Dreamhunter

by Elizabeth Knox

  The rangers near the cairn were therefore quite surprised to see a couple of dreamhunters come scampering up the road after word had been sent to the shelter and the flow of people stemmed. They were more surprised when the two rushed past the tortoise-back of joined umbrellas and ran on, headlong, towards the cairn. The two had their packs held up over their heads. When stones began to fall around them, making pockmark splashes in the mud, the big one, the boy, pushed the girl behind him. They continued on that way, like an engine and its carriage, into the shelter of the cairn. They crammed together there, laughing. The boy picked up a stone from the cairn and tossed it into the bushes. It was answered by a furious volley. Stones clapped and thumped on the far side of the cairn. The two put their heads together and had a consultation. They filled their hands with stones. He ducked out into the road, she followed, threw her handful, then dived through the space beyond the cairn, and vanished. Stones splattered into the puddles where she had been. The boy poked up his head, feinted, provoked another volley of stones, which he ducked. Then he jumped to his feet, threw his handful and plunged through after the girl.

  There was a burst of clapping from the watching dreamhunters. Others were inspired to make a dash for it and, after a few more minutes, the wet road was pimpled by flung stones and littered with mangled umbrellas.

  WHEN THE LAST of their followers had overtaken Sandy and Laura, greeted them and hurried on in squelchy shoes, they found themselves alone. Their jackets steamed, and their dripping trouser legs left trails of clotted dust behind them on the road.

  Sandy had asked Laura that morning whether she minded if he went along with her. He’d felt surprised — and surprisingly happy — when she said she’d welcome his company.

  They walked to where the road forked, into road and track — the track beaten and scoured of dead grass. There was a sign on a tree; it told them they were only an hour from Starry Beach.

  ‘I set my alarm and got up really early,’ Laura said. She stretched and yawned. ‘I’m ready for a nap.’

  Sandy had kept himself up late. He’d read old issues of the Founderston Monthly Illustrated that Mrs Lilley kept in piles in the hall. He had scoured the magazine’s pages for any mention — or better, any pictures — of Hames and Tiebolds. The whole time he had been skimming and swooping, Sandy had felt he was studying for an exam. In what subject he didn’t know.

  He had already done the Hames and history. He knew — for instance — that they were one of five families who had come to the country from the island of Elprus after a volcanic eruption. The Elpra who crossed the seas all settled in Founderston — then a jerry-built settlement around a fort and river port. They were welcomed for their highly cultivated skills in silk making — and for the relics, the bones of St Lazarus. The relics were housed in the Temple. The islanders stayed together as a people in the streets they built, in what, over the centuries, became Founderston’s Old Town. In fact, up until eighty years before Sandy was born, the Old Town was predominantly peopled by the dark-skinned, curly-haired people, and would be still, were it not for a cholera epidemic, and the two contaminated wells in the Old Town which caused more than half the epidemic’s deaths.

  The Tiebolds were another story. Sandy had encountered plenty of Tiebolds in his history courses at school. They were impossible to miss — the histories were full of them, sometimes scoundrels, but usually worthy citizens. The family appeared as politicians and soldiers, scientists and churchmen — the current Grand Patriarch, Erasmus Tiebold, was a cousin of Chorley Tiebold’s father.

  Of course, the most famous Tiebold was, in fact, a Cooper. Grace Cooper was only eighteen when she first entered the Place and discovered she could catch dreams. Her father owned a tobacco shop, and her family hadn’t the resources to rent rooms, and so Grace was at a loss how to sell what she caught. But she had always been an avid reader of the social pages, and it was her knowledge of who was who in society, of the habits, hobbies and tastes of the rich — as reported in Founderston Monthly Illustrated — that helped her form an idea.

  The story Sandy had heard was this: Grace Cooper had turned up one day at a famous dressmaker’s when a certain racy lady of fashion was there for a fitting. The dreamhunter told this perfumed person, ‘This is what I can do for you.’ She was invited to turn up at a house party at the woman’s country place. The woman said to Grace, ‘You shall be my rabbit in the hat.’

