Land of Dreams E-Book

James P. Blaylock

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 450

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

When a boat-sized shoe and giant spectacles wash up on the shore, three of the town's orphans - Jack, Skeezix, and Helen - know there's something fishy going on, and the old ghost in the orphanage attic is inclined to agree. An evil carnival comes to town, run by a sinister gentleman who can turn himself into a crow. A mouse-sized man hiding in the woodwork leaves Jack an elixir that might, just might, allow him to cross during Solstice to another world, a mysterious land of dreams that holds the key to Jack's past and all their adventures. Land Of Dreams is a phantasmagorical adventure reminiscent of Charles Finney's The Circus of Dr. Lao and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. REVIEWS: "... a singular American fabulist." -- William Gibson "Land Of Dreams is Blaylock's best yet - powerful, magical, suspenseful and funny, this novel sails us through the supernatural backwaters of the northern California coast, and none of its readers will ever quite be able to leave its landscape of rotting waterfront towns, and strange songs echoing in from the sea, and vast, unknown cities visible on dubious horizons. Blaylock is the best of contemporary writers, and Land Of Dreams is destined to be one of the field's classics." -- Tim Powers "Striking, beautifully turned surreal fantasy... Weird, complex, wise, original, delightful: pounce!" -- Kirkus Reviews

Leseprobe

ALSO BY JAMES P. BLAYLOCK

NOVELS

The Elfin Ship

The Disappearing Dwarf

The Digging Leviathan

Homunculus

Land Of Dreams

The Last Coin

The Stone Giant

The Paper Grail

Lord Kelvin’s Machine

The Magic Spectacles

Night Relics

All The Bells On Earth

Winter Tides

The Rainy Season

Knights Of The Cornerstone

Zeuglodon

The Aylesford Skull (forthcoming)

COLLECTIONS

Thirteen Phantasms

In For A Penny

Metamorphosis

The Shadow on the Doorstep

Novellas

The Ebb Tide

The Affair of the Chalk Cliffs

With Tim Powers

On Pirates

The Devil in the Details

Copyright © James P. Blaylock 1987

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Dirk Berger.Cover design by John Berlyne.

Published as an ebook in the United States by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc., in conjunction with the Zeno Agency LTD.

ISBN: 978-1-936535-60-6

CONTENTS

Copyright

Dedication

Preface

Part One

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Part Three

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Author Bio

To Viki and to Lynn, Ron, Tim, and Katy, who have the right inclinations

Saint-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter XX, which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX, which is hearing the band play in the gardens.

– Robert Louis Stevenson 'An Apology for Idlers’

PART ONE

In which the carnival arrives

1

IT HAD ALREADY BEEN raining for six days when the enormous shoe washed up onto the beach. It was an impossible thing, as big as a rowing boat, with frayed laces trailing a garden of pink hydra and blue-green algae.

It was almost evening, in mid-autumn. The sky was choked with clouds and with spindrift from waves breaking across exposed reefs – vast shadowy breakers that quartered round the headland and drove towards shore like skating hillsides, feeling for the shallows and throwing themselves over in a booming rush so that you could hear them break a quarter of a mile above the village, beyond Edgware farm and beyond the Tumbled Bridge. Along the horizon, like a wrinkled blue ribbon that stretched north from the headland towards the edge of the world, the hem of the sky shone beneath the clouds, looking like old porcelain, watery pale with a mist of rain falling across it.

The shoe lay on the beach and smelled of kelp and wet leather and salt spray. Its tongue had shoved up under the laces and was pointed cockeyed at the sky like the misshapen sail of a fairy-tale boat, and every now and again a wave greater than the last would wash up across the sand in a churning of sea foam and push the shoe a foot or two farther along, until, when Skeezix found it just at sunset, it sat high above the declining tide, as if some wandering giant had left it there and gone home.

It was full of sea water that leaked past the stitching in the soles, but the leather had swelled so much during its voyage that the water leaked out only very slowly, and it would still be mostly full even by morning. Under the threatening sky the water in the shoe was as dark as well water. There was the shimmer of something in the depths, though, the silver-green shimmer offish scales or silver coins; it was impossible to say which without rolling up your sleeve and reaching down into the cold and shadowed water.

