Dreamhunter Duet: Dreamquake Part 7

5.

O LONG SPIT'S "BLINKING BOB" WAS NOT ONE OF THOSE LIGHTHOUSES THAT people lived in, a tower of mortared STONE, CONTAINING A SERIES OF CYLINDRICAL ROOMS AND TOPPED WITH A ROOM HOLDING THE LAMP. ALL THERE WAS TO BLINKING BOB WAS FOUR STEEL LEGS, FOUR LONG FLIGHTS OF STEPS GOING UP IN THE CENTER, AND A SQUARE ROOM WITH GLa.s.s AROUND THE TOP HALF OF ALL FOUR WALLS. THE ROOM HOUSED ONLY THE LAMP, THE MECHANISM THAT MADE THE LAMP REVOLVE, AND SEVERAL CANS OF BENZENE. THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS AND THEIR FAMILIES LIVED IN THREE WEATHERBOARD AND CORRUGATED IRON HOUSES THAT STOOD AROUND THE TOWER. THE HOUSES WERE IN A WINDBREAK, THE TOWER ON A SLIGHT RISE, ITS LEGS ANCh.o.r.eD IN CONCRETE. BLINKING BOB WAS THE SECOND TOWER BUILT ON THE SPIT; THE FIRST HAD BEEN WRECKED BY DRIFTING SAND.

One day, a few weeks before the summer solstice, Laura sat with her back to the rivet-studded wall of the lamp room at the top of the lighthouse.

Her father, Tziga, was cleaning smoke stains from the lamp. The lamp was bigger than her father's torso, a structure of cut crystals in a copper frame, four bull's-eyes surrounded by curved ribs of crystal. The whole thing was shaped like a glittering bishop's miter.

Laura's father's hands were gloved with rags. He was running them back and forth between the crystal ribs. It was rather like trying to clean the blades of an eggbeater without first immersing it in water. He worked with the sun behind him, so as not to be dazzled by the light shining through the lamp. And in that light his scars seemed nothing but the shadows his hair threw across his face, his smeared eyebrow only the blurring obscurity of shadow.

Laura had been with her father, sleeping and waking, almost every minute since she'd arrived six weeks before. She was beginning to be used to the changes in him.

She had been warned, as well. A priest called Father Paul had taken charge of Laura at Westport and had brought her to So Long Spit. She hadn't crossed paths with her uncle Chorley-he'd left several days before she arrived. Chorley had apparently been there when Tziga read the newspaper accounts of the riot at the Rainbow Opera. He had witnessed Tziga's fit. He had talked to Father Paul about Tziga's frailty, and Father Paul had prepared Laura.

It was only when they boarded the schooner Morningstar at Westport that Father Paul had told Laura who was waiting for her at the lighthouse. Her father-who she'd been allowed to think was dead. Who had been kept from her, and on whose behalf she'd acted, hurting Aunt Grace and Sandy, infuriating Rose and earning her cold shoulder. If only she'd known her father was alive. If only someone had told her. Laura had said all this to Father Paul-raging at him, at first too resentful to feel relief or happiness.

And Father Paul had patiently explained some things to her.

He told her that, over the last few years, a handful of dreamhunters had come to the Church-the inst.i.tution most loudly critical of dreamhunting-to express their worries about some of the Regulatory Body's uses for dreams. "We lost touch with a few of these persons," Father Paul said. "They disappeared. Too many dreamhunters do disappear. So, Laura, when your father turned up, his famous face swollen beyond recognition, at the Magdalene Charity Hospital in Westport, in what doctors call a 'coma' but still able to infect other patients sleeping near him with terror, we thought it best to report him dead and spirit him away. It was cruel to his family, but after the other disappearances, the Grand Patriarch deemed it necessary. When we heard that Tziga Hame was supposed to have vanished while attempting a crossing of the Place, we knew he had to stay hidden."

The other thing Father Paul had said to Laura, just before they climbed down the rope ladder from the deck of the Morningstar to the platform by the lighthouse, was that her father's health was very fragile and that she must take care not to upset him.

Laura had been forewarned, and she hadn't upset him. She'd treated him tenderly, waited on him, and, whenever he just sat staring into s.p.a.ce, would sit pressed up against him. Her uncle Chorley had dispatched a doctor to the light-house-and paid a fortune to keep him quiet about where he was going and whom he was treating. The doctor prescribed Laura's father drugs that did help reduce the intensity of his seizures, if not their frequency.

Father Paul had stopped by only the day before with letters for Laura and Tziga. He told them that Chorley wanted them both back at Summerfort by Christmas. (Christmas was three weeks away, a few days after the solstice.) "The Grand Patriarch says that now that the government has set up its Commission of Inquiry into the riot, if the Regulatory Body wants to speak to either of you-to question you, or call you to account-then, equally, the Commission might subpoena you. The Grand Patriarch thinks that the Body will think twice about doing anything to call Tziga Hame's existence to the Commission's attention."

