Land of Dreams (13 page)

‘Who’s dead then besides the man from San Francisco, the engineer?’

‘No one’s dead.’

‘Where’s my father?’

‘Ask Mrs Langley. She knows.’

‘Where’s Dr Harbin?’ When Jack asked he realized that he really didn’t want to know – that if he knew for sure he’d want to kill the man himself. That wasn’t true either. He
ought
to want to kill the man, maybe, for what he’d done to his mother and father. But then Jack hadn’t much known his mother and father, had he? He had only vague childhood memories. And the idea of killing anything was foreign to him. It was the sort of thing that would appeal to Peebles or MacWilt or to Harbin himself. ‘I don’t get it,’ said Jack, feeling foolish for stating the utterly obvious. ‘I mean about the old bones in my father’s grave.’

‘We didn’t need any corpses, to tell you the truth. What happened out on the bluffs was going to take some explaining anyway. The old man wasn’t anything but a mummy when we found him. He was lying in the rain. Looked like an old leather bag sewed up into a sort of doll. There were sounds coming out of his mouth, but they didn’t mean anything, or they were in a language we couldn’t understand. Inside of five minutes he’d dwindled to nothing but a heap of bones and dust. His dust is part of the mud of the meadow still; his bones we put in a gunnysack and hauled home. I put them into the coffin along with ballast, like I said, and I told everyone that asked that it was Lars Portland in the coffin. I was the coroner then, and there was no reason for me to lie, not really. No one suspected me of having a hand in the business. And I didn’t, up to a point. I just wanted to keep things neat. They’ve been neat, too – as a pin – up until a couple of days back.’

Skeezix had sat in silence atop a nail keg, listening to Jack and Dr Jensen. It was their affair, really, and he had enough sense to stay out of it. When it seemed that Jack was played out, though, he asked, ‘What about the carnival? You said this old man who –what, decayed on the bluffs there? –
ran
the carnival. What happened after he was gone? Carnival close down? Where did it go?’

‘A mystery, I suppose,’ said the doctor, squinting at the floor. ‘It sat in the rain for two days, looking like it was going to rust to pieces. I’d have bet that by the end of the week there wouldn’t be anything more of it left than there was of Kettering’s friend –nothing but dust and carnival bones. But then it left in the night. Pulled up stakes and was gone. I heard the calliope whistle. Woke me up around midnight, but by the time I got the wagon out and drove down to the Coast Road it had vanished. Nothing but moonlit steam rising in a line down toward Scotia. I put an ear to the tracks, and I could hear it, travelling south. I followed it, is what I did – next day. I drove all the way into San Francisco and stayed for a fortnight, looking in on the warehouse, even though I knew I wouldn’t find it there, and even though last time we’d been there the warehouse itself had been gone. It was a fool’s errand, and I knew it, and yet there was something in the atmosphere of the whole thing that compelled me. Well, it was back, after a fashion – the warehouse, that is. It wasn’t what it had been years earlier, and you’ll recall that it was falling into ruin then.

‘Now it was the skeleton of a building. Termite dust was ankle deep in the sheltered corners. Wind had scoured the floor where it blew off the bay. There was a litter of iron debris, and of brass and bronze and copper, but most of it was massed together with rust and verdigris so that I couldn’t say for certain what any of it had been. There were old posters glued across the few walls left teetering there, circus posters, mostly, or carnival posters, and all of them peeling off in the weather to expose more of the same underneath, layer after layer. It was as if the walls themselves hadn’t ever been plastered, but were nothing but papier-mâché, glued together with the ooze from mussels and barnacles. It certainly smelled so. The whole place, even in the wind, had the smell of a tide pool too long out of the water, boiled by the sun.

‘The berry vines had grown luxuriantly, though they seemed to be dying back now. There was scarcely a place in the tumbled warehouse, though, from which you could see either of the buildings that flanked it beyond weedy yards. The only view was out onto the bay, across the railroad trestle. On the street in front, off the Embarcadero, there was an iron fence, tilted and broken, that ended on either side merely by burying itself into the vines. I had gotten there at low tide and had had to climb down onto the mud flats and pick my way up from the bay. It was that or cut my way through the blackberries.