Skeezix was what Bobby Wickham called himself and had called himself since he was five years old, ever since he’d seen a picture of an old man in an ostrich-plume hat on the wall of the library. He’d been told it was King Skeezix of Finland, who had, a century earlier, been so famous that now his picture could be found in any good illustrated dictionary. The name had sounded birdlike to him, and the ostrich feather, when he was five, had looked grand as anything. Now, at sixteen, it looked foolish, but the name had stuck and he probably couldn’t get rid of it even if he wanted to.

He peered down into the depths of the water. The sides of the shoe rose almost to his neck. If it was silvery coins that lay within, they were too deep to reach anyway, and only looked like they hovered near the surface because of a trick of the slice of sunlight that glowed for the moment beneath the rim of the clouds above the sea. Skeezix hoisted his tattered umbrella when the breeze freshened and swept a patter of raindrops down the back of his coat collar. The glints of silver winked out, and he could see they had been nothing but the sunlit tails of a school of little fish.

There was no explaining the shoe. It had been on the ocean for a week or so – that was easy to see – but whether it had sailed across from some distant land or had drifted south in the longshore current Skeezix couldn’t guess. Like the enormous spectacles found two weeks ago in the tangled eelgrass of a tidal pool, the origins of the shoe were a mystery. It occurred to Skeezix that he ought to hide it. He ought to drag it behind a heap of rock and driftwood so as to save it for Dr Jensen. The doctor should be the first to see it, to study it. They’d taken the eyeglasses away from Dr Jensen and hung them on the wall of the tavern beside the wonderful two headed dog. The lenses were crusted with salt and sand and dried seaweed, and the brass of the frame was etched with turquoise verdigris as if it were turning into a jewel. They’d scraped the muck from the lenses with a spatula and painted comic eyes on them, so that the glasses seemed to be peering at you from the tavern wall. Right next to them hung the two-headed dog, looking woeful, its fur sketchy and matted.

Skeezix didn’t at all like the idea of it. They’d been making fun – of the sorry dog, of Dr Jensen. There were some things that oughtn’t to be made fun of. Heaven knows they’d made fun of him often enough, mainly because he was fat and because he walked on the beach every day, rain or sun. He’d almost given them up –his walks on the beach – when it had begun to seem like the rain wasn’t going to stop.

On the first day of heavy rains he’d slipped out of the orphanage window at dawn, after having lain awake most of the night listening to the rain drum on the tin roof and rush and gurgle through the gutters, and he’d spent the morning rummaging in tide pools under his umbrella. He collected a pail full of brittle stars, which Dr Jensen could ship south to the city, and by ten or eleven it made little difference that he carried the umbrella, for he was soaked with rain and seawater despite it. He had built a fire of driftwood under the cavern in the hillside, and he sat watching the rain fall all afternoon through a veil of smoke, stringing seashells on line pulled from the ribs of the umbrella.

Dr Jensen would want the shoe. Heaven knows what he’d do with it, but he’d want it, if only to study it. He’d wanted the spectacles very badly, but the tavern keeper, a man named Mac Wilt, who had a crooked nose and one eye screwed almost shut because of some wasting disease, wouldn’t give them to him. He would hang the spectacles on the wall of the tavern, he’d said, and Dr Jensen could hang himself. What would MacWilt do with the shoe? Make a planter box of it, probably, out in front of the tavern, then let it go up in weeds out of spite.

The sea swallowed the sun at a gulp just then, and the cvcning beach fell into shadow. Skeezix slipped his hands beneath the weathered shoe sole and lifted. It was like trying to lift a house. He’d have to bail the water out of the shoe before he could even think of moving it, and even then it might be futile unless he had help. His stomach was beginning to growl too, and he felt suddenly that if he didn’t cat he was going to faint. The little bit of lunch he’d brought along hadn’t lasted him past noon. He’d had nothing to eat since. He would eat at the orphanage – for what it was worth – then slide out and eat again at the doctor’s. Somehow he wanted nothing more than hot potatoes with butter and salt on them, about ten, all steaming on a plate with the butter pooling around them. He’d get cabbage soup and bread again at the orphanage, but there were worse things to eat. He’d eaten raw mussels once when Dr Jensen had gone south for three days; he could still remember the slimy liver texture of the things and the pier-piling flavour. He would have starved then, probably, if Elaine Potts, the baker’s daughter, hadn’t come through with doughnuts. Good old Elaine; she was gone now, though, on holiday down south, and wouldn’t be back for a week. She’d miss the Solstice entirely.

