Dreamhunter

by Elizabeth Knox

  Again Laura had the strong suspicion she was being teased. She frowned at him.

  ‘But I will watch your face for frowns, Laura, if that is what you want,’ Nown said.

  ‘You would do well to,’ Laura said, tartly. ‘For now you can fetch me the biscuit tin.’ She pointed at the pantry. ‘The tin with the kittens on it.’

  She watched Nown cross the room and thought that even exhausted and numb as she was — even surprised by him — somehow having him seemed natural to her.

  Nown came back and put the biscuit tin into her hands. She took it from him but was staring past him at the cut-crystal knob of the pantry door. Was it her imagination, or had the crystal clouded, marred by his abrasive touch? Laura got up to take a closer look, then lost her nerve — was she really ready to know that her servant could unconsciously destroy things at a touch? No — that was more than she needed to know right now. She decided that she must not confuse her servant, overburden him with trivial questions and instructions. It was important that he respect her, and her judgment.

  She left the room, trailing her blanket but trying to look queenly. She called out to Nown to follow her. She led him upstairs. She showed Nown her room and told him to make a fire there — then remembered to add, ‘In the hearth, please.’ She took the biscuit tin into the bathroom, put the plug into the bath and turned on the taps. She sat on the edge of the bath and crunched her way through five dry macaroons.

  The bathroom filled with steam. Laura closed, then locked its door.

  The steam formed skeins, seemed to bale itself up near the ceiling. Condensation appeared on the inside of the bathroom windows and droplets ran, zigzagging, down their bobbled glass.

  Laura shed her filthy clothes. She kicked them into a corner. She stepped into the hot water, sat, then slid down. She left the taps running for a while and the water chimed in a rising tone as the bath filled to its rim. Laura floated down the bath and turned the taps off with her toes. She submerged her head, then came up for a breath and rested her head on the bath’s rim while water drained, sizzling, out of her short hair.

  Laura managed to eat another biscuit, this time dipping it in her bath water, then draping it — a biscuit-shaped paste — on to her tongue. She thought of the open door of the kitchen range — she hadn’t told Nown to close it. She thought of the camera on the kitchen table — she hadn’t thought to ask Nown to carry it upstairs. Her thoughts were fragmentary and helpless, her limbs heavy in the hot water.

  WHEN LAURA WOKE up the bath was still warm, but only just. She woke abruptly, slipped down in the water then lifted her head to listen for a noise she was sure had woken her. She tried to sort the sound out — whatever it was — from the wash and slap of the little waves her sudden movement had made in the bath water. She was looking up at the ceiling, and saw the swinging squares of pebbled light appear there as the headlights of a car swept across the glass of the bathroom windows.

  Summerfort was nowhere near the road — the car must have come up its driveway.

  Laura held her breath. She sat up in the lukewarm bath water and listened to the still house, the wintry grounds.

  SHE HEARD CAR doors slam, and then the latch on the front door making its familiar musical rattle.

  Laura flung herself out of the bath, slipped and slithered across the bathroom floor to the wicker cabinet where towels were kept. She grabbed a towel and draped it over her shoulders. She fumbled with the lock on the bathroom door. The bolt was slippery with condensation. It gave way suddenly, and Laura skinned a knuckle. She opened the door and looked around it. She saw lamplight, and the crown of her cousin’s glossy golden head appear — Rose was coming up the stairs.

  Laura dashed down the hallway to the door of her bedroom. Rose had reached the top of the stairs. She saw Laura and called out to her. Their eyes met. Rose looked relieved. She was holding a lamp, but raised her other hand to gesture — she seemed to be saying something about Laura’s towel. Then she turned and spoke to someone over her shoulder. It was Uncle Chorley, of course.

  Laura wrenched open her bedroom door, went into her room and leant against the door to close it. She stayed there, a puddle of water forming around her feet.

  Nown was standing by the fire. When she came into the room he turned and looked at her. In the firelight his eyes were hidden under the deep shadow of his gnarled forehead.

  There was no lock to Laura’s bedroom. Laura gripped the doorknob in her slippery hand and held it closed. Rose was now on the other side. ‘Laura?’ Rose said.

