So it was that, a few hours before, in the dark of night, when frost was forming on the timber ties of the rail line they walked along, Laura had leaned over her sandman’s shoulder and scratched out one letter on the back of his neck, the first N in his name. She’d freed him. And he didn’t leave her (as her father had). Instead he gathered her close and kept on walking.
“You hide yourself but stay near,” she told him, then stood for a moment stupefied by the thought that since she’d freed him he didn’t need to obey her. Then, “I’m soaking wet,” she said. “I must go in. Will you wait for me?”
“Yes,” said Nown.
Laura approached the house. She went up the stairs to the porch. As soon as her foot touched the top step, barking erupted from within. It was Downright, her aunt’s dog. She heard the dog coming till he was on the other side of the door, his nails clicking on the wooden floor as he danced around.
Laura called through the door, “It’s me, Laura!”
Downright paused to listen, then began to bark again.
The stained-glass border around the door lit up as a lamp was carried to it. It was Mr. Bridges, one of Aunt Marta’s elderly servants. Laura heard the man speak sharply to Downright. Then Marta joined him, calming her dog with praise. “There’s a good boy, settle down now.” The bolt rattled, the door opened, and two people and the dog all stared at Laura.
Downright surged forward, and his collar jerked free from Marta’s grip. He brushed past Laura, ran outside, and began to track back and forth across the lawn with his nose down. He reached the long grass at the edge of the mown area and stood, stiff-legged, silent, pointing. Then his ears went back, and he hunkered down on his haunches, made a tight turn, and scuttled back across the lawn. He pushed past the people in the doorway and vanished into the dark dead end below the main staircase, where he cowered, whimpering.
Marta looked after her dog, frowned, then drew Laura indoors. She released her niece and looked at her wet hands. “What is this?” she said. “Where have you come from? And what on earth are you wearing?”
“I walked here. I’m wet through,” Laura said.
Marta made a small sound between a grunt and a gasp, more exasperated than shocked. She took hold of Laura and hustled her up the stairs, issuing instructions over her shoulder about breakfast.
Marta’s bedroom was warm, last night’s fire smoking still. She gave her niece a nightgown and told her to change out of her wet clothes and get under the covers. Marta poked at the fire, put on more coal. Laura stripped off her silk pajamas, which weren’t evenly soaked—no, her back and seat and one shoulder were dry, for they had lain against the shelter of Nown’s body. Laura could see that the pattern was incongruous, so she crumpled the silk into a wad so that the dry patches blotted the wet ones. She dropped the bundled pajamas and put on her aunt’s nightgown. Her bare feet tingled with the blood coming back into them. She climbed into her aunt’s bed but remained sitting. “I mustn’t sleep,” she said.
Marta got up from the hearth and stared at her niece. “What have you done?” she said.
“I showed them.” Laura shivered.
Marta put on her dressing gown and stood at the mirror to brush out her braid. She wound her hair into a coil and pinned it. She was silent throughout, and it was as though she hadn’t heard Laura. But then, without turning, she met her niece’s gaze in the mirror and asked, “What did you show them, Laura?”
“What happens,” Laura said. She opened her mouth again to add, “The dreams they take to the prisons,” but something inside her interrupted. It wasn’t like being interrupted by her own thoughts. She recognized it as different from her, a fragment of planted intelligence, something that had come to her with the dream. It seemed to say: “What has happened,” to warn: “What will happen.”
“Laura.” Aunt Marta was sitting on the bed beside her, hands gripping her shoulders. “Lie back, girl, you’re faint. Your face is completely white. You can sleep if you need to. No one in this house is about to go back to bed.” Marta began to muse. “Though, really, if your dream is that dire, I will have to have you moved elsewhere.”
Laura put her head back on the pillow. Her shivering began to subside. She closed her eyes. A moment later she felt her aunt lift the covers. Marta said, “You weren’t wearing any shoes, but your feet are clean. Who brought you here? Who else knows you’re here?”
