Land of Dreams Read Online Free PDF Page B

Coast Road and have a look.’
    ‘I’m freezing,’ said Helen. ‘If I’m riding anywhere, it’s home to bed. None of us knows anything about that train, and that’s fine with me. It’s got no business stopping here. It’s got no business
being
here. If we’re lucky, it will be gone before we’ve reached the Coast Road, let alone driven around to the bluffs, which is where it is now, from the sound of it.’
    After that, both she and Jack stepped out into the rain and skidded down the wet scree to the beach, where they picked up the railroad ties and lugged them along to the shoe. Jack watched Helen carry the timber across her shoulder, balancing it there like it was nothing. He admired that. She was beautiful with her dark, wet hair and musty wool sweater. She saw him watching her, and he looked away in embarrassment, dropping his timber onto the beach and then grappling it back onto his shoulder, thankful that the rainy night would mask the colour in his face.
    Skeezix and Jack pulled and pushed and slid the shoe across the top of one pair of parallel timbers and onto the next, then stopped while Helen dragged the two abandoned timbers around and flopped them onto the sand, and so on until, cold and weary, they found themselves at the beach road, where the cart stood in the rain, the horse asleep. Jack shoved a railroad tie in front of the rear wheels just in case. Then the three of them lifted the toe of the shoe onto the back of the wagon. Helen and Skeezix held it firm while Jack ran around to the heel and put his shoulder against it to make sure it didn’t slide back off onto the road. His two friends joined him then, and together they lifted the shoe and pushed it entirely up onto the rain-slick cart until it bumped against the slats in front. The horse awoke with a whinny, shaking her head to clear her eyes. They tied the shoe to the side rails with the heavy, water-soaked laces, letting half the heel overhang the rear of the wagon.
    By quarter past two they were rattling Dr Jensen’s door knocker, and ten minutes later they stood shivering by his fire, watching Mrs Jensen light the oven and haul a pie out of the pantry. The fire hadn’t, thank goodness, burned down yet, since the doctor had gone to bed late, and the coals were so hot that it had taken no time at all to get the fire banked and roaring in the grate.
    They had hauled the shoe into the doctor’s carriage house, where there sat a number of other treasures with which it shared a strange affinity: a round, convex sheet of cracked glass, like the crystal of an impossible watch; a brass belt buckle the size of a casement window; and a cuff link that might easily have been a silver platter. The shoe was the best of the lot, though, for while the crystal and the belt buckle and the cuff link might have been tricked up by an enterprising craftsman intent on playing a prank on someone, the shoe hadn’t been. It had clearly been worn. It was down-at-heel to the point at which the sole tacks showed through, and it was scuffed and ragged about the toe, and there was a bulge in the side, as if it had been too small for the giant who had worn it and the side of his foot had pressed against it and stretched the leather out of shape.
    Dr Jensen was speechless with joy. It seemed to prove something to him, as did the unlikely appearance of the train, which troubled him too. But what it proved and how it troubled him he couldn’t entirely put into words. That didn’t matter to Skeezix, who didn’t much care for words right then anyway, and who had one eye on the lamplit kitchen window the entire time. But it bothered Jack.
    Something was happening, and it involved him. He was sure of it. Something had come with the rain. The air had shifted, it seemed, like a season turning. He could almost smell it on the breeze through the loft window in the morning. The ocean was restless. The wind blew day and night. The cattle were moody and suspicious, and they