‘Not Helen,’ said Jack. ‘And not Dr Jensen. He was done in when we left.’
Whoever it was drew closer. They’d lose sight of him in a moment if he kept on along the woods, and he’d come out just on the other side of the hill adjacent to theirs, where they couldn’t see him. No doubt he was harmless – someone out strolling, taking advantage of the few hours of sunshine. Jack told himself so. Somehow the whole business of the Solstice was getting to him. He was seeing things when there wasn’t anything to see. He was suspicious, suddenly, of everything. Skeezix was too. Jack could see it on his face.
‘Let’s go,’ said Jack, standing up. ‘We’re doing nothing out here but spooking ourselves.’
Skeezix shook his head and held the button aloft. ‘We found this. Imagine what else we might find when we get back up into the hills. Maybe it’s the curious Dr Brown.’ He nodded toward the woods, where, for the moment, nothing at all could be seen except the shadowy trees.
Jack shivered. ‘Maybe,’ he said, recalling the look on the carnival owner’s face when he’d run his finger around the cider cup and tasted the result. Then he remembered Lantz, white and dead as the stones of the stream bed. ‘I say we head west. We can hit the Coast Road where it winds inland beyond Table Bluffs Beach. There’s always someone on the road. We can catch a ride into town on a wagon.’
‘I mean to see where this stream comes from,’ said Skeezix. ‘I’ll go alone if you don’t want to. It won’t be much farther, one way or another. We could hike across the hills to Moonvale before dark, if we had to, and spend the night there. I’ve got enough money for dinner.’
Jack wasn’t fond of the idea. But then he couldn’t leave Skeezix out in the hills alone either, especially not with someone abroad in the woods like that. ‘Let’s get at it, then. I won’t go as far as Moonvale, though, even if the stream does lead us in that direction.’
They set out again, scrambling through the scree along the edge of the hill and down onto the stream bed. It wound along through the little valleys separating the hills, now widening, now narrowing, now disappearing beneath the grass only to reappear a hundred feet farther up where the soil was sandy enough to make the grasses sparse. It would have been more to the point for them to climb a hill again and determine the general direction of the stream, and then head there straightaway, instead of following around every loop and bend.
Skeezix wasn’t satisfied with that though. If they’d found the giant button, he said, they’d find something else – maybe something that would lead them to conclusions. The sun fell in the sky, and the twilight on the horizon spread down toward them. Jack wondered if in Moonvale it was already evening, perhaps had been all day, or whether the odd twilight shadowed their horizon too, and, if so, how far north and east a person would have to travel to catch up with it. Maybe you couldn’t get there merely by travelling, by chasing it.
The afternoon grew almost hot back in among the hills. Flies buzzed around Jack’s ears. The silence was complete. A cutaway hill loomed up on their right, angling out over the stream bed as if in the distant past the stream had undercut it, and now a little root-tangled triangle of hillside defied gravity by hovering there, shadowing the white sand and stones.
They heard the scrunch of the stick before they saw it, both of them standing at the edge of the stream bed where it wrapped around the hill. There was the sound of the stick shoving into the sand and gravel. Then the tip of it thrust into view, followed by MacWilt, whose eyes were wrapped in a single strip of black cloth.
Jack’s feet seemed to root themselves to the stream bed. Skeezix’s face was frozen in disbelief, staring at MacWilt’s blue denim jacket, at the billowy white shirt misbuttoned beneath, its tattered tails half tucked in. The tavern keeper paused three feet away from them and sniffed the air. He cocked his head, leaning into the wind. A grin stiffened his face. There was something odious in the grin, malevolent. His head swivelled once back and forth, and his cheeks twitched and shivered.
Skeezix took a step backward, carefully, and drew himself up, ready to bolt. Jack set himself to follow. He could outrun a blind mart; that much he knew. But then the idea of it struck him suddenly as ludicrous. Obviously MacWilt was still at it. He’d been struck blind when he’d peered through his telescope, but he’d seen enough to send him out on the same search that Jack and Skeezix were engaged in. MacWilt wasn’t following them at all; they were simply bound for the same destination. He’d stuck to the edge of the forest because he could follow it blind. On the open meadow he’d be lost in an instant. Speak to him, Jack told himself. Say something – anything to break the silence. Jack opened his mouth just as Skeezix turned and ran, stumbling first in the soft gravelly sand, then howling away in a wild rush, hollering at Jack to follow. Before Jack could, before he could speak or straighten up, MacWilt’s stick swung through the air and struck him on the shoulder.
