Chorley and Grace got on the Westport local. They too carried films. One was of the sand-sculpting competition, the other of a pod of blackfish stranded on So Long Spit. The couple would leave the train at the small stop near Marta Hame’s house, where they would be met by Marta’s Mr. Bridges, with a car. They would take the car, skirt the capital on country roads, and meet the border to the Place just east of Doorhandle. Grace would go In and try to catch The Gate. Chorley meant to drive on through the Rifleman Pass to Sisters Beach, where he would stay with his daughter and wait for news.
Rose represented the group’s backup plan. She left the concourse of Founderston Central Station and boarded a local for Sisters Beach—alone. She carried an overnight bag and a hatbox containing a wide-brimmed, flower-trimmed hat.She was in first class, as usual, and as soon as she got on the train she locked the door of her compartment.
Laura was to stay in Founderston, at the Temple, to dream The Gate and hold the fort till Grace—or George Mason if Grace was unable to make it back in time—relieved her.
That was the plan.
Laura was allowed to accompany the others to the station to see them off. When they got to the divider between platforms 5 and 6, she hurriedly kissed her cousin, then turned to plead with Father Roy. “Could I please, please, see my father onto the train and settled in?”
“Very well,” said the priest. “But be quick.”
Laura unfolded a travel rug and tucked it around her father’s knees. She gave her aunt Marta some hasty instructions on how to mix elder-flower cordial to his taste.
“Yes, yes, child,” Marta said. She gestured at the priests waiting for Laura on the platform. “You should go. You must understand that, if this were a game of chess, you would be the king.”
“I don’t play chess.”
“Don’t draw it out,” her father warned. “It only makes saying goodbye more difficult.” He caught her eye. She was still fussing around him, rearranging his pillows. Their heads were together. He said, “What’s on your mind, Laura?”
Marta said, musing, “Founderston must be full of dreamhunters wondering why business is falling off. If Erasmus could only gain their confidence …”
“Contentment will have erased any dream that isn’t its near equal,” Tziga said to his sister. Then, to his daughter, “What is it, love?”
She kissed his cheek. “I should go.” She kissed her aunt too and wished them both good luck. Then she said again, to her father, “I must go.”
Laura left the compartment and turned away from the door she’d come in by. She hurried up the train, into the second-class compartments, which were full. She went along, peering into the compartments and through their windows, which looked out onto the train on the track beside theirs—the Sisters Beach local. Finally Laura saw what she was looking for, her cousin, a solitary figure clutching a candy-striped hatbox. Laura pushed into a compartment. She said, “Excuse me,” to its occupants, then stretched over them to haul down the window. She leaned out and waved.
Rose got up and opened her window.
The people behind Laura were protesting and pulling at her clothes.
“Wider,” Laura said to Rose.
Rose leaned her weight on the window and forced it open. Laura gripped the luggage rack above her, stepped onto the windowsill, and climbed out the window of the train she was on. She straddled the gap. Rose leaned out and helped her through. They tumbled together into Rose’s compartment. The hatbox fell off the seat, lost its lid, hat, loose satin lining, and reel of film. Rose got up and slammed the window shut to cut off the sounds of indignation: “Well I never!” and “Of all the nerve!”
The train beside the local began to move, the annoyed faces slid out of sight, then the dining car with its SPRING VALLEY legend. Laura pushed Rose back into her seat. She said, “Don’t look,” and ducked down herself as one of her father and aunt’s escorts hurried along the hallway of the moving train, looking and looking, no doubt alerted by the people Laura had left behind on the platform.
Then the windows were empty, the train gone. Rose pulled down the window blind. A minute later their train jerked and began to move. It slid out of Central Station, jostling through switches in the rail yard before finding its way onto the north line.
Laura got up off the floor. She gathered the hatbox and its contents.
“I thought there was a fishy lack of ceremony in your leave-taking,” Rose said.