Of all this, Laura's father had seemed to take in only that he'd be back at Summerfort by Christmas. He appeared baffled by anything beyond immediate practicalities. For him it seemed there was only ever the task at hand-the crystal clouded by smoke coming clean under his cloth. He'd become slow and remote. There were people to smile at, or listen to with somber attention. There were things that must be remembered-for instance, he was always reminding Laura not to go out in the sun without her hat. But there was no larger world for him anymore, no public life, or any matter of real consequence.

Laura stood up and looked through the lighthouse window. The tide was out along the Spit, and the few patches of scrub in the dunes showed as black flaws on the horizon, wobbling in the heat haze. Scarves of dry sand blew along the surface of the wet. There was sand high in the wind, for Laura could hear the whisper of its grains in the gusts buffeting the windowpanes.

"Da?" she said.

Her father looked at her, then rotated the lamp on its housing so that the cleaned crystals spun scintillating in the sunlight.

"Do you remember I told you about Sandy?"

"Your friend? You mention him often. Did you tell me something particular about him?" Laura's father frowned at her, anxious that he'd forgotten something she'd said.

"No."

"I liked his uncle, George Mason. As a singer, I mean. Marta and I often went to the opera. We would sit up in the top balcony cheap seats with all the other students. Mason was about twenty-five when I was sixteen. He was young, but he had this big ba.s.s voice, like the father of all fathers."

Laura laughed at this story, because it was something new, and related to Sandy. And because her father seemed so collected in speaking about his past-his past before the Place.

"Lots of the early dreamhunters were musical. I don't know if that was ever noted as a tendency. No one would think to notice now, since there aren't too many distinguished musicians at fifteen. When George Mason became a dreamhunter, it really was a loss to music in Founderston." Laura's father knelt to gather the cleaning rags into a bucket, and she noted that once he'd simply have stooped to perform this task. She could see that he was actually concentrating on grasping, lifting, and releasing. But he did keep talking, his memory of twenty years ago exact, even if his movements were not. Laura had wanted to hear his thoughts on Sandy-on Sandy's bewildering p.r.i.c.kliness-but she didn't want to interrupt his remembering. He was usually so quiet now.

"What about you, Da? How good were you?"

"Marta was a better musician than I was. So it was probably just as well it was me and not her who fell." He hauled himself up, gripping the housing of the light. Then he turned to Laura, and she was forced again to regard the ruin of his face, and that frightening look in his eyes-a kind of tremulous pulling together of his attention. He said, "Laura, you know I wasn't in my right mind when I wrote you that letter."

Was this an apology? she wondered. "That letter was all I had left of you," she said. "Of course I took it seriously."

He touched his scarred forehead. Then he reached for Laura, put an arm around her, and held her.

She closed her eyes and simply basked in being held. She shouldn't ask any more than this. He couldn't answer-wasn't answerable anymore. When she looked into his eyes now, she saw watchfulness and uncertainty. His love for her was intact-but his understanding wasn't.

Laura's father released her.

She said, "Here, let me give you a hand," and took the bucket from him. They left the lighthouse. Partway down from the tower, Laura stopped. She had spotted something. She shaded her eyes and squinted into the wavering air.

There was someone out there, standing still and straight on the bared beach. The figure was far off, but Laura felt that he or she was looking at her.

Laura clattered down after her father, checking now and then on that watching figure. At the foot of the steps, she returned the bucket to her father, then took a few bounding steps backward, making excuses. "I'm just going for a walk, Da-" Then she was off, running barefoot on the springy stems of beach gra.s.s, under the pines, then onto the sand. She ran in a long curve, for the watching figure was moving off the beach and into the dunes, and she had to alter her course in order to intercept him.

As she came closer, Laura could see only bright skin, no clothes. It was Nown, and he was waiting for her, just leading her in among the dunes where they wouldn't be seen. As she closed the distance between them, she could see that his head was lifted and that he was checking the lines of sight between himself and the top of the lighthouse.

Laura came to a skidding stop before him. She staggered, panting, then folded over a st.i.tch in her side. For a moment all she could hear was her own breathing. Then she heard the sea, and a tern crying as it flew along the line of low breakers. She straightened up and faced her sandman. He held out his arms to her.

She looked over her shoulder at the lighthouse.

"There must be things you want to say," he said.

She went to him and let him pick her up.

He stooped over her and hurried away, skirting the base of the dunes till they were screened from the lighthouse, and from the sound of waves on the western sh.o.r.e.

Nown stopped within the shade of a high, crescent-shaped dune. Below the dune was a salt pan, and when he set Laura down, her feet cracked its crusted surface and she found herself standing in a shallow trench surrounded by sliding, dirty-white plates of salt.

