Land of Dreams (32 page)

Jack bumped solidly into something soft. It was the back of the sleeping fisherman. Skeezix hit the man with both fists, effecting nothing. The rat crept forward. Jack spun around, closed his eyes, and shoved the hook through the man’s shirt and into the roll of flesh that sagged over his belt. The fisherman leapt awake, shouting, dropping his shoe into the harbour, waving his fishing pole in a mad, hopping dance.

The rat was gone. One moment he was there; the next he’d leapt away, disappearing into the crates. The fisherman spied Jack and Skeezix and immediately tried to stomp on them. ‘Rats!’ he cried – an observation that would have been true ten seconds earlier – and he reeled back and forth, shrieking with anger when he stepped on a pebble with his shoeless foot, kicking at Skeezix as he ran toward the water.

Jump!’ shouted Jack, and he leapt as he shouted, off the little stone kerb that ran along the edge of the ramp and angled down into the water. He landed in the floating shoe, and Skeezix landed on top of him. The shoe listed crazily for a moment, riding up and over a little swell, and then eddied out toward the rowing boats moored in the harbour.

The fisherman raged on the shore, hopping on one foot. He reached for the escaping shoe with the tip of his pole, slapping the side, trying to turn it about. But the tide had caught it, and his prodding served only to spin it out farther. He cast his hook at it then, thinking to snag it and reel it in. The heavy hook whirled past, chasing Skeezix and Jack back in toward the toe. It snaked in again and again, finally biting into one of the laces. The shoe jerked about, skidding across the top of the water. Jack dashed out and snatched at it, wiggling the hook out, wishing he hadn’t lost his pocketknife. Halfway back to shore he pitched the hook into the water, and the tide picked them up again. The fisherman beat the water with his pole, furious, incapable in his fury of casting into the shoe again. In moments it was lost to him and he knew it. He stood with his hands on his hips and watched it float out toward the open ocean.

A man in a battered stovepipe hat strode down the ramp toward the fisherman, asking about the shouting, and the fisherman told him, gesturing wildly, about the two tiny men who had stabbed him while he slept and stole his shoe and were sailing it out of the harbour. The hatted man shook his head slowly and walked back up the ramp, stopping at the top to say something but failing, perhaps, to find the words. He walked away up the High Street, leaving the fisherman scratching his head in wonder.

The tide ran out quickly, swirling around and out the mouth of the harbour, past the headland, skidding up into a southwest swell and disappearing into the broad Pacific. The sun crept down toward the horizon, and a fog was blowing up, stretching along in a vast grey wall a half mile or so out to sea. Jack and Skeezix sat shivering, watching the land slip past, happy for the calm sea. There was the cove and the bluffs, and way down the shore, shimmering in the late afternoon sun, was the placid expanse of the Eel River. A land wind blew, surprisingly warm but cooling quickly as it travelled across the ocean. When night fell, the lacy dolls’ clothes wouldn’t be worth much. They could climb into the shoe to escape the wind, but they’d still have to sit on the ocean-soaked leather of the shoe sole. If the wind freshened, of course, their travels would be at an end. The shoe wouldn’t stand a chop.

‘There’s no carnival,’ said Skeezix suddenly, standing up and pointing toward the bluffs.

‘You’re right. And it’s still Solstice time too, otherwise we wouldn’t have gotten here.’ He stared at the bluffs for a moment, wondering at their immeasurable height and realising it was the first time he’d seen them from out at sea like that. ‘This is just like Dr Jensen’s voyage, isn’t it?’

‘I
wish
it was,’ said Skeezix. ‘Dr Jensen got pushed in to shore, at least. We’re just drifting farther out, into the fog. You know what’s going to happen, don’t you? Any time now.’

It had already begun to happen. Jack untied his belt and then retied it a bit looser. They were growing. A shoe made a fine sort of longboat for mice, and a tolerable rowing boat for rats, but it wouldn’t amount to as much as a washtub for, say, a possum. ‘Long damned way to swim, isn’t it? Even if we were full size.’

‘I’m too beat to swim anywhere,’ said Skeezix. ‘And imagine swimming in the ocean during the Solstice. A sardine’s as big as a shark.’