  ‘In a minute,’ said Laura.

  ‘Rose, what is it?’ Chorley was there too. That was his hand slapping high on Laura’s door.

  ‘Go away,’ said Laura.

  Laura panicked. She abruptly released the doorknob and crossed the room in several bounds, leaving her towel behind her. Then she was next to Nown, beside the fire, its flames warming the water on her chilly skin. For a moment she was closer to her servant than she had been since he’d cornered her. He was looking down at her with calm expectation. All the fine, crystalline river sand in his form was alive in the firelight — alive! Laura was quick. She put up her hand and caressed her servant’s forehead. She did what she had known how to do since she’d first touched him. She didn’t think of what she wanted, or ‘Will it work?’ but simply acted on the information she’d gleaned from that touch. She erased the W in his name.

  Nown collapsed with a gentle, mineral sigh.

  The door burst open behind Laura.

  WHEN ROSE CAME into the room she found that her cousin was naked. Rose saw Laura’s towel at her feet. She picked it up and carried it over to Laura, held open ready to drape her. Before dropping the towel on to her cousin’s shoulders Rose turned back briefly to her father, in the doorway. She frowned at him, and made a little movement with her fingers, sweeping him away.

  Rose’s father had frozen, his mouth open. Rose was angry with him, and embarrassed on Laura’s behalf. She wished he would just take the hint and step out of the room. Rose’s father hadn’t quite caught up with the fact that she and Laura were young ladies now.

  Rose turned her attention back to her cousin. She settled the towel around Laura, meaning to mask her breasts and backside, and then to dry and warm her. It was only then that Rose saw that her cousin’s face, shoulders, breasts, stomach and thighs were coated in sand as though a blast of wind had blown it at her. Rose saw that Laura was standing up to her ankles in a mound of sand. She saw that Laura’s hand was raised at the level of her head, and that Laura’s fist was clenched as though she had been knocking on an invisible door.

  Rose took a step back. She stared at the mound. The sand was mostly smooth, but was in places mealy with lumps of clotted clay. Rose saw, peeking out of the pile, what looked like the fingers of a clenched, clay hand.

  Chorley came up beside his daughter, then he touched his niece’s arm. Rose stepped forward again, so that she and Chorley flanked Laura. They began to speak, to try to talk to her. They spoke over one another.

  ‘Laura?’ said Rose.

  Chorley said, ‘Take a hold of your towel, dear.’

  ‘Are you all right, Laura?’ Rose said.

  ‘What is all this?’ said Chorley, pointing at the floor.

  Rose didn’t understand what her cousin was up to, she simply helped Laura hold her towel.

  Laura’s eyes slid sideways. She looked at her uncle. She looked wild and furtive, then she dropped on to her knees and began to scrabble through the mound. Perhaps she had seen something. Something buried in the sliding mass of silver. She was moving the sand about with all the messy diligence of a digging puppy. It was Chorley who first saw what Laura was looking for. He saw the corner of an envelope sticking out of the sand. He bent and picked it up. Laura jumped to her feet, dropped her towel and made a snatch at it. Her sandy skin rasped against her uncle’s clothes. Chorley reeled back, holding the envelope up over his head.

  ‘Give that to me!’ Laura said.


  Chorley held off his niece with one arm, brought the envelope down to his eyes and shook the sand from it. The letter was addressed in Tziga’s hand — ‘Laura’ it said. The letters of her name were faint, the ink scratched away, the surface of the envelope itself distressed and furry — as though it had been rolling around in sand. But, since the letter was addressed to Laura, Chorley surrendered it to her.

  As Laura waded out of the mound, clutching her letter, one of her feet hooked free another paper. Laura didn’t notice it, but Rose picked it up. Laura went over to her bed and wound herself up, sand and all, in her eiderdown. She tore her letter open. Chorley watched his niece’s eyes go back and forth, climbing down the page, reading. He became aware of Rose, beside him, making crackling noises as she unfolded the other piece of paper. He looked over her shoulder at a large fragment of a letter. He and Rose read:

  … it is reasonable to suppose that he will attempt to enter the Place on a quiet section of the border, and without registering his intentions at a rangers’ station. Follow him and find out where he goes.

