2
THERE WAS ENOUGH MOON to see by, but not to see well. Peebles could make out the dim shapes of cypress trees, bent and contorted like hunched creatures that might easily have crept out of the freshly opened grave before him – the grave he’d dug open by himself, blistering his hands until they bled. The trees bordered the cemetery where it crawled up into the hills, the farthest graves having disappeared long ago under a tangle of berry vines and lemon leaf, their tilted stones lost beneath moss and lichen. There was enough silver moonlight to throw shadows along the ground. The moon hung just above the horizon, and the shadows of more recently set gravestones stretched across the grass in stark black rectangles, making it seem to the boy, when he turned his head just so, that every grave was an open grave and every grave was empty.
He licked his hand, vaguely enjoying the coppery taste of blood but feeling as if he were part of a nightmare, the sort of nightmare in which you dare not move for fear you might jostle things, perhaps, and be noticed by something you’d rather not be noticed by. But the wind cutting down out of the mountains to the east, slicing across the back of his neck and freezing his fingers, hadn’t at all a nightmare quality to it. You can’t feel the wind in a nightmare, but you could feel this wind; and he wouldn’t wake up in his bed and be able to turn over and see something else when he closed his eyes. There was a thrill in this, though – in the hovering death and darkness.
He looked uneasily at the cypress trees. He could imagine something menacing in twisted limbs or bent stumps and in the creak of tree branches on the night wind. He couldn’t keep his eyes entirely away, either. They wandered, ever so little. He’d see things out of the corners of his eyes – things that shouldn’t be –and sometimes he had to glance at them straight on, just to know for sure. Here was a jumble of berry vines, almost luminous in the moonlight, that shifted in the wind like some loathsome thing from the deep woods put together out of leaves and sticks, creeping sideways inch by inch onto the open graveyard and sighing in the wind as if it mourned something dead.
What he feared most was what they’d find in the coffin. The body had been buried for nearly twelve years. He’d heard that the hair of a corpse continues to grow even after the bones are dry and brittle and old. Now and then, when the Eel River rose in flood, it washed open hillside graves, and the skeletons that tumbled out into the muddy current to go clacking away to sea had hair that wisped around the bones of their shoulders and in which was tangled the trinkets they were buried with.
There was a curse right then and the sound of a spade ringing against iron coffin handles and then scuffing off across pine boards. The man standing waist deep in the grave before him wore a black topcoat with cuffed sleeves. His hair fell dark and oily around his shoulders. Judging from the grey pallor of his bearded face, he might have been dead himself for a week and then dug up and animated.
The boy, who leaned on a shovel above and half hid his eyes and who was stricken with terror now that the coffin had at last been unearthed, was even more frightened of the man in the grave, whom he despised. Unlike the moon shadows round about them and the sighing of things on the wind, he was a flesh-and-blood horror. Though he was weak, as if he were starving and tired and ill, his eyes were dark and deadly. But he had offered Peebles something – hadn’t he –that would make it worth the terror and more.
The man cursed again and then hissed something through his teeth.
‘What?’
‘I said, give me the bar. Are you deaf?’
Peebles said nothing but picked up an iron crowbar that lay in the damp grass and handed it to the man, who looked back fiercely, as if he’d just as soon kill the boy right there and have done with him. The man bent back to his work, levering the crowbar under the coffin lid. There was the squeak of rusty nails pried loose and the scratch and scrape of the iron bar when the rotted wood of the lid snapped and broke away. The man cursed again and slammed the curved end of the crowbar into the lid smashing and smashing it until the night rang with the blows and the man gasped for breath and there was nothing left of the coffin lid but splintered fragments still fixed by long casing nails to the edge grain of the coffin’s side.
Peebles looked away as a cloud shaded the moon. The trees above him faded into blackness and the shadows of gravestones slowly disappeared. A drop of rain plinked down onto his hand, which grasped the shovel so hard that it shook. Another drop fell, and then another. In an hour the gravel road out of the cemetery would be a muddy rill that would bog the wheels of their cart in mire, and he’d find himself trudging the two miles home in a downpour. He pushed his glasses up onto his nose, shaded his forehead in an effort to keep the glasses dry, and looked back at the black-coated man, who stood beside the grave now, scowling and grinning in turn, as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to be insanely happy or insanely angry.
Peebles peered into the grave, imagining the gumless teeth, the empty sockets, the wisps of greyed hair, the dusty and worm-eaten clothing slumped across the xylophone curve of rib cage. It was a horrifying thought, to be sure, but it was fascinating too. Something in him loved the idea of death and decay. He’d found a book once on a high shelf in the village bookshop, and in it were sketches of instruments of torture and of dead men hanging from gibbets. He’d torn the pictures out and kept them, fearful they’d be found and hating the people who might find them because it was their fault – wasn’t it? – that he had to live in fear of being discovered. Those were just pictures, though, and what lay in the grave, dead these long years, wouldn’t be a picture.
