Dreamquake

by Elizabeth Knox

  Then she stopped again to listen. The headland behind them was booming. Laura looked back at Nown, her eyes wide.

  An engine burst from the tunnel, braked on the incline, and came sliding and panting down the track toward them.

  Laura took off. She closed the distance between herself and safety—but then her foot slipped and she sprawled across the tracks, slamming her elbow hard. Her arm lost all feeling, then seemed to fizzle back into existence as if it was breaking out of a numbing foam.

  Nown reached her, scooped her up, and ran with her. She saw the train over his shoulder, looming onto the bridge, its light sweeping an engine length ahead of its long cowcatcher. Laura screamed. Nown swerved off the tracks and pushed her through two crisscrossed girders onto the outside of the bridge. He stretched up and over one girder to lower her onto another that jutted from the plane of the bridge. Laura’s feet touched the girder, then took her weight. She stood balanced. She tried to pull herself free from Nown’s grip. Her arms were stretched over her head, wrists closed together in one of his hands. She could see his face through a gap in the bridge structure, close to her own and sidelit by the growing yellow light of the train. She shouted at him. “Get off the bridge!” She couldn’t hear hear own voice over the thunder of the train.

  Nown released her arms, and she folded up into a crouch, her palms and boot soles clinging to the girder. The bridge was jolting under her.

  Nown stooped and began to ooze through the gap below the one he had rolled her through. Laura saw his head and arms emerge whole and shapely, then his chest and hips follow, extruded like icing piped through a square nozzle.

  Laura closed her eyes against the glare of the engine. The train sounded its whistle, then blasted past. She was sprayed with sand. The train’s violent jolting dislodged her from the girder. She slipped, scrabbled for a hold, then dropped off. She opened her eyes as she fell, glimpsed the underside of the bridge and a cloud of sand fanning out into the air and already drawing back in thickening eddies toward the shadow that was Nown.

  Laura fell into the river. It was cold and salty. Her eardrums stabbed with pain, and her back felt slapped red even through her jacket and shirt. Her pack and bedroll were pulling her down, so she wriggled out of the straps, let her pack go, and kicked up to the surface. She blinked the water out of her eyes and looked back at the bridge.

  Nown was visible, in silhouette, backlit by the flashing yellow squares of carriage windows and the straight, sweeping shadows of the bridge structure. He seemed to be poised, looking her way, as if about to jump into the water after her.

  She opened her mouth and shouted at him. “No!” Then she realized as she shouted that Nown might imagine she was calling for help. She trod water for a moment longer, then turned and struck out at an angle for the far bank. She headed away from the middle of the stream and—she could tell by the solid power of the water—the current pushing by the bluff and out to sea, even against the full tide.

  The train had passed over the bridge. Its thunder diminished. Laura stopped swimming and looked back again. Nown was still there, leaning out over the water, looking after her. Laura swam on.

  Suddenly there was a solid shelf under her hands; her hands first, her feet couldn’t seem to find it, as if it really was a ledge rather than the bank. It couldn’t be the bank anyway—Laura could see the bank, still some twenty yards from where she was, a pale beach scalloped by the river and tide and topped by a tangle of driftwood. But there was something under her hands, something solid and strangely furry, like thick dust. She heaved and scrambled up onto it. The crown of her head was touched by heat, then she tumbled out into the bright, diffuse light of the Place. She was soaking, and water ran from her hair and clothes and made thick fawn mud of the dusty ground she lay on.

  Laura stood up. She started to laugh. She stood, dripping and hiccuping with mirth. Of course she had known that the bridge was built as far upriver as it could be without crossing the border, but she hadn’t imagined that the train line she had traveled on so many times, back and forth to Summerfort, was only yards from that border.

  She gave herself a good shake. She wondered how far she’d have to walk along the border to clear the river. She made an arbitrary decision—an hour would do it. Before she set out, she held her watch to her ear and was relieved to hear it making its usual sharp, dry tick—it hadn’t been damaged by its dunking.

