Helen hadn’t any desire to wander in the hills with Jack and Skeezix. Not really. She wasn’t wildly excited about magical lands. She was perfectly happy being where she was. Well, almost perfectly happy.
Helen wasn’t sure about Skeezix, though. He needed someone around to look after him sometimes. He talked very bravely, but Miss Flees was spiteful and jealous, and Skeezix had always been an easy mark. He was as close to being a brother to Helen as anyone would ever get. There’d been rough moments two years back when he’d fallen in love with her, or thought he had, and she’d had to put an end to it. Then he’d fallen in love with Elaine Potts, the baker’s daughter. Elaine Potts hadn’t put an end to it, even though sometimes she pretended that she didn’t care about him.
Helen could see the truth about Elaine Potts when they stopped in at the bakery. And it wasn’t surprising either. Skeezix was one of those plain sorts of people who become less and less plain the better you know them. Helen appreciated that sort of thing. One of her favourite authors had written that beautiful women should be saved for men with no imagination. The same could be said for men – really handsome men, that is. Skeezix had one of those interesting faces that, admittedly, would never become handsome, but would become – what was it? – attractive. That was it. He had the sort of face that would paint well, if you could capture what it was that made it so.
Elaine Potts seemed to sense that. She was the same way, although she didn’t know it. That’s part of what made Skeezix like her – her not knowing it.
Jack wasn’t anything much like a brother, and never had been. He was strange, in his way: gazing out of his loft window through his telescope, wandering in the woods, collecting glass bottles and old books. And now his elixir; he’d got it from a mouse, he’d said, or else from a tiny man dressed as a mouse. That was just like Jack.
Helen smiled. The High Street was almost empty. Everyone was at the carnival, Helen supposed. Only a single fisherman sat on the pier, whittling idly. The wind blew down the centre of the street, whirling a yellowed old sheet of newspaper into the air and picking up leaves. Helen was suddenly lonely. She wished that she had gone with Jack and Skeezix, and for a moment she thought of turning round and following them. But there was no telling, really, where they’d be by now. Jack was good company. It was too bad he was so solitary, kept so much to himself, although it was that, partly, that made him as interesting as he was. Interesting, thought Helen. What a rotten word for it.
There was the taxidermist’s shop. Jack and Skeezix and she had sneaked in there one night and stolen a stuffed ape that they’d given to Lantz. She’d felt bad about it for a long time, but that was two years ago, and bug-eaten animals still sat in there doing nothing. Riley the taxidermist was dead. He’d made a Visitation’ that morning at the carnival, or so she’d overheard some people to say, and he’d talked ceaselessly about the quality of glass eyes, carrying on until they’d pitched cold water in the face of the medium and shut the taxidermist up. There was a light in the shop now, way in the back, only a little light, like maybe someone was burning a candle in there.
It had nothing to do with her, of course. She had better things to do than be curious about candlelight. Jack and Skeezix would investigate, if they were there, and would probably end up being chased up the alley by a tramp. They’d investigate anything. Skeezix would come home gloating this afternoon, boasting about what he’d found, full of theories, clucking his tongue and shaking his head that Helen hadn’t been with him. What had she been doing? he’d ask, feigning interest. Then he’d nod broadly at whatever she’d been painting and say something smart about it and then sigh. Then he’d swagger off making furious faces, which, he’d imply, Helen was making at him. Helen wouldn’t be, of course. She’d ignore him utterly.
She found herself halfway around to the back of the taxidermist’s, tiptoeing along. She wouldn’t go home empty-handed. She’d have an adventure of her own, is what she’d have, and throw it in Skeezix’s face.
The rear windows were dusty and dark and had been covered with newspaper, glued on long ago. Here and there the newspaper had dried out and yellowed and peeled off in patches.
She glanced up and down the river. It was empty. The fisherman on the pier wasn’t in sight. She edged along the rear of the shop, wincing at the sound of gravel and trash scrunching underfoot. There was the light. She could see it past a ragged rent in the newsprint covering the window. She peered through, holding her breath, squinting against the dimness of the room within.