He bent closer, relishing the anticipated shock of horror. What he saw was a disappointment. The skeleton lay buried beneath scattered debris. And it hadn’t any webby, overgrown hair. The flesh had returned to dust, and even the bone seemed to be crumbling, so that the skeleton lay in mouldering pieces, like an instructive illustration from an archaeology textbook.
What lay in the coffin was simply too thoroughly dead to be frightening. There was no rotted flesh, no grinning zombie, just the slowly vanishing remains of a man long dead and forgotten, lying beneath a heap of books and glassware as if beneath the earthquake-tumbled contents of a room set up for alchemical study. There were broken sheets of tinted isinglass and a half-dozen conical beakers. There were fragments of rolled copper and a length of glass tubing shoved in among the rest like a spear. There was a crockery jar big enough to hold a severed head, and in it was the cracked bust of a fierce-looking bearded man, whose jaw and left ear had been broken away. Scattered throughout were long-necked, unlabelled wine bottles.
The man in the topcoat crouched at the edge of the grave, silent now and stroking his chin. Peebles edged closer, gaping at the lumber in the cracked coffin and tugging his coat closer around his shoulders to keep out the rain. The moon appeared again like a lamp suddenly unveiled, and moonlight shone for a moment off the curved glass of a heavy, almost opaque bottle that was still half full of some dark liquid. The man leaned in and plucked out a book that seemed to have been bent by dampness. The pages were glued together, and the outside cover pulled away from the spine, as if worms, having reduced the corpse to a papery hulk, had gone to work on the leather binding. On the first page of the book, scrawled across the top in black ink, was the inscription To Lars Portland, from Jensen and then the month and day of a year twenty-five years past.
The book tumbled out of the pale hands and fell into the grave, sliding down the dirt incline and jolting to a stop against the half-filled bottle. ‘What are you gaping at!’ cried the man, turning toward the face of the boy, who read over his shoulder. Peebles stumbled back, catching his heel on the spade that he still held, falling over backward onto the wet grass. The man laughed low in his throat and shook his head; then he reached again into the grave, hauled out the bottle, sniffed at it, and threw it end over end into the night.
He plucked out the skull next and peered, at it intently, thumping his finger against the top of the thing’s cranium. The brittle bone splintered under his nail, as if it were a termite-eaten husk of wood. He took it between his two hands and shredded it, letting the brittle teeth clatter down into the grave, and then he threw the fragments in after it. ‘Dead a thousand years,’ he muttered, and then he shook, as if from a chill.
The cemetery was lit just then by lightning through clouds, and with the boom of thunder that followed came a sudden downpour. The man arose without a word and slouched tiredly around the grass, tramping on graves with his boots and pulling his hat over his forehead. The boy watched for a moment, then sprang up and grappled with the shovels and crowbar and with a heavy pick, dragging the lot of them along in the man’s wake until he caught up. The man struck him in the face with the back of his hand, tore the muddy tools out of his hands, and flung them away. Then, looking at the cowering boy, he said, ‘What do we want with stolen tools?’ as if his explanation would justify his hard treatment, and he helped the boy roughly into the cart before climbing in himself and taking up the reins. They clattered away toward the Coast Road, a peal of wild laughter howling away behind them on the wind; then the sound of a racking cough followed the laughter, with a string of curses to bind it all together. The graveyard, in moments, lay empty and dark beneath the cloud-veiled moon, and the rain beat down onto the moss and grasses and pooled up until it ran in little rivulets down the hill toward the sea, some of it edging into the mouth of the freshly opened grave and pouring over onto the strange litter of glass and books and bones and alchemical debris like a rising tide of seawater submerging the curious inhabitants of a long-evaporated tide pool.
The shoe still sat on the night-dark sand like a beached whale. They drove the wagon down onto the slick, packed dirt of the beach road, blocked the wheels, and put a feedbag on the horse. There wasn’t much time; it was past midnight, and they’d want to be at the doctor’s by two if they were going to wangle a meal out of Mrs Jensen. Helen didn’t much care about eating in the middle of the night, but it appealed a little bit to Jack and especially to Skeezix, whose stomach felt at the moment like a collapsed balloon. He wished he’d brought a lunch, but he hadn’t, so there was nothing to do but hurry.
