The girls had lain awake talking and thinking until dewfall, then until the cool perfume of dew gave way to the smell of bread from the two bakeries along the seafront of the resort. They’d had only a few hours’ sleep, so it was easy for Rose’s father to talk them out of their plans of rescue. He asked which of them knew how to set a broken wing? And, if the wing was only wrenched, perhaps the bird might still gather its strength and fly away. He suggested that, if they wanted to go to bed till lunchtime, he could check on the bird now and then.
Rose and Laura went up the beach yawning. Chorley bundled up their bedrolls and picked up their picnic basket. He doused the grey but still smoking coals of their fire.
Once his daughter and niece were in bed, Chorley went back down to the beach to find the shag lying face down in the sand. Its head was turned and its smooth feathers and round shoulders made it look like a sleeping baby. Chorley picked it up and carried it down to the water. The tide was still going out, and if he threw the bird far enough the tide would carry its body away. He would tell the girls that it had been gone when he’d checked. He wouldn’t lie for Rose, who would think that the bird’s death was a shame, and might wonder whether or not it might have been better off if she had taken it up to the house — she’d wonder, but she was tough-minded, and the bird’s death wouldn’t trouble her. Chorley disposed of the small corpse for Laura’s sake. Laura had said, ‘How lonely it looks. How tired.’ Laura was sensitive, and her uncle had the habit of protecting her from upset whenever he could.
Laura was the only child of Chorley’s dead sister — his only sibling. He loved his daughter, naturally, but Laura was all he had left of Verity.
Verity and Chorley Tiebold had been inseparable, and so, after they married they combined their households. The brother and sister were support for each other in their mutual peculiar marriages to the great dreamhunters. Grace and Tziga were friends. Friends who went away for weeks at a time, foraging for dreams. When the girls were born their care naturally fell to Verity and Chorley. It had made sense for them all to live together. To throw in together, financially.
But, when Verity’s marriage was only five years old, and her daughter only four, she became ill, and it became apparent that she wouldn’t recover.
The family, so dedicated to one another, and to their unconventional lives, had found themselves facing a slow, creeping disaster. They were already financially overextended by Chorley’s ambitions to restore the Tiebold estates, refurbish the Tiebold town house and build a beautiful summer residence at Sisters Beach. They had to struggle to keep up payments.
Yet, while Grace scaled up her dreamhunting to meet the family’s commitments, there came a time when Tziga would only leave his wife to catch the kind of dreams that might help restore her health. Later, he caught the kind of dreams that might prolong her life. And, at the last, he sought and pursued the kind of dreams that might help ease her dying. Tziga caught and performed for nobody but his wife. Every night, for Verity alone. She and he would disappear together into her darkened sickroom, and into his dreams. Apart from his hurried forays into the Place, Tziga was always with Verity. His savings ran out. Chorley and Grace supported him, and his neglected daughter. To Chorley it seemed that his sister, in dying, was taking her husband with her. He imagined that Verity would die in her sleep — in Tziga’s sleep — and that neither would wake.
In the end Chorley begged his sister to stop Tziga. He was in anguish, torn in two, but he said to her, ‘Please, dear, you must refuse his help now. You must ask him not to go to the Place again. Please — can you please try to go from us awake? Forgive me. But please, Verity, don’t let Tziga go with you in his sleep.’
Verity promised to do what her brother asked. ‘But only when my time has come,’ she said. She postponed her sacrifice, while Tziga worked to banish her pain and stave off her death. Little Laura asked her Uncle Chorley, ‘Is Daddy sick too?’ Even the child could see how it was — that her father was desperately active, but fading.
Tziga went away to get another dream. ‘It’s only overnight,’ he promised his wife. ‘Be brave.’ When he’d gone Chorley told his sister what her daughter had said. Verity asked to see Laura. They had a little talk. Then Verity kissed her daughter, and sent her off to play. She summoned Chorley and Grace. She said she wanted to get up. She put on a robe and they helped her out on to the terrace. She sat watching the river traffic go by in the afternoon sunlight. An hour later Chorley and Grace carried her in, unconscious. They called the doctor, and watched by her bed, and, in the small hours, Verity Hame died without ever coming around again.
