Land of Dreams

by James P. Blaylock

  The attic of Miss Flees’s orphanage was lit largely through a half dozen gable windows. On a sunny day the sprawling room was a confusion of shadow and light, and on a dark day it was mostly shadow. Helen had found a pair of candelabra in among the lumber of stored furniture that heaped the walls and floor, so even on the most overcast of days she could paint by candlelight. At night she didn’t go into the attic. Neither did Skeezix.

  There were a few clues that Peebles inhabited the attic at night, or at least crept up there on occasion. Miss Flees certainly didn’t. There was a ghost in the attic. Miss Flees, in years past, had played at spiritualism in order to swindle people, but she never much believed in her own antics. She never much believed in anything. Very recently, with the coming of the Solstice, she’d begun to develop a sort of unhealthy curiosity in the occult, looking to use magic to accomplish some vague and nebulous goal. The ghost in the attic terrified her, though, and she resented it for that. She could hear it muttering, sometimes, through the ceiling vents. Helen heard it too. She called the ghost Mrs Langley, which was the name of the woman who had owned the house before she’d died and it had been given by the village to Miss Flees for use as an orphanage. The furniture in the attic had belonged to Mrs Langley too, but it hadn’t been used in nearly twenty years and was covered with dust and cobwebs. Miss Flees could have used it, but she didn’t care about it. She preferred an empty house and was easily confused by clutter. Also, she half supposed the furniture was haunted. It had sat so long in the attic, after all.

  Helen didn’t get along at all badly with Mrs Langley. Jack had heard her talk to the ghost on more than one occasion, although he hadn’t heard the ghost say anything back. The ghost played occasional pranks on Helen – like locking the trapdoor from the inside so Helen couldn’t get in. That had happened twice. Skeezix had had to climb a pruning ladder and shove himself in through the only casement window in the attic gables that would open, and he wouldn’t do it at all until Helen promised to buy him pies and ice cream and root beer. Even then he hesitated. Helen told him to hold the ladder and let her climb in at the window, if he was afraid to do it, but Skeezix wouldn’t hear of that. This wasn’t the sort of thing, he’d insisted, that a girl should undertake. When he was inside, he’d turned to wave back down at Helen, to show her, perhaps, how successful he’d been, and Helen had seen a face hovering above and behind him, wavering ghostly pale against the darkness of the attic. Skeezix hadn’t seen it, thank heaven, or he’d have gone head first back down the pruning ladder. He’d heard something, though – faint tittering laughter from the hundred corners of the room like the scurrying of mice. He hadn’t visited the attic again for months.

  Helen had found the crusts of a sandwich on a windowsill once, and shortly thereafter an origami paper ball, painted over with symbols and containing a lock of human hair tied with a tiny bit of copper wire. It gave Helen ‘mites’, or so she said to Jack and Skeezix. She had knocked both the crusts and the paper ball out of the window onto the weedy lawn below, and later that afternoon she watched Peebles find the ball there on the lawn. He’d been furious, and he’d scowled up at the window, surprised to see her looking back down at him. She’d waved and grinned, just to infuriate him, but she hadn’t been half so complacent about the business as she forced herself to appear.

  Not having grown up in the orphanage, Jack wasn’t as familiar with the attic or with the stories attached to it as were Helen and Skeezix. It seemed to him to be a cosy enough room, despite its size. Perhaps it was the quantity of wood that did it: the rough-hewn rafters, the rain-stained shingles showing through the sheathing, the stud walls clothed with unpainted backs of clapboard panelling. There were a hundred rich tones in the wood, heightened by Helen’s candles. Gables jutted off here and there with their respective windows, so that light shone in and was almost immediately interrupted by a bit of wall or the dip of a roof valley, and the floor was crosshatched with shadow and light.