Jack set a hooded lantern on a driftwood burl, so that the light was shining down onto the shoe, and then all three of them started bailing water out of it with milk buckets. Big as the shoe was, though, more than anything else they got into each other’s way, and when Helen splashed a bucketful of seawater down the back of Skeezix’s trouser leg, he quit and went away mad to hunt up driftwood to use as sleds.
The heel end of the shoe angled away uphill, so they emptied it first, and then tried heaving the toe end up into the air in order to dump the rest of the water onto the sand. But Helen and Jack couldn’t budge it. When Skeezix appeared out of the darkness dragging long, waterworn timbers in each hand, he tried tilting the shoe with them, but it still wouldn’t move. They shoved one of the timbers – an immense broken oar, it seemed, from a monumental wrecked rowboat – in under the toe and then wedged the other timber under it, levering away at the first until the heel edged around and down the hill. They inched it along, burying their fulcrum timber in the soft beach sand and pulling it out and resetting it and burying it again, until water rushed from the toe to the heel. Then they bailed it clean, shoved it farther, bailed once more, and then pushed the shoe entirely over onto its side, ocean water cascading out past the tongue and the laces and the heel edge along with a school of silvery fish that flopped and wriggled on the wet sand.
Helen plucked up the fish and dropped them into her bucket. Then, realizing that the bucket was dry, she ran down to where the waves foamed up along the beach and waded out ankle deep, scooping up water and then running back up to where Skeezix and Jack were busy yanking the shoe over onto the two timbers.
‘Leave off there, can’t you?’ shouted Skeezix, who was still mad about his pants.
‘I’ve got to save these fish.’
Skeezix gave her an exasperated look, a look which said that there was no time to save fish, but she acted like she hadn’t seen it and went right along with her task. Groaning aloud, as if he’d never understand girls like Helen, Skeezix quit messing with the shoe and started picking up fish himself, dropping them into Helen’s bucket with exaggerated care so as to let her know that, although he had more important work to do, he’d humour her for the sake of her fish. Helen said thank you very politely each time he dumped in a fish, and then she started to pretend that the fish were saying thank you, and she made the fish talk to Skeezix in high, burbling voices, like bubbles through water. Skeezix made a threatening gesture, as if he were going to eat one of the fish – bite its head right off and swallow it raw.
Helen ignored him, turned, and walked down once again to the water, emptying the several dozen fish into a receding wave. Skeezix ran along after and pitched his in too. Then, with a clever look on his face, he said something to Helen about her not taking the bait, but a forked bolt of lightning and a simultaneous crack of thunder buried her equally clever reply, and both of them ran back toward the shoe, hunkering down now under a fresh torrent of rain, which washed in on the driven wind, beating on the surface of the sea and soaking them through in moments.
They debated taking shelter in the cavern in the cliff, but that seemed pointless – they were already as wet as they were likely to be that night– and the longer the shoe sat in the rain, the more water it would catch and the heavier it would be. So they slid it heel first over the timbers, all the way across and down onto the beach, where it pushed up a sort of bow wave of sand and lodged there, its sad, seaweedy laces trailing along on either side.
‘We need two more boards,’ Helen announced, and immediately all three of them went off searching, Jack carrying the lantern in such a way as to keep rain out of the shade, playing the feeble light over the dark beach. There were any number of snags of driftwood, none of which would do them any good at all, tangled as they were, with any useful boards trapped beneath stumps and branches and half buried in sand. Then, just when searching any farther began to seem pointless, Skeezix found a sort of graveyard of old railroad ties, tumbled from the ridge above. They dragged two free. With the rain beating into their faces and the surf roaring against the rocky edge of the cove, they hauled them back toward where the shoe lay beyond a veil of falling water.
None of them questioned the foolishness of their mission. Here was a beaten and water-soaked shoe, after all, useless to anyone but a giant. But there were no giants living on the coast, or anywhere else, as far as any of them knew for sure. It was a shoe which, come morning, would still be sitting on the beach–had they left it alone – and so didn’t, perhaps, require their slogging through wet sand and cold rain at past midnight.
There was something wonderful, though, in doing useless work. You could turn it into a sort of art. They’d spent the better part of a day and night once building a fortified sand castle on that very beach. Dr Jensen had promised an eight-foot tide the following morning, and they’d calculated how high to build the castle so as to assure its doom. There was no grandeur in a sand castle that was safe from the tide. They’d built a wall around it of stones carried in buckets from the rocky shingle to the south, and inside they’d dug a waist-deep moat, and then, between the moat and the castle, they’d set a line of stakes driven two feet into the sand and they’d woven kelp strands through the stakes, along with whatever sorts of flotsam looked likely to stop an ounce or two of encroaching seawater.
