Land of Unreason Read Free

Masefield.
     
                His mind swung lazily into
contemplation of the essential Tightness of choosing Masefield as the poet
laureate of this people, for whom he wished he could do something—then drifted
into a hazy picture of Masefield characters, all mingled with fairies, Kaja and
the Gurtons. He came to with a start, realizing that he had almost been asleep.
Without regrets, he drifted into a blankness of thoughts half formed ...
     
                Tik.
     
                The door hinge,
faintly, as though someone had moved the door through a few minutes of arc.
Then again—tik—tik—tik, tik tik, tiktiktik.
     
                Barber, fully awake now,
looked toward the door. It was open, and something coming through it. He
couldn't be sure in the gloom, but it looked like a face, an incredible face
that might have come from a comic strip. The loose lips were drawn back in a
grin so extended that the corners of the mouth were out of sight. For all
Barber could tell the grin went all the way round and met at the back, like
Humpty Dumpty's. The ears were pendulous; over the grin was a head utterly
hairless but bearing a pair of knobbed antennae.
     
                Oh, well, that, said
Fred Barber to himself, and with that strange double vision, outside and inside
of one's personality, that comes at the edge of sleep, felt certain he was
dreaming and slipped down into the blank again.
     
    -
     
     
     

CHAPTER
II
     
                He was lying on his side,
one arm curled under his head and blue moonlight all around him. Bright
moonlight: one could read newsprint in such an illumination, he reflected in
the first half second of returning consciousness, and then write to Ripley about
it. Somewhere in the "Believe It or Not" collections was the
statement that the feat was impossible. If ...
     
                He became aware that the
fingers of the hand underneath were touching grass and heaved himself to a
sitting posture, now bolt wide-awake. From beyond his own feet the face of the
dream was grinning under knobbed antennae, which pricked eagerly toward him
like the horns of a snail. Behind, Barber was conscious of other crowding
figures as he tried to concentrate on what Knob-horns was saying.
     
                "... mickle bit o'
work, moom." Knob-horns spread arms and let the hands dangle from a pair
of loose wrists, slightly swaying like a tight-rope walker. " 'E were that
'eavy. 'ic."
     
                There was a
little ripple of suppressed amusement behind Barber, with a clear contralto
voice rising out of it:
     
                "Wittold! Is't so you
were taught to address the Queen's Majesty? What said you?"
     
                The mobile features
regrouped themselves from a grin into an expression of comic and formidable
sullen-ness.
     
                "I said 'e were
'eavy."
     
                "Aye. One needs not
your ass's ears to have caught so much. But after that?"
     
                Barber swiveled. The
contralto belonged to a beauty, built on the ample lines of a show-girl chorus
he had once seen, justifiably advertised as the "Ten Titanic
Swede-hearts." He caught a glimpse of patrician nose, masterful chin, dark
hair on which rode a diadem with a glowing crescent in front.
     
     

                The being with the antennae
replied: "I said nowt after that, 'ic."
     
                Barber
experienced the odd sensation of being informed by some sixth sense that the
individual was not quite sure of his own veracity. The tall lady had no such
doubts:
     
                "Ah, 'tis time for a
shaping, indeed," she cried, "when my husband makes messengers of
louts that lie barefaced! What is't, I asked, some new form of address in mock
compliment from my gentle lord? You said Ic!"
     
                Antennae shifted
his feet, opened his mouth