“No one,” Laura said. “I came on my own.” In her mind she saw the three remaining letters on the back of Nown’s neck. She flicked her thumb against her forefinger and felt the sand packed under her fingernail.
Her aunt said, “Why did you choose to come here?”
“I haven’t anywhere else to go. Everyone will be mad at me,” she said, and thought, “And it was raining.”
She had been wet and cold. But if when the day came the sun had appeared too, then she might have asked Nown to keep on walking, to carry her away somewhere, as if a spell held her together, instead of all her regular needs—food and shelter, clothes and money.
The bedroom door closed. Aunt Marta had gone out. Laura opened her eyes and looked at the plaster decorations on the ceiling, the white ropes of leaves and flowers gathered at the four corners of the room by big bows borne by birds in flight.
Once she was warm, Laura got out of bed and stood at the window. It was a gray morning, not much lighter than the dawn had been. Laura saw Mr. Bridges hurrying off down the road, patting one pocket as he went.
The bedroom door opened. “Get back into bed,” Marta said. “I’ve sent Mr. Bridges to the telegraph office at the station. I feel the need of some advice. You were always an honest girl, Laura, and open—without having picked up that habit the Tiebolds have of broadcasting constant reports on their mental weather …”
Laura got back into bed, remained sitting, but drew the covers up to her chin. She listened to her aunt mutter about the shortcomings of the rest of her family. Marta was opening drawers and rattling hangers in her wardrobe as she spoke. “You were honest, but now I see you’re heading down the same path your father took. You have to understand that you shouldn’t abuse your gift for any reason. Not for any reason.”
“I’m not. You’ll see.”
Marta shook her head, bundled her clothes in her arms, and went out of the bedroom again.
Half an hour went by. Mrs. Bridges came in with breakfast on a tray. She too told Laura that her husband had gone to the station’s telegraph office. “Miss Marta has asked her friend the Grand Patriarch to send a car—‘immediately’ is what she wrote.”
It appeared that Laura had come all this way only to be carried back to Founderston.
Mrs. Bridges shoveled more coal into the grate, then said, “You should eat up, dear. You must be famished. Here, let me take the top off that egg.” The woman came and did that and then stood making soothing noises over Laura as she ate. “That’s right. Get that down you,” she said, and, “Have some more toast. My quince jelly turned out particularly well this year.”
When Mrs. Bridges finally left, Laura eased the tray off her legs and got out of bed. She posted herself at the window and waited. Mr. Bridges came back along the road and turned in at the gate. Once he was indoors, Laura pushed up the window and thrust her head out. It was dull, full daylight outside, but she couldn’t see where Nown might have hidden himself. She called his name—in a loud whisper.
Behind her, the bedroom door opened. “Get away from that window!” commanded Aunt Marta.
Laura took her knee off the sill and shuffled back to the bed. Her aunt’s nightgown was too long for her.
Marta closed her wardrobe doors. She turned the key in the lock, removed it, and put it in her pocket. “I have nothing that would fit you anyway. You’d be swimming in all my dresses,” Aunt Marta said. “And this way you won’t think of setting out cross-country again.”
“Mrs. Bridges told me you asked the Grand Patriarch to send a car.”
“That’s right. Upon ref
lection I’ve decided that I can’t turn the Bridgeses out of their beds just because you’re carrying a nightmare.”
Laura’s aunt stood straight-backed, with one hand pressed flat to her pocket as though she thought the key might leap out of it. Her face was stern and full of suspicion. “While I am pleased that you think you can come to me, Laura,” she said, “I’m afraid that this is all a bit beyond me.”
When Laura had last visited Marta, she’d had her aunt teach her “The Measures.” Laura had told her aunt that she had been talking with her father about “The Measures” and other old Hame songs the last times she saw him, at Summerfort, and at Sisters Beach Station before the special train carried him away. She’d told her aunt that her father said the songs were his only real family legacy, and that she should know them. Marta Hame had, till recently, been the choir mistress at the Temple in Founderston. She was a musician, a music teacher, and a Hame—the ideal person for Laura to ask about the family music. But Laura hadn’t been collecting songs to remember her father by—no—she had wanted to learn “The Measures” because it was a spell, a recipe for making a servant out of earth. Now, looking at her aunt, Laura wondered how Marta could know the chant and not know what it could do.
