Land of Dreams (27 page)

‘Traded him for what?’ asked Jack, referring to Harbin’s deal with the old man.

‘Death. He was tired of being held in thrall, of being the carnival’s unwilling engineer. Lord knows how he’d come into it – some, horrifying business, I don’t doubt. Harbin grasped at it as a means of staying alive, such as it was, until he had another chance of getting across. And here he has it, twelve years later.’

Mrs Jensen looked as if she were anything but satisfied with her husband’s ramblings. The doctor had been happy enough to forget the doings on the bluffs for the past twelve years, but they’d come round to haunt him again finally. Jack wasn’t at all mystified any more, and although Dr Jensen had claimed to be done with it, Jack wasn’t.

‘Where did the elixir come from – this stolen batch?’ Jack half suspected the answer when he asked it.

‘From your father,’ said Jensen.

Helen jumped with surprise. ‘The man in the taxidermist’s shop!’

Jack looked at her. ‘How did you know that?’

‘About what?’

‘About the man in the taxidermist’s?’

‘How did you?
I
ran into him this afternoon, mostly by chance.’ She turned to Dr Jensen. ‘That was Jack’s father, wasn’t it? The big man. He was dressed in James Langley’s painter’s smock. The spectacles were his, the shoe was his. All that giant stuff was his. He’d come back, hadn’t he?’

‘Yes,’ said the doctor. ‘He’d come back. The small man was him too, although the explanation of that is tough.’

‘The midget,’ whispered Helen.

‘My father wasn’t a midget,’ said Jack. ‘Nor a giant cither.’

Helen waved him silent. ‘Mrs Langley told me about it this afternoon, about how these other worlds, if you like, are moving along in their own time, not ours, and you might get over into one that’s ten years behind us, and then into another that’s five years behind it, and be in both worlds at once, and then both of you could slip into a third world and be there at the same time, one of you a midget and the other a giant, and both of you shrinking and growing. There might be another of you there, too, just living normally – although there wasn’t in this case because Jack’s father had already left it. And all of
us
are there too, will be, or have been, going about our business.’ She stopped to catch her breath.

Skeezix stared at her with his eyes wide open like the eyes of a fish. He waited for a moment and then asked, ‘Are you certain?’ in a plonking sort of voice. He screwed up his face theatrically, as if he were thinking hard about what she’d said and wasn’t at all doing it to ridicule her.

‘She’s right,’ said Dr Jensen.

Helen smirked at Skeezix. ‘Of course I’m right. Mrs Langley told me. It was Jack’s father who got the last batch of clothes from under the trestle. She’d asked him to put them there for Jimmy before the business with Harbin, and he found them again when he washed ashore. He couldn’t just be running around town, could he? Not as a giant. He must have lived in the woods until he was small enough to wear the clothes. Then he set up at the taxidermist’s shop. I’ve got to tell Mrs Langley. She’ll be happy to hear it. All that hiding of clothes hasn’t been in vain.’

Jack sat silently, half listening. He knew now why the stranger in the taxidermist’s had accosted Harbin with such fury. Did he know who Jack was, or was it the old grievance that set him off? Harbin had escaped, clearly. He’d come back around to the doctor’s. And Jack had run away. That was the dismal part. He’d run away when he might have seen his father, spoken to him. Now where was he? ‘I’ve got to go back to the taxidermist’s.’

Dr Jensen shook his head. ‘It won’t do any good. He’s gone –they’re gone, I should say. Your father came across to pass the elixir on to you. He hadn’t wanted to stay. He’d wanted to slip in and have a look at you while you slept, then slip back through. It was him dressed as a mouse; you know that by now. And he came around the other direction too, across the water like James Langley did the second time – like Helen said – and was surprised to find himself here, on the same mission. They brewed up another batch of the elixir so they could get back across – or he did, I should say – and he gave a jar of it to me. He was rushed. I wish I’d had a day – a week –to talk to him, but the Solstice was passing and there wasn’t any time. There’s a sort of twilight, he said, in between it all, in the shadow of all the passing worlds. He said it would be full of people going across, like a railway depot. And you see things there, apparently, glimmers of the past and of the future. He wanted me to tell you that you’d meet someday; you weren’t to worry. There simply wasn’t time now.’