‘Anyway, that’s what I found. I convinced myself that we’d been mistaken on the last trip. We hadn’t made much of a search of it then, and it was coming on dusk. We had peered past the fence and through the vines and had
thought
there was nothing left of the place, but clearly we’d been fooled by the dying sunlight. Maybe we’d mistaken the broken framework of the place for part of the railroad trestle.’ Dr Jensen ran out of steam suddenly. He stood up and surveyed his boat, which didn’t look at all seaworthy to Jack. But it had floated ashore from somewhere without capsizing or sinking. Perhaps it could stand another voyage.

‘So you haven’t been back since?’ asked Jack, not entirely satisfied that the doctor had come to the end of his tale.

‘Oh, I went back, all right. Three years later. I’d gone into the city again after certain amphibians and stopped in Chinatown for supper. I drove around the Embarcadero in a coach – not to visit the warehouse, mind you, but to collect salamanders at the wharf – and en route we passed the gates. I hadn’t been thinking about the place, so it took me by surprise, and I’d passed them in an instant and was rattling away toward the wharf before I could collect myself.

‘The gates, you see, had been repaired and either painted or brushed clean of rust. The vines were clipped and green and covered with ripe berries. The warehouse itself had been repaired and shingled and the windows glazed. The paint had been enlivened, and through a lit window I could just see someone tinkering with a bit of machinery, bending over it and working at it with a wrench. Then we were gone. There were problems with the salamanders – half of them were dead and the rest weren’t worth bothering with. I spent hours chasing down money I’d paid for nothing and then raced into the station and caught the evening coach for Inverness with moments to spare. I never got back around to Embarcadero, to discover who it was that had rejuvenated the warehouse. All I know for certain is that it wasn’t Kettering’s old friend. His bones were in the coffin in Rio Dell Cemetery, and they’re there now, covered up with dirt again and likely to stay that way.’

‘So who was it?’ asked Skeezix, looking at Jack and then at Dr Jensen, as if he knew something was being discussed that was beyond his understanding but mightn’t be beyond Jack’s.

He was wrong; Jack didn’t know. Dr Jensen shrugged and said he couldn’t be sure, but he was beginning to suspect. He wouldn’t invent any tales, though. He’d wait until he was sure; then he would tell them. Anything else might cause trouble, and it seemed to Dr Jensen that the three of them got into an adequate amount of trouble as it was. They didn’t need help.

Jack asked him what they ought to
do.
They couldn’t just stand idle, could they, while the rest of the north coast was caught up in mysteries? What if they missed out? What if everyone got there and they were left home?

Where? Dr Jensen wanted to know. Jack couldn’t say but went him one better by asking again exactly where it was he was sailing to in his shoe. Dr Jensen shrugged and said there was no way of knowing where a man might end up. And so they were back around to where they’d started.

Later, after Skeezix had been satisfied with the remains of yesterday’s turkey and cranberry sauce, Helen asked Dr Jensen about what Mrs Langley referred to as the ‘land of dreams’. Helen had, quite clearly, been trying to piece together something coherent out of all the fragments, while Skeezix’s time had been spent half smirking and Jack’s thoughts had been torn by curiosity, regret, and anticipation and so had come to nothing in the course of the evening.

Helen could see patterns in all this strange behaviour – it involved Mrs Langley’s magical land, didn’t it? That’s where everyone thought they were going. Heaven knew how many villagers were making preparations to set sail, just like Dr Jensen; this one, perhaps, by fashioning a stupendous kite; that one by conjuring a monster from the ocean; the next one by building – what? – an enormous telescope out of a whisky keg and the spectacles of a giant. And where
had
the spectacles come from? Mrs Langley’s land of dreams, obviously. It had begun with the Solstice. Any of a number of things began to arrive with the Solstice. Lars Portland had disappeared with the Solstice. He’d gone to the land of dreams, hadn’t he?

Dr Jensen shrugged. Maybe he had. He’d wanted to. He certainly hadn’t been seen again in the twelve years since, nor had Kettering, who’d been on the bluffs with them. The road he’d pursued had been opened to him through alchemy. He’d talked of an elixir, a wine that smelled of tar and dandelions and ocean water, all at once. But it hadn’t been the elixir alone that had done it. The carnival, somehow, was an ingredient, as were easterly winds and a swell out of the north and a change in the weather. It was all very unlikely, is what it was, although Algernon Harbin hadn’t thought so.

