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

was he was looking for, down on his knees on the barn floor like that. Jack shrugged. It was an impossible question to answer.
    ‘See something, did you?’ asked Willoughby, looking at him sideways.
    ‘Yes. I think so. Might just have been a mouse, I suppose.’
    ‘You don’t
know
if it was a mouse?’
    ‘It was too dark. I couldn’t see clear. It looked like, like –’
    ‘Something that wasn’t a mouse?’
    ‘Exactly,’ said Jack. It seemed to him suddenly that Willoughby wouldn’t at all be surprised to hear that little men in costume came and went in the darkness. ‘What was it?’
    Willoughby shrugged suddenly, as if he were weary of the whole subject. ‘Nothing you should meddle with,’ he said, taking the lantern and hanging it again on its hook. ‘It probably
was
a mouse, now that I think of it. What else
could
it be? You leave it alone. It’ll only waste your time. There’s trouble that comes from peering through cracks like that; you can mark my words. Your father found it – you already know that. So you’ leave it alone. There’s better things to do. Weather’s broke, if you ask me, and when I come up from town this morning I found this on the Cottonwood at the fork.’
    He handed Jack a sheet of grainy paper, gaudy with colour even in the shadowy barn. CARNIVAL! it said across the top, and below that were the words
Dr Brown of World Renown
in smoky, languorous lettering that might have looked mystical and exotic if it weren’t for the cheap and tawdry effect of the colour-washed sketch below: a bird’s-eye glimpse of a carnival spread out in an open field: vast coasters and whirlabouts, a Ferris wheel with a rainbow of coloured cars leaning off it at jaunty angles, wild-eyed, broad-faced people staggering out of a funhouse through the window of which peered a tilt-headed skeleton with jewels in its eyes, wearing a slouch hat.
    Jack studied it for a moment, then climbed back up into the loft to pull on his shoes. He unpegged the shutters and pushed them open, surprising a crow that had evidently been sitting on the sill. The bird was immense; it flapped there outside the open window, seeming to look in at him. Grasped in one claw was a gnarled little stick. The idea of it appealed to Jack – a crow with a walking stick. It circled round in a big loop out over the meadow before making away toward the coast. It flew astonishingly fast; it seemed to Jack that he could hear the creature’s wings beat the air even when it was nothing but a black dot silhouetted against the blue-green of the sea beyond Table Bluffs.
    On the bluffs themselves stood the half-erected scaffolding of the Ferris wheel, and across the meadows was strewn a litter of mechanical debris – the angular, disjointed skeletons of the curious carnival rides depicted in the poster that Jack still clutched in his hand. He grabbed his hat and set out. Coffee could wait.
    There was a vast migration of hermit crabs that morning, all of them scuttling south down the beach, up the rocks, around the headland, then out into the shallows again and up onto the long strand that stretched nearly to the town of Scotia. By late afternoon there was a more or less continual line of the creatures, all of them wearing seashell hats and bound for unguessable destinations. Skeezix spent the morning on the beach, chasing the things down and dropping them into gunnysacks for Dr Jensen. The doctor himself called a halt to the collecting at noon, when it became clear that the creatures intended simply to
walk
to the city and that his Bending down a cartload would be pointless. The coals, apparently, were walking to Newcastle. There was a limit, it seemed to Dr Jensen, to the hermit crab market.
    Besides, as the day wore on, the crabs seemed to be growing in size. The first trickle of crabs on the beach had involved periwinkle-housed creatures no bigger than a thumbnail. By ten the crabs sported conch shells of varying sizes, some as big as rabbits,