Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (59 page)

Doran gave the Judge a polite nod.

“How did you hope to get away with it?” the Grand Patriarch said.

Doran thought for a few moments about a possible defense—and saw it was impossible. He thought about making Wilkie’s life uncomfortable—of all the people he could take down with him. But he liked what he’d achieved too much to undo it all just because he couldn’t enjoy it. Knowledge was enjoyment. Knowledge of a few lasting successes. And, since he didn’t plan to defend himself, he at least had the satisfaction of being able to answer the Grand Patriarch. “I would have succeeded had the Place not disappeared.”

“The Place is not the whole story. There will be other changes,” said the Grand Patriarch in the tones of a crusader. “This society cannot continue in its callous willingness to base its wealth on suffering.”

Doran laughed. “Oh, yes, Your Eminence? And what are y
ou
going to give up?”

Garth Wilkinson smiled ever so slightly and inspected the fingernails on one hand.

“Do you think I might be taken off to jail now?” said Doran. “My lawyer is here already and wants to go along with me.” He touched the solitary paper on his desk and looked at Wilkinson. “This is my resignation—though I don’t know why I imagined it was required.”

“Thank you, Cas,” said the President.

Father Roy opened the door and stood aside. Doran came around his desk and walked past them. He stopped beside Tziga Hame and tried to catch the man’s shy gaze. He asked, “Do you know why the Place disappeared?”

“I know nothing,” said Tziga Hame.

“And you
are
nothing now,” said Doran. “You and your famous family.”

Tziga Hame gave Doran a beautiful smile. “Yes, please God,” he said. “Let us be nothing—for a time, at least.”

Doran stared into that wavering black gaze and sought understanding. Understanding didn’t come to him. “What I tried to do
had
to work,” he said to Hame, very quietly, and with desperate puzzlement, “because there I was, twenty-six years later, congratulating myself on my successes. The dreams were the future.”

“Oh—you knew that?” said Tziga Hame.

Doran nodded, then walked out to the waiting police.

8

HEN THEY FINALLY REACHED SUMMERFORT, LAURA DRANK A LARGE GLASS OF MILK AND WENT STRAIGHT TO BED
, not worrying that her hair was tangled, or that her feet would make her sheets filthy. She left any explanation to Rose, who didn’t know much but did explain why Laura was so tired.

For days Grace had alternated between silence, weeping, and clinging to Chorley saying, “What will we do now? What can I do with my life?” Rose’s bit of news gave Grace something to think about. “Laura’s
pregnant!”
she said. “How far along?”

“Well—it must have been before Sandy—”

“Oh, the poor girl,” Grace said. She jumped up. Rose grabbed her. “No, Ma. Let her sleep. She told me that’s all she wants for now. I’ll go and make up a bed for Mamie.”

Mamie had remained outside. She’d picked up one of the folded rugs from the wingback wicker chairs and was sitting, cocooned, gazing out at the view.

“And then I’ll run a bath for that man,” Rose said, and jerked her thumb at