Free Land of Dreams by James P. Blaylock Page B

of paper, and a wooden box too. It was very intricately built, this box, and full of slivers of charcoal and pastel chalk and tubes of oil paints half squeezed out. There were fifty brushes in it: fat, squat brushes made of sand-coloured hairs; long, tapered brushes, only a couple of strands thick at the ends and suitable, maybe, for painting eyelashes; and any number of conical, fluffy-looking brushes for daubing on skies. The paint box seemed magical to Jack, and the big grainy sheets of paper were full of promise. It seemed it must be true that, like magical amulets, the box and the paper would enchant his hand into cooperating, into painting what it was he saw in his mind.
    So once, with Helen’s encouragement and advice, he painted a tree that looked almost like a tree, especially if you stood across the room and squinted or, better yet, crossed your eyes so that there were two trees run together; then it had what Helen had called an ‘intriguing sense of dimension’. Skeezix suggested that it would be even better if you were blind, so it could have an intriguing sense of anything you wanted. Jack gave up on trees and painted a face, but with the eyes tilted, like a stiff wind had blown them haywire, The nose, to his great despair, turned out to be on sideways, even though it had seemed to him as if he were painting it on straight. Also, there wasn’t enough forehead on the face, which gave it an inexplicably idiotic look, and its ears stood away on either side like Christmas ornaments. Skeezix had been wonderfully happy with it, pointing out tirelessly what it was that made Jack ‘unique’ among artists. There hadn’t been any magic in the box or in the paper. The magic was in Helen.
    Jack and Skeezix wandered along now, kicking stones, taking the long way around. As they drew abreast of the mouth of a skinny little alley – Quartz Lane, it was called -they heard the wild clucking and squawking of a chicken. ‘Dogs,’ Skeezix said, and turned up the alley, meaning, Jack supposed, that dogs were worrying the chicken – something Skeezix wouldn’t stand for. Jack picked up a rock in either hand, and Skeezix picked up a stick, and the two of them trotted around the first bend, past a wooden fence covered with blooming passionflower vines. The alley was full of trash pitched over back fences: old straw ticks, cracked wagon wheels, garden tools that had broken and gone to rust. There was a stuffed chair that housed a nation of bugs and, beside it, a half dozen paint cans tilted on edge and spilling dirty paint that had dried months since.
    It didn’t sound like a dog to Jack. There was no growling, only the frantic clucking of the chicken, cut off, just then, in a screech that made both boys leap down the last few yards of alley and tear aside the tangle of vines from before a sort of little alcove between two tilting fences. There, kneeling amid brown leaves and crumpled newspaper, Peebles hacked away at the now dead chicken with a keyhole saw, pinning the bird to the dirt with his left hand. He jerked around and gaped at Jack and Skeezix, sweat standing out on his forehead, his eyes wide. He’d managed to haggle the chicken apart along its breastbone and seemed to be trying to empty its organs into a little cloth sack rolled open next to his knee.
    Neither Jack nor Skeezix spoke. Neither could believe what he saw. Peebles rocked back onto his feet and shuffled farther into the recesses of the alcove, stuttering out a jabber of syllables that were nonsense in the stillness of the alley. He goggled in fear at Skeezix, who couldn’t find any appropriate words but, instead, cocked his arm and swung his stick at a point an inch above Peebles’s head, smashing it into a wooden fence rail. Then he threw the stick down as if it were a serpent. ‘What –’ he said, then stopped, staring as Peebles, who, cowering away from him, jammed the chicken parts into the bloody sack and shoved the sack beneath his jacket.