Dreamhunter Duet: Dreamquake Part 13

Her cousin pulled at her, but Rose stood firm.

"Don't be scared," said Laura. "He won't hurt you."

"No. No. No," Rose said, and wriggled to shake off Laura's grip. But she didn't make any move to go back up to the house.

Laura let go and faced Rose. "You wanted to know. This is the only way you are ever going to come near to knowing."

Rose said, "I've seen it. I can believe my eyes."

"You should meet him."

Rose could feel the blood in her head-indignation, fear, and fury. She told her cousin, "People don't meet monsters. No one offers introductions to monsters."

"Aren't you even curious?"

Rose was quiet, thinking about that. Laura waited, looking so anxious for approval that Rose wanted to smack her. Rose began down the path again. Laura gave a little gasp of relief and darted on ahead, searching the trees. Rose felt she was out walking a silly young dog.

Laura's monster was hiding in the filmy gloom under a tall weeping willow. At first it was hard to see, utterly still, and of a dun shade similar to the tree trunk. But when Laura flung the willow fronds aside, it stirred, and the light scintillated on its sandy skin. Rose saw Laura take one of its hands, her fist closing around a big thumb. She drew the monster out.

Rose backed away as it approached. Laura was between them, her face glowing with love, but the monster was so huge, so competent in its movements, so uncanny, that Rose could not hold her ground.

"This is Rose," Laura said to her monster, who continued to look down on the top of Laura's head, then into her face as she turned back and glowed up at it.

"She looks so proud of me you'd think she'd made me too," Rose said. She heard how steady her voice was and felt a little braver.

Laura laughed. She said to her monster, "Were the rivers and streams a problem on your way back?"

"It hasn't rained, and they are smaller," the monster replied.

Rose thought that no one could ever mistake that voice for human. It was too dry. There was no moisture, no flesh, involved in it. The sound wasn't even animal-yet those were words. Rose shivered but continued to stand her ground.

"Let your cousin go back to the house," the monster said. "You must have things you need to tell me, Laura."

Laura looked disappointed, as if she'd hoped they would all sit down together and have a conversation. She looked at Rose, then back up at her monster. "But the things I have to tell you are about discoveries Rose has made. We think that the Regulatory Body has built a rail line into the Place. We thought that you and I should go look at it, and see where it goes."

The monster did not move its eyes. It didn't glance up at Rose for confirmation, as any person would have. It hadn't looked at her at all, she was sure. The only indication she had that it knew she was there was that it had spoken to Laura about her. It wasn't as though the monster was being rude; Rose didn't feel snubbed, as she would have if a person had treated her this way. She just felt that she wasn't the monster's business-that she was so not its business that her existence was minimal to it. "Laura," she said, "you talk. You make plans."

"Am I to set out somewhere?" the monster said, to Laura."Tonight will be safer than today. Where shall we meet?"

Laura clutched the monster's arm and pulled. It didn't lean into her. It was immovable. Her feet slid on the gritty ground till she was pressed against its side. "Don't go right away," she said. "You just came."

"I said tonight, not today."

"You must be tired."

"Now you are being silly, Laura."

Laura laughed again. She sounded very happy.

Rose said to her cousin, "I will leave you to give your-sandman-directions." Then, "He does follow orders, doesn't he?"

"Oh," Laura said, and laughed some more. Then she collected herself and said, "Well, obviously. He's here, isn't he?"

"Here," thought Rose, "and shouldn't be. Shouldn't exist." But she said, "I'll leave you to talk." She backed away from the willow. She kept backing, kept the monster in sight for a time before turning and hurrying up the hill to the house.

IV.

The Depot.

1.

EN DAYS LATER, LAURA MADE HER RENDEZVOUS WITH NOWN A LITTLE EAST OF THE LAST REGULAR TRAIN STOP AT Mora.s.s River. They began their journey, weaving In and out across the border. Inside, they tramped through dry but untouched and upstanding meadows, Nown going before Laura and treading the stalks down. The going was easy. Every few minutes they would stop and listen for signs of other travelers. The trail was deserted.

