Dreamhunter (23 page)

‘That was pretty impressive,’ Chorley said, then added, ‘Sweetheart.’

Marta appeared. She held out her letter. Chorley wiped his greasy hands on his trousers and took it. The letter was in a sealed envelope. The envelope was addressed to ‘His High Reverence, Erasmus Amon Tiebold’ — the Grand Patriarch.

LAURA AND CHORLEY
stayed one night at Marta’s. The adults enjoyed a diluted version of the young
dreamhunter’s Convalescent Two — in its ninth night no longer saleable, but strong enough to be felt. Uncle and niece caught a train back to Founderston together, in what each thought was a friendly silence.

Laura didn’t wonder about the oil-spotted, unopened envelope her uncle carried, or notice how his hand went to his jacket pocket now and then to check that the letter was still there.

Chorley didn’t notice how Laura sat, her face turned to the view of paddocks and poplars and ditches filled with blackberry bushes, or how her lips moved and fingers flickered as she mouthed the chant and counted its measures.

They failed to notice what they should have noticed; that Chorley was nursing his hopes, and Laura her secret resolve.

For Laura was planning to make herself a sandman.

Laura spent several days at the house in Founderston. She let her aunt and uncle fuss over her. Grace was at home during the day, but sleeping at the Rainbow Opera, where she was dreaming Balloon Wars. During those days Grace made plans for what they would all do in the summer, ‘as a family’. Chorley and Laura nodded and made attentive noises. Chorley wrote a letter asking for an audience with the Grand Patriarch. And Laura practised ‘The Measures’ in the bath, in her bed at night, whenever she was left alone.

When she was ready Laura took her pack, maps, food, money, bedroll — and one other thing. She left a note for her aunt and uncle and caught a train to Sisters Beach.

She went on up the track to Whynew Falls, and trudged for two days through the silent country to the dry riverbed.

The sand disturbed by her father’s digging, and by her flight and struggle, hadn’t settled. With no wind or rain to erase them the signs stayed. Laura looked at the imprint of Chorley’s camera, and the marks where her fingers had clawed at the bank and, lastly, at the excavation, which looked like a shallow grave. She tried to imagine what her father had seen when he sang a body up out of that grave.

For the first time Laura let herself really think about what she planned. It seemed to her that she had been drawn back to this place by a series of unconnected impulses. She had asked her Aunt Marta to teach her certain old songs that Marta and Tziga were taught as children by their great-grandfather. She had memorised and mastered one song — a long, complex chant Marta called ‘The Measures’. Before she left Founderston, Laura had removed something from her jewellery box — the rust-stained rock she had picked up from the trackbed six months before. She had kept her hand closed around the rock in her pocket as she rode on the train to Sisters Beach. She had mouthed ‘The Measures’ at the carriage window, and her hand felt her heart beating in it, as though the rock in her hand was a heart.

She had been planning this for weeks, the plan like a pulse in the back of her mind. She’d fondled the statue in the museum, touched it in order to feel how to
shape
it. Laura had formed a strange notion. She felt that she wanted to learn who Nown really was — if he really was somebody in his own right, not just an occasional
powerful wish wished by a succession of powerful Hames. Laura was planning a kind of experiment that, she thought, would let her look on the
real
face of her sandman. She had realised that she didn’t want to look on a face like the one she and Rose had formed in the sand of Sisters Beach during the sand-sculpting competition, a face with the marks of their tools in it, clumsily made. No — Laura wanted to look into her sandman’s
true
face.

Standing in the dry riverbed at map reference Y–17, Laura was about to attempt something that no Hame had attempted before. She
knew it
too, knew it in her body and brain, and in her mouth, where the words of ‘The Measures’ seemed to sit on her tongue and fizz like sherbet dissolving.

Laura took her coat off. She put down her pack, and the heavy water bottles she had carried and scarcely touched to drink herself — for she might need water for her work. She found an undisturbed patch of river sand, and began to dig. She dug with one of Grace’s narrow gardening trowels, which she had taken from its hook on the porch of Summerfort. It wasn’t a very effective digging tool — Grace only ever used it on Summerfort’s potted plants — but it did spare her hands.

