Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (19 page)

Then the heaving and juddering stopped. The yard went quiet, though the air seemed to torque and rustle.

The boy’s mother held him tight. Her heart was beating so hard the boy could feel it pushing against him, fierce and powerful. Her heart was strong—the boy thought—but not nearly as strong as the ground, the angry ground.

Grace was shaken awake by the bed heaving. Beside her, Chorley was sitting up. She heard him fumbling around on the nightstand. He lit a candle.

Grace made a muffled noise of irritation. The bedsheets were uncomfortably starchy, and the room was stuffy. She remembered that she was in a hotel—the sort of hotel young Sandy Mason could afford to rent for his performance.

“That was Verity,” Chorley said to his wife.

Grace’s next annoyed grunt had, at its end, a mild tone of inquiry. Verity was Chorley’s dead sister, Laura’s mother.

“The woman on the porch,” said Chorley.

“Sandy isn’t a Gifter,” Grace said. She was waking up, reluctantly. She could feel herself shrinking away from something.

Maze Plasir was a Gifter (or, impolitely, a Grafter). He could graft the bodies of real people onto the characters in his dreams. That was why he was in demand by the sorts of men who would send him out to watch—say—their daughters’ school friends and then have those school friends stand in for the obligingly friendly females of Plasir’s specialty dreams. Gifting was a very rare talent. Some dreamhunters, at certain times in their lives, did make their own substitutions. As a young woman, Grace had found herself replacing the anonymous handsome faces of her dreams’ heroes with Chorley Tiebold’s after she first saw him at a ball. It just happened, and was beyond her control.

“But why would Sandy think of
Verity?”
Chorley asked, bemused. “Where would he
get
her from?”

“Laura.”

“How could he get her from Laura?”

“No. It
was
Laura.” Grace sat up so quickly she threw the covers off them. “It wasn’t Verity; it was Laura.”

Chorley screwed up his face. “Why would Sandy want to imagine himself as a child and Laura as his mother?”

Grace put her hands over her face. She was very confused, appalled, and, at the same time, deeply moved.

“It’s perverse,” Chorley was saying, his voice strained.

Grace put a hand on his arm. She was worried he might leap out of bed, wake up Sandy Mason, and start demanding explanations. “Calm down,” she said, though she was far from calm herself.

“It’s so perverse I can’t even imagine what kind of perversity it is!” Chorley said. Then, “Why are you laughing?”

“You’re funny.”

“Grace, Sandy Mason finds he’s an angelic, violin-playing little boy so he immediately supplies himself with my niece as his mother. And you’re laughing. I’m a liberal man. I have an abundance of tolerance for dreamhunters and their peculiarities. But this is going too far.”

Grace wiped her eyes. “Shhh,” she said.

Chorley shut his mouth and only radiated indignation.

Grace took his hand and met his eyes. “That was Laura. She wasn’t tall or fair like Verity, but she had Verity’s sweet, queenly face. Sandy Mason isn’t a Gifter. And if he recognizes the woman in his dream, he’ll be very upset and angry with himself and suppose it’s because he can’t get Laura out of his head.” Grace kissed her husband’s hand. Her own heart was pounding as hard as the heart of the woman in Sandy’s dream, but she tried to be calm for her husband’s sake. “Listen, love,” she said. “The convict in Laura’s first dream remembered being a boy racing a schooner along the shore of So Long Spit, and you saw the lighthouse keeper’s boy doing just that. The dreams are set in the future. And that was Laura, grown-up, and with a little boy of her own.”

1

HEN SHE WAS ON VACATION IN THE AWA INLET, MAMIE PREFERRED TO SPEND AS LITTLE TIME AS POSSIBLE WITH
her brother, Ru, and his friends. She told Rose that the boys were boring. Right after breakfast she and Rose would often walk up the stream and into the beech forest, or set out along the hot mud track through the reedbeds at the eastern end of the Inlet. Mamie would tell anyone who was listening that they were going to gather shells on the sandbar. Or she’d say they were going swimming and then
would
go to gather shells. Ru had once confronted Mamie about it. “You told us you’d be down by the rocks,” he said, aggrieved.

“So?” said Mamie. “Why do you suddenly want
my
company?”

Ru had blushed and hadn’t complained again.

Mamie was, in her own brutal way, trying to look after Rose, who had discovered that it wasn’t at all fun to be admired by someone she didn’t like, especially someone you had to share a roof with. When Ru Doran looked at her, Rose felt at odds with her own body. She felt that there was something wrong with her. She didn’t want Ru to think she was beautiful. She felt she should be able somehow to show him that he wasn’t allowed to have opinions about her appearance—or, at
least, that he wasn’t allowed to show them. Being openly admired by someone she found unattractive made Rose feel that her beauty didn’t belong to her, was in fact something tricky, a demon hiding inside her, prompting, and making offers, and emitting strange odors when she’d rather just go about being her usual self.

