Land of Dreams (6 page)

Jack studied it for a moment, then climbed back up into the loft to pull on his shoes. He unpegged the shutters and pushed them open, surprising a crow that had evidently been sitting on the sill. The bird was immense; it flapped there outside the open window, seeming to look in at him. Grasped in one claw was a gnarled little stick. The idea of it appealed to Jack – a crow with a walking stick. It circled round in a big loop out over the meadow before making away toward the coast. It flew astonishingly fast; it seemed to Jack that he could hear the creature’s wings beat the air even when it was nothing but a black dot silhouetted against the blue-green of the sea beyond Table Bluffs.

On the bluffs themselves stood the half-erected scaffolding of the Ferris wheel, and across the meadows was strewn a litter of mechanical debris – the angular, disjointed skeletons of the curious carnival rides depicted in the poster that Jack still clutched in his hand. He grabbed his hat and set out. Coffee could wait.

There was a vast migration of hermit crabs that morning, all of them scuttling south down the beach, up the rocks, around the headland, then out into the shallows again and up onto the long strand that stretched nearly to the town of Scotia. By late afternoon there was a more or less continual line of the creatures, all of them wearing seashell hats and bound for unguessable destinations. Skeezix spent the morning on the beach, chasing the things down and dropping them into gunnysacks for Dr Jensen. The doctor himself called a halt to the collecting at noon, when it became clear that the creatures intended simply to
walk
to the city and that his Bending down a cartload would be pointless. The coals, apparently, were walking to Newcastle. There was a limit, it seemed to Dr Jensen, to the hermit crab market.

Besides, as the day wore on, the crabs seemed to be growing in size. The first trickle of crabs on the beach had involved periwinkle-housed creatures no bigger than a thumbnail. By ten the crabs sported conch shells of varying sizes, some as big as rabbits, running wonderfully fast along the sand. At about noon a crab the size of a grown pig crept out of the green ocean, festooned with seaweed and making clacking sounds, as if someone were knocking together two lengths of dried bamboo.

It went on that way for hours. The crabs chased both Skeezix and Dr Jensen from the beach and ripped one of the burlap bags to shreds, releasing the hundreds of smaller crabs within and herding them back into line and away south. Dr Jensen had gone home to get his brass spyglass and then come back to watch, hidden in the bushes beside the ruined railroad tracks on the cliff above. It seemed to him, when he put his ear to the hot, rusty steel of the tracks, that he could hear the distant roar of the old Flying Wizard as it plunged along into the north coast. But what he heard, obviously, was something more akin to the sound of the ocean in a seashell. Against that roar he could barely make out the faint
clack, clack, clack
of the migrating crabs, sounding weirdly metallic when telegraphed like that through the railroad tracks.

The sky that same morning was deep blue, like evening, and Jack could see stars faintly luminous beyond the thin sunlight, so that the whole circle of the sky looked like the mouth of an upended bucket brimming with water and reflected stars. Jack walked along toward the bluffs, his hands in his pockets, hoping that he’d see Helen, who hadn’t been at Miss Flees’s when he’d stopped by. He heard in the village about the migration of crabs, so he knew where to find Skeezix. He heard too that a man had been murdered just after sunup, and that his body had been bled white and pitched off the cliffs into a tide pool. Dr Jensen himself had found it.

Jack walked across the meadow toward the carnival, kicking his way through high autumn grass and listening to the silence of the ocean and the occasional ringing of hammers. The air barely moved. He wished he’d taken the time to go after Skeezix or made a greater effort to find Helen. Even Lantz would be good company. He felt suddenly lonely, on the meadow by himself, nothing around him but grass and wildflowers and the carnival, shrunk by distance.

He had no idea on earth where he was going. There was really no carnival yet, nothing but half-built skeletons. But they drew him curiously, as if the jumble of debris was somehow magical, the product of enchantment, perhaps, and held him in thrall. He could have turned around and walked back the way he’d come, or he could have angled over toward the Coast Road and strolled south to where Skeezix almost certainly was messing around on the beach. It seemed to him, though, that the appearance of the carnival hadn’t been just a random happenstance; it had drifted in on the weather and the strange tides and on the colours that had stained the horizon and now tinted the sky.

