Land of Dreams (3 page)

Skeezix had been right about old Willoughby, who, Jack insisted, wouldn’t be likely to waken until morning and so wouldn’t miss his wagon. In ten minutes they were rattling away down the road, the three of them wedged in together on the plank seat, bound for the cove through the dark and silent night. The sky by then was full of stars, veiled by ragged clouds, like tattered curtains fluttering through the open window of a room inhabited by fireflies.

T
HERE WAS ENOUGH MOON
to see by, but not to see well. Peebles could make out the dim shapes of cypress trees, bent and contorted like hunched creatures that might easily have crept out of the freshly opened grave before him – the grave he’d dug open by himself, blistering his hands until they bled. The trees bordered the cemetery where it crawled up into the hills, the farthest graves having disappeared long ago under a tangle of berry vines and lemon leaf, their tilted stones lost beneath moss and lichen. There was enough silver moonlight to throw shadows along the ground. The moon hung just above the horizon, and the shadows of more recently set gravestones stretched across the grass in stark black rectangles, making it seem to the boy, when he turned his head just so, that every grave was an open grave and every grave was empty.

He licked his hand, vaguely enjoying the coppery taste of blood but feeling as if he were part of a nightmare, the sort of nightmare in which you dare not move for fear you might jostle things, perhaps, and be noticed by something you’d rather not be noticed by. But the wind cutting down out of the mountains to the east, slicing across the back of his neck and freezing his fingers, hadn’t at all a nightmare quality to it. You can’t feel the wind in a nightmare, but you could feel this wind; and he wouldn’t wake up in his bed and be able to turn over and see something else when he closed his eyes. There was a thrill in this, though – in the hovering death and darkness.

He looked uneasily at the cypress trees. He could imagine something menacing in twisted limbs or bent stumps and in the creak of tree branches on the night wind. He couldn’t keep his eyes entirely away, either. They wandered, ever so little. He’d see things out of the corners of his eyes – things that shouldn’t be –and sometimes he had to glance at them straight on, just to know for sure. Here was a jumble of berry vines, almost luminous in the moonlight, that shifted in the wind like some loathsome thing from the deep woods put together out of leaves and sticks, creeping sideways inch by inch onto the open graveyard and sighing in the wind as if it mourned something dead.

What he feared most was what they’d find in the coffin. The body had been buried for nearly twelve years. He’d heard that the hair of a corpse continues to grow even after the bones are dry and brittle and old. Now and then, when the Eel River rose in flood, it washed open hillside graves, and the skeletons that tumbled out into the muddy current to go clacking away to sea had hair that wisped around the bones of their shoulders and in which was tangled the trinkets they were buried with.

There was a curse right then and the sound of a spade ringing against iron coffin handles and then scuffing off across pine boards. The man standing waist deep in the grave before him wore a black topcoat with cuffed sleeves. His hair fell dark and oily around his shoulders. Judging from the grey pallor of his bearded face, he might have been dead himself for a week and then dug up and animated.

The boy, who leaned on a shovel above and half hid his eyes and who was stricken with terror now that the coffin had at last been unearthed, was even more frightened of the man in the grave, whom he despised. Unlike the moon shadows round about them and the sighing of things on the wind, he was a flesh-and-blood horror. Though he was weak, as if he were starving and tired and ill, his eyes were dark and deadly. But he had offered Peebles something – hadn’t he –that would make it worth the terror and more.

The man cursed again and then hissed something through his teeth.

‘What?’

‘I said, give me the bar. Are you deaf?’

Peebles said nothing but picked up an iron crowbar that lay in the damp grass and handed it to the man, who looked back fiercely, as if he’d just as soon kill the boy right there and have done with him. The man bent back to his work, levering the crowbar under the coffin lid. There was the squeak of rusty nails pried loose and the scratch and scrape of the iron bar when the rotted wood of the lid snapped and broke away. The man cursed again and slammed the curved end of the crowbar into the lid smashing and smashing it until the night rang with the blows and the man gasped for breath and there was nothing left of the coffin lid but splintered fragments still fixed by long casing nails to the edge grain of the coffin’s side.

