Free Land of Dreams by James P. Blaylock Page A

seen was worth remarking on, peered into their pipe bowls and shook their heads.
    Skeezix grinned at Jack. This was just the sort of thing Skeezix liked – bullies beating each other up. The two boys leaned on the railing, both of them animated by excitement and by the unspoken determination to stay on the balcony until they were chased away. The crowd was breaking up. The second man slogged out of the bay and strode away in disgrace when he found that his lady friend had abandoned him. After ten steps or so he turned and stared back at the dispersing crowd as if there was one last thing he intended to say to them, but that it was powerful language and might confound them. Then he made as if to shake his fist, but a roar of laughter at his expense made him think better of it. In ten minutes there was no one on the pier but fishermen, mending nets and coiling junk lines and drinking beer out of tin cups. The fisherman who’d lost his catch had put back out in his dory. Jack could see him hauling on the oars with a passion, disappearing around the little swerve of shore that angled out to form the mouth of the harbour.
    Just then, as the street fell into an early afternoon quiet, Miss Flees hurried out from under the pier, cutting across the mud toward the stand of overgrown pepper trees that had consumed the back yard of the abandoned taxidermist’s shop. Both boys watched, knowing she’d been lurking under the pier this last half hour. She carried a wet burlap sack clutched against her frog-coloured dress, as if whatever was in the sack might make a noise and give her away. And it seemed to Jack for a slice of a moment as if he could hear the twitter of small birds on the air, mingling with the whispered exhalations of the calliope and the screams of wheeling gulls.
    Jack and Skeezix grew tired of sitting on the balcony. They’d watched the street below for a while, but nothing much was going on. The villagers had already had a day’s worth of excitement and had gone back to work. Old Mrs White hung sheets out to dry in the back yard of her house beyond the taxidermist’s, and Skeezix insisted that they were corpse shrouds and would inflate with the night wind, haunting the countryside until morning. They weren’t though. Maybe they’d be more when the moon rose above the mountains at midnight, but at the moment they were only sheets, not worth anything at all in the way of entertainment – even imaginary entertainment. Then Mrs Barlow’s dog ran through one of the sheets and yanked it out of its clothespins, and that was pretty good, though it only lasted a minute. After that there was nothing for a long time. A half hour passed, and they heard MacWilt yell a couple of times. Then he smashed out of the tavern and hung the CLOSED sign on the door. For a moment it seemed that something would come of MacWilt’s raging that would serve to enliven the afternoon, but actually MacWilt rarely did anything
but
rage, and so his antics were simply tiresome.
    They decided, finally, to stroll up to the orphanage and find Helen, who was sure to be up in the attic painting ‘views’, as she called them. She wouldn’t tolerate interruptions in the morning, but now it was well after noon. Maybe they’d bring her something to eat in order to make the interruption seem worthwhile. They’d make fun of her paintings, of course, although they had admitted to each other any of a number of times that the paintings really were very good. Jack couldn’t get over that Helen could make a brush or a pencil or a piece of charcoal do whatever she wanted it to do. She could make the cheekbones of a face look like cheekbones, with shadows and glints exactly where they ought to be; or, even better, where you wouldn’t have expected them to be, so they’d lend the face a surprising expression, and you couldn’t quite define what it meant or exactly where it came from.
    Jack had tried his hand at it. Helen owned a tablet of enormous sheets