Land of Dreams (31 page)

‘What?’

Jack hauled him around the bread loaf, where they both stood staring at the box. They walked to the edge of the counter, shading their faces from the swirling steam, and peered over. Right below was the bubbling pot, the grainy poison dissolved in the soup. A brief scrape and clink sounded above. Jack looked up, cursing himself for his stupidity, and threw himself into Skeezix as a crockery saucer slid out of a newly opened cupboard and sailed down at their heads. The saucer fell sideways, whumping into the bread loaf, sliding down with a whirling clatter onto the countertop, knocking both of them over and settling across Skeezix’s legs. Jack prayed that the noise of it would attract the giants, who were laughing aloud again over their chess game.

Algernon Harbin peered down at them from above, grinning maliciously. He’d started to grow. He’d been back longer than they, perhaps by hours, and he was twice their height – rat-sized now, big enough to tackle the boxful of poison, to climb up into the cupboard and hide himself there. They’d interrupted his meddling with the soup when they’d come in through the cat door. He would have hidden the box, and the unsuspecting giants would have eaten the soup.

Harbin held his stick out in front of him and leapt, his rag clothes ballooning out around him, straight into the centre of the bread. He climbed off, advised them sarcastically to wait a moment, and hurriedly limped down to the open drawer lowering himself into it.

Jack wasn’t in a mood to wait. He helped Skeezix from under the saucer and sprinted toward the open window. If the giants wanted to sing comic songs while their soup was poisoned, that was their lookout. He and Skeezix weren’t part of it. They could shove a message under the front door -later, after they’d got away.

Harbin loomed up out of the drawer with a poultry skewer in his hand, a skewer that would have knitted shut a turkey big as an elephant. He climbed onto the countertop and in three steps cut them off from the open window, jabbing the skewer at Skeezix’s head with a viciousness that appalled Jack. Both boys swerved back toward the canisters, leaping along, grateful for Harbin’s limp. Jack reached them first, sliding in behind the fat glass jars. Skeezix followed. Either Harbin would squeeze in after them -and he was almost too big for that now – or he’d go round to the other side and cut off their escape. They wouldn’t be able to see him easily beyond the flour-fogged glass and the mounded sugar; but then, he wouldn’t be able to see them either.

They waited, halfway between the flour and the oatmeal, breathing heavily, wondering which way to run. Harbin was nowhere to be seen. Jack took a tentative step back out, and suddenly Harbin was there, leaning around the sugar canister and stabbing at him with the skewer, held in both hands. Jack dropped, scuttling back into the shadows of the canisters like a crab. The sugar jar thunked abruptly against the wall, trapping them there. Harbin appeared beyond the last, almost empty rice canister, casting a little trifling wave at them as he shoved that one against the wall too, so that Jack and Skeezix stood in a little prison, bounded on all sides by the canisters and by the wall. They could see Harbin through the glass now, limping along toward the stove.

He whacked the sides of the box of rat poison, shaking out every fragment, then got round behind it and shoved it along the marble, back past the canisters, tilting it off the edge and into the open drawer. He clambered in after it and was gone for a moment, no doubt sliding it into the recesses. Then he was out again, strolling toward them across the countertop as if he had all the time in the world. Still the giants laughed and joked and sang, as if they’d been at it for hours and were only half done. The cat, trapped in the pantry, kept up a sort of yowling accompaniment.

‘Hey,’ said Skeezix. ‘Look!’ He’d got his knee in behind the rice canister and inched the heavy glass jar away from the wall. Jack pushed in beside him and shoved. The canister slid away, and Skeezix was past it, running. Jack followed, straight toward the fork. Jack heard Harbin curse. Something struck him on the shoulder – the skewer, thrown like a spear but flying up endwise and glancing off, then sliding away across the slick marble and onto the floor behind the stove.

Skeezix and Jack picked up the fork together. It was heavy but secure as a battering ram with one of them on either end. They rushed back at Harbin, who fled toward his drawer, faster than they were despite his limp. He tumbled headfirst into it, ducking back out of sight. They stood on the edge, waiting for him to show himself, but there was nothing they could do with the fork if he did appear except drop it on him. They couldn’t thrust it downward and both still hold onto it. It was time, perhaps, to leave, while they could still hold the villain at bay.