  2

  AURA STAYED IN LONG ENOUGH TO DRY OFF. SHE FINALLY EMERGED ABOVE THE BEACH BY THE RIVER. THE TIDE had dropped and the moon come up. Laura could see the river’s current muscled in the moonlight.

  Nown unfolded from the beach, shedding sand that wasn’t his. As he came toward her, Laura saw at once that he was a little shorter and more slender than before. “Did the train hit you?” she asked.

  “My feet,” he said. “I lost some of them.” He spoke as though he were a centipede and had plenty to spare. “The train carried part of my feet away with it. When I continued along the track, I found some sand—but I couldn’t persuade it that it was me anymore.”

  “You look younger,” Laura said.

  Nown’s head reared back with surprise. “How?”

  “Less bulky, I suppose.” Laura ran a hand down his arm. She stepped close to him to measure herself against him. The top of her head had formerly come to his sternum; now it came to his collarbone.

  Nown said, “I saw you disappear. But I was sure that you didn’t go under—then certain of it when I went on.”

  “Went on where?”

  “Went on existing, Laura. I waited not to exist—though I did think you had gone into the Place, not under the river. Then, when I did go on existing, I went on walking too, along the bridge to look for the rest of my feet.”

  Laura shook her head. They were always having these strange conversations. She asked him, “Do you still have the water skins?”

  Nown pointed at a single skin on the ground nearby. “When the train came, I flung them over onto the far shore. One burst.”

  “Damn.”

  “And you’ve lost your pack and bedroll, Laura.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then shouldn’t we go back?”

  “Oh, no! Let’s go on to the Doran property. Rose said there was an orchard. I can steal some fruit. We should at least take a look In to see where those rails have gone.”

  Nown picked up the surviving water skin, then Laura, and began to make his way around the shore of the Inlet.

  Near dawn they crossed the ironwood trestle over the braided channels of the Sva mouth—without encountering another train. Then they turned toward the back of the Inlet, walking on the hard-packed sand beside a channel through reedbeds, where the warmth of the previous day was still trapped in the thick fur of stalks.

  At sunup they found the Dorans’ jetty, and the beginning of the narrow-gauge railway. A little while later Laura spotted the orchard. She asked Nown to put her down and sprinted toward the trees. She could see clusters of apricots and black plums with a white bloom on them.

  But before she reached the orchard, she ran through the border and into the Place. She swore. Her voice came back at her instantly, a single flat reverberation, from a mass of crumbling gray landforms that rose abruptly about a quarter mile from the hummocky meadow where she stood.

  The Pinnacles—eroded, crooked spikes—stretched out along the horizon, a barrier made, apparently, from heaps of sculpted ash. The peaks looked as fragile as piles of old leaf litter held together by spiderwebs.

  Behind her Nown said, “I can’t climb that.”

  Rose had said there was a gate. Laura guessed that she and Nown had come In beyond where it was, simply by turning off toward the orchard rather than continuing up the avenue of plane trees. She asked, “How much water do we have?”

  Nown handed her the water skin, and she weighed it—it was several days’ ration. But she was without food.

  Laura fished in her pockets and found only a tin of Farry’s
Extra-Strong Licorice Pellets (Recommended for Regularity). “Oh, great,” she muttered. Why couldn’t she have been carrying mints or barley sugar? She said, “I’ll have another nap here, then see how far we can get on this much water and without food.” Laura stared at Nown, her finer-limbed and slightly less overbearing sandman. “And I suppose I could send you on farther to take a look for me.”

  “You could,” he said.

  “We’ll see.”

  “Yes, we will see what you decide,” he said.

  Laura hadn’t expected him to respond at all. And she was even more surprised when he expanded. “You are the one who needs to eat, Laura. And you are the one who needs to know.”

  Perhaps he was chastising her for saying “we”—saying it and not meaning it, because she was the one with a mission, and he only had to look after her. She said, “Are you angry with me?”

