Dreamquake

by Elizabeth Knox

  “For what?” Sandy was bemused.

  His uncle said, “Several of Plasir’s dreams are master dreams. He can catch—say—Secret Room and overwrite this nightmare. Would you like me to send him on to you, Alexander? I’m splitting Plasir’s fee with Mrs. Tiebold, though obviously she’s first in line.”

  “Plasir might not agree,” said Grace.

  “Well, if he does decide to, you’d better make sure our guards know to direct him to us,” said Mason.

  Grace nodded and went indoors in search of the Chief Ranger.

  “I can’t contribute anything toward Plasir’s fee,” Sandy said. The idea of being alone in the forest with Maze Plasir made him feel queasy.

  Plasir was a Gifter—he could take his own memories of real people’s faces and manners and graft them onto the characters in the dreams he caught. He was often employed by people who wanted what they couldn’t have, and his dream repertoire included dreams that weren’t at all respectable. Plasir wasn’t respectable, though he did have powerful friends.

  Sandy said to his uncle, “I’d better just tough it out.”

  “It’s your funeral,” said Mason, and chuckled at his own black humor.

  Grace returned, followed by a group of grim-faced rangers. One clapped his hands to get their attention. The drooping, hollow-eyed dreamhunters started with fright. “Get up!” the ranger ordered. His men scooped up their packs and bedrolls. They were led away from the station and out of the village. Five rangers walked before the dream-hunters, setting the pace, and five brought up the rear.

  Sandy felt herded and corralled. But he was the son of a shop steward in a factory that made flax matting. He had been raised in a house with strong views on the rights of working people. “You know what we need?” he whispered to his uncle as they tramped along. “We need a union.”

  7

  OSE CAME IN ALONE WITH LAURA’S BAG AND PULLED THE LITTLE DOOR CLOSED BEHIND HER, AS IF SHE DIDN’T want what she had to say to get out into the open air. She at once began to speak, commencing an attack. A few moments later Laura, thinking she would confound her cousin, wet her finger and thumb, and closed them on the wick of the room’s single candle.

  “Laura!” Rose was enraged. And then she looked down into the light on the table, the world in miniature, perfect but for the distortion at its edges. Laura monitored her cousin’s face, waiting for Rose’s set, righteous look to soften in amazement.

  Rose stared at the streets, beetling traffic, and brushstrokes of flocking pigeons. She continued to look grim, staring through the world as though it were an apparition. She said, “To think I believed that you were telling me everything. That you’d let me in on what you were planning. But all you told me was what you were feeling. If we are friends, do you imagine that our friendship is just made up of shared feelings?”

  “I didn’t talk to you about my dreamhunting. I thought it was better not to speak about what you’d missed out on.”

  “Do you think that’s what I’m talking about? You sparing my feelings by not tantalizing me with dreamhunter stories? Are you listening to me? I’m not even talking about what you chose to do—you may have had very good, considered reasons for bringing that nightmare to the Opera. But, Laura, I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me about that—that thing!”

  Laura thought it was better to pretend she didn’t know what Rose was talking about. She knitted her brow. “Thing?”

  “The monster. The statue. The thing that carried you off.”

  “That was the nightmare. Part of the horrible dream.”

  “I didn’t sleep, Laura! You made sure I didn’t sleep. You put Wakeful in my musk creams. I was awake, and I know what I saw.”

  “Do you? You have to realize, Rose, that my talent has made me different from you,” Laura said. “I’m not as susceptible to—”

  “Lots of people have talent. Lots of people have things that make them different. But, you know, even if we shared every aspect of our lives, the difference between you and me was still going to be huge, not because you’re talented but because you believe our differences are more important than what we have in common.”

  Laura looked at Rose and wondered whether her cousin was going to cry. Rose was so worked up. She, Laura, had always been the weepy one. Now she felt dry, deadened, and suspended.

  “So—I don’t want to hear about your God-given talent. Especially since you are just going to stand there lying to me!”

