Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (18 page)

Grace shook her head. She had once thought that way about Laura, but Laura had changed.

“Anyway,” Sandy said, “at least I didn’t totally waste my time. When I got to Debt River, I met a ranger who was walking the border from Tricksie Bend, mostly on the outside, ducking In only at those earth ramps they use as lookouts. Do you know what I mean?”

Grace nodded. She’d seen the ramps on the border the few times she’d gone along it rather than heading straight In. They were ten to fifteen feet high and made of piled earth
tamped down by spadework. Each ramp was a vantage point over the surrounding country.

“The ranger told me about a dream on Foreigner’s North,” Sandy said.

Grace knew that Foreigner’s North was a landmark on maps of the Place. It was on the farthest western border, just Inside. It was in the north as well as the west—possibly also the farthest northern point of the invisible territory—she would have to check a map of Coal Bay to be sure. She had always presumed that it was a compass reference of some kind.

“The dream, Quake, is something only a few dreamhunters can catch. The ranger told me that it was alarming but not exactly a nightmare. No one has claimed it, because it isn’t commercial—supposedly.” Sandy looked smug. “Though I think I’ve uncovered its commercial potential.” He laughed. “I saw that, Mrs. Tiebold, your eyes lit up.”

“I’m intrigued,” Grace said. “How can a dream be ‘not exactly a nightmare’?”

“Well—if something alarming happens in it but the person whose point of view it is isn’t alarmed. Quake is from the point of view of a child, like The Water Diviner. I’m wondering whether that’s my affinity—dreams in which the audience gets to be a child again. The boy in The Water Diviner is about ten. This is a much younger child, maybe four or five.”

“That’s very unusual.”

“Perhaps you’d like to come to my performance tonight? I’ve spent the last two days chewing Wakeful and getting together an audience—mostly scientists from the University. Geologists and so forth. I’ve rented a whole floor of a hotel here on the Isle. Eight bedrooms. I’m charging twenty dollars a head.”

Grace was a little embarrassed for Sandy—standing in the
aisle of an outfitter’s and advertising his prices. But she still asked for the name and address of the hotel, and at what time the doors closed before the performance.

“Will you come?” Sandy said, eager to impress her.

Grace considered. She closed one eye. She very much wanted to come and try Sandy’s Quake. She hadn’t been four or five since she was four or five, and she couldn’t remember it very clearly. She’d been to a performance of The Water Diviner and had thought that, although Sandy’s penumbra was still quite tight, his dream was very clear, and exact in all its details. He was promising, and he was catching new things, which the majority of dreamhunters didn’t even try to do. She said, “If I attend, you’ll be boosted.”

“Then perhaps you could come at a reduced price.”

“Reduced?” Grace didn’t believe her ears. He was so brazen. He’d even folded his arms and tilted his head back. He was bargaining. He wasn’t going to be flattered by her interest. She said, “A discount then, for me and my husband.”

“Done,” said Sandy.

“We’re fashionable people, you know,” Grace said.

“Yes, I do know. And I know I’m supposed to fawn upon all the fashionable people.”

He was thinking of Laura, Grace thought. What
had
the girl done to him? What was in that letter he tore to pieces? She said, “We’ll see you tonight then. I’m looking forward to it.” She patted his arm and took her new pack up to the counter.

“A letter! And he destroyed it?” said Chorley. “Was it a letter to some man?”

“He didn’t say it was to a man. You’re jumping to conclusions—the conclusions you’re always jumping to these days.
One moment you’re fretting about Laura and Sandy Mason, the next you’re fretting about Sandy’s supposed rival. Honestly, Chorley!”

“Young men can’t be trusted with girls.”

“This is the voice of experience, I suppose?”

“Rather remote experience, but still.”

“You’re turning into such a reactionary. It’s that old man with the beard—your new best friend.”

There was a scorched silence from Chorley. He put his coat on over his silk robe. He put boots on over his tasseled slippers. He fumed. “The Grand Patriarch is not a replacement for Tziga,” he said.

“I’m sorry, dear. But you can be so silly about Laura. She’s no more likely to be seduced than Rose is. Less likely, since she’s sequestered on So Long Spit. Conveniently,” Grace added. “Till I cool off.”

Chorley ignored this remark. “Laura doesn’t have many barriers left in her behavior. That seems to be something dreams do to some dreamhunters. And—let me remind you—I was
right
to worry about Tziga.”

“You weren’t worried that he’d be
seduced.”

“I was worried that none of us, and nothing he had, would ever be enough for him.”

“I’m like that too,” Grace said.

“No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am. The only difference between me and Tziga is that I love all the dreams I catch. I love them. And without them I’d be nothing. I’d be a withered apple on a windowsill.” Grace pulled her image from a dream, one of her sad ones, in which a widow returned home after her husband’s funeral, and a short time staying in the houses of relatives, to find nothing much changed, but her house empty and stale, and her stored apples withered.

Grace said, “I love being borne up by my big audiences—everyone breathing together, breathing in time with my breathing. It’s not just that I enjoy what I do, or that I’m proud of how good at it I am. It’s this—when I’m carried up on the high tide of a full house at the Rainbow Opera, when I’m
not myself
, that’s when I’m most fully alive.”

Chorley put his arms around his wife and kissed her. He said, “Dear, none of that is under threat. Your audience fell off for a time, but you got them back again. You had a bad patch, but it’s over.”