Hunger overwhelmed him like a silent rushing wave, and he found himself clambering up the slope towards the Coasts Road and the railroad tracks and the village beyond. Nightfall would hide the shoe. No one would find it in the dark, least of all MacWilt, who would be busy pouring ale into pitchers and scooping up coins until well past midnight anyway. The shoe was safe enough. From the hilltop along the road it looked like nothing more than an oddly shaped tide pool. He’d eat, then hunt up Jack Portland. Jack would help him with the shoe. They’d come back after it that night, and the two of them would haul it up to the doctor’s house on a wagon, and old Jensen would answer the door in his nightshirt and cap, Mrs Jensen at his elbow. It would be nearing dawn. He and Jack would be ragged and wet from having worked all night at saving the shoe, and while the doctor went out in lantern light in the pouring rain, wearing his slippers, Mrs Jensen would hurry them in and give them cookies and coffee and cheese and pickles and slices of pie.

Skeezix loved to think about food, especially when he was hungry. Around four every afternoon he daydreamed about meals he’d sometime eat, and he had sworn, years earlier, that one day he’d travel from one end of the world to the other, eating in every café and inn along the way. He’d eat two desserts, too; if he was going to be a fat man, he’d be a good one. Halfway measures weren’t worth dirt when it came to food.

When he got there, the village was dark beneath the clouds and the coastal trees. Living rooms and parlours were cheerful with fires burning in grates. Smoke tumbled up out of chimney pots. Skeezix trudged along through the wet, up a cobbled alley that wound along parallel to the High Street. Through lit windows he could see families already eating dinner around wooden tables – sisters and brothers and mothers and fathers all gobbling away at mashed potatoes and pot roast and slivered apples with cinnamon. He could remember his own mother’s face if he tried, but he didn’t very often try. He couldn’t remember, though, ever having sat around a table like that and eaten with his family. He’d had no family, not really.

Now he had Jack and Helen – and, of course, Peebles and Lantz. Jack didn’t live in the orphanage; he lived with Mr Willoughby up the hill. Jack was in love with Helen, although he wouldn’t let on that he was, even to his best friend, Skeezix. Helen did live at the orphanage and had lived there at least as long as had Skeezix. What she felt about Jack she kept a mystery, which no doubt confounded Jack.

Skeezix didn’t like Peebles. Nobody did, really, except perhaps Miss Flees, who ran the orphanage, or at least came as close as anybody did to running it. Peebles ‘kept her informed’. That was what she was always saying: ‘Peebles will keep me informed.’ And then she’d squint up her eyes like she had a sand grain in them and nod her head very slowly. Peebles had a nose like MacWilt’s nose – like someone had yanked on it with pliers –and he was always after Miss Flees to be after Skeezix not to eat so much.

She’d lecture Skeezix by the hour about diets. She’d eaten only whole-wheat muffins and well water, she said, when she was a girl. And it seemed to be true, since she was thin as a wind-beaten scarecrow and had dark hollows under her eyes. Skeezix couldn’t see any profit in such a diet. And even if he could, he could hardly have eaten less of her cabbage soup and bread than he ate; there wasn’t half enough to go around as it was. Helen very often gave him a piece of her bread, because she was small and didn’t eat much, she said, and Skeezix would bring Helen dried starfish and the empty shells of chambered nautiluses and moon snails that would be tossed up onto the beach after a storm.

But you had to put up with Peebles. There he was, after all – what old Willoughby would call a ‘sad case’, hated as he was by almost everyone except Miss Flees, and by himself most of all. That’s how it seemed to Skeezix anyway, who climbed now over the little stile fence behind the orphanage, waded through the knee-high grass, slipped a copper ruler between a window rail and its jamb, and levered up the little slip lock that held the window shut. After a minute of groaning and hoisting and kicking, he tumbled in past the open casement and onto the floor. He stood up and dropped the ruler into the grass outside, along the clapboards of the wall. Then he shut the window and peered out into the hallway, where he could hear the sound of clinking plates and glasses.

The sour, heavy aroma of boiled cabbage hung on the air. Two cats wandered toward him down the hall, and he bent down and picked one of them up, a white and orange cat named Mouse, his particular favourite. He was half sure that the cat could speak, and more than once just lately he had awakened in the middle of the night to find it perched by his ear, whispering something to him, something he couldn’t quite make out. It was the Solstice that did that, that turned everything onto its head.

