Dreamhunter

by Elizabeth Knox

  Grace didn’t like watching her husband set off somewhere before her, or in this case without her. Nor did she like how small his suitcase was. Chorley wouldn’t usually travel anywhere overnight without a selection of clothes and a case of toiletries. He liked to look his best.

  ‘What are you hoping to find?’ Grace asked.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I do find,’ he answered, ‘that’s all I can say.’ He changed the subject. ‘Does Laura know you expect to see her on St Lazarus’s Eve?’

  ‘Yes. Rose has spoken to her. And she sent us a postcard from Tricksie Bend.’

  ‘She’s at Summerfort again?’

  ‘Yes, Chorley — she’s looking for clues. She got the camera, but she’s still looking.’

  Chorley put on his coat and picked up his suitcase. ‘Well — maybe soon she won’t need to look any more.’

  Grace watched her husband’s slow, growing smile. He looked like a man with a confident hope in his future happiness. Grace couldn’t share his hope. As she watched him standing there with his suitcase she felt that he was leaving her. Leaving her alone with the lonely affliction of her fear.

  Two

  A week before the feast of St Lazarus, Nown carried Laura, her pack and provisions, up the Whynew Falls track and into the Place.

  The sandman loped along, his stride and speed almost unvarying. Sometimes Laura asked him to put her down so she could walk for a bit. ‘To get my blood moving,’ she told him. She walked and raised a sweat and the dust of chaff stuck to her face and prickled in her nose. Nown could run with her without raising sweat, or tiring — of course. She had him hurry when she was sleeping. She hoped he would run her right through dreams.

  They had passed the stream Y–17 before she was quite ready to sleep — Nown had carried her there in ten and a half hours. Nearly thirty hours after that Laura fell asleep in his arms, on the upward slope of a crumbling, fissured hillside. And Nown did run her through dreams.

  Laura dreamt she was a young man who had found a place above a waterfall where he could look down and see the picnickers who came and bathed. She dreamt that he was waiting at the end of the summer, on a day when the track was quiet, and a certain girl came to the pool in the company of his sister. Laura left the young man waiting. She then dreamt she was a hunter, walking through brush at evening beside a ravine from which a terrible smell was coming.

  Laura woke up, moaning. They were at the foot of the far side of the hill. ‘Nown! Stop!’ she complained. ‘You hold the heat so. You’re like a hot stone. Put me down.’

  Nown put Laura down and she staggered about till he steadied her. She asked for the water bottle and sat on the ground to drink. ‘I had the beginning of a dream about a man in too-tight trousers,’ she told Nown, then laughed. ‘Funny feeling. And I had a nightmare.’ She shivered.

  Nown said nothing. He didn’t even tell her she should eat. Not that she needed telling.

  Laura got out her strongbread, some nuts and an apple. She looked around herself as she ate. They were in a narrow valley between hills that were more like dust heaps in a midden. Laura almost expected to see human rubbish — old bike wheels or bits of broken bedsteads smeared with ash. It was a horrible place, and if there had been any wind Laura was sure she would be breathing dust.

  It had been windy when she and Nown had crossed the paddock before Whynew Falls reserve. Nown had been impervious to the wind, which had left him as untouched as a rock — when she had expected him to smoke in the gale like the crest of a dry dune.

  Laura couldn’t tell, from where she sat at their base, whether the hills were the same shape as those in her father’s film of the backward view from the burnt building. She hoped they were the same. She hoped these were the last of the hills. She and Nown couldn’t go around these because they were so crumbled away that the ravines between each hill were choked with boulders and heaped shingle, all harder going than the climb.

  Laura pitched her apple core at the next hill. ‘What am I doing?’ she said.

  ‘Eating,’ said Nown.

  ‘I keep forgetting just how literal-minded you are,’ Laura said. ‘I keep imagining you’re marvellous.’

  Nown was silent.

  Laura looked up at him. ‘Would you like to be able to eat?’ she asked. She wondered whether he was envious of things he might know she could do, like taste food.