‘Hey!’Jack shouted, leaping back. ‘I didn’t –’ A shadow passed over the dry stream bed, and Jack looked up to see a single crow, high overhead, circling. MacWilt tugged at the bandage over his eyes, exposing nothing but white, and he threw his head back and craned his neck, as if there was some little corner of vision that he could find if he contorted himself sufficiently. He cursed, cut the air again with his stick, pulled the bandage back into place, felt the air with his free hand, and took a step in Jack’s direction, holding his stick like a sabre.
Jack leapt out into the open stream bed and faced MacWilt. The man, surely, had made a mistake. The crow was a coincidence. A rock whistled past Jack’s head and caught the blind man in the shoulder, half spinning him around. He shrieked and whirled back towards Jack, cursing and lunging. ‘Strike a blind man, will you?’ he cried. ‘Help! Murder! Hit a poor blind man!’ And then he stepped in neatly and cracked Jack across his right kneecap, hauling the stick with both hands to hit him in the head. He bubbled with sudden laughter. The shadow of the crow passed overhead again.
MacWilt wasn’t blind. He couldn’t be blind. Jack knew that as he rolled away, the stick whistling past his ear. MacWilt cursed again and hobbled after him, holding his head up unnaturally. The cawing of the crow sounded nearby. Jack looked for it. There – in a dead tree along the stream bed. Another rock sailed past, chunking into the hillside. Skeezix appeared, crouched, scooping up a baseball-sized rock. He hefted it once and then threw it straight at MacWilt’s head, but the old man shifted and ducked. He’d seen Skeezix throw it. Jack picked up a rock of his own and edged away toward Skeezix. MacWilt mumbled and chirped, talking to himself maybe. He reached under his coat and drew out a shiny blue gun. For one ludicrous second Jack thought it was a toy. Skeezix didn’t make the same mistake. He turned wonderfully fast and dived into the bushes behind the hill. Jack threw his stone wildly as MacWilt aimed the pistol.
The blind man dodged to the side, Jack’s stone sailing past his head. Jack heard it thunk the weedy gravel of the stream bed as his shoulder hit the sand and he rolled against the side of the hill. There was no place to hide, though. He couldn’t burrow into the earth like a gopher. He smashed himself against the cutaway hillside, scrabbling for another rock to throw even as he turned to run. He angled across toward where Skeezix had disappeared, and he shouted as he ran without thinking about it, maybe so that he wouldn’t hear the crack of the gun when it fired.
He heard it anyway, over the shouting. The bullet zinged against the granite ledge beside him, and he dived into waist-high weeds, rolling away down the little valley between two hills. There was a shout and a curse behind him, and Skeezix hollering his name. He stopped and turned, expecting to see MacWilt, head canted, stumbling after him with a smoking pistol.
The tavern keeper reeled like a drunken man, throwing his pistol into the brush, prodding the air with his stick, waving his free hand. ‘Wait!’ he shouted. ‘Don’t leave me here! Hello!’ He was blind now, disoriented. Skeezix dropped from the edge of the hill above, wrenched the stick from the man’s hand, and threw it end
over end up the brush-covered hillside. Jack leapt back toward the two of them. Skeezix crawled in the weeds on his hands and knees, looking for something – MacWilt’s gun.
‘Forget it. Leave it,’ Jack shouted. ‘Let’s go.’
‘The crow!’ Skeezix shouted. ‘Kill the crow! I hit it with a rock, but it’s not dead! I’ll shoot the filthy thing!’ But he couldn’t find the gun. It had landed out of sight when the old man had thrown it, in his surprise and fright at suddenly losing his vision. The crow had been his eyes, and Skeezix had knocked the crow silly with a rock. Jack should have thought of that. What had he been meddling with MacWilt for? MacWilt was a pawn, used by Dr Brown because the doctor was lame. Jack plucked up a rock, wondering at once whether he could kill an animal at all. Peebles could, but that was half of the problem with Peebles, wasn’t it? Skeezix scrabbled in the brush, complaining under his breath and puffing with exertion.