Miss Flees blinked at him out of a pinched-up face. Her hair seemed to have lost its mind. Half of it was shoved up atop her head in a sort of geyser and clamped with a piece of twine. The other half had abandoned the twine and hung around her ears like the oars of a galley. The corners of her mouth drooped. ‘You’re late,’ she squeaked, in a voice only half human.

‘I fell asleep. I was awfully tired because of all the rain last night.’

‘You’re lying again.’

That’s right, he is,’ said Peebles happily. ‘He wasn’t in his bed half an hour ago. I looked in, and he was still gone. He’s been gone all day. Look at him, his clothes are wet, aren’t they?’

‘Yes, Mr Peebles, I’m certain they are. Miss Flees gave Skeezix a shrewd look, seeming to mean that she saw right through him, that Skeezix would have to work a little harder if he wanted to fool someone like her.

‘You’re lying,’ said Helen to Peebles in a tired voice. ‘I saw him asleep myself an hour past, and then again just before supper.’

Now it was Helen’s turn to be squinted at. Miss Flees looked her up and down, as if she was just that second seeing her for the first time, or as if she’d just then really seen her for the traitor she was. ‘And the wet clothes?’ she asked, smiling and nodding at Peebles.

‘I was sleeping with the window open, actually,’ Skeezix put in, not wanting to make Helen lie for him. It was fairly clear by then that Miss Flees hadn’t herself looked into his room. She rarely did. She sat and read dime novels in what she called the parlour, and she told fortunes for a penny.

She used to hold séances. Once Skeezix and Helen had watched through the window and were surprised to see a ghostly apparition appear from the direction of the kitchen in the middle of the spiritualizing. One woman had fainted and another had screamed, the fainting woman thinking it was the ghost of her dead son come back around at the bidding of Miss Flees. It hadn’t been the dead son, though – although the woman had never found that out – it had been Peebles covered in baking flour and wearing a black robe. The fainting woman was the wife of the Mayor, the other was the Mayor’s sister, and the Mayor himself had bitten the end off his cigar and nearly set his trousers on fire with the ash. Peebles had fled through the kitchen door, and it took about a gallon of tea at five cents a cup to restore the party to the extent that they could walk home.

Helen and Skeezix had waited a day before they asked Miss Flees, very casually, why it was that Peebles had bathed in baking flour and what all the screaming had meant. Skeezix had had extra bread that night, and Helen was relieved of washing the dishes, and for two months afterwards they had a better time of it than they had in years – coming and going as they liked, finding a scrap of salt pork in their cabbage soup, laughingly recalling now and again how surprised they were to see Peebles dressed up like that in the robe and all, and what a fine trick Miss Flees had played on the two ladies, who, heaven knew, were too stuffy for their own good in the first place. They could ‘throw the whole thing in their face,’ insisted Skeezix. It would serve them right. But Miss Flees seemed very anxious that such a thing be avoided, and although she shook with the effort of it, she’d even bought Skeezix a pie for dessert one night, and he’d eaten it – sharing a slice with Helen – right down to the last scrap of crust, while Miss Flees stood gaping and sputtering like a bomb about to explode and level the house. Miss Flees hated both of them. So did Peebles.

After supper Skeezix went out through the window again. He’d catch it from Miss Flees in the morning. She’d keep an eye on his room for sure that night. But so what? What would she do to him, put him on half rations? He could live with Dr Jensen, couldn’t he? Except that would mean abandoning Helen to Miss Flees and Peebles, and he couldn’t do that. She was like his sister. He wasn’t half a block up the hill to Willoughby’s farm when Helen caught up with him.

‘Where are we going?’ she asked. But she knew the answer well enough; there was nothing beyond Willoughby’s farm but redwood groves and meadows choked in berry vines and skunk cabbage.

‘Only up to Jack’s.’

‘Then where?’

Skeezix shrugged. He wasn’t certain he wanted a girl along on such a night – not with the storm threatening to break loose again and the sky full of bats and clouds and wind. ‘Just hanging out.’

‘You lie as badly as Peebles. You and Jack are up to something. What is it? I’m going to help.’ She pulled her coat around her more tightly and turned the collar up against the wind, which was blowing almost straight onshore and was heavy with misty sea salt.

