Dreamhunter (15 page)

Laura saw only one ranger near the border. She was following a fence through farmland when she saw him emerge from the border of whiteywood scrub at the head of the track to Whynew Falls. Before he had turned her way Laura crouched down in the wet grass and ducked her head. The skirts of her coat spread out around her, making a creased bell. The coat was an old salt-stiffened oilskin she’d found in the room by Summerfort’s main hall, a room that was stuffed with badminton rackets, coats, croquet mallets and hoops, picnic rugs, fishing rods and tackle, and all the other props of the family’s idle attempts at living life in the great outdoors. The coat smelt like old copper coins, but it did the trick, it made the crouching girl look like a large rock. Laura didn’t dare turn to watch the ranger but, after a moment, she was alarmed to hear a tread and breathing behind her. Breathing, a sound like a
bellows working and thumping footfalls. Laura squeezed her eyes shut and tried to think of what to say, of an excuse, of who else she could be but Laura Hame.

Something stirred her hair. She turned her head and a cow blew a cloud of grassy steam into her face. There were several cows, they’d come over to see what she was doing. They surrounded her, snuffling and whipping their back legs with their yellowed white tails. They sniffed, then began to lick her coat. They fell to, licking, pushing at her, thorough and luxurious. They were black and white cows, with mottled pink and grey tongues. They were very happy to make the most of this source of salt that had kindly stopped in their field.

Laura held the coat up over her head and reflected that at least it was unlikely that the ranger would suppose that the cows were clustered around a trespassing dreamhunter — or indeed that anyone was at the bottom of this scrum of salt-hungry animals.

After some time Laura pushed the cows away and got to her feet. Her coat, shoes and bare hands were covered in swipes and strings of glue-like spittle. The ranger was a long way off, already out on the farm road and heading on to the gentle downhill towards the coast. Laura took her coat off and shook it, then dragged it along the grass. The cows plunged away from her when she flapped the coat at them. She held it over her head, up in the breeze, to dry as she walked.

LAURA ENTERED
Whynew Falls reserve in the late afternoon, through a half-acre of regenerating forest, all indigenous evergreens, whose pale, twisted trunks formed a sunlit filigree before the rest of the forest. Laura climbed a stile over the last farm fence and went on to the track.

An hour later she was walking between mature mountain beech, on the track that was just a trough of bare ground surrounded by a confetti of tan beech leaves. The air was filled with their savoury perfume. The track had climbed above the streambed, and Laura could see the water downhill between black, velvety beech branches and the dry boulders of the wide streambed. She came to the sign: ‘CAUTION: You are now only 100 yards from the border to the Place.’ She stopped. Despite the height of the stream, and the damp brilliance of the vegetation — despite all the signs that it was winter — for a moment Laura imagined that the rest of the picnickers were about to catch her up, to come around the corner with their sunhats and baskets and their jackets tied around their waists. Laura could hear the falls, from this distance an endless deep sighing sound, only another quarter-mile away. It was here, on last summer’s walk, that she and her father, Grace and Rose, had sat down on the bank while the rest of the picnic party went on.

Laura stepped past the sign. She walked on, turning several corners till the sound of the Falls grew louder. She came to a tree that had a circle of orange-painted
tin nailed to its trunk. She passed the tree. The sound of the falls faded and stopped. Laura stepped into the dry, open country of the Place.

The track went on before her, buff-coloured, bared earth running through grass with the white sheen of candy floss. Laura stood at a T-junction. There were three paths Laura could choose. To either side of her the path branched off to follow the border. On her left it led to the main thoroughfare from the ranger’s post at Tricksie Bend. On her right it went on for miles, for days, gradually becoming less definite, less travelled. The path before her feet, the tail of the T, led on deeper into the Place.

Laura was headed In, but didn’t really want to encounter anyone. So she went on straight ahead for a time then, when she came to a tree twice the height of a tall man, she left the track. She picked her way through the meadow away from the path. When she could only see the very top of the tree she straightened her course and walked on, parallel to the path, but — she hoped — invisible to anyone on it. Every now and then she stopped to consult her map, and to listen. She listened to the silence then went on. The brittle grass hissed and crackled as she passed through it. It didn’t close behind her, and as she went she left a wake of snapped stalks.