Laura’s aunt said, “Erasmus will tell me how to handle you.”
Laura laughed and shook her head, partly out of a sense of absurdity—her aunt had such faith in her friend and spiritual guide, the Grand Patriarch of the Southern Orthodox Church. But the Grand Patriarch was always speaking out against dreamhunters and dream palaces. According to him, the Rainbow Opera was a place where people indulged in “a secondhand education of the senses” and “acts without consequences.” What kind of advice could the Grand Patriarch offer a lawbreaking dreamhunter? All he believed in was abstinence. Besides, Laura hadn’t wanted advice, she’d only wanted to get the job done.
Marta pulled the window closed before she left the room. For a long time Laura didn’t dare to stir. She was sure that her aunt was just beyond the door, listening for movement. Laura waited. She became drowsy, and it was her drowsiness that frightened her out of the warm bed and across the room. For a minute she stood pressed against the window—her face turned to the door. There was a light in the hall, a candle perhaps, its wavering radiance lancing through the keyhole. Laura watched it, and the strain of watching was so great, and she so still, that everything seemed to come to life around her; the bedroom furniture, the plaster garlands carried by plaster birds, the patterns on the carpet—everything became animated and seemed to watch her back. Laura felt like a wild animal; she ached for escape.
After a long time she turned back to the window.
Nown was standing on the lawn looking up at her.
Laura pushed the window open and swung her legs over the sill. She stepped out onto the cold, corrugated iron of the veranda roof. She walked as far as she could, to where the curve began to plunge down to the gutter.
Nown stalked nearer, till he stood at the veranda rail, directly beneath her.
Laura looked down into his black-banded, statuesque eyes and thought that it wasn’t really any wonder she’d imagined the bedroom furniture had come to life. Nown was made of inanimate matter, sand all the way through—and yet here he was, waiting to hear what she wanted. She said, “My aunt has sent for a car. She’s taking me back to Founderston. Not to the authorities, though, I think.”
Nown didn’t move, show surprise, nod to acknowledge he’d heard, or make any noise to encourage her to go on speaking.
Laura looked around the misty farmland. She saw a pine plantation—trees black in the mist—growing on the curve of the nearest hill like the neatly cropped mane of a cavalry horse. She pointed. “Wait for me there, in that forest. Can you do that? I’ll be back as soon as I’m able. I don’t want anyone to see you.”
Nown didn’t reply—he didn’t say “I’ll do that.”
“Please,” she said.
He lifted his arms and held them out. He didn’t say anything, but the gesture meant, “Jump!” It meant, “Jump, and I’ll catch you.”
From the room behind her Laura heard her aunt, shocked, shouting, “Laura! What are you doing out there? Come back inside this instant!”
Laura took one last look at her sandman’s open arms, his black-banded, brilliant eyes, then turned and made her way carefully back to the open window and stepped into the warm bedroom.
3
NLY THE DAY BEFORE—ST. LAZARUS’S EVE—WHEN LAURA’S OVERNIGHT TRAIN HAD ARRIVED IN FOUNDERSTON AT nine-thirty in the morning, she had pushed three envelopes into the mailbox on the concourse of the station.
The letters were collected and sorted at the Central Post Office. None made the ten-thirty delivery. All three went out at noon.
One landed at twelve-forty in the basket of the assistant to the Director of the Regulatory Body. It was still lying there unopened when the man put on his coat and hat at one p.m.—the beginning of his half-day holiday—and went out to meet his wife at the People’s Gardens.