“The Grand Patriarch will have to make do with Plasir and his Secret Room,” said Laura. “He can pack everyone he really needs into a few rooms with Plasir, and they’ll be safe from Contentment.”
“He’ll have them all chewing Wakeful, Laura, before he ever shares one of Plasir’s sleazy dreams.”
Laura grinned at the thought. “Well, a sleazy dream might offend him, but so would The Gate. It’s blasphemous. It says that paradise is only time running backward. And someone’s mother guards the gate instead of St. Peter.”
Rose gave her cousin a careful look. “The woman in The Gate isn’t ‘someone’s mother,’ Laura—she’s you.”
“Yes, I know.”
“And all those years ago, your da must have mistaken her for your mother. He’d have thought that the dream really was meant for Verity, to ease her dying.”
Laura nodded. “I thought it was Sandy’s doing that she looked like me. Then I caught it without Sandy, and she still looked like me.”
Rose put up the window blind again, in time to see the birch-lined playing fields of Founderston Girls’ Academy slide by. She said, “Do you think Uncle Tziga and your aunt Marta have a chance?”
“Not much of one, not if they’re followed.”
Rose plucked at her skirt, patted its lace-edged pockets. “I hope you have a plan then.”
“No.”
“You climbed between trains without a plan?”
Laura did know where she was going. And she knew that Nown would feel her leaving Founderston and would follow her, as fast as he was able. There was a place she would go, and he would join her there—then they would see. She said, “I have this much of a plan. You should go out and find a conductor and pay my fare. And you should tell him that we want to get off at the train stop in the Awa Inlet.”
“We’re visiting Mamie? That’s the plan?”
“You are.”
Rose nodded and got up to do as she was told.
It was dark at the train stop. The tide was out, and the only light came from the breakers, a mile away at the mouth of the Inlet. Gulls roosting on the sandbar made a warm clucking out in the dark. At intervals the lighthouse on So Long Spit blinked its warning at them.
Laura and Rose sat on the stony bank. They didn’t dare go on till there was more light. Rose had her bag and hatbox. Laura had Rose’s coat, and in its pockets a bottle of lemonade and some wafers from the train’s dining car.
“I can’t think what you’re planning,” Rose said to the patch of solid darkness that was her cousin.
“Neither can I. I don’t mean I don’t know—I mean I can’t think about it.”
“Don’t do anything self-sacrificing.”
“I think I have to, Rose. But it’s not that bad. I promise you’ll see me soon.”
“There’s only that rail line and the Depot over the border here. Do you mean to make your monster wreck the cable car?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“It would be a pretty desperate measure. The people at the Depot might starve.”
“Yes. That’s a good argument against it.”
Rose scooted next to Laura and put her arm around her. She was seeing certain things very clearly now. She saw that there were decisions people had to make, alone, for other people. And that sometimes there was no substituting for whoever had to decide. There were torches that couldn’t be passed on. Laura’s light would go out in Rose’s hands. Rose saw it now—and it made her feel very old and lonely.
A band of light the shade of
a ripening lemon outlined the eastern headland. The world came back, bit by bit, till the girls could see water glimmering in the channels of the reedbeds, and the white streak of crushed shell that was the path to the Doran summerhouse.
Mamie woke when a maid knocked on her door, came in, opened the curtains, and started talking. “Miss,” she said, “your friend Rose Tiebold is here. She must have arrived on the five o’clock train. She was waiting on the terrace when the boy went out to get milk from the springhouse.”
Mamie got up and found her robe and slippers. She stumped downstairs scratching her scalp.
Rose was at the breakfast table. A maid and the butler were bustling around her as though she was in danger of dying in the next several minutes for lack of jam, honey, and hot rolls.
Mamie sat down too and waited for the servants to leave.When they had gone, she said, “Did you have some kind of disagreement with someone, Rose?”
Rose hesitated, then looked amused. “Yes.”
“And you came here to me?”
“Yes.”