Mamie and Rose’s favorite beach in the Inlet was toward the western end, quite a distance from the Doran house.

On a day two weeks into Rose’s visit, the weather was very hot, and the girls had swum for more than an hour, jumping from the rocks over and over until their ears began to ache. Then they lay on the sand. Salt prickled on their warming bodies as their skin grew dry and tight.

“How long can we stay away?” Rose asked her friend. Her room got the afternoon sun and would be too stuffy to retire to.

“I’m going to have to have a word with Ru, aren’t I?” Mamie said.

Rose shrugged, her shoulders rasping on the sand.

Mamie picked up Rose’s skirt and fished in its pocket for the letter her friend received that morning.

“Hey!” Rose said, but didn’t move.

“It’s only Patty—Patty is a weakness we share, Rose.” Mamie frowned, then quoted their classmate’s letter: “I am deprived of society here in the South. I see no one I like.” She laughed. “But see, a paragraph later she’s dancing the military two-step with her cousin. You know, I think they’re all cousins in the South. Which is a shame, since poor Patty is one of those girls who is longing to be able to say to someone things like ‘An introduction for the purposes of a dance does not constitute an acquaintance.’ But she knows absolutely everyone. And, Rose! It says here she already has the pattern for her Presentation Ball gown. Hasn’t she got
any
other interests?”

“Making fun of what other people are thinking doesn’t actually constitute ‘an interest,’ Mamie,” Rose said.

Mamie tossed the letter down. “Let’s go back,” she said. “I’m not going to be kept from the house by my brother and his tedious admiration.”

Rose got up and dressed while Mamie tried to think of a plan to discourage Ru. “You could propose marriage—that ought to sober him up.”

“I could start scratching myself all the time, so he thinks I’m infested.”

“Or you could clear your throat every thirty seconds, like Miss Toop at the Academy.”

“I could make a three-pronged attack, clearing my throat, scratching, and proposing,” Rose said.

“Or you could just attack his three prongs!”

“Mamie!”

Shrieks of laughter.

That night, in the early hours of the morning, Rose woke and lay listening. She heard a disturbed bird twittering in a tree near her window. Perhaps its calls had hooked her out of sleep, or perhaps she’d been roused by the same thing that made the bird cry in alarm. She felt that something remarkable had happened only a moment before. The curtains in Rose’s room were thick, the room black, and the birdcalls were bright in the darkness.

She got out of bed and shuffled to the window, slid the curtains open, and squinted into brilliant moonlight.

Outside, all the colors of day were present under a smoky filter. It was late, and a dewfall had softened and silvered the grass.

Rose decided to go out. She left her room and crept down the stairs. She went out by the French doors in the dining room. They were locked, but the key was in the lock.

She set off down the flagstone steps of the terrace, then veered away through the orchard and headed for the best path to the sea, the bed of the narrow-gauge railway that ran from the shore to the house.

The Doran summerhouse was on a slope at the back of the Inlet. It was grand and solid, built of blond sandstone, its roof tiled with slate. It had been a big project, in a remote spot, and had presented its builders with some challenges. Labor wasn’t a problem, for the hill had been terraced and the foundations laid by convict workers. The difficulty was in getting the materials from the shore to the site across the boggy paddocks of the former farm. The farm already had a rough road that ran, plumb straight, from the shore to the foot of the hill, along an avenue of mature plane trees. Cas Doran’s solution to the transportation problem was to have a narrow-gauge railway built along the road. A small engine ran on the line. In many trips, over many months, the engine hauled stone and timber, marble and parquet flooring, roof tiles, window glass, and finally furniture.

When Rose had first arrived at the Awa Inlet, the train she was on made a special stop at the end of the trestle bridge that crossed the mouth of the Sva River. Rose then got into a small boat and was rowed up a broad tidal channel, through the reedbeds, to the Doran jetty. There she was greeted by the sight of a butler sitting in the cab of a little engine. A footman stowed her bags in the single truck the engine was pulling. Then she climbed into the engine behind its driver and rode up to the house.

The engine had been stoked up several times during her visit—to pick up Ru’s guests and their luggage, and to carry
supplies: baskets of fruit and vegetables; sides of pork and beef; cages of live chickens; blocks of ice; and hampers of dry goods, preserves, cheese, and wine.

Rose emerged from the orchard and went into the avenue of old trees. She patted the engine, which was sitting in its shelter, cool, still, and breathless.

In the daytime the avenue was a shady tunnel; at night it was like a cathedral, a ruin with a broken roof. Rose walked beside the tracks, her face turned up to the moonlight that fell, almost warm, through gaps in the foliage high overhead. She glanced down only now and then to step over tree roots that snaked almost all the way up to the rails.

Rose intended to go to the shore. The tide would be out, and she wanted to see what the bare sands of the Inlet looked like by the light of the moon. But as she came near the two stacks of rails left over from the time the line was laid, Rose saw something that made her stop, and then slink off the track and behind a tree trunk.