Jack watched for ten more minutes, until the north wind began to ignore the blanket and the dark rain began to fall again, blowing in through the shutters and against the lens of his telescope. It was getting on toward dawn, time to sleep. The carnival was open and doing business, in a limited way; Jack and Skeezix would have a look at it in the morning, if they could slide out without Helen. She’d probably be in the attic painting and reading Mrs Langley’s book anyway, perhaps shooting the breeze with the old dead woman herself. Jack felt once again for the tiny bottle, then, satisfied, drifted away into sleep, dreaming of Helen and Skeezix and Dr Jensen, but mostly of Helen, all of them adrift in a giant’s shoe on a sea so deeply blue that they might as easily have been sailing through the night sky toward shoals of stars.
7
‘IT MIGHT BE HIM.’
‘Changed, though. I caught a glimpse myself, and I wouldn’t have thought it; not just from looking at him.’
‘All of us have. It’s been a few years.’
The voices murmured out of the parlour, carrying into the kitchen but not much farther. They were low and secretive. One belonged to Dr Jensen and the other to Willoughby. Neither could disguise his voice if he tried – not enough to fool anyone –and they weren’t trying here anyway. Jack stood just inside the service porch door, listening. He’d got up early. He couldn’t sleep, not with the mysteries tangling up his thoughts all night. And he’d come inside after a cup of coffee and a hunk of bread and jam. He stood in his shirt sleeves, head cocked, shivering in the morning chill that seeped through the screen door. He’d have shut the kitchen door, but it creaked, and he didn’t, right then, want either of the two in the parlour to know he was there.
‘Twelve years.’ Willoughby paused after saying it, as if studying. ‘Can we know for sure?’
‘No, I don’t suppose we can. We can’t stroll up and ask him, after all, can we? It doesn’t really matter much, I suppose. Too many years gone, if you ask me, for any of us to start stirring up the dust. Let it lie; that’s my advice, but keep it from Jack and the others. Jack especially. It wouldn’t do him a bit of good to know.’
‘And we don’t know,’ said Willoughby almost at once, as if he were anxious to agree with the doctor. There was a silence then. Jack wondered who it was they were talking about. He supposed it was his father. Someone had ‘come back’, that much was certain.
‘Anyway,’ continued the doctor after a moment, ‘I saw it down on the bluffs, near where I found the body in the tide pool. There was something awfully strange about that whole business. And then the kids were telling me last night that they’d seen it in town, near MacWilt’s.’
‘It’s been here too. I took a shot at it yesterday afternoon, but it was too far off. But I’ve got my gun by the door there, loaded. I’m ready for it. I don’t think I could shoot a man, not unless I had to. But I could easy enough shoot –’
There was a shuffle of feet and the scrape of chairs being pushed back. Jack turned and shoved out through the screen door, onto the wooden back porch. He vaulted the railing and leaped up the paving stones set into the grass of the back yard leading down to the river. He expected to hear Willoughby’s voice, shouting after him. The idea of skulking and snooping in the kitchen was bad enough; being caught at it would be mortifying. Not that he’d done anything particularly wrong. But he should have made his presence known. He should have walked into the parlour, announced that he’d overheard them, and asked the two men to explain themselves. Even if they’d declined to, he wouldn’t have any less information that he had now.
No one shouted at him. They hadn’t come out the back. He was stepping along behind the barn when he heard the first shot. Then Dr Jensen shouted. There was the sound of running feet, another shout, and a second shot. Jack ran toward the end of the barn, rounded the far corner, and saw Willoughby standing in the pasture with his rifle to his shoulder. Jack’s loft window stood open above. Dr Jensen’s head thrust through it suddenly. He cried, ‘No! Damn it!’ and then saw Jack standing below him. In the distance, flapping almost tiredly over the tops of the oaks that fringed the edge of the pasture, was a solitary crow, cawing shrilly. In an instant it was gone.
‘I’m certain I hit it,’ said Willoughby, turning toward Jack, thinking for a moment that it was Jensen who stood in the shadows of the barn.
‘Why?’ asked Jack, puzzled.
