Dreamhunter Duet: Dreamquake Part 6

Plasir had been the thief, on and off, for years. He'd seen everything through his eyes. The thief knew his own past, of course, but he wasn't really thinking about it on that morning. For instance, Plasir had known from Second Sentence that the thief played the violin, but only learned from Sunken that he had stolen his own instrument from a p.a.w.nshop. Plasir knew about the thief only what he'd managed to gather from the young man's thoughts on that afternoon at the bridge. Then, when he first caught Sunken, the old Lifer had shown Plasir the face of the person through whose eyes he'd formerly seen everything.

There was something about that face. Something familiar. The thief looked healthy and happy, and wary and furtive-none of this strange in a criminal on light duty and near the end of his time. But when the stone fell into the river, and the guards turned their spite into sport, and the two convicts were driven to the river's edge, and the old Lifer gazed into the young thief's face and saw fear and pity- "I know that person," Plasir thought. "I've seen that sensitive, stubborn mouth before. Not in a dream." He pictured the mouth and the eyes. Eyes full of sadness and shame and resignation and, behind all that, power: pitiless, cold power.

3.

HORLEY TOLD GRACE THAT HE'D PROMISED THE GRAND PATRIARCH HIS HELP WITH "THE CAUSE."

"What cause is this?" Grace asked. "Tziga's? Laura's? The cause of stirring up trouble between dreamhunters and their public?"

"The Grand Patriarch offers refuge to renegade dreamhunters. He thinks the Body is up to no good. Tziga's ideas and Laura's actions have nothing to do with him. You can't blame him."

Grace glared at her husband. "Am I allowed to blame anyone? Or is it best for me to just bite my lip?"

"Better than biting me, dear. It's not my fault that Laura and Tziga are out of reach."

"No, but it is the fault of Erasmus Tiebold."

Chorley gave a sigh of put-upon patience, kissed his wife on top of her head, and went out.

The Grand Patriarch thanked Chorley for his visit and told him that, since no one expected him to denounce dreamhunting, did he think he could investigate the Place?

"Rangers go there and make maps and call it exploration," the Grand Patriarch said. "Philosophers muse about it as a phenomenon and call that-rightly in some ways -thinking about it. But none of us are getting any nearer to knowing what the Place really is. You've been close to the subject for years; you are familiar with all the distracting facts already. You have a reputation as something of a scientific mind, and an independent thinker. So please, Mr. Tiebold, look into it for me."

Chorley had gone away, and for days he hadn't been able to imagine where to start. He reread some of those philosophers and was struck again by how they all seemed to talk about the Place as if, by coming up with the right metaphor for it, they might be able to say what it was. He found that he liked Dr. King's account in A History of Southland. King's approach to the Place seemed practical; he tried to find evidence of its earliest appearance. Chorley mused on Dr. King's speculation that the dreams might be memories of people who had lived in its geographic vicinity. And on his own idea that the Place was like a mirage. Chorley considered all this-as, no doubt, the Grand Patriarch already had.

And then he remembered the telegraph line that had once run through the Rifleman Pa.s.s, from Doorhandle to Sisters Beach. A line that was long ago abandoned. The wire, though intact and visible along its entire length, was finally deemed hopelessly unreliable. Signals were lost, and there were strange interferences, both a patterned tapping that didn't match any known telegraphic code and bits of code that could be deciphered but that gave the key man on the receiving end bad, mad messages.

And so it was that, several days after remembering the abandoned telegraph line, Chorley found himself waiting in a poky room beneath the mosaic floor of the Founderston Central Post Office. The man Chorley waited with didn't have much to say, but he stood at his desk sorting through a bunch of keys on a string. The room was dingy. There were windows only at the top of one wall. Through them Chorley could see people-or their feet at least-pa.s.sing on the street, scuffed shoes and polished ones, the wheels of a pram, a woman in a hobble skirt, and the lower legs of a small girl in flimsy blue sandals.

"It's summer already," he thought.

A second clerk, a man with a coat and a complexion the color of manila cardboard, shuffled into the room. The first clerk stopped sorting his keys and tossed them back into an open drawer. He said, "I was just telling Mr. Tiebold here that if any of the bad transcriptions from the Wry-Valley-to-Sisters-Beach line had been kept, you would know where to find them." He turned to Chorley and said, "Mr. Nevis was a key man at Doorhandle twenty years ago, when the trouble started." Then-to Mr. Nevis, "Can you help Mr. Tiebold?"

Mr. Nevis nodded and held the door open.

