Dreamhunter Duet: Dreamquake Part 5

10.

AURA LEFT THE TEMPLE AFTER FIVE DAYS. SHE PROMISED NOT TO SLEEP ON THE TRAIN. SHE WAS ACCOMPANIED BY the nuns who had looked after her, and by Father Roy, who said-once they'd boarded the train and closed the door of their compartment-that they were going with her only as far as Westport.

"This is an express, isn't it?" Laura said. "I had hoped we'd stop at Aunt Marta's."

"Your aunt has been included in every decision made on your behalf," said Father Roy. "She knows where you're going." He watched the girl withdraw into a corner of the seat, then into the folds of her black winter coat. She looked like some animal backing into its burrow.

Shortly before the express pa.s.sed Marta Hame's stop, Laura got up and went out into the corridor.

Father Roy observed her.

She stood, her cheek laid on the window, and watched the stop come up. Her eyes were fixed on a hill near Marta Hame's house, a hill with a crest of black pines. Laura stared as the hill loomed, then flicked a glance at the compartment. Her eyes were bright and furtive. She left the window and hurried away along the jostling carriage.

Father Roy jumped up, threw open the compartment door, and ran after her. She was at the end of the carriage, hauling with her whole weight on the red-painted handle of the emergency brake-which, fortunately, had not been designed with a child's strength in mind.

Father Roy threw himself at Laura and tore her away from the handle. She turned on him, hitting him with her fists.

The sisters appeared and helped him subdue her as gently as they could. As they hustled her back into the compartment, her head turned to follow the sight of that hill, sliding from window to window, then retreating along the track.

They closed the compartment door and sat her down.

"I have to see him," she said.

"You will be allowed to write to your friends. So long as you're careful what you say," Father Roy told her. He thought, "And we will read your letters. And perhaps discover who is in this with you. Whose strength you're looking to now. Who the real Lazarus is."

II.

Foreigner's North.

1.

OUR WEEKS AFTER THE RAINBOW OPERA RIOT, SANDY MASON RECEIVED A LETTER. ITS ENVELOPE WAS POSTMARKED "Westport Central Post Office." The letter was sent care of Mrs. Lilley at Sandy's boardinghouse in Doorhandle, and he had to retrieve it under the watchful eye of his landlady's daughters.

The Lilley girls had a constant parade of young and homesick dreamhunters pa.s.s under their noses. They were choosy about whom they would pay special attention to, offer treats, and flirt with. Alexander Mason, at nineteen, already had one good dream registered in his name. He had good prospects, and the Lilley girls were determined to cultivate him. When the letter arrived, the sisters at once got their hands on it. They had a look at the handwriting on the envelope and decided that it was from "that Hame girl"-that sullen, flatchested thing whom Sandy Mason, for some unfathomable reason, admired. The Lilley girls didn't hide Laura's letter, for they were principled schemers. But they did make sure they were present when Sandy retrieved it from the stack of mail on the hall table so that they could watch his reaction.

Sandy Mason was big but sure-footed. And yet, the moment he glanced at the envelope, he stumbled and knocked his knee on the newel post. He stood frozen at the foot of the stairs and gazed at what he held in his hand. Then he tore the envelope open while bounding on up the steps. A second envelope dropped out on the landing, and he stooped to pick it up, then straightened slowly, staring at its address. Then he began to read the other pages while still stopped on the landing. His hand trembled. He walked slowly out of the Lilley girls' sight.

The girls' mother came out of her sitting room. "Was that Mr. Mason? Did he get his letter?"

"Yes, Mother."

Mrs. Lilley regarded her daughters sharply. They were at their most refined when dealing with-or even thinking about-Alexander Mason. She wasn't sure which one of them had decided to snare him, or whether they were still working it out.

"Mother?" said one. "Are Miss Hame's aunt and uncle still paying for her room?"

