Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (5 page)

“You hide yourself but stay near,” she told him, then stood for a moment stupefied by the thought that since she’d freed him he didn’t need to obey her. Then, “I’m soaking wet,” she said. “I must go in.
Will
you wait for me?”

“Yes,” said Nown.

Laura approached the house. She went up the stairs to the porch. As soon as her foot touched the top step, barking erupted from within. It was Downright, her aunt’s dog. She heard the dog coming till he was on the other side of the door, his nails clicking on the wooden floor as he danced around.

Laura called through the door, “It’s me, Laura!”

Downright paused to listen, then began to bark again.

The stained-glass border around the door lit up as a lamp
was carried to it. It was Mr. Bridges, one of Aunt Marta’s elderly servants. Laura heard the man speak sharply to Downright. Then Marta joined him, calming her dog with praise. “There’s a good boy, settle down now.” The bolt rattled, the door opened, and two people and the dog all stared at Laura.

Downright surged forward, and his collar jerked free from Marta’s grip. He brushed past Laura, ran outside, and began to track back and forth across the lawn with his nose down. He reached the long grass at the edge of the mown area and stood, stiff-legged, silent, pointing. Then his ears went back, and he hunkered down on his haunches, made a tight turn, and scuttled back across the lawn. He pushed past the people in the doorway and vanished into the dark dead end below the main staircase, where he cowered, whimpering.

Marta looked after her dog, frowned, then drew Laura indoors. She released her niece and looked at her wet hands. “What is this?” she said. “Where have you come from? And what on earth are you wearing?”

“I walked here. I’m wet through,” Laura said.

Marta made a small sound between a grunt and a gasp, more exasperated than shocked. She took hold of Laura and hustled her up the stairs, issuing instructions over her shoulder about breakfast.

Marta’s bedroom was warm, last night’s fire smoking still. She gave her niece a nightgown and told her to change out of her wet clothes and get under the covers. Marta poked at the fire, put on more coal. Laura stripped off her silk pajamas, which weren’t evenly soaked—no, her back and seat and one shoulder were dry, for they had lain against the shelter of Nown’s body. Laura could see that the pattern was incongruous, so she crumpled the silk into a wad so that the dry patches blotted the wet ones. She dropped the bundled pajamas and put on her aunt’s nightgown. Her bare feet tingled
with the blood coming back into them. She climbed into her aunt’s bed but remained sitting. “I mustn’t sleep,” she said.

Marta got up from the hearth and stared at her niece. “What have you done?” she said.

“I showed them.” Laura shivered.

Marta put on her dressing gown and stood at the mirror to brush out her braid. She wound her hair into a coil and pinned it. She was silent throughout, and it was as though she hadn’t heard Laura. But then, without turning, she met her niece’s gaze in the mirror and asked,
“What
did you show them, Laura?”

“What happens,” Laura said. She opened her mouth again to add, “The dreams they take to the prisons,” but something inside her interrupted. It wasn’t like being interrupted by her own thoughts. She recognized it as different from her, a fragment of planted intelligence, something that had come to her with the dream. It seemed to say: “What
has
happened,” to warn: “What
will
happen.”

“Laura.” Aunt Marta was sitting on the bed beside her, hands gripping her shoulders. “Lie back, girl, you’re faint. Your face is completely white. You can sleep if you need to. No one in this house is about to go back to bed.” Marta began to muse. “Though, really, if your dream is that dire, I will have to have you moved elsewhere.”

Laura put her head back on the pillow. Her shivering began to subside. She closed her eyes. A moment later she felt her aunt lift the covers. Marta said, “You weren’t wearing any shoes, but your feet are clean. Who brought you here? Who else knows you’re here?”

“No one,” Laura said. “I came on my own.” In her mind she saw the three remaining letters on the back of Nown’s neck. She flicked her thumb against her forefinger and felt the sand packed under her fingernail.

Her aunt said, “Why did you choose to come here?”

“I haven’t anywhere else to go. Everyone will be mad at me,” she said, and thought, “And it was raining.”

She had been wet and cold. But if when the day came the sun had appeared too, then she might have asked Nown to keep on walking, to carry her away somewhere, as if a spell held her together, instead of all her regular needs—food and shelter, clothes and money.

The bedroom door closed. Aunt Marta had gone out. Laura opened her eyes and looked at the plaster decorations on the ceiling, the white ropes of leaves and flowers gathered at the four corners of the room by big bows borne by birds in flight.

Once she was warm, Laura got out of bed and stood at the window. It was a gray morning, not much lighter than the dawn had been. Laura saw Mr. Bridges hurrying off down the road, patting one pocket as he went.

The bedroom door opened. “Get back into bed,” Marta said. “I’ve sent Mr. Bridges to the telegraph office at the station. I feel the need of some advice. You were always an honest girl, Laura, and open—without having picked up that habit the Tiebolds have of broadcasting constant reports on their mental weather …”

Laura got back into bed, remained sitting, but drew the covers up to her chin. She listened to her aunt mutter about the shortcomings of the rest of her family. Marta was opening drawers and rattling hangers in her wardrobe as she spoke. “You were honest, but now I see you’re heading down the same path your father took. You have to understand that you shouldn’t abuse your gift for any reason. Not for any reason.”

“I’m not. You’ll see.”

Marta shook her head, bundled her clothes in her arms, and went out of the bedroom again.

Half an hour went by. Mrs. Bridges came in with breakfast on a tray. She too told Laura that her husband had gone to the station’s telegraph office. “Miss Marta has asked her friend the Grand Patriarch to send a car—‘immediately’ is what she wrote.”