  On her first night in the country house, full of a dream she had caught only two days before, and ready to sleep deeply — because she had deprived herself of sleep in order to keep the dream fresh — Grace lay down and filled forty rooms with her dream. The guests found themselves fleeing cross-country, night and day, as two lovers pursued by enemies who wanted to keep them apart. Grace set the sleepers afloat in boats down dark streams fringed by bulrushes. She laid them down in an embrace in the sweet damp summer grass. Some of the male guests found themselves in the head and body of the woman as she watched her lover defy their pursuers, filled with fear and admiration for him. Some female guests found themselves in the mind and body of the man as he lay over his lover touching her tenderly and gazing into her face. Some sleepers moved from one to the other. And all woke moved, refreshed, excited by their thoughts and their bodies. They could talk of nothing else all the next day. It was beyond anything that any of them had experienced, or even heard reported.

  At breakfast their hostess pulled her rabbit out of the hat — she introduced her guests to her young dreamhunter.

  GRACE COOPER WAS an overnight sensation. From then on she was very much in demand in certain circles, at some houses, though it must be said that there were mothers who would keep their daughters away from any house at which Grace Cooper was to be a guest. Grace was the toast of — as the newspapers said — ‘the fast set.’ Grace Cooper and her dreams were disturbing to polite society in a way that Maze Plasir was not. Plasir conducted his business with privacy and discretion, and could only project his dreams into rooms right next to his own. Grace Cooper, despite the frivolous content of her dreams, had powers of projection rivalled only by those of Tziga Hame. When she dreamed, her dream was shared by as many people as could be packed in comfort into some two hundred square metres space. Many people tasted her dreams, and her influence was great. For instance, it was for Grace Cooper that the first dream palace, the Rainbow Opera, was built. Shortly before the Opera was completed, Grace Cooper had married the dashing, but debt-laden, Chorley Tiebold.

  As Sandy walked along beside Laura, this Tiebold/Hame, he wasn’t feeling too star-struck. In fact he felt he could be of some use to Laura, who, after all, had been a sheltered schoolgirl up until only a few months ago. There was so much that Laura didn’t know and should, Sandy thought. She had become a dreamhunter naturally, but haphazardly. Her father and aunt hadn’t bothered to explain the life, had possibly only ever talked about it in a vague, self-glamorising way. Her father may even have hoped she wouldn’t become a dreamhunter — the fact she had attended Founderston Girls’ Academy suggested quite different ambitions. Laura Hame was adrift, dabbling, wasting time and money, buying the texts like a good schoolgirl, wearing the correct uniform, but — to Sandy Mason’s mind — she was adrift. After all, what had she said about catching Starry Beach — that she wanted to ‘have a look at it’? As though the Place was a big store, and she was a lady of fashion out shopping with a fat purse.

  ‘So —’ Sandy said, breaking into the perfect, uncanny silence of the Place, ‘you want to catch Starry Beach to “have a look at it”, but not to sell it?’

  ‘There’s something I want to learn.’

  ‘About Starry Beach?’

  Laura said, ‘Have you ever shared it?’

  ‘No. I told you I come from south of the Corridor. I only shared dreams once I came north to stay with my uncle.’

  Laura nodded. Then she seemed to decide to confide. ‘In Starry Beach the friends around the bonfires wonder about a line of lights moving thro
ugh the forest on the hills above them. I caught a dream where I was among the lights on the hill. My dream was a reverse view of Starry Beach. Starry Beach is a healing dream and my dream was a nightmare. I guess I’m just checking all the angles.’

  Sandy was perplexed. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘you want to know what the two dreams mean in relation to each other?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a very strange approach to dreamhunting.’

  Laura shrugged.

  ‘And that’s your plan?’ Sandy said. He thought she was very odd — one of those people with an impractical amount of intellectual curiosity.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘my plan. I also want to learn how to walk for days and days. And I want to learn how to make something.’

  ‘Make what? Are you talking about the material world? You know dreamhunters don’t really deal with the material, except money, water and shoe leather.’

  Laura Hame wore an airy, secretive look. She said that all the girls at her former school were making beaded snoods for St Lazarus’s Day gifts.

