Dreamhunter (24 page)

Chorley’s appointment with the Grand Patriarch was on a Sunday afternoon between the masses at noon and three. On Sundays the Isle of the Temple was quiet. All dream parlours and palaces were closed till sundown. By one the cafés were open and serving whatever it was possible to prepare in an hour.

Chorley crossed from the west bank on the enclosed iron footbridge slung under the railway bridge. He was early. He stopped at a café for coffee, and crépes with honey and nuts — a Sunday favourite. The café was in a colonnade across the square from the Temple. Chorley ate, and watched pigeons fossick for crumbs among the iron table and chair legs. Then he paid, stored a coffee-soaked sugar lump in one cheek and crossed the square. He went around the Temple to the gates of the Grand Patriarch’s palace. He presented his appointment card. The guards,
men in long embroidered capes — beneath which they cradled repeater rifles — let Chorley in. An usher led him upstairs and along galleries under high vaulted ceilings covered in frescoes. Their footsteps echoed.

Chorley had expected to be taken to an office, or an audience chamber, but instead the usher took him to the Grand Patriarch’s private rooms.

The Grand Patriarch was just finishing his lunch. He was sitting at one end of a long, polished table, and tilting his plate to spoon up the last of his soup. There were a few slices of black bread and a pot of tea in front of him. When Chorley appeared the Grand Patriarch called over the solitary servant in the room and had him pull out a chair for Chorley where a second cup and saucer sat waiting for him.

Chorley sat down. He turned this way and that to check how many people there were in the large, gloomy room, and whether they were near enough to hear him if he spoke. There were two guards, one by each door, the servant and a young priest who stood closer.

The Grand Patriarch set the plate back on its base, laid his spoon down and removed the napkin he’d tied around his long beard to keep it clean. He wiped his mouth. His beard, dented where it had been tied, began to spring back into shape. For the next few minutes, while they talked, Chorley watched the beard expand, bristling, and restore itself to its square, golden magnificence.

The Grand Patriarch held his hand to Chorley, palm down. He offered his ring for Chorley to kiss — but
Chorley only took the hand and shook it. The Grand Patriarch smiled faintly.

‘Cousin,’ Chorley began. ‘I will call you cousin because I am not a parishioner, and I intend to presume upon our relationship.’

Erasmus Tiebold took up the teapot and poured Chorley a cup.

‘Er — thank you,’ said Chorley.

‘How was my friend when you saw her?’

‘That was more than a week ago,’ Chorley said — he couldn’t resist telling his kinsman off for not responding more quickly to his request to see him. ‘Marta was well — a week ago,’ Chorley added, then took the sealed letter from his jacket and gave it to his kinsman.

The Grand Patriarch broke the seal and read the letter. It wasn’t a long letter. Erasmus Tiebold finished and looked at Chorley over the top of the page. Then he gestured to the young priest, who came over. The Grand Patriarch handed the young man the page, then said, ‘No, don’t read it.’ Then he gestured at the branch of candles in the middle of the table. The young priest held the corner of the page to a candle flame. The paper flared up. The Grand Patriarch pointed to his empty soup plate, and the young priest laid the paper there to burn and backed away from the table.

Chorley watched this and realised that, if his family really had found itself on the wrong side of something — a secretive, sinister something that had to do with the Regulatory Body — then this secret, sinister something
had
opponents
. This man, the head of the Orthodox Church, and his father’s cousin, was an opponent. This man — and other men and women. Marta, for instance. Chorley realised that he wasn’t just here to look for Tziga, he had come to show that he was willing to sign on to some sort of
resistance
. If they would have him.

Chorley actually had no idea what Cas Doran and the Body were up to — but they had taken Tziga from him, he was sure of it. He blamed them. They were his enemies. And his enemies’ opponents were his friends.

Chorley leant towards his kinsman, his eyes fierce. ‘Tell me what to do,’ he said.

The Grand Patriarch laid his hand on Chorley’s. ‘Only this, for now,’ he said. ‘You must take passage to Sisters Beach by sea. Catch the packet boat from Westport. The schooner
Morningstar
, which sails every week. You must leave the
Morningstar
at the first place she stops.’

The Grand Patriarch lifted his hand and leant back. He took up his teacup and sipped, raising his brows to urge Chorley to taste his tea. ‘Don’t bring anything back with you,’ he added. ‘And I hope to see you on your return.’

GRACE SAT ON
the bed and watched her husband pack.

‘I won’t be back till the day after St Lazarus’s Day,’ he said. ‘I have a table booked for us at Bacchus. The booking is for six-thirty. And Rose wanted to go skating in the afternoon.’

