Land of Dreams (26 page)

A light winked on. Someone had lit a match and, one by one, was relighting the candles. It was Peebles. Miss Flees was gone, vanished. Peebles’s hand shook so he could barely keep the match lit. He pulled one of the candles out of its holder and lit the rest with it, clustering them around the centre of the table, over the broken pie and the book still thrusting out like a sail. He plucked the book out and wiped it off carefully on the corner of the tablecloth. Then he put his fingers to his mouth, to lick off the fragments of pie smeared across them, but thought better of it, apparently, and turned to the tablecloth once again.

Abruptly he stepped to the window and looked out into the night. He cupped his hands round his eyes and stood there, then crouched and looked skyward. Helen, Jack and Skeezix stood still, trusting that they were concealed by shadow and rain. They watched Peebles tuck the book under his arm and pick up the pie. He walked into the kitchen, idly sucking on his finger as he disappeared from view, leaving the candles to burn themselves out on the parlour table.

When he crawled out of the ocean onto the rock ledge, grappling at kelp strands and heaving for breath, he still clutched his stick. He’d held on to it even as the tide had swept him out of the harbour and into the ocean. He hadn’t got a clear look at the man’s face, but what look he’d got had convinced him it was Lars Portland. He’d come back across; there was no doubting it. Too many signs pointed to it, and now this – a giant in the taxidermist’s, mixing up the elixir. It had to be Portland. And he would have killed him too. The years seemed to have put an edge on his hatred. If he’d had a revolver, he’d have killed Portland twice there under the pepper trees – once for the sake of his miserable wife, and once for the sake of his son, who’d have given up his precious bottle gratefully enough if things had gone uninterrupted for another minute.

Well, they’d pay; both of them would pay before he was done. He’d be across this time around or be damned, even if he had to float there on the blood of the whole lot of them. He crouched on the rocks, catching his breath. He was weak, frightfully weak, and not just from the chase. And he could feel himself being drawn north, up the coast, to where the carnival, his carnival, laboured on without him. There’d be people aplenty on the bluffs, lingering too near the shadows, curious about the darkened interiors of freak shows. He could walk among them in half an hour if he chose. But time grew thin. The passing moments shaved away at the lingering Solstice. He could almost feel the night rumbling with it, like a railway station full of the shriek and steam of a departing train. He had business to finish – old insults to avenge, people to see.

He walked across the headland toward the village, slogging along in wet shoes. He didn’t feel the cold; he felt almost nothing at all but a powerful weariness, as if he were wasting away bit by bit with the passing seconds, evaporating into the night air. He’d have to hurry.

He angled up the alley that led to the rear of Dr Jensen’s surgery, stepping past ash cans and rusted buggy springs and tin cans, past chicken coops and vacant lots thick with berry vines and jimson weed. He’d come this way before, several times, watching Jensen. He’d have his way with Jensen too, before he was done – the meddling pig of a surgeon. He’d see him dead and drained, just for sport, as a parting gesture before he went across.

There was the house, the surgery lit by gas lamps glowing from wall sconces. Jensen bent over the slab, over the body of the boy he’d gathered up that morning on the bluffs, the fool. He must be mystified, wondering what sort of outrage this was, what sort of monster lurked in the night, yet knowing the answer at the same time. The hypocrite. He’d been as anxious to have his way with Jane Henderson as any of them. He’d pretended cheerful defeat when she’d wed Lars Portland, but Harbin had seen through him; he’d seen through them all – their lies, their sham happiness, their nothing little lives played out as if they weren’t doomed, weren’t living in the shadows of impending ruin on a wet and decaying corner of an indifferent world. Harbin spat into the dirt of the alley and narrowed his eyes.

He wiped wet hair from across his forehead and shaded his eyes from rain he hardly felt. It was another irritation in a world filled with irritations, one of a number demanding his attention, begging for it. There was a second man in the room, a short man dressed in the clothes of a clown, in floppy pants and a shirt that hung on him like a sack. He was loathsome, fit to be crippled and shown in a freak show. The two were talking, gesturing at the dead boy on the slab, shaking their heads. They stopped and looked at each other. The small man handed something to Jensen – two things, one of them ajar, it seemed, full of liquid. They spoke. Their heads nodded, shook, regarded each other seriously, as if what they did there meant something.

