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

running wonderfully fast along the sand. At about noon a crab the size of a grown pig crept out of the green ocean, festooned with seaweed and making clacking sounds, as if someone were knocking together two lengths of dried bamboo.
    It went on that way for hours. The crabs chased both Skeezix and Dr Jensen from the beach and ripped one of the burlap bags to shreds, releasing the hundreds of smaller crabs within and herding them back into line and away south. Dr Jensen had gone home to get his brass spyglass and then come back to watch, hidden in the bushes beside the ruined railroad tracks on the cliff above. It seemed to him, when he put his ear to the hot, rusty steel of the tracks, that he could hear the distant roar of the old Flying Wizard as it plunged along into the north coast. But what he heard, obviously, was something more akin to the sound of the ocean in a seashell. Against that roar he could barely make out the faint
clack, clack, clack
of the migrating crabs, sounding weirdly metallic when telegraphed like that through the railroad tracks.
    The sky that same morning was deep blue, like evening, and Jack could see stars faintly luminous beyond the thin sunlight, so that the whole circle of the sky looked like the mouth of an upended bucket brimming with water and reflected stars. Jack walked along toward the bluffs, his hands in his pockets, hoping that he’d see Helen, who hadn’t been at Miss Flees’s when he’d stopped by. He heard in the village about the migration of crabs, so he knew where to find Skeezix. He heard too that a man had been murdered just after sunup, and that his body had been bled white and pitched off the cliffs into a tide pool. Dr Jensen himself had found it.
    Jack walked across the meadow toward the carnival, kicking his way through high autumn grass and listening to the silence of the ocean and the occasional ringing of hammers. The air barely moved. He wished he’d taken the time to go after Skeezix or made a greater effort to find Helen. Even Lantz would be good company. He felt suddenly lonely, on the meadow by himself, nothing around him but grass and wildflowers and the carnival, shrunk by distance.
    He had no idea on earth where he was going. There was really no carnival yet, nothing but half-built skeletons. But they drew him curiously, as if the jumble of debris was somehow magical, the product of enchantment, perhaps, and held him in thrall. He could have turned around and walked back the way he’d come, or he could have angled over toward the Coast Road and strolled south to where Skeezix almost certainly was messing around on the beach. It seemed to him, though, that the appearance of the carnival hadn’t been just a random happenstance; it had drifted in on the weather and the strange tides and on the colours that had stained the horizon and now tinted the sky.
    Only a handful of men worked to assemble the carnival rides, gaunt, pale, wretched-looking men in rumpled, ragged clothes, none of them talking. Two of them knocked together the framework of a wooden arch that spanned the dirt road from the beach, curving down into the weeds and ending there, as if it were a disattached gateway.
    Jack saw MacWilt suddenly, talking to a man he didn’t recognise. The stranger’s back was toward him. He had long, black hair that hung round his shoulders, and the skin of his hands was peculiarly sallow, the white of a fish too long out of water. He wore scuffed boots caked with mud, and he wore a black top coat, which, along with his black hair, gave him the appearance of a great black bird.
    The man turned to scowl at Jack, as if he’d expected him but didn’t half like it that he’d come. The scowl was replaced for a fragment of a second by a look half of recognition and half of surprise, as if he’d been caught out. Then once again there was a scowl, and a malicious scowl at that. Jack nodded and walked past, noting the long bullet scar on the man’s cheek. He kept his