They’d worked at it until late in the night and then slept above the beach in the cavern. All three had awakened past midnight to work again on the sand castle in the light of the moon, and they were still working – building a city of minarets and domes and trowelled avenues beyond the castle – when the eastern sky had paled with the dawn and the moon had disappeared beyond the watery horizon after lying for a moment like a smoky island on the sea. They had watched from the cavern as the tide swirled up the beach, but they were too tired by then to be anything but silently happy when the rocks and the moat and the wall held up against the first onslaught of waves. More waves had followed, marching up in long straight lines out of the dark ocean, nibbling away at the sand beneath the rocky wall, collapsing the woven sticks in a heap, filling the moat and cascading across the towers and spires and domes and flooding subterranean tunnels. In something under a minute there had been nothing on the beach but a vague mound of wet sand like the back of a turtle and a little fan-shaped tumble of smooth stones and sticks.
They were twenty yards from the shoe when the shriek of a train whistle erupted from the hill above. Skeezix shouted in surprise and dropped the end of the timber he’d been dragging along the sand with both hands. Jack threw his down, too, and with Helen at his heels set out at a hunched run for the cavern. They climbed the sandstone slope, slipping and clutching and hauling themselves into the mouth of the cavern and out of the rain. From there they could just see, misty and pale through the curtain of falling drops, the train trestle where it crossed above the stream eighty feet farther down the beach.
The train tracks were a ruin, and had been for as long as any of them could remember. They were rust-pitted and twisted, and a good many of the ties had long ago fallen prey to termites and to sliding hillsides. But there was something in the night, in the rain and the wind and the tide, in the dark bulk of the giant shoe that sat like a behemoth on the sand, that made the impossible appearance of the train seem half expected.
Years ago there had been a northbound coastal train, the Flying Wizard, from San Francisco to the south and all the way up from subtropical border towns before that. The population of the north coast had dwindled, though, over time. And in the rainy season, water off the coastal mountains crumbled cliff sides and swept train trestles and tracks into the heaving ocean below. The tracks fell into disrepair. The train – strangely – had run anyway during the Solstice twelve years earlier, but it had never been settled whether the tracks had been hastily repaired for that last journey or whether it had been a miracle that brought the train and the Solstice carnival to Rio Dell and Moonvale.
There was another whistle blast and the screech of brakes, and from where Jack crouched in the cavern he could see steam roiling from beneath the cars. The train was slowing. It wound around a curve of track, appearing for the moment that it took to clatter across the trestle, then almost at once disappearing beyond the rain and the redwoods that climbed down the hill toward the sea. One by one the hazy cars lurched past, dark and low and open and freighted with strange, angular machinery.
‘What is it?’ Skeezix whispered, referring not to the train but to the junk heaped in the cars.
Jack shook his head, realizing suddenly that he was shaking with cold too. Wind off the ocean sailed straight into the cavern, swirled round in back of it, then sailed out again. It was drier than it had been on the open beach, but at least there they’d had their minds on something other than the cold and wet. The chill seemed to have come with the train, carried, perhaps, on the steam that whirled away into the misty night. They could hear that the train had stopped, although they could no longer see it, and Jack supposed he could hear the soft chuffing of the waiting engine, even though the wind was blowing in the opposite direction.
‘Carnival stuff,’ Helen whispered.
Skeezix jumped, as if Helen had poked him in the ribs. ‘What?’
‘On the train. That arched framework was a Ferris wheel, and there was one car piled with little cars of some sort. Didn’t you see that?’
‘Yes,’ Jack said, because he had seen it, although he hadn’t any idea what he was looking at. Helen came from down south, from San Francisco, and she would have seen carnivals. But there hadn’t been any such thing on the north coast since the last Solstice, and Jack had been too young to remember it much. What had happened there, though, at the carnival, was something he couldn’t entirely forget, ever –even though there were times when he might have wished to. He’d seen pictures of carnivals in library books, and he knew well enough what a Ferris wheel was. Seeing one in a book, all put together and lit up and with the rest of the carnival laid out below, was a different thing from seeing the dim pieces of one dismantled and howling past in a distant, darkened train.
‘Why’re they stopping at the bottom of the grade, do you suppose?’ asked Skeezix, whispering just loud enough to be heard above the rain. Neither Jack nor Helen answered, since they didn’t know, so Skeezix replied to his own question. ‘Some sort of mechanical trouble, I bet. We could ride down the 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 looked around when they grazed as if they heard someone approaching across the open fields, even though nothing could be seen but the long grass rippling in the wind or the shadow of a passing cloud.
