Dreamhunter Duet: Dreamquake Part 16

Laura covered her mouth with her hand. She retched, and some of the water came back up from her gullet tainted with bile. She swallowed and tried to control herself.

Gavin went on. "There's my mother waiting for us-still in the best of health. And my grown children, favored by fortune, he prosperous, she generous. How foolish I was to worry about them. And the grandchildren-here they come up from the beach, the girls practicing cartwheels and the boys carrying the canoe paddles-"

"It's a dream, Gavin," Laura said, to put a stop to his rapturous chanting.

"A dream ..." His eyes flickered.

"Contentment," Laura said, guessing.

"Yes." His face cleared. Then he said, puzzled, "Don't you want to be happy?"

There was a clanging from one of the buildings. It sounded like a dinner bell. Gavin got up, dusted off his backside, and left without saying another word. Laura watched all the yellow-clad figures making their way, orderly and eager, toward the sound of the bell.

There was no fence around the compound. There was no need for one; the barefoot, captive dreamhunters wouldn't want to run away from decent food and the blessed company of the dream.

Before they had put her in the hut, the rangers had made Laura turn out her pockets. She'd said to them, sneering, "Do you suppose I'm carrying a lock pick? Or a knife?" But of course they'd been looking for Wakeful. Wakeful was what Laura wished she had now-the drug, or a lock pick, or a knife.

She knew that her captors had only to wait for her to sleep. Then they could ask her their questions. Once she had taken a print of the dream, and been drugged by its bliss, they would ask their questions and she'd answer them, trustingly. Nothing would matter. It would be a beautiful day, and she'd have the whole day ahead of her.

Before she could have second thoughts, Laura began to feed the oozy oatcakes through the bars; then she poured the tomato stuff out after them. As she did this, she whispered, "I don't want to be happy. I don't want to be happy." She didn't put the food in her slops bucket because the bucket was still empty and clean, and she might be tempted to take the food out again. Her captors might not be patient-she reasoned-they might drug her food to make her sleep sooner. Laura could still see how the smashed gates had looked. If they were her gates and she had found them and hadn't known how they'd been broken, she'd be very eager to find out as soon as possible.

Laura ate only the orange. She chose to believe that it was protected from tampering by its peel. She stopped whispering to herself as she ate but went on once she'd swallowed her last bite, in a slow-burning panic. "I don't want to be happy."

She moved to the window again to stare out into the gra.s.slands. She imagined she saw a far-off figure, a dark speck.But it was only a dust mote sliding down the surface of her eye.

Her mouth shaped his name.

A ranger found the food. He picked up the oatcakes and went away. The doctor appeared a few minutes later at her door. "You're being very stupid," he said. "Unless you want to answer our rather pressing questions now."

Laura shook her head and backed away from him.

He signaled to the rangers waiting behind him. The men stepped into the hut and grabbed her. The doctor advanced on her. He pulled a square, black leather case from the pocket of his white coat. He snapped its lid open. Laura glimpsed the gleaming gla.s.s and steel of hypodermic needles. "No!" she shrieked.

"No?" The doctor hesitated, the case open. He tilted it back and forth so that bubbles slid in the gla.s.s barrels of clear chemical.

"I'll be good, I'll eat, I'll lie down." She was babbling. Then she burst into tears. She sobbed in rage and fear, her voice dropped a full octave, and she said, "I'll kill you," sobbing.

"You'll be good, and you'll kill me?" the doctor said, cold and sweet. But he must have made a silent command too, for the rangers released her. Laura cowered away from them against the wall. Through the distortion of tears, she saw the doctor point down, at the mattress she was standing on. She obeyed him, lowering herself to her knees.

"I'll send in more food. It isn't drugged, Miss Hame. You'll sleep better with something in your stomach."

"Yes," Laura said. "Yes, all right." She held her hands out, palms up, pushing them away.

They left. She heard the bolt on the outside of the door slide into place. Someone gave it a rattle for good measure. Then it was quiet. She could hear footsteps, their feet in the yard, the occasional murmuring voice. She thought she could hear the other captives having dinner, the clack of spoons on enamelware. She covered her ears and squeezed her eyes shut and tried to push back the panic that was threatening to annihilate her, prematurely, since Contentment was poised to wipe her out as soon as she slept. The dream would replace herself with itself, her desires with its self-satisfaction. It would replace her family with its family, its cartwheeling granddaughters.

