Land of Dreams (29 page)

Jack sat down on a wooden bench and stared into his hands. It seemed suddenly that seeing his parents there – his disappeared father and his long-dead mother – had been an illusion. It had to have been. What had Mrs Langley called it? ‘The land of dreams.’ He’d been chasing after figments, hadn’t he? But then again, he himself wasn’t a figment, and neither was Skeezix. Nobody looked less like a figment than Skeezix did. So why, necessarily, would the rest of the people in the depot be figments?

‘We should keep looking,’ said Skeezix.

Jack shrugged. ‘I probably imagined it, my parents being there. How could they be? Let’s just go. Let’s follow these people out – see where we end up.’

Skeezix scratched his cheek and looked around. Then he stopped, blinked, and pointed. A dimly lit cafeteria stretched along the wall of the depot, the front of it broken by magazine kiosks and shoeshine benches and pushcarts tended by hot potato vendors and coffee sellers. People filed in and out through revolving doors, disappearing into the hazy interior. The random noise of voices and clinking dishes washed out along with the odour of food – nothing definable, but everything mixed together and boiled up into a stew of smells that was vaguely sickening: boiled peas and carrots and fried fish. Miss Flees might have been cooking. Even Skeezix didn’t seem to be tempted by it.

Just as Jack thought about it – about Miss Flees boiling up cabbage for broth – there, standing outside the door of the cafeteria beside a boy hawking old yellowed newspapers, stood Miss Flees herself. She had the unmistakable stamp of lunacy on her face: eyes too wide and staring, a smile empty of meaning, hair like a trodden-on tumbleweed. She’d got hold of a sack, somehow, a burlap bag that might one time have held eighty pounds of potatoes, and she spoke to people brushing past her. One man stopped and dropped a coin into the sack. Another shook his head, shrugged, and fumbled in his pockets, pulling out a wrinkled handkerchief and tossing that in. She thanked him obsequiously, but then without warning, in the middle of a broad bow, she began cursing at the man, who ducked in through the revolving doors and was gone, disappearing into the faceless mass of people in the cafeteria.

A wind blew down through the station, stirring up dust, smelling of engine oil and steam. A sheet of newspaper cartwheeled past, and Miss Flees snatched it up, folding it and smoothing it out, trying to read it sideways. She seemed satisfied with it, and she folded it over and over again until it was the size of a playing card before she dropped it into the sack.

‘Maybe this is the place where you get what you deserve,’ whispered Skeezix.

The idea gave Jack a chill. It didn’t seem to appeal to Skeezix either, who was clearly troubled by the sight of Miss Flees, come to such a bad end. He seemed half inclined to approach her, to give her something. ‘She’d go even more nuts if she saw me,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It would do her more harm than good.’

Jack nodded. Quite likely it was true. Still ...

‘We can’t just go away, though, can we?’

‘No,’ said Jack. ‘Maybe she won’t recognise us.’ He found a quarter in one pocket and three pennies in another. Skeezix was richer; he counted up a total of eighty-seven cents. They walked toward her, pretending to be passersby, and dropped the change into her open sack. She thanked them by name, and as they walked off, nodding and smiling at her and telling her to take care of herself, she advised Skeezix not to eat so much. Then, as if a switch had been thrown in her head, she began to lecture them about the advantages of roughage in the diet, advising bran muffins, flaxseed, wheat germ, ground fish bones, and sawdust, whining along in a voice shrill with the suspicion that no one was taking her seriously. It was clear, though, that she was talking mostly to an imagined audience, for her eyes drifted away from the two boys and she spoke with a general, detached vagueness at the sides of the heads of people drifting past, the subject of her lecture shifting away and losing itself like the landscape of a dream.

Jack shivered at the sight. Skeezix was silent for a moment; then he said, ‘I wish we’d had more.’

‘We didn’t,’ said Jack.

‘Maybe we could come back. Isn’t that how all of this is supposed to work – you can come and go at the Solstice, popping in at different times? Didn’t Helen say there were two of your father at the taxidermist’s? That must have been weird.’

‘I bet it was.’

‘Sorry,’ said Skeezix. They found themselves climbing a flight of very long stairs, trudging along without tiring, bound for nowhere at all. They hesitated at the top. Skeezix looked at Jack and shook his head. ‘I think we screwed up,’ he said.