Harbin had sought some such avenue until the search had made him wretched. Whatever parts of him hadn’t been tainted with ruin and greed had languished and died, and when it seemed to him that Lars Portland had succeeded where he himself had failed, well ...

Dr Jensen shook his head. They’d covered this ground before, and there was no need, he said, to drag themselves across it again. Helen was right, of course. None of them knew where they were going or what they’d find there. Dreams were often not very pretty items, and there were precious few of them that we’d want to come true, as the saying went. There was the mystery in it, though, that attracted us, said Dr Jensen, and there was the sad notion that there must, in our lives, be something more than the continual decay of the world we fooled ourselves into thinking was solid. We totter along the brink of a crumbling precipice, it seemed to him, balancing on the dubious edge, and all around us we watch our friends toppling off and smashing to the stones below, and no way on earth for us to anticipate when that little bit of dirt on which we’ve thrown our weight will disintegrate below us and we’ll plunge headlong in the wake of all the rest. There must be some way, he insisted, to map things out, to grasp the tiller and steer for a shore less fogbound and precipice-ridden than the shores we’ve known.

Dr Jensen looked at his pocket watch and sighed. It was late, and he was starting to talk maudlin. With the morning sun things would look brighter. He was off on a pleasure cruise, he said, and nothing more. He had enough faith in his dreams to suppose he wouldn’t go blind when he caught a glimpse of them. He offered everyone a second helping of pie, but only Skeezix had an appetite for it.

Skeezix, forking out a chunk of pie, said that if he found himself suddenly in the land of his dreams he’d set out to cross it on foot and would eat at every inn along the way, good or bad. He’d let the bad ones remind him of just how good the good ones were. It was a sad business, he said, all this about strolling along the edge of a cliff, and true enough in its way. But for him it seemed that the precariousness of the business lent a sort of flavour to it; it would be a dreary place all in all if his existence were mapped out too thoroughly. Dr Jensen smiled at that and said Skeezix was young, and some day he might easily see things through a different pair of spectacles.

Jack slept fitfully that night. The wind gusted outside and rain beat against the walls of the barn now and then while Jack drifted off and awoke with a start, thinking he’d heard something, and then drifted off again. Once he woke up, climbed out of bed, and shoved his hand under his mattress, feeling around until he found the little bottle of amber-green liquid that he’d hidden there for a week. The bottle wasn’t quite three inches high. It had no label but had a screw top, which was good, since if it were corked he’d probably never have got the cork out. It had been left – he was almost certain of it now – by the little man in the mouse suit. He’d opened it after he’d found it, left beside his book and his candle on the bedside table, and the barn in an instant had been filled with the aroma of tar and dandelions and ocean water, all of them at once and yet each of them distinct, as if a bottle of each had been opened simultaneously and their aromas hovered roundabout each other in the air.

He’d told Skeezix and Helen about it; there had been no reason not to. Peebles had overheard. He’d been skulking outside the door to Skeezix’s room but had sneezed and given himself away. Jack hadn’t cared much one way or another; Peebles, after all, had seemed to him little more than a sad irritating blotch. But now, after the last couple of days, Jack wasn’t sure. Peebles had begun to seem like something more. Still, Peebles would hardly be interested in the elixir – if that’s what it was – and even if he wanted it passionately, he was too much the coward to sneak round and steal it.

Jack shoved the bottle back in under the mattress. It seemed to him that he could hear the calliope in the distance, that he had been listening to it in his dreams. He wrapped a blanket around him and opened a shutter. The sound of music seemed to leap just a little, as if it had been lurking without, waiting for a chance to push its way into the barn. The rain had fallen off for the moment, and it was clear and dark. Jack could see the black line of the ocean away off beyond the bluffs, and it seemed to him as if he could see the glow of lights from Moonvale too, although heaven knew why Moonvale would be lit up in the middle of the night. Perhaps it was the aurora that glowed there, low in the sky above the Moonvale Hills.