Laura found herself singing. She sang to stay sane. She sang the school song of Founderston Girls' Academy, a song about striving and virtue and setting forth together. Then her voice trailed off, and she stared through the striped mattress cover in front of her.

She had come up with a plan.

The ranger sent to look in on Laura Hame stopped by her cell window and took a quick peek. He didn't know quite what he expected-to surprise her at something perhaps, but what?

The girl had her back to the window and didn't notice him. She was kneeling in one corner and seemed to be busy sweeping up the dust gathered in the angle of floor and wall. She was using her hands and was in danger of picking up splinters from the rough planks flooring the hut. The ranger thought, "So-she's decided to keep herself awake by doing housework." She looked like a penitent, on her knees and grubbing away at the dirt.

"It's futile, you know," he said.

She stopped what she was doing, stiffened, but didn't turn around.

The ranger waited for a moment, then went away.

When, over an hour later, he came back to check, the Hame girl was sitting cross-legged in the center of the room, with her back to the window. She'd removed her jacket and spread it out before her. The dust she'd swept up was gathered in a tiny pile on the jacket. This was odd, but he was rea.s.sured to see that she had in her hand the small, seedy loaf from her second plate of food.

"Good girl," he said.

She turned around and gave him a cold look. "Don't gloat," she said. Then, "My clothes are uncomfortable. I'd sleep better in a pair of those yellow pajamas everyone is wearing."

He went away and found a clean pair, a little too big for her, but she could roll up the sleeves and ankles. He returned to the hut and found her standing at the window. Over her shoulder he could see her jacket, lying humped in the middle of the room. There was no sign of her housekeeping dust pile. The bread was gone, the water cup empty and on its side.

He pushed the pajamas through the bars. She thanked him, and he went away once more.

The ranger stayed away over an hour. The next time he looked in on the Hame girl, she was still up but was in the pajamas-their yellow highly visible in the gloom of the hut.

She was singing.

The ranger opened his mouth and drew breath to say something to startle her; then a familiar, lovely odor hit his palate. The scent seemed to come billowing out through the bars in the window. Ozone-summer rain on warm earth. The ranger shook his head and shouted, "Girl!"

Laura Hame broke off her singing with a cough like a sob. Her shoulders slumped.

"Do you want me to tell the doctor to come and pay you a visit?"

"Go away!" she yelled. She didn't jump up or twist herself around. She spoke vehemently but only turned her head to look back over her shoulder. "I want to sleep," she said. "I have a sore stomach. I'm waiting for it to pa.s.s."

"Better be soon," he threatened, then went away once more.

Laura put her palms over her eyes to catch her tears. She rocked back and forth in her own darkness. There was only this to do. Either it would work or it wouldn't. She had to empty her mind of all fear and expectation. She had only to remember that it did work-that she, Laura, was already living in a world in which she'd succeeded at this already. The only rule was the spell. The only effort, faith.

She set her wet fingers on the drying surface of the little man she'd made out of dust and chewed bread. She made the surface of the mix tacky and pliable once more. She began to sing again, from the beginning: "The Measures," that chant made of Koine, demotic Greek; and nonsense sounds, glossolalia, the tongues of angels. Every word was different from the one before.

The power began to build and spin around her. She sang on in her tired, sweet, young voice, and, this time, no one came to interrupt her. When she finished singing, the room seemed to vibrate-it was so stuffed with energy. Laura picked up the second of two small, crescent-shaped slivers of fingernail, her own, and stooped over the tiny, tacky form of the bread-and-dust man. She scratched the letters onto the broadest part of his anatomy, his chest. The other bit of fingernail was already buried in that doughy chest, as a heart. Laura etched "N O W" but left off the final N. She didn't need him to speak to her, only to follow her orders.

For a second the tiny bread-and-dust figure lay inert. Then, suddenly, his stillness looked like surprise. He flexed his legs, got up, and turned his little, roughly formed face to hers.

Laura laughed and smiled down at him.

His attention was so focused and expectant that it pulled her out of her brief moment of rapt relief. "Look," she said. "I'll just go check the window to see how many people are out there. We need plenty of people in yellow, and fewer rangers. A while ago I heard a bell ringing at that building farther off-so perhaps the rangers are having their meal. I hope so." She bit her lip to stop talking. She didn't need to explain her whole situation. He was so tiny that she thought she'd better keep her instructions simple. "His brain can't be very big," she thought, nonsensically. Then she recalled that he didn't have a brain anyway, so maybe his size didn't determine his mental capacity.