‘Wrong stairs?’

‘No. Coming here and all. I’m hungry enough to eat my arm, but all I want is one of Potts’s doughnuts.’

‘I know what you mean. I wonder if Helen – ’

‘Will you look at that!’ Skeezix interrupted, pointing ahead of them, way off in the distance. There was the train depot, stretching out before them, steamy and loud. There was the cafeteria and the vendors again, appearing to be about a half mile off, although the vendors’ voices were clear and close. Skeezix and Jack approached them once more, both of them struck with the horror of tramping round and round through the same circuitous dreamlike depot, finding nothing at all substantial enough to make the place seem real.

Miss Flees still stood with her bag open, accosting the milling crowds. In front of her stood a fat man, who seemed to be dumping odds and ends into the bag. There was something oddly familiar about him: in the way he wore his clothes, in his posture. It was more than just a passing notion. ‘He’s wearing my jacket,’ said Skeezix. ‘I wish I had that one now. It’s warmer than this one by a mile.’

‘And your hat,’ said Jack. ‘Isn’t that your lucky Pierre hat? It’s you, isn’t it? You’ve come back.’

‘By golly, it is.’ Skeezix hurried forward but stopped after having taken a half dozen steps, struck, perhaps, with the weird notion of coming up behind himself and tapping himself on the shoulder and watching himself turn in surprise, or perhaps in mirth. That would be it: he’d know - wouldn’t he? – that he was about to be tapped and would have brought along some sort of gag, a squirting flower or a rubber snake in order to have a bit of fun. Skeezix watched as he – the fat man—emptied his pockets into Miss Flees’s bags and then, tipping his hat to her, stepped hurriedly away down a yawning corridor and was gone.

‘What would you have to say to yourself that you wouldn’t already know?’ asked Jack.

‘Nothing. I’m glad I came back, though. You know what this means? We get through all right. We must.’

‘You do, anyway. Let’s go.’

With that the two of them set out down an adjacent stairway, down and down and down until the dim, flickering light of the depot was replaced by sunlight, flowing up from below. There was a thin edge of blue sky and the green of trees, which grew as they descended the stairs, forming itself into the half circle of a tunnel mouth. They stepped out into the leafy silence of an oak wood. Brown grass and green fern rose to their shoulders, and mushrooms and fungi on the forest floor sat solid and alien like peculiar rubber statuary. The distant echoes of train whistles had diminished, and one last, long, ghostly blast was consumed by the hooting of an owl that peered at them from the limb of an enormous tree, an oak that towered away impossibly overhead.

The stairs from the train depot were gone. They’d vanished in the shadows. Looming behind Jack and Skeezix was the dark arch of the Tumbled Bridge, near Mrs Oglevy’s orchards. The glow of sunlight shone beyond, and beyond that was the rise of the meadow and the hills where – what was it, yesterday? – they’d fought with blind MacWilt and pitched rocks at Dr Brown. All of it, the meadow and the hills and the bridge itself, were immeasurably vast, as if they were in a land of giants. Jack stood and stared, feeling as if he would choke. His shirt was too small, and his toes seemed to have jammed up against the ends of his shoes. One of his cuff buttons popped loose and dropped into the weeds.

The air was suddenly full of the rush of wings. ‘Run!’ cried Skeezix, turning and sprinting back toward the dark mouth of the bridge. Jack didn’t need the advice. An owl big as a cow swooped down out of the tree toward them. They were mice to it – supper, and a meagre supper at that.

They darted into the safety of the shadows, scurrying behind a heap of broken rock, watching the owl fly through and out the other side, beating the air with enormous wings. ‘What a monster,’ said Skeezix, hauling off his jacket.

‘It’s us,’ said Jack. ‘We’re tiny. That’s the way it works, remember?’

‘Why didn’t you warn me? How long will it take to grow up?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jack. ‘Not long, I hope. A few hours before it really gets started. These clothes are done for already. We’ll suffocate if we don’t get out of them. What’ll we do?’

‘Where are we? Home?’

Jack studied it for a moment, both of them listening for the flapping of owl wings on the air. ‘In a way.’

‘Is this a dream, do you think? Some sort of vision? I don’t trust any of it.’

