Something in the performance with the Eye had drained him, he felt, and perhaps had also energized him in some new way, which he considered might account for the spell that had overcome him when caning Josh Breed. He had no explanation for the women in white. Then the shock of finding the Clutters, and all the questions their grisly situation called forth! It was all such a jumble, and yet he sensed that just to the edge of his mind’s sight was an explanation that brought it all together. The hint of it toyed with him for a while, as he lay clutching his bag of precious items on the hard bedroll in the skin-smelling tepee that kept the night damp at bay.
For a few moments he listened to his parents’ emphatic whispering, trying to clear his head—trying to feel the protective presence of Lodema and to imagine where his beloved Hattie was, hoping she was out of danger and knowing that almost certainly she was not. It was in this anxious, exhausted, wondering state that a dream began to enfold him.
He had the idea that he was hunting for Hattie, trapped inside a giant music box. The inside of the box was like an empty theater he had peered into in St. Louis. Hattie was hidden somewhere within, but he could not find her; she was being held prisoner by a man like Junius Rutherford with mechanical crab-claw hands. Then into the darkness of the empty seats there came a weird wind that brought with it a cloud of what looked like fireflies, luminous tiny insects that were so beautiful to behold that he wanted to reach out and touch them. But when he did they burned his hand like cinders. He swatted at them, trying to escape, and when he readjusted his eyes he saw that on every empty chair there now burned a sleek candle with even flames rising from them like the voting hands of some dire and unanimous congress. A door opened, and he saw a figure he took to be Hattie dragged from the theater and out into the light. He raced after them, feeling the scorching flecks of the insects against his face, hearing the hissing of the candles, like a religious chant.
He knew that he was still inside the music box, but it was much larger than he had first thought. The door of the theater opened into the street of a town, a ghost town lit by unknown means, like the lights he had seen in Mother Tongue’s grotto. Dead people were walking about as if in a trance. Skeletons and mechanical men and women, like a vast fair of haunted machines. There were folk dressed in historic costumes and all manner of fantastic creatures from out of fairy tales, while women in hoopskirts with the same porcelain mask for faces paraded past in silence.
In the dark of the windows he ran by, he glimpsed things like torture chambers—people getting their limbs removed, human bodies with the heads of other animals, pits full of reptiles with the faces of children. On and on he ran, trying to catch the man who had Hattie—or was it his sister?
Gradually, the light began to change, and he saw that the music box that he thought was a theater and then a town was like another kind of theater yet again. There were living people watching, pointing, ogling the sights—as if the entire maze he was lost in was but one huge medicine show. The people were in costumes of a type he had never seen before. Bright artificial colors, ridiculous shoes. Many of the women were baring obscene amounts of flesh, and everyone seemed obese. The more frantically he explored, the more disgusted he became, for he came to see and smell the overpowering aromas and quantities of the nauseous, tempting food they were devouring. Gorging like maniacs.
In the labyrinth of the automata ghost town, there were islands and lagoons where machine men dressed as pirates fought with swords and fired cannons. Somnolent blank princesses sang to birds and squirrels, whose mouths opened on hinges in perfect time. He saw riverboats like the kind he had ridden on, filled with talking dolls. All the living people were laughing at these distractions, stuffing food into their mouths as if they had never eaten before. The horror of it almost made him forget why he was there, what he