  ‘What the hell is a snood?’ said Sandy.

  ‘A woven bag to wrap around loosely bundled long hair,’ Laura said, informative.

  They walked along in silence for a time. Sandy, who felt he was being teased with stories about snood-making, tried again. He said, ‘You know, I think it’s pretty slack of the Body not to have given you your figures.’

  Laura said, ‘They might have, I may not have been paying attention. I don’t pay attention sometimes.’

  ‘You drift,’ Sandy said, pleased to have one of his own views confirmed.

  She didn’t answer. She had the look of someone who was listening, trying to identify some distant sound. Then she stopped, squatted and touched the ground. She seemed to pet the surface of the road.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Whenever I come In, for the first hour or two I get a funny feeling.’ She stood up again and resumed walking. ‘It’s as if it’s telling me something.’

  ‘You hear the Place talking to you?’ Sandy tried not to sound too sceptical.

  ‘I don’t hear it. I begin by knowing I’m being talked to, then I get a very strong feeling. I feel I want to console the Place, as if it’s crying. Or — or I have to save it somehow.’

  Sandy told Laura that all that meant — probably — was that she had an affinity with healing dreams. ‘They are all around here. If you feel you want to stop the suffering it’s because those dreams are here. Perhaps you’re a healer, like your father.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  This was enough of an invitation for Sandy. He went on to explain some things to Laura, to educate her about affinities. She listened to him with interest. He was right, she had only a sketchy knowledge of what was what — the pedigrees of dreamhunters.

  There were Soporifs, Sandy told her. Soporifs like his uncle, who could send people off to sleep. Sandy told Laura he thought she might be a Soporif, if the way she’d nearly knocked out the rangers at Wild River was anything to go by. There were Novelists, Sandy went on. Novelists were very rare dreamhunters who could catch split dreams. Laura’s Aunt Grace was the most celebrated example. ‘Wild River is a split dream, but none of us caught its split version,’ Sandy said.

  ‘I didn’t even catch Wild River,’ Laura said. ‘I told you that.’

  Sandy ignored this. He knew she’d caught a nightmare. But he figured that, since the Body had licensed her, it must have been an isolated episode. He told her about Healers, with their affinity for healing dreams, and Hames — any dreamhunter with a big penumbra. ‘A whole class of dreamhunters is named after your father!’ Sandy said. ‘Imagine.’

  There were Mounters, who may not have big projection zones but could easily overdream others. ‘Your father was a Mounter, too. So is Plasir — he is also what is politely called a Gifter and impolitely a Grafter. Depending on your point of view, he either grafts real people’s faces and bodies on to characters in dreams, or he gives people what they can’t have, or what they’ve lost.’

  Lastly, Sandy said, there were Colourists. ‘Colouring is illegal. I have heard a Colourist can infiltrate dreams and suggest things. They’re secret persuaders.’

  Laura was staring at him, apparently horrified. ‘What do they persuade people to do?’

  ‘Alter their opinions, invest their money, sell their houses, vote a certain way, leave town, get married, change their will, like or dislike someone, form suspicions — all that.’

  ‘But how? How can they catch dreams to do all those things?’

  ‘I don’t know. Because it’s illegal no one talks about Colouring.’

  Laura was quiet, thinking. Sandy let her think — he’d told her enough to be going on with.

  After a little they reached Starry Beach. The dream site was in a clearing between trees with polished white limbs. The patch of ground between the trees was dusty and interrupted by hollows where people had been bedding down for the past twenty years.

  Laura and Sandy were stopped short of the clearing by a couple of rangers. The men were sitting together and swigging from a bottle. They were surrounded by dirt-caked picks and shovels. They had been digging a new latrine, they said. They were having a break before closing and covering the old one. ‘There’s a couple of dreamhunters at the site already. They’re asleep. Men from St Thomas’s Lung Hospital. You’ll have to wait till they wake.’

  The rangers finished their meal and went back to their digging, off behind a screen of trees. Sandy and Laura waited quietly. Sandy hadn’t run out of conversation, or lessons, for Laura, but while he was making his lesson plan he became distracted by something the girl was doing.