The letter was from Miss Hame, of course. Mrs. Lilley had recognized Laura's handwriting. "Yes. And that's their business-but I must say that girl's had the slowest start of any dreamhunter I've ever lodged." Mrs. Lilley went into her kitchen, leaving her girls in peace, and smirking at each other.

Laura's letter was careful, coded, and chatty.

Dear Sandy, I'm sorry I didn't have more to say to you last time we met. I just hadn't expected to see you there. I'm sorry for the trouble, and for any worry I caused you.

I am mostly quite contented just now. It is very peaceful here. And I keep myself busy. Today, for instance, we all took a cart out along the sh.o.r.e to pick up the seaweed that came up with the king tide on the last full moon. It's had a week now to dry and reduce. The men bale it up and store it all summer under the houses. It sits between the house piles in stiff tangles with shiny gla.s.s fishing buoys here and there among it. They use seaweed here as kindling and burn coal all winter. There's hardly any firewood.

I helped gather seaweed, but it was more my job to keep an eye on these two little girls-six and eight. They really know more than I do about (for example) the quicksand one should never walk on, or how one should never get between a sea lion and the sea. (There are sea lions resting up along the coast here. Sick or injured ones among them. We saw one seal yesterday with huge gashes from a shark, or a killer whale.) There's a big boy here too-actually, he's about my age but seems younger. He applauds diving gannets as if they are performing for him. He is a little odd and wrapped up in himself. He talks and talks and never seems to know when anyone has had enough. On the seaweed expedition, we girls were supposed to be having a nap under the cart, but he kept us awake telling us that this was why motorcars were no good and how Southland could never have been settled at all if people on the plains hadn't been able to take shelter under their wagons. He reminds me a little of you in that he is so full of information. But you are far better at imparting it!

I will write to Rose too, and Aunt Grace, but it is you I have chosen to trust with a task. I want you to do one thing for me. I want you to take the enclosed letter to a certain place. You must catch a train going out toward Westport and get off at the little station at Gla.s.s Eye Creek. Then walk up the road past my aunt Marta's house. As you come past the house, you will see a hill with a pine plantation on it. I want you to climb up to the forest and go a short way into the pines and leave the letter lying on the ground. Then go away immediately.

Will you do that? It would mean the world to me.

I promise that I will see you again before too long.

You are my dear and trusted friend.

Laura Sandy read the letter several times. He realized Laura had given him enough clues for him to guess that she might well be at the lighthouse on So Long Spit. But was she giving him directions? Did she want him to visit her?

As he stood reading, a blush of pleasure had crept through him, heating his skin and robbing his legs of strength. He sat down on his bed and turned his attention to the sealed envelope, which was addressed simply: "From Laura."

Sandy stared at the white square, the two black-inked words. From Laura-as if Laura was the only real attachment the intended recipient of the letter had in all the world.

Sandy thought, "Someone walks up to the wood every day to check for a message from Laura." But surely not Marta Hame, whom, after all, Laura had mentioned in her instructions for the letter's delivery.

Sandy's skin began to cool. He seemed to cool and congeal all over. He went sour, sitting there.

Eventually he got up, stuffed the unopened letter into his pocket, and went down to the kitchen, where he was fed tidbits by Mrs. Lilley and courted by her daughters, and where he helped peel potatoes till, finally, he was left alone with the steaming kettle.

Sandy held the envelope in the steam from the kettle's spout until the already dimpled paper dimpled more, and its glue softened. He unsealed the flap of the envelope, then fled upstairs, shut himself in his room, drew out the single sheet of paper, and unfolded it with hands shaking so violently that the Lilley girls would have been amazed by it-and frightened of him.

He read: I'm sorry to take so long to get word to you. They carried me away. Please come to me. I am where the boy on the sh.o.r.e was in the dream I told you about. My first dream.

I want you to come at once. I feel I must say "please" and call you "my dear" because you will no longer take orders from me.

My dear. Mine still. Please.

I should have gone with you. I should have listened to you on the train. I should have let you look after me. Without you I'm afraid of everything. I think I have put my heart outside of my body.

