Land of Dreams by James P. Blaylock Read Free Book Online

curtain and at any moment would snatch it aside.
    He realised, of a sudden, that his mind wasn’t at all on his book. Two of the candles had blown out and one of the shutters rattled against the window casing. Wind whistled softly through chinks. Rusted hinges squeaked downstairs and the barn door slammed. Yellow lantern light leaped up the walls, and Willoughby, come to work on his cheese, hummed softly and tunelessly after barring the door against the wind. There’d be coffee in the house.
    Jack pulled on his trousers, shirt, and sweater and stepped across to the stile railing that fronted the loft. The rear half of the barn floor, separated from the cattle by a tight, low, panelled wall, was swept clean every afternoon. Tables and benches lined the walls, cluttered with tubs and buckets and shrouds of cheesecloth. Cheeses hung in nets from the ceiling and sat in moulds along the walls, heaped together, one atop and beside another like buildings along a street.
    Jack and Willoughby couldn’t begin to eat that many cheeses, and Willoughby never sold any. The cheeses were an excuse to keep six cows.
One
cow would have been enough to keep them in milk and butter. Years ago Jack had assumed that the cheeses would one day come to something, that there would be some end to them. ‘Some things are never finished,’ Willoughby had said cryptically. They can’t be. Finishing doesn’t enter in.’
    Many of the cheeses had long since become dust, and the rest had become a sort of mouse township, complete, Jack assumed, with aldermen and a mouse mayor. ‘Let the mice have them,’ Willoughby had said patiently. There was a lot in Willoughby to admire.
    Jack could see the mice working the cheese. They appeared from little gnawed avenues and then disappeared again, toting chunks from deep in the interior toward secret destinations. Why they bothered was more than Jack could say. Why haul cheese from house to house in a city built of cheese? It had to do with ageing it, perhaps; the mice were connoisseurs.
    Willoughby meddled with a cheese mould for a moment, cursed under his breath, and went out again through the door, shutting it after him. Lantern light flickered across the cheese, guttering in the cool, moving air of the barn. There was a noise in the shadows – the meowing of a cat and the scraping of claws against the boards of the barn wall. The cat pounced, suddenly, out into the circle of yellow light, landing on all fours but with its front paws together, trying to pin something to the floor. It was a mouse, running higgledy-piggledy, scurrying toward a crack in the floorboards.
    ‘Hey!’ Jack shouted at the cat, thinking to take the side of the mouse. He bent over to pluck up his shoe in order to pitch it over the railing. But then he saw that the shout had been enough. The cat had stopped where it landed in the lantern light. It stood there gaping, as if it had seen something it hadn’t half expected to see. Jack gaped too and straightened up slowly. There wasn’t a mouse on the floor of the barn at all; there was a tiny thumbsized man. He clutched in his hands the head of a mouse, a mask, actually. All Jack’s gaping and goggling lasted only a fraction of a second; before Jack could speak, before he could shout at the man, compel him to stay, the cat leaped at him and he dashed through a chink in the barn wall and was gone.
    Jack fairly flew down the ladder. The little man had disappeared, lost in the high grass. Jack started after him but gave it up almost at once, fearful he’d step on him by mistake. He walked back into the barn and yanked the lantern off its hook and then held it near the chink in the barn siding, trying to illuminate it in such a way that he could see what lay beyond – outside. There was nothing but morning gloom and grass blades, just as he’d known there’d be.
    The door opened and Willoughby strode back in, looking grizzled and tired. He chased the cat out and then asked Jack what it