‘Goody,’ said Grace, who didn’t like skating.

‘She won’t expect you to take her,’ Chorley said.

‘Still, I had better take her. She won’t mind if I’m groggy.’ Rose would know that her mother would be tired. Grace performed a dream called Homecoming on the evening of Saint Lazarus’s Day, every year. The site of Homecoming was three days In from Doorhandle, and Grace was setting out herself the following day.

Grace didn’t like watching her husband set off somewhere before her, or in this case without her. Nor did she like how
small
his suitcase was. Chorley wouldn’t usually travel anywhere overnight without a selection of clothes and a case of toiletries. He liked to look his best.

‘What are you hoping to find?’ Grace asked.

‘I’ll tell you what I do find,’ he answered, ‘that’s all I can say.’ He changed the subject. ‘Does Laura know you expect to see her on St Lazarus’s Eve?’

‘Yes. Rose has spoken to her. And she sent us a postcard from Tricksie Bend.’

‘She’s at Summerfort again?’

‘Yes, Chorley — she’s looking for clues. She got the camera, but she’s still looking.’

Chorley put on his coat and picked up his suitcase. ‘Well — maybe soon she won’t need to look any more.’

Grace watched her husband’s slow, growing smile. He looked like a man with a confident hope in his future happiness. Grace couldn’t share his hope. As she watched him standing there with his suitcase she felt that he was leaving her. Leaving her alone with the lonely affliction of her fear.

A week before the feast of St Lazarus, Nown carried Laura, her pack and provisions, up the Whynew Falls track and into the Place.

The sandman loped along, his stride and speed almost unvarying. Sometimes Laura asked him to put her down so she could walk for a bit. ‘To get my blood moving,’ she told him. She walked and raised a sweat and the dust of chaff stuck to her face and prickled in her nose. Nown could run with her without raising sweat, or tiring — of course. She had him hurry when she was sleeping. She hoped he would run her right through dreams.

They had passed the stream Y–17 before she was quite ready to sleep — Nown had carried her there in ten and a half hours. Nearly thirty hours after that Laura fell asleep in his arms, on the upward slope of a
crumbling, fissured hillside. And Nown
did
run her through dreams.

Laura dreamt she was a young man who had found a place above a waterfall where he could look down and see the picnickers who came and bathed. She dreamt that he was waiting at the end of the summer, on a day when the track was quiet, and a certain girl came to the pool in the company of his sister. Laura left the young man waiting. She then dreamt she was a hunter, walking through brush at evening beside a ravine from which a terrible smell was coming.

Laura woke up, moaning. They were at the foot of the far side of the hill. ‘Nown! Stop!’ she complained. ‘You hold the heat so. You’re like a hot stone. Put me down.’

Nown put Laura down and she staggered about till he steadied her. She asked for the water bottle and sat on the ground to drink. ‘I had the beginning of a dream about a man in too-tight trousers,’ she told Nown, then laughed. ‘
Funny
feeling. And I had a nightmare.’ She shivered.

Nown said nothing. He didn’t even tell her she should eat. Not that she needed telling.

Laura got out her strongbread, some nuts and an apple. She looked around herself as she ate. They were in a narrow valley between hills that were more like dust heaps in a midden. Laura almost expected to see human rubbish — old bike wheels or bits of broken bedsteads smeared with ash. It was a horrible place, and if there
had been any wind Laura was sure she would be breathing dust.

It had been windy when she and Nown had crossed the paddock before Whynew Falls reserve. Nown had been impervious to the wind, which had left him as untouched as a rock — when she had expected him to smoke in the gale like the crest of a dry dune.

Laura couldn’t tell, from where she sat at their base, whether the hills were the same shape as those in her father’s film of the backward view from the burnt building. She hoped they were the same. She hoped these were the last of the hills. She and Nown couldn’t go around these because they were so crumbled away that the ravines between each hill were choked with boulders and heaped shingle, all harder going than the climb.

Laura pitched her apple core at the next hill. ‘What am I doing?’ she said.

‘Eating,’ said Nown.

‘I keep forgetting just how literal-minded you are,’ Laura said. ‘I keep imagining you’re marvellous.’

Nown was silent.

Laura looked up at him. ‘Would you like to be able to eat?’ she asked. She wondered whether he was envious of things he might know she could do, like taste food.

‘I have watched eating often. Vitas Hame asked the fifth to hold up the arch by his fireplace for many years. The fifth could see the dining table. Vitas Hame often had guests. Feasts.’

Nown was telling her that some ancestor of hers had had him play statue and support the roof.