Partway through reading the letter, Sandy went cold, and his gorge rose, and he had to press his hand to his mouth. He tried to control himself but couldn't. A moment later he was groveling under his bed after his chamber pot, which he never used and which was covered in dust. He vomited into it. He stayed on his hands and knees till the retching had pa.s.sed. Then he began to cry, dropping clear tears into the mess of regurgitated tea and toast. He hadn't cried in years, so he did it perilously, like a busted machine whose cogs no longer meshed; painfully, straining his scalded throat; helplessly, because his feelings had him completely-grief, and jealousy as burning and bitter as acid.

2.

HE TROUBLEMAKER WAS TAKEN ON A LONG TRAIN JOURNEY FROM HIS PRISON IN CANNING TO ANOTHER, A PRISON at the end of a long pier. He knew he was in the north because it was warmer. Westport was where they sent all the hard men. Westport and the government mine.

The prison governor took a look at him, then he was left in his shackles, sitting before a desk in a locked room. After a time a man joined him: a man in a suit and bowler hat with one of those gold fraternity pins winking in his lapel. The man took off his hat, sat down, and studied the papers in the file he carried with him. Then he closed the file, folded his hands, fixed the troublemaking convict with the clouded jellies of his eyes, and began to talk. He talked about "the rehabilitation of an ailing character"; he talked about "criminality" and "being tempted to take shortcuts to prosperity." He talked about "the cleansing sweat of honest work." He said, "You have shown an antisocial resistance to what, however demanding, amounted to a course of treatment. And so your treatment must be more aggressive, and tailored to your particular difficulties."

The troublemaker's particular difficulty was that he didn't understand why this person was talking to him. Was the man a warden, or a doctor?

The man put his hat back on, gathered his papers, and left the room. The wardens returned and took the troublemaker to another solitary cell. This one had a barred window, a covered bucket, a table and chair-dinner already there, lukewarm but plenty of it-and a bed with a rolled mattress.

The convict ate. His tray was removed. Just before the lights went out, a warden came by and told him he could now unroll his mattress and go to bed. The convict liked the look of the mattress, it was thicker than any he'd had before, and they had given him an extra blanket, though it was the warmest night he'd felt in a long time.

He lay down. Whatever was to come next, the coal mine, or more puzzling talk, it wouldn't come till tomorrow.

The Lifer was part of a work gang that was building a bridge. For twenty years he had labored on the roads, in the coal mine at Westport, and at the copper mines on Shackle Island. He had worked till he couldn't straighten his fingers anymore. Now he was among men on lesser sentences-the odd character who had strangled all his neighbor's hens, a light-fingered storekeeper, and a young man who had smashed the window of a p.a.w.nbroker's shop in order to steal his own hocked violin. He was a murderer among milder men, but old and harmless now, and on easy work. The others laughed when he told them this. One asked, "What easy work is there these days even for free men-with convicts building all the roads and bridges? I started my sentence picking fruit. So who would pay wages to fruit pickers?"

There was something in this. When the Lifer had worked in the coal mine, the only free men were skilled labor engineers and those who set explosives. He told his fellow convicts this. Then they were all talking about the savings a mine owner made and profit pouring back into the penal system. "The whole country's a prison," said the violin thief. "I didn't know that before. But I won't forget it again."

The violin thief was a month from the end of his sentence. The guards trusted him. He was the one who got to work in the tent in the water meadow by the bridge site. They even trusted him to sharpen the mason's chisels. The thief was fresh that afternoon because he'd been in the mason's tent and out of the worst of the heat. (When he'd come back to the bridge he'd stood smiling at the Lifer while the guards reattached his shackles. The smile really wasn't for anyone, but only seemed to say, "Nearly now. I'm nearly free, nearly home.") The Lifer was faint with the heat. It was April, and the farmers in the valley had been burning stubble and the stumps of trees in fields freshly cut from the forest. Smoke hung over the valley and magnified the sun rather than filtered it. The Lifer asked for water. A guard brought the dipper. The water had a tang of burned blackwood. The old man tried to take his time but the dipper was s.n.a.t.c.hed out of his hands. Half the water splashed onto the ground.