Actually, Skeezix was happy enough to have her along. He muttered something about girls out on a night like this, but Helen gave him a look and he shut up about it, grinning at her as if he’d said it just to provoke her, which, of course, was why he had said it. Higher up the hill, the wind blew along in gusts, kicking up newly fallen leaves as if it meant to sail them into the next county. But the leaves were heavy from days of rain, and they fell almost at once back onto the road and lay there dark and wet and glistening with moonlight. Creeks and rills flowed with muddy water. They’d continue to flow straight through until summer, all of them dropping finally into the Eel River, which, any day now if the rain kept up, would overflow its banks and flood the orchards and farmhouses in the lowlands along the coast. The Eel fanned out into little sandy islets and then disappeared into the ocean above Table Bluffs Beach, some miles up the Coast Road from the cove where Skeezix had found the shoe and where the enormous spectacles had washed up.

Wild fuchsia bloomed in the shadows of hemlocks and alders along the road, but the startling purple and pink of the blossoms was washed colourless in the shadow. The mossy forest floor was like a saturated sponge, so Skeezix and Helen kept to the road, counting on the leafy carpet that lay upon it to keep mud off their shoes. All was silent but for the occasional patter of rain flurries and the moaning of wind in the top of the forest, and once, when the wind fell off and there was nothing in the air but the drip, drip, drip of water falling from tree branches, they could hear, distant and muted, the crash of breakers collapsing along the shore of the cove behind and below them. There wouldn’t be another high tide until almost morning. The shoe would be safe at least until then – plenty of time, it seemed to Skeezix, for the three of them to haul it away on a cart.

He didn’t tell Helen about the shoe. She could hear about it when he told Jack. She tried to get it out of him, and that made him happy. Then she quit trying to get it out of him, and that made him happier yet, because he knew she was just pretending to be indifferent. So he shrugged and started talking about whether or not butterflies flew in the rain and, if they did, whether the dust that covered their wings would shed rainwater so they wouldn’t get saturated like wet leaves and end up as a part of the carpet on the roadway. Dr Jensen, he said, once owned a butterfly as big as an albatross that had beautiful aqua-blue wings with silver spots like raindrops in sunshine. Its body, though, was still the body of a bug – and a monstrous bug at that – and you couldn’t stand to look at it, not if you wanted to sleep that night.

The story was a lie and Helen knew it. Dr Jensen had heard of such a creature – almost everyone had. He’d travelled by rail up to Lilyfield where it had been netted by a butterfly collector, a man named Kettering, with whom Dr Jensen had gone to school. Where it had come from neither of them could say, from some distant land, perhaps, on a wind out of the east. Mr Kettering’s cats got in through an open window one night and shredded the creature’s wings until it resembled a tired kite that had hung through the autumn in the branches of a tree. It wasn’t worth much to anyone after that. All that was left of it, really, was the bug part. Even a scientist like Kettering was repelled by such an enormity.

Helen told Skeezix that he was a fool; Dr Jensen had never owned the butterfly and everyone knew it. In fact, most people wondered if the whole story weren’t a lie. There was an awful lot about Dr Jensen that people wondered about, and that was why almost no one, except people who hadn’t any money, went to Dr Jensen when they were sick or hurt. He could set a bone as well as the next doctor, of course, but he’d set it in an office that looked like a museum – an office full of bins of dried tide-pool animals and moths and beetles and the skins of snakes. And he had the jawbone of a skull on his mantel – a skull that he’d fairly clearly dummied up out of plaster of Paris and dirt, for the thing was the size of a barrel hoop smashed in half and had teeth in it like ivory playing cards. There was a certain amount of suspicion in the village that Dr Jensen’s interest in the enormous spectacles was feigned, and some went so far as to suggest that he’d had the glasses built on one of his trips south and had tossed them into the tide pool himself and then arranged to have them found. Why he would have done such a thing they didn’t know. He was a lunatic, some said, and that was reason enough.

Skeezix waved his hand at Helen, who had got to him by talking that way about Dr Jensen. He’d been teasing her by avoiding the subject of the night’s mystery, and now she’d got back at him. The doctor had to have the bins full of odd stuff, Skeezix said, in order to sell it down south to the biological supply houses in San Francisco and Monterey, because there wasn’t enough money in doctoring to make it pay – not on the north coast, there wasn’t. Helen said if he cleared the stuff out of his house maybe he’d get a little bit of business from people who didn’t want to hobnob with salamanders and toads when they were getting their tonsils yanked out, and then Skeezix said she didn’t understand anything at all, and after that he wouldn’t talk. They were at Jack’s by then anyway, so Helen gouged him in the side and slugged him on the arm in order to show him she was just kidding. Of course she understood everything. Peebles wouldn’t have – that was certain. But Helen had the right instincts, as had Jack, and Skeezix knew that, and Helen knew that he knew. She’d proven, though, that she could irritate him as easily as he could irritate her, and so things had ended well.

