Land of Dreams Read Free Page A

not if you wanted to sleep that night.
    The story was a lie and Helen knew it. Dr Jensen had
heard
of such a creature – almost everyone had. He’d travelled by rail up to Lilyfield where it had been netted by a butterfly collector, a man named Kettering, with whom Dr Jensen had gone to school. Where it had come from neither of them could say, from some distant land, perhaps, on a wind out of the east. Mr Kettering’s cats got in through an open window one night and shredded the creature’s wings until it resembled a tired kite that had hung through the autumn in the branches of a tree. It wasn’t worth much to anyone after that. All that was left of it, really, was the bug part. Even a scientist like Kettering was repelled by such an enormity.
    Helen told Skeezix that he was a fool; Dr Jensen had never owned the butterfly and everyone knew it. In fact, most people wondered if the whole story weren’t a lie. There was an awful lot about Dr Jensen that people wondered about, and that was why almost no one, except people who hadn’t any money, went to Dr Jensen when they were sick or hurt. He could set a bone as well as the next doctor, of course, but he’d set it in an office that looked like a museum – an office full of bins of dried tide-pool animals and moths and beetles and the skins of snakes. And he had the jawbone of a skull on his mantel – a skull that he’d fairly clearly dummied up out of plaster of Paris and dirt, for the thing was the size of a barrel hoop smashed in half and had teeth in it like ivory playing cards. There was a certain amount of suspicion in the village that Dr Jensen’s interest in the enormous spectacles was feigned, and some went so far as to suggest that he’d had the glasses built on one of his trips south and had tossed them into the tide pool himself and then arranged to have them found. Why he would have done such a thing they didn’t know. He was a lunatic, some said, and that was reason enough.
    Skeezix waved his hand at Helen, who had got to him by talking that way about Dr Jensen. He’d been teasing her by avoiding the subject of the night’s mystery, and now she’d got back at him. The doctor
had
to have the bins full of odd stuff, Skeezix said, in order to sell it down south to the biological supply houses in San Francisco and Monterey, because there wasn’t enough money in doctoring to make it pay – not on the north coast, there wasn’t. Helen said if he cleared the stuff out of his house maybe he’d get a little bit of business from people who didn’t want to hobnob with salamanders and toads when they were getting their tonsils yanked out, and then Skeezix said she didn’t understand anything at all, and after that he wouldn’t talk. They were at Jack’s by then anyway, so Helen gouged him in the side and slugged him on the arm in order to show him she was just kidding. Of course she understood everything. Peebles wouldn’t have – that was certain. But Helen had the right instincts, as had Jack, and Skeezix knew that, and Helen knew that he knew. She’d proven, though, that she could irritate him as easily as he could irritate her, and so things had ended well.
    Jack Portland lived on Willoughby’s farm. No one else lived there except old Willoughby, who had been a friend of Jack’s father – no one else unless you counted the cows and the cats. Skeezix and Helen threw rocks at the shutters high up in the barn loft, and Skeezix called Jack’s name in a sort of shouted whisper. There wasn’t any real reason to be sneaking about like that, since farmer Willoughby would be snoring beside his pint glass by then anyway and wouldn’t care about them even if he weren’t. But the night was dark and windy and full of portent, and Skeezix was anxious that everything be done right.
    After a half dozen rocks the shutters opened and Jack looked out. They could see that a candle burned on the table beside him, and the dark cylinder of his telescope formed a