Land of Dreams by James P. Blaylock

rivers or what might be cloud drift, red clay roofs rising out of thickets of trunkless trees, high windows looking out on meadows that stretched into nothing, into the deep blue mirror of the heavens. It wasn’t the city they’d seen, but it floated in the same enchanted sky, tinted with twilight colours.
    ‘Forget the soup,’ said Jack, pulling up a chair. ‘We can eat at my place later.’
    Uncharacteristically, Skeezix nodded, fetching a chair for himself. ‘Then we can eat again at Dr Jensen’s, after we show him this book and tell him about MacWilt and the glasses.’
    ‘Shut up about food,’ said Helen, ‘and listen to this: “Ours is one of many worlds,” ’ she read, starting at the top of the first page, ‘ “of millions of worlds, unending numbers of worlds, all the same and all different, all of them spinning past each other like the shadows of stars. We fancy ourselves alone in time and space, conceited as we are, and it is during the Solstice that we are reminded of just how inconsiderable we are in the vast eyes of eternity – an insight that should cause us to laugh at ourselves, but doesn’t. The mind, instead, freezes at the thought, and we go clambering after some means of fleeing from the little tract of countryside on which we have mapped our existence. Some of us are successful. Some of us are destroyed.”’
    ‘Some of us are mystified,’ said Skeezix, stepping back across the floor to have another look down the vent.
    ‘You’re mystified about everything,’ said Helen, ‘unless it’s on a plate. This is simple as pie.’
    Skeezix grimaced. ‘I wish it
was
pie. We all
knew
that something happens during the Solstice. It’s like during a hot wind; everyone’s on edge. People skulking in alleys and on rooftops. Voices in the night. Villagers babbling in funny languages. And the carnival train on the ruined tracks – where did it come from? What happened to it? What did MacWilt think he’d see? That’s what I want to know. What
did
he see?’
    ‘I bet he saw his own face,’ said Helen, ‘reflected in the spectacles. Imagine what that would have done to him. Imagine what it would do
to you
. Look at this and shut up. This is all about legends concerning these “many worlds”, as she calls them –’
    ‘Who?’ asked Skeezix.
    ‘Pardon me?’
    ‘Who is
she?’
    Helen looked up and grinned. ‘Guess.’
    Skeezix shook his head tiredly, as if he couldn’t be, bothered with it. Helen knew that he was bursting to know. So was Jack, but Jack wasn’t as much fun to bait as was Skeezix. Helen acted as if she were satisfied with Skeezix’s pretended indifference. She grinned at him, turned a page, and began to read silently. Jack peered over her shoulder, not half so mystified, in truth, as Skeezix had claimed to be.
    Jack was used to mysteries. He’d known for years that there had been odd circumstances surrounding his father’s death – or disappearance, whatever it was – that had been kept from him, perhaps because Willoughby didn’t entirely understand them himself; perhaps because Dr Jensen thought it safer. And it wasn’t just the bare facts of the business. He’d kept his ears open wide enough to have gleaned a fragment of the story here, a shard of it there. There was no shame in it - at least not in his eyes. That his mother had been loved or sought after by a trio of men, including his father, was nothing to keep hidden. Dr Jensen had been one of those men. So what? Jack had known for years that she’d died four years after childbirth, and that his father had insisted the death was the deliberate doing of a doctor – one Algernon Harbin – who had, along with Dr Jensen, been an abandoned lover.
    The details of the murder on the bluffs at the Solstice carnival were scandalous enough to satisfy an entire village full of gossips, even when they were busy elsewhere – with MacWilt’s monster and the canary gypsy and the taxidermist’s son. Lars Portland