The second letter was delivered to the Temple at noon, but the Temple was always busy over the feast of St. Lazarus, and the letter didn’t find its way into the hands of Father Roy, the Grand Patriarch’s secretary, until seven the following morning. When the Grand Patriarch returned to the vestry after the celebration of early mass, he was met by Father Roy, with the letter and a telegraph from his friend Marta Hame asking him to send a car to her house. The Grand Patriarch read Marta’s message and dispatched a car. He read the letter, then handed it back to Father Roy and said, “Perhaps this explains the crowd at mass. Much more than the usual St. Lazarus’s Day throng. There were people wrapped in blankets standing at the back and lining the aisles. They looked like they’d wandered in from the site of a disaster.”
The Grand Patriarch went back to his apartments and sat down to breakfast and the morning paper. The paper carried a red “Stop Press” report of the riot at the Rainbow Opera.
The third letter found its way to the mailroom of the Founderston Herald shortly after one on St. Lazarus’s Eve, then languished among dozens of other letters to the editor since the paper was being put to bed early that day—printers working overtime to get out the holiday edition, a paper full of advertisements, announcements of engagements, and the Ladies’ Supplement’s thoughts on hats and tango heels. A paper very light on actual news. At midnight on St. Lazarus’s Eve, the skinny, seedy little man whose job it was to sift through letters to the editor burst out of the nearly deserted Herald offices and into the street to jog several blocks and over a bridge to the Isle of the Temple. He arrived in time to see bloodied people spilling out of the Rainbow Opera and the first constables pushing their away in. Despite his protests, he was turned away from the Crescent Plaza by the police. It was hours before he managed to find the Herald’s editor, who was at home by then, cleaned up but still gray-faced, and with fresh scabs on his scalp from where he’d torn at his own hair. The skinny, seedy man handed the letter to his editor, who peered at the elongated, backward-sloping handwriting and read:
Dear Sir,
Please publish this letter.
It has come to our attention that the Dream Regulatory Body has been using nightmares to terrorize and subdue the inmates of this nation’s prisons in order to guarantee a cooperative labor force to work in mines and factories and on road and rail projects.
The accusation was all in one long, mad, bad sentence. The editor frowned and read on:
The public may already be aware that dreams are used for education and rehabilitation in prisons. But the public does not know that, instead of sharing dreams about the wages of their sins, the prisoners are forced to endure frightful nightmares from which no one could learn anything.
“The author of this letter has a large vocabulary but is semiliterate in my opinion,” said the editor.
The nightmare broadcast in the Rainbow Opera on St. Lazarus’s Eve is one such dream. We have overdreamed Grace Tiebold�
�s Homecoming so that the public will know that this is what it is like for those prisoners. We did it in order to wake the public conscience.
Stop the torture!
Lazarus
“I’ll deal with this,” said the editor to his assistant. He saw the man to the door, then sat down to compose a note to his friend Cas Doran, the Secretary of the Interior.
The police handwriting expert peered at the two letters, the one that began “Dear Sir, Please publish this letter” and the other beginning “The time has come for the Regulatory Body to submit to judgment …” He said that the writer was left-handed, and secretive. “Look at those backward-sloping letters.” He said that the stationery was the same for both letters but that one page was more yellowed than the other, was perhaps the top sheet of a pad that had sat around in sunlight for some time. It was export-quality linen paper, manufactured in a certain paper mill in the south. The letters had probably been written at a desk equipped with a writing set, because the ink was blotted with sand. The handwriting was highly distinctive, fluent, and not—the expert thought—a disguised hand. “But, it seems to me that the handwriting is more mature than the composition of the letter—the bad grammar and poor punctuation.”
Having given his opinion, the handwriting expert was shown from the room. Cas Doran, the Detective Inspector from Founderston Barracks, and the Director of the Regulatory Body were left alone.
The Detective Inspector said, “Before we ask Grace Tiebold in here, we should think about charges.”
Doran closed his eyes, saw darkness, winced, and opened them again. His mouth and jaw were sore. It hurt him to speak. “What can she or Mason be charged with? There is no crime called ‘grievous mental harm.’”
“Perhaps there should be.”
“Certainly not,” said Doran. “We’d then have this Lazarus and his allies bringing criminal charges against the Regulatory Body and the Department of Corrections.”
Dreamquake Page 3