It appeared that Laura had come all this way only to be carried back to Founderston.

Mrs. Bridges shoveled more coal into the grate, then said, “You should eat up, dear. You must be famished. Here, let me take the top off that egg.” The woman came and did that and then stood making soothing noises over Laura as she ate. “That’s right. Get that down you,” she said, and, “Have some more toast. My quince jelly turned out particularly well this year.”

When Mrs. Bridges finally left, Laura eased the tray off her legs and got out of bed. She posted herself at the window and waited. Mr. Bridges came back along the road and turned in at the gate. Once he was indoors, Laura pushed up the window and thrust her head out. It was dull, full daylight outside, but she couldn’t see where Nown might have hidden himself. She called his name—in a loud whisper.

Behind her, the bedroom door opened. “Get away from that window!” commanded Aunt Marta.

Laura took her knee off the sill and shuffled back to the bed. Her aunt’s nightgown was too long for her.

Marta closed her wardrobe doors. She turned the key in the lock, removed it, and put it in her pocket. “I have nothing that would fit you anyway. You’d be swimming in all my dresses,” Aunt Marta said. “And this way you won’t think of setting out cross-country again.”

“Mrs. Bridges told me you asked the Grand Patriarch to send a car.”

“That’s right. Upon reflection I’ve decided that I can’t turn
the Bridgeses out of their beds just because you’re carrying a nightmare.”

Laura’s aunt stood straight-backed, with one hand pressed flat to her pocket as though she thought the key might leap out of it. Her face was stern and full of suspicion. “While I am pleased that you think you can come to me, Laura,” she said, “I’m afraid that this is all a bit beyond me.”

When Laura had last visited Marta, she’d had her aunt teach her “The Measures.” Laura had told her aunt that she had been talking with her father about “The Measures” and other old Hame songs the last times she saw him, at Summerfort, and at Sisters Beach Station before the special train carried him away. She’d told her aunt that her father said the songs were his only real family legacy, and that she should know them. Marta Hame had, till recently, been the choir mistress at the Temple in Founderston. She was a musician, a music teacher, and a Hame—the ideal person for Laura to ask about the family music. But Laura hadn’t been collecting songs to remember her father by—no—she had wanted to learn “The Measures” because it was a spell, a recipe for making a servant out of earth. Now, looking at her aunt, Laura wondered how Marta could know the chant and not know what it could do.

Laura’s aunt said, “Erasmus will tell me how to handle you.”

Laura laughed and shook her head, partly out of a sense of absurdity—her aunt had such faith in her friend and spiritual guide, the Grand Patriarch of the Southern Orthodox Church. But the Grand Patriarch was always speaking out against dreamhunters and dream palaces. According to him, the Rainbow Opera was a place where people indulged in “a secondhand education of the senses” and “acts without consequences.” What kind of advice could the Grand Patriarch
offer a lawbreaking dreamhunter? All he believed in was abstinence. Besides, Laura hadn’t wanted advice, she’d only wanted to
get the job done.

Marta pulled the window closed before she left the room. For a long time Laura didn’t dare to stir. She was sure that her aunt was just beyond the door, listening for movement. Laura waited. She became drowsy, and it was her drowsiness that frightened her out of the warm bed and across the room. For a minute she stood pressed against the window—her face turned to the door. There was a light in the hall, a candle perhaps, its wavering radiance lancing through the keyhole. Laura watched it, and the strain of watching was so great, and she so still, that everything seemed to come to life around her; the bedroom furniture, the plaster garlands carried by plaster birds, the patterns on the carpet—everything became animated and seemed to watch her back. Laura felt like a wild animal; she ached for escape.

After a long time she turned back to the window.

Nown was standing on the lawn looking up at her.

Laura pushed the window open and swung her legs over the sill. She stepped out onto the cold, corrugated iron of the veranda roof. She walked as far as she could, to where the curve began to plunge down to the gutter.

Nown stalked nearer, till he stood at the veranda rail, directly beneath her.

Laura looked down into his black-banded, statuesque eyes and thought that it wasn’t really any wonder she’d imagined the bedroom furniture had come to life. Nown was made of inanimate matter, sand all the way through—and yet here he was, waiting to hear what she wanted. She said, “My aunt has sent for a car. She’s taking me back to Founderston. Not to the authorities, though, I think.”

Nown didn’t move, show surprise, nod to acknowledge
he’d heard, or make any noise to encourage her to go on speaking.

Laura looked around the misty farmland. She saw a pine plantation—trees black in the mist—growing on the curve of the nearest hill like the neatly cropped mane of a cavalry horse. She pointed. “Wait for me there, in that forest. Can you do that? I’ll be back as soon as I’m able. I don’t want anyone to see you.”

Nown didn’t reply—he didn’t say “I’ll do that.”

“Please,” she said.

He lifted his arms and held them out. He didn’t say anything, but the gesture meant, “Jump!” It meant, “Jump, and I’ll catch you.”

From the room behind her Laura heard her aunt, shocked, shouting, “Laura! What are you doing out there? Come back inside this instant!”

Laura took one last look at her sandman’s open arms, his black-banded, brilliant eyes, then turned and made her way carefully back to the open window and stepped into the warm bedroom.

3

NLY THE DAY BEFORE—ST. LAZARUS’S EVE—WHEN LAURA’S OVERNIGHT TRAIN HAD ARRIVED IN FOUNDERSTON AT
nine-thirty in the morning, she had pushed three envelopes into the mailbox on the concourse of the station.