"Get on with it," the guard said, and gave him a shove. The Lifer went back to work. He and the violin thief lifted another shaped block from a stack, checked its number, and carried it to the bal.u.s.trade, to the gap it was made to fit.

"Are you all right?" the young thief said.

And that was when it happened. The Lifer's head was swimming in the heat; his cramped hands were slippery with sweat and spilled water. His grip on the chiseled sandstone failed and instead of easing the stone into its slot, he let it go so that it slammed down on one corner. The thief's hands lost it too, and it teetered, then tipped over the rail and into the river. It disappeared into the weeds that grew on the river bottom. Weeds that flowed like combed hair in the channel and, nearer the bank, pressed against the surface of the water like hair bundled into a hairnet.

The guards heard the splash and came to look. They craned over the rail. "Where did it fall?" one asked.

"How do you suppose you are going to fetch that up out of there?" said another.

The guards pushed the Lifer and the thief, jostled them about between their fists and feet and rifle b.u.t.ts.

The mason appeared to inspect the damage. The stone beside the gap was cracked. "The one in the water is probably chipped too," he said. "They'll both have to be replaced."

"Do you hear that?" a guard said, and shoved the thief again. "You'll both have to be replaced."

"The stones," the mason said, dogged and irritated. "I meant the stones."

"We could have this sc.u.m wade in from the riverbank to get it out," said the overseer.

"Yes. I would like to take a look at it," the mason said.

"But if you're sure it's ruined ..." the thief began, and was struck in the mouth. He was quiet for a while after that, his top lip skewered by a broken tooth.

The guards turned on the Lifer and pushed him along the bridge and onto the road. He scuttled, pursued by blows, down the bank to the river's edge. He protected his head with his arms, then fell to his knees on the soggy ground and stared at the water. Its shallows were thick with curdled weeds. The thief dropped down beside him. The young man's chin and throat were coated red. Over their heads a guard said, "Which of you dropped the block?"

"It was him," said the young thief. "Look at his hands. He can't keep a firm hold on anything." He sounded desperate.

"All right, old man. Get in there." The guard put his boot in the small of the Lifer's back.

"Remove his shackles, for G.o.d's sake!" the young man pleaded.

"Fine," said a guard, "You can go, since you're so concerned for his well-being." The guard kicked the thief, who splashed into the water's edge and caught himself on his hands. Black mud oozed up between his fingers till his hands were buried. The young man turned to the guards, eyes glimmering with fear. He edged around so that his feet and shackled ankles entered the water first. He crept backward, his hands groping and slithering on the sopping turf. He was looking into the Lifer's eyes, and his gaze said, "No. Not now. Not when I'm nearly free."

When he was up to his hips in the weeds, his feet slipped. His eyes flared with terror and he sank his fingers into the turf. He heaved and grappled his way back up the bank, clawing the thick coating of moss from the ground. He came out wallowing in mud, his front coated and face dappled. He lay on the bank, gasping, his hands still full of gobs of mud. He stared at what was in his hands, his face quite mad for a moment, both horrified and exultant, as though he'd discovered them full of human flesh or the makings of a dreadful weapon.

The Lifer could see the thief's face, and his expression, but the guards couldn't. They were laughing, staggering with mirth, their feet slipping in the mire the thief had made. When they stopped laughing, they turned their attention to him. "Let's see how he does." They didn't even put it to him. Only agreed among themselves that it was his turn. Then they began to kick at him, not hard, only coaxing, but they didn't stop till he turned to try backing into the water.

"No!" The thief came to life, gave up nursing his handfuls of mud, shook his hands empty to reach-but was struck down.

