Land of Dreams (28 page)

With his left hand he plucked the bottle of elixir out of his jacket pocket. There was no time left for indecision. He unstoppered it with the same hand that held it, tilted it to his lips, and drank – just a tiny sip. He handed it to Skeezix. It would have been more gentlemanly, perhaps, to give it to Helen first, except that he was half afraid of it – more than half.

At once there was a patch of illuminated meadow grass, littered with a basket and crumpled cloth – the remains of a picnic. Jack felt the creakings of vague memories, something suggested by the dilapidated basket, by the yellow checks of the cloth. But they were gone and a light glowed ahead, steamy with rising fog. There was Willoughby’s farm – a miniature of it, or else the farm itself, very distant, with oak leaves piling up across the front porch and an autumn wind slamming the screen door shut over and over again. And then there was a pond, fed by a clear stream, with leaf-stained water and grass growing down its banks. He could sec trout swimming slowly in the rocky depths, and for a moment, just before they plunged again into darkness, he could see his own face painted in the weedy pebbles of the pond floor.

Glowing windows seemed suddenly to be flashing past them at a prodigious rate, as if they careered along once again beside a train. Darkness slammed down and a howling arose. A clown leered into view, seeming to float in the air, wearing a pointed cap and ruff collar and smeared with whiteface. He turned toward them, as if surprised to see them hurtling at him. Out of the air, out of the darkness, he contrived a bleating lamb and prepared to slit its throat with a billhook, grinning all the while and whistling with the sound of wind blowing under a door. Jack looked away.

There was the shriek of a train whistle once more, of escaping steam. Skeezix handed the bottle back, and Jack turned with it, thinking to give it to Helen and thinking too that Helen mightn’t have any stomach for it any more. But Helen was gone. He sat alone with Skeezix. They were aboard a train – inexplicably, instantly – chuffing into the arched mouth of an enormous stone depot.

Jack smashed his eyes shut and then opened them again. He felt for Helen beside him, sure that this was a trick of carnival enchantment. There was nothing beside him but the wood and leather and brass of a train car.

‘Am I imagining this?’ asked Skeezix.

‘No. Helen’s gone. She didn’t get a chance at the elixir.’

Skeezix was silent, waiting. Jack watched out of the window, thinking of Helen on that endless carnival ride. It was his fault, wasn’t it, taking his time with the elixir? But what could he do about it now?

The mouth of the depot drew toward them slowly, although it appeared that the train they were in was rushing along. Through the window he could see stars in the twilight sky, although somehow it seemed as if that sky weren’t very deep, as if it were the cleverly painted ceiling of a vast rotunda. There was fog outside, or steam. Nothing moved and nothing broke the dim monotony of the landscape, if landscape it was. Jack would have expected a town, perhaps, along the tracks – a city, judging from the size of the depot. But there was nothing, not a solitary light, not a shadow. It wasn’t a landscape, certainly, that one could walk through; there wasn’t even a horizon, just a general darkness that paled gradually into the twilight of the sky.

He felt like a fool. What in the world had he meant by meddling with the elixir? He had thought it was something like fate, like destiny, only he didn’t believe in any such thing. It had been his father, luring him along, and Mrs Langley with her book, and Dr Jensen with his sailboat shoe, and Mac Wilt with his telescope built out of the spectacles of a giant.

Two hours earlier he had felt as if he understood the whole business clearly. Here was a village full of people capering with excitement at the idea of going across, but none of them actually getting there. It half appeared as if they hadn’t really wanted to cross at all but were consumed with the idea, like a child seeing just how close he could creep to the edge of a precipice without actually tumbling off. Jack had the elixir; he had Mrs Langley’s book; he had a father who’d been across and come back again; he knew where the giant’s clothes had come from; he knew who Algernon Harbin was; he knew about the warehouse in San Francisco. He had a suitcase full of information – plenty, he had figured, for a brief visit to Mrs Langley’s ‘land of dreams’. But now that he was there, he hadn’t any idea on earth of what to do, and his wonder and fear of the misty night outside the train windows was overshadowed only by his desire to be home again, reading by candlelight in the loft and knowing that Helen was safe.

