Dreamquake

by Elizabeth Knox

  As Laura stood gazing at Nown and wondering about the change, he finished buttoning the coat and slipped his glass hands into his pockets, to see how much bright surface he could hide. Something in the pocket rustled, and Nown drew out a piece of paper. He gave it to Laura.

  It was a yellowing newspaper clipping. It was a photograph of her, looking fearfully through the veil of her new hat, into the blast of a photographer’s magnesium flash, on the day of her Try, a year ago.

  Laura folded the picture and put it in her own pocket. Then she held her arms out, and Nown picked her up and began to run with her, upriver, away from Doorhandle.

  4

  AURA DIDN’T GET TO FALLOW HILL TILL AFTER MIDNIGHT, SO MISSED SPEAKING TO HER FATHER. IT WAS NOWN who held her up at the end of their journey, by arguing about leaving her. She had to insist that she’d be all right, she’d be with her father. Nown had finally let himself be persuaded and taken himself off to Market Bridge.

  Laura settled into the room beside the one she’d always shared with Sandy. They’d liked the room whose single bed was against a wall, so that they could share it with less danger of tumbling out. Laura chose to sleep in the adjacent room, in a narrow iron bed. She dreamed The Gate and woke to find sunlight filling the room, because she’d forgotten to close the curtains. She got up and went to find her father, who, it turned out, hadn’t checked in the night before.

  Laura was alarmed. She said no thank you to breakfast and set off for home.

  She caught a streetcar. It was early, but the usually packed Monday morning coach was as empty as a Sunday evening one. Laura got off in the market. The farmers’ stalls were full, but the market wasn’t. Laura didn’t notice the anxious vendors; she was intent on getting to her favorite pastry shop, on a corner near her house.

  But when she arrived at the shop, she was disappointed to find the trays under the counter almost empty.

  “Do you have any pinwheels?” she asked the woman behind the counter.

  “I have cream cornets, almond puffs, and lemon tarts. All the ones I like best,” the woman said, and beamed.

  “All right, I’ll have eight almond puffs.”

  The woman slipped them into a bag. She passed them to Laura and left Laura’s money lying on the counter, though a little change was due.

  “What a beautiful day,” the woman said.

  Laura said, “Mmmm,” and waited a moment longer for the woman to ring up the sale and give her change. Then she blushed, and left.

  The awnings were still closed on the news kiosk opposite Market Bridge. Bundles of the Founderston Herald lay beside it, the strings fastening them still uncut. Laura steered around the bundles and dashed down the steps by the bridge. Before she got to the first arch, she saw a pile of clothes lying in the bottom of a boat tethered to a ring by the steps. She recognized the knitted hat on top of the pile. Then she saw, against the submerged steps below her, a clear patch in the river, like raw egg white dropped in milky tea. The patch stirred and unfolded, and water rose up out of the water, shedding water. Nown walked up the steps.

  “It can’t matter to you that your clothes stay dry,” Laura said, pointing at the bundle in the boat.

  “They’re not my clothes,” said Nown.

  Laura went back up onto the embankment and looked around, both ways. She could hear traffic on the bridge, but there was no one in sight. She told Nown to put his clothes— the clothes—back on.

  She took him home and into the backyard. She planned to smuggle him up to her room later. “I can always run a bath and hide you in it,” she said. Then, “Can you see water now?”

  “No. And I can’t see through it either. I felt you on the steps by the river. I can always feel you as you come toward me.”

  Laura stood with him, thinking about what he’d said. She knew she should go in. She needed to know what had happened to keep her father from his appointment at Fallow Hill. But the yard was quiet and familiar and private—and she wasn’t unhappy. She laid her palm against her servant’s side. His shirt—Sandy’s shirt—was damp, having blotted the river water from his surface. He felt like stone under the cloth. “And what do I feel like as I come toward you?”

  “Laura,” he said.

  She removed her hand and went toward the back door.

  “Laura,” he said again, and she turned back to him. But he was only finishing his answer. “Laura, who is life,” he said. “But not just Laura.”

  “I should hope not. There’s life everywhere,” Laura said, somewhat primly. She lifted the latch, pushed the door, and went inside.