The Lifer edged back into the river. The water was warmed by the sun, and by the vegetation. He went carefully, searching for safe footings. He went down in a fresh place, not in the muddy slot the thief had made in the bank. He looked over his shoulder and saw water textured by floating weeds, then, beyond that, smooth, its skin twitching only where touched by pond skimmers. He glanced up at the guards, who were quiet now, and at the bridge, the still forms of all the staring convicts, the beautiful carvings, the lucent scales of sunlit water reflected on the underside of the sandstone arch. He looked around, and then he slipped, slithered back, his hands tearing at the weeds. He saw the thief lunge forward and splash onto his belly, hands stretched out.

The weeds came loose in the Lifer's grasp. He was holding on to them, but they had let go at the root. There was nothing behind his feet. The weeds parted and he went back into the water, his eyes open. Billowing clouds of mud followed him and he lost sight of the surface for a moment. Then it was back, as brackets of black ripples on a hot blue sky. His shackles drew him down into the channel, and the weeds closed over his head. He was engulfed in caressing green gloom.

He held his breath. He stretched his arms up. He felt the cool lightness of air on his knuckles, so he opened his hands, forced his gnarled fingers straight up into the air. He waited for a grip, a rope, a breath- The green light turned red, the still water turbulent. His lungs ached, then opened. He sucked in water. There was nothing behind it, or beyond it. No air. In a room beside the troublemaker's cell, someone pushed back a down comforter. Maze Plasir turned up the flame of the lamp by the bed. The light was like a reprieve. The dreamhunter leaned back on his pillows and breathed deeply. He felt weak with grat.i.tude just for waking up. It was absurd to feel that way, and Plasir waited patiently for the feeling to fade. While he waited, he hurried his recovery by saying to himself, "It is my nightmare, and so I am the river."

Once the force of the nightmare's end had faded, Plasir again began to feel dissatisfied with it. It wasn't particularly strong, as far as nightmares went. But the Department of Corrections had chosen it from its description in the Regulatory Body's Dream Almanac. The man next door, the troublemaker, had done something that Corrections thought would best be treated with a nightmare in which submersion and the weight of iron figured heavily. Plasir had no idea what the man had done. He just had to suppose that Corrections knew what they were doing.

The dreamhunter picked absentmindedly at a loose thread on the silk cord trim of his bolster. In a moment he'd lie down again and begin another cycle of the dream. He caught himself holding his breath as he strained to hear sounds on the other side of the wall. He remembered that there had been one subject who, for some reason unable to wake up, had stopped breathing.

The dream, Sunken, did end with a death. It was one of only a very few dreams that did so. Hame's nightmare Buried Alive was so terrible that it was said no dreamhunter would be able to stay asleep long enough to see its end. Plasir wondered what would happen if an unconscious dreamhunter was set down on the site of Buried Alive. That would be an interesting experiment. But, sadly, no one could experiment with the nightmare since no one knew where it was to be found. Tziga Hame had concealed the dream's site, and Lazarus-whoever the h.e.l.l he was-wasn't volunteering information to anybody.

Plasir liked to experiment with dreams. He had learned to like this process as he became more experienced, and as he began to notice how much some dreams changed.

Second Sentence, for instance, was a split dream. For years Plasir had caught it but hadn't known it was a split dream. Then the Body had had Jerome Tilley, one of the rare "Novelists" (as those who caught split dreams were called), take a good look at all its most effective "Think Again" dreams. The Body had wanted to check that-for instance-a dream Plasir had been catching, about the young woman attacked in her home, might not also have something from the point of view of the husband who discovered her bleeding body at the dream's conclusion. It turned out that it did have, and the dream Violated became Violated and The Husband's Horror. The Body then had all its dreamhunters with Corrections contracts catch the dream till they found one who could reliably catch only The Husband's Horror. Jerome Tilley's experiments were all part of the Body's plan to develop more "targeted treatments" for hardened offenders.