  “I’m never angry.”

  “Then I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.”

  Nown was silent, and Laura knew he was thinking because the iron sand gathered in his eye sockets and on his brow. After a time he said, “If you send me to look, you may not be satisfied with my report. You and I see everything differently.”

  Laura nodded. She was only partly paying attention while casting around her for a bit of ground without bumps, somewhere to bed down. The grass was in very bad condition, not just flattened but shredded. As she scuffed at the humps on the ground, Laura listened to Nown once more giving examples of things he saw. Because she was listening with only half an ear, it took her a while to realize that he was almost singing. Singing without a tune.

  “You are a web of light,” he said. “You are the shape you are. Trees stream upward, grasses lance, fire billows and makes a flaw of light. The sea is where there isn’t anything, but gannets go like spears into it, and fly up again from nothing—”

  “You made a poem!” Laura said.

  “—sometimes with a fish,” Nown concluded, less poetically.

  Laura chose a relatively even patch of bare ground. She asked for the water skin, swallowed a few mouthfuls, and lay down. She yawned till her jaw joints cracked. She tried to remember the poems she’d learned for examinations in elocution lessons, and those she’d learned at school. She lay with her eyes closed and recited the few fragments she knew by heart. “A slumber did my spirit seal; / I had no human fears …” And “She is coming, my own, my sweet; / Were it ever so airy a tread …” Then, as she drifted off to sleep, she heard Nown repeating it all back to her, word perfect. And she thought, “He really does remember everything I say.”

  Laura woke later, in the Place’s unchanging light. Nown was standing sentinel beside her, facing west, the direction from which people could most likely be expected to appear. She got up, said, “Stay here,” and wandered off to find a bush to squat behind.

  Instead, she found a grave.

  It was a long, low mound, of the same size and shape as earth piled up on a fresh grave.

  Laura shouted for Nown. Her shout echoed from The Pinnacles.

  Nown came at a swift run. He saw that she wasn’t in any danger and stopped beside her, anxiously searching her face till he noticed the direction of her gaze.

  They contemplated the grave together.

  “Why would anyone choose to be buried in the Place instead of being taken back to their family?” Laura asked, haunted and horrified. “To their family,” she thought, “and trees, grass, rain, day and night, church bells and birdsong.”

  “This might not be choice, Laura.”

  “Do you mean that someone was murdered? But this isn’t a secret grave. It’s here in plain sight—even if only dreamhunters and rangers can see it.”

  “There’s no marker.”

  “No.” Laura’s skin was clammy and her scalp tight. “Nown—could you see if there was someone alive in there? Could you see their … web of light, under the earth?”

  “No. I can’t see the gannets once they go into the water. I couldn’t see your body in the river, only your head, and your arms moving in and out as you swam.”

  Laura moaned.

  “Are you thinking of your nightmare?”

  Laura clenched her jaw and nodded once, sharply.

  “Shall I dig it up for you?”

  Laura grabbed her sandman’s arm, though he’d made no move to start digging. She shook her head. She didn’t want to see any corpses. Since grass didn’t grow in the Place, there was no way to tell how long ago the earth had been piled up over whatever lay beneath it. “Let’s just go,” she said. She turned away to find somewhere else to make herself comfortable. She didn’t look back. She didn’t see Nown pause, long, his gaze apparently penetrating the disturbed earth as if, perhaps, he could see what lay there.

  Who lay there.

  3

  HE GATE TO THE PASS THROUGH THE PINNACLES WAS CLOSED. THERE WAS NO ONE BEYOND IT ON GUARD — NO ONE ANYwhere around. The gate was made of black iron, a plain, workmanlike thing, bolted together and set into two short walls of mortared brick. The walls were pressed right up against the sides of the pass.

  The Pinnacles themselves were perhaps only a hundred and fifty feet high, but steep and unstable. No one with any sense would think to set foot on their mealy gray slopes. There was no grass or scrub on them. It was as though they, like the grave, had come into existence after the grass had grown (and had stopped growing), as if they had bubbled up through the ground and set, a belt of brittle peaks.