  “Laura and someone else now,” Nown finished, speaking to the closed door.

  Laura found boiled eggs broken and mashed into the flagstones of the kitchen floor. She stopped and stared at them, then hurried on into the hall. She called, “Hello!”

  “Hello, darling!” Rose called back.

  Rose was lying on the window seat in the morning room, in her robe. She was playing with the tassel of the curtain, catching it and tweaking it with her toes.

  “Are you all right?” Laura asked.

  “Yes. Isn’t it a lovely day?” Rose stretched, arched her back, relaxed again, continued to pluck at the cord.

  “Have an almond puff.”

  Rose sat up and took one. She bit into it and gave a little grunt of happiness.

  “Where’s Da?”

  “Don’t know,” Rose said, muffled and scattering flakes of pastry.

  “Isn’t he up yet?”

  “He was up for breakfast,” Rose answered. Then she giggled. “We forgot the eggs, and they almost boiled dry. They were bouncy.”

  Laura went to look for her father upstairs. His door was open, and he was asleep in a tangle of bedclothes. He looked peaceful, so she left him.

  Chorley was in the library listening to his gramophone. He too was in his pajamas and robe. He had little purple dots of spilled jam on his front. The top of his desk was clear except for a row of gramophone cylinders lined up across it. All his papers, notebooks, even his inkstand had been pushed to the floor.

  “Laura, listen to this!” Chorley said. He raised a hand to conduct the tenor’s squeezed voice for a few bars of the song. “This music reminds me of eating dinner outdoors,” he said. “Alfresco. Surrounded by family. How wonderful it is to be surrounded by family.”

  “Well—yes,” Laura said. She couldn’t believe she was looking at her uncle wearing food stains. She didn’t think she’d ever seen him drop food on himself. He could even eat ice cream in a stiff wind without mishap.

  He kept his hand up, conducting, his arm moving just a little off the beat. “It was all worth it,” he said, dreamily. “I put in the time and ended up with this—all the time in the world,” he said.

  Laura backed out of the room and into the hall. She leaned on the wall, her legs watery.

  A few minutes later Laura was back in the yard. She was carrying a pair of her uncle’s slippers and a long scarf and gloves. She gave them to Nown. He sat down to put the slippers on. She had to help him with the gloves.

  “Your hands are shaking,” he said.

  “My family have had that dream. Contentment. They’re all blissful and silly,” she said. Her voice had a tremor too. “This is my fault. I was afraid to tell them all how bad it was at the Depot. I didn’t want to upset Da. And I kept hoping that Gavin Pinkney was so hopeless because he’d had the dream over and over, and because he was so soggy to begin with.”

  Nown didn’t respond to this. He wound the scarf to mask his lower face. He was overdressed for the weather, which was still warm. He looked a little sinister—or as sinister as anyone in slippers could. Yet no one would imagine his bundled figure was anything but human.

  Laura walked out of the yard. Nown followed her. He didn’t ask where they were going, or what they’d do.

  As Laura walked, she saw all the things she hadn’t noticed before, like how quiet the streets were—a Monday like Sunday. And that none of t
he people who were out and about were in a hurry, and all looked friendly and happy.

  The motorists on Market Bridge were the same as ever, jostling and impatient. Most were from outlying suburbs.They were going about their business and perhaps felt just as baffled as Laura by a choice of only three pastries in their favorite pastry shop, and the Founderston Herald printed, packaged, but not on sale.

  Laura and Nown crossed the river to the Isle of the Temple. They made their way to Temple Square. Laura told Nown to wait for her in St. Anthony’s Chapel, which was in the northwest corner of the nave and always full of shadows in the morning.

  Laura went to the Grand Patriarch’s palace and told one of the caped guards at the gate that she wanted to see His Eminence.

  After a long time, over an hour, Laura rejoined her glass man in St. Anthony’s Chapel. It was gloomy and uninviting, but Nown wasn’t the only one there. There were two women at the altar, silhouetted, heads bowed, in the light of the candles they’d lit.

  It turned out that Nown could no longer whisper. His voice had been a deep, dry rasp. It was deep still, but now clear and melodious, and even when he spoke quietly it was like listening to water falling into a stone basin in a still garden. “St. Anthony is the patron saint of the lost,” he said, informatively.