  And — this cannot be stressed enough — do not sleep when or where Hame sleeps.

  Chorley was surprised to hear his daughter saying, under her breath, ‘Yours, Cas Doran, Secretary of the Interior.’ Then Chorley thought of the fragment of paper he found in the mouth of the man run over by the Sisters Beach stagecoach. The fragment had read: ‘ours as D ecre’. The paper Rose was holding was another piece of the letter whose partial signature he had pulled from the sand-stuffed mouth of that dead ranger, three months ago, on the day that he last saw Tziga.

  Rose understood more than he did, Chorley realised. He and Grace had been protecting their daughter from knowledge she already had. She’d been keeping secrets — not her own perhaps, but Laura’s.

  Chorley tried to catch Laura’s eye. He said, ‘What does your father have to say?’

  Laura looked up from the page only to say, ‘Get up.’ She appeared to be speaking to the mound of sand. She said, ‘Pull yourself together.’ Then she laughed, a ragged, unhappy sound.

  ‘MY DEAR LAURA,’ the letter began. Laura, reading it, heard Nown speaking, not her father. ‘My dear Laura,’ Nown had said. Later she had seen him working his hand into his chest — to fetch out this letter, she now knew. The letter had lain against his heart, or had lain inside his chest alone, instead of a heart. Laura had asked Nown about her father — she had requested information, and Nown had reached for the letter. If only, Laura thought.

  My dear Laura,

  Please excuse this clumsy scrawl. I haven’t much time, and my hands are hurting me. I’m writing only to tell you what I must.

  I’ve made a mess of things. I’m afraid I intend to leave my mess for you to tidy up — a shameful thing for any father to do.

  Laura, you must listen to what the Place tells you, what it will tell you if it speaks to you as clearly as it has to me since the beginning. I wasn’t ever prepared to listen to it. I should have let it make something of me — what it needed me to be. Instead, I took what I wanted from it. I really always knew that the Place wanted me to do something for it. What I wasn’t able to understand was that it was warning me, warning me what I must not do.

  Laura, I’ve made terrible mistakes. I don’t want to tell you what I’ve done because I know that, if I try, I will betray myself even further by defending my actions when, in fact, they are indefensible. Indefensible and unspeakable. Can you blame me if I can’t speak about it? But see — I am defending myself. Maze Plasir, who is as guilty as I am, would not try to make excuses for his part in our crime. Plasir, it turns out, is a more decent man than I am.

  This is my excuse, Laura — for the little it’s worth — I loved your mother for too long before she consented to be my wife. I loved her too much, till it wasn’t love, till it was only excessive sentiment and miserable longing, as lonely a habit as habitual drunkenness.

  I must stop this. I must remember everything I have to tell you.

  Your Aunt Marta knows ‘The Measures’. It may be that you will find need of them, though I have given you someone — this someone. He will be able to help you, to carry you places where you wouldn’t be able to walk on your own. His patience, his stamina and his loyalty are infinite. I hope that you will make good use of him, and that his usefulness to you will make up for my failings.

  Laura, I have left you with a terrible task. But you need only do it once, if you do it properly. When you’re ready catch the dreadful dream. Overdream someone with the right-sized audience — your aunt in the Rainbow Opera. Pick the right occasion, then break and enter, break and enter their minds. Make them see that the dreams are ghosts. That the Place is a tomb — the tomb of the future.

  Laura, love, I am so sorry for involving you in my ludicrous life.

  Laura twisted the page in her hands and tucked it out of sight under the bedclothes. At that moment her confusion was the only reason she had for not answering her uncle’s question, or simply handing over the letter.

  Her father’s last line was like the darkness following a lightning flash. The letter had dazzled Laura, but after reading it, only its final line stayed with her. She couldn’t understand it. Laura was her father’s child — had he ‘involved her in his life’? Ludicrous. What a word — it was too deflating, too bleak, too adult for her to understand. There had been a moment — a moment between Nown’s collapse, and this — when she thought she would get an explanation, receive instructions, be released from the lonely prison of her puzzlement. But Laura found her father’s letter unfathomable. And she was ashamed of it.