Nown stood watching her and waiting for her to speak.

She said, "You got my note?"

"No."

"I sent a note enclosed in a letter to Sandy. I asked him to leave it in the forest."

"I left the forest when you moved west. I followed you."

"How did you know where I was?"

"You made me, Laura. You are my compa.s.s."

Laura sat down abruptly in a patch of smashed salt crust. The air was uncomfortably hot nearer the ground, but she wasn't able to get up again. She had thought of something, and her thought had taken the strength from her legs.

Nown was speaking, volunteering his story-something he didn't do before she freed him.

"There were many rivers to cross," he said. "I followed the foothills of the Rifleman Mountains and struck only tributary streams. Sometimes I crossed over into the Place, but the distances there are too great. And at the coal mine beside the river-I don't know its name, Laura-there were miners, and barges coming and going, and a river ford with a ferry on a rope. I had to wait till it was dark and disguise myself under a blanket. I had to steal the blanket. The ferryman was drunk. There was one threatening deluge on my journey-and I had to burrow in under a bank. It took time, but I got here without getting my feet wet."

"Your literal feet," Laura said.

"The feet you gave me."

For some reason this sounded like an accusation. Laura couldn't tell whether she was being blamed for the shortcomings of Nown's feet or for failing to respect them as feet. "Nown," she said. "If you knew where I was because I made you, does that mean that you-I mean the eighth you-knew where my father was when he was missing?"

"Yes."

She took several deep breaths before asking, "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I did tell you that since I was, then he was still alive. And you strode ahead of me smiling and crying. You didn't ask me where he was."

In the shelter of the dune, the salt filled the still air with its dry fumes. Laura was having difficulty thinking. She got up and kept walking. Her sandman followed her. His weighty steps made wider circles of cracks in the crusted salt.

After a time she asked, "Does anything I say matter to you the way it did before you were free?"

"I don't yet know."

"But you followed me here."

"Yes."

She led him out onto the beach again. The tide was coming in, and, as she looked back between the gap in the dunes, Laura could see that it was making more progress on the western sh.o.r.e than where they were, so that the sea seemed to pile up against the barricade of the Spit.

She was more comfortable in the open air. Nown had come close to her until she was standing in his shadow. She was sure he'd done it deliberately-had noticed that she was panting and that she'd put up a hand to shade her eyes. Without looking at him, she pressed her hand against his side, his gritty skin and mock ribs and ridges of muscle. She said, "From now on, could you please tell me anything you think I might need to know?"

He was silent.

"Nown?"

Laura could have sworn she heard him sigh. She glanced at him, but his face had no expression, or none she could interpret. Perhaps she had only expected to hear a sigh. He was looking at a bank of cloud closing in on the Spit faster than the light sea breeze. Or at least he seemed to be looking at it. She asked, "Can you see that?"

"There are layers of wind. One is warmer," he said. Then, "Laura-my experience of freedom is limited. So, therefore, is my experience of making judgments. I cannot yet know what I will have to consider each time I am considering what you need to know. My knowledge of your needs has been guided by your instructions. At times I have tried to imagine, without guidance from you, what you might need. I have made mistakes. After you caught the nightmare, you were weeping, and I picked you up to rock the tears out of you-I had seen that done. You did stop crying, but you didn't approve of my action. I cannot trust the sympathy I have for you to guide me. We are too different, you and I. If you ask me to take care of all your needs, are you then giving me your freedom? Why would you free me only to hand over your own freedom?"

"Nown!" Laura had to stop him. He was retreating into a thicket of philosophical complications, and she was sure that it was a deeper and thornier thicket than either of them could imagine. She stepped onto one of his feet in order to stretch up and cover his mouth with her hand. "Shh," she said. "That's enough."

He pulled her hand away. "Besides," he said, "if you ask me to tell you anything you might need to know-to remember to tell you from now on anything you might need to know-are you asking me to promise? I think a promise must be like a law. I understand laws. They are what I've lived by. If a promise is like law, then, even free, I think I might do whatever I promised. Come what may."

"But-no-I released you," Laura said. "You're free."

"I'm free to promise," Nown said. "And if I choose to make promises, I'll honor them."

"Don't promise then! Don't tell me what I might need to know."

Nown's eyes blackened and glittered. "Don't say that."

"You can't possibly still be susceptible to my orders."

"I find I am. I still want to do what you want."

"Well-stop!" Laura ordered, exasperated.

"No," Nown said.