They backed off toward the window, a step at a time. Jack stepped into a crevice in the marble, fell over backward, and let go of his end of the fork, which clanked down onto the countertop and bounced. Skeezix was dragged over with it, shouting and kicking, and Harbin was up and out of the drawer, hauling a tin tea strainer behind him on a chain. He stood up, glaring at Skeezix, and whirled the strainer around his head as if it were a bull-roarer. Skeezix seemed to pause, halfway to his feet, as if wondering whether there was anything in a whirling tea strainer that would give him real trouble. The grimace on Harbin’s face seemed to decide him, and he was up, running for the windowsill, where Jack stood ready to help him up.

Skeezix pulled himself across the sill, resting his chest on it, trying to swing his legs up. He failed and slid down to the counter, huffing for breath and looking back at the capering Harbin, who stepped forward with his tea strainer, grinning but wary. Skeezix smashed against the wall beneath the sill, ducking a swing that would have wrapped the chain around his neck, and reeled back, shouting out loud and leaping nimbly toward the canisters again.

Jack put his shoulder against a saltshaker, a ceramic devil-ridden pig. He tilted it off the sill, and it smashed against the countertop a world away from where Harbin still whirled his device, trying for Skeezix one last time and looking over his shoulder at the open drawer, as if he were wondering what to haul out next – a corncob handle or a potato peeler or a honey dipper. Jack toppled another saltshaker off and then another, making noise. He shouted and screamed and leaned out over the flower box to grab up a pebble that filled his hand.

Harbin turned in a rage and threw the tea strainer at Jack’s legs. The chain wrapped around him, and the strainer whipped past, pulling him off his feet, dragging him over sideways toward the ledge. Jack rolled and sat up, still holding his rock, pitching it into the face of the maniacal Harbin.

Skeezix slid out from behind the canister and ran square into the villain’s back, knocking him onto his face, then leaping onto his back and vaulting up onto the windowsill. He teetered on the edge, nearly falling. Jack clutched at Skeezix’s doll garments, hauling him back across the sill, toward the window and the flower box and the open expanse of the grassy back yard. He shook off the chain, kicking the tea strainer down onto Harbin’s head, and then pushed another saltshaker down after it.

There was a shuffling in the other room, a shout, the sound of a book hitting the floor. Jack and Skeezix froze, perched on the windowsill. A man’s voice shouted, ‘That’s it! It’s me!’ And a woman’s voice followed: ‘Hurry!’

‘Let out the damned cat!’ shouted someone else – one of the old chess players, maybe, who’d finally heard the cat’s yowling and somehow understood its plight.

The bearded giant stepped in through the open door, towering above the counter, horrible to look at. The hairs in his beard, neatly trimmed, perhaps, in the eyes of a giant, covered his face like forest undergrowth. His nose was immense, his teeth ridged and broad like weathered slab doors painted ivory. Clamped between them was a pipe with a bowl big around as a tub and glowing like a furnace, the swirling reek of tobacco clouding out of it like fog off a tule marsh.

The giant reached out and plucked up Algernon Harbin, who shrieked and cursed in terror. Then he set the struggling villain onto the wooden floor, jerking his hand back and shaking it, obviously bitten. He reached across and yanked open the pantry door, then stepped back as the cat leapt out, almost onto Harbin’s back. The cat hissed and batted with its paw, as if it knew the thing on the floor ought to be knocked down, that it was something worse than a rat. Then, with a screech and a snarl and a grisly snapping that made Jack and Skeezix look away, the cat picked its prey up in its teeth and ducked out through the cat door, the last of Harbin’s shrieks diminishing toward the distant bushes.

The giant turned toward the stove, his face grim. Skeezix nudged Jack and cast him a broad, savage wink, standing very still and with a cockeyed grin on his face. Jack did the same, ready in an instant to bolt for the flower box.

‘We eat at Hoover’s tonight!’ shouted the giant. Just like I said.’ The boom of his voice nearly knocked Jack and Skeezix over backward. He pulled his pipe from his mouth suddenly and tapped the ashes out into the soup. Then he twisted off the gas and started back out of the kitchen. He stopped, pulled the open drawer even farther open, and hauled out the empty rat poison box, shaking his head and setting it onto the counter. ‘Soup’s done for,’ he said. He stepped into the doorway, turned, and looked straight toward the window. Jack nearly leapt out. The giant twisted the ring off his finger, grinned in their general direction, and flipped it end over end in the air, catching it, chuckling, and slipping it back on. He turned and strode out.