Laura asked Nown to show her how he’d stood.

He put his feet together and stretched his arms up over his head, the heels of his hands horizontal as though pressing a great weight upward.

‘How unkind,’ Laura said.

‘It was the service asked.’

‘I won’t ever ask anything like that,’ Laura promised. Then she had Nown pick her, the pack and water bottles up again. She told him not to let her fall asleep till they got to where they were going. ‘I want to be ready to sleep when we get there.’

They went on, up the next hill, Nown climbing on two legs and with one hand. The arm that cradled Laura had lost its elbow joint and had become a flattened sling. Her pack and the water bottles rested in a hollow Nown had made in his own back.

At the summit they found lesser hills below them, a rucked cover of vegetation, dead pasture on hills any wind would have made bald, grass like a haze, and more hills piled in the hazy distance.

Laura walked for a time. Nown broke a path for her; he parted the grass.

SIXTY-FIVE HOURS
In, by Laura’s watch, they came to where more sky was visible than at any place in the Place. The sky was still white, but like steam gathered under an immense high dome. They looked down from
a low hill on to what appeared to be a wide harbour, a seabed of sand and rocks that shelved down to several deep, branching channels. On a spur of land with an apparently man-made, straight-edged shoreline, was the remains of a huge timber-framed building.

‘There,’ Laura said. Nown let her down and she went ahead. She held his hand as if she were leading him, though he was the one anchored on the slope.

They climbed all the way down and walked to the head of the causeway — for Laura could see now that that was what the squared headland was, a wide bank of hewn stones, mortared together, the bank paved on top. The ruin stood on a hammerhead of embankment at the end of the causeway. Its main beams were of tree length and girth, the surfaces of their wood scabbed and glossy black.

Laura took her pack from Nown, untied her bedroll and spread it on the ground. She was thinking
Whatever the nightmare was, it should relate to the fire, to this particular place.
She imagined being penned in by smoke, and herded by flame.

She squatted by her bedroll and drank and ate a little. She said to Nown, ‘I’m afraid.’

He made no sound, no comforting noises, not even a grunt of acknowledgement. He didn’t offer encouragement, or remind her that having come so far she
must
want to find out.

‘My father wanted me to do this,’ Laura said.

Nown was silent.

‘Is he still alive?’ Laura asked. She needed to know now. If she couldn’t ever expect to see him again then she didn’t need to do this, she didn’t need to sleep here.

‘I don’t know if he’s alive,’ Nown answered. ‘The eighth knew that. I am the ninth. I only know whether
you
are alive.’

‘Know, or believe?’ Laura imagined her father standing in the shadow of a passionfruit vine that grew over the arch of a gate. The gate to a garden in the afterlife.

‘I can’t believe. I can only know,’ said Nown.

Laura thought about that. She said, ‘There’s a nightmare here that my father caught to take to the men in prisons. Something to frighten them into obedience. Something worse than the worst sermons about hell. My father wanted me to catch it too — and show it to other people, so that they’ll know how bad it’s been for the prisoners. It’s like the little children working in mines and factories a hundred years ago — everyone knew about that, but they didn’t feel how heartless it was till people wrote describing the conditions. Then public opinion changed the law. If people experience what the prisoners are forced to, then they’ll be shocked, indignant, and — I hope — compassionate.’ Laura was wiping her hands, which were covered in oil from the peanuts she had eaten. She said, ‘Anyway, that’s what Da said I should do. He always thought that, with any encouragement at all, most people will behave kindly.’ Laura mused for a moment,
then said, ‘I should probably tell the newspapers too. Write them letters explaining what I know.’

Nown said, ‘Your father had injured his hands. Shall I hold your arms?’

It was a practical suggestion. And given what she knew about his nature, Laura was surprised that Nown had offered any suggestions. But it was
coldly
practical, and Laura felt like a condemned criminal sitting out his final night with a polite warden. She lay down. She looked up at Nown and said, ‘All right. But gently.’

She couldn’t stop shivering. She was afraid to close her eyes. ‘Is it cold?’ she said.

‘I don’t know.’

Laura yawned and her jaw shuddered. She was tired after all. She listened, but there was nothing to hear. She was adrift in her body, in the quietest place in the universe.

Weak from a long sickness, heavily encumbered with what he did not know — perhaps the bedclothes — the man moved. He came to and moved. With no result. His eyes were open, but it was dark. Pitch black, as though death had pressed its thumbs into his eye sockets. He turned his head. A thin cloth pulled tight against his face as he turned. He opened his mouth and sucked in air to call out, and the cloth came into his mouth, a bubble of lily-scented satin and air that smelt of damp earth.

