Land of Dreams

by James P. Blaylock

  Helen, with a suddenness that made Jack shout, twisted off the cart and launched a kick at the doll in Peebles’s hand. Jack slammed back into the wall, as if it had been him kicked by a giant foot. The doll sailed into the darkness. Helen stood reeling, looking faint, about to collapse. Peebles sprang at her with a curse. As he swung his fist at her, the lights brightened and steam chuffed up from under the track and out of the cracks at the corners of the ceiling and floor, as if the entire building were an engine, coming to life. The empty cart leapt forward, pushing Helen into Jack, clipping Peebles in the side as he tried to leap clear but couldn’t because of the momentum of his swing. The cart rattled away, empty.

  Jack grabbed Helen’s hand and dragged her back toward the door, down the dark corridor. Helen sagged, and Jack yanked her out of the way of the second cart – Peebles’s cart – which hurtled past, materialising out of the darkness and running straight on into Peebles’s back as he scrabbled on the tracks after the fallen doll. As Jack bent down to pick Helen up, he heard Peebles scream. With fear coursing through him like an elixir, Jack found the strength to lurch away, carrying Helen against his chest. He held his breath, knowing he wouldn’t make it ten steps through the steamy heat of the enlivened darkness if he gave in. Skeezix must have failed; MacWilt must have stopped him. Peebles screamed at his back and staggered along behind, his deformed hand dangling unnaturally, partly severed or broken by the cart. It was bloodless, like the hand of a waxwork dummy. But Peebles was still grinning, clearly feeling nothing, having cried out in surprise when the cart hit him, not in pain.

  Jack could hear Skeezix shouting above the din of escaping steam and the throbbing of the oven, which reverberated through the plywood walls. Again, abruptly, the steam died, the lights dimmed, and Jack was running. He felt as if he’d just yanked his feet free of heavy mud. Helen, now that she was balanced and secure in his arms, wasn’t so heavy after all.

  He saw the door in front of him, wedged open with a stopped cart half through. Ocean air blew in through the door, swirling across them. Outside, the night was aflame. The line of tents and plywood shacks burned in a long orange wall. Six steps from the door a thrill of pain shot through his chest. He staggered against the wall, breathing hard, letting. Helen roll out onto the ground, where she half stood up, shaking the fog out of her head.

  Peebles waited behind them, twenty paces or so. He held the doll in the crook of his ruined arm, the pin raised. ‘Wait there!’ he shouted. Jack waited. Helen stood up, hands on her knees. The night shook with the pounding of the oven and with the thundering of the calliope – completely wild now, a cacophony of toots and hoots. There was the shriek of steam again, like the sound of a train whistle now, but the pounding didn’t dim at all. The bluffs shook with it. Smoke suddenly swirled in under the edge of the building. The walls were afire. Peebles wavered, looking round him, perplexed. ‘Out!’ he commanded, striding toward them, menacing them with the upraised straight pin.

  Jack backed toward the door. He had nothing against cooperating. Helen stumbled out before him, coughing in the suddenly heavy smoke. Skeezix shouted Jack’s name. He pounded the ride’s wooden and iron operating machinery with a three foot length of railing. A chunk of the machinery broke off, twisting away and hanging there with the audible groan of bending metal.

  Beside Skeezix lay the scattered bones of a skeleton that I had been whacked to bits. MacWilt lay farther off, folded up across the little broken fence. Beyond, in the leaping glow of the fire, Dr Jensen’s crab jerked and snapped, entangled in the struts and cables of the tilting Ferris wheel. Guy lines ripped out around it. The wheel revolved wildly, carts I rocking and hopping as the whole thing smashed over onto the burning tents, sending a whoosh of flaming canvas showering across them all. Skeezix threw down his piece of railing and leapt to where Jack supported Helen, then abandoned them at once to chase Peebles, who dashed away, running in a sort of one-legged stoop toward the pulsing oven and engine. Skeezix slowed, guarding his face with his bent right arm, letting Peebles race away into the searing heat.