Harbin braced himself against the pickets of the waist-high fence along the alley and sagged with impatience, with the effort of waiting. He saw Jensen hold up his hand near a gas lamp. He’d slipped a ring onto his finger, apparently, and he regarded it narrowly, then nodded his head again and slipped it off, laying it on the counter next to the jar. They walked away together. Harbin hurried across toward the gate, leaning on his stick and hopping almost like a crow. He stopped and craned his neck, but he couldn’t see them. He was through the gate, stumping toward the window through the rain. He heard the front door slam and knew the small man had gone out. He could follow him easily enough, track him through the evening streets and throttle him at his leisure. But a ruckus in the streets might cause trouble, and trouble might waste time, might alert Jensen unnecessarily. And Jensen, after all, would make prettier carrion than the small man would. Jensen would have some flavour to him.

The back door was unlatched. The man was a fool. Did he think he was immune? He’d come into a sudden bit of knowledge tonight – more of it, perhaps, than he’d appreciate – but it would do him a nation of good, being dead would. He’d have time to spin philosophies. They could summon him back at the next Solstice carnival and ask him about life beyond the pale. He could recite the ingredients in the cure for poison oak or discuss the mysteries of the periodic tables, maybe read them off backward. He’d provide no end of amusement for a thousand sorry little people.

Harbin slipped in through the door, careful of his stick, and stood dripping on the asphalt tiles of the floor. He crept forward silently in the semidarkness, listening, smiling, imagining what the next ten minutes would bring him. His hearing seemed suddenly to be honed on a strop. The music of the calliope, the rush and roar of the oven, the creak and groan of the carnival rides spun in his head as if they were alive in there, propelling him forward.

He stood in the doorway, looking across the hall into the surgery. His vision narrowed, as if he stood at the far end of a dark tunnel and watched Dr Jensen working alone in the gaslight of the room beyond. The back of the doctor’s head bobbed as he nodded over the little jar of liquid. There was a something in the air – dandelions, tar, ocean. Harbin’s nostrils flared. He was suddenly giddy with the smell of it. He lurched forward, raising his stick, propelling himself into the surgery. He seemed to be moving far too slowly, as if through dense air. Jensen turned and shook his head. He twisted the cap onto the jar on the counter, tried to push it back, to hide it somehow. He opened his mouth to shout. His spectacles flew half off, dangling there from his left ear as he made to duck away, to ward off the descending stick. Flailing his arms, he fell over backward, cracking his head against the sharp edge of the counter, then smashing over sideways into shelves full of chemical glass.

The clatter made Harbin lurch. He shook his head, trying to rid it of the noise that whirled there, that tugged at the hand that held the stick and tried to compel it to strike again. He swept his free hand across the countertop, sliding dishes and beakers and dried tide-pool animals off onto the floor. He clutched at the jar – picked it up and swirled it in the lamplight like a man might swirl a glass of wine. He twisted open the lid and breathed the vapours, his eyes widening with anticipation.

The reek of it drove the noise from his head, and for a moment it seemed to him that he drove a buggy along the Coast Road, down from the freshwater lagoons to the north. Jane Henderson sat beside him, dressed in lace, and in the back, wrapped in wet grasses, were a half dozen trout, caught on flies he’d tied that morning. For a moment he remembered feelings that he couldn’t quite fathom, as if he’d heard a sound – a few notes of music, the drone of bees on a warm day in summer – that recalled something from his youth, something he could no longer define. He twisted the lid onto the jar. This was dangerous business. It demanded care, or he’d make a fool of himself yet. The memory faded, winked out like a dream and was gone. He bent over the fallen doctor and pressed the tip of his stick into the doctor’s neck, leaning on it gently at first.

Jack, Helen and Skeezix heard the gunshot when they were fifty yards from Dr Jensen’s front door. There was nothing to indicate that it had come from the doctor’s house, but they began to run anyway, without a word. The idea of flying bullets slowed them some when they got to the gate, but a deadly quiet within the lighted house prodded them on, and Helen, with the two boys on either side, beat on the door with her fist.

‘Come in!’ shouted Mrs Jensen’s voice, half crying it. They pushed the door open and found her in the surgery. Dr Jensen lay on the floor, rolled over onto his side. He clutched his neck and coughed.

‘Shot!’ cried Jack, looking at the revolver that lay on the slab, tumbled atop Lantz’s shrouded body.

‘No, he’s all right,’ said Mrs Jensen evenly. ‘The man’s gone out the back, a thief, I suppose.’ She bent over her husband, rubbing at his neck with cotton wool soaked in alcohol, loosening his shirt.