As they descended into the cold subterranean corridors beneath the Central Post Office, Mr. Nevis told Chorley that-yes-he had been a key man in Doorhandle. He had sent and deciphered messages to and from Sisters Beach. In fact, he had been at his post in the telegraph office on the evening that the Doorhandle innkeeper came in to wire for a surgeon from Sisters Beach. "For the boy with the broken leg-who later became your brother-in-law, Mr. Hame," Mr. Nevis said. "The line had been complete then for three years. It was working well, except when the road washed out once and took half a dozen poles with it. The weather in the Rifleman Pa.s.s was a challenge, but we hadn't yet encountered the problem that closed us down. That problem started after Tziga Hame's fall."

Mr. Nevis opened a steel door, located a light switch, and let Chorley into a room with long avenues of shelves filled with files. The air was chilly and undisturbed.

"We kept those messages separate," said Mr. Nevis. "We had a special file for them-several by the time the Post Office abandoned the line, which they didn't do, despite the problems, till the Founderston to Sisters Beach Railway opened, and the new telegraphic line with it. Those files had red tape on their spines. I remember making up a new one myself."

"How many were there?"

"Mad messages? Hundreds. We had to have a special short key code for 'Corrupt. Send again.'"

Mr. Nevis made a noise of discovery and dropped into a crouch, his knees creaking. He pulled files from a shelf, bundled them into his arms, and got up with Chorley's help.

At the back wall, there was a bench under a light, a bare bulb in a wire cage. "I'm afraid you won't be very comfortable, Mr. Tiebold. My manager doesn't really like anything brought up from underground. But I'm sure you'll find you won't need to look far for a good example. For nonsense of a special kind."

"Is it formless nonsense? Or nonsense only in the context of the message?" Chorley asked. He longed to edge the man aside and look himself.

Mr. Nevis was patting the pile of files, tidying and talking. "I never thought madness terribly interesting myself, whether it was Lady Macbeth wringing her hands or Lucia di Lammermoor wafting around in her bloodied bridal gown. I never looked at the corrupt messages with any real attention."

Chorley stepped up beside the elderly clerk, seized the stack, and slid it along the bench till it was under his own nose. "Has anyone ever gone through these looking for a pattern?"

"What kind of pattern? All the Post Office did was try to fix the problem. It even had men camping out nights under every tenth pole in order to catch the pranksters."

"And all this happened before the Regulatory Body was formed?"

"Yes. Otherwise it would have been their problem. The Post Office blamed us key men at first, said it was our mischief. We blamed the fellows on the other end. But it was the Place. That telegraph line was unbroken from Doorhandle to Tricksie Bend; it ran outside, not Inside-but the Place used it to try to talk to us. Look!" Mr. Nevis s.n.a.t.c.hed one file, flipped pages, and found a message: MOTHER FAILING STOP DOCTOR SAYS ONLY MATTER OF DAYS STOP PLEASE RISE UP I SAID RISE UP COME AT ONCE STOP ANDREW.

"That's more or less typical. That 'Rise up' stuff." Mr. Nevis sounded triumphant. He peered at Chorley, waiting for a reaction.

Small hairs were bristling on Chorley's nape, his whole scalp tightening. The "interruption" in the telegram was a plea, like the cry of a king besieged on a battlefield. He licked his dry lips. "Does this sort of thing turn up often?"

"'Rise up' you mean? Yes. We got that one all the time. Come to think of it, perhaps that's the pattern you're asking about?"

"Yes."

Mr. Nevis sighed. "I suppose then that you'll want to read through all of these?"

"I will." Chorley was engrossed already, leafing through the first file.

"Shall I see if I can find you something to sit on?"

"Thank you."

On the afternoon of the last day of cla.s.ses, Rose brought Mamie home with her so that Mamie could help her choose what she should take on her proposed four-week visit with the Doran family at their summerhouse in the Awa Inlet. Rose and Mamie came in with the Dorans' chauffeur and Rose's school trunk.

"You can put it down here, thank you," Rose said to the man. "Mamie will stay for dinner, and someone will take her home later."

"Have you even checked that anyone is home?" Mamie said. "Or are you too busy being decisive?"

Rose ignored her friend, thanked her friend's chauffeur, and sent him off. "I could spend hours choosing what to take," she said. "I think I've exhausted my decisiveness."

"Well then, while you're weak and easy to influence, shall we start by deciding what you'll take to read?"

They went to the library, where they met Rose's father, who was standing in the doorway with a notebook held open on the top of his head like a small pitched roof. "Girls!" he said, in a tone of happy discovery. "You know your poetry, don't you?"

Mamie said, "Yes, poetry is the proper province of girls."

Rose said, "Mamie is here to help me choose what to pack. I'm going away on Monday. You won't see me again till Christmas. You have taken that in?"