Jack Portland lived on Willoughby’s farm. No one else lived there except old Willoughby, who had been a friend of Jack’s father – no one else unless you counted the cows and the cats. Skeezix and Helen threw rocks at the shutters high up in the barn loft, and Skeezix called Jack’s name in a sort of shouted whisper. There wasn’t any real reason to be sneaking about like that, since farmer Willoughby would be snoring beside his pint glass by then anyway and wouldn’t care about them even if he weren’t. But the night was dark and windy and full of portent, and Skeezix was anxious that everything be done right.

After a half dozen rocks the shutters opened and Jack looked out. They could see that a candle burned on the table beside him, and the dark cylinder of his telescope formed a long dancing shadow across his face and the open shutter opposite. He had a book in his hand, and when he saw who it was on the meadow below, he waved the book at them and then disappeared back inside – gone after his sweater and jacket, perhaps.

In a moment he stood in the window again, hooking the iron hangers of his rope ladder over the windowsill. The tails of the ladder flopped to the ground, and Jack clambered down like a sailor down rigging. In a moment he was on the meadow. He hauled back on the end of the ladder, gave it a wavy sort of toss, and the hooks hopped off the windowsill. The entire ladder dropped onto the grass. Jack rolled it up and then ran around and tossed it in through the barn door, padlocking the big hasp afterwards. Skeezix liked the idea of Jack’s coming out by the window even though there was a door at hand. And he liked the idea of reading by candlelight. Jack could as easily have used a lantern, of course, but it wouldn’t have been the same. One did things right, thought Skeezix, or one might as well just go to bed. There wasn’t much to be said for common sense – or for anything common, for that matter.

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.

2

THERE 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.

They debated taking shelter in the cavern in the cliff, but that seemed pointless – they were already as wet as they were likely to be that night– and the longer the shoe sat in the rain, the more water it would catch and the heavier it would be. So they slid it heel first over the timbers, all the way across and down onto the beach, where it pushed up a sort of bow wave of sand and lodged there, its sad, seaweedy laces trailing along on either side.

‘We need two more boards,’ Helen announced, and immediately all three of them went off searching, Jack carrying the lantern in such a way as to keep rain out of the shade, playing the feeble light over the dark beach. There were any number of snags of driftwood, none of which would do them any good at all, tangled as they were, with any useful boards trapped beneath stumps and branches and half buried in sand. Then, just when searching any farther began to seem pointless, Skeezix found a sort of graveyard of old railroad ties, tumbled from the ridge above. They dragged two free. With the rain beating into their faces and the surf roaring against the rocky edge of the cove, they hauled them back toward where the shoe lay beyond a veil of falling water.

None of them questioned the foolishness of their mission. Here was a beaten and water-soaked shoe, after all, useless to anyone but a giant. But there were no giants living on the coast, or anywhere else, as far as any of them knew for sure. It was a shoe which, come morning, would still be sitting on the beach–had they left it alone – and so didn’t, perhaps, require their slogging through wet sand and cold rain at past midnight.

There was something wonderful, though, in doing useless work. You could turn it into a sort of art. They’d spent the better part of a day and night once building a fortified sand castle on that very beach. Dr Jensen had promised an eight-foot tide the following morning, and they’d calculated how high to build the castle so as to assure its doom. There was no grandeur in a sand castle that was safe from the tide. They’d built a wall around it of stones carried in buckets from the rocky shingle to the south, and inside they’d dug a waist-deep moat, and then, between the moat and the castle, they’d set a line of stakes driven two feet into the sand and they’d woven kelp strands through the stakes, along with whatever sorts of flotsam looked likely to stop an ounce or two of encroaching seawater.