When she had cleared a long, wide trench, and had dug down to damp sand, Laura rested and had something to eat. Then she excavated some sticky clay from the bank of the stream. She wet her hands and worked the clay till it was firm but plastic. She spent an
hour carefully fashioning two hands, hands nearly three times the size of her own, with long, thin fingers, big knuckles and backs marked by branching sinews. She did her best. Art was one of two school subjects at which Laura had done well. (The other was music.) The girls at the Academy had often crowded around her table in art class to admire her work.

When she had finished making the hands Laura looked up to check the light. It was a reflex — but of course the light hadn’t changed, no sunset would come to hurry her along.

Laura washed the clay from her hands. She stepped down into the excavation and began to scrape the damp sand together. She bulldozed with her palms. After a time she had scraped together a long mound. She stood up and walked around it, measuring it with her eyes. Then she knelt once more and began to work.

She disappeared into her work. She became invisible to herself.

Laura shaped a pair of long, sturdy legs. She shaped square heels, round ankle bones and a thick Achilles tendon. She modelled squared calf muscles, strong thighs and a narrow pelvis. She made a form remembering the statues she had looked at, and the one she had been moved to touch, much to Rose’s embarrassment.
How could Rose have known?
Laura thought, as she finished with the buttocks and began to shape the small of the back.

While the back was still only roughly shaped, Laura put her sandman’s heart in place.

Nown had had her father’s letter hidden in his chest. It had served him as a heart. Laura fished the rust-stained rock from out of her coat pocket and pushed it through the sandy back. She shoved it deep into the body she imagined lay before her, with its knees, feet, hipbones, chest and face —
its own true face —
all hidden in the sand. She withdrew her empty hand and closed the hole, smoothed the place over. She then shaped the symmetrical trapezoid muscles and shoulder blades. She fashioned wide shoulders and strong arms. She made sure the elbows were level with the waist, and wrists with the top of the thigh. She got his proportions right. She laid the clay hands at the end of the arms, backs down and curled fingers up. She blended the join between sand and clay and sprinkled a coating of dry silver sand on to the still damp blue clay so that — when he was dry — his hands would be the same colour as the rest of him. She made a powerful neck and as shapely a skull as she could fashion.

Laura sat back and began to laugh. She’d forgotten to make ears. She looked at the clay on the bank, and at the place both she and her father had dug, and felt too tired to move. So she wrapped her coat around her and lay beside the face-down, earless figure, and went to sleep.

THERE WAS NO DREAM
at that place in the riverbed. Nothing marked on the map, and nothing even for Laura.

WHEN LAURA WOKE
up she opened a tin of condensed milk and poured it on top of several dry rounds of dreamhunter’s bread. She looked at the face-down figure. It was beginning to dry in the air, its surface turning a soft, granular silver. Laura was careful as she moved around it. She didn’t want the vibrations of her footsteps to shake any sand from the figure, making cracks in his skin.

Laura went to the bank and scooped out two balls of clay. She fashioned each into an ear, a left and a right, like the hands. She had to dampen and remould the sand of the figure’s head in order to attach the ears, though each had a cupped back, like a shell, that held them firm.

Laura lay down once more to gather her strength. She had been in that place for sixteen hours by her watch, through a sleep and two meals.

She began to sing, lying there, looking into the sand-man’s ear. She didn’t feel any need to get up and lift her hands to the mist-covered skies. She sang in a quiet, clear, intimate voice. An unfaltering voice. And, as before, on other occasions when she’d managed to get through ‘The Measures’ without making a mistake, Laura began to feel the spell build around her, a force like a wind funnelling up around her body. Nothing moved, though, her clothes and hair stayed still, and no dust devil got up to dance for her as it had when she sang in Aunt Marta’s yard. The force sucked at her, like air pressure so low it was
almost a vacuum. Laura grew cold. She finished her song shivering. She shut her mouth. The air began to shimmer around her.