Mamie was pleased. She nearly told Rose she was honored, only that wasn’t quite right. She’d been so bored. Now she felt useful. Then she frowned. “I’m not any good at drying tears and so forth.”
“You won’t have to do that. We can sit on the terrace drinking cider, and playing cards, and reading books all day. That will fix me.”
Mamie pushed the plate of rolls toward her friend. “My perfect day,” she said. She missed seeing Rose’s pained expression.
For much of the day they did sit on the terrace, sipping cider cooled by luxurious ice. They read mostly, for Mamie hated cards and every other game of chance.
In the late afternoon, alertness pulled Mamie out of her book. She looked up.
Rose put her own book down and stood. She walked on the edge of the terrace and slowly, tentatively, raised her arm.
There was a man striding up the avenue of plane trees. When he passed through the bands of sunlight, Mamie saw that he was wrapped, head to toe, in an odd assortment of garments.
The man saw Rose, broke stride, and raised a hand to return her greeting. Then he strode on and vanished into the air.
Mamie said, “Do you know that dreamhunter?”
“No. I don’t know him at all,” Rose replied.
8
OWN WAS TWELVE HOURS BEHIND LAURA. HE TRAVELED BY DAYLIGHT AND NIGHT, AND MANY PEOPLE SAW him—the motley, bundled man who ran as fast as a horse. He was a sign and a wonder to many, who were able to say thereafter: “Only the day before, I saw …”
Laura, waiting, was afraid of being seen. She was out in the open. She hid herself as best she could by lying down beside the low mound of earth. Her wait was long, and she fell asleep.
It was late in the epidemic, and the boy knew what to expect. He’d seen things at other houses along the country road on which they lived. He’d seen how the mailboxes at the breaks in poplar hedges would have white tea towels tied to them. That was what people were told to do if they needed help. The Boy Scouts would come by to deliver cooked meals and clean linen.
During the sickness, the boy’s mother had said that he was allowed to go out for exercise but shouldn’t go near anyone. He’d sometimes lie in wait in the culvert by the crossroads, and would emerge when the Boy Scouts went by. He’d follow them, fishing for news. From them he heard of the houses—two neighboring —where only silence greeted the visitor’s knock and everyone inside was discovered dead. “With their faces and fingers turned black,” one Scout said.
When his mother became ill and banned him from her sight, the boy would sit outside her bedroom door and listen to her cough. And at night he’d wake up in his own bed and listen for silence—the silence he imagined coming, as eloquent as speech, from a blackened face. Then he’d hear her cough again.
The third night he woke up because the cough was dragging itself along the hall. The boy lay straight in his bed, like a body in a coffin. He was cold because he didn’t have enough blankets on his bed. He was cold because he was feeding himself and had let the stove go out. And he was cold within himself, all the way through, as though he were an orphan already and had to think first what he could do for himself.
He got out of bed and followed his mother into the kitchen. She had carried her writing box from her bedroom to the table. It was open, and the boy saw her many packets of letters, bundled with ribbons that had faded over the years and grown brittle.
His mother’s face was white. Her hair was plastered to her neck by sweat. She knelt on the floor pushing handfuls of wood chips through the stove door. Then she got a match and lit the stove. Tendrils of smoke came out the door, then were sucked back into the stove as the fire began to draw.
The boy was practical. Since there was a fire, he filled the kettle and put it on the stove. He reached over his mother to set it down, and she pushed him back, her hand hot on his leg.
The boy sat on the other side of the kitchen and kept his eyes fixed on the spout of the kettle, waiting for steam. He’d make some beef tea. While he waited he picked up his violin and tuned it. He didn’t watch his mother burn her letters, or glanced only once and saw the fire turn one packet into a black-striped brick, then a kind of paper chaff, flakes of soot circling in the stove.