  ‘I have watched eating often. Vitas Hame asked the fifth to hold up the arch by his fireplace for many years. The fifth could see the dining table. Vitas Hame often had guests. Feasts.’

  Nown was telling her that some ancestor of hers had had him play statue and support the roof.

  Laura asked Nown to show her how he’d stood.

  He put his feet together and stretched his arms up over his head, the heels of his hands horizontal as though pressing a great weight upward.

  ‘How unkind,’ Laura said.

  ‘It was the service asked.’

  ‘I won’t ever ask anything like that,’ Laura promised. Then she had Nown pick her, the pack and water bottles up again. She told him not to let her fall asleep till they got to where they were going. ‘I want to be ready to sleep when we get there.’

  They went on, up the next hill, Nown climbing on two legs and with one hand. The arm that cradled Laura had lost its elbow joint and had become a flattened sling. Her pack and the water bottles rested in a hollow Nown had made in his own back.

  At the summit they found lesser hills below them, a rucked cover of vegetation, dead pasture on hills any wind would have made bald, grass like a haze, and more hills piled in the hazy distance.

  Laura walked for a time. Nown broke a path for her; he parted the grass.

  SIXTY-FIVE HOURS In, by Laura’s watch, they came to where more sky was visible than at any place in the Place. The sky was still white, but like steam gathered under an immense high dome. They looked down from a low hill on to what appeared to be a wide harbour, a seabed of sand and rocks that shelved down to several deep, branching channels. On a spur of land with an apparently man-made, straight-edged shoreline, was the remains of a huge timber-framed building.

  ‘There,’ Laura said. Nown let her down and she went ahead. She held his hand as if she were leading him, though he was the one anchored on the slope.

  They climbed all the way down and walked to the head of the causeway — for Laura could see now that that was what the squared headland was, a wide bank of hewn stones, mortared together, the bank paved on top. The ruin stood on a hammerhead of embankment at the end of the causeway. Its main beams were of tree length and girth, the surfaces of their wood scabbed and glossy black.

  Laura took her pack from Nown, untied her bedroll and spread it on the ground. She was thinking Whatever the nightmare was, it should relate to the fire, to this particular place. She imagined being penned in by smoke, and herded by flame.

  She squatted by her bedroll and drank and ate a little. She said to Nown, ‘I’m afraid.’

  He made no sound, no comforting noises, not even a grunt of acknowledgement. He didn’t offer encouragement, or remind her that having come so far she must want to find out.

  ‘My father wanted me to do this,’ Laura said.

  Nown was silent.

  ‘Is he still alive?’ Laura asked. She needed to know now. If she couldn’t ever expect to see him again then she didn’t need to do this, she didn’t need to sleep here.

  ‘I don’t know if he’s alive,’ Nown answered. ‘The eighth knew that. I am the ninth. I only know whether you are alive.’

  ‘Know, or believe?’ Laura imagined her father standing in the shadow of a passionfruit vine that grew over the arch of a gate. The gate to a garden in the afterlife.

  ‘I can’t believe. I can only know,’ said Nown.

  Laura thought about that. She said, ‘There’s a nightmare here that my father caught to take to the men in prisons. Something to frighten them into obedience. Something worse than the worst sermons about hell. My fath
er wanted me to catch it too — and show it to other people, so that they’ll know how bad it’s been for the prisoners. It’s like the little children working in mines and factories a hundred years ago — everyone knew about that, but they didn’t feel how heartless it was till people wrote describing the conditions. Then public opinion changed the law. If people experience what the prisoners are forced to, then they’ll be shocked, indignant, and — I hope — compassionate.’ Laura was wiping her hands, which were covered in oil from the peanuts she had eaten. She said, ‘Anyway, that’s what Da said I should do. He always thought that, with any encouragement at all, most people will behave kindly.’ Laura mused for a moment, then said, ‘I should probably tell the newspapers too. Write them letters explaining what I know.’

  Nown said, ‘Your father had injured his hands. Shall I hold your arms?’