Jack shrugged and then was struck with an idea. ‘Let’s find Dr Jensen. He’ll know.’

‘Well,’ said Skeezix. ‘He’ll be sympathetic anyway.’

The stream was low and sluggish. It was still autumn, but the autumn of a dry year. They weren’t altogether home, then – which made finding Dr Jensen a questionable sort of thing. The two of them peeked out from under the bridge, creeping along in the shadows, clambering around rocks that yesterday might have fitted into their pockets. The sound of voices reached them on the wind, and they peered over the top of a driftwood log at two gigantic children, playing on a sandy little beach where the stream had receded. A boy meddled with a tin bucket, ladling sand into it with his cupped hand, then upending it to build turrets along either side of a moored wooden boat. A girl, his sister perhaps, arranged dolls on a stump.

‘Monsters,’ breathed Skeezix. ‘Behemoths. Who are they? They don’t live in Rio Dell. Not our Rio Dell.’

Jack shook his head. ‘This isn’t our Rio Dell, I guess.’ His heart sank when he said it. He’d hoped he was home, despite signs to the contrary, but he wasn’t.

‘Horrifying, aren’t they? – children that big. Makes your flesh crawl. Imagine watching them eat.’

A voice hollered from away up the river, toward Mrs Oglevy’s orchard, or at least toward what they remembered as Mrs Oglevy’s orchard. The children disappeared up the path, skipping along, leaving their toys behind. ‘Probably going in for lunch,’ said Skeezix, stepping out of hiding. ‘Let’s go.’

It took them all of ten minutes to tug the clothes off the enormous dolls. To keep things fair, they left their own clothes in a little heap at the base of the stump. Then they cut the painter from the toy boat and cut it again in half with their pocketknives. They left the knives, their good-luck charms, and their caps atop the clothes, pretty sure the children would be well enough satisfied with the trade. Their father, or someone, could build them another boat. This one wasn’t worth much anyway. It looked clever enough, with its movable tiller and cloth sail, but the sail didn’t much work, and steering the toy vessel was like trying to steer a house. They fought to keep it near shore. If worst came to worst they could swim ashore; there wouldn’t be any problem there – if they weren’t eaten by a catfish on the way in. It would take them forever to get into town, though, if they had to go overland.

They slid along beneath the trees, dressed idiotically in the doll clothes, not knowing whether to be thankful for them or not. At least they were big – big to the point of falling
off
. They’d tied the cut pieces of painter around their waists before setting out, and then pulled the hem of the dresses back up and tucked them under the ropes. ‘You must not feel half as much a fool as I do,’ said Skeezix, as they rounded a bend in the stream and sailed along past a stand of rushes.

‘Why do you say so?’ asked Jack, leaning on the tiller.

‘I thought you said you were Scottish, somehow – your mother or something.’

‘That’s right. So what?’

‘Your ancestors dressed like this, then. Skirts and like that. They ate guts, too, didn’t they? I’m getting to the point where I could eat guts. Cheerfully.’

‘Look there,’ said Jack, pointing. ‘It’s the farm. There’s Willoughby.’ And sure enough, there was the farmer messing around behind the house, hoeing in his garden.

The sight of him cheered Jack immediately; they were in their own Rio Dell, or something very much like it. But it wasn’t the Willoughby who’d given him the carnival circular; it was a changed Willoughby, an older Willoughby. ‘His hair’s gone grey,’ said Jack, feeling suddenly lonely.

Skeezix nodded. ‘I wonder if you’re in the loft.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Jack. ‘I guess I might be. Wonder what I’m doing. What if we went to look and I wasn’t there? What if my books were gone and there was nothing but hay up there and cats. What would it mean?’

‘Nothing. You’d gone somewhere else, that’s all. This boat’s getting tight, isn’t it?’

Jack agreed that it was. But the town wasn’t ten minutes off. The boat would hold up until then if they sat still. Willoughby’s farm disappeared behind them and once again they were skimming along through the woods on a journey that had become weirdly reminiscent of the one Jack had taken a few long hours ago. Thinking about it made him wonder suddenly about Dr Brown. He was struck with the troubling thought that Dr Brown could quite easily be lurking round about, waiting again behind the taxidermist’s shop, perhaps, intent on finishing his score with them.