They quietly held each other. Then Grace said, “Shall we go see what this boy has, then?”

Sandy’s twelve guests gathered in the larger suite to have a drink before they retired. They pulled dining chairs into the space before the hearth, around the sofa and armchairs already there. A waiter wheeled in a trolley with hot chocolate and cakes, port and brandy.

It fell to Grace to play hostess—she was the only woman present, and the collection of crusty geologists was clearly used to being waited on. She poured hot chocolate, handed around cups and glasses, and spooned cream onto slices of cake. Then she gathered her white silk robe around her bright yellow silk pajamas and sat down with her own cup of chocolate.

Sandy stood with one arm on the mantelpiece and one foot up on the hearth. He was giving an account of his journey. He seemed to be enjoying himself, speaking well and with a natural authority.

Chorley leaned toward his wife to whisper. “How old is he?”

“Eighteen or nineteen, I believe—he Tried late.”

Chorley nodded and continued his haughty scrutiny of the boy Rose referred to, jokingly, as “Laura’s suitor.”

“The farther west I went, the poorer the land was. When we think of Coal Bay, we think about Sisters Beach or the dairy flats around Whynew Stream. But beyond Whynew Stream there are only wet paddocks rusty with dock leaf. I slept where it was dry, just Inside the border. But I didn’t walk along on the Inside. It’s pointless to do that.”

“Yes!” One geologist removed his pipe from his teeth with a loud clack. “I read about those experiments. The ratio of Inside to outside is miles to yards, I gather. He put his pipe back in his mouth with another punctuating clack of tooth enamel on polished walnut. “It’s simply incredible.”

Sandy said, “Because the Place is so vast, its explorers have tried to make landmarks, as well as record the landmarks they find. One of the first explorers was a legendary figure—legendary among rangers at least—a man known as the Foreigner.”

“He was French,” said Grace.

“He tried to walk the border before anyone else,” said Sandy. “The first mapmakers kept finding his marks. Foreigner’s North is a landmark. A compass mark on the border, at the point farthest north and west, though I understand his west is somewhere else.”

Grace said, “It’s because of his west that they suppose he’s a foreigner—west is ‘ouest’ in French.”

Sandy said, “A ranger took me to Foreigner’s North. The dream Quake is right on top of it. The compass mark—a big N—looks like it’s been hit by a quake too. It’s cracked all the way across.”

“There was a sizable earthquake in Coal Bay in 1886,” a geologist said. “That’s what first uncovered the coal at Debt
River. Lumps of it washed downstream and began to turn up on the tide. The forest is very thick in the northwest, but prospectors went in and found the slip, and the seam of coal. Of course folks had already found coal at Whynew Stream over a hundred years before. But that seam was soon exhausted. However, that’s where the name—Coal Bay—comes from.”

“The quake was twenty years ago?” asked Chorley.

The geologist nodded, then turned to Sandy and asked, “Is the quake in the dream a good-sized one?”

Sandy straightened and took his arm off the mantelpiece. “Shall we go and see?”

The boy was practicing his violin on the porch of the cottage when he saw something pouring out of the dead tree trunk in the yard. He put down his violin—his child’s violin, a fine thing, as precious and clever as he was himself—and brushed his itching jaw against his shoulder. The rosin made a mark on his shirt. He stepped off the porch and wandered across the yard to look at the flood of—what? Sap?

From far away the substance looked like chocolate sauce from one of his ma’s self-saucing puddings. (His ma used to say that
she
was a “self-saucing pudding,” which was a joke about how in their family there was no “Da” like other families had.)

The boy squatted to look at the brown substance. The air was hot nearer the ground, as though the ground was cooking something.

He saw that the oozing mass was ants, thousands of them, flowing in a twisting, glistening brown rope down the grooved tree trunk. He could actually hear them. The ants were making a noise like bursting bubbles in sea foam—except much quieter. The boy could hear them only because the sounds of the world had dropped away. Even the birds in the bushes were silent.

His mother came to the cottage door to ask what he was doing. She was wiping her hands on her apron. He wanted to say to her that the ants were leaving
their nest. But he didn’t get to say it. He saw her hands grow still, though she continued to hold her apron gathered before her.

They both listened. The boy wondered why the horses in the paddock behind the house had decided, all at once, to gallop down to the back fence.

But the thunder wasn’t horses.

The ground began to move; it lurched sideways, and then jolted up in shudders. The boy fell onto his hands and knees. He heard his mother shout. He saw her rush across the porch. At the same time the cottage chimney slammed down onto the corrugated iron roof, then came apart and slid—bricks and boulder-sized chunks of mortar and brick—down the curve of the roof and off its edge. The boy’s mother rushed out among the falling bricks. None of them struck her.

She staggered across the yard and picked him up, then stumbled under the yard’s one tree, a cabbage tree partly smothered with honeysuckle. The honeysuckle was in flower, and as they stood—he in her arms—the tree dropped honeysuckle blossoms and a thick veil of floral scent down over them. His mother spread one hand over the crown of the boy’s head and held him sheltered in the curve of her body. She leaned back against the tree trunk and struggled to keep her footing.

There were crashes and thumps from the cottage—scarcely audible in the thunder from everywhere. And there were high-pitched sounds, the squawk of nails pulled loose from timber, and the painted weatherboards splitting with a sound like gunfire.

Water was jumping out of the puddles and into the air.