Tziga carried his dream home, and found a hearse parked at his gate.
Verity’s funeral was held three days later. Tziga stood at his wife’s graveside, his eyes sunken in circles of bruises.
HE REFUSED TO sleep or eat, took nothing at the funeral breakfast and sat in the chief mourner’s chair oblivious to the approaches of friends and relations, who steeled themselves to come up to him and offer their sympathy; oblivious to his daughter, who was ruining her black velvet dress by lying on the floor under his chair.
When the guests had gone, and the girls had been carried off to bed, Tziga prowled about the house. Chorley got out of bed at dawn to find Tziga in the kitchen yard, his head held under the stream from the pump. ‘You can’t stay awake for ever,’ Chorley told him — though he could smell the spice of Wakeful in Tziga’s sweat, and see that his lips were stained mauve from the drug.
‘This dream isn’t anyone else’s,’ Tziga said. ‘It was for her. The best yet. The best I’ve ever caught.’ He raised his wet, white face and glared at his brother-in-law. ‘You can bury me with it,’ he said.
By the next morning he was swaying and stumbling. He stumbled on the stairs and sat on the landing with his head hanging. Chorley followed him about. Tziga called him a vulture, and threw things at him. Grace sent the servants away and sat with the girls in the nursery. She read to them, sang lullabies and put them in their beds. She listened to the house. Rose’s bright, sleepless eyes regarded her mother through the white mosquito net around her bed. Laura poked her head out of her netting — sat veiled in it, like a little communicant. At sunset Chorley found Tziga holding himself up against a doorframe, on which he was rhythmically beating his head. Chorley inserted his hand between the bloodied moulding and Tziga’s oozing forehead. Then Tziga collapsed and Chorley picked him up. Tziga was light, worn thin by walking inland after the consoling beauties of the Place, by watching, by keeping himself awake. Chorley carried Tziga to his and Grace’s bed.
Tziga woke in the morning — at the same time as a whole city block woke weeping with joy at a dream so powerful and beautiful that it altered each one of its dreamers for ever, a dream caught to carry a beloved, pain-racked woman into paradise. Tziga woke, weeping himself, and saw that Grace was beside him, and Chorley beside her, looking over her shoulder with pouring eyes, and between them were the little girls, Rose laughing at her dream with nervous, puzzled delight, and Laura calling alternately ‘Mummy!’ and ‘Rosie!’ — as though she wanted to share some wonderful news but didn’t know who to tell first. Tziga could feel his dream echoing in the city like a thunderclap. He lay floating in breathing light. Grace cupped his wet face in both her hands, and Chorley’s hands covered hers.
Tziga wasn’t good for much after that. He rested, and the bills mounted up. Grace, meanwhile, foraged deep into the Place, looking for wonders and novelties, overwriting one dream with another till she got something she knew she could sell at a very high price. Sometimes she would encounter dreamhunters who had abandoned their own plans in order to wait for her, dreamhunters who would offer to empty their heads for her. She was exhausted — so they might also offer to carry her out. They’d carry her out, and delete their own dreams, replacing them with what she had — not so that they could part from her and peddle their poor copies of her dreams, but so that they could act as amplifiers, dream in unison with her,
lie down with her, share the dreamer’s bed and a small part of her fee. For, remembering with what force her presence in Tziga’s sleep had amplified his last dream, Grace was ready to accept these offers.
Chorley was busy. He reorganised the family’s finances — budgeting and juggling due dates on payments. He kept Tziga company — Grace had been very clear to him about this. ‘Tziga has to get well,’ she’d said. ‘He’s worth more than we are. He is the beauty of dreamhunting. He is the good of it.’
Chorley had the girls to care for. Grace was clear on that score too. ‘Watch poor Laura. And you know, love, I can work, and work, and work, so long as Rose is happy.’