  There were books, too, shoved into bookcases back in the piled furniture. They couldn’t pull the furniture aside to get at the books, because Miss Flees would hear them and cause trouble. Once she’d threatened to lock Helen and Skeezix in, had accused them of intending to steal Mrs Langley’s goods, I which were now, of course, Miss Flees’s goods. She threatened less, now that Helen and Skeezix had witnessed

  the business involving the Mayor’s wife, and was likely to do nothing at all about their being in the attic unless they made an issue of it by banging around and making a lot of noise. Miss Flees, in fact, was a sort of pudding, who wanted nothing more than to be left alone to read cheap novels and talk complainingly to herself. She demanded only that she not be crossed. Her pronouncements, then, were worth very little, as Helen and Skeezix had realised long ago. They could i sneak around and do what they pleased, as long as they didn’t confront Miss Flees with their shenanigans.

  Then there was Mrs Langley to think about. The books, after all, were hers. She hadn’t given them up altogether yet. Helen wouldn’t risk upsetting her. She liked her attic studio too much and did what she could to humour the old dead woman. But Jack couldn’t get the idea of the books out of his head. Now, with rain clouds swirling in from the east and darkening the sky, and the attic lit by the glow of dozens of candles, it seemed to him a perfect time to have a look at them. They might, of course, be nothing: old textbooks or impossible-to-read romances or technical books. On the other hand they might be something more.

  By lying on his stomach and peering beneath the apron of a low table and between a forest of chair legs, he could see a row of dark book spines stacked on the bottom shelf of an otherwise hidden case. Helen and Skeezix held candles, and Jack pulled himself under the table upside down. He slithered around half sideways so that he could get his feet in after him. The beaded frill of a dusty tablecloth dragged across the side of his face and into his eyes. He hauled himself past it, peering up at the distant vaulted ceiling, past towering furniture draped in yellowed bed sheets, most of which had sagged and slid and pulled themselves off over the years.

  ‘Give me a candle,’ he whispered.

  ‘You’ll set the place on fire,’ said Helen, grimacing at him past the table legs.

  ‘I won’t. I want to be able to read these book titles. Just give me a little piece.’

  Helen shoved herself partly in under the table and reached a lit candle along the floor to him. Jack took it, then crept forward as far as he could, climbing in among the chairs. He held the candle on its side and dripped wax onto the pine floor, then settled the candle into the hardening pool. He pushed himself past a tall carved sideboard and in among a maze of chair legs stacked against a wardrobe that still smelled of aromatic cedar.

  He could see Skeezix and Helen’s faces, dark outlines against the candle glow behind him, and he was clutched with the idea that he’d at any moment see Mrs Langley’s face there too, hovering pale in the air. Suddenly he wasn’t at all happy to be crawling around amid that odd furniture. The smell of dust, of decaying bed sheets and musty wood, and the strange odour of camphor and cedar swirled around in the attic air and made it seem as if he were creeping through deep woods at night.

  He plucked his candle up and set it again six feet farther on, where it cast a glow on the books. Wafering himself against the back of a massive wardrobe, he shoved his head and arm in between the legs of a stuffed chair, the coiled springs combing his hair, cotton fluff raining down around him. He stretched out his arm and reached for the bookcase. He could just brush it with his fingers. He jammed himself farther in, got a finger on the top of a tall book and pulled it out, then dragged it back into the candlelight.

  Corridors through the stacked and heaped furniture seemed to run away in every direction, like tunnels through a goblin cave, all of them disappearing into shadow. Rain began to patter on the roof above him, and then to pound down, and in moments the gutters were gurgling and rattling with running water. He jerked out from beneath the chair, snu
ffing his candle with his elbow, and found himself plunged into darkness. The lights of Helen’s candelabra shone away off behind him like firelight through a forest, and he heard, as if from somewhere deep inside his ears, a curious commingling of sounds: the singing of birds and the tooting of the calliope and the soft whispering of voices trying to tell him something, though he couldn’t at all make out what it was.

  He jerked around, his candle spinning away across the floor and out of sight. The other books, suddenly, didn’t interest him. Nothing interested him but getting out. He pushed the book along in front of him, sliding and pulling, very nearly toppling chairs. He grabbed the dangling corner of a draped sheet, tugged to see if it was anchored, then, pulling on it, towed himself past the out-thrust legs of a smoking table. The sheet jerked loose with a sudden pull and slid off the table it had covered, dropping like a dusty shroud onto his face.