‘Then I’m to follow him across,’ said Jack. ‘It’s inevitable. He wouldn’t have said that otherwise; he wouldn’t have brought me the bottle of elixir.’

Dr Jensen shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I won’t recommend it, but then I won’t tell you not to either. You’ll make the choice for yourself.’

‘I’m going.’ Jack looked at the clock. It was time. The night was drawing on. He had hours yet, it was true, but if he missed it, there would be twelve wearisome years before he had another chance at it, and the thought of those twelve years made the few hours left to him seem more like minutes ticking past. It must have seemed the same to his father.

‘Did he find my mother?’

‘He said he knew where she was, now, and what to do about it,’ said Dr Jensen. ‘That’s why he couldn’t wait; he couldn’t risk losing her again.’

‘I’m going with you,’ said Skeezix. ‘It was my idea in the first place, you know. Helen was the one with the doubts.’

‘I didn’t have any doubts. I knew it was foolery from the start, and I believe it even more now. But you still need a sea anchor. You’re not trustworthy enough, either of you. I’m going with you this time.’

Jack looked at her doubtfully. He ought to protest: Helen, after all. It couldn’t be risked. He glanced at Dr Jensen, half expecting the doctor to do the job for him, to refuse to let Helen go. Skeezix and he were looking for something, after all – heaven knew, maybe, what it was. But Helen; what was she after? What propelled her? Dr Jensen said nothing, only nodded. Helen moved toward the door, buttoning up her jacket.

‘I don’t half understand this,’ Mrs Jensen said. ‘But wherever you’re going, good luck. Come back, won’t you?’

‘Either tomorrow or twelve years from tomorrow; sometime,’ said Jack. ‘We don’t altogether understand this either, but we’ll be back.’

‘Not through a gopher hole,’ said Helen, as they pushed out into the weather. ‘Don’t look for us in a gopher hole.’

‘I’m sure I won’t,’ shouted Mrs Jensen. Silhouetted against the glow of the open door, she waved a handkerchief at them as they hurried out into the windy alley, bound for the bluffs.

‘A
RE YOU SURE
he said the Flying Toad?’

‘Of course I’m sure. My memory is longer than that.’ Helen brushed her hair back and pulled her jacket around her. The night seemed to have darkened; it lay now out on the meadows in stark, opaque contrast to the lights of the carnival. The three of them stood in the shadows of the fun house and looked across toward where little buggy-like carts careened along a track, spouting steam like wheeled teakettles, disappearing into the interior darkness of a plywood building scabbed together like a house of cards. ‘Besides, this can’t be coincidence. There’s the Flying Toad itself. That’s the one, just like your father said.’

They stood in silence for a moment, cold with ocean wind and with anticipation. Jack shivered. They’d looked for Dr Brown but hadn’t found him. Jack expected as much. The doctor wouldn’t have clubbed Jensen and stolen the elixir and then sat around and pondered it. He’d have gone across himself by now.

An oddly jerky and debilitated lot of men operated the rides and pitched split logs into the beehive oven. What Jack had seen in the face of the man at the Ferris wheel, that hadn’t been hallucination; he was certain of that now. He’d seen things clearly in that moment, because of the elixir. He couldn’t be certain that the carnival workers were the recent inhabitants of the ripped-open graves or of the washed-out crypts along the Eel River, but he’d bet the quarter he had in his pocket on it. They were doing the bidding of another master now; that is to say, if Dr Brown had been the master. Perhaps the carnival was the master. It was an eerie thought – one that disinclined him toward riding on the so-called Flying Toad. There wasn’t anything toadlike about it.

A big cleated door sprang open every thirty seconds or so to admit another car, accompanied by a drawn-out mechanical shriek, no doubt triggered by the door’s opening. Low laughter sounded, from within, clipped off when the door banged shut, then starting up again when a door on the opposite end opened and a car shot out – propelled, it seemed, by an ocean of windy steam – its occupants screaming with fear and wonder at whatever terrible mysteries they’d glimpsed within.