Willoughby grinned suddenly, as if he’d been caught doing something he oughtn’t to do. ‘Almonds,’ he said. ‘The thing’s been eating my almonds. They’ve stripped half the tree. Greedy things, crows.’
Jack nodded. Here was his opportunity to ask a question or two. Dr Jensen joined them, feigning a look of mild surprise to see Jack there, but unable to hide the concern that tugged at the corners of his mouth and eyes. ‘Well,’ he said, running his hand backward through his hair. ‘I can’t hang around here all morning helping you bag crows. There’s too many of them anyway to ever get the job done right. Take it from me. You can kill two dozen crows this morning, and the horizon will be black with them by this afternoon. It’s a scarecrow you want, Willoughby, or a rubber snake wound into the branches. It puts the fear into them, a snake does. I’m on my way now.’ He pulled out his watch and scrutinized it, reminding Jack overmuch of Mac Wilt checking his pocket watch and studying the hills through his telescope.
‘The shoe’s launched, Jack,’ continued the doctor. ‘I hauled it down this morning early. Tide goes in an hour, so I’d better run. I’ll see you, I suppose, in a day or two.’
‘Come back,’ Jack said.
Dr Jensen nodded. ‘I have to. I’ve got promises to keep. But there’s a couple things I’d like to know, a couple things I’d like to see, and I aim to try. I can’t wait another twelve years.’ With that he strode away toward his wagon and left Willoughby and Jack standing on the wet grass.
It hadn’t been his father that the two men were talking about. Jack knew that suddenly, and as soon as he did he leaped away toward the barn door, took the stairs to the loft three at a time, and shoved his hand in under the mattress. His book and candle and cup had been knocked off the nightstand and onto the floor. The wind through the open shutter might have blown them off, but Jack didn’t think so. His bottle was still there. He pulled the shutter closed, retrieved and lit the candle, and hauled out the bottle, twisting of the lid. The barn was filled at once with the odour of the bay at low tide, mingled with the wildflower smell of a windy spring meadow. Not a drop had been stolen. He looked around with an eye toward a safer hiding place, but there were none. He could hide it in the woods, of course, but there was no telling who or what might be watching him if he went outside. He screwed the lid on tight, slipped the bottle into his pocket, grabbed his coat, and set out for the orphanage.
They watched Dr Jensen from the cavern in the bluffs. His sailboat shoe rounded the headland, appearing and disappearing beyond rolling seas. He seemed to be making almost no headway, sailing against the current, blown toward shore by the winds. The little boat rose atop a feathery crest, then sank again in the trough; even the tip of the mast dipped out of sight for a time. Then it appeared again, rolling across the next swell before it was gone.
They watched for over an hour, eating bread from the bakery and drinking coffee. The shoe tacked back and forth still, a half mile out. It made almost no headway. By nightfall Dr Jensen wouldn’t have sailed beyond the mouth of the Eel. He’d spend the night hobnobbing with floating skeletons. It occurred to Jack that if you could so easily sail there – to wherever it was that Dr Jensen was bound – half the village would have been on the ocean days ago. The doctor assumed, quite likely, that it was the particular sort of boat you used that made the difference, just like Mac Wilt and his telescope lens. And there was probably truth to the idea, but apparently not enough truth to overcome the wind and tide.
Jack and Helen and Skeezix wandered up to the Coast Road when the coffee and bread were gone. Dr Jensen would have to take care of hi
mself The carnival was alive with villagers. It seemed like half of Rio Dell was there, along with no end of people from Moonvale and Scotia. There was fresh paint on the plywood sides of the fun houses and on the iron framework of the thrill rides, or at least there was a newness and freshness to it that Jack hadn’t been able to see when the debris of the carnival had lain yesterday in the wet meadow grass. The wooden arch over the road was papered with posters, a sort of kaleidoscope of carnival images, almost sinister in their profusion.
