Dreamhunter

by Elizabeth Knox

  Chorley left the railway station and tramped on up the road. The postman rode past, and peered at him. The bike’s front wheel wobbled, then the bike tipped in a rut, dumping the postman on to the road beside Chorley.

  Chorley helped the man to his feet. He picked the bicycle up. Its chain had come off.

  ‘Thank you,’ said the postman.

  Chorley retrieved the mailbag. It was dripping mud. He held it out to the postman, who said again, ‘Thank you, Mr Tiebold.’

  ‘Do you have any mail today for Marta Hame?’ Chorley asked.

  The postman explained that he hadn’t sorted the letters yet. He usually sorted the mail at the station but —

  But today he was in a hurry to see where I was going, thought Chorley. ‘— and sometimes I sort the mail at Miss Hame’s. I have a cup of tea with her. She’s a friend.’

  ‘I see,’ said Chorley. ‘I only meant to offer to carry Miss Hame’s letters — if you have any for her. To spare you the trip, since you’ve torn your trousers.’

  The rip was in the worst possible place. The postman found it, blushed and went knock-kneed in an effort to conceal it. He explained that a third of the mail was usually for Miss Hame anyway.

  Chorley gestured at the torn trousers. ‘That — and the broken chain on your bike — need immediate attention.’ He looked about at the railway line and the farmland, then back at the postman. ‘What will you do?’

  The postman answered with dignity, ‘I will make my way slowly up to Miss Hame’s and seek assistance there.’

  Chorley put out his hand for the mailbag.

  The postman clutched it to him. ‘With the mailbag,’ he said. ‘It’s my responsibility.’

  Chorley shrugged, tipped the man a salute and strode on up the hill.

  CHORLEY RECOGNISED the house from Tziga’s description — a description given offhand, but so detailed and interesting that Chorley had felt the question he had asked was being answered: Why do you spend so much time there when Laura’s here? (Chorley had meant, ‘When we are all here,’ but didn’t want to make any demands on his own behalf.) ‘It’s very peaceful,’ Tziga had explained. ‘And there’s no other place near it.’ Tziga had described Marta’s house — and his description was an explanation. He’d explained everything — without burdening Chorley with the truth. For, as Chorley stood where Marta Hame’s driveway turned off the road up to the house, he knew he was looking at the place where his brother-in-law had hidden with the tired fragments of the final days of each of his terrible nightmares.

  Marta Hame’s house was handsome, but it looked haunted.

  As he crossed its yard Chorley heard singing, a light, low voice singing not a melody, but a complex, modulated chant. The singing was accompanied by the sound of a stick thumping on a wooden floor. Marta was giving a lesson.

  It’s only a lesson, Chorley thought, though the chant seemed to pull him about inside. It made him feel queasy.

  When he knocked at the door the singing stopped, and a dog began to bark. Chorley heard the bark coming closer as the dog raced to the door. He heard its nails skittering in the hall, and then Marta hushing it.

  Marta opened the door. She was clutching her woolly-coated boyar by his collar. She hauled him back out of Chorley’s way. She looked stern — at the dog — and amazed to see Chorley. ‘I’ll put him out,’ she said. She shuffled around him, pushing the dog out with her legs. She closed the door on her dog, who barked briefly, then whined a little, then yawned while still whining, then fell silent and trotted off into the yard.

  ‘Can I take your coat?’ Marta said. She was a short, broad woman with her grey and black hair wound into a tight knot at the nape of her neck. She had Tziga’s deep-set, dark-circled, black eyes.

  Chorley gave her his coat and followed her into the nearest room, a sunny front room, with a piano, and a cello leaning on a chair, and with Laura — Laura was there.

  Chorley asked his niece just when she had planned to tell him and Grace where she was. ‘You told us you would be sleeping at Pike Street, dreaming with the resident dreamhunters, but we had hoped you might come home during the day.’

  Laura got a stubborn, defensive look. ‘I spent two of those days with Rose. Didn’t she mention it?’

  ‘No,’ Chorley said.

  ‘But perhaps you haven’t seen Rose,’ said Laura, with transparent false nonchalance. ‘But that’s all right, I guess, since you always know where she is — where you’ve left her.’