  Jack shouted, tearing at the sheet, imagining for a moment that it was the ghost of Mrs Langley, come for him at last. He felt hands on his shoes, and he kicked at them, barking his shins against a chair leg. Then he felt himself being dragged, and he rolled onto his back, clutching the book, his head bumping out from under the sheet and along the floor. He raised his face, cracked his forehead on something, and flattened himself out once again, finding himself abruptly in the candlelight and Skeezix holding his ankles.

  ‘ Will you shut up?’ Helen said to him, pulling the book out of his hands. ‘Is this all? One book? What was all that banging and snuffling about? Where’s my candle?’

  ‘I lost it,’ Jack said, ignoring the rest of her questions.

  ‘I need that candle. Candles aren’t cheap. Go back in and get it. And pull out a couple more books as long as you’re there; this one looks pretty good.’ She stared at the cover, then stepped across toward the window and set the book on a table.

  Jack stood up and brushed himself off, ignoring Helen’s suggestion. Skeezix strolled away toward a shadowy gable and peered down a floor vent through which there glowed the light of a gas lamp from a room below: Miss Flees’s kitchen. Jack’s curiosity about the books had diminished more than a bit. He smoothed down his hair and tucked his shirt in, rumpled as he was from creeping around beneath the furniture. His hand shook mutinously, so he shoved it into his pocket, then turned to have a look out the window toward the street and to catch his breath.

  Rain beat through the trees along the kerb. The sky, in the last half hour, had darkened from end to end, and only on the very horizon, out over the ocean, was there any sunlight. It was almost evening, the sun setting over the grey Pacific. In the thickening rain the west was nothing but a haze of raindrops laced with dying orange. He could see beyond the rooftops of the houses across the street, all of them running with rainwater, which was already pooling up on saturated lawns. There was the taxidermist’s shop, way down toward the harbour, and beyond it, mostly hidden, was the pier, empty now even of fishermen.

  Mac Wilt’s tavern was still closed up; Jack could see the tiny sign dangling from a nail in the door. It was possible that MacWilt was out on the bluffs meddling with the carnival, which had picked a peculiarly bad week to set up – if it had picked the week at all. The carnival, partly because of MacWilt’s being connected with it, had become strangely ominous. And Dr Jensen’s talk of waterfront warehouses hadn’t done anything to lessen the feeling. It attracted Jack a little, adding weight to his suspicions that something was happening, that the Solstice was more than simply harvest ceremonies and holidays.

  MacWilt wasn’t on the bluffs. He was atop the roof of the tavern. As Jack watched, he climbed out through a door in the flat roof, hunching into the rain and dragging an empty whisky keg. There was an open-walled lean-to shed on the roof, under which was a heap of stuff covered with a tarpaulin. He hauled the keg under that roof, in out of the rain, then went down the open hatch and emerged again moments later, this time carrying the giant glasses with their painted-out lenses. He hurried them through the falling drops as if anxious to keep them dry and set them alongside the keg. He paused under the roof to light his pipe. After wiping rainwater out of his face with his shirt sleeve, he yanked the tarpaulin off the jumble of debris. Beneath it was a sort of trestle of scabbed-together boards with tilted two-by-four legs. The two behind were shorter than the two in front, so that the whole construction pointed away at the sky like the mount for an enormous telescope.

  Jack gestured Skeezix over to the window and nodded at MacWilt’s antics. The tavern keeper had hoisted his keg into another keg, slightly larger, and was banging away at the end of the smaller inside keg with a hammer, breaking it to flinders. He yanked off the end hoop, and the staves fell outward like the petals of a flower but were caught by the larger keg. He worked one of the lenses out of the giant glasses and fitted it into the now-empty groove in the loosened staves, shoved the hoop back down over them while holding the lens awkwardly with one hand, and knocked the hoop tight. Then he turned the keg upside down and repeated the procedure on the other end.