Chorley did all that he had to — and he failed to notice things. He didn’t see the dubious looks people had begun to give him in the street. He didn’t hear the odd, stifled snigger in acquaintances, or see how an embarrassed, fastidious look would appear on the faces of certain friends whenever he spoke about his wife.
One evening he took Tziga out drinking, to shake him out of his misery. At six in the morning, Chorley and Tziga decided to go quietly — or as quietly as a couple of scuffling, giggling drunks can — through the stage door of the Rainbow Opera. They had decided to wait for Grace in one of the galleries (this was before they owned private suites). They’d carry her off for breakfast. They’d go to a café and eat a pile of potato cakes and sour cream, just like they used to. ‘She must want a change of scene,’ Chorley said. ‘She spends half her life in this place — or the Other.’
Chorley and Tziga stumbled up the back stairs to the first-floor gallery. The Opera was silent. The men of the fire watch, who were sitting one level above and opposite, leant out to gesture, fingers across their lips. Chorley mirrored the gesture. He put a finger to his lips and shushed Tziga. Then he tiptoed to the balustrade and looked over.
Chorley Tiebold saw that his wife was asleep in the Opera’s dais bed and that there were two strangers lying on either side of her.
THE DREAM Regulatory Body was set up under a piece of legislation known as the Intangible Resources Act. The Body came into existence six weeks after Chorley Tiebold’s discovery and, in a way, owed its existence to him. For Chorley had caused a scene, he and the fire watch had come to blows and some furniture was broken. Grace, hearing her husband’s drunken bluster, flung herself and everyone else out of sleep. Several hundred people woke up abruptly, before the happy conclusion of their dream. It was, one man later told his cronies, like being thrown into an icy pond while in the act of love. Behind the Rainbow Opera’s padded doors people surfaced shouting, gasping and gagging.
There were complaints to the Rainbow Opera, of course. Some patrons demanded the return of their ticket price. Others cancelled their season tickets. The police considered charging Grace Tiebold with criminal negligence. But no current law quite covered what went on in dream palaces.
The newspapers reported the incident, then refused to let the matter drop. For ten years fastidious fear, suspicion and disapproval had been brewing about dreamhunters and their performances. Even when dreams were only a therapy, even when Tziga Hame was the only one able to broadcast a dream wider than a room, there were people who said that dreams were wicked seductions, that dreamhunters interfered with people’s souls and that the Place was alien and unhallowed. The public was ready for a moral panic, and the newspapers whipped up the public’s fears.
The President called a special meeting of Congress. This was the meeting at which the young Deputy Secretary of the Interior, after making a number of alert and thoughtful remarks, was appointed head of a commission of inquiry.
Over several months the commission called its witnesses, asked its questions and discussed the testimonies. The commission gave its report and its head, Cas Doran, wrote a draft Bill based on its findings. Doran’s Intangible Resources Bill proposed that a body be set up: to regulate traffic In and out of the Place, to police the Place and its bordering countryside, and to act as a licensing body for dream parlours and palaces — deciding where they could be set up, and how they would be run. ‘The Place is not a mirage that will disappear,’ Doran wrote in the commission’s report. ‘It is a valuable resource belonging to our nation and, as such, it cannot be an ungoverned frontier.’
When the Act was passed, and the Dream Regulatory Body set up, and its regulations written, almost everyone was satisfied.
Chorley Tiebold was not. He complained to his wife that nowhere in the regulations did it say that a dreamhunter wasn’t allowed to sleep in the same bed as any amplifiers she used. The legislation got its start in public concern about public morals. Where was that reflected? All the government seemed to care about was that they got control.