Laura lifted her own cheek and ear from the riverbed. She leant up on one elbow and bent over the back of the figure’s neck. There, on the bumps she’d made to suggest vertebrae, Laura scratched the letters with the tip of her finger. She wrote his whole name:

NOWN.

The cold, shimmering, sucking force around her leapt into her body and out again through her finger. She heard the spell again, a whole song that seemed to shout only this:
Soul of the spell! Come out of the earth! Wake! Speak! Obey my will, and know your name!

Laura flopped back, exhausted.

Nown’s arms moved up from his sides, turned palm down, and pressed. Laura was only feet from him. His hand brushed by her as it moved. She saw the back of the head she had shaped stir, a crack appear in the sand where what she had shaped came to an end, and the earth itself began. Laura watched Nown lift his face from the riverbed. He came up shaking off clots of sand. Only not
all
the sand fell. Instead it sorted itself out, some grains rising like steam against Nown’s face, settling there and shaping it.

He turned towards Laura, his skin of sand still rearranging itself. She saw his skin move to make sharp ridges of eyelid. She saw his nostrils become dark and deep, then flare, as though he drew breath. She saw his
lips split in two, and teeth rise up before the hollow of his mouth, and sand run from the hollow, leaving only enough for a tongue. She saw thin gaps appear in the fence of his teeth, but nothing in his eyes, no lines to represent an iris, no hole for a pupil. His eyes stayed smooth — widely spaced eyes in a face as handsome as that of a classical statue. Except that, having no human model, the face was too symmetrical.

Nown got up, separated his sandy self from the sand of the river bed. He stood above Laura, looking down at her. He opened his mouth again — and this time didn’t dribble sand. He said, ‘Laura Hame. I am your servant.’

Laura had done what she wanted to do. She had made her own Nown. That done, she was left with only her duty. She had to follow her father’s instructions. She felt that, if she followed them faithfully, she might somehow find him again. Sometimes this was what she felt, and sometimes she thought it was silly and crazy to have feelings like that, and that her father was lost to her for ever.

Laura knew where she had to go next because the film her father had left had shown a view of a burnt building. Laura believed that she would find her father’s ‘dreadful dream’ near the building. The film had shown its black beams flickering like the shadows of twigs stirred by a breeze, against a bay of naked sand. The film had stopped, then started again with the building, shot from her father’s shoulder. He had held the camera and
turned himself about, one hundred and eighty degrees, to show the view back the way he had come, and hills like a page in a book of profiles.

Laura was looking at those hills now from the other side. She could see them rising in the distance, above the scrubby country across the dry streambed. She knew that, beyond the hills, she would find the ruin, and the dream she had to catch and carry.

For over three months, Laura had gone about her business as if turned side-on to her own intentions. From the moment she had read her father’s letter she had meant to do what he told her. She had felt that if she followed his instructions she could conjure
him
too, and make him reappear. But she had not thought clearly about what following her father’s instructions would actually entail. She hadn’t thought about catching the ‘dreadful dream’ and overdreaming her Aunt Grace.

Laura tried to make plans as she lay on the ground looking up at her sandman. But any thoughts about what she should do next were driven out of her head by the sight of him — the
fact
of him.

She — Laura Hame — had raised a thinking, speaking being from nothingness, or time, or family tradition. It was very confusing. She had made
a person
out of river sand in the Place, and the rock she’d kept. She had made her sandman out of longing and disappointment and indecision. She had made him as though she were making her own father, rather than a replacement for her father’s servant.

Laura had made someone to look after her. And here he was, big and strong, and
wise —
she was sure of it — and looking at her to see what she would ask him to do. Waiting for her to make decisions.

Laura was too exhausted to move, and couldn’t decide what to say to him.

Hello again. I missed you. I needed you.

Looking up at Nown, Laura felt she had finished everything she
wanted
to do. She felt safe, not just because he’d arrived again to protect her, but because she’d put something of herself into him — where it was safe for now — something she felt she was too young to use wisely.

Laura realised that she needed to sleep. So great was her need that, when she closed her eyes, she immediately fell asleep.