Noting Tilley's experiments, Plasir had begun to wonder about his own specialty dreams. After a time, just wondering seemed to make it possible for him to open some of them up. He never did catch a split dream-he wasn't a Novelist-but he found that a few dreams he knew suddenly switched their point of view. And so it was that Second Sentence had thrown up the nightmare Plasir named, simply, Sunken. Sunken had the same setting as Second Sentence-a bridge under construction in a country town, on a hot day after harvesttime.

Maze Plasir stopped pulling threads on the bolster and held his breath again. He had realized something. That Alexander Mason's Water Diviner was also set in that place and at that time-the country town and valley full of the haze of smoke. Plasir concentrated; he looked very hard at his memory of the country town. It wasn't anywhere he knew in life, and there was something about its reality that was off-kilter. There was the whittled elegance of the women's skirts-skirts with higher hems than those women were wearing. There was the lack of jitters in the sleek motorcars. The town seemed real and not real at the same time (though, of course, all the dreams were factual, none had monsters, or una.s.sisted flight, or any of the things true human dreams had). The country town of The Water Diviner, Sunken, and Second Sentence was strange to Plasir, yet, if he squinted through the brown haze at its distances, he thought he could see familiar hills, hills he'd seen somewhere he'd been as a child.

Plasir concentrated. He strained to know. Then he gave up, sighed, settled himself down on the bed, and went back to his first train of thought.

Sunken may have been set in the same place as Second Sentence, but it was very different. It showed the same events from a different point of view. The Lifer's eyes lingered on everything because his thoughts dithered and doubled back on themselves. The man had gotten to the end of his life and seemed still to be trying to put his life together-like two plus two-to make something of it.

Second Sentence, however, was from the point of view of the violin thief. The young man began the dream happy, because his sentence was nearly up, and because he'd been working with the mason, a man whose skill he admired. The heat wasn't draining the young thief dry; he had his health, and hope. He had learned his lesson. He was full of a resolve to stay out of trouble, to spend the rest of his life out of the power of the law. The smoke-stained skies made him think of music; the slow, green, waving weed made him think of music. Second Sentence was a constructive, reforming dream. It had lessons to teach, such as "Stick to your resolve" and "Keep your temper." After the old Lifer drowned, straining up into the air, straightening his crippled fingers, the young man stared for a few seconds at his mud-caked hands and a thought flashed through his mind-or more a feeling than a thought, for the dreamhunter Plasir had never been able to make much sense of it. It was a thought about a belief or a story, and, like most of the thief's thoughts, it had a kind of tune to it, a musical chant. "I'm not helpless," the thief thought-as people in desperation do sometimes think the exact opposite of what is true and being proved to them. And then, in the dream, the young man lost his temper and surged up, took hold of a rifle in the hands of the nearest guard, the one standing slack-jawed and sated with cruelty. He tore the rifle away from the man, swung it, clubbing and clubbing, till other guards hauled him off. The guard had a broken skull, and the young thief, only weeks away from freedom, was then looking at years, at a second sentence.

Second Sentence was very effective, less a nightmare than a dream with a nasty, sobering turn at its end. But now that he was catching its other aspect, the dream seemed a lot less useful and positive to Plasir. The old man of Sunken had next to no experience of pity, yet how desperately he looked around him for it. He looked into all the faces. What he saw was what he already knew about the world-that it didn't make any difference if you kept your temper or stuck to your good resolve, for there was malice, always close, and always ready to lend its icy hand.

Second Sentence showed a way out of trouble-though the young man didn't take it. Sunken showed that it didn't matter what you did, because accidents happened, and accidents were opportunities for evil. Second Sentence was a warning dream. Sunken was a nightmare. Taken together, they were horribly incompatible, and Plasir couldn't help but wonder what a Novelist like Grace Tiebold would make of the dream-for it was one dream, and Grace Tiebold would catch it intact, the old man and the young together. She'd catch both the terror and despair of one, and the rage and crushed hope of the other.

Maze Plasir closed his eyes. He would go back to sleep. He would give the troublemaker in the next room another dose. And he'd try to take a better look at the other thing about the dream that troubled him.