Land of Dreams Read Free Page B

long dancing shadow across his face and the open shutter opposite. He had a book in his hand, and when he saw who it was on the meadow below, he waved the book at them and then disappeared back inside – gone after his sweater and jacket, perhaps.
    In a moment he stood in the window again, hooking the iron hangers of his rope ladder over the windowsill. The tails of the ladder flopped to the ground, and Jack clambered down like a sailor down rigging. In a moment he was on the meadow. He hauled back on the end of the ladder, gave it a wavy sort of toss, and the hooks hopped off the windowsill. The entire ladder dropped onto the grass. Jack rolled it up and then ran around and tossed it in through the barn door, padlocking the big hasp afterwards. Skeezix liked the idea of Jack’s coming out by the window even though there was a door at hand. And he liked the idea of reading by candlelight. Jack could as easily have used a lantern, of course, but it wouldn’t have been the same. One did things right, thought Skeezix, or one might as well just go to bed. There wasn’t much to be said for common sense – or for anything common, for that matter.
    Skeezix had been right about old Willoughby, who, Jack insisted, wouldn’t be likely to waken until morning and so wouldn’t miss his wagon. In ten minutes they were rattling away down the road, the three of them wedged in together on the plank seat, bound for the cove through the dark and silent night. The sky by then was full of stars, veiled by ragged clouds, like tattered curtains fluttering through the open window of a room inhabited by fireflies.

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    T HERE WAS ENOUGH MOON to see by, but not to see well. Peebles could make out the dim shapes of cypress trees, bent and contorted like hunched creatures that might easily have crept out of the freshly opened grave before him – the grave he’d dug open by himself, blistering his hands until they bled. The trees bordered the cemetery where it crawled up into the hills, the farthest graves having disappeared long ago under a tangle of berry vines and lemon leaf, their tilted stones lost beneath moss and lichen. There was enough silver moonlight to throw shadows along the ground. The moon hung just above the horizon, and the shadows of more recently set gravestones stretched across the grass in stark black rectangles, making it seem to the boy, when he turned his head just so, that every grave was an open grave and every grave was empty.
    He licked his hand, vaguely enjoying the coppery taste of blood but feeling as if he were part of a nightmare, the sort of nightmare in which you dare not move for fear you might jostle things, perhaps, and be noticed by something you’d rather not be noticed by. But the wind cutting down out of the mountains to the east, slicing across the back of his neck and freezing his fingers, hadn’t at all a nightmare quality to it. You can’t feel the wind in a nightmare, but you could feel this wind; and he wouldn’t wake up in his bed and be able to turn over and see something else when he closed his eyes. There was a thrill in this, though – in the hovering death and darkness.
    He looked uneasily at the cypress trees. He could imagine something menacing in twisted limbs or bent stumps and in the creak of tree branches on the night wind. He couldn’t keep his eyes entirely away, either. They wandered, ever so little. He’d see things out of the corners of his eyes – things that shouldn’t be –and sometimes he had to glance at them straight on, just to know for sure. Here was a jumble of berry vines, almost luminous in the moonlight, that shifted in the wind like some loathsome thing from the deep woods put together out of leaves and sticks, creeping sideways inch by inch onto the open graveyard and sighing in the wind as if it mourned something dead.
    What he feared most was what they’d find in the coffin. The body had been buried for nearly twelve years. He’d heard that the hair of a