  Laura stood, silent, thinking about the Hame inheritance, “The Measures,” her servant. She fought her urge to explain and, fighting it, realized that she wasn’t finished, that there was more to do. After a while she said, “When I go to the Place, I feel that I might be able to catch a dream that will make sense of my whole life. Not of other people’s lives. Just my own. It isn’t that I think I’m different. It’s that I have to deal with actually being different—with things that have changed me.”

  “Listen to you,” Rose said. “Even now all you’re doing is talking about your bloody feelings.”

  Laura shook her head. She was too tired to properly understand what Rose was saying to her. She doggedly went back to her explanation. Why wouldn’t her cousin just let her get this said?

  “Try to imagine it was you. Try to imagine that your ma and da disappeared and all you were left with was a letter saying what you were expected to do. Try to imagine that you did something you knew was impossible—but it felt right. It felt like gravity. Not like a mystery and a terror, but like a secret wrapped around its own solution. Rose, I know I can be impulsive. But I couldn’t see to do anything other than what Da told me to. And setting out to do it was like crossing a narrow bridge over a chasm—I couldn’t stop, I couldn’t look down. And I had to think my gift came to me because someone thought I should have it. That it was God-given.” Laura was aware that Rose did not believe in God. All her life Laura had wavered between her cousin’s and uncle’s atheism, and her father’s faith. Now she was firmly in her father’s camp. If “The Measures” had not come from God, where had they come from?

  Rose said, “You think you’ve stolen fire from Heaven.”

  Laura waited. Then she nodded. She nodded to say she accepted that Rose’s view was fair and may well have been right.

  Rose just looked at her, bleak. “Laura, you haven’t told me anything. You don’t trust me. Clearly you’re not the person I thought you were. Or you’re not the person you once were.”

  Laura said, weakly, “People change.”

  But Rose had raised a hand to stop her speaking. “The point is—honestly—that I don’t know whether I trust you anymore. Or even like you.”

  Laura’s face clenched, and two cold tears slid down her cheeks. “I don’t believe you, Rose.”

  “You’d better believe me.” Her cousin pushed the bag across the table. “Have a safe journey,” she said, then left the turret room.

  8

  HORLEY TIEBOLD FOUND HIS DAUGHTER AT HER SCHOOL. HE MET HER IN THE PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE AND WALKED HER OUT into the quad, where they stood under a peach tree whose buds had just cracked to show tight, spotless tips of pink blossom. Rose stood a little way from him and slipped her hands under the bib of her pleated pinafore to warm them. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “You’re going to ask me where Laura is. You know, if I had a dollar for everyone who’s asked me that, I’d be rolling in money.”

  “I know where Laura is. I’ve been to the Temple. Father Roy told me that, at his request, you delivered some of her clothes.”

  Rose was looking at him now. It was a careful, self-contained look, and very grown-up. “For her journey,” she said.

  “Yes. They’re sending her off somewhere safe. To join her father—who I’ve seen.”

  “Oh,” said Rose. She blinked. She stretched out the toe of one highly polished shoe and pushed it through a puddle to make ripples. “Laura didn’t know about that when I saw her.”

  “They plan to tell her when she’s wel
l on her way. They’re worried about her state of mind, and I think it suits them to keep her subdued.”

  “Yes, I can see that.”

  “Darling?” Chorley said. He felt as if he had dropped a stone down a well and hadn’t heard either a clatter or a splash.

  “So Uncle Tziga’s alive?” Rose said; then she looked into her father’s face, her expression open and wondering. Chorley reached for her and drew her to him. His earlobe brushed across the top of her head, and he realized she’d grown since he’d last held her. She was hugging him now—hard—so that his breathing was a little constricted. “I’ve been worried that Ma will be really angry with you,” Rose said. “And with Laura.”

  “I doubt your mother will be angry with me when I tell her I’ve found Tziga. I’d have come home sooner, except where I was they get five days’ worth of newspapers only every five days. When Tziga read about the riot and nightmare, he said, ‘It’s Laura.’ And I shouted at him.”

  A sharp gust of wind swept over the roofs around the quad and altered the air pressure in the enclosed space. The peach tree seemed to throw up its branches in surprise, and drops of water rained down on father and daughter.

  Chorley said, “Tziga has a head injury. He has fits. It doesn’t do to upset him.”

