Land of Dreams

by James P. Blaylock

  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 an
d 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 here. If we’re lucky, it will be gone before we’ve reached the Coast Road, let alone driven around to the bluffs, which is where it is now, from the sound of it.’

  After that, both she and Jack stepped out into the rain and skidded down the wet scree to the beach, where they picked up the railroad ties and lugged them along to the shoe. Jack watched Helen carry the timber across her shoulder, balancing it there like it was nothing. He admired that. She was beautiful with her dark, wet hair and musty wool sweater. She saw him watching her, and he looked away in embarrassment, dropping his timber onto the beach and then grappling it back onto his shoulder, thankful that the rainy night would mask the colour in his face.

  Skeezix and Jack pulled and pushed and slid the shoe across the top of one pair of parallel timbers and onto the next, then stopped while Helen dragged the two abandoned timbers around and flopped them onto the sand, and so on until, cold and weary, they found themselves at the beach road, where the cart stood in the rain, the horse asleep. Jack shoved a railroad tie in front of the rear wheels just in case. Then the three of them lifted the toe of the shoe onto the back of the wagon. Helen and Skeezix held it firm while Jack ran around to the heel and put his shoulder against it to make sure it didn’t slide back off onto the road. His two friends joined him then, and together they lifted the shoe and pushed it entirely up onto the rain-slick cart until it bumped against the slats in front. The horse awoke with a whinny, shaking her head to clear her eyes. They tied the shoe to the side rails with the heavy, water-soaked laces, letting half the heel overhang the rear of the wagon.

  By quarter past two they were rattling Dr Jensen’s door knocker, and ten minutes later they stood shivering by his fire, watching Mrs Jensen light the oven and haul a pie out of the pantry. The fire hadn’t, thank goodness, burned down yet, since the doctor had gone to bed late, and the coals were so hot that it had taken no time at all to get the fire banked and roaring in the grate.

  They had hauled the shoe into the doctor’s carriage house, where there sat a number of other treasures with which it shared a strange affinity: a round, convex sheet of cracked glass, like the crystal of an impossible watch; a brass belt buckle the size of a casement window; and a cuff link that might easily have been a silver platter. The shoe was the best of the lot, though, for while the crystal and the belt buckle and the cuff link might have been tricked up by an enterprising craftsman intent on playing a prank on someone, the shoe hadn’t been. It had clearly been worn. It was down-at-heel to the point at which the sole tacks showed through, and it was scuffed and ragged about the toe, and there was a bulge in the side, as if it had been too small for the giant who had worn it and the side of his foot had pressed against it and stretched the leather out of shape.

  Dr Jensen was speechless with joy. It seemed to prove something to him, as did the unlikely appearance of the train, which troubled him too. But what it proved and how it troubled him he couldn’t entirely put into words. That didn’t matter to Skeezix, who didn’t much care for words right then anyway, and who had one eye on the lamplit kitchen window the entire time. But it bothered Jack.

  Something was happening, and it involved him. He was sure of it. Something had come with the rain. The air had shifted, it seemed, like a season turning. He could almost smell it on the breeze through the loft window in the morning. The ocean was restless. The wind blew day and night. The cattle were moody and suspicious, and they looked around when they grazed as if they heard someone approaching across the open fields, even though nothing could be seen but the long grass rippling in the wind or the shadow of a passing cloud.

  Two days earlier Jack had awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of a cow lowing in the barn below, and he’d thrown open the window thinking that someone was prowling around out in the darkness. He’d seen nothing but night shadows and the moonlit meadow with the forest and hills rising beyond. Low on the horizon, though, out beyond Moonvale, the sky had been alive with a flickering of lights like an electric storm – except that the lights were faintly coloured, blue and azure and green, and there was no thunder, not even distant thunder, only a silence hanging in the air like a storm about to break. Rain began to fall then. It seemed to wash the sky clean as if it were a watercolour painting.

  Later that night he’d heard the sound of a voice. He’d awakened to find no one at all nearby, only a mouse scuttling away across roof joists. But it stopped some distance out onto the span to look back at him, standing oddly on its hind legs, regarding him curiously. Then the following morning he’d made an odd discovery: his bathwater, when he pulled the plug, dumped straightaway down the drain, over the edge and gone, like in an old drawing of ocean water falling off the edge of the flat earth. It ought to have swirled around, creating a little vortex, but it didn’t. Th
e Solstice had that sort of effect; it altered things, sometimes for a couple of weeks, sometimes for ever. He’d forgotten about it, though. There were cows to milk and hay to be forked, and he was off that afternoon with Helen and Skeezix to take food and clothes to Lantz, a scatterbrained friend of theirs who lived alone in a shack on the meadow above the sea.

  Lantz might have lived at Miss Flees’s, had he wanted to. The village would pay for it. But he liked solitude better. He kept a menagerie of stuffed animals, too, bug-eaten and falling to ruin, which he talked to in low voices and which he’d got when Riley’s taxidermy shut down for want of business. Lantz looked just a little bit like one of his animals–tall and stooped and ragged, like the stuffing was coming out of him – and he walked in a loose, disjointed sort of way that would have made Miss Flees shout to see it. As far as conversation went, he accomplished more with his stuffed creatures, probably, than he did with anyone who spoke out loud.

  Although he might have stayed at Miss Flees’s, he wasn’t exactly an orphan, or at least no one was certain that he was an orphan. Some said that he was the son of MacWilt, the taverner, and a hunchbacked gypsy woman who had kept birds in the attic rooms above the tavern. Years earlier you could hear her singing to the canaries on warm summer evenings, high trilling songs that sounded eastern, somehow, and ancient, like they were being sung in the tongues of the birds themselves. It had been discovered one day that a boy lived there among the birds, a mute, it was thought, although later it turned out that Lantz had simply never been taught to speak any language other than the language of the canaries. MacWilt insisted that the child was a foundling whom he’d given to the gypsy woman, along with a certain monthly sum, just out of the kindness of his heart. This last had become a sort of joke for days, people insisting that the story must be a lie, since MacWilt was widely known to lack such an article of anatomy.