There was a rustling of weeds beyond the dead oak and a sudden uncanny cawing, sounding half human, half like a crow. ‘There it is!’ shouted Skeezix, meaning, perhaps, both the pistol and the crow. He lunged into the brush, coming up with the gun. He shook sand from it, pointed it at the sky, and pulled the trigger, turning his head away and grimacing.
The crow flapped once or twice on the ground, hopping across weeds and stones. Skeezix stepped toward the crow, pointed the pistol, and shot. The bullet cracked into the tree trunk, a yard wide of where the great crow stood twisting its head, looking about itself with its small black eyes. MacWilt, ten yards down the stream bed, howled and cursed. He tried to run, stumbled, climbed shakily to his feet, and felt his way forward. ‘Don’t shoot!’ he cried. ‘Don’t shoot a poor blind man. Scum! You’re scum to shoot a blind man!’
Jack had half a mind to hit him in the back with a rock, but he didn’t. He yelled at him to shut up and be gone. Skeezix stopped, looked at MacWilt as if contemplating something, turned back to the crow, steadied his hand, and fired again; then again and again, squeezing off rounds one after another and all of them scattering dirt and gravel and weed. The crow hopped onto a fallen limb and flew away cawing, although the cawing sounded to Jack overmuch like cockeyed laughter as it evaporated on the still air overhead. In a moment there was nothing but the sound of the hammer clicking against empty chambers and the diminishing curses of blind MacWilt, who felt his way around the edge of the hillside and disappeared from view.
9
WHEN THE CAT had chased him out through the crack in the barn wall he’d almost got lost in the high grass. Thank goodness the barn door had been closed and the cat trapped inside. There were few advantages to being three inches high, and even fewer when you were three inches high and growing at such a rate as to make your mouse costume nearly choke you before you’d had enough time to do what it was you had to do and then slip away unsuspected. He should have borrowed a different costume, that was the truth of it, something cats hated.
He’d found his way to the river, though, out behind Willoughby’s farm, and he’d hitched a ride downstream on a log, climbing ashore unseen, thank goodness, and finding rags of clothes in the taxidermist’s. They fitted him now like the clothes of an ordinary man would fit a midget – which was exactly the case, of course. He’d started to grow in earnest, and if he hung round for another hour they’d fit better, but he wasn’t concerned with fashion; he had things to do and he hadn’t much time left to do them in.
He’d sneaked down to the wharves and scraped tar from the pilings, and he’d got dandelions easily enough from the yard. There were enough dishes and pots and the like in the old taxidermist’s shop to brew the stuff up. It wouldn’t be any real trouble at all; he knew that – he’d seen himself do it once, hadn’t he? He wished there was time to brew more, but there wasn’t. He would have to make do. A little batch for himself, a batch for Jensen, a batch for the man who in a few minutes would come in through the door and who would very badly want more.
There he was now. A hand shoved in through the broken window and pawed at the inside of the door, finding and pulling back the lock. The door swung to. In stepped a giant, nearly eight feet tall, but shrinking, of course, just as he himself was growing. In an hour, if the man were around that long, his clothes might fit too. And he would be around that long – an hour and a little more, wearing another man’s too-small clothes. Then he’d be on his way into the past, to try and fail to find the four-year-old Jack Portland at Willoughby’s boarded-up farm, to visit Viola Langley, to journey forward again and deliver the elixir, finally, and be chased by a cat into the tall grass and slip into the river and end up here, in the abandoned taxidermist’s shop, brewing up another batch of elixir, in a hurry now. All these unscheduled stops ate away at the few remaining precious hours of the Solstice; and his most important work still lay ahead.
He paused for a moment in the melting of the lumpy tar, remembering his wife. In a few hours, if everything worked ...
The giant stood in the doorway, looking at him stupidly. It embarrassed him to see it. ‘Close the damned door, idiot,’ he said. ‘They’ll see you.’
‘Who are you?’ the second man asked, closing the door.