As they went, Laura gazed Inland, across the gra.s.slands to a line of low hills, all in graduated shades of beige. Sometimes she turned her eyes toward what she could see beyond the border, an endless haze of meadow that faded away to a creamy sky. Laura knew that if she walked in that direction she would cross back into the green world. But, as she gazed, she began to imagine facing a second kind of Try, in which she would find that the reliable border had vanished, and she'd never be able to get out again. She saw this so clearly that she had to check, to walk toward the border- -where she found herself on a path that ran along a bluff above one of the many brilliant blue coves in Coal Bay's notched curve. The sun was hot and had raised all the perfume of the forest.

Nown stepped out beside her. Almost onto her, since she hadn't moved to make room for him. She teetered, and he caught and steadied her.

A light wind was hissing through the scrub and flax between the track and the coast. The sea was calm, the waves idle and sleepy. But it seemed noisy after the Place. Laura said, "We won't hear anyone coming along this track. We'll be caught. And your eyesight is better in there, isn't it?" She said all this but didn't really want to go back In.

"It's only because there's less to see that people are highly visible there," Nown said. "Laura, we'll make better progress on this side of the border. And if I carry you, then you can listen while I walk."

Of course Laura went to sleep in Nown's arms and didn't wake till his gait changed. He was stepping from boulder to boulder along a beach heaped with stones ranging from fist-sized to elephantine. "I think I'll stay where I am for now," Laura said, and tightened her arms around his neck. "Don't drop me." She knew he wouldn't, said it only to savor how safe she felt.

Nown said, "I want to beat the tide. To get around that headland before the sea comes up."

Laura wondered what it was like for him, stalking along the edge of a sea that was invisible to him except as a hole in the world, a void that gradually came up to engulf the path on which he made his way. She asked, "Does the sea frighten you?"

"The tide is reliable. And none of these bluffs is too steep to climb."

"But doesn't it unnerve you? Don't you feel threatened? Don't you think, 'What if a big wave comes?'"

"No," Nown said. "I don't know that I have an imagination." He gripped Laura firmly and vaulted up a rocky spur in several strides, launching himself across gaps lined with kelp and thickly beaded with green-lipped mussels. A high swell pushed into a gap and, white with trapped air, lunged at Nown's legs. Laura squeezed her eyes closed and pressed her face against his gritty neck.

By late afternoon they had rounded the headland at the western end of the Awa Inlet. The tide was still high, and they faced a wide sweep of water. Far away across the Inlet was the lacework of a railway trestle across a river. Beyond that they could see the thick forest in the rain shadow at the back of the Inlet and, against the dark hills, the blond stone of the Doran summer house, shining in the low sun.

"We should go as far as that long bridge over the river mouth, then turn back In," Laura said. "If I sleep soon, I can be up again before midnight. And I'm sure we can get from the bridge to the house between four and dawn, at your speed."

Nown pointed at the water directly below them, at a channel, blue between two submerged sandbars. "What is that?"

"I don't know what you mean," Laura said, looking at it. Then she realized. "Oh, d.a.m.n-there are two rivers. That's the Sva going out through the reedbeds way over there. The Rifleman must be hidden behind this headland. I've gone past here in the train dozens of times, but it all looks different." She could see that the water in the channel was moving very fast. Even if they waited for the tide to go all the way out, the river would still be there, pushing against the cliff on the far side of the headland.

"The channel is a colder nothingness," Nown said, to explain how he'd picked out the river from the surrounding seawater. "It is even more nothing."

Laura said, "The rail line is in a tunnel here. After the tunnel it runs along a ledge above the river and turns onto a bridge." She pointed at the hill they stood on. "The tunnel runs through this hill, and the bridge must be just beyond it."

She knew the view out the train windows very well, the long curve of graded track that pa.s.sed down a channel of rock roughly formed by dynamite, then chiseled out by the pickaxes of-she now knew-convict laborers. The bridge over the Rifleman was iron, and very strong. It had to be. The Rifleman was a short river, fed by streams draining from a range of rainy mountains. It arrived at the sea swift, chilly, and full. Ten miles farther along the rail line was the other, bleached-ironwood structure, which picked its way across the braided channels and low sandbanks of the Sva mouth. The Sva where it reached the sea was a much gentler river than the Rifleman, its stream hastened only a little as its valley narrowed between the foothills and solitary Mount Kahaugh.