His hands stirred. He meant to lift them. He meant to pull the cloth from his face. His hands moved up only inches, and were pinned by pillows of satin, an upholstery over hard
walls. His hands scraped and slithered. He heard the noise his nails made.

He heard the box.

He began to scream. The reverberations of his screams gave him the whole shape of the box, narrow-walled, low-roofed, unyielding. Its lid was screwed down hard and would not give. Earth was piled above the lid, airless earth, pressing down hard.

He screamed and moaned, he fought the box, in a frenzy of terror. He struggled and scuffled, strained his head up so that it beat against the coffin’s lid. He chewed his shroud, took it into his mouth to tear it, to get a little more air. Any more. He bit at his lips, and through his lips, and through the shroud. He managed to make a hole in the shroud, and yet still stifled on the condensed vapour of his own breath. He bent his hands back and pressed upward, clawed till the satin tore and he was through to the wood. He beat on the lid of the coffin. He strained till his wrists cracked.

Then he stopped. He made himself lie still and listen. He forced his panic back. He thought he heard birdsong. He thought he heard the world above him, daylight and the open air. He listened. He listened. He listened. He hoped to hear someone coming, someone who could help him. He hoped. He listened. Then he burst out of his hope, as he couldn’t burst out of the coffin. He went mad with activity, he convulsed. His bowels let go and the trapped air went from bad to worse. He scraped at the lid till his nails ripped way from his fingertips, then till his fingers were broken. He didn’t feel it — he only felt the grip of the box.

He forced his hands up as far as his face, to find flesh that did yield, his own mouth the only space he could thrust his
fingers through. His lips were in tatters, and his broken hands were full of his own torn hair.

He kicked and thrashed.

It was dark.

It would not break.

It was dark.

He was shut in, shut in, scuffling on in the stifling dark.

LAURA WOKE AND
reared up. Her head collided with something above her, on top of her. She screamed.

Nown released her hands and they flew out making rents in his arms and shoulders, bashing sprays of sand out from his body. The sand flew wide, stopped in the air, then rushed back into Nown’s body.

Laura scrambled up and away from Nown. She stood, shaking her arms and howling. She had bitten her lips and blood was dripping from her chin. She cried like a child, in terror and despair. She had caught the dreadful dream. She would find herself buried alive, if she slept, when she slept, night after night. It wasn’t over.

The dream went on. Laura knew that it did. The buried man suffered. He waited to die in a mess of blood and filth. He hadn’t any hope. He was a penned thing.

Laura walked back and forth, shaking her hands and crying. Her arms were aching. She could see bruises and sandy welts on her skin. Laura pulled up her sleeves and showed Nown the marks he had made. She roared at him, and shook her arms under his nose.

Nown got to his feet.

Laura rushed at him, put her arms around him and pressed her head into his creaking chest. ‘Be human!’ She begged.

Nown said, ‘How?’

Laura continued to cry. Nown was unrewarding to cling to. Stony, then yielding. If she pressed his sand it cracked and shifted.

Suddenly he picked her up, his hands under her armpits. He lifted her up, then lowered her. Lifted her up again, then lowered her. He swung her gently from side to side.

Laura was shocked, she hung from his hands, stiff and stunned. Then she realised that he’d seen people do this to coax their small children out of crying. She was being dandled, like a baby. She stopped crying. ‘Nown?’

He lifted her to his eyes.

‘I’m not a baby,’ she said.

He put her carefully down.

LAURA PACKED UP
her bedroll. She had water, then set Nown walking in front of her, towards the hills.

As they went she thought about her father on the platform of Sisters Beach Station — his gnawed lips and bandaged hands. She wondered how her father had managed not to think of her as a child. As
his
child, whom he should protect at all costs. But between the nightmare and the station her father had shaped and sung his Nown into existence. Laura thought that she must judge her father now like God, not like a girl of fifteen.

In springtime Laura had often been late for school because she would stop to pick woolly bear caterpillars up off the path. Rose called her a soppy thing. Laura was softhearted, but now would have to do what her father had asked. She would take the dream to those who profited from their willingness to terrify other people with it, and dreams like it. They would all be there — on the evening of St Lazarus’s. The President would be in his suite with his family. The Secretary of the Interior in his, with his family. Government secretaries, and deputy secretaries, captains of industry — they would all be there. Laura had no doubt at all that she could overdream her aunt. She was the same size as the dream now. It was packed into her, tamped down, compacted under tremendous pressure, like a huge, horrible charge.