But he knows, thought the small man, or at least he suspects. We look enough alike, heaven knows. And besides, I’ve been through this business before, so I know he knows, or is figuring it out fast. He resisted the temptation to bait the man, to confound him. He still had a few moments to do it in. He couldn’t take time for sport, though. ‘I’m you,’ he said. ‘From the future. Do I have to tell you that?’
‘No,’ came the reply, after a moment.
‘Then mash up those dandelions. We haven’t got a moment to spare.’
‘But tell me,’ said the giant, still staring, even though he understood things well enough suddenly. ‘Tell me what you know.’
‘You’ll find out. Just mash those dandelions and listen. Up to a point you’ll do all right. You’ll deliver the elixir, but not without considerable trouble. That’s right, quit gaping and grind them up. You know how; you’ve done it before. We won’t have enough elixir; you can see that.’
‘We’ve got to get more. You’re right, of course. I’ll go out after the stuff now.’
‘No, you won’t. You’d stand out like a hippo. And besides, here we are, mashing away, aren’t we? You’ll get to where you’re going, otherwise I wouldn’t be here, would I? It’s me we have to worry about. And Jensen too.’
‘Of course, Jensen. He’s missed out, hasn’t he? I regret having gone off with the formula and left poor Jensen to his own devices. They must have failed him.’
‘Don’t I know about your regrets? Do you have to tell me about your regrets? There’s hardly anything I do more of than avoid thinking about your regrets.’
‘I can’t see a damned thing without my glasses. We should have anticipated that.’
‘We should have anticipated a boatload of things, but we didn’t, did we? More regrets. We’ll undo a few before we’re done, though, see if we don’t.’ Together they mixed the dandelions and tar, deglazing the pan with ocean water.
‘That’s it!’ cried the big man as the elixir in the pan turned colour and started to steam. The aroma of it filled the air, wafting round on the little bit of ocean breeze that blew in through cracked panes.
‘Of course that’s it. Here I am, aren’t I? Ssh! There’s a noise through the window.’
The small man stepped across, trailing his rolled trouser legs, and shoved open the door. A girl stood outside, under the pepper tree, lost in reverie. She came to herself and looked at him, half surprised, as if she recognised him. He smiled at her – no use setting her off, after all; they still couldn’t afford to be found out. ‘Who are you?’ he asked, assuming that there might be some purpose in her spying on them.
‘I’m … Helen,’she said.’Excuse me for staring. You look just like a friend of mine. It’s uncanny, really.’
‘Is that right? What’s his name?’
‘Jac
k,’ she said, then turned to leave.
She was frightened; he could see that. But she knew Jack. He couldn’t let her go, but he couldn’t chase her either. ‘Wait!’ he shouted. She was running, though, even as he said it. ‘Tell Jack to try the Flying Toad!’ he hollered. ‘Please!’ It wasn’t exactly a comment meant to slow her down any, but maybe it would do the trick. He’d meant to leave a note, to do more than whisper into Jack’s ear, but the damned cat had spoiled the business. Well, there was no time to make amends. They’d do another batch, cook it all down, bottle it, and be off.
It was over an hour later when a ruckus started up outside again. It was dark out and raining off and on. There was a shout and a scuffle. ‘That’s yours,’ said the small man.
The big man was asleep on a table, catching forty winks, he’d said, leaving the boiling down to his smaller counterpart. He woke up now with a start. ‘What?’
‘This one’s yours.’ There was another cry and a terrible cursing. The tall man leapt for the door. Someone was in trouble out in the night. It wasn’t his business, but he couldn’t very well let it go.
The small man knew that as well as the other one did. He sighed, remembering the blow he was about to receive on the side of the head. He reached up and felt the lump it had raised, and as the door swung open he said, ‘Watch out! You’ll meet someone out there you recognise – Harbin. I’m certain of it. Take this with you; you won’t see me again, ever.’ He handed across ajar of elixir with the lid screwed on. There wasn’t much in it, but there was enough to get him back onto the train, so to speak, back to the depot. Along with it was a tiny stoppered bottle containing more of the same, a bottle the size that a mouse might carry, if a mouse were inclined to carry a bottle of elixir.
The giant shoved them into his pocket and wrenched the door open, looking back in wonder at his companion and nodding a goodbye. Then he pushed out into the wet night and was gone.
Land of Dreams Page 14