  Rose drew back and looked into his face. “How did he hurt his head?”

  Chorley looked away. He couldn’t meet his daughter’s eyes. He tried to control his face and his feelings.

  “Da?”

  “I don’t expect your mother back for several days yet.”

  “Da?”

  “No,” said Chorley. “I’ll tell you when I understand more.”

  “Uncle Tziga is hiding from the Body,” Rose said. “The Body supplies the Department of Corrections with nightmares.”

  Chorley was startled. “How do you know that?”

  “Maze Plasir told Laura and me. We went to see him. That letter Laura tore up suggested she talk to Plasir. And it told her to do what she did—to catch a nightmare and overdream Ma at the Rainbow Opera. It was Uncle Tziga’s idea. But—Da—Laura lied to me.” Rose’s voice went high and tight. “She lied to me,” she said again. Her father could see she was fighting tears. “She didn’t trust me enough to tell me what she meant to do. She mixed Wakeful into my Farry’s musk creams so that I wouldn’t sleep. She thought she was doing me a big favor, but she kept me out of everything, and when I confronted her she lied. To me! And I can’t even talk about it properly till I have proof about what she’s hiding. It’s like I have to lie too, or look crazy.”

  “The Hames—” Chorley began, trying to organize his thoughts about the Hames, the three he knew anyway—morbid, dramatic, closemouthed, and apt at times to act like divinely appointed judges. “You can’t be too angry at Laura. Her father left her and wrote a letter saying do this and do that. It was as if he’d told her she’d failed him somehow and had to make it up to him. She can’t have wanted any of this.”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t have the nightmare. It made everyone crazy, but Uncle Tziga could always hold big, forceful, awesome dreams in his head without going out of his mind. For all we know, Laura might not have hated it.”

  “Rose, Tziga did go out of his mind.” Chorley touched her arm. He wanted to reassure her. And he didn’t want to tell her that her uncle had tried to kill himself. “Besides,” he said, “it wasn’t just that Laura’s father told her what to do; it was also a matter of her conscience. What the Regulatory Body and the Department of Corrections are doing is wrong. Within the letter of the law, but wrong. And there’s more to it. They must be up to illegal things as well—more than just forging Tziga’s signature in the Doorhandle intentions book. I’m hoping the Grand Patriarch will eventually trust me enough to let me know all he suspects.”

  Rose shuffled her feet and scowled at her father. “Those bloody pledge takers,” she said. She was talking about the swelling ranks of those who, inspired by the preaching of the Temple, had sworn off sharing dreams.

  “The Grand Patriarch calls them his Ark.”

  “So we’ll all be drowned and they’ll be saved?” Rose was exasperated. “The Grand Patriarch thinks sharing dreams is sinful and we’ll all be punished one day for doing it—struck down by a righteous God. The Regulatory Body may be up to no good, but there’s nothing wrong with Ma or Mr. Mason or the Rainbow Opera. I’m not throwing the baby out with the bathwater because I’m told to by some bearded, fasting ninny!”

  Chorley burst out laughing.

  Rose glared at him. “Truth and justice are scarcely ever the property of religion!” she snapped. “You taught me that! And if a pack of mangy convicts needs our help, let’s help them because it’s the right thing to do, not because God loves them!”

  The school principal, a tiny woman, rushed with brisk little steps into the quad. “Rose Tiebold! I hope you are not shouting at your father. Academy girls do not take that tone with their elders.”

  “Bearded ninny,” Chorley muttered, sniggering. “Mangy convicts.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Rose. Then, irrepressible, “But he’s a sore trial to me.”

  “That’s enough of that, my girl!” The principal shot the sniggering Chorley a quelling look. She said to him, “It would be far better for Rose if, when she’s rude, she wasn’t so confident that she’s also amusing.”

  “Yes, I see.” Chorley wiped his eyes.

  “Is this interview over?” the principal inquired, tartly.

  “Yes,” said Chorley. “I have to go home and burn my Darwin.”

  “Da!” Rose squeaked, and they both started giggling again.

  “Rose! Mr. Tiebold! Please!”

  Chorley took the principal’s hand and shook it. “Thank you for your time, and your concern,” he said. He gazed into her eyes.