Two days earlier Jack had awakened in the middle of the night to the sound of a cow lowing in the barn below, and he’d thrown open the window thinking that someone was prowling around out in the darkness. He’d seen nothing but night shadows and the moonlit meadow with the forest and hills rising beyond. Low on the horizon, though, out beyond Moonvale, the sky had been alive with a flickering of lights like an electric storm – except that the lights were faintly coloured, blue and azure and green, and there was no thunder, not even distant thunder, only a silence hanging in the air like a storm about to break. Rain began to fall then. It seemed to wash the sky clean as if it were a watercolour painting.
Later that night he’d heard the sound of a voice. He’d awakened to find no one at all nearby, only a mouse scuttling away across roof joists. But it stopped some distance out onto the span to look back at him, standing oddly on its hind legs, regarding him curiously. Then the following morning he’d made an odd discovery: his bathwater, when he pulled the plug, dumped straightaway down the drain, over the edge and gone, like in an old drawing of ocean water falling off the edge of the flat earth. It ought to have swirled around, creating a little vortex, but it didn’t. The Solstice had that sort of effect; it altered things, sometimes for a couple of weeks, sometimes for ever. He’d forgotten about it, though. There were cows to milk and hay to be forked, and he was off that afternoon with Helen and Skeezix to take food and clothes to Lantz, a scatterbrained friend of theirs who lived alone in a shack on the meadow above the sea.
Lantz might have lived at Miss Flees’s, had he wanted to. The village would pay for it. But he liked solitude better. He kept a menagerie of stuffed animals, too, bug-eaten and falling to ruin, which he talked to in low voices and which he’d got when Riley’s taxidermy shut down for want of business. Lantz looked just a little bit like one of his animals–tall and stooped and ragged, like the stuffing was coming out of him – and he walked in a loose, disjointed sort of way that would have made Miss Flees shout to see it. As far as conversation went, he accomplished more with his stuffed creatures, probably, than he did with anyone who spoke out loud.
Although he might have stayed at Miss Flees’s, he wasn’t exactly an orphan, or at least no one was certain that he was an orphan. Some said that he was the son of MacWilt, the taverner, and a hunchbacked gypsy woman who had kept birds in the attic rooms above the tavern. Years earlier you could hear her singing to the canaries on warm summer evenings, high trilling songs that sounded eastern, somehow, and ancient, like they were being sung in the tongues of the birds themselves. It had been discovered one day that a boy lived there among the birds, a mute, it was thought, although later it turned out that Lantz had simply never been taught to speak any language other than the language of the canaries. MacWilt insisted that the child was a foundling whom he’d given to the gypsy woman, along with a certain monthly sum, just out of the kindness of his heart. This last had become a sort of joke for days, people insisting that the story must be a lie, since MacWilt was widely known to lack such an article of anatomy.
Beneath the joke was a certain amount of scandal. It was true – MacWilt would no more house a foundling or feed a gypsy than he’d give a gold piece to a beggar, which is to say never. The woman died, some said in childbirth, when Lantz was eight, and there was a brief, wicked rumour that the unlikely offspring had been a monster and that MacWilt himself had borrowed a skiff, rowed three miles out to sea in a calm, and cast it into the deep ocean. Some went so far as to whisper that he’d murdered the woman himself, out of sheer horror, but it had never been proved.
Lantz, though, fled into the woods and stayed there, and village children brought him what he needed to stay alive. He avoided the village, although he sometimes helped Skeezix fish for tide-pool animals, and now and then Mrs Jensen hiked out to his shack above the bluffs with a basket of food. Helen one time had brought him a caged canary, but Lantz had fled in horror at the sight of it and they hadn’t seen him after that for months.
It was all very strange, and the later at night Jack thought about it, the stranger it seemed. There was no profit in thinking after midnight. Some little bit of the darkness slipped in and cast shadows across what ought to be commonplace details and events. The late hour changed their countenance in subtle ways until you began to see patterns in the stones in the tumbled countryside of your mind, patterns that were the vague outlines of almost recognizable shapes.
Jack shook the sleep out of his head. Mrs Jensen was laying the remains of an apple pie on the table, and beside it a pitcher of cream and a cold joint of beef and a great wedge of cheese. Skeezix nodded to Helen by way of politeness and then sat down and helped himself to the beef and cheese. The sight of Skeezix eating swept the doubts and suspicions and vagaries out of Jack’s mind. There was something about an apple pie, he thought as he sat down at the table, that made a mockery of late-night fears. But as he ate it, sleepy and drying out in front of the Are, he couldn’t quite rid his thoughts of the sound of the moving wind and the pattering rain.