  Laura was playing with the dirt. She was sitting cross-legged, scraping the dusty earth together until she had a small mound before her. Sandy was reminded of his neighbour’s daughter making mud pies on the back steps of her house. Laura pressed the mound together and patted it smooth. Then she began to shape it. Sandy saw her form deep eye sockets and a rough, flattened nose. While she worked the dirt her face was blank and dreamy.

  From the far side of the clearing came the sound of stirring bodies, coughs and murmurs. The dreamhunters were awake. They sat up, one scratching his head. They looked about them with slitted, blissful eyes, then yawned, stretched, got up and shook the dust from their bedrolls. One spotted Sandy and Laura and said, ‘It’s all yours, kids.’

  Laura’s head jerked up, she stared at the man, startled. As she got to her feet she knocked her dust sculpture to nothingness with her knee.

  The dreamhunters stuffed their bedrolls into their packs. Sandy and Laura came into the clearing and stood waiting for them.

  ‘Is it still raining?’ said one man.

  ‘When we left it was,’ Laura said.

  The dreamhunters shouldered their packs, waved and left. Laura and Sandy spread out their bedrolls at the base of one of the skeletal trees.

  THEY DIDN’T CATCH Starry Beach. When she lay down to catch her first dream Laura had run off on her own with the fleeing convict, while her successful test mates plunged together into Wild River. By himself, unsupported by other dreamers who were catching the predictable dream, Sandy Mason had to go where Laura Hame went. It really was as though the Place was determined to communicate something to Laura through her dreams.

  Later Sandy came to name the dream and make it part of his repertoire, once he had caught it a couple more times and had learnt to wake up before it changed, turned from an ‘achievement dream’ into a nightmare. Sandy registered the dream as his own, and the following year, in the latest issue of the charts, the dream appeared in small print under the still stable Starry Beach. The map reference read: ‘The Water Diviner — Alexander Mason.’ The dream’s name was coupled with Sandy’s name because it was his claim, and he first performed it. It didn’t fall under the description of ‘dreams for the public good’, so wasn’t commandeered by the government. Sandy had an
exclusive on the Water Diviner for a year and he made good money out of it — but only once he had learnt to wake himself in time.

  The boy went out in the afternoon and cut a forked branch from the hazel tree by the stables. He stripped off all its leaves and twigs and took it out to the lip of the crack — the relic of an earthquake half a century before — a scar on the home paddock, filled with blackberry brambles. The boy did what he had seen the water diviner at the agricultural produce show do. He balanced the branch between his spread palms, fixing it in place with his thumbs. With the hazel rod held that way the boy paced along the edge of the crack. He only walked with the rod, didn’t point it. The water diviner had shown him how to go slowly and hold the rod loosely.

  The boy circled the crack and the rod failed to move, so he went on up the hill behind the house and stables, among the rocks, and there, after an hour walking back and forth, the hazel rod suddenly flipped down in his hands and pointed at a patch of rocks and ferns. The boy put the rod down and moved the stones with his hands. He pulled out ferns by their roots, dislodging more rocks.

  Water bubbled out, at first in little pushy knuckles, then in a steady trickle. Clear water, though it came out through a crack lined with coal.

  The boy’s father had been worried about water, his plans for the farm constrained by a shortage of it.

  The boy poked the rod into the coal crack to mark the spot, then ran off to find his father. His father would be so pleased with him, and proud of him. ‘At last!’ he thought. ‘At last I’ll be praised. At last I’ll be noticed for the right reason.’

  The boy couldn’t find his father, who wasn’t at the house, or in the stables. A stockman said his father had gone into town.

  The boy set off down the road, which passed through fields where the stubble had been burnt off after the harvest. The slope beside the boy, undisturbed by rain or wind, was charred still, black against the white sky, and as glossy as an ember. The boy was running, and he startled several crows that were picking over the burnt field. He didn’t see them until they separated themselves from the silky black slope and flew off. It was as though fragments of the hill had broken off and fluttered away into the sky.