  The oven seemed double its size – immense now, its cavernous door an almost solid white-pink. The metal pipes and canisters and tanks attached to it glowed red. Two skeletons stood before the oven, their clothes and hair burnt off, the fire glowing through their ribs. One of them still shovelled in spadefuls of coal; the other pitched in logs, weirdly, jerkily animated in time to the booming, whooshing steam. The second skeleton paused to lean into the lever, but the iron bar had bent over like a hot tallow candle and nothing at all happened when the thing pushed it. Peebles shrieked at them, waving his arms.

  Jack and Skeezix and Helen fled, away from the fire, away from the oven, back out toward the gate and the open meadow and the sea. They heard the roof of the Toad collapse in a rumbling heap, and Jack looked back, watching the crab scuttling down between the flames, stopping to pick up the feebly struggling MacWilt, whose robes smouldered and sparked.

  The night was nothing by now but flames and pouring steam and the boom, boom, boom of the beehive oven. The coal-shovelling skeleton bent, oblivious to Peebles’s cries, and scooped up a mountain of coal, turned, pitched it in, and stood wavering as if in surprise when its arm flew off and followed along behind the shovel and the spraying coal straight into the mouth of the oven, dangling there as if held up for the moment by the intense heat, then exploding into fragments. Both skeletons shivered into bits like domino houses brought down by an earthquake. Peebles threw his good arm across his face and loosed one last drawn-out howl that neither Jack nor Skeezix nor Helen could hear, its existence betrayed only by his open mouth and by the wide-eyed fear on his face in the last luminous moment before the oven exploded.

  15

  JACK WOKE UP in Dr Jensen’s surgery. His head throbbed, and when he pushed himself up onto his elbows, a pain like the sharp edge of a chipped stone stabbed across behind his forehead. He winced but stayed propped up. There was a mist in his head too, and he blinked to chase it away. He’d been asleep, it seemed, for a very long time. It was late morning, maybe noon. Helen and Skeezix and Dr Jensen were there. And there was Mrs Jensen, too, standing in the doorway and whispering to someone in the kitchen.

  Jack tried to shift his legs in order to sit up, but he couldn’t. His left leg was splinted and stiff. There was a bloody rag tied around Skeezix’s forehead. When he saw that Jack was awake and staring at the rag, Skeezix grimaced and shook his head slowly, seeming to say that he’d been through the wringer, that they’d won through, but not without a fearsome price.

  ‘You’re cut,’ said Jack thickly.

  ‘Yes,’ said Skeezix. He shook his head some more. ‘It was hellish – the explosion, flying bricks, fire raining down. It was the Cities of the Plain. And that horrible crab –’

  Helen reached across and snatched the bandage off Skeezix’s head, throwing it onto the counter in disgust. ‘He scratched himself on a cypress tree pulling you out of the way of the crab. He hasn’t cut his head at all.’

  ‘I might have cut my head. I came close. And you should have seen the crab, Jack. It snatched up MacWilt right before the oven blew up, and then it ran like crazy for the cove – straight at us, and you lying there senseless, hit by a brick and With your leg sprained. The explosion toppled it – blew its small claw right off. Look.’ Skeezix pointed to the counter where sat an enormous curved claw, some three feet across and faintly blue in the lamplight. ‘And that’s the small one! I hauled you in behind a cypress – well, Helen and I did – and the crab got up and went right on, carrying Mac Wilt, right into the ocean and was gone. Anyway, I scraped my arm, but it isn’t much of a scrape. The bandage on my head was a sort of joke.’

  Jack grinned at him, then smiled wider. Then he noticed, next to the great crab claw, a bouquet of cut wildflowers – pink ladies and dandelions and yellow alder leaves. ‘Gee,’ he said, not knowing what more to say about friends like that.

  ‘Those aren’t for you,’ said Skeezi
x. ‘They’re for Elaine Potts. She’s coming in today on the afternoon coach. Helen made me pick them. She says it’s time I quit messing around.’ Jack kept smiling. That was even better – Skeezix giving Elaine Potts flowers.