CHORLEY TIEBOLD STOOD on the beach, watching the dead shag floating a foot under the calm surface of the morning sea, slowly drawing away in the ebb tide. Chorley was thinking about the life of a dreamhunter. Not ‘the beauty of it’, as his wife had said to him about Tziga all those years before, but its dangers. His daughter and niece might congratulate themselves on having lived in a liberal, adventurous household, but really they’d led sheltered lives. Chorley had led a sheltered life too — and was very grateful for it. He wanted to see the girls grow up surrounded by pleasant, civilised people. Grace, in her fantasies about Rose’s future, couldn’t seem to see past that magical moment on the border, at a Try, where one child in a hundred walks out of the world everyone can see. Dreamhunting had brought Grace everything — fame, wealth, pride in her work. But the girls already had everything they could ever need. They were well off, and well informed and confident. They didn’t need a job that would see them limping home haunted and hollow-eyed, as Tziga often did. Increasingly often. If the girls went into the Place they would be going where Chorley couldn’t walk after them, couldn’t look for them if they got lost. And he was the parent who’d done those things, who’d rounded them up at dusk from the safe little park a few streets from their house in Founderston, who’d called them in from the beach below Summerfort. He was the one who was always there at bedtime. Chorley didn’t want his daughter and niece to Try — especially not Laura, who was small for her age, and always had at least one serious cough every winter.
He didn’t want it, he’d argued against it, but he hadn’t stood a chance against everyone else’s wishes. For a while it had seemed as though Tziga was in two minds about his daughter’s Try, but now he was in just as much hurry as everyone else.
Chorley lost sight of the dead bird. The sea dazzled him. He trudged back up the beach to Summerfort, where he stood listening in the lower hall. There was no noise from upstairs; the girls had fallen asleep.
Seven
The ranger thought he was finally safe, with the balding earth and pale, trampled vegetation of the border before him. But he still jogged on, his feet dragging and sweat dripping past his belt. He was gasping for breath, and making a lot of noise, but when it came, he still heard it. He heard the whisper of his mineral pursuer.
The ranger put on a burst of speed. The nightmare that was chasing him must belong to the Place, he reasoned. Once he was across the border the monster would vanish.
He felt the creature’s heavy, semi-solid hand drop upon his shoulder. He let out a raw scream.
The hand solidified enough to grip, and jerk the ranger about. He faced the creature, its dry, lumpish face and the horrible swarming attention in its holes-for-eyes. The ranger felt the creature fumbling at him, and imagined that it was searching him. As he tried to tear the creature’s hands from him, the ranger’s own hand found the remnant of his letter of instruction. He took the paper and stuffed it in his own mouth and began to chew. At the same time he threw his weight backwards, and hauled himself away towards the border.
The sandman’s muddy, fused-together fingers separated. He poked two into the ranger’s mouth.
The ranger tried to swallow the letter and began to choke. He and the sandman rocked back and forth, fighting, but moving ever nearer to the bord
er.
The ranger bit down on the fingers. His mouth filled with loose sand. Sand packed down the partly chewed letter.
The sandman released the ranger, who saw the monster’s bitten fingers reform, grow from a trickle of sand running like veins down the surface of its arm. He saw the fingers lengthen, till the hand was whole.
The creature was holding a fragment of the letter.
The ranger saw all this before he staggered, gagging, through the border, into the heat and colour and noise of the world.
The noise was that of running horses, and iron-rimmed wheels rolling on sun-baked earth.
The ranger turned towards the sound, and threw up his arms to ward off what instantly overwhelmed him — the Sisters Beach stagecoach, which had come, at full tilt, around a bend in the road above the village of Tricksie Bend.
Eight
The day after their camp-out, at around four in the afternoon, Laura and Rose were on the infants’ beach. For the last few weeks of that summer the cousins had made a daily visit to this sheltered spot. There was a lifeguard they liked to look at. The girls tried not to be conspicuous in their admiration, so would park themselves at the edge of the ranks of for-hire sunbeds. The beds were usually empty at that hour — the infants and their minders having packed up and gone home. The sun was well past its zenith and the sun umbrellas cast their streaks of shade along the sand behind each slatted bed.
That day the handsome lifeguard wasn’t at his station, but was prowling up and down before the shallows in the shelter of the breakwater. Rose and Laura ambled as near to him as they dared, finally settling down partly concealed behind a sunbed.
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