A number of stuffed animals littered the floor, looming half in shadow. She could just make out the head of a bear, the dorsal fin of a shark, a clutch of moony-eyed squid, mounted in a long line as if they drifted in the current atop an offshore reef. A hand moved. A man in an artist’s smock worked at a bench. It wasn’t candlelight after all; it was the glow of a little fire that was cooking a pan of something. Helen realised with a start that the heavy smell of ocean and tar on the air wasn’t blowing in on the sea wind after all; it hovered in the room beyond, leaking out through the hole in the window.
There were two men in the room, not one. One, in the smock, was far taller than the other. The smock was undersized, now that Helen had a moment to study it. The man worked at a bench, grinding something up. He was the tallest man Helen could remember having seen – easily seven feet tall, maybe taller. He bent over his work so that he looked at it from about an inch away, as if he were fearfully nearsighted but had lost his spectacles. The other man stirred the pan on the fire. He was a midget, for sure, not just small in relation to the giant that he laboured alongside, but shorter than the top of the bench. He stood on a stool to work, and he wore outsized clothes, his sleeves and trousers rolled. It was too dark in the taxidermist’s to make out much detail. The men might easily have been brothers, mismatched twins even.
What should she do? What would Jack or Skeezix do? She could walk away, but what she’d seen wouldn’t make much of a story later on. She’d tell it as well as she could, but then she’d get to the end and Skeezix would say, ‘What did you do then?’ She’d say, ‘Nothing. I came home.’ That wouldn’t do. The smell of tar and ocean was cut suddenly by the sharp odour of dandelion. The beaker bubbled and fizzled. A cloud of greenish vapour tumbled up out of it, dispersing through the room, and the smell of elixir, of Jack’s elixir, weighted the air.
Helen reeled back against the trunk of a pepper tree. Her eyes were misted by the elixir, and she was overwhelmed with longing’ and with regret for all the places she’d wanted to go in her life but hadn’t, for all the wonderful places she’d been and had to leave, for all the places she longed to see but wouldn’t. Before her eyes was the fleeting vision of rolling springtime countryside glimpsed through the window of a train car, and she anchored herself to a tree limb with one hand, fearing that she’d pitch over into the grass with dizziness. In her ears was the sound of the rush and surge of the ocean and of the clatter of train wheels on a railroad trestle, and for one brief moment she seemed to be standing on the train tracks above the bluffs, waving at a receding train and at a man and woman she didn’t know who waved back at her from where they stood on the last car. In an instant they diminished to specks on the far-flung landscape and disappeared.
She realised abruptly that someone was watching her. It was the small man. He’d pushed the rear door ajar and was looking out, smiling at her. She let go the tree limb, shook the mist out of her head, and smiled back, although it was a troubled smile. He had an oddly familiar face. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.
The encounter didn’t last a minute. He looked like Jack, and she felt compelled to tell him so, but that’s all she’d tell him. This wasn’t the sort of thing she was fond of. She didn’t need to chat with oddly clothed men outside an abandoned taxidermist’s shop.
‘Wait!’ he shouted as she turned and ran. He didn’t follow her, though. He stepped out into the shade of the tree and hollered, ‘Tell Jack to try the Flying Toad!’ Then she w
as gone – around the side of the shop, up onto the High Street, pounding along toward Miss Flees’s. She went in through the back door, silent as she could and wondering about ‘the Flying Toad’. Maybe Skeezix would know. Or Jack. It was Jack she was supposed to tell, after all. She’d save it for him. Jack would love the mystery of it.
Up the attic stairs she climbed. She pushed into the room, locked the trapdoor behind her, and turned around to see Peebles sitting there in the darkness, sucking on his finger. Mrs Langley’s book lay open on the desk, as if he’d been reading it. The canvas that had rested on the easel had been slashed and torn with a pocketknife and the easel kicked over. Her box of paints lay on the floor, brushes and tubes and hunks of chalk scattered and kicked.
Helen stopped and stood still. She edged back toward the door but didn’t dare reach down to open it. Peebles grinned at her stupidly, a look that suggested he’d happily push her downstairs if he had the opportunity. She was overcome with a sudden rage. The filthy little brute, getting into her stuff, knocking it around. On the floor before him was a crockery bowl, a heap of twigs, some sulphur matches, and what must have been chicken entrails. Skeezix and Jack had told her about that.
I’m tired of you,’ said Peebles, lighting a match with his thumbnail and watching it burn down toward his thumb.