The bicycle-riding clowns and the top-hatted skeletons grinned out once again from where they were painted. There was the smell of fresh sawdust in the air, of engine oil and burning cedar logs and coal, of greasepaint and barbecued duck. Booths sold beer and skewered meats and hot oranges, and it seemed uncannily like the carnival was enormous, that it stretched away up and down the coast and across the meadows toward the distant smoky village. Here was a paint and plywood structure of two-dimensional domes with the words MOORISH TEMPLE painted over a curtained doorway; there was a covered wagon bearing unspecified CURIOUS FREAKS. Lean-tos and tents dotted the bluffs, and in among the people filing in and out of them, paying ten cents to see a creature half fish and half man or a bird with the head of a pig, were Miss Flees and the Mayor’s wife, MacWilt’s nephews, the fisherman who’d had ill luck on the pier the previous day, and even old MacWilt himself, his eyes bandaged, tapping his way into the heart of the carnival with a stick.
No end of people shouldered their way through milling crowds, and on the otherwise silent ocean air Jack could hear the flap of canvas and the creak of iron rubbing against iron and the thunder of fire in the great oven, all of it against the hum and roar of what might have been thousands of laughing and chatting voices.
Calliope music underscored the rest, steamy and wild and seeming to pipe out in time to the turnings and cavortings of the carnival rides, each of which flew and swung and rotated in symphony with all the rest. Skeezix tried his hand at knocking down iron milk bottles with a baseball, but he had no luck. Helen won a rubber pig with a look of surprised grief on its face by pitching three dimes onto a plate. Jack kept his money, but not because he was cheap. He had his eye on the Ferris wheel. He couldn’t seem to pay attention to anything else. Lantz, of course, no longer rode it – if it had been Lantz. It might as easily have been someone else – testing it, perhaps. It certainly ran well enough now. The rust and grime that had coated it the previous day had been scrubbed away. It was painted gaudy colours, and the little swings jerked up and around, their occupants pointing away down the coast, catching a glimpse, perhaps, of church steeples in Moonvale or of the tower of the grange building down the coast in Ferndale.
It seemed to be twilight, as if it were six in the evening rather than an hour before noon. Jack glimpsed stars in the dim purple sky, although they seemed to flicker and vanish and might easily have been the tiny lamps strung overhead from one end of the carnival to the other, which were still lit, despite its being midday. There were a half score of booths occupied by fortunetellers and by people who claimed to speak to the dead, and from one or two came the plaintive, wheedling voices of the dead themselves, demanding attention, asking after unfinished business, complaining about the sorry accommodations of the hereafter.
Peebles strode out from within a tent, staring at his hand and nearly running into Skeezix, who leaped clear as if to avoid touching a poisonous reptile. Neither Jack nor Helen nor Skeezix said anything. The recent events in the alley and in Miss Flees’s kitchen seemed to have made small talk impossible. Speaking turned out to be unnecessary, though. Peebles sneered at the three of them, as if he’d sooner talk to bugs, and then he hurried away toward the Moorish Temple, where the alligator child was advertised. Jack saw, as Peebles hurried away, that his severed finger was partly restored, like the arm of a starfish, and that Peebles peered at it two or three times before he disappeared through the door of the temple.
Jack stepped across to the booth that Peebles had hurried out of moments earlier. He pulled back the canvas door and looked in, seeing in the light of an oil lamp a man bent over a makeshift desk, reading a book with his face a half inch above the page, as if he were straining to see it at all. It took a moment for Jack to realise that it was Dr Brown sitting there, but the lank hair and the bullet scar across his cheek gave him away when he looked up. He grimaced first, then grinned, and asked, ‘Do you want something?’ in a voice that suggested the man’s certainty that Jack indeed wanted something, whatever it might be.
He seemed to have fleshed out considerably since Jack had seen him on the bluffs the day before. He wasn’t half so -what? –transparent, maybe, and not half so shrivelled. He was still pale, as if lit with the silver reflected light of the moon rather than with yellow lantern light, and his face was drawn and haggard with lines that expressed unspeakable emotions. He wore his black topcoat and a black cravat, and his hair hung black and oily about his collar and stooped shoulders, and even as he sat placidly smiling, his hunched shadow darkening the canvas behind him, it seemed to Jack as if he might easily be a great feathery crow.
There was a strange litter of debris behind and around him: packing crates heaped with yellowing carnival posters, kegs of iron gears and flywheels and bolts, and toppled stacks of books, all of them old and half ruined, with pages thrust out and covers soiled and torn. A smell of iron filings and gear oil mingled with the musty smell of old damp books and the sawdust that covered the weedy dirt floor to the depth of an inch.