Only a handful of men worked to assemble the carnival rides, gaunt, pale, wretched-looking men in rumpled, ragged clothes, none of them talking. Two of them knocked together the framework of a wooden arch that spanned the dirt road from the beach, curving down into the weeds and ending there, as if it were a disattached gateway.

Jack saw MacWilt suddenly, talking to a man he didn’t recognise. The stranger’s back was toward him. He had long, black hair that hung round his shoulders, and the skin of his hands was peculiarly sallow, the white of a fish too long out of water. He wore scuffed boots caked with mud, and he wore a black top coat, which, along with his black hair, gave him the appearance of a great black bird.

The man turned to scowl at Jack, as if he’d expected him but didn’t half like it that he’d come. The scowl was replaced for a fragment of a second by a look half of recognition and half of surprise, as if he’d been caught out. Then once again there was a scowl, and a malicious scowl at that. Jack nodded and walked past, noting the long bullet scar on the man’s cheek. He kept his hands in his pockets and looked at the ground, as if he were just strolling toward Table Bluffs Beach and had passed the carnival out of necessity, because it was in the way. But he could feel the man’s eyes against his back as he made his way toward the beach trail. Somehow Jack knew that the man was Dr Brown, of the poster. And he knew that he didn’t at all like him.

Jack stepped around the wooden sheds painted with grinning clowns and gaudy whirling acrobats and impossible, shadowy freaks. The paintings had been wonderful, in their time. But their time had passed many years since, and now they were so faded by rainwater and sunlight that they were just the tired ghosts of paintings. There was an enclosed wagon with a canvas flap for a door. Above the flap were the words
Alligator Child
, painted long enough ago so that whatever sort of freak lived within couldn’t very likely be a child any more. And beyond the wagon, lying in a heap on the meadow grass, were a half dozen skeletons, dirty ivory in the shadowy daylight, their bones wired together with silver thread.

The crossbraces and gears and rails stacked round about were rusted and ancient. They’d been painted in the distant past too, but the paint had flaked off, so that what had once been the depiction of a bicycle-riding clown in a pointed hat and ruff collar was now nothing more than a severed head drifting above a nearly spokeless wheel, half the head peeling away in a sheet of dirty blue and pink. Partly built amid the heaps of machinery sat a contrivance that seemed half beehive oven and half steam engine. A calliope lay on its side a few yards off, and between the oven and the calliope, cordwood was stacked shoulder high beside a heap of coal.

All talk had stopped as he passed, as if they’d been uttering things that weren’t for the ears of an outsider. He found himself scrambling down the beach trail and out onto the sand, with no earthly reason for being there but mightily relieved that he was. The tide was low. He could pick his way around the cliffs by skirting tide pools and clambering over normally submerged reefs until he got to the cove. The only alternative was to hike back up the trail and stroll once again through the midst of the carnival –something he wasn’t inclined to do. He’d wait until it was more of a piece, and he’d take his friends with him.

Jack didn’t find Skeezix on the beach. He found Dr Jensen on the bluffs with his spyglass and a little leatherbound notebook in which he was keeping count of the crabs. He explained that his counting wasn’t worth as much as it ought to be; numberless crabs had no doubt crept past in the night, and earlier that morning Skeezix had been counting but had boggled it a half dozen times, had started over and then over again, and finally had estimated by multiplying numbers that Dr Jensen hadn’t yet fathomed.

What did it matter, after all? Jack asked. Dr Jensen shrugged. Maybe it didn’t. When you thought about it,
nothing
much mattered – did it? – beyond a sandwich and a plate to eat it on. And even the plate wasn’t worth much. Clerks spent their days chasing down numbers and writing them into columns and adding them up and, as often as not, growing agitated at what they found. Well, Dr Jensen chased down numbers too, and his numbers were as good as theirs, better maybe. There hadn’t been a migration of hermit crabs in twelve years. Another opportunity wouldn’t come for twelve more. Dr Jensen was going to make the most of this one, just in case he could make it pay. He’d missed part of the last one, and he’d regretted it since.