  ‘Well?’ said Chorley. His voice sounded like a grating hinge.

  Under the covers Laura had begun to tear the letter into pieces. Her uncle saw what she was doing and dived at the bed. Suddenly he had one corner of the paper, and Laura was rolling around over the other fragments, kicking, and slapping him with her free hand. She shouted at him, ‘It’s my letter!’

  Rose came to Laura’s aid. She took her father by the arm and hauled him away. She yelled, ‘Let Laura keep it!’

  Chorley shook his daughter off. He said to her, ‘She isn’t keeping it, she’s tearing it up! Why won’t she let me help her?’ Then, to Laura, ‘Why won’t you trust me?’

  Rose, seeing Laura in tears, began to cry too. Laura was still shredding the paper, tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces. ‘Dad wouldn’t want you to see it,’ she said to her uncle.

  ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ Chorley said. ‘You’re still only a child, Laura.’

  ‘You don’t need to know.’ Laura shook flakes of paper off her ink-blackened fingers. She and her uncle stared at each other, each looking through tears on the other’s anger, pity and compassion. They didn’t look away till Rose said, ‘Where did all this sand come from?’

  Part IV

  Open Secrets

  One

  Chorley had to leave his car at a garage in Sisters Beach. Laura couldn’t be taken back through Rifleman Pass where, for her, the border was. So they caught the train. They went in their usual style, and had a compartment to themselves.

  Laura refused to answer their questions. After a time she found it easy to disregard them. She felt chilly and light-headed. Her hair hadn’t dried properly after her bath, and her scalp was damp. She inclined her head into the padded corner of her seat and let her uncle and cousin talk. At one point she found herself telling her uncle a story. She said that her father had left her a sandcastle — that he had built a sandcastle in her bedroom at Summerfort. She’d only just found it. ‘It fell apart when you hammered on the door,’ Laura said.

  Her uncle’s face was like the reflection of the moon on water, pale and unstable. Laura couldn’t seem to look at it properly. Chorley was reminding her that her father had been dead before they had left the house at Sisters Beach, two days after her Try. He said, ‘You’re just being insolent, Laura.’

  Rose said, ‘Laura, when I asked where all
the sand came from, why did you lie down on your bed and pull the covers over your head?’

  Laura slid further down the seat. She heard Rose say, ‘She has beads of sweat on her top lip. I think she’s unwell, Da.’

  The seat beside Laura depressed as Chorley sat down. He prised her out of her corner and felt her forehead. Laura said to him she was going to have her dream about the mice — she always dreamt about mice when she had a fever, dear little mice running all over the place so that she couldn’t lie down anywhere. Beneath her uncle’s hand her head felt like a teapot stowed under a cosy — something was brewing there. Rose seemed to be counting the stops between Sisters Beach and Founderston — but weren’t they on the express? They were discussing where they might have the train stop. She heard Rose say, ‘Do you think she is very sick?’

  ‘She’s very hot. But I want to get her home. I’d rather not hand her over into anyone else’s care.’

  ‘No,’ said Laura. She was agreeing with her uncle, she wanted to be taken home. She tried to explain that she was only knocked back because she’d walked so far. Her water was in her pack, wouldn’t someone please give her water?

  There was a little flurry around her, as if the mice had arrived. Then someone put a cup to her lips, and she took a few sips of cool water. Her teeth hurt. She heard Chorley say to Rose, ‘Do you have any idea what she’s been up to?’

  ‘I told you — she went to get the film from your camera.’

  The camera. Laura asked them had they remembered to collect it from the kitchen. ‘After all my trouble,’ she said. She saw Rose frown and slap her forehead. They had forgotten it.

  Laura said she wanted to lie down. ‘Let me,’ she begged. Then she said, fearful, ‘You stay over there. Stay where you’re put.’ Then she called his name, ‘Nown!’ and began to cry, and put her right hand — her writing hand — up into the curling column of the music that had appeared around her, and was smoking away from her body, the music she had felt singing between Nown and her when she gave him his voice.