  “We should say a prayer then,” said Laura. “I couldn’t get anywhere near the Grand Patriarch or Father Roy. Apparently they are either out or terribly busy. The people I spoke to wouldn’t disturb them just to say a little dreamhunter had come to see them. I’m a person of no consequence, and I’ve been snubbed by pompous functionaries. I did get to leave a note for Father Roy. I hope he jumps out of his skin when he reads it.”

  “It’s because you’re a girl,” Nown said, matter-of-fact.

  “Yes,” said Laura. She put a coin in the donation box, took a candle, lit it, and said a short and not terribly coherent prayer. Then she took her glass man by his gloved hand and left the Temple.

  5

  INUTES AFTER LAURA HAD LEFT HER HOUSE, A CAR PULLED UP IN front of it. Three men got out. Two WERE IN PINSTRIPES AND BOWLER HATS, AND HAD HEAVY, SWINGING BULGES IN THEIR JACKET POCKETS. THE THIRD WAS THE RED-HAIRED, WAXY-SKINNED MAZE PLASIR.

  Plasir tugged on the bell chain for several minutes before Chorley opened the door. “Hello!” Chorley said, cheery. “Visitors! Isn’t it a lovely day, visitors?”

  Plasir took Chorley’s arm and propelled him back indoors. The other men crowded in after them.

  “Shall we sit down?” Chorley said. “My papers are all over the place in the library. Let’s go in here.” He threw open the parlor doors and swept into the room ahead of them. He flopped into a chair, draped his legs over one of its arms, and let his slippers drop off his feet to the floor.

  The Regulatory Body officials perched together on the edge of a sofa, ramrod straight and ready for action.

  “I must go out and buy some more music,” Chorley said. “I’ve listened to everything I have here.”

  Plasir nodded sympathetically. “This afternoon, perhaps,” he suggested.

  “Isn’t it afternoon yet? I’m looking forward to a nice nap later,” Chorley said.

  “An excellent idea,” said Plasir.

  One of the burly officials sniggered.

  “I’ve come to ask about one of your films, Mr. Tiebold,” Plasir said.

  Chorley’s face lit up. “That’s something else I could do later. Watch my films. That would be fun. Those films are certainly one thing I’ve done that was worthwhile. I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately—what was worthwhile.”

  “Yes. Taking stock. Very healthy,” said Plasir.

  “That’s right, humor him,” said an official.

  Plasir gave the man a cold, quelling look. “There’s one film in particular that interests me,” Plasir said to Chorley. “A film of the Place.”

  “I have two of those,” Chorley said. “No one in the world but me has a film of the Place.” He looked thoughtful. “Except Cousin Erasmus, I suppose.”

  “Cousin Erasmus has a film of the Place?”

  “Yes.” Chorley swung his legs down, and when his bare feet touched the floor, he looked at them and laughed. “Why do people bother with shoes indoors?”

  “He’s full of opinions. True to his character,” said one of the officials.

  “Be quiet,” Plasir said. “Mr. Tiebold, where do you keep that film?”

  “It’s in my darkroom.”

  “Would you get it for me?”

  “Do you want the other one too?”

  “Cousin Erasmus’s copy?”

  “No. He has that. I mean the one Tziga took, it’s only two or three minutes long, but it’s very beautiful in its way.”

  The officials were nodding, so Plasir said, “Yes, I think we’d better have both of them.”

  One of the officials got up. “I’ll help you, Mr. Tiebold.”

  The other said, “Is Mr. Hame at home?”

  “Yes, is he?” said Plasir. “And when do you expect your wife back?”

  “Tziga was here at breakfast,” Chorley said, vague. He left his slippers and wandered to the door. “I can’t remember what Grace said about when she’d be back. Does it matter? We have the whole day ahead of us. This beautiful day.”