LAURA WOKE WHEN
she turned over and snuffled up a little sand. She sneezed and sat up. She was thirsty, and needed to pee. Time had passed. Nown stood as he had before. He was looking out over the low bank of the riverbed and through the curtain of grasses at the hills Inland.

Laura asked him what he was doing.

‘Listening,’ he said.

Laura crawled over to her pack and found her water bottle. She took a long drink, not bothering to ration it. Nown could carry her out again.

This thought came to her calmly. He had suggested it once, and she had shied away from him. Now she
couldn’t see anything wrong with the idea. Perhaps
this
Nown was less uncanny — more hers. She looked at him again and began to laugh.

Nown had no nipples, or navel, or whatever lay under the fig leaves on the copies of classical statues at the Museum. Laura had studied her favourite statue before making this Nown. She had studied the most beautiful statue she could find, but it had had a fig leaf. Laura had made her Nown face down, hoping to discover his true face — but she also wanted to find out what was underneath the fig leaves on statues. Of course she had a vague idea — she’d seen plenty of small children of both sorts, girls and boys, running about naked on the beach. But she was quite sure men were different from little boys.

Laura finished laughing and wiped her eyes. She imagined sharing the joke with Rose — then sobered up when she remembered just how much she’d have to explain first.

Nown had watched her laugh. But when she was quiet he lifted his head again and listened.

‘Is someone coming?’ Laura said. She clapped her hand over her mouth, regretting having laughed so loudly.

‘No,’ Nown said.

‘Then what are you listening to?’

‘I am listening to it. It is listening to you.’

Laura shivered. ‘The Place?’ She said. ‘Is the Place listening to me?’

‘Yes. I can hear now. I am nearer to myself than before.’

Laura stared at Nown for so long that her neck began to hurt. She climbed to her feet, and stood rubbing it. Did Nown mean that each new Nown was
better
than the one before? That he was made to make progress towards some
perfect
sandman? Is
that
what he meant by being nearer to himself? He couldn’t mean that, could he?

‘What do you mean?’ Laura said.

‘I can hear now. I am here with myself,’ Nown said.

‘How?’ Laura asked, then realised it wasn’t the right question.

‘I don’t know.’ Nown answered her anyway.

‘Are you more yourself? More your
true
self?’ Laura asked, then blushed — feeling she had asked for a compliment, or a show of gratitude.

Nown was looking at her intently. She knew it by the way the gleaming black grains of iron sand sorted themselves out from the mix in his face and flooded his wide open eyes, till his eyes, brows and the bridge of his nose were banded with glittering black. He answered her. ‘Yes, I am.’

Laura was pleased to have helped Nown. Pleased with her own speculation. She didn’t for a minute consider that her servant might have spoken obscurely.

Nown stood, his face striped black with the force of his attention, and waited for his mistress to help him understand what he sensed. Then she was talking again, and his desire to understand disappeared into the flow of time, for her will was the flow of time for him.

She said, ‘My father wrote in his letter that I must listen to the Place. He meant the
dreams
. He meant me to do something about the convicts in the dreams.’

‘Yes,’ Nown said. ‘I think that is what he wanted.’ He touched his chest, wherein he had once carried Laura’s father’s letter — or where, at least, the
eighth
him had.

Laura saw that he remembered the letter and was curious to know if he knew what she’d put into him. When she asked he said, ‘It’s a rock you wanted to throw at your father. To throw at the train that took him away. It is anger and unhappy love in a rock.’

Laura began to cry then. She covered her face with her hands — sore, raw under their nails from scraping sand — and sobbed. Her sandman made no move to comfort her, and after a time she simply finished crying.

Nown was listening again, it seemed. Perhaps he was even embarrassed. Laura imagined that it might be embarrassment that made him look away through the grass to the hills Inland.

Laura told him to pick up her pack. He did. Then she told him to pick her up.

His arms were faintly warm, like sand under a winter sun. They softened to accommodate her. She rested her head on his chest, heard a faint creak of sand moving on sand — but no heartbeat. ‘Back to Summerfort first,’ Laura said, ‘for provisions.’

Nown began to walk back the way Laura had come.