She burned all of them—the letters from her cousin who lived in another country. One letter a week for eight years. She had never read any of the letters to the boy, and so it didn’t matter, nothing was different, the cousin in another country knew all about him and he knew nothing about her. But his mother was burning the letters, and that mattered. And then she didn’t want beef tea, and she wouldn’t let him touch her or help her as she dragged herself back to bed.
He washed his few dishes, because there was hot water. Then he returned to his bed, where he tried to stay awake and listen, as though his attention was a rope—a rope that keeps a boat tethered to a jetty as the river rises. His waiting turned into a dream. In his dream the rope wasn’t long enough to keep the boat afloat when the river rose. It was the rope that drowned the boat.
In the morning the house was silent, so silent that, as he strained to hear, the boy heard a plum fall from the tree in the yard—landing with a soft thump on the neglected lawn.
After the dream, Laura didn’t go back to sleep. She stayed down, her cheek turned away from the bulk of the grave and her eyes on the bleak, ashy peaks of The Pinnacles, so near but hazy, standing in a white ground mist of dead grass.
Time went by. Then the ground vibrated, and Nown said, “Laura,” in his low, musical voice.
Laura sat up. Nown pulled off his hat, as if removing it out of good manners. Then he began to undress. He stripped off and abandoned all the clothes but handed her Sandy’s coat and told her to put it on.
She didn’t argue with him, even though the request was strange. She had a coat on already. And she somehow knew he didn’t mean for her to take off the one she was wearing. Laura simply put Sandy’s coat on over hers. It was hot and heavy, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere dressed like that. But she obeyed Nown because it was the first time he’d ever given her instructions.
She rummaged in her now blanketing clothes for the apples Rose had picked for her in the Dorans’ orchard. And for her bottle of lemonade. She pulled on the wire that loosened its china stopper and took a mouthful. “I wish we could sit down and share a meal,” she said to Nown.
“With this grave as a table?”
Nown was easier to look at in the light of the Place. The light was even, and his skin threw off no dazzling reflections. He did kneel by her, kept quiet as she ate an apple and the crack of each bite echoed off The Pinnacles.
Once the apple was gone, Laura licked its juice from her fingers and touched Nown’s chest. She saw her fingers suspended only inches from his heart. She could recall distinctly the velvety feel of the rust-stained lump of gravel she had picked up from between the rail lines at Sisters Beach Station. “No
wn,” she said. “This grave is the heart of the Place. Its unhappy, horrible heart.”
“My heart isn’t me,” Nown said. “It’s only what you put into me.”
Laura closed the space between them and leaned on him. He held her tight. After a time he started to speak, in his beautiful new voice, as clear as he was. It was like hearing fresh air speak.
“Laura, this Now—the Place—is so immense and powerful, what must it have as its heart?”
Laura shivered.
“A person,” Nown said.
Laura pressed her face against his shoulder and opened her eyes wide. She saw her own arm through his body, her bone bent as though she’d suffered poor nutrition in childhood.
“Someone is buried here,” Nown said.
Laura whispered, “I knew it.” Though her nose was pressed against him, he had no smell. When he was sand, he’d sometimes smelled of heat and moisture; now the air near him was empty of odor. She said, “I hated this grave when I first saw it. I thought of the grave in The Water Diviner—rustling and moaning.”
“Yes. What is buried here isn’t a body, it’s a living person.”
“Buried alive!” Laura said, and began to cry. “But I don’t hear anything.” She mashed her mouth and nose into Nown’s hard, impossibly flexible shoulder. He didn’t taste of anything either, left neither flavor nor matter on her tongue. “You’re not there,” she grieved. “And I can’t change you.”
“My own,” he said. “My sweet—you must try to be calm.” He said, “Listen—leaves don’t fall from the trees here unless someone walking by them brushes them off. Nothing is alive, and nothing is dead.”
Laura pushed herself away from Nown. She propelled herself backward and knelt, her arms wrapped around her stomach, stooped so that the crown of her head touched the dirt of the graveside. “I can’t bear this,” she said. Then, a moment later, “What will happen?”
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