  ‘Please do not speak to your uncle like that,’ Marta said. She was standing in the bay window, facing the yard. She said, ‘Laura, would you please go out and rescue the postman from Downright?’

  There was barking outside. Laura went out to deal with the dog, and Chorley joined Marta at the window. He saw Laura running towards the postman, who had put his broken bike between himself and Downright’s doggy enthusiasm. Chorley looked at Marta. He caught her eye. ‘I knew I hadn’t long before the postman descended on us with his broken chain and torn trousers.’

  ‘What on earth did you do to him?’ Marta said.

  Chorley lost his temper. Laura’s criticism had stung him and he wasn’t going to take a telling-off from Tziga’s sister. ‘Why would you imagine I’ve done something to the man?’ he said. ‘What do you think I am?’

  ‘A Tiebold,’ Marta said, coldly. She turned away. Her profile looked like a portrait on a medal, cold and minted. ‘Your sister tormented my brother,’ Marta said.

  ‘What are you talking about? Verity loved Tziga!’

  ‘She tormented him for years before she would marry him,’ Marta finished her sentence.

  ‘She was afraid of him!’ Chorley shouted.

  Marta flinched. She stared at Chorley, her eyes wide, while he glared back at her.

  Then, all at once, Chorley saw how hopeless it was, his having come here to beg Marta to cooperate with him and Grace in organising the memorial service for her brother. There was too much between them — too much made of too little. Years of neglect on his side. He had taken her brother — one of only two surviving relatives, counting Laura — and made him part of his tribe, the Tiebolds. He hadn’t discouraged Laura from regarding Marta as her ‘dull auntie’. He hadn’t invited Marta to family celebrations — and neither had Tziga, but then Tziga would never remember to host family celebrations anyway. If Chorley ever remembered Marta and felt uncomfortable, he would remind himself that Marta had her church and choir. Marta was respectable. (That was another thing Laura had always called her, mockingly — ‘My respectable aunt’.) Grace and Tziga hunted dreams and wore themselves thin, while Chorley stayed at home with the girls and was loved. He was the one who got the love. He had been neglectful and disrespectful and he didn’t deserve Marta’s help. And he did deserve to have Laura answer back when he started his ineffectual nagging.

  Chorley folded, he slumped down on the window seat, bent over with his face in his hands. He said, ‘Please, please, for God’s sake, let us hold this service. Help us do it.’

  Marta put her hand on his shoulder. She said, ‘Chorley Tiebold, you don’t believe in God.’

  ‘But you do,’ said Chorley, muffled. Then he jumped up from under her hand and went across the room to lean on the fireplace. He gripped the mantelpiece with both hands, but couldn’t prevent his shoulders from shaking. ‘The only reason you won’t help us bury Tziga is that you think he’s still alive,’ Chorley said. His words were strangled, but audible. He listened to Marta’s silence and supposed she hadn’t heard him. But then she asked, ‘Why would that thought upset you?’

  Chorley heard her footfalls, she came close to him. He tried to get a grip on himself. ‘If Tziga was alive, why wouldn’t he let his daughter know?’ Chorley said.

  ‘Or you,’ Marta added.

  He hadn’t said it. He’d kept his mouth tightly shut.

  ‘You — his best friend,’ Marta said, rubbing it in.

  Chorley dropped his head till it pressed into the jutting s
helf of the mantelpiece.

  ‘Do you think Tziga’s dead?’ Marta said.

  ‘I don’t know what I think. What I think changes every hour. But I know it’s wrong to let Laura go on hopelessly hoping.’

  Chorley heard her move closer, then her voice at his shoulder. ‘Think,’ she said. ‘Think why you’re so determined to hold a memorial service.’

  ‘I want it settled somehow for Laura,’ Chorley said. ‘For all of us. And Tziga was a great man. A public figure …’

  Marta interrupted him. ‘No — I mean, why do you want to be seen holding a service?’

  Grace and he had agreed, months ago, that it was vital to have some public show of their belief in the official story of Tziga’s fatal disappearance. Grace had said, ‘If they — whoever they are — imagine that we think they’ve lied to us then they’ll never relax enough for us to learn anything. A memorial service will, perhaps, make them drop their guard. Besides, I’m scared that, if we don’t somehow discourage her, Laura is going to go looking for him days In from Doorhandle. She isn’t strong or experienced enough to do that.’