  It was a practical suggestion. And given what she knew about his nature, Laura was surprised that Nown had offered any suggestions. But it was coldly practical, and Laura felt like a condemned criminal sitting out his final night with a polite warden. She lay down. She looked up at Nown and said, ‘All right. But gently.’

  She couldn’t stop shivering. She was afraid to close her eyes. ‘Is it cold?’ she said.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Laura yawned and her jaw shuddered. She was tired after all. She listened, but there was nothing to hear. She was adrift in her body, in the quietest place in the universe.

  Weak from a long sickness, heavily encumbered with what he did not know — perhaps the bedclothes — the man moved. He came to and moved. With no result. His eyes were open, but it was dark. Pitch black, as though death had pressed its thumbs into his eye sockets. He turned his head. A thin cloth pulled tight against his face as he turned. He opened his mouth and sucked in air to call out, and the cloth came into his mouth, a bubble of lily-scented satin and air that smelt of damp earth.

  His hands stirred. He meant to lift them. He meant to pull the cloth from his face. His hands moved up only inches, and were pinned by pillows of satin, an upholstery over hard walls. His hands scraped and slithered. He heard the noise his nails made.

  He heard the box.

  He began to scream. The reverberations of his screams gave him the whole shape of the box, narrow-walled, low-roofed, unyielding. Its lid was screwed down hard and would not give. Earth was piled above the lid, airless earth, pressing down hard.

  He screamed and moaned, he fought the box, in a frenzy of terror. He struggled and scuffled, strained his head up so that it beat against the coffin’s lid. He chewed his shroud, took it into his mouth to tear it, to get a little more air. Any more. He bit at his lips, and through his lips, and through the shroud. He managed to make a hole in the shroud, and yet still stifled on the condensed vapour of his own breath. He bent his hands back and pressed upward, clawed till the satin tore and he was through to the wood. He beat on the lid of the coffin. He strained till his wrists cracked.

  Then he stopped. He made himself lie still and listen. He forced his panic back. He thought he heard birdsong. He thought he heard the world above him, daylight and the open air. He listened. He listened. He listened. He hoped to hear someone coming, someone who could help him. He hoped. He listened. Then he burst out of his hope, as he couldn’t burst out of the coffin. He went mad with activity, he convulsed. His bowels let go and the trapped air went from bad to worse. He scraped at the lid till his nails ripped way from his fingertips, then till his fingers were broken. He didn’t feel it — he only felt the grip of the box.

  He forced his hands up as far as his face, to find flesh that did yield, his own mouth the only space he could thrust his fingers through. His lips were in tatters, and his broken hands were full of his own torn hair.

  He kicked and thrashed.

  It was dark.

  It would not break.

  It was dark.

  He was shut in, shut in, scuffling on in the stifling dark.

  LAURA WOKE AND reared up. Her head collided with something above her, on top of her. She screamed.

  Nown released her hands and they flew out making rents in his arms and shoulders, bashing sprays of sand out from his body. The sand flew wide, stopped in the air, then rushed back into Nown’s body.

  Laura scrambled up and away from Nown. She stood, shaking her arms and howling. She had bitten her lips and blood was dripping from her chin. She cried like a child, in terror and despair. She had caught the dreadful dream. She would find herself buried alive, if she slept, when she slept, night after night. It wasn’t over.

  The dream went on. Laura knew that it did. The buried man suffered. He waited to die in a mess of blood and filth. He hadn’t any hope. He was a penned thing.

  Laura walked back and forth, shaking her hands and crying. Her arms were aching. She could see bruises and sandy welts on her skin. Laura pulled up her sleeves and showed Nown the marks he had made. She roared at him, and shook her arms under his nose.

  Nown got to his feet.

  Laura rushed at him, put her arms around him and pressed her head into his creaking chest. ‘Be human!’ She begged.

  Nown said, ‘How?’

  Laura continued to cry. Nown was unrewarding to cling to. Stony, then yielding. If she pressed his sand it cracked and shifted.