Jack sat on the bluffs for a time, watching the sky out over the ocean. The stars had faded, but the sky was, still a deep evening blue, and the sea, calmer now than it had been last night, was bottle green and rolling beneath an oily ground swell. It looked for a moment as if the sky were flat, like the Surface of the sea, and was a thing of substance, hovering in the air miles overhead. Then, although nothing identifiable had changed, the sky seemed prodigiously deep, as if he were peering into the clearest sort of ocean water and it was only distance that obscured his vision. He had the uncanny feeling that something was hidden from him in the depths of the sea and sky – something pending, something waiting.

Dr Jensen said he felt that way too, especially at the time of the Twelve-year Solstice. Why they called it a ‘Solstice,’ he couldn’t say, since it seemed to have little to do with the sun. He’d seen two of them since he’d moved to the north coast to open his practice. Each time there’d been the arrival of a carnival – the same carnival, for all he knew. There’d been ceremonies and a festival and a few people had floated baskets of bread and autumnal fruit out onto the ocean and into the longshore current. Fishermen took a holiday, either because they deserved a holiday or because they caught things in their nets during the Solstice that they’d rather not catch.

The few boats out on the water this morning were newcomers. It was doubtful that villagers would buy their fish even if the fishermen caught something they had the stomach to keep. It was more likely that they’d catch other sorts of oceanic flotsam – things that had been swept out of the east by deepwater tides and had been under the sea so long they’d become hoary with seaweed and worms. Twelve years ago the taxidermist’s son had gone mad after eating Solstice fish, and for days had spoken in the voices of long-dead townspeople. In the moonlight it had seemed as if the boy
looked
like the corpses of the people whose voices he mimicked, and the taxidermist, whose business never amounted to much in the first place, had put away his glass eyes and stuffing and had set up as a spiritualist in one of the carnival tents.

But he failed as a spiritualist too, although for the first few hours it seemed as if he’d finally made his fortune. Dead men clamoured to be heard, but it turned out they hadn’t anything more interesting to say when they were dead than when they’d been alive. The entranced son gibbered out a steady monologue of tiresome complaints until he was possessed finally by old man Pinkerd, who’d been struck and killed six years earlier by a wagon driven by a drunken stranger from Moonvale. He wanted the stranger brought to justice, he said. He couldn’t abide any more delay.

Through the mouth of the boy the old dead man had mumbled about lawsuits but had obviously got the idea confused with the sort of suit you wore, which made it seem to everyone that death turned a man into an idiot. To make the complaint even more foolish, the wagon driver from Moonvale had himself been killed by lightning a week after he’d run over Mr Pinkerd, and so all talk of lawsuits was foolishness. There was speculation about why old man Pinkerd, being dead himself, hadn’t heard about the lightning strike, hadn’t had a chance to confront the stranger from Moonvale himself, beyond the pale, as it were. It was generally agreed upon, by the villagers who were listening to the taxidermist’s son, that it was simply more evidence that dead men didn’t know half as much as they were generally given credit for and were the same sorts of pains in the neck dead that they were alive. There was the same sort of general relief among the audience, in fact, when old man Pinkerd finally ended his ghostly harangue and the taxidermist’s son fell asleep in his chair, as when the old man died six years earlier.

The taxidermist’s son had awakened a half hour later to a diminished audience, but by then there were so many ghosts trying to talk at once, and none of them in the mood for answering questions, that the boy had seemed suddenly to go insane and burbled his way up into a rising shriek that ended when the chair he sat in collapsed over backward and he had to be helped to bed.

Dr Jensen said he’d never seen anything like it before. It was entirely possible that the whole thing had been a hoax. It seemed possible, if you thought about it, that
all
the strange business of the Solstice was a fake – a matter of suggestion. People expected the dead to speak, and so they heard cryptic messages uttered in the chirping of crickets and the croaking of toads. They accepted without question the arrival of the two-headed dog, which was found dead in the street outside the tavern. Had it appeared six months earlier, heads would have nodded and eyes would have squinted, and it would have been murmured that it wasn’t a two-headed dog at all but a clever fake, got up by the taxidermist in league with MacWilt. During the Solstice, said Dr Jensen, people were ready to believe anything.