‘Don’t mention sharks,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t want to think about sharks.’

The shoe bobbed lazily on the swell as the sun set. They drifted into the first of the swirling fog and into darkness at the same time. The wind turned, feeling cold and damp, slanting out of the south, up the coast. The two of them crawled back into the toe, lying down with their heads toward the heel so that when it came time they could pull themselves out. Certainly they’d wake up before they were squeezed senseless by the shoe. Knowing that there was nothing they could do about what would surely come, and too tired to worry about things they couldn’t avoid, they untied their belts and lay in silence, listening to the ocean lap at the sides of their craft and watching the misty evening drift into misty night until they fell asleep shivering.

W
ITH A SUDDENNESS
that made her gasp, Helen found herself alone in the little cart, whirring along through the weird darkness. For a slip of a moment she thought that Jack and Skeezix had flown out, or were snatched out, or had never been there in the first place and she was dreaming and would wake up.

Then she knew, in a rush. They’d gone across without her. They hadn’t been quick enough with the bottle of elixir. Part of her was relieved, but only for an instant. If she’d been somewhere else – back in the attic, say, or at Dr Jensen’s – and not hurtling along through this black carnival ride, the relief would amount to more.

She slid to the middle of the cart, where Jack had sat, but slid back again almost at once. There was something safe about being on the edge of the seat. She’d always felt like that, preferring the edge of the sidewalk to the middle of it, the edge of a sofa to the centre. Maybe it was because she felt she could get out quicker that way, or maybe it was because it was lonely being all alone at the centre of something.

The wheels clacked. Little musty breezes stirred her hair. Cobwebs brushed her face. When Jack and Skeezix had vanished, she’d thought she had heard the sound of a distant train, and she’d smelled salt air and tar and the odour of mussels and barnacles clinging to pier pilings. Now there was nothing but silence and darkness and musty air, like in a cellar, and a light, dim and distant but rushing up at her along the corridor.

She gripped the iron bar across her knees and bit her lip. The cart slammed into the circle of light, and there, sitting on a kitchen stool, stroking the fur of what appeared to Helen to be a dead cat, sat Peebles, grinning at her. She shut her eyes and was past him, into the pleasant darkness again. Laughter hooted somewhere ahead, and there was the sound of a blade thunking against a chopping block and then a cry that gurgled into nothing. Double-time music burbled out and then abruptly shut off. A door slammed, ‘Helen!’ whispered a voice, away off in the recesses of the darkness.

She careened around an S-shaped bit of track, lurching from side to side. A light blinked on and she found herself hurtling toward a wall, painted with a likeness of the carnival itself, centred around the smoking oven. Jerking skeletons fed bleached bones into the smoking, open mouth of the thing, and just before she ducked her head and curled up in anticipation of smashing into it, steam hissed out in a rush, pouring over her, smelling horribly of hot ground bone.

Then she was outside, still moving, aware that the carnival was empty and half dark. She felt suddenly sleepy and exhausted. She could easily lie across the seat and close her eyes. She was drained, was the truth of it, from the excitement of the Solstice, from the too-long day, from the shock of finding herself alone and Jack gone. There was the entrance again, the slab door opening, slowly – a black tunnel into which she was falling, as if down a well toward the soft and steamy centre of the earth.

Peebles rattled along in his cart, directly behind Helen. He gnawed at his finger, liking the feel of the rubbery flesh. The numbness in it was spreading along his arm, just as Dr Brown had promised it would. Shortly, though, when the carnival had finished with Helen, the numbness would be gone. He smiled to think about it. He liked the idea of living at the expense of people like Helen. He hadn’t had a taste, so to speak, of Lantz. Helen was his first.

He’d dealt handily enough with Miss Flees, who’d been tiresome. She was beneath him, whining away all the time, looking like a mess, mothering him. The Solstice pie had done the trick. She’d been stark, staring mad before she’d gone across. It was a pity he hadn’t any chance to deal with Jack and Skeezix too, but he’d get at them through Helen. And he’d be back, of course. Then they’d see – all of them. The only real regret was that he shared the carnival with MacWilt, but he’d work on that too. He didn’t need partners.