  ‘Actually,’ said Helen, casting Skeezix a look and then smiling at Jack, ‘I went out after flowers for you, in the lot next door, and I told Skeezix that he ought to gather a few for Elaine – something he couldn’t fathom. Of course I had to do it for him, didn’t I? He kept picking weeds and talking about making the bouquet look Oriental. In the end he took my I flowers and threw his out, which was good, because he would have ruined it with Elaine, giving her weeds. Then Dr Jensen hollered that you were waking up, so we came in without any flowers at all for you. Sorry.’ ‘That’s fine,’ said Jack. ‘I –’

  Helen interrupted. ‘Maybe you and I can go out after some later. Together.’ Then, obviously remembering his injured leg, she added, ‘After we find you a cane.’

  Dr Jensen, who’d been letting Helen and Skeezix catch Jack up, broke in and said, ‘No canes. Not today. It’s not much of a sprain, but with the crack on the head and all, you’ll take it easy today. And, Jack, before you three went off last night, before I’d been knocked out by Harbin, I’d wanted to give you something. Your father had given it to me earlier in the evening.’ The mention of his father recalled to Jack his efforts to find his parents in the depot. He could picture his mother’s face through the train window, behind his shouting father. He had recognised it from the photo – there was no mistaking it, really. But now that he’d actually seen her, he remembered something more than a photo, and the memory was at the same time painful and wonderful. It meant that somehow, in some distant time, his mother hadn’t died, that she was alive somewhere with his father. And it meant also – the memory did – that he’d have nothing but that brief glimpse of her face as a souvenir.

  Dr Jensen handed him a ring. ‘Your father said he mightn’t be coming back. He didn’t know. He was in a terrible hurry, and he might not be quick enough to finish the night’s work and get back across. So he let me have this with instructions to give it to you, a memento, I guess.’

  Jack stared at the ring. He’d seen it before. It was made of gold – a ring of waves toppling over onto themselves. It was the ring that had been on the hand of the giant, the ring the giant had flipped into the air with his thumb. Jack could picture it turning over and over and landing in the giant’s enormous hand and then the giant winking at him, inexplicably, before turning away. Jack slipped the ring onto his finger, realising suddenly who the giant was. And he knew, too, who the woman was who looked so much like Helen, only older. It was Helen, and older too. And the giant was him.

  ‘It was your bakery,’ said Jack suddenly, looking up at Skeezix. ‘The doughnuts were yours.’

  Skeezix nodded. ‘I’ve been thinking so. That means I marry Elaine, of course. I told Helen that. These flowers are nice and all, but not entirely necessary. My weeds would have done the trick.’

  ‘You’re a jerk,’ said Helen.

  ‘And you and I –’ said Jack to Helen, but caught himself and stopped, blushing. He couldn’t be sure, after all, that he had been married to Helen in that house near the harbour. They might still be mere friends. Well, he’d see about that. He didn’t like the look of himself in a beard. He’d write himself a letter to remind himself. From the perspective of a mouse, a beard was a terrible thing.

  ‘Something’s cooking,’ said Jack, smelling suddenly the odour of baking bread.

  ‘There’s fresh bread,’ said Skeezix, rolling his eyes happily. ‘And a stew and pie. Don’t empty your pipe into the stew pot this time. We can’t go to – what was it? – Hoover’s. Hoover hasn’t shown up yet. Everybody else has, though.’

  ‘What?’ asked Helen, looking puzzled. ‘Your pipe?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t smoke a pipe, do I? I guess I’ll take it up, to be ready when the time comes.’

  ‘There’s a little surprise,’ said Helen, obviously anxious about something.

  Jack hadn’t time even to ask what the surprise was when through the door stepped a man and a woman – his father and mother. Jack nearly pitched of onto the floor and might have, too, if his mother hadn’t grabbed him and hugged him and generally carried on as if she hadn’t seen him in twelve years, which, of course, she hadn’t.

  I His father stood beaming, over the top of his spectacles, then very soberly shook Jack’s hand. ‘We’ve all made it, then,’ he said. ‘Even old Jim Langley. He rode in on the train with us; he was aboard when we saw you there, in the depot. He’s moved back in.’

  ‘And we’ll stay on there,’ said Helen excitedly. ‘As long as we want, he says.’

  ‘I’ll cook,’ said Skeezix. ‘ “Not a cabbage passes the threshold”; that’s my motto. Nothing but culinary delights.’