Laura said, "Put me down."

Nown lowered her to the ground, and she leaned against him and stretched and shook her legs to get her blood moving again. Then she took his hand to encourage him and began to scramble up the hill through the scrub, grabbing at the slender trunks of Hebes and brilliant waxed sea laurel. She let go of Nown to haul herself up the steepest part of the slope. She could hear him following her, the foliage making a flinty sc.r.a.ping against his hardened body.

Laura reached the top of the hill and went on carefully after that, peering till she saw where the scrub abruptly came to an end. She crept forward and arrived at a drop. She craned over and saw the brick b.u.t.tresses of the tunnel mouth and the railway line twenty-five feet below.

She turned to Nown. "If we climb down beside the tunnel,we can go along the track and cross the bridge. It's the quickest route." Then, "Can you see in the dark?"

"I don't know dark, Laura. 'Dark' is what you say to explain not being able to see."

"Oh," said Laura. She lay down on her stomach, unscrewed the copper cap of her water bottle, and held the bottle under a steadily dripping fringe of moss. Her arm tired, but she managed to get a drink.

"I have water," Nown said, and shook one of the two big skins he carried.

"I'll need that later, when we go In."

Laura rolled back from the bluff and onto her sandman's feet. She pulled at his arm to let him know she wanted him to sit. He folded himself carefully into the little s.p.a.ce there was, branches snapping as he lowered himself onto them. "I'm going to sleep for a while," Laura said. "Please make sure I don't roll off the drop."

He lifted one leg and placed it, crooked, over her body. She rearranged herself, her back to the drop and her head pillowed on his other foot. She said, sleepy, "You know to stay still, don't you?"

"Yes, Laura."

She closed her eyes and let herself drift off.

Laura slept for a few hours and woke up, stiff and cold. The sun had gone, and Nown was nearly the same temperature as the air. It was summer, but she had let herself fall asleep on the ground without wrapping herself in her bedroll.

Though all the sunset color had gone, the sky in the west had a pithy pallor, and there was still enough light for Nown and Laura to climb safely down the bluff onto the track.

The tunnel mouth breathed at their backs, smelling of wet brick and coal smoke.

They began on down the long, shallow incline of the track. Both were walking as far from the drop as they could, Laura leading and Nown following. They stepped from tie to tie and built up quite a rhythm, hurrying, only sometimes steadying themselves against a pickax-pockmarked rock of the cliff face.

They reached the place where the track turned away from the cliff. It ran onto an iron trestle that curved to join the span of the rail bridge. There was nowhere to pause and step off the track. Still, Laura put her hand back to halt Nown. He stopped instantly at her touch, didn't blunder into her as most people would have. She glanced back and saw him frozen with one foot raised. He looked like a photograph of himself.

Laura listened to the night. She couldn't hear the river. The tide was high, slack, and silent. She heard one of the little rain-forest owls giving its two-note cry. She heard oyster-catchers out over the Inlet. She didn't hear any trains.

Laura stepped onto the bridge. It wasn't a very long span, probably no more than fifty yards. It was easier to walk on than the track by the cliff had been; there were girders under the timber ties of the bridge, a firm skin of rivet-studded iron. It was a good surface, and Laura hurried.

Then she stopped again to listen. The headland behind them was booming. Laura looked back at Nown, her eyes wide.

An engine burst from the tunnel, braked on the incline, and came sliding and panting down the track toward them.

Laura took off. She closed the distance between herself and safety-but then her foot slipped and she sprawled across the tracks, slamming her elbow hard. Her arm lost all feeling, then seemed to fizzle back into existence as if it was breaking out of a numbing foam.

Nown reached her, scooped her up, and ran with her. She saw the train over his shoulder, looming onto the bridge, its light sweeping an engine length ahead of its long cowcatcher. Laura screamed. Nown swerved off the tracks and pushed her through two crisscrossed girders onto the outside of the bridge. He stretched up and over one girder to lower her onto another that jutted from the plane of the bridge. Laura's feet touched the girder, then took her weight. She stood balanced. She tried to pull herself free from Nown's grip. Her arms were stretched over her head, wrists closed together in one of his hands. She could see his face through a gap in the bridge structure, close to her own and sidelit by the growing yellow light of the train. She shouted at him. "Get off the bridge!" She couldn't hear hear own voice over the thunder of the train.