He had never been tempted, really, to go across. One world was the same as the next, all of them equally odious. It was power he wanted, that and the eradication of the people who hadn’t let him have it, who had scoffed at him and ignored him and tried to save him from himself. He had that power now – over life and death. The only master he served was the carnival itself, and it was a master that couldn’t speak, that needed what he needed, that sought, day to day, the same ends that he sought.

He rather enjoyed the darkness of the ride. He could feel something in the air, a sort of electricity, like before a hot wind. It hovered around him, probing, watching him. But he was part of it, in a way, and could ignore it. Helen couldn’t, or at least she shouldn’t. But then she hadn’t any real choice in the matter. She was theirs.

Painted skeletons and headless men appeared and receded. Steam roiled up around him. For a moment he felt the uncanny certainty that it was fog, not steam, and that he occupied a vast, open, and crumbling building somewhere, a building that decayed around him, the floors ankle deep in termite dust, sea wind whistling through gaps in clapboard siding. It felt right, somehow; like home. Then he was back in the cart, angling along the dark corridor. He heard Helen scream from the car ahead. He laughed, imagining her terror and half regretting that it wouldn’t last.

Before they left for the south, he promised himself, after he’d seen to Helen, he’d burn down Miss Flees’s house. Fire might not kill the old woman who haunted the attic, but it would wipe out every trace of the things she possessed, of her reason for haunting anything at all. He smiled as he rumbled along, imagining the house burning. He’d burn Jensen’s house too. He’d have a busy night of it, and tomorrow he’d be gone, beyond where anyone would think to look for him.

Jack and Skeezix found themselves on a beach. Jack woke up first, wondering how long he’d slept. The moon was rising beyond the coastal hills, and only a pale yellow bit of light leaked across the night landscape, so that just the outlines of things were visible. It felt like midnight, or thereabouts. They were in the cove – they must have blown back in, as Dr Jensen had done. The wet dolls’ clothes hung on him loosely, as they had when he’d first put them on. The foggy weather must have stretched them. It was too much to hope for any other explanation.

There was no sign of fog now, not even offshore, although it might have been hidden by the night. The tide was out, exposing rock reefs and tide pools, shadowy and dark, the still water of the pools barely visible in the pale radiance cast by the hidden moon.

Something moved down the cove, out in the water toward the headland – something big, that clacked and splashed. A ragged arm waved out of the water, the moonlit claw on the end clutching something, a fish maybe, as long as Jack’s leg. They’d returned to a world of monsters. This was proof – a hermit crab as big as a house. He could see the mountainous whorl of the turban snail shell on its back. Nowhere was safe. It was curious that they hadn’t grown. Harbin had. If he’d lived he’d be big enough by now to walk the streets. He’d have no fear of cats, or crabs, or rats as big as oxen. It wasn’t safe on the beach. A crab might as easily take a fancy to them as to a fish.

Skeezix still slept. Jack didn’t want to wake him, even though he knew he had to. Despite Skeezix’s brave, adventurous talk, he’d be downhearted to find that he was back again, that he still occupied a world in which there was quite possibly another Skeezix, one that had quite conceivably already wooed Elaine Potts, a world in which a passing hermit crab could eat them both before going to bed.

He prodded Skeezix with his foot and peered at the soggy shoe, wondering at it. Something was wrong. They’d gone to sleep thinking that during the night they’d outgrow it, that their increasing weight would swamp it, and that they’d find themselves swimming in the open, foggy ocean. Now it seemed to him that it was even larger than when they’d first leapt into it. Certainly the wet hadn’t stretched the shoe and his dolls’ clothes both.

A wave broke behind them, washing across the heel of the shoe, spinning it sideways and beaching it entirely. A seagull landed on the toe just as the moon cleared the hills, bathing the coast in silver light. Jack stared at the bird for a moment, then blinked in surprise. It wasn’t a monster, like the hermit crab or the owl in the oak woods. It was a standard seagull. It would have had to stand on his forearm to look him in the face. He turned around to look at the beach again. Perhaps the crab was a figment, an illusion, a shadow, a trick of moonlight and darkness. But it wasn’t. It was still there, clacking and clambering over rocks, toward them. They seemed to have drifted into some giddy version of the world that was half monster, half normal. But there wasn’t any time to be puzzled about it.