Laura had heard her father say that the Place was driest at its perimeter. Like a wound, he had said. Laura wanted to find the streambed she had heard Grace and
her father speak about. It was marked on her map. It was a two-and-a-half day walk In from Tricksie Bend, and two days from the Whynew Falls track. According to marks on the map the streambed showed the first signs of what rangers called ‘remaining moisture’. ‘There are places where you can dig down and find damp earth,’ Laura’s father had once told her.

Laura had often wondered, idly, how that could be. If it hadn’t rained in the Place for — to the best of anyone’s knowledge — twenty years, how could there be any groundwater?

Since first coming to the Place, Laura’s idle wondering about how it worked had become sharp speculation. She had made the investigations that she knew other dreamhunters and rangers must have made many times before. She’d tried carrying a burning match across the border, or striking a light once there. She had found that nothing would burn. She’d experimentally snapped twigs off the trees and seen the sappy gristle at their hearts. She’d seen that the trees in the Place were not like those struck by earthly droughts. Trees in the Place had leaves, sere, on branches that hadn’t had a soaking in living memory. The Place was full of vegetation that wasn’t dead, but wouldn’t revive. It seemed somehow to continue right at the point of death, year after year, as if time had simply stopped.

The landscape was stripped of all animal life — even insects — but was without corpses too, without empty chrysalises or the brown skins of cicada nymphs,
without transparent, scale-printed, cast-off lizard skins. There were no piles of rotted fleeces, the remnants of sheep corpses left after a cold spring in earthly fields. There were no bones, no empty birds’ nests, no cold eggs.

Because of what it lacked the Place looked like a modelled mock-up. But it was too vast, and too detailed, for anyone to have made it. If it wasn’t a model, or a living landscape, what was the Place? Were dreams its inhabitants? What kind of place had no mortal remains but dreams?

Laura went over all this once more as she walked. And she wondered whether, if someone did perish in the Place, would the Place, after a time, somehow tidy their remains away? Laura thought of her father, and abruptly sat down in the dusty grass to cry. She cried hard, but in the dry air her tears hadn’t even reached her chin before turning to stiff salt trails on her skin.

She got up again and went on.

LAURA CONCEALED HER
trail by struggling through little copses, and by climbing a hill to step along the raised nubs of its stony backbone. Sometimes she came upon signs of traffic — boot toe-sized steps kicked in a bank, a smooth place where the bark had been worn from a tree branch by the hands of people helping themselves up a steep slope. She hurried through these places, breathing hard. She made her winding but definite way towards the highest rise she could see, a hill whose
contours she recognised from her map. From the hill’s crest she believed she would be able to see where the land was creased by the stream, somewhere in band Y, in whose dry bed her father had left her uncle’s camera.

LAURA HAD TO
call it a day before she reached the summit of the hill. She had been walking for eight hours by her watch, eleven if she was to count the walk from Summerfort to the Whynew Falls track. She had stopped several times to have a drink and snack. But now she knew she must sleep.

She pushed her way into a stand of thorns and lay down on a patch of springy heath, there unfastened her bedroll and crawled into the bag of blankets. She lay on her side, munching on a few handfuls of scroggin, washed down with a mouthful of water from the copper spout of her water skin. She coated her lips with wax salve and put on her eye mask, then lay still and listened to the hushed flicker of the tiny leaves of the heath sifting down through the twigs beneath her bedroll. She heard the blood in her ears. She lay still, waiting for sleep to come up over her; she lay secret and solitary under a tide of sleep.

The only dream she had was her own. She woke up and could recall only how it ended. In the dream Uncle Chorley had sent her out to see if her father was coming. When she reached the gate of Summerfort her father had just turned to climb up the track from the beach. She saw him against the evening light, his
shoulders rounded and walk tired. She saw the moment he noticed that she was there, waiting for him — the moment he recognised her and picked up his pace, began to hurry to meet her.