Peebles looked away as a cloud shaded the moon. The trees above him faded into blackness and the shadows of gravestones slowly disappeared. A drop of rain plinked down onto his hand, which grasped the shovel so hard that it shook. Another drop fell, and then another. In an hour the gravel road out of the cemetery would be a muddy rill that would bog the wheels of their cart in mire, and he’d find himself trudging the two miles home in a downpour. He pushed his glasses up onto his nose, shaded his forehead in an effort to keep the glasses dry, and looked back at the black-coated man, who stood beside the grave now, scowling and grinning in turn, as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be insanely happy or insanely angry.

Peebles peered into the grave, imagining the gumless teeth, the empty sockets, the wisps of greyed hair, the dusty and worm-eaten clothing slumped across the xylophone curve of rib cage. It was a horrifying thought, to be sure, but it was fascinating too. Something in him loved the idea of death and decay. He’d found a book once on a high shelf in the village bookshop, and in it were sketches of instruments of torture and of dead men hanging from gibbets. He’d torn the pictures out and kept them, fearful they’d be found and hating the people who might find them because it was their fault – wasn’t it? – that he had to live in fear of being discovered. Those were just pictures, though, and what lay in the grave, dead these long years, wouldn’t be a picture.

He bent closer, relishing the anticipated shock of horror. What he saw was a disappointment. The skeleton lay buried beneath scattered debris. And it hadn’t any webby, overgrown hair. The flesh had returned to dust, and even the bone seemed to be crumbling, so that the skeleton lay in mouldering pieces, like an instructive illustration from an archaeology textbook.

What lay in the coffin was simply too thoroughly dead to be frightening. There was no rotted flesh, no grinning zombie, just the slowly vanishing remains of a man long dead and forgotten, lying beneath a heap of books and glassware as if beneath the earthquake-tumbled contents of a room set up for alchemical study. There were broken sheets of tinted isinglass and a half-dozen conical beakers. There were fragments of rolled copper and a length of glass tubing shoved in among the rest like a spear. There was a crockery jar big enough to hold a severed head, and in it was the cracked bust of a fierce-looking bearded man, whose jaw and left ear had been broken away. Scattered throughout were long-necked, unlabelled wine bottles.

The man in the topcoat crouched at the edge of the grave, silent now and stroking his chin. Peebles edged closer, gaping at the lumber in the cracked coffin and tugging his coat closer around his shoulders to keep out the rain. The moon appeared again like a lamp suddenly unveiled, and moonlight shone for a moment off the curved glass of a heavy, almost opaque bottle that was still half full of some dark liquid. The man leaned in and plucked out a book that seemed to have been bent by dampness. The pages were glued together, and the outside cover pulled away from the spine, as if worms, having reduced the corpse to a papery hulk, had gone to work on the leather binding. On the first page of the book, scrawled across the top in black ink, was the inscription
To Lars Portland, from Jensen
and then the month and day of a year twenty-five years past.

The book tumbled out of the pale hands and fell into the grave, sliding down the dirt incline and jolting to a stop against the half-filled bottle. ‘What are you gaping at!’ cried the man, turning toward the face of the boy, who read over his shoulder. Peebles stumbled back, catching his heel on the spade that he still held, falling over backward onto the wet grass. The man laughed low in his throat and shook his head; then he reached again into the grave, hauled out the bottle, sniffed at it, and threw it end over end into the night.

He plucked out the skull next and peered, at it intently, thumping his finger against the top of the thing’s cranium. The brittle bone splintered under his nail, as if it were a termite-eaten husk of wood. He took it between his two hands and shredded it, letting the brittle teeth clatter down into the grave, and then he threw the fragments in after it. ‘Dead a thousand years,’ he muttered, and then he shook, as if from a chill.