Nown released her arms, and she folded up into a crouch, her palms and boot soles clinging to the girder. The bridge was jolting under her.

Nown stooped and began to ooze through the gap below the one he had rolled her through. Laura saw his head and arms emerge whole and shapely, then his chest and hips follow, extruded like icing piped through a square nozzle.

Laura closed her eyes against the glare of the engine. The train sounded its whistle, then blasted past. She was sprayed with sand. The train's violent jolting dislodged her from the girder. She slipped, scrabbled for a hold, then dropped off. She opened her eyes as she fell, glimpsed the underside of the bridge and a cloud of sand fanning out into the air and already drawing back in thickening eddies toward the shadow that was Nown.

Laura fell into the river. It was cold and salty. Her eardrums stabbed with pain, and her back felt slapped red even through her jacket and shirt. Her pack and bedroll were pulling her down, so she wriggled out of the straps, let her pack go, and kicked up to the surface. She blinked the water out of her eyes and looked back at the bridge.

Nown was visible, in silhouette, backlit by the flashing yellow squares of carriage windows and the straight, sweeping shadows of the bridge structure. He seemed to be poised, looking her way, as if about to jump into the water after her.

She opened her mouth and shouted at him. "No!" Then she realized as she shouted that Nown might imagine she was calling for help. She trod water for a moment longer, then turned and struck out at an angle for the far bank. She headed away from the middle of the stream and-she could tell by the solid power of the water-the current pushing by the bluff and out to sea, even against the full tide.

The train had pa.s.sed over the bridge. Its thunder diminished. Laura stopped swimming and looked back again. Nown was still there, leaning out over the water, looking after her. Laura swam on.

Suddenly there was a solid shelf under her hands; her hands first, her feet couldn't seem to find it, as if it really was a ledge rather than the bank. It couldn't be the bank anyway-Laura could see the bank, still some twenty yards from where she was, a pale beach scalloped by the river and tide and topped by a tangle of driftwood. But there was something under her hands, something solid and strangely furry, like thick dust. She heaved and scrambled up onto it. The crown of her head was touched by heat, then she tumbled out into the bright, diffuse light of the Place. She was soaking, and water ran from her hair and clothes and made thick fawn mud of the dusty ground she lay on.

Laura stood up. She started to laugh. She stood, dripping and hiccuping with mirth. Of course she had known that the bridge was built as far upriver as it could be without crossing the border, but she hadn't imagined that the train line she had traveled on so many times, back and forth to Summerfort, was only yards from that border.

She gave herself a good shake. She wondered how far she'd have to walk along the border to clear the river. She made an arbitrary decision-an hour would do it. Before she set out, she held her watch to her ear and was relieved to hear it making its usual sharp, dry tick-it hadn't been damaged by its dunking.

2.

AURA STAYED IN LONG ENOUGH TO DRY OFF. SHE FINALLY EMERGED ABOVE THE BEACH BY THE RIVER. THE TIDE had dropped and the moon come up. Laura could see the river's current muscled in the moonlight.

Nown unfolded from the beach, shedding sand that wasn't his. As he came toward her, Laura saw at once that he was a little shorter and more slender than before. "Did the train hit you?" she asked.

"My feet," he said. "I lost some of them." He spoke as though he were a centipede and had plenty to spare. "The train carried part of my feet away with it. When I continued along the track, I found some sand-but I couldn't persuade it that it was me anymore."

"You look younger," Laura said.

Nown's head reared back with surprise. "How?"

"Less bulky, I suppose." Laura ran a hand down his arm. She stepped close to him to measure herself against him. The top of her head had formerly come to his sternum; now it came to his collarbone.

Nown said, "I saw you disappear. But I was sure that you didn't go under-then certain of it when I went on."

"Went on where?"

"Went on existing, Laura. I waited not to exist-though I did think you had gone into the Place, not under the river. Then, when I did go on existing, I went on walking too, along the bridge to look for the rest of my feet."

Laura shook her head. They were always having these strange conversations. She asked him, "Do you still have the water skins?"