‘Not half as tired as I am of you.’
The match burned down to where he held it. He didn’t twitch –he let the flame burn him, seeming to like it.
‘Very impressive,’ said Helen, looking again at the slashed canvas. ‘Why don’t you light your shirt on fire and burn yourself up?’
‘I might just burn us all up.’ He lit another match and held it to the edge of the canvas. The fire caught and spread, eating across the half-painted canvas, the paint flaring.
Helen took half a step toward it. The painting was ruined as it was; she didn’t care about that. It was the house she cared about. He might very easily burn them all up, exactly like he said. She stopped, though. She wouldn’t give Peebles the satisfaction of seeing her stamp out the flames. And besides, he was probably half bluff. He talked too much. He was too showy. His glasses were tilted and his hair was mussed, and if it came to it, she’d beat him senseless. One of the candelabras was in easy reach. She could pluck it up and persuade him with one good blow. Then she’d kick him downstairs. The thought of it made her heart race, and she found herself trembling. She hated this sort of thing.
Peebles smirked at her. ‘Scared?’
Helen said nothing. She stared at him intently, as if she were assessing the nature of his peculiar behaviour. It was a look that would drive him mad. She’d used it on him before, implying that she saw very clearly that he was sadly insane and was ‘scoping him out’, as Skeezix would say.
Peebles peered at his new finger, wiggling it uncertainly. It grew out of his hand at a cockeyed angle, like the grown-back arm of a starfish. His smile faltered for a moment. He lit a match, then bent down and lit the twigs in the crock, blowing them into flame and dropping on the gizzard, or whatever it was. Then he pulled a silver needle out of his coat and pricked his new finger, holding it up for Helen to see. She stared at him stony-faced. He pricked it again, and then again and again. No blood flowed from it. He grinned, as if proud of himself, and pricked the finger next to it. He pushed on it, holding it over the bowl, but nothing happened. A second prick accomplished nothing either. Then, in a sudden rage, he stabbed away at his fingers at random, but they seemed equally bloodless. A look of awe and fear flickered across his face, turning into sudden loathing and desperation. He jammed the needle into the palm of his hand, squeezing a globule of blood onto the half-burned twigs.
With a hiss and a sizzle smoke poured out of them, congealing in the air above the bowl, whirling and seeming to pulse on the still attic air. Vague shapes formed. Airy pictures danced in front of her: a sheep with a gash in its neck, the face of an insect, a gibbet with a man hanging from it, his hands bound. Peebles grinned through it. Helen was horrified, and her face gave her away. She leapt forward and kicked the smoking herbs into the wall, stamping them out against the floorboards.
Peebles cried out in surprise and then leapt up and rushed at her, shoving his needle into her arm. Helen lurched aside, crying out even though she hadn’t felt any pain. The needle had caught in the heavy seam of her coat, and when she jerked away it pulled out of Peebles’s hand. He seemed to writhe with anger. He stood with his mouth open and working, as if he were probing his teeth with his tongue. His chest heaved. He pulled out another match, tried and failed to light it with his thumb, and then plucked a matchbox out of his shirt, spitting out a curse and lighting the match with shaking fingers.
Helen wasn’t near the trapdoor any more. She was against the street windows now. The candelabra wasn’t within reach either. The canvas on the floor had burned itself out. She’d brain him with the chair, that’s what she’d do. She’d smash it to flinders over his tiny head. She’d –
But before she had a chance to do anything, even speak, he held the match to the tattered muslin curtains. They went up in a rush of flame. He backed toward the trapdoor, lighting another match as he went and looking around for something else to burn. There was the ragged end of a tablecloth, draped over a table on the edge of the stacked furniture. Peebles held the match to it, until flames crept off across the table, licking up along the legs of a chair that sat atop it. He bent down suddenly, grinning maliciously at Helen, and reached for the latch of the trapdoor. He meant to leave her there. He meant to climb down and brace the door shut and leave her there.
