Land of Dreams (20 page)

The encounter didn’t last a minute. He looked like Jack, and she felt compelled to tell him so, but that’s all she’d tell him. This wasn’t the sort of thing she was fond of. She didn’t need to chat with oddly clothed men outside an abandoned taxidermist’s shop.

‘Wait!’ he shouted as she turned and ran. He didn’t follow her, though. He stepped out into the shade of the tree and hollered, ‘Tell Jack to try the Flying Toad!’ Then she was gone – around the side of the shop, up onto the High Street, pounding along toward Miss Flees’s. She went in through the back door, silent as she could and wondering about ‘the Flying Toad’. Maybe Skeezix would know. Or Jack. It was Jack she was supposed to tell, after all. She’d save it for him. Jack would love the mystery of it.

Up the attic stairs she climbed. She pushed into the room, locked the trapdoor behind her, and turned around to see Peebles sitting there in the darkness, sucking on his finger. Mrs Langley’s book lay open on the desk, as if he’d been reading it. The canvas that had rested on the easel had been slashed and torn with a pocketknife and the easel kicked over. Her box of paints lay on the floor, brushes and tubes and hunks of chalk scattered and kicked.

Helen stopped and stood still. She edged back toward the door but didn’t dare reach down to open it. Peebles grinned at her stupidly, a look that suggested he’d happily push her downstairs if he had the opportunity. She was overcome with a sudden rage. The filthy little brute, getting into her stuff, knocking it around. On the floor before him was a crockery bowl, a heap of twigs, some sulphur matches, and what must have been chicken entrails. Skeezix and Jack had told her about that.

I’m tired of you,’ said Peebles, lighting a match with his thumbnail and watching it burn down toward his thumb.

‘Not half as tired as I am of you.’

The match burned down to where he held it. He didn’t twitch –he let the flame burn him, seeming to like it.

‘Very impressive,’ said Helen, looking again at the slashed canvas. ‘Why don’t you light your shirt on fire and burn yourself up?’

‘I might just burn us all up.’ He lit another match and held it to the edge of the canvas. The fire caught and spread, eating across the half-painted canvas, the paint flaring.

Helen took half a step toward it. The painting was ruined as it was; she didn’t care about that. It was the house she cared about. He might very easily burn them all up, exactly like he said. She stopped, though. She wouldn’t give Peebles the satisfaction of seeing her stamp out the flames. And besides, he was probably half bluff. He talked too much. He was too showy. His glasses were tilted and his hair was mussed, and if it came to it, she’d beat him senseless. One of the candelabras was in easy reach. She could pluck it up and persuade him with one good blow. Then she’d kick
him
downstairs. The thought of it made her heart race, and she found herself trembling. She hated this sort of thing.

Peebles smirked at her. ‘Scared?’

Helen said nothing. She stared at him intently, as if she were assessing the nature of his peculiar behaviour. It was a look that would drive him mad. She’d used it on him before, implying that she saw very clearly that he was sadly insane and was ‘scoping him out’, as Skeezix would say.

Peebles peered at his new finger, wiggling it uncertainly. It grew out of his hand at a cockeyed angle, like the grown-back arm of a starfish. His smile faltered for a moment. He lit a match, then bent down and lit the twigs in the crock, blowing them into flame and dropping on the gizzard, or whatever it was. Then he pulled a silver needle out of his coat and pricked his new finger, holding it up for Helen to see. She stared at him stony-faced. He pricked it again, and then again and again. No blood flowed from it. He grinned, as if proud of himself, and pricked the finger next to it. He pushed on it, holding it over the bowl, but nothing happened. A second prick accomplished nothing either. Then, in a sudden rage, he stabbed away at his fingers at random, but they seemed equally bloodless. A look of awe and fear flickered across his face, turning into sudden loathing and desperation. He jammed the needle into the palm of his hand, squeezing a globule of blood onto the half-burned twigs.

With a hiss and a sizzle smoke poured out of them, congealing in the air above the bowl, whirling and seeming to pulse on the still attic air. Vague shapes formed. Airy pictures danced in front of her: a sheep with a gash in its neck, the face of an insect, a gibbet with a man hanging from it, his hands bound. Peebles grinned through it. Helen was horrified, and her face gave her away. She leapt forward and kicked the smoking herbs into the wall, stamping them out against the floorboards.

