Land of Dreams Read Free

the house. Miss Flees hated both of them. So did Peebles.
    After supper Skeezix went out through the window again. He’d catch it from Miss Flees in the morning. She’d keep an eye on his room for sure that night. But so what? What would she do to him, put him on half rations? He could live with Dr Jensen, couldn’t he? Except that would mean abandoning Helen to Miss Flees and Peebles, and he couldn’t do that. She was like his sister. He wasn’t half a block up the hill to Willoughby’s farm when Helen caught up with him.
    ‘Where are we going?’ she asked. But she knew the answer well enough; there was nothing beyond Willoughby’s farm but redwood groves and meadows choked in berry vines and skunk cabbage.
    ‘Only up to Jack’s.’
    ‘Then where?’
    Skeezix shrugged. He wasn’t certain he wanted a girl along on such a night – not with the storm threatening to break loose again and the sky full of bats and clouds and wind. ‘Just hanging out.’
    ‘You lie as badly as Peebles. You and Jack are up to something. What is it? I’m going to help.’ She pulled her coat around her more tightly and turned the collar up against die wind, which was blowing almost straight onshore and was heavy with misty sea salt.
    Actually, Skeezix was happy enough to have her along. He muttered something about girls out on a night like this, but Helen gave him a look and he shut up about it, grinning at her as if he’d said it just to provoke her, which, of course, was why he
had
said it. Higher up the hill, the wind blew along in gusts, kicking up newly fallen leaves as if it meant to sail them into the next county. But the leaves were heavy from days of rain, and they fell almost at once back onto the road and lay there dark and wet and glistening with moonlight. Creeks and rills flowed with muddy water. They’d continue to flow straight through until summer, all of them dropping finally into the Eel River, which, any day now if the rain kept up, would overflow its banks and flood the orchards and farmhouses in the lowlands along the coast. The Eel fanned out into little sandy islets and then disappeared into the ocean above Table Bluffs Beach, some miles up the Coast Road from the cove where Skeezix had found the shoe and where the enormous spectacles had washed up.
    Wild fuchsia bloomed in the shadows of hemlocks and alders along the road, but the startling purple and pink of the blossoms was washed colourless in the shadow. The mossy forest floor was like a saturated sponge, so Skeezix and Helen kept to the road, counting on the leafy carpet that lay upon it to keep mud off their shoes. All was silent but for the occasional patter of rain flurries and the moaning of wind in the top of the forest, and once, when the wind fell off and there was nothing in the air but the
drip, drip, drip
of water falling from tree branches, they could hear, distant and muted, the crash of breakers collapsing along the shore of the cove behind and below them. There wouldn’t be another high tide until almost morning. The shoe would be safe at least until then – plenty of time, it seemed to Skeezix, for the three of them to haul it away on a cart.
    He didn’t tell Helen about the shoe. She could hear about it when he told Jack. She tried to get it out of him, and that made him happy. Then she quit trying to get it out of him, and that made him happier yet, because he knew she was just pretending to be indifferent. So he shrugged and started talking about whether or not butterflies flew in the rain and, if they did, whether the dust that covered their wings would shed rainwater so they wouldn’t get saturated like wet leaves and end up as a part of the carpet on the roadway. Dr Jensen, he said, once owned a butterfly as big as an albatross that had beautiful aqua-blue wings with silver spots like raindrops in sunshine. Its body, though, was still the body of a bug – and a monstrous bug at that – and you couldn’t stand to look at it,