the tilted shape of a black scarecrow silhouetted against the whitewashed wall of a lean-to shed, the wind blowing the straw-stuffed arms of the thing back and forth as if they were hinged. He could hear it rustling. He stopped and stood still, waiting, thinking that he heard the sound of wings flapping, of things flying in the night. Suddenly he felt surrounded by pressing shadows, by sprites and hobgoblins and the sliding, sentient wind. The alley bent so sharply ahead that he couldn’t see beyond ten or fifteen feet, but he felt something crouching there in the mud and the cast-out furniture. He turned and ran, the wind at his back.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the scarecrow dance in the sudden wind, jiggling and flailing and tugging at the broomstick that pinned it to the dirt of a weedy garden. Its hat blew off, sailing like a saucer onto the roof of the shed, then tumbling across the shingles and clicking across the pickets of the low stile fence. Lantz ran back out toward the High Street, the xylophone clacking of the hat, the rustling of the straw, the hooting of the owl, and the creaking of the wind all playing through the avenues of his mind like the music of a goblin orchestra.

His house in the woods had slid down the hillside. Seven days of rain had turned the ground to mud, and the shack had set out toward the sea in a rush. His stuffed beasts had gone with it, squawking and mewling and screeching, their eyes dark with fear and wonder. Lantz had fought to save them, but in the slick mud and the pounding rain and the darkness he could do nothing at all.

Perhaps there’d be something left of them when the sun rose. They might easily have pulled up short along the bluffs and be waiting for him there, near the carnival. But probably not. In two or three days they would wash up along the mudflat beaches of San Francisco Bay like a drowned zoo. People with their trouser legs rolled, poking after razor clams at low tide, would find them there in a litter of glass eyes and cotton stuffing, kelp snails and periwinkles.

Lantz could see it. He could close his eyes and see it as if it were painted on a canvas the size of a barn wall. But he couldn’t think about it; he couldn’t, step by step, trace their strange odyssey: washing down the hill, teetering on the edge of the crumbling bluffs, roiling in the sea foam of a breaking h wave, and drifting out into the current, entangled in kelp and flotsam. He could picture only bits and pieces of it that flickered across the evening hallways of his imagination like fragments of a landscape glimpsed through a telescope held wrong end to.

He shut his eyes and there they were, all of them moving swiftly in the darkness of an oceanic trench, sweeping south on a deepwater current. There was the ostrich and the elk head, the stray dog and the fish with its mouth gaping and rows of neat teeth like clipped-off bits of piano wire; there was the ape with patchy fur, and there was the bit of plywood I with sixteen shrews pinned to it, all of them lined up in ranks and swirling now past a surge of seashells and tube worms t and coral fans that waved and bowed in the shifting tides.