She started to laugh, stood laughing, turned into the wind and the sunlight, which was fiercely hot, concentrated by the encroaching cloud. She felt happy, in a crazy way. Nown was a fearful responsibility, but when she was with him, the feeling she had of being trapped and baffled just disappeared. He was so contradictory-scrupulous and untamed at the same time-that in his presence all the things that had hemmed her in seemed to melt away. Her father was broken and beyond reproach, Rose was right to hate her, and she had been wrong to keep her own promises. But Nown made her feel like G.o.d on the first Sabbath; he was a great responsibility, but he was good, like the world, and being with him made Laura sleepy with happiness.

They kept wandering along the Spit, away from the sentinel lighthouse and Laura's human company. They didn't talk. It seemed that Nown had nothing further to tell Laura, and she, finding herself so content with him, stopped thinking altogether.

The ma.s.sed gray clouds closed in on them, and a wind came up, a constant, cool, gritty wind. It scalped the dunes and scattered sand into the waters of Coal Bay. As the tide came in, and the waves grew bigger and steeper, water began to percolate through the Spit itself, so that the dunes grew damp and gave differently behind each step they took. Nown hiked up to the spine of the dunes and walked there. Laura followed him with difficulty, till he picked her up again and went along with her, rocking her as he swayed.

"Can you see the sea at all?" she asked.

"No."

"Is it like walking on a bridge, then? A bridge over nothingness?"

"But there are birds," Nown said.

Laura looked where she supposed he was looking and saw the diminishing dunes and bleak, choppy sea and, at the very end of the Spit, flashes of white, not foam on whitecaps but the myriad bodies of roosting gannets. Even in the stiff wind there were gannets out over the sea, weaving back and forth, scanning the water for prey. Hard-pressed and hopeful now, for it couldn't be easy for the birds to spot fish under the agitated waves. Still, every few seconds one of the great, gliding creatures would pause, and close its wings, and fall, an accelerating white dart, into the water. The bird would disappear and would surface sometime later, shaking itself off, clutching at the air till the air shouldered its weight, and flying up to rejoin the rest of the hungry patrol.

Laura asked Nown to set her on her feet. She leaned against him, sheltered from the worst of the wind, and watched the gannets fish. She felt she should applaud these dives as the lighthouse keeper's son did.

They stayed watching for a long time, till it was too cold and gray, and the birds became hard to see because the day was coming to a close. Then Laura put up her arms, and Nown picked her up and set off along the narrow backbone of the Spit toward the pale streak of the distant lighthouse.

Laura had her sandman crawl in under the keeper's house, where tangles of harvested seaweed were drying among the timber piles. She told him to stay still and hidden.

In the early hours of the morning, when the dependable westerly had dropped again, she climbed out of her bed-a mattress on the floor beside her father's-and crept out of their hut and under the keeper's house. She found Nown by touch. She lay down with her back against his body and drew his arms around her. Then she went back to sleep again, cradled in a nest of shaped sand and snarls of seaweed.

At dawn Tziga woke and let his arm drape off the side of his bed to feel for his daughter's head on her pillow. He couldn't find it. He ran his palm over the cold, empty dent where her warm curls should have been and then leaned up on an elbow to look at her bed.

Tziga put on his patched fisherman's jersey and went out to find her. He looked on the outer sh.o.r.e and found only a flock of terns standing by the tide line turned in to the breeze. Then, as he was crossing the windbreak to look on the Coal Bay sh.o.r.e, Tziga noticed a smear of pallor between the piles of the keeper's cottage. As he got closer, he recognized Laura's white nightgown. He steadied himself against the wall of the cottage and stooped to look.

Laura was asleep, but the sandman's eyes were open-always open, made that way-and looking at him.

Tziga felt himself recognized. He felt the sandman's calm, alien interest. He saw how the thing's arms enfolded Laura's slight body, how her head was pillowed on its shoulder. The thing looked nothing like his own roughly made and rather grotesque servant.

Laura had been late for dinner, pink with cold and exertion, and very happy. Now here she was, asleep in these inhuman arms. The sight was terrifying to Tziga. He wanted to crawl in among the seaweed and haul her out. He wanted to make the thing disappear.

She didn't need it anymore.

Tziga looked for the letters of its name and saw an unmarked brow, and below the brow the eyes, watchful, but with no sign of concern or challenge in them. The thing was simply waiting for him to go away. It seemed to know that he wouldn't want to wake Laura, and to understand that he wouldn't want her to find out that he'd seen it.

Laura woke up when she heard stirring above her, the keeper's wife opening the stove top to drop kindling in on the embers of last night's fire. She turned to Nown. "My uncle Chorley is sending a boat to take me and Da to Summerfort. For Christmas-so soon. I'll want you there, Nown. I'm sorry to have to send you off, but if you're going to get there in time, you'll have to start walking. I know you do most of your walking by night, and the nights are getting shorter."

"Yes."

"What are you saying yes to?"

"The nights are shorter. You'll want me. I should start walking to meet you there. I believe you are sorry. I'm saying yes to all that. And, yes, I will go now, I will do what you ask."