  MacWilt knew something of the putting together of kegs; Jack could sec that. He found himself vaguely surprised that a man as thoroughly rotten as MacWilt could do anything at all beyond lie and cheat, but that vague surprise turned into a more solid sort of surprise when the tavern keeper hoisted the whisky keg out of the larger barrel and onto the wooden contrivance and then blocked up the rear legs so as to lower the angle at which it pointed at the sky. He tied the keg to the boards with a length of rope, blocked the legs some more, and shoved his nose against the end. What he saw, Jack guessed, was Moonvale, or rather the line of misty hills that hid it, and which were already dim with evening.

  Those hills were blue-black against the sky, and stars shone right above the horizon as they had earlier that morning. It didn’t seem to be a night sky, though; it seemed a morning sky above the hills – grey and pink with dawn light, even though it was five o’clock in the evening and even though when the sun did rise it came up 90 degrees around the compass to the east, above the coastal mountains.

  ‘Will you look at that,’ mused Skeezix, pointing at the tavern, and although he whispered it, his tone was such that Helen stood up from her book and muscled in between her two friends to have a look.

  ‘A telescope,’ said Jack, half to himself and half to Helen. MacWilt had built a telescope out of a whisky keg and a giant’s pair of glasses. With a rain-soaked rag he began swabbing the paint off the lenses. He went about the business methodically, stopping twice to consult his pocket watch and once to refill his pipe. Then he picked up the brass frames of the glasses and shoved them into the empty barrel, which he rolled away to the edge of the lean-to as if he were clearing the decks and getting down to some really serious work. By the time he was finished the sun hung just above the sea and beneath roiling clouds, threatening to be swallowed on the instant by one or the other. At the same time, impossibly, there seemed to be a sun rising above the Moonvale Hills.

  Jack was struck with the notion of sprinting for home. He suddenly wanted his own telescope. MacWilt was setting up to look at something, and Jack wanted to know what it was. But even if he ran all the way, it would take him fifteen minutes in the mud and rain. The sun would set without him. He’d be cheated of discovering Mac Wilt’s secret and would accomplish nothing. And besides, it was moderately possible that the lenses of a commonplace telescope like his own wouldn’t have been ground for work like this. Even if he beat the sun home, he’d probably see nothing from his loft window but a commonplace evening sky, and Helen and Skeezix would have had all the fun of watching MacWilt.

  The tavern keeper threw down his rag and set his pipe on the hood of a vent protruding through the roof. Shading his eyes from the waning light, he peered into the end of his keg telescope. He kicked out two of the shims under the rear legs and peered again, hauling the whole contrivance a half inch to the right as if to get exactly the right angle. He pulled out his pocket watch, squinted at it for a long moment, looked ab
out him at the rain as if wondering whether it was lightening, then squinted at the watch again. His head nodded with the ticking seconds.

  Toward Moonvale, beyond the clouds that veiled the heavens, stretched a streak of deep blue, a pastel slash of sky that lay upon the hills like a pool of sunlit water. The glowing orange arc of the sun, just a slice of it, shone in the blue, as if it had gone down in the ocean minutes earlier, then run off behind the hills to rise once again, forgoing its journey around the earth.

  Above the hills the sky was all mist and sunlight, and stars showing weirdly above the sunlight like fireflies, all of it shivering through the rain, wavering like air above hot pavement. It seemed as if it were an image projected against the sky and would at any moment dissolve into particles and fall with the rain onto the grassy hillsides. Shadows deepened against the blue, lit golden around the edges in the light of the peculiar sun. The shadows formed the vague outlines of buildings, of a city, perhaps, as if somehow the church spires and bell towers of Moonvale were reflected against the sky. Jack had the curious feeling that it wasn’t Moonvale, though; it was the shadow of Rio Dell itself reflected there, rendered enormous by the oblique angle of strange sunlight. The rain slackened. Above it, distant and muted, sounded what might have been the chuffing of a great steam engine, a train, perhaps, rolling in over the hills toward the distant smoky city, the puffs of cloud on the horizon having been blown from its enormous stack.