Skeezix punched him in the shoulder and grinned. We made it, his grin seemed to say. Jack grinned back weakly. He upended the bottle that had contained the elixir, letting one last green drop slip out onto his trouser leg. Skeezix’s grin slumped momentarily. ‘I hope we don’t need more of that to get home,’ he said.

Jack shrugged, as if to say the die was cast and there wasn’t a frightful lot they could do about it.

Skeezix grinned again. ‘Who cares?’ he said. ‘What do we have to lose?’

Jack immediately thought of a half dozen things he had to lose. They quite likely wouldn’t have seemed so valuable to him yesterday, but now … ‘I could draw you up a list.’

There were other people in the train car, lots of them. Jack didn’t recognise anyone. Most of them appeared calm enough, some of them anxious, some of them vaguely frightened, as though, like Jack, they wished suddenly that they weren’t there. One man three seats up twirled his hair. A woman across from him talked incessantly, explaining to an old gentleman how it was she’d come across – something to do with a basket of eel eggs and a salt shaker full of dust that had blown in on the Solstice wind that she’d strained out of the air with a sieve made of fishbones and the hair of dead men. The old man looked straight in front of him, nodding now and then. When she left off finally he nodded at his smouldering pipe and winked at her. Jack saw her tilt her head forward, look into the pipe bowl, and recoil with horror. She stood up and lurched toward a different seat, casting a look of revulsion at the man, who shrugged, pulled his hat down over his eyes, and fell asleep.

The depot loomed ahead. It had to be miles away, given the rate of speed at which they were rushing upon it. But perspective, somehow, was muddled. It seemed to Jack to be a painted prop again, not a real depot at all, suspended in front of the moving train, racing along at a parallel speed like a tin rabbit in front of a greyhound. And then they were there, suddenly and without warning. They steamed into the cavernous mouth of the building and were swallowed up, instantly seeming to be deep inside, with the arched darkness of the entry portal a half mile behind them.

There were no end of trains, pulling in and out, running along beside them, now braking to a stop as they rushed past, now abruptly angling off onto side tracks. Dim violet lamps burned in the steamy distances. Whistles blew. Clouds of vapour whirled up from beneath them, dissipating in the darkness overhead. People walked along beside the tracks, between trains, and up and down companionways leading to upper and lower levels that Jack could only guess at. Some of the people walked with a purpose, hurrying toward a destination. Others looked around them, puzzled, getting in the way, leaping with startled surprise at a rush of steam or the shriek of a train whistle. Vendors hawked hot potatoes and coffee and souvenir hats from wheeled carts. ‘Last chance!’ one man shouted, waving a little pennant over his head. ‘Time’s wearing on!’

‘I could use a roll and coffee,’ said Skeezix as the train lurched to a stop, rolled forward twenty feet, and stopped again.

Jack watched the people milling outside. ‘I could use a map,’ he said.

A porter in a blue cap and striped jacket stepped up and opened the door of the train car, peering in at them and grinning. The woman who’d sieved the Solstice wind stood up and rushed toward the open door, gesturing back toward the old pipe-smoking gentleman, goggling in the face of the porter. ‘That man should be arrested,’ she announced. Then she gave the old man a last withering look and stepped out onto the platform. People rose and began to file out, Jack and Skeezix following along behind.

Another train eased up alongside theirs and stopped. Jack stopped to regard the passengers – the same mixture of troubled, anxious faces and calm, experienced travellers. One woman wept and another patted her shoulder. A hurried-looking man in an overcoat held his hat and stood in the aisle, as if he were late for an appointment. A merry-looking couple sat side by side, chatting amiably, the man gesturing roundabout and out the window as if he were a seasoned traveller, had been through it any number of times, and was explaining their condition to the woman – who hadn’t been, but who trusted her companion entirely.