Jack shook his head in answer to the man’s question. He was certain, suddenly, that he was confronting Algernon Harbin, the man his father had shot to death twelve years earlier. There couldn’t be much doubt, all in all, not when you added up everything Dr Jensen and Willoughby had said. And the bullet scar. It made Jack almost glad to see it. By what unholy means the man had contrived to return from the sea and become the proprietor of the Solstice carnival, it was impossible to say, and it didn’t make much difference anyway. Jack knew at once that he didn’t want to kill the man. He didn’t want to kill anyone. He just wanted to be rid of him, that and know what it was the man had come back for.
Jack thought suddenly of the bottle in his pocket, but stopped himself from patting it with his hand. The doctor must have read his fear in his eyes, though, for he smiled at Jack and nodded his head, as if to say, I know. I’ll take it when I please.
Jack backed out into the sunlight. Skeezix and Helen had gone on. He glanced behind him at the Moorish Temple, from which issued the sound of flutes being played to the accompaniment of wailing, and there was Peebles, watching him from behind the door, darting back into the darkness when Jack caught sight of him.
He found his two friends in the shadow of the Ferris wheel. He told them what it was he’d figured out about the supposed Dr Brown of World Renown. Helen said it didn’t surprise her a bit. The only thing that surprised her was that it had taken Jack so long to see it. Skeezix said he didn’t care who Dr Brown or anyone else was, not until they cared about him. Jack’s problem, said Skeezix, was to think that he was involved in some great plot. Which was all vanity, quite likely. There weren’t any plots, as far as Skeezix could see; that would make things too easy, you could guess everything out. ‘My advice,’ said Skeezix, nodding shrewdly at Jack, ‘is to open that bottle of liquor you’ve been hiding and give each of us a taste.’
Jack shook his head. The idea seemed too risky to him, for reasons he couldn’t entirely put his finger on. The bottle certainly wouldn’t contain poison, after all, else why would he have been given it in the first place? And why would Dr Brown, or whatever his name was, have been skulking around trying to steal it? And is that entirely why it was that Jack had brought the bottle with him, to prevent its being stolen? He could as easily have hidden it in the woods. It would have been safer there than in his pocket, despite what he’d told himself that morning. He’d brought it because somewhere in his mind was the idea of doing exactly what Skeezix suggested
they do.
He looked around, startled all of a sudden to find himself surrounded by milling people. ‘I don’t know ...’ he said to Skeezix, and Helen nodded her head, as if to say that she didn’t know either. Skeezix, in reply, hastened across to a man selling cider, bought a cup, and stepped back across, grinning at Jack.
‘Nothing ventured ...’ he said, nodding at the cup.
‘Don’t,’ Helen said. ‘There’s trouble in this. Dr Jensen would tell you to pour it down the drain.’
‘Dr Jensen would drink the whole bottle and set sail in a shoe,’ said Skeezix. ‘We’re not asking you to be in on this. We’ll scout it out first, and if it’s safe we’ll tell you.’ Skeezix smiled benignly at her and patted her on the shoulder in a fatherly way. Helen immediately slugged him in the arm and said he was an idiot. She wasn’t going, no matter what he said to her. Skeezix insisted that he didn’t want her to go. She was like a little sister to him, he said, and must be kept from harm. There were some pony rides, he said, that might interest her, and then he gave her a dime and two nickels, winked, and nodded once again at Jack and the cup. Helen dropped the three coins into the cider and insisted that she was going. She wasn’t going to drink any of Jack’s elixir; she was going along sober, to act as a sort of sea anchor when Jack and Skeezix lost their minds.
Jack unstopped the bottle and dribbled a bit into the cider, looking around him guiltily as he did so. There was no sign of Peebles or of Dr Brown. Skeezix wasn’t happy with the small quantity of elixir, though it had stained the brown cider a seaweed green, but Jack wouldn’t add another drop. Better too little than too much, it seemed to him. And in truth, he didn’t want to waste it. He had no idea what it was or how he was intended to use it, or even if anyone intended anything at all. Jack and Skeezix shared the cider between them.
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