Laura made herself stop thinking it all through. She went to the window, saw that there were now plenty of yellow-clad people around-as many as there had been when she first arrived, hours ago. Perhaps this was their daytime roster. The camp might very well run with a "day" and a "night" for the convenience of the rangers. So, it was "day," and there were people around. There were even a few wandering quite far from the camp-maybe as far as they'd ever want to go on the invisible leash of the dream.

Laura turned back to the room. She picked up her bread-and-dust man and put him on the windowsill between the bars. "I want you to jump down, run around the hut, and figure out how to climb up and unbolt the door."

The tiny Nown didn't hesitate. He jumped out the window. Laura heard the pattering sound he made landing. She didn't hear his footfalls.

She went to the door and waited. Eventually, she heard noises, as if someone with sticky fingers was touching the door. She put her ear to the wood and concentrated till she could hear that the noises were progressing up the outside surface. Then she was deafened by the rattle of the bolt. She pulled her ear back, and the door swung in, the little man riding it, his elbows locked around the loop of the bolt and his legs braced against its sleeve.

Laura poked her head around the door. A few of the yellow-clad people looked at her, some smiling but none with any real interest. She put out her hand, and the bread-and-dust man stepped onto her palm. She slipped him inside her shirt, where he clung like a lizard.

Laura stepped out of the hut and bolted the door behind her. Then she put her head down and ambled away, smiling to herself and swinging her arms as though she was filled with some private, sunny monologue. She imitated the other people. As she went past one of the tent dormitories, she petted its canvas wall. She walked in a weaving, indirect way, in the opposite direction from the isolated rangers' barracks. She didn't attempt to keep the rail line in sight-she would have to find it later.

She sat down for a time where the bare, beaten earth of the compound began to sprout gra.s.s again. She kept her back to the buildings and tried to look relaxed, drizzling dust through her fingers and talking to herself. Now and then she glanced back till-at one glance-she saw the buildings, the yellow-clad bodies, but no rangers nearby or facing her.

Laura immediately ducked down and stripped off the yellow pajama top and pants. She was still wearing her own clothes underneath. She pushed the pajamas down the front of her pants, then rolled and wriggled away into the thin gra.s.s, headed for the scrub. As she went, she rubbed herself in the dust-her face and hair, her dark pants and pale shirt-till she was as dun-colored as the ground she crawled along.

For a long time she slid from bush to bush. Her bread-and-dust man now nestled in the small of her back, holding on to her belt. The heels of her hands, her fingertips, and the skin on her feet dragged on the ground till they were sc.r.a.ped and burning. Her palms filled with splinters of dead vegetation. She didn't dare put her head up until she could no longer hear any noise from the Depot. Finally she got to her feet and, stooped over, hurried away.

It was hours before Laura let herself turn back toward the rail line. She took a course only tending in the direction where it lay. At every few steps she glanced around, looking for rangers on foot or riding on a handcar. When the handcar did appear, Laura was surprised how close it was. She threw herself down on the ground and lay completely still. Her bread-and-dust man tumbled off her back and lay still too, by her ear, with his cracked and drying hand against her cheek.

When Laura looked again, the handcar had traveled out of sight.

She went on, parallel to the railway. She just kept putting one foot in front of the other, hour after hour. She walked, straining her eyes, looking and looking for any sign, however far off, of The Pinnacles and the tower.

She slept for a time, but badly. She was thirsty and feverish.

A nosebleed woke her. The blood only oozed, sluggish and tacky. While she held her nostrils closed, trying to stanch it, her bread-and-dust man leaned against her knee and watched her.

"He knows where I am. Wherever I am," Laura said to him, in a pinched, croaking voice she scarcely recognized as her own.

Eventually she got up and went on, not noticing that she'd left the small man behind till she felt him leap and cling to the leg of her trousers. She scooped him up and put him on her shoulder.

She walked. Nothing moved but her. Hours went by, transparent, emptied out, even of time.

Laura's lips cracked. Her tongue gradually grew a coat of some thick, salty stuff. Then it began to swell.

Many hours later her bladder began to cramp. She fumbled at her trousers and squatted to urinate. It burned. There were only a few drops, and it went on burning deep inside her.

Laura sat down and cried-cried without producing tears.

The bread-and-dust man tugged on her hair.

She got up and went on.

Later-a long time later-Laura had a lucid moment. She thought: "I'll die unless I let the rangers find me." She lifted her head and took a good look around. She could see no sign of The Pinnacles, not even a smudge on the horizon. She turned and saw she had wandered close to the raised railbed. The steel lines were shining at her like water. She went toward them, clambered on all fours up the little slope and sat there, slumped.