  Suddenly he picked her up, his hands under her armpits. He lifted her up, then lowered her. Lifted her up again, then lowered her. He swung her gently from side to side.

  Laura was shocked, she hung from his hands, stiff and stunned. Then she realised that he’d seen people do this to coax their small children out of crying. She was being dandled, like a baby. She stopped crying. ‘Nown?’

  He lifted her to his eyes.

  ‘I’m not a baby,’ she said.

  He put her carefully down.

  LAURA PACKED UP her bedroll. She had water, then set Nown walking in front of her, towards the hills.

  As they went she thought about her father on the platform of Sisters Beach Station — his gnawed lips and bandaged hands. She wondered how her father had managed not to think of her as a child. As his child, whom he should protect at all costs. But between the nightmare and the station her father had shaped and sung his Nown into existence. Laura thought that she must judge her father now like God, not like a girl of fifteen.

  In springtime Laura had often been late for school because she would stop to pick woolly bear caterpillars up off the path. Rose called her a soppy thing. Laura was softhearted, but now would have to do what her father had asked. She would take the dream to those who profited from their willingness to terrify other people with it, and dreams like it. They would all be there — on the evening of St Lazarus’s. The President would be in his suite with his family. The Secretary of the Interior in his, with his family. Government secretaries, and deputy secretaries, captains of industry — they would all be there. Laura had no doubt at all that she could overdream her aunt. She was the same size as the dream now. It was packed into her, tamped down, compacted under tremendous pressure, like a huge, horrible charge.

  Three

  On a sunny Saturday, two days before the official first day of spring — the feast of St Lazarus — a shop assistant at Farrys’ looked up to see Laura Hame. He smiled. ‘You are the first of your family I’ve seen this season,’ he said. ‘Welcome back.’

  ‘I’m here alone,’ she said.

  The man was puzzled. He watched the girl touch her hair — the ends of her curls that showed under the red velvet hat she wore. Her hair was damp, freshly washed — and short.

  Of course — one of the inseparable two had passed and the other had failed. He had read that in the newspaper. She was thin, he saw, and had lost none of her summer tan. She was beginning to look like a dreamhunter. ‘What would you like, Miss Hame?’

  ‘I’d like a hazelnut log. And some toffee shells and musk cream. The cream in a jar, please. I’ll make the musk creams up myself.’

  ‘For Miss Rose,’ the man
said. He knew each girl’s favourite sweet. ‘Yes, a saint’s day present. Could you put the shells and the hazelnut log in pretty boxes?’

  Her tongue was mauve, the man saw. She was already chewing that drug they used.

  As he assembled the boxes and punnet of musk cream the man thought about everything he had read in the papers. He’d forgotten it all when he’d first seen her. He’d seen her and smiled, as he would at the first cherry blossoms or daffodils. She’d made him think about summer. He’d always liked those girls.

  As he put the boxes in a bag he said, ‘I was sorry to hear about your father.’

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, and took her package from him.

  AT THAT TIME of year, off season, the Sisters Beach train had only two coaches and a mail car. It was never an express. The conductor had an easy job. He kept his eye on the third-class carriage, since there were people on and off it at every station. But he had only two people in the private compartment of first class — and those two had tickets all the way to Founderston. In fact he only looked in on them once, to ask them if they would like their beds turned down. The compartment was a sleeper and the beds were next door.

  The girl was nearest to the door. She told the conductor no thank you. ‘My father will do it,’ she said, and gestured at the man in the seat beside her. The man was huge, bundled in a coat and travel rug and wearing a broad-brimmed hat.

  ‘Shall I turn up the heat in here?’ The conductor asked.

  ‘Would you?’ she said. ‘Father feels the cold.’

  The man didn’t acknowledge the conductor. He didn’t turn from the window. It was dark outside; there was nothing to see.

  ‘Can I do anything else for you?’ the conductor asked. He raised his voice to reach the man.

  ‘No. That will be all, thank you,’ the girl said.