  A length of chain was wrapped around the joined sides of the gate. The chain was fastened with a padlock.

  Laura put her face to a gap in the bars and looked along the pass at a road sprinkled here and there with hunks of fallen earth but otherwise swept smooth.

  Behind her Nown said, “If you step out of the way, I’ll break it open for you.”

  Laura took several steps back. Nown seized hold of the bars and began to shake the gate, pulling back and thrusting forward with his whole weight. At first he moved as if he were a body with muscles; then he began to move faster than any human body could. The gate clanged and boomed. The noise set off slides on the sides of the pass. It looked as if The Pinnacles were melting. Laura glanced around but saw no one. The din the gates were making would be audible for miles.

  Finally, in the racket, there came a sharp, metallic crack. One of the hinges had broken, so that half of the gate sagged. Nown said, “Can you climb that?”

  She nodded.

  He picked her up and boosted her into the gap. She scrambled, then lowered herself over the top of the gate, hung on for a moment, and dropped. She backed away and waited for Nown to join her. He tossed her the water skin, then swarmed up the slope of the bars and tumbled over, landing with a thump that shook the ground at Laura’s feet. He got up. They stood still for a moment, listening to pattering falls of earth. Before them the surface of the road was no longer smooth but blistered with debris.

  Nown and Laura began along the path, she now and then jumping and scuttling aside from small rushes of dislodged pebbles. They walked softly for fear of shaking down the walls above them. They didn’t speak.

  Laura thought it was reasonable to assume that the gate was closed only for safety, when The Pinnacles Pass was in poor repair, or when the Body was transporting materials for the secret railway of Rose’s theory. So, Laura realized that, because the gate was closed, she and Nown were likely to encounter other people—making repairs or carrying rails. At any moment, they might round a corner and run into a party of rangers hurrying back to see what had made all the awful noise. She should have a plan in case someone appeared. Things had been going badly—she’d lost her bedroll, her food, one water skin; she’d missed the fruit; and Nown had lost part of his feet—though the ones on which he was walking looked almost exactly the same, if a little smaller. She should decide what to do if she and Nown did run into rangers. She racked her brain. Eventually, she spoke. “Nown?” she asked.

  “Yes, Laura?
”

  “If we meet any rangers, could you—um—render them unconscious?”

  He was silent.

  “Could you—?”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Unconscious. Yes.” Laura was annoyed. Nown was acting like a responsible adult again. “Do you have any other suggestions?”

  Nown was quiet for a long time, then he said, “You could shout at them: ‘Run for your lives, my nightmare has gotten loose!’”

  Laura laughed. It was silly but seemed less chancy than her plan.

  Her sandman added, “I’m not sure that I know how hard to hit a man to make him unconscious. I could try putting a hand over his mouth, but then I could deal with only one man at a time.” He sounded practical.

  “All right. We’ll try your idea. Maybe that should be a contingency plan if we meet another dreamhunter or ranger.”

  “Even your friend Sandy?”

  Laura fell silent, thinking of her unanswered letters. She was going along with her head down and so missed the branch in the path. She stopped only when Nown called out to her. She looked up and saw that he was standing beside another closed and locked iron gate while she was paces along the open path.

  The path they had already traveled had twisted and turned so much that Laura had lost her usual vague east-west orientation (the feeling that, since she was on this border of the Place, and facing In, Tricksie Bend lay somewhere west on her right-hand side). Laura was sure that the path she was on was the trail from the map she’d studied. A trail that led to Sanctuary Valley, a spread of open grassland containing a handful of commercial dream sites, the only official destination beyond The Pinnacles, and the only reason the Regulatory Body maintained a pass through those dangerous peaks. There’d been no sign on the map Laura looked at that the trail branched anywhere beyond the gate. And yet Nown was standing by another gate, which blocked the way onto another trail.