Peebles cried out in surprise and then leapt up and rushed at her, shoving his needle into her arm. Helen lurched aside, crying out even though she hadn’t felt any pain. The needle had caught in the heavy seam of her coat, and when she jerked away it pulled out of Peebles’s hand. He seemed to writhe with anger. He stood with his mouth open and working, as if he were probing his teeth with his tongue. His chest heaved. He pulled out another match, tried and failed to light it with his thumb, and then plucked a matchbox out of his shirt, spitting out a curse and lighting the match with shaking fingers.

Helen wasn’t near the trapdoor any more. She was against the street windows now. The candelabra wasn’t within reach either. The canvas on the floor had burned itself out. She’d brain him with the chair, that’s what she’d do. She’d smash it to flinders over his tiny head. She’d –

But before she had a chance to do anything, even speak, he held the match to the tattered muslin curtains. They went up in a rush of flame. He backed toward the trapdoor, lighting another match as he went and looking around for something else to burn. There was the ragged end of a tablecloth, draped over a table on the edge of the stacked furniture. Peebles held the match to it, until flames crept off across the table, licking up along the legs of a chair that sat atop it. He bent down suddenly, grinning maliciously at Helen, and reached for the latch of the trapdoor. He meant to leave her there. He meant to climb down and brace the door shut and leave her there.

Helen picked up the chair he’d been sitting in, lifted it over her head, and pitched it at him. He dodged it easily – surprisingly easily. It was as if he’d been snatched out of its way. Helen turned and pulled at what was left of the curtains. They tore away in a wash of sparks, and she dropped them to the floor and danced on them, stamping out the flames. She leapt across to tear the tablecloth off the table before it set the whole heap of old furniture alight. But there wasn’t any need to. The tablecloth floated hovering in the air, burning out over the floor. It wrung itself out like a washcloth while he stood transfixed, gazing at it, his hair standing on end as if it were yanked up by someone’s fist. He stood on tiptoe, jigging like a mechanical ballet dancer, hooting out one clipped-off shriek. The fallen chair floated into the air, righted itself, and sat down hard on all four feet at once. The trapdoor opened with a bang. Peebles teetered on the edge of it. The tablecloth shook itself out like a rug and collapsed in a burnt heap on the floor as Peebles seemed to step involuntarily out over the abyss, shaking his head and looking about him and then falling suddenly with a shout onto the steep stairway below. He managed to cast Helen one last befuddled and venomous glance as he fell, and she heard him bang down the stairs. The trapdoor slammed shut. The latch slid into place, and the attic was deathly silent.

Helen wanted company. No, that wasn’t quite right. Someone was in the room with her. She could feel the presence, and she knew straightaway who it was. It was Mrs Langley. Mrs Langley hadn’t at all wanted to see Peebles burn the house down. The burned tablecloth had infuriated her, and she’d dropped Peebles down the stairwell like a sack of oranges.

Helen suddenly wanted to put things right, to pick up the burned tablecloth and carry the chair back over to the table, to gather up the fallen paints and chalk. But she didn’t dare. Perhaps it would be best to let Mrs Langley cool down a little – let Mrs Langley make the next move. Nothing happened, though. Helen waited. The afternoon was drawing on and the attic was slipping into shadow. She bent down finally and reached for Peebles’s box of matches. They lay on the floor where he’d dropped them when Mrs Langley yanked him up by the hair. Helen half expected the matches to be snatched away, to fly into the air, to skitter off across the floorboards. They didn’t, though. She lit the candles in the candelabra and set it very carefully back onto its table. Her heart no longer careened quite so wildly behind her ribs. She was better off quit of Peebles. She’d been friends, as far as it went, with Mrs Langley, but she’d never been friends with Peebles, although she’d tried. Peebles hadn’t let her, even years ago when such a thing would have been possible.

She picked up the chair and then stepped across with it to the desk, looking around her as she walked and half expecting something to happen – a ghost to appear or a disembodied voice to moan out of a dark corner. She scrabbled around the floor, retrieving bits of chalk and tubes of paint. The box, thank goodness, hadn’t been wrecked. He’d snapped one or two of the brushes, though, and she couldn’t replace them without sending to San Francisco. A little glue and tape perhaps ...