Helen picked up the chair he’d been sitting in, lifted it over her head, and pitched it at him. He dodged it easily – surprisingly easily. It was as if he’d been snatched out of its way. Helen turned and pulled at what was left of the curtains. They tore away in a wash of sparks, and she dropped them to the floor and danced on them, stamping out the flames. She leapt across to tear the tablecloth off the table before it set the whole heap of old furniture alight. But there wasn’t any need to. The tablecloth floated hovering in the air, burning out over the floor. It wrung itself out like a washcloth while he stood transfixed, gazing at it, his hair standing on end as if it were yanked up by someone’s fist. He stood on tiptoe, jigging like a mechanical ballet dancer, hooting out one clipped-off shriek. The fallen chair floated into the air, righted itself, and sat down hard on all four feet at once. The trapdoor opened with a bang. Peebles teetered on the edge of it. The tablecloth shook itself out like a rug and collapsed in a burnt heap on the floor as Peebles seemed to step involuntarily out over the abyss, shaking his head and looking about him and then falling suddenly with a shout onto the steep stairway below. He managed to cast Helen one last befuddled and venomous glance as he fell, and she heard him bang down the stairs. The trapdoor slammed shut. The latch slid into place, and the attic was deathly silent.
Helen wanted company. No, that wasn’t quite right. Someone was in the room with her. She could feel the presence, and she knew straightaway who it was. It was Mrs Langley. Mrs Langley hadn’t at all wanted to see Peebles burn the house down. The burned tablecloth had infuriated her, and she’d dropped Peebles down the stairwell like a sack of oranges.
Helen suddenly wanted to put things right, to pick up the burned tablecloth and carry the chair back over to the table, to gather up the fallen paints and chalk. But she didn’t dare. Perhaps it would be best to let Mrs Langley cool down a little – let Mrs Langley make the next move. Nothing happened, though. Helen waited. The afternoon was drawing on and the attic was slipping into shadow. She bent down finally and reached for Peebles’s box of matches. They lay on the floor where he’d dropped them when Mrs Langley yanked him up by the hair. Helen half expected the matches to be snatched away, to fly into the air, to skitter off across the floorboards. They didn’t, though. She lit the candles in the candelabra and set it very carefully back onto its table. Her heart no longer careened quite so wildly behind her ribs. S
he was better off quit of Peebles. She’d been friends, as far as it went, with Mrs Langley, but she’d never been friends with Peebles, although she’d tried. Peebles hadn’t let her, even years ago when such a thing would have been possible.
She picked up the chair and then stepped across with it to the desk, looking around her as she walked and half expecting something to happen – a ghost to appear or a disembodied voice to moan out of a dark corner. She scrabbled around the floor, retrieving bits of chalk and tubes of paint. The box, thank goodness, hadn’t been wrecked. He’d snapped one or two of the brushes, though, and she couldn’t replace them without sending to San Francisco. A little glue and tape perhaps ...
For what capering reason, she wondered, had Peebles decided to take his filthy malice out on her? Why break things up? Just for sport? She shook her head, and then gasped in surprise as a grey cat walked out of the shadows of a gable, meowing. It stopped in the afternoon light that still shone weakly through the window and curled up into a ball, falling asleep almost at once. More meowing came from a distant corner, and another cat, a black one now, wandered out, sniffing the air. A third cat appeared suddenly on the table beside the candelabra; one moment there was nothing, the next there was a cat, materialising out of vapour.
Helen didn’t know any of the cats and she had the distinct suspicion that no one else in the house did either. A bird chirped. In the dusty brass cage angling out of the stored furniture was a canary, ghostly grey and sitting on a piece of dowel lashed to the cage wire with a bit of string. A fourth cat appeared, out of nothing, out of the air.
Helen’s hand shook again. She closed her box and uprighted her easel. Then she smoothed out her jacket and hair. She heard the first faint sounds of someone humming, and for a moment she thought it was Miss Flees, working in the kitchen below, carving cabbages for the soup. But Miss Flees didn’t often sing, or hum, for that matter. This was something else. A silver-white light shone near the trapdoor, hovering there above it, seeming to spin, like one of Peebles’s enchantments, as if someone had thrown a handful of luminous chalk dust into a miniature wind devil. It was Mrs Langley, materialising. Helen steeled herself for the confrontation. She hadn’t really ever got used to the idea of hobnobbing with ghosts. Mrs Langley hadn’t ever meddled in her business before, and she, heaven knew, had left Mrs Langley well enough alone – only fragments of casual chatting now and then.
Land of Dreams Page 15