  “Well—er—yes,” the principal said, then stood blushing and flustered as Chorley turned and left them.

  9

  HE MAN IN THE CHAIR BEFORE CAS DORAN’S DESK WAS TIRED OF ANSWERING THE SAME QUESTIONS, OF GIVING answers that couldn’t satisfy anyone, even himself.

  “The assailant smashed the lights and broke the doors,” he said. “He was wearing a mask. Or he had dirt on his face and a black mask tied across his eyes. He was wrapped up in something thick and squishy. His body felt soft when he knocked me down. He was there one moment, then gone the next. It was dark all along the second tier. Mrs. Tiebold was shouting at us because a mob was after Mr. Mason. I sent my men down to see what they could do for Mason—then, shortly after that, the police arrived. I didn’t see where our assailant went.”

  Secretary Doran was silent for so long that the former head of the Rainbow Opera’s fire watch finally raised his face.

  “Whoever he was, he was awake before the dream ended,” Doran said. “Or he hadn’t slept at all.”

  The man nodded.

  “A coat, a hat, padded clothes, well-built, masked, perhaps six and a half feet in height, you say?”

  “Yes. And he was gritty, as though he’d been lying on the ground.”

  “The doors were hanging off their hinges. The doorframes were splintered.”

  “Yes, I saw that later,” the man said. He looked miserable. “I should have ordered the alarm bells rung as soon as the screaming started. We just watched Mrs. Tiebold fighting it—the nightmare. We couldn’t understand at first that everyone was doing the same thing. I’ve never seen a dreamhunter with a nightmare.” The man made claws of his hands and touched his pallid, unmarked cheeks.

  Cas Doran’s hand went to his own face and the stiff rows of adhesive bandages.

  “It was an emergency. We weren’t meant to stand by amazed,” the man said. Then, “Will I be prosecuted?”

  “That’s up to your manager, and the police.”

  Grace arrived home earlier than Chorley expected, battered and dirty. He was able to tell her that Laura was no longer at her aunt Marta’s but was safe, and Rose was back at school.

>   “I’ll want to talk to Laura,” Grace said.

  Chorley opened his mouth to explain that that might be difficult, and why, but his wife interrupted him. “I’m going to have a bath,” she said.

  Half an hour later, Chorley carried a tray upstairs—soup in a cup, buttered toast, coffee. He put a stool by the tub and set the tray on it.

  Grace said, “I’m going to catch the express to Sisters Beach tonight. I’ve got a copy of Secret Room. It’s somewhat spicy, so I’d better not give it to our neighbors. Summerfort is far enough from other houses. The dream isn’t at my full size—something to do with Plasir’s eensy-teensy penumbra, which I might say may be tiny but is as black and deep as a well.”

  “You slept with Plasir?”

  “Yes, dear. Out in the woods too.”

  Chorley took deep breaths.

  “Only a master dream can erase a master dream,” Grace said. “I was lucky. Plasir already had Secret Room. He went In on St. Lazarus’s Eve, apparently. He told me that St. Lazarus’s Day is a good day for him to go dreamhunting since no one wants his performances on family holidays.” Grace smirked. “Anyway, I checked the intentions book before I caught the coach from Doorhandle. Plasir did go In shortly before midnight, almost as though he wanted an alibi.”

  “You can’t seriously think Plasir had anything to do with the nightmare? With his parlor-sized penumbra?”

  “I don’t know what I think.” Grace emptied the soup cup and started on the toast and coffee. She told Chorley she wanted him to come to Summerfort with her. “You’ll enjoy Secret Room.” She looked at him, cool. “You should be grateful that I want you to come. You must know I’m angry with you.”

  Chorley nodded. Then he smiled. And it was a smile not of gratitude or reassurance but of plain happiness. “And I bet you could do with some really good news,” he said.

  10

  AURA LEFT THE TEMPLE AFTER FIVE DAYS. SHE PROMISED NOT TO SLEEP ON THE TRAIN. SHE WAS ACCOMPANIED BY the nuns who had looked after her, and by Father Roy, who said—once they’d boarded the train and closed the door of their compartment—that they were going with her only as far as Westport.