For what capering reason, she wondered, had Peebles decided to take his filthy malice out on her? Why break things up? Just for sport? She shook her head, and then gasped in surprise as a grey cat walked out of the shadows of a gable, meowing. It stopped in the afternoon light that still shone weakly through the window and curled up into a ball, falling asleep almost at once. More meowing came from a distant corner, and another cat, a black one now, wandered out, sniffing the air. A third cat appeared suddenly on the table beside the candelabra; one moment there was nothing, the next there was a cat, materialising out of vapour.

Helen didn’t know any of the cats and she had the distinct suspicion that no one else in the house did either. A bird chirped. In the dusty brass cage angling out of the stored furniture was a canary, ghostly grey and sitting on a piece of dowel lashed to the cage wire with a bit of string. A fourth cat appeared, out of nothing, out of the air.

Helen’s hand shook again. She closed her box and uprighted her easel. Then she smoothed out her jacket and hair. She heard the first faint sounds of someone humming, and for a moment she thought it was Miss Flees, working in the kitchen below, carving cabbages for the soup. But Miss Flees didn’t often sing, or hum, for that matter. This was something else. A silver-white light shone near the trapdoor, hovering there above it, seeming to spin, like one of Peebles’s enchantments, as if someone had thrown a handful of luminous chalk dust into a miniature wind devil. It was Mrs Langley, materialising. Helen steeled herself for the confrontation. She hadn’t really ever got used to the idea of hobnobbing with ghosts. Mrs Langley hadn’t ever meddled in her business before, and she, heaven knew, had left Mrs Langley well enough alone – only fragments of casual chatting now and then.

The glowing dust whirled upward toward the peak of the roof, then fell suddenly like a heavy mist. Mrs Langley stood there. At first she was simply a wash of moonlit fog, and then, like the city above the Moonvale Hills, she grew slowly solid until she stood there grey and bent, an old woman in a shawl and outsize bedroom slippers, smiling at Helen. ‘Have you seen Jimmy?’ was the first thing she said.

Helen blinked at her. ‘No, I haven’t.
Should
I have seen Jimmy?’

The old woman squinted at Helen, shaking her head in rapid little palsied jerks. ‘He might come across, Jimmy might. He was always one for coming across. I’ve got to leave a bundle of clothes under the trestle at the cove. I’m late this year. I always try to get it out early.’

Helen nodded and grinned. She had no idea at all what Mrs Langley was talking about. Helen had only heard speaking spirits a couple of times in her life, and they hadn’t amounted to much. One ghost had recited its multiplication tables up to eight times eight and then had been very proud of itself and quit. You didn’t know what to expect from a ghost.

‘Did you drop Peebles down the stairs?’ asked Helen.

‘Is
that
his name? It sounds like rocks, doesn’t it? Very ugly little rocks. I’m certain he deserved to be dropped downstairs. He deserved worse, I dare say. You should have seen him carry on before you arrived. It was shameful. Diseased, is what it was. I had to take the cats into the back, poor things, and I neglected to take Peety with us. Heaven knows what the sight of such things will do to him.’

For a moment Helen guessed that Mrs Langley had mixed up Jimmy and Peety, whoever they were. But Peety, it turned out, was the canary, who’d suffered through Peebles’s foul behaviour because of having been left behind. Helen was at a loss. She couldn’t think of anything to say, but it was impolite to say nothing. She reached down to pet the grey cat, but her hand passed through it. ‘I’m reading your book,’ said Helen. ‘It’s really quite nice. The illustrations are lovely.’

‘Yes, they are,’ said Mrs Langley. Then she sat down on a chair and the grey cat jumped into her lap. Helen wondered why she didn’t fall through the chair – why, for that matter, she didn’t fall through the floor.

‘Did you paint them yourself?’ Helen asked, and then remembered that she hadn’t, that there’d been mention of an illustrator.

‘No,’ said Mrs Langley, petting the cat. ‘Jimmy painted them. Before he went off He’ll be coming back, and he’ll need these clothes. There’s nothing funny about not having a change of clothes when the clothes you’re wearing are growing like hops. Be a dear and take Jimmy’s clothes to the cove for me. I’m an old lady, you know.’