  Chorley wiped his eyes on his sleeve and faced Marta. ‘So — you won’t go along with our plans for a memorial service, even for the sake of appearances?’

  ‘I’m a religious woman; I never pray for the sake of appearances,’ Marta said. ‘And — who knows — I might be holding out a foolish hope.’ She shrugged.

  Chorley stared at her for a long moment, then said,

  ‘Where is he?’

  The question hung between them in the quiet, plain, sunlit room. Marta put out a hand, a shy hand, but one without the slightest tremor, and laid it on Chorley’s. ‘Listen,’ she said. Her hand was warm. ‘I’d like you to go out and help the poor postman restore the chain to his bicycle. Now, don’t protest, I know you’re a mechanically minded man, Chorley Tiebold. While you do that I’ll write a letter for you to carry to my friend. He will tell you what to do.’

  CHORLEY SAT ON the steps and restored the chain to the bike. He got some grease on his trousers. The postman sat in a cane chair, at a wicker table, sorting the mail. Every so often he would look expectantly along the veranda. He clearly hoped tea would appear. Downright the dog sat at his feet, sighing.

  Laura came and sat near Chorley. He asked her whether Aunt Marta was giving her singing lessons. Despite her impressive piano playing Laura had never shown much interest in learning to sing.

  ‘I wanted to learn some more of the old songs,’ Laura said. And then she sang one of the Tailor’s, a short song:

  The past is a purse;

  the future a note of promise.

  Past blights are poison in the ground, rotted crops or living corpses. Against the time the debt falls due is time itself, and only time. The dry seconds are sand in a glass, and a servant made of sand.

  ‘That wasn’t what you were singing when I arrived,’ Chorley said. ‘It was something older. Something foreign.’

  ‘It’s in koine, demotic Greek, with some additional Cabbalist-type words. It’s a song they say St Lazarus heard in the tomb.’

  ‘Sing it,’ Chorley said.

  Laura got up and backed off from the steps till she stood in the centre of the yard. She clasped her hands, as if it was important that each hand held the other still. She began to sing. She was still practising the chant — that much Chorley could hear, because her voice faltered sometimes. The chant was made of complex, shifting tonal patterns, of strings of words that didn’t sound like sentences, because each word sounded like a new word, as if no word was used twice, as if the language of the song had no use for ‘and’ and ‘to’ and ‘it’. Laura scowled in concentration. Chorley even saw sweat start on her face, swelling beads of it, big enough to tremble as a breeze got up. For, as she sang a wind did get up and sweep around the yard, around and around, till it had raised a little dust devil which danced for a moment about Laura. At the same moment that Laura lost her place in the chant and broke off with a coughing sob, the dust devil collapsed and vanished. ‘Damn it,’ she said, panting.

  ‘That was pretty impressive,’ Chorley said, then added, ‘Sweetheart.’

  Marta appeared. She held out her letter. Chorley wiped his greasy hands on his trousers and took it. The letter was in a sealed envelope. The envelope was addressed to ‘His High Reverence, Erasmus Amon Tiebold’ — the Grand Patriarch.

  LAURA AND CHORLEY stayed one night at Marta’s. The adults enjoyed a diluted version of the young dreamhunter’s Convalescent Two — in its ninth night no longer saleable, but strong enough to be felt. Uncle and niece caught a train back to Founderston together, in what each thought was a friendly silence.

  Laura didn’t wonder about the oil-spotted, unopened envelope her uncle carried, or notice how his hand went to his jacket pocket now and then to check that the letter was still there.

  Chorley didn’t notice how Laura sat, her face turned to the view of paddocks and poplars and ditches filled with blackberry bushes, or how her lips moved and fingers flickered as she mouthed the chant and counted its measures.

  They failed to notice what they should have noticed; that Chorley was nursing his hopes, and Laura her secret resolve.

  For Laura was planning to make herself a sandman.