They’d worked at it until late in the night and then slept above the beach in the cavern. All three had awakened past midnight to work again on the sand castle in the light of the moon, and they were still working – building a city of minarets and domes and trowelled avenues beyond the castle – when the eastern sky had paled with the dawn and the moon had disappeared beyond the watery horizon after lying for a moment like a smoky island on the sea. They had watched from the cavern as the tide swirled up the beach, but they were too tired by then to be anything but silently happy when the rocks and the moat and the wall held up against the first onslaught of waves. More waves had followed, marching up in long straight lines out of the dark ocean, nibbling away at the sand beneath the rocky wall, collapsing the woven sticks in a heap, filling the moat and cascading across the towers and spires and domes and flooding subterranean tunnels. In something under a minute there had been nothing on the beach but a vague mound of wet sand like the back of a turtle and a little fan-shaped tumble of smooth stones and sticks.

They were twenty yards from the shoe when the shriek of a train whistle erupted from the hill above. Skeezix shouted in surprise and dropped the end of the timber he’d been dragging along the sand with both hands. Jack threw his down, too, and with Helen at his heels set out at a hunched run for the cavern. They climbed the sandstone slope, slipping and clutching and hauling themselves into the mouth of the cavern and out of the rain. From there they could just see, misty and pale through the curtain of falling drops, the train trestle where it crossed above the stream eighty feet farther down the beach.

The train tracks were a ruin, and had been for as long as any of them could remember. They were rust-pitted and twisted, and a good many of the ties had long ago fallen prey to termites and to sliding hillsides. But there was something in the night, in the rain and the wind and the tide, in the dark bulk of the giant shoe that sat like a behemoth on the sand, that made the impossible appearance of the train seem half expected.

Years ago there had been a northbound coastal train, the Flying Wizard, from San Francisco to the south and all the way up from subtropical border towns before that. The population of the north coast had dwindled, though, over time. And in the rainy season, water off the coastal mountains crumbled cliff sides and swept train trestles and tracks into the heaving ocean below. The tracks fell into disrepair. The train – strangely – had run anyway during the Solstice twelve years earlier, but it had never been settled whether the tracks had been hastily repaired for that last journey or whether it had been a miracle that brought the train and the Solstice carnival to Rio Dell and Moonvale.

There was another whistle blast and the screech of brakes, and from where Jack crouched in the cavern he could see steam roiling from beneath the cars. The train was slowing. It wound around a curve of track, appearing for the moment that it took to clatter across the trestle, then almost at once disappearing beyond the rain and the redwoods that climbed down the hill toward the sea. One by one the hazy cars lurched past, dark and low and open and freighted with strange, angular machinery.

‘What is it?’ Skeezix whispered, referring not to the train but to the junk heaped in the cars.

Jack shook his head, realizing suddenly that he was shaking with cold too. Wind off the ocean sailed straight into the cavern, swirled round in back of it, then sailed out again. It was drier than it had been on the open beach, but at least there they’d had their minds on something other than the cold and wet. The chill seemed to have come with the train, carried, perhaps, on the steam that whirled away into the misty night. They could hear that the train had stopped, although they could no longer see it, and Jack supposed he could hear the soft chuffing of the waiting engine, even though the wind was blowing in the opposite direction.

‘Carnival stuff,’ Helen whispered.

Skeezix jumped, as if Helen had poked him in the ribs. ‘What?’

‘On the train. That arched framework was a Ferris wheel, and there was one car piled with little cars of some sort. Didn’t you see that?’

‘Yes,’ Jack said, because he had seen it, although he hadn’t any idea what he was looking at. Helen came from down south, from San Francisco, and she would have seen carnivals. But there hadn’t been any such thing on the north coast since the last Solstice, and Jack had been too young to remember it much. What had happened there, though, at the carnival, was something he couldn’t entirely forget, ever –even though there were times when he might have wished to. He’d seen pictures of carnivals in library books, and he knew well enough what a Ferris wheel was. Seeing one in a book, all put together and lit up and with the rest of the carnival laid out below, was a different thing from seeing the dim pieces of one dismantled and howling past in a distant, darkened train.

‘Why’re they stopping at the bottom of the grade, do you suppose?’ asked Skeezix, whispering just loud enough to be heard above the rain. Neither Jack nor Helen answered, since they didn’t know, so Skeezix replied to his own question. ‘Some sort of mechanical trouble, I bet. We could ride down the Coast Road and have a look.’

‘I’m freezing,’ said Helen. ‘If I’m riding anywhere, it’s home to bed. None of us knows anything about that train, and that’s fine with me. It’s got no business stopping here. It’s got no business being