Laura woke up knowing she had dreamt something she’d seen, her father hurrying towards her, pleased to see her. She found that she was in tears again, weeping with grief and gratitude. For weeks she had been worried that a deeper sorrow was lying in wait for her — some sort of predatory, crippling sadness made of regret and guilt. She knew that she hadn’t fully felt her father’s loss — that loss had been absorbed into her global grieving for her old life, her home, Rose, her school routine, a time when all her decisions were made for her and she had only to go along with them. How
kind
of the dream to remind her that, when he saw her waiting for him, her father would hurry forward! Her father — who had gone, who had left her — but who, after all, had loved her.

THE STREAM
, where Laura first came to it, was in a narrow gorge and bordered by tree ferns with slender trunks and startled tops. The fern fronds were limp and curled, as if they had died just a few days ago. Laura went down between the ferns, her hands skinning the trunks of their furry bark. She walked along the bed, heading to her right, moving still further from the main road and its traffic. She wasn’t sure that this was the right way, but thought it likely, given her father’s constant questing after new dreams.

Laura walked for another hour, stepping from boulder to boulder. The gorge grew gradually shallow and opened out. The boulders became stones, and the going easier. The vegetation changed too. There was scrub growing back from the bank and weeping willows at the edge of the streambed, willows with the occasional bare wand, leaves stripped away by the touch of passing human hands. The streambed flattened out, became a trench through fields dotted with thickets of gorse and tea tree. The stream had been the meandering sort, and in places had undercut the bank so that blue clay showed beneath fringes of grassy turf, grass roots exposed to the air and the same colour as the dry stalks above. Gleaming swathes of very fine river sand appeared between the stones, and Laura made her way between them. The sand was easy on her feet, though now she left a trail. She made progress. She stopped to drink, standing in the middle of the dry bed where the vanished water had formed a smooth eel of silver sand.

When Laura lowered the water skin from her lips she saw a gleam some distance ahead of her. She saw the brass and oak legs of Chorley’s camera, its black concertina lens and shining, lacquered crank handle. Her heart jumped and her throat grew suddenly tense. Laura’s training forced her to stand still at least to screw the cap back on her water skin, then she sprinted to the camera. It was lying just beyond a patch of disturbed sand, an excavation she jumped over to reach it. She fell to her knees beside the camera and was for a moment
completely still, staring at indentations in the sand under the camera’s gathered legs, the imprints of the knuckles of a hand. Laura knew that her father’s hand had made the mark when he laid the camera down.

She didn’t want to disturb his signs. For a moment she knelt, her hands pressed to her mouth, rocking. Then she took a deep breath, and began carefully brushing sand from the box that she hoped contained an undeveloped film. She knew what to do — she would make sure her hands were clean, then would pull her oilskin over her head to form a tent over the camera while she unwound the wing-nuts on its case, opened it and retrieved the film without exposing it to the light. But first things first. She sat back on her heels, unbuckled the flap on her pack and found the film canister. She put it down carefully on her knees and thrust her sandy hands under her coat and into her armpits to wipe them clean.

Something moved in the shadow of the overhang on the bank nearest her. Laura started — then instantly recognised the movement, or explained it to herself, as an earth fall, the bank giving way.

Then, suddenly, she was up and running.

The earth hadn’t fallen, it had collected itself and had stood up out of the shadow.

Laura rushed across the stream towards the far bank. She jumped at it, and caught hold of two handfuls of grass. They came away in her hands, roots and all. She fell backward, but on to her feet. She dodged the grey,
blurred bar of an arm — an arm! — that snatched at her as she scrambled away again. The sand, a welcome softness after her long tramp on hard earth, was now treacherous; it yielded behind her boots, offered no resistance from which she could launch herself at speed away from the thing that was chasing her.

She looked back, saw a huge, heavy, glittering mass looming after her, moving forward with great fluid strides. Laura screamed and veered for the bank again. She ran at a ramp of fallen sand and tufts of turf. She waded up it, then jumped at the lip of the bank. Her feet came down on the edge. She saw a crack appear before her. A seam of grass roots ripped opened, the lip broke off and she was dumped back in the streambed.