The cemetery was lit just then by lightning through clouds, and with the boom of thunder that followed came a sudden downpour. The man arose without a word and slouched tiredly around the grass, tramping on graves with his boots and pulling his hat over his forehead. The boy watched for a moment, then sprang up and grappled with the shovels and crowbar and with a heavy pick, dragging the lot of them along in the man’s wake until he caught up. The man struck him in the face with the back of his hand, tore the muddy tools out of his hands, and flung them away. Then, looking at the cowering boy, he said, ‘What do we want with stolen tools?’ as if his explanation would justify his hard treatment, and he helped the boy roughly into the cart before climbing in himself and taking up the reins. They clattered away toward the Coast Road, a peal of wild laughter howling away behind them on the wind; then the sound of a racking cough followed the laughter, with a string of curses to bind it all together. The graveyard, in moments, lay empty and dark beneath the cloud-veiled moon, and the rain beat down onto the moss and grasses and pooled up until it ran in little rivulets down the hill toward the sea, some of it edging into the mouth of the freshly opened grave and pouring over onto the strange litter of glass and books and bones and alchemical debris like a rising tide of seawater submerging the curious inhabitants of a long-evaporated tide pool.

The shoe still sat on the night-dark sand like a beached whale. They drove the wagon down onto the slick, packed dirt of the beach road, blocked the wheels, and put a feedbag on the horse. There wasn’t much time; it was past midnight, and they’d want to be at the doctor’s by two if they were going to wangle a meal out of Mrs Jensen. Helen didn’t much care about eating in the middle of the night, but it appealed a little bit to Jack and especially to Skeezix, whose stomach felt at the moment like a collapsed balloon. He wished he’d brought a lunch, but he hadn’t, so there was nothing to do but hurry.

Jack set a hooded lantern on a driftwood burl, so that the light was shining down onto the shoe, and then all three of them started bailing water out of it with milk buckets. Big as the shoe was, though, more than anything else they got into each other’s way, and when Helen splashed a bucketful of seawater down the back of Skeezix’s trouser leg, he quit and went away mad to hunt up driftwood to use as sleds.

The heel end of the shoe angled away uphill, so they emptied it first, and then tried heaving the toe end up into the air in order to dump the rest of the water onto the sand. But Helen and Jack couldn’t budge it. When Skeezix appeared out of the darkness dragging long, waterworn timbers in each hand, he tried tilting the shoe with them, but it still wouldn’t move. They shoved one of the timbers – an immense broken oar, it seemed, from a monumental wrecked rowboat – in under the toe and then wedged the other timber under it, levering away at the first until the heel edged around and down the hill. They inched it along, burying their fulcrum timber in the soft beach sand and pulling it out and resetting it and burying it again, until water rushed from the toe to the heel. Then they bailed it clean, shoved it farther, bailed once more, and then pushed the shoe entirely over onto its side, ocean water cascading out past the tongue and the laces and the heel edge along with a school of silvery fish that flopped and wriggled on the wet sand.

Helen plucked up the fish and dropped them into her bucket. Then, realizing that the bucket was dry, she ran down to where the waves foamed up along the beach and waded out ankle deep, scooping up water and then running back up to where Skeezix and Jack were busy yanking the shoe over onto the two timbers.

‘Leave off there, can’t you?’ shouted Skeezix, who was still mad about his pants.

‘I’ve got to save these fish.’

Skeezix gave her an exasperated look, a look which said that there was no time to save fish, but she acted like she hadn’t seen it and went right along with her task. Groaning aloud, as if he’d never understand girls like Helen, Skeezix quit messing with the shoe and started picking up fish himself, dropping them into Helen’s bucket with exaggerated care so as to let her know that, although he had more important work to do, he’d humour her for the sake of her fish. Helen said thank you very politely each time he dumped in a fish, and then she started to pretend that the fish were saying thank you, and she made the fish talk to Skeezix in high, burbling voices, like bubbles through water. Skeezix made a threatening gesture, as if he were going to eat one of the fish – bite its head right off and swallow it raw.

Helen ignored him, turned, and walked down once again to the water, emptying the several dozen fish into a receding wave. Skeezix ran along after and pitched his in too. Then, with a clever look on his face, he said something to Helen about her not taking the bait, but a forked bolt of lightning and a simultaneous crack of thunder buried her equally clever reply, and both of them ran back toward the shoe, hunkering down now under a fresh torrent of rain, which washed in on the driven wind, beating on the surface of the sea and soaking them through in moments.