  Plasir frowned and shook himself. This dream of Cas’s was horrible—incomparably horrible. Cas was making adjustments, moving his loaded dreamhunters around, and making sure that the capital kept on running, that its civil servants and politicians were soothed and full of generosity, but not as lost as this—or as desperately lost as the dosed dreamhunters themselves. The Hame-Tiebold house had been two nights at the intersection of overlapping penumbras, under the spell of no fewer than three vivid dreamhunters. And this was the result. Chorley Tiebold had always sneered at and snubbed Plasir, and yet here he was being good-natured and cooperative without giving his actions a moment’s thought.

  When Chorley disappeared into his darkroom, Plasir went looking for the house’s other inhabitants. He found Tziga upstairs asleep, and smiling. He found Rose in the morning room, playing with one of those toys where a clown climbs a ladder and does flips. She had an empty cookie tin before her, and her robe was speckled with crumbs. She looked up at Plasir and gave a shriek of laughter. “I wasn’t thinking about you,” she said. “I was daydreaming. I thought my daydream might conjure someone. But not you. Yuck!”

  “I’m wounded, Miss Tiebold,” said Plasir. Then, “Your cousin didn’t stay for breakfast at Fallow Hill. Where do you think she is?”

  “Um,” said Rose. She squeezed her toy so hard that the little clown flew right off it.

  “On such a beautiful day, where might Laura have gotten to?” Plasir coaxed, since Rose was a little more feisty than he had expected.

  “She was here shortly after breakfast,” the girl said. Then she grinned. “Uncle Tziga and I bounced boiled eggs.”

  “That sounds like wonderful fun,” said Plasir. “But where is Laura?”

  “Laura is alone,” Rose said, blankly. “Alone. All alone.”

  “Do you have any idea where she is alone?”

  “Everywhere. She doesn’t have to be, though. She could make herself another monster. She’s being stubborn about it.” Rose looked up at Plasir, and a little frown marred her smooth brow. “Doesn’t she want to be happy?”

  Maze Plasir shook his head in sympathy. He went out to check on the search for the film and found both of the men he’d come with in the library. One was pushing together a pile of paper under the bottom of a long damask curtain. The other had a reel of film tucked under his arm and was holding a box of matches.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Plasir demanded.

  “What we were told to do, Mr. Plasir. We have the film. We are meant to take care of everyone who has seen the film.”

  “Doran told you to ‘take care of them’?”

  “Yes, Mr. Plasir.”

  Plasir was stunned. “No! St
op!”

  The man who was standing put his hand up, in warning.

  “At least let me take the girl. Doran can’t possibly want Rose Tiebold killed. She’s a friend of his daughter.”

  “Nothing was said about that.”

  Plasir pushed forward, and there was a scuffle. He was shoved from the room. He heard Chorley calling in a plaintive voice from the darkroom, “Hello? I seem to be locked in.”

  Plasir hurried in to Rose, grabbed her, and pulled her to her feet. “Come with me,” he said.

  At that moment there was a knock on the front door. Plasir froze. Rose wriggled her shoulders and got out of his grasp. “Don’t be so rough,” she said.

  The officials ran out into the hall. Both men were carrying revolvers.

  The person on the front step called, “Rose! Why is this door locked?”

  “It’s Laura Hame,” said Plasir.

  “Good,” said an official. He rushed at the door. But just before he yanked it open, the shadow of the girl left the glass. She had bolted. He chased her out into the street.

  Plasir saw his chance. He made his choice. He’d leave Laura Hame to her fate—but he’d save Rose Tiebold. He hustled her out the front door. He was in time to see the Body official sprinting through the side gate and into the alley that led to the backyard of the house. It seemed the Hame girl had boxed herself into a dead end.

  Plasir gripped Rose’s arm and dragged her along the embankment.

  Laura skidded into the yard and pushed past Nown. She yelled, “Look out!” She didn’t even look back, just rushed to her family’s rescue. She banged through the back door, stumbled across the kitchen, skidding on mashed eggs, and fell through the kitchen doorway.

  A man with a revolver jumped forward and seized her. He thrust the gun’s muzzle into her ribs. She twisted, and then a gap appeared beside her—the darkroom door had opened. The gunman’s grip loosened momentarily, and Laura flung herself through the door, crashing into her uncle, who was saying, “I remembered where I put the spare key.” Then, “Ouch” as she trampled him, though he didn’t sound very perturbed.