Land of Dreams by James P. Blaylock

Author:James P. Blaylock [Blaylock, James P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781936535606
Publisher: Jabberwocky Literary Agency
Published: 2012-06-18T06:00:00+00:00

9

WHEN THE CAT had chased him out through the crack in the barn wall he’d almost got lost in the high grass. Thank goodness the barn door had been closed and the cat trapped inside. There were few advantages to being three inches high, and even fewer when you were three inches high and growing at such a rate as to make your mouse costume nearly choke you before you’d had enough time to do what it was you had to do and then slip away unsuspected. He should have borrowed a different costume, that was the truth of it, something cats hated.

He’d found his way to the river, though, out behind Willoughby’s farm, and he’d hitched a ride downstream on a log, climbing ashore unseen, thank goodness, and finding rags of clothes in the taxidermist’s. They fitted him now like the clothes of an ordinary man would fit a midget – which was exactly the case, of course. He’d started to grow in earnest, and if he hung round for another hour they’d fit better, but he wasn’t concerned with fashion; he had things to do and he hadn’t much time left to do them in.

He’d sneaked down to the wharves and scraped tar from the pilings, and he’d got dandelions easily enough from the yard. There were enough dishes and pots and the like in the old taxidermist’s shop to brew the stuff up. It wouldn’t be any real trouble at all; he knew that – he’d seen himself do it once, hadn’t he? He wished there was time to brew more, but there wasn’t. He would have to make do. A little batch for himself, a batch for Jensen, a batch for the man who in a few minutes would come in through the door and who would very badly want more.

There he was now. A hand shoved in through the broken window and pawed at the inside of the door, finding and pulling back the lock. The door swung to. In stepped a giant, nearly eight feet tall, but shrinking, of course, just as he himself was growing. In an hour, if the man were around that long, his clothes might fit too. And he would be around that long – an hour and a little more, wearing another man’s too-small clothes. Then he’d be on his way into the past, to try and fail to find the four-year-old Jack Portland at Willoughby’s boarded-up farm, to visit Viola Langley, to journey forward again and deliver the elixir, finally, and be chased by a cat into the tall grass and slip into the river and end up here, in the abandoned taxidermist’s shop, brewing up another batch of elixir, in a hurry now. All these unscheduled stops ate away at the few remaining precious hours of the Solstice; and his most important work still lay ahead.

He paused for a moment in the melting of the lumpy tar, remembering his wife. In a few hours, if everything worked .

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