Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (38 page)

“It’s free then,” Laura thought. “Its first N has been erased, as I erased Nown’s in the early hours of St. Lazarus’s
Day. It’s its own. And I’ve always felt it was talking to me because it
was
, or was
trying
to. It knows me. The dreams are set in the future, so it must once have known me. My father’s sandman was the eighth Nown, mine is the ninth. The Place must be a later one.”

Then she thought of the angry demands from the bad telegrams: “Rise up and shake them all off! Rise up and crush them!” She didn’t understand it at all. What did it want?

“Laura, please stop crying,” Sandy begged.

She held her breath, hiccuped, struggled.

Agonized, Sandy burst out, “You should be happy!” But he was asking too much for himself, and that scared him. “Because of The Gate,” he added. “How can you be unhappy with
that
inside you?”

Laura shook her head, choked. “This is just a reaction. Don’t mind me.”

He put an arm around her waist. “Can you walk? Let’s go home. Let’s go do your father some good, and start making our fortunes.”

Laura nodded. She let him help her up. They stepped out of the circle and went slowly away from that place.

7

IVE DAYS BEFORE FOUNDERSTON’S PRESENTATION BALL, THE DIRECTOR OF THE CITY’S LARGEST SANATORIUM, FAL
low Hill, was shocked by the sudden visit of a man he’d thought was dead. Called to his office, the director found Tziga Hame sitting in front of his desk.

For nearly twenty years Hame had had a contract with Fallow Hill. When the dreamhunter disappeared, it had been a great loss to the sanatorium. The director was surprised and delighted to see Hame. Then, looking harder, he wondered whether the man had come seeking treatment. In the minute it took the director to process these impressions, he noticed his office was full of Hame’s relatives. He shook hands with all of them, then sat down to hear what Hame had to say about his injuries.

Hame and his sister-in-law were sitting. Grace Tiebold’s husband, her daughter, and Hame’s daughter stood at the back of the room, with a dreamhunter unknown to the director, a young man with tired eyes and several days’ stubble on his jaw.

The director leaned forward and focused on Hame, or tried to, because his eyes kept wandering, and he found himself counting them,
one, two, three, four
—four dreamhunters in the room. He imagined he could feel them, like storm pressure,
an inaudible roar coming off them, and an invisible fire raging around them.

“As you know,” Tziga Hame began, “it isn’t often that any dreamhunter catches anything new. The almanac gains perhaps fifteen to twenty dreams in any year, and most aren’t of any great consequence.”

The director nodded, then was distracted by Rose Tiebold, who was making a quizzical face, touching her own chin, then pointing at her cousin’s, miming a question about the grazes on Laura Hame’s cheeks and chin and top lip. The marks were nothing much, gorse prickle scuffs. Laura Hame touched her own face, looked away from her cousin, and kept her fingers pressed against her mouth. The young man glanced at her; then his hand found hers, and the director saw them move their arms to conceal their entwined fingers behind their backs.

Tziga Hame was saying, “If we go straight to the Body with this, it will be classed as ‘a dream for the public good.’ But I think it should be tested before it’s classified. I think it needs expert witnesses. You and your doctors are experts on dreams, long-term illness, and palliative care.”

The director sat up straight. “Good God!” he said. He had realized that it was the
dream
he could feel, in the room, an endless cascade of high emotion. He looked into all the dreamhunters’ faces. He should be able to
see
it.

“My daughter, Laura, and Alexander Mason here have a dream the like of which has never been felt,” Tziga said.

Grace Tiebold coughed. She covered her mouth with her gloved hand.

The director said to her, “You’ve sampled it already?”

“Yes. We both have,” Hame said. “And I’d very much like to have it again. So, if you could include my board in their six-night contract?”

“The Presentation Ball is in five nights,” Laura Hame added, as though to explain something vital.

“Laura wants to stay till the very end of the ball,” the young man said. He blushed and looked around nervously, as though he had no right to speak. Then he squared his shoulders. “But I will sign up to play the night of the ball, and for however long the dream lasts after that.”

“I can come back too, and sleep with Sandy—only not on the night of the ball,” Laura said. Her chafed cheeks dimpled.

Alexander Mason looked stony.

Grace Tiebold turned around in her chair to look at the young dreamhunters. She froze, staring, then said, “You should shave, Alexander.” She sounded wrathful. The director couldn’t imagine what the boy had done to offend her, or what his position was among this talented and high-handed family.

Grace turned back to the director. “These young people should wait outside while Tziga and I settle details.”

“It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Miss Hame, Miss Tiebold, Mr. Mason,” the director said.

The young people left, the girls whispering fiercely. The director busied himself with the paperwork.

Rose said to her cousin, “I hope you can get rid of that rash by Saturday night.”

“What rash?”

“On your chin.”

Laura touched her chin. She gave a secretive smile, then she looked at Sandy. “Aunt Grace is right, you should shave,” she said.

“Oh—it’s a
kissing
rash,” Rose said. “I’ve heard about those.”

8

OSE STOOD IN THE LOWER HALLWAY OF THE FOUNDERSTON HOUSE, READY MINUTES BEFORE EVERYONE ELSE, THOUGH
hers had been by far the most involved preparations. Her hair had been washed and loosely curled in the morning, then pinned into seemingly artless whorls and tendrils shortly after lunch. After dinner it was decorated with real pearls, both fixed pins and drops that shimmered and shimmied every time she moved her head. Rose had been sponged down, powdered, and perfumed by eight o’clock and had gotten into her stockings and slip, then finally her dress. She’d had a maid to help her, hired especially for the occasion, since the household ordinarily had no need of ladies’ maids. The maid had worn cotton gloves to protect the lustrous silk of Rose’s ball gown from her hands. Rose was gloved now too, in one of the five pairs she had gotten for the season. She had covered herself with her white velvet cape. She was ready—ready to be presented to society, and to make a spectacle of herself. It was nine p.m. The ball was to begin at nine-thirty.

Where was everyone?

Rose tapped her foot. She didn’t touch anything. She began to imagine that dust and cobwebs would jump off the walls, that fingerprints would float off the banisters beside
her and drop greasily onto her clothes like soot from a ship’s funnel.

Rose heard a door latch. It was the back door. Laura pushed through from the kitchen, walking backward, her brilliant skirt bunched in one hand. In the other she had a large canister of film. She had her gloves on, but her hands were poking out from the unbuttoned openings at her wrists. There was a small spray of dark mud on the back of her skirt.

“This is it!” Laura said, panting. She opened the door under the stairs and went into Chorley’s darkroom. Rose followed her, stopping in the doorway when she caught a whiff of all the chemicals.

Laura put the film canister on the table and opened the drawer where Chorley kept his pasteboard labels. She uncapped a bottle of ink, dipped her pen.

“Be careful,” Rose said.

Laura stopped, pen poised. “You’re right. What should I put? I can hardly write ‘Damning Evidence,’ can I?”

“I meant don’t get ink on your gloves.”

Laura laughed, overexcited. She’d been like this all week. At times she was deliriously happy, at other times she seemed paralyzed by gloom. The dream alone couldn’t explain it. Rose supposed that it was whatever Laura and Sandy were up to—more than kissing maybe. She felt left out, and left behind. It wasn’t that she saw herself as less grownup than Laura, because Laura wasn’t acting particularly grownup—she wasn’t acting like anything, except perhaps a string of firecrackers lit at both ends and dropped in the street. It was just that Rose found she couldn’t imagine what it took to generate this crazy pitch of feeling.