  Jack’s mother had left off her hugging, finally, and stood back to look at Jack, and he at her. She was young – surprisingly so. Years younger than his father – something that ran counter to his recollections but was probably explained by all the popping in and out through time that had been going on.

  ‘We’ve taken a house by the harbour,’ she said, ‘behind the tavern.’

  ‘I know which one,’ said Jack. Helen had painted the cats. Jack looked at his father, puzzled. ‘How –’ he began.

  ‘Easy,’ came the reply, ‘if you’re quick enough. It was poison that Harbin had given your mother. I knew that, but I didn’t know what kind. She was dying and I couldn’t do a thing. Kettering knew, and went across thinking that I knew too, but I didn’t. I followed him but couldn’t find him in the depot – you know how that is. When I finally ran him down the Solstice was passed, and it took twelve years to come back around.

  ‘I planned for every moment of those twelve years – honed it down just right, I thought. Then the run-in with the cat and Willoughby’s having taken you north for a year put a crimp in all my planning, and I had to rush around trying to catch up. When I returned for your mother, knowing now how to save her, we talked, she and I, about finding you and taking you with us, picking up where we’d left off, not losing all those years of watching you grow up. But we didn’t. We decided that you’d turned out well enough to suit us, from the little bit I’d seen and from what Jensen had told me. And you had your friends and your memories, and we couldn’t take those away.

  ‘So we slipped across and came along to catch up to you, thinking we wouldn’t make it, thinking that the Solstice would pass us by and we’d lose you again. I had given you the elixir, though. That was our only wild card. Maybe you would have come across too, and if worst came to worst, we’d make a life for ourselves somewhere in time. When we lost you in the station, though … Well, never mind about that. It was a bad moment for all of us, but here we are now, aren’t we? Skeezix tells us that Harbin is dead. The carnival is gone, destroyed. Jensen didn’t get a glimpse of the crab, but he’s got the claw, hasn’t he?’

  He had indeed. Jack couldn’t take his eyes of This mother. It would be weird to have one. Would she let him read by candlelight at night, or go in and out the window on a rope ladder? When he thought about it, there was no second storey to the house by the harbour anyway. He wouldn’t need a rope ladder. He could swing the window open and climb out into his own back yard.

  Mrs Langley’s land of dreams hadn’t come to half as much as he’d anticipated; though, come to think of it, nobody had ever promised him it would. It was mostly the romantic notion of a ghost in an attic, the pursuit of phantoms. He and Helen and Skeezix had gone round and round on Ferris wheels and trains and through haunted fun houses, and they’d set sail in impossible boats. Now here they were home again, where they’d always wanted to be, in the land of doughnuts and rainy weather, of books and tide pools, of sandcastle dreams waiting for the rising tide. In the spring there would be picnics in the cove. Autumn would be a smoky memory among countless others, blowing across the bleached shreds
of an old carnival poster on a sunset beach, piling up sand in a cast-off shoe, covering the brass loops of a pair of lost spectacles crusted with sea salt.

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  Also by James P. Blaylock

  The Elfin Series

  The Elfin Ship

  The Disappearing Dwarf

  The Stone Giant

  Langdon St Ives

  Homunculus*

  Lord Kelvin’s Machine*

  Other Novels

  The Digging Leviathan

  Land Of Dreams

  The Last Coin

  The Paper Grail

  The Magic Spectacles

  Night Relics

  All The Bells On Earth

  Winter Tides

  The Rainy Season

  Knights Of The Cornerstone

  Collections

  Thirteen Phantasms

  In For A Penny

  Metamorphosis

  Dedication

  To Viki

  and to Lynn, Ron, Tim, and Katy,

  who have the right inclinations

  James P. Blaylock (1950 - )

  James Paul Blaylock was born in Long Beach, California, in 1950, and attended California State University, where he received an MA. He was befriended and mentored by Philip K. Dick, along with his contemporaries K.W. Jeter and Tim Powers, and is regarded – along with Powers and Jeter – as one of the founding fathers of the steampunk movement. Winner of two World Fantasy Awards and a Philip K. Dick Award, he is currently director of the Creative Writing Conservatory at the Orange County High School of the Arts, where Tim Powers is Writer in Residence.