Jack and Skeezix had climbed down the bushes, sprinted across the cropped lawn, and ducked under the fence before either one of them felt like speaking. They found themselves on the High Street again, looking across at the harbour. Suddenly the giant world seemed filled with a million perils. A stinkbug big as a dog eyed them from the gutter. A sparrow hawk swooped down to have a look and then swooped up again. They could hear the rustling, padding footsteps of what must have been another cat, stalking beyond the wooden fence they’d just slid under – a fence that rose above them like the wall of a canyon. A cat could scale it in an instant.

‘Come on,’ said Skeezix, and he darted out into the road, angling toward the side of the inn.

‘Why?’ shouted Jack, following, across the street and into the shadows.

‘Why not? Let’s hide until we can figure this out. Until we start to grow. Dr Jensen can wait till it’s safer. He’s not in any rush.’ They rounded the inn, hopping down stone stairs toward the bay, scuttling in behind a heap of wooden crates, breathing hard. Skeezix grinned, obviously proud of himself. ‘He thought we were saltshakers.’

‘What?’ asked Jack. ‘
Who
did?’

‘That monster did, after he set the cat on Harbin. Not that Harbin didn’t deserve it. It was our standing there like that that did it, that saved us. I was salt, being the fat one, and you were pepper.’

Jack rolled his eyes. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘What was that gag with the ring?’

Skeezix shook his head. ‘Damned if I know. And what was Harbin doing there, poisoning innocent people? The giant must have known who he was. Did you see how he just emptied his pipe into the soup like it was nothing, like he was putting in herbs? We’re out of our depth here, is what I think. We stumbled into something that was none of our business. Good thing we did, though; it was all the noise and the fight that brought the giant around. They’d have sucked down the soup otherwise and been dead in their beds.’

‘How long do you suppose Harbin’s been here?’

‘I don’t know,’ Skeezix answered, shrugging and peering out through the slats of the crate. ‘A couple of hours anyway. We ought to start growing fairly soon, as I see it. And when we do, we’d better have some clothes to put on or we’ll find ourselves in trouble. I’m not going anywhere near Elaine Potts under circumstances like that.’

Jack nodded. ‘We ought to get back down to the river. We could hook some clothes off the clothes-line at the White sisters’ houses. We wouldn’t have to be any bigger than Harbin to yank a couple of pairs of pants out of their clothespins. Then we could drag them into the bushes and wait.’

‘Let’s go. We’ve got nothing to do here but crack our heads on the top of these crates.’

They crept out, straight into the face of a rat sniffing along the crates. It was immense – fat and with short bristly fur and a tail a foot long. Its upper lip flickered up to expose a row of teeth that might have gnawed off Jack’s arm without a terrible lot of trouble. Jack and Skeezix backed away slowly. The rat sniffed after them, curious.

‘Back down the ramp,’ whispered Jack. ‘He won’t go near the guy fishing down there.’

Skeezix nodded, mostly because their back was to the broad wagon ramp that ran down to where the dories put in, and there was no place else to go. It was a sound idea anyway, or at least seemed so until it became clear that the rat didn’t care who was fishing at the end of the ramp; it followed the two down, its tail twitching, ready to leap.

‘He’s pig drunk,’ said Skeezix.

‘The rat?’ Jack was astonished at the pronouncement.

‘The guy fishing. He won’t help. Look at him; he’s about to lose his shoe, dangling it like that from his toe. He’s stinking. The rat knows it; the guy’s probably a permanent fixture around here. They can’t arrest him for vagrancy as long as he carries a fishing pole.’

Jack looked around him for a weapon: a stick, a shard of glass, anything. The whole place seemed swept, as if they’d sent a man around earlier to make sure that there was no debris in the streets that might tempt a mouse-sized man into violence. But there was something – a fish hook, rusted and old with the eye snapped off. Jack lunged for it, plucking it up and waving it over his head to menace the rat, who stared straight at them through impossibly brown eyes, eyes that didn’t notice the hook or didn’t care. It was a useless weapon anyway.