Her bread-and-dust man scrambled off her and onto the railbed. He doubled up and pressed his whole little length against the steel.

Laura thought, "He's listening for a handcar." Then she lay down.

Someone touched her. It hurt. A hard something rasped across the stinging fissures on her mouth.

Wet parted her lips. At first she could taste only water on her tongue, then, as she took more, its true taste came-musty warm, stale water.

It was taken away from her before she was full. She croaked a complaint and drooped, her head lolling against the yielding, creaking arm that held her.

With a ghost of decision, she whispered, "I don't want to be happy."

She was lifted up. She was gathered in her loose skin, in her own weakness; she was gathered in his strength. She was lifted, cradled, carried in safety.

And they went so fast there was wind to cool her skin.

6.

AURA AND NOWN EMERGED FROM THE PLACE JUST WEST OF THE RAILWAY BRIDGE OVER THE SVA. IT WAS dawn, but the air seemed to cool only Laura's skin, not to reach the parched, burning core of her body. Her chilled skin had formed a sh.e.l.l around her. She'd lost touch with the world. She was being carried, but the movement seemed to pantomime walking. Perhaps Nown was only pretending to move. Yet, when Laura opened her eyes, she saw that they were farther out on the tide-bared sands of the Inlet.

Nown sat her down by a channel of the river and slid her forward so that her feet dangled in the stream. Its cold burned her blistered skin. She cried out and tried to flex her knees but was too weak to withdraw her legs from the water. Nown held her in place until her feet went numb. Then he picked her up again and carried her back to the train stop by the bridge. He put her down on the gravel of the raised railbed and lifted the metal flag that would signal the next train to stop. He came back, hunkered down, and drew Laura into his lap. "I have nothing with which to wrap your feet," he said, then, "From now on I'm going to put things that might be necessary to you into my body."

Laura puzzled over this remark but couldn't make any sense of it. Minutes later he said, "I've filled the water skin.The tide is going out and the stream flowing seaward, but its water might be tainted by salt. I wouldn't know. I can't taste it."

Laura tried to answer him but only croaked. It seemed to her in her fever that her sandman was brooding on his shortcomings. The water skin pushed against her. She fumbled for it with her hands and scabbed mouth, but it was too heavy for her to lift. Nown raised it and eased the nozzle into her mouth. The water was a little salty, but Laura liked its taste. Perhaps she needed salt.

"Not too much at once," Nown said, and they had a little tussle, she clinging to the skin and he trying to take it away without upsetting her. The water gushed out onto her face and shirt. Laura felt the cascading coolness, then the panicked scuttling motion of the creature who-all this time-had ridden clinging to the inside of her shirt. Laura's bread-and-dust man emerged, clambered up her, finding handholds on her collarbone, then the ends of her hair. For a moment he swung b.u.mping against her jaw, then Nown closed a fist around him and plucked him from her.

The bread-and-dust man surveyed Laura, the rail line, and the Inlet from his perch in Nown's fist. His mittlike, fingerless hands were folded across the top of Nown's thumb. His flat and vestigial face looked mild and perhaps curious.

Nown stretched back the arm that held the little creature, then punched it into his own chest. Laura had one glimpse of a tiny, gaping mouth and kicking legs, then both Nown's fist and the bread-and-dust man vanished, buried in the sandman's chest.

"No!" Laura rasped. She was horrified.

"It is better if there are not too many of us around at one time," Nown said. His buried wrist began to separate itself from the sand of his chest, and he withdrew his hand, whole and empty.

"Is two too many?" Laura's eyes were stinging, but no tears would come.

Nown didn't answer her.

"Why did you do that?" She knew he could hear her, however insubstantial her voice had become.

"There were too many of us."

"Is two too many?" she asked again, and again Nown didn't answer her.

"Can you do that?" she said. "Destroy him? Don't I have to do that?"

"It isn't destroyed; it is only swallowed."

Nown put his hand on the rail line. He announced that there was a train on its way. He set Laura on her feet by the train stop signal, then lifted her arm and hooked it around the signal pole. "Stay there. Stay standing," he said, then he left her. He picked his way down the embankment and strode along a reed-lined beach beside one channel of the river. Some distance from her he hunkered down and wrapped his arms around his legs, dropped his face onto his knees, and imitated a tide-worn stone.