Land of Dreams (35 page)

‘Easy,’ came the reply, ‘if you’re quick enough. It was poison that Harbin had given your mother. I knew that, but I didn’t know what kind. She was dying and I couldn’t do a thing. Kettering knew, and went across thinking that I knew too, but I didn’t. I followed him but couldn’t find him in the depot – you know how
that
is. When I finally ran him down the Solstice was passed, and it took twelve years to come back around.

‘I planned for every moment of those twelve years – honed it down just right, I thought. Then the run-in with the cat and Willoughby’s having taken you north for a year put a crimp in all my planning, and I had to rush around trying to catch up. When I returned for your mother, knowing now how to save her, we talked, she and I, about finding you and taking you with us, picking up where we’d left off, not losing all those years of watching you grow up. But we didn’t. We decided that you’d turned out well enough to suit us, from the little bit I’d seen and from what Jensen had told me. And you had your friends and your memories, and we couldn’t take those away.

‘So we slipped across and came along to catch up to you, thinking we wouldn’t make it, thinking that the Solstice would pass us by and we’d lose you again. I had given you the elixir, though. That was our only wild card. Maybe you would have come across too, and if worst came to worst, we’d make a life for ourselves somewhere in time. When we lost you in the station, though … Well, never mind about that. It was a bad moment for all of us, but here we are now, aren’t we? Skeezix tells us that Harbin is dead. The carnival is gone, destroyed. Jensen didn’t get a glimpse of the crab, but he’s got the claw, hasn’t he?’

He had indeed. Jack couldn’t take his eyes of This mother. It would be weird to have one. Would she let him read by candlelight at night, or go in and out the window on a rope ladder? When he thought about it, there was no second storey to the house by the harbour anyway. He wouldn’t need a rope ladder. He could swing the window open and climb out into his own back yard.

Mrs Langley’s land of dreams hadn’t come to half as much as he’d anticipated; though, come to think of it, nobody had ever promised him it would. It was mostly the romantic notion of a ghost in an attic, the pursuit of phantoms. He and Helen and Skeezix had gone round and round on Ferris wheels and trains and through haunted fun houses, and they’d set sail in impossible boats. Now here they were home again, where they’d always wanted to be, in the land of doughnuts and rainy weather, of books and tide pools, of sandcastle dreams waiting for the rising tide. In the spring there would be picnics in the cove. Autumn would be a smoky memory among countless others, blowing across the bleached shreds of an old carnival poster on a sunset beach, piling up sand in a cast-off shoe, covering the brass loops of a pair of lost spectacles crusted with sea salt.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

World Fantasy Award winning author James Blaylock, one of the pioneers of the steampunk genre, has written eighteen novels as well as scores of short stories, essays, and articles. His steampunk novel
Homunculus
won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and his short story "The Ape-box Affair," published in
Unearth
magazine, was the first contemporary steampunk story published in the U.S. Recent publications include
Knights of the Cornerstone
,
The Ebb Tide
, and
The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs
. He has recently finished a new steampunk novel titled
The Aylesford Skull
, to be published by Titan Books.