Skeezix shoved both Helen and Jack farther back into the shadows. He pointed down the line of tents. A light had been burning in Dr Brown’s tent, but the shadow of the man slumped over the desk within hadn’t been the shadow of the doctor. Now the flag jiggled and flew back. The hunched figure of MacWilt the tavern keeper came out. He wore a robe tied with a rope, like a medieval monk, and he appeared to be shrivelled and bent, as if burdened by the weight of his own evil and the trials of the past days.

He’d given up his stick. He walked with his head twisted back so that he had to swivel his eyes around and down in order to see -but he could see; that much was clear. He looked up and down the avenue before him. The few late-night revellers gawked and circled warily around him when they walked past, as if he were a dervish about to run mad. He shuffled toward the three in the shadows, coming their way, it seemed, by chance. Jack could feel Skeezix tense up beside him, ready, probably, to pummel MacWilt into senselessness if he was threatened.

He passed them by, walking toward the oven and cursing at the men who gathered round it. Jack could see his eyes, glowing in the lamplight. They were grey, like the belly of a catfish too long out of water. It was impossible that he wasn’t blind. It was impossible that Peebles’s finger had sprouted too. It had been Dr Brown’s doing, is what it had been, and now Dr Brown was gone. MacWilt was in charge. The carnival had a new operator, a worthy successor to Wo Ling and Algernon Harbin.

When MacWilt disappeared around the corner of the fun house, Jack stepped out into the light. Skeezix and Helen weren’t slow in following. Jack couldn’t imagine they were eager, but they knew, as he did, that standing and shivering wouldn’t work any magic. Sliding in through a hinged waist-high gate, they climbed aboard a buggy and waited there. Out of the corner of his eye, Jack watched the rain drizzle down through the light. It was taking an eternity. MacWilt would return and there’d be trouble. They would only have one chance that night.

They lurched. The wheels creaked into motion, and the buggy shot forward suddenly along its track, rushing toward the still-closed door. It flew open in their faces when it seemed they’d slam against it for sure, and then it swung shut and left them in darkness.

A light flared beneath an enormous grinning skull, and the body of a man swung out on a boom, into the light, whumping into the fender of the buggy. Helen shrieked. The man’s head flew off, tumbling goggle-eyed across in front of them and whacking with the sound of a split melon into a basket of heads beside the track. The headless corpse swung back into darkness as laughter chattered out, echoing off the plywood ceiling. A suddenly burning candelabra revealed a laughing skeleton, draped with what might have been seaweed or might have been dried flesh. It sat on a high stool, nodding forward as if to pitch bodily into the buggy, and then it was gone too, back into darkness and silence. They clattered on along a black tunnel, into a cold wind, like air blowing out of a musty cellar.

A light glowed ahead of them. Something was coming up. The ride must be immense, or else cleverly looped around like a maze. There was the facade, suddenly, of a building, standing along the edge of the sea. It was a painted prop, tilted against wooden supports, wound around with the long-dead branches of wild berry vines. Along with it was the smell of fish and tar and sea foam, of steel shavings and dry old leather upholstery and rain-soaked shingles. There were a thousand smells together, and Jack felt compelled to sort them out, to savour each one, except that they were rocketing in through the open door, sliding across wooden floorboards in a rush of oil-tainted steam. A train whistle moaned, sounding rusty and strained and distant through the steam, and then, as if a curtain had been snatched aside, it loomed suddenly in front of them rushing out of the darkness, its lantern throwing glints of light into the evaporating steam.

Jack threw himself in front of Helen, shielding his face with his arm, hearing Helen shout into his ear. The car spun dizzily, caroming off the rushing train, past car after car of travellers bound for unguessed destinations. Then they swerved off into the darkness, slamming through a wall built of paper and cobwebs and what seemed to be a billion amber wings of swarming termites. They stopped, ratcheted round once, and shot away again, the train whistle evaporating, giving way to an insect hum and once again the bubbling of nearby laughter.

At the sound of the laughter, Helen gripped Jack’s arm as if she were going to rip it off. The pressure reminded Jack of why they’d climbed onto the ride in the first place, and he was struck with the strange certainty that if he didn’t do something to change their course – to finish what they’d started – they’d whiz and lurch forever through the dark corridors.