Skeezix was out the back door in an instant, with Jack and Helen at his heels. They stopped at the fence, peering down the dark alley, wondering who had fired the gun. Dr Jensen hadn’t been bleeding;
he
hadn’t been shot. Somehow they knew who it was they searched for. They cocked their heads and listened, the night having trimmed their sudden bravery a bit. There it was –they could hear it – the hurried
tap, tap, tap
of a stick on pavement. He’d got out of the alley onto the road.

‘Let’s go,’ said Skeezix, and started out at a trot. Jack kept pace, not nearly so anxious.

‘Why?’ asked Helen, slowing down as Skeezix huffed along. Jack wondered the same thing. He trotted along mostly because it was expected of him, but he hadn’t any desire to run headlong into Dr Brown when he’d just got away from him an hour before.

‘We missed earlier; we’ll get him this time,’ said Skeezix.

Helen stopped and crossed her arms. ‘No, we won’t. He’ll take to the air. You know that, unless all the stuff you were telling me was just nonsense. We’re wasting our time. At worst he’ll get
you
this time, or all of us.’

Skeezix stopped too and turned around to argue with her. It was clear there’d be no budging her, though. And it was true. What would they accomplish? They hadn’t any stones or any gun. Also, speaking of guns, it must have been Mrs Jensen who shot at Dr Brown. Why else would the revolver lie in the surgery? What had he been after? Had he come round just to murder poor Jensen?

‘We gave up,’ said Skeezix as the three of them trooped back in. Dr Jensen had sat up. He didn’t seem to be badly hurt, but he didn’t look particularly comfortable either. When Mrs Jensen laid a compress on the back of his head, he winced at the touch of it. The surgery was a ruin of broken glass and crockery. There was the faintest aroma of something on the air – something oddly compelling. Jack knew what it was. He felt in his pocket, panicked that he’d somehow broken his bottle. But there it lay, stoppered and dry. He cast a glance around the room, but there was no sign of elixir. That’s what Dr Brown had been after.

Dr Jensen stood up and retrieved the revolver from where it sat, cold and menacing. Thanks,’ he said to his wife, and he grimaced just a little when he said it, but waved her away when she reached for the compress. ‘I’m all right. A little hoarse, maybe, but all right. He would have done for me, though.’

‘Why?’ asked Mrs Jensen. ‘For goodness’ sake, couldn’t you have given the man what he asked for? Nothing’s worth being murdered over.’

‘My mistake,’ said the doctor. ‘I’ve learned a bit tonight.’

‘He got away with it, though, didn’t he,’ said Jack. He looked at the clock on the wall – nearly ten. The night was passing; the Solstice was passing. It would peak in a matter of hours, or so Mrs Langley had said in her book. The night was uncommonly dark outside, except for the ribbon of twilight and stars along the Moonvale Hills, and even as they talked Jack could hear the sound of hailstones clacking against the roof. The wind in the alley had been heavy and wet, and it had an exotic smell to it, as if it were saturated with the essences of a thousand foreign lands and with countless memories and anticipations and regrets, all of them distilled into atmospheric perfume.

Dr Jensen regarded Jack for a moment. ‘Yes, he did. I didn’t have a chance to save it. He wanted me dead too.’

‘Who did?’ Mrs Jensen looked at him with surprise.

‘Algernon Harbin.’

‘He’s been dead these twelve years!’

‘I believe he has,’ said the doctor, ‘in a sense. It’s a complicated business. Jack has most of it by now. Harbin struck a deal with Wo Ling twelve years ago. Lars Portland swore he’d kill Harbin, and Harbin took him seriously. Lars Portland always meant what he said. Harbin tried to get in before him; he meant to kill Lars himself and steal the elixir and get across, but he didn’t. There was the business on the bluffs – you know about that – but Harbin didn’t wash downshore in the current like everyone thought he had, like
I
thought he had. Wo Ling had traded him the carnival, is what I think, when Harbin anticipated being killed. He could have avoided the whole mess by fleeing. Lars wouldn’t have gone after him; he was bound for other destinations. But there was too much at stake for Harbin. His greed wouldn’t let him go. He wanted the elixir that he knew Lars possessed. He tried to steal it, but failed, and Lars and Kettering and I followed him out to the bluffs, where Lars shot him before he and Kettering went across themselves. Well, Harbin succeeded tonight, twelve years later. I won’t follow him this time, though. I’m through with it.’