"Yes, darling, and we mean to spend the weekend at your beck and call. Your mother is coming home tonight. And there's a letter from Laura on your dresser."

Mamie looked at Rose, curious. Rose hadn't mentioned her cousin for ages. "Where is Laura?"

"Staying with relatives," said Rose and her father simultaneously.

Chorley wandered over to his cluttered desk and moved books and papers around to find something. Rose came and peered over his shoulder at a notebook. She read: HOME FRIDAY 9:15 STOP SHE IS COMING MY OWN MY SWEET CAN YOU meet me at station stop phillip. And: offer acceptable stop she is coming my own my sweet were it ever so airy a tread settle today stop you have my full confidence stop welles.

"She is coming, my own, my sweet; were it ever so airy a tread," Chorley quoted.

"Yes-that is poetry," said Rose. "Almost certainly poetry."

"It's Maud," said Mamie. "Maud: A Monodrama, by Tennyson. We did it last year. You remember, Rose, you kept saying: 'Come into the garden, Maud, the black bat, night, has flown,' whenever you wanted a word with someone in private." Rose had always been with Laura then, and Mamie was not her friend. Mamie had watched Rose's joking intimacy, amused and a little envious of Rose's many 'Mauds.'

Rose went to the bookshelf to look for Tennyson. "What do you want it for, Da?"

Chorley glanced at Mamie, then said, "I'm writing a scientific article, and I thought I'd give it some polish by adding a little verse."

Mamie couldn't conceal her look of scorn.

Rose found the collected works of Tennyson and pa.s.sed it to her friend. Mamie could find the right lines far more quickly than she. Rose went to look over her father's shoulder at his notes again. He flipped the book to show her its first page, and his t.i.tle: "Bad Code from the Obsolete Founderston-Sisters Beach Telegraph Line, 18861893."

Mamie said, "It is 'Maud'-chapter twenty-two, stanza eleven." She read it out loud: She is coming, my own, my sweet

Were it ever so airy a tread,

My heart would hear her and beat,

Were it earth in an earthy bed;

My dust would hear her and beat;

Had I lain for a century dead;

Would start and tremble under her feet,

And blossom in purple and red.

"That's so strange," Rose said. "What do you make of it, Da?"

"I think that's the least strange bit of the whole overwrought poem," said Mamie, who didn't know what they were talking about. She shut the book with a snap.

"I'm still working on it," Chorley said to Rose.

4.

ANDY CAUGHT CONVALESCENT TWO AND TOOK IT TO ST. THOMAS'S LUNG HOSPITAL. BUT HIS DREAM WAS OF A VERY POOR quality, his copy of it somehow murky and strained. He was sent away again. He returned to Doorhandle and Mrs. Lilley's house and tried to pull himself together-he felt scattered, jumpy, and lumpish at the same time. He couldn't seem to fix himself. He thought about Laura all the time. Laura and her unknown suitor. Her letter to him was folded small and tucked into the lining of his wallet. As for the other one-the same night he'd opened it, Sandy had torn it into tiny pieces and thrown it out his bedroom window. It was gone, so he couldn't now decide to be honorable after all and just deliver it.

Sandy's room in Doorhandle was his only home. When he was in Founderston, he was working, and had a bed at one of the hospitals. But at Mrs. Lilley's, he didn't have much in the way of privacy. He couldn't just be alone and nurse his broken heart, or his bad conscience-he wasn't actually sure which was troubling him more. Mrs. Lilley's other young tenants were in and out and kept asking him about Laura. "Where is she? Is she coming back?" And the Lilley girls, seeing him silent and morose, would try to cheer him up with kind little attentions. Sandy was sure his linen was changed more than his rental contract stipulated (and he was someone who read and remembered every clause of any contract he signed). The younger girl kept waylaying him in the hall, darting out of the kitchen perhaps with a stirring spoon for him to lick-the sort of treat he'd once begged his mother for. He got clean linen, food, flattery, flirtation.

And, on a Sat.u.r.day night when Mrs. Lilley's bed of outrageously pink carnations had all turned modest and furled for the night, the elder girl came and sat beside Sandy on the back steps. She said, "What a shame it is, Alexander, that you can't take up a pipe. A pipe is a peaceful, manly sort of habit, I think. My father enjoyed a pipe. But of course I know dream-hunters don't bother to smoke since they can't keep a pipe alight when they're In the Place." She was showing concern, and what she knew. She leaned forward at the waist and tried to look into his lowered face. "Still, I would like to see you light up, Alexander."

"Why carry around another craving?" Sandy said, brooding.

The Lilley girl laid a hand on his back.

And Sandy turned his head and kissed her, because she wanted him to, and because she wasn't Laura.