  Two

  Laura spent several days at the house in Founderston. She let her aunt and uncle fuss over her. Grace was at home during the day, but sleeping at the Rainbow Opera, where she was dreaming Balloon Wars. During those days Grace made plans for what they would all do in the summer, ‘as a family’. Chorley and Laura nodded and made attentive noises. Chorley wrote a letter asking for an audience with the Grand Patriarch. And Laura practised ‘The Measures’ in the bath, in her bed at night, whenever she was left alone.

  When she was ready Laura took her pack, maps, food, money, bedroll — and one other thing. She left a note for her aunt and uncle and caught a train to Sisters Beach.

  She went on up the track to Whynew Falls, and trudged for two days through the silent country to the dry riverbed.

  The sand disturbed by her father’s digging, and by her flight and struggle, hadn’t settled. With no wind or rain to erase them the signs stayed. Laura looked at the imprint of Chorley’s camera, and the marks where her fingers had clawed at the bank and, lastly, at the excavation, which looked like a shallow grave. She tried to imagine what her father had seen when he sang a body up out of that grave.

  For the first time Laura let herself really think about what she planned. It seemed to her that she had been drawn back to this place by a series of unconnected impulses. She had asked her Aunt Marta to teach her certain old songs that Marta and Tziga were taught as children by their great-grandfather. She had memorised and mastered one song — a long, complex chant Marta called ‘The Measures’. Before she left Founderston, Laura had removed something from her jewellery box — the rust-stained rock she had picked up from the trackbed six months before. She had kept her hand closed around the rock in her pocket as she rode on the train to Sisters Beach. She had mouthed ‘The Measures’ at the carriage window, and her hand felt her heart beating in it, as though the rock in her hand was a heart.

  She had been planning this for weeks, the plan like a pulse in the back of her mind. She’d fondled the statue in the museum, touched it in order to feel how to shape it. Laura had formed a strange notion. She felt that she wanted to learn who Nown really was — if he really was somebody in his own right, not just an occasional powerful wish wished by a succession of powerful Hames. Laura was planning a kind of experiment that, she thought, would let her look on the real face of her sandman. She had realised that she didn’t want to look on a face like the one she and Rose had formed in the sand of Sisters Beach during the sand-sculpting competition, a face with the marks of their tools in it, clumsily made. No — Laura wanted to look into her sandman’s true face.

  Standing in the dry riverbed at map reference Y–17, Laura was about to attempt something that no Hame had
attempted before. She knew it too, knew it in her body and brain, and in her mouth, where the words of ‘The Measures’ seemed to sit on her tongue and fizz like sherbet dissolving.

  Laura took her coat off. She put down her pack, and the heavy water bottles she had carried and scarcely touched to drink herself — for she might need water for her work. She found an undisturbed patch of river sand, and began to dig. She dug with one of Grace’s narrow gardening trowels, which she had taken from its hook on the porch of Summerfort. It wasn’t a very effective digging tool — Grace only ever used it on Summerfort’s potted plants — but it did spare her hands.

  When she had cleared a long, wide trench, and had dug down to damp sand, Laura rested and had something to eat. Then she excavated some sticky clay from the bank of the stream. She wet her hands and worked the clay till it was firm but plastic. She spent an hour carefully fashioning two hands, hands nearly three times the size of her own, with long, thin fingers, big knuckles and backs marked by branching sinews. She did her best. Art was one of two school subjects at which Laura had done well. (The other was music.) The girls at the Academy had often crowded around her table in art class to admire her work.

  When she had finished making the hands Laura looked up to check the light. It was a reflex — but of course the light hadn’t changed, no sunset would come to hurry her along.

  Laura washed the clay from her hands. She stepped down into the excavation and began to scrape the damp sand together. She bulldozed with her palms. After a time she had scraped together a long mound. She stood up and walked around it, measuring it with her eyes. Then she knelt once more and began to work.

  She disappeared into her work. She became invisible to herself.

  Laura shaped a pair of long, sturdy legs. She shaped square heels, round ankle bones and a thick Achilles tendon. She modelled squared calf muscles, strong thighs and a narrow pelvis. She made a form remembering the statues she had looked at, and the one she had been moved to touch, much to Rose’s embarrassment. How could Rose have known? Laura thought, as she finished with the buttocks and began to shape the small of the back.