Jack was struck suddenly with the familiar look of the man. His clothes were ill-fitting, as though they were borrowed and he’d done his best to make them work. There was something in the high cheekbones and the sandy hair and in the depth of the man’s smile – what was it? Jack had seen him before, and recently. He glanced at the woman. ‘No!’ Jack said, half under his breath, in surprise rather than denial. He slid between the seats, pressing up against the window, fumbling with the latch. The woman wore a black and red velvet dress. Her thick black hair fell about her shoulders, half hiding a gold necklace from which hung a rectangular green stone, a cut emerald. She was his mother, and the man was his father. Jack had seen him for an instant on the riverbank behind the taxidermist’s shop when he’d been saved from Dr Brown.

Jack yanked the window down and shouted, but his voice was lost in whirling steam. He leaned out through the window, holding the frame with his left hand so as not to pitch out onto the tracks. He hefted the elixir bottle with his right hand, cocked his arm, and threw the bottle at their window. Thunk! His father leapt, startled. He turned to look, pressing his hands against the window on either side of his face. He squinted at Jack, obviously seeing him there, wondering at it. Then his eyes flew open in surprise. He said something over his shoulder and immediately Jack’s mother was at the window too, waving. She stood up, as if to rush away down the aisle. She started, took two steps, turned, and lunged back to grab the man’s arm.

A whistle screeched and Jack’s train lurched forward, throwing him into the edge of the window. He pulled himself back inside the car, and found it was empty. Skeezix was gone. The train jerked to a stop and then rolled forward again, smoothly now, gathering steam. ‘Wait!’ he shouted through the open window, and then leapt away down the aisle towards the now-closed door. He thought he could hear his father hollering something about all of them going home, about how it was all right now, but his words were lost in the noise and there was no time to think about them anyway.

Jack wrenched at the handle, yanking the door open, watching the platform slip past him in a gathering rush. There was Skeezix, fifty feet back, waving his arms. Jack leapt for it and hit the platform at a run, catapulting into a crowd of people gathered around a sign that was covered with place names.

He reeled back, apologising, nearly stumbling off the platform and into the accelerating train. He turned, waving away their curses and complaints, and leapt straight up into the air, looking through the flying windows at the train beyond. It was moving too. It’s just an illusion, he told himself, caused by looking through one moving train at another. But it wasn’t. The train that held his father and mother chuffed slowly away, alongside his own but in the opposite direction. He ran toward Skeezix, waving and shouting, snatching at his friend’s arm, knocking his newly bought roll out of his hands.

There had to be a way to get across. He ran up a stairway, pushing through the crowds until he looked down on both trains, at what seemed to be a hundred trains, coming and going, starting and stopping and starting again as though orchestrated. There was a passage beneath the tracks. He could see the dark mouth of it where it exited on the next platform over. He pushed past Skeezix again, hollering at his friend to follow, and jumped back down the stairs two and three at a time, bouncing off a man in a top hat, shouting an apology over his shoulder.

There was the tunnel. He was in it and running through the half-light, hearing Skeezix puffing along behind and hollering for him to hold up. Another tunnel branched off to the right, choked with people – should he take it? Yet another sloped downward to the left. He hesitated, feeling a warm spring wind heavy with wildflowers and sunshine blowing along up the tunnel toward him, then went on, more slowly now, confused. He seemed suddenly to be groping through a warren of tunnels that angled up, down, and sideways, winding away into darkness. Skeezix came wheezing up, bent over, demanding to know what Jack was up to. He fell silent and followed along when Jack explained.

The depot must have been honeycombed with tunnels. Arrows pointed this way and that, announcing destinations. Train whistles echoed down from above. One moment they were alone; the next moment a sudden crowd of people materialised, clutching coats and handbags and hurrying along. Jack and Skeezix followed their tunnel up toward a platform, hurrying again, and in moments stood in the open once more. A train rolled slowly past, full of passengers. It was impossible to say which train it was, whether it was coming or going. Jack and Skeezix ran along beside it. They sidled past people, leaping now and again to see in through the window, but the train picked up speed, chuffing along into the darkness. They fell away behind. It mightn’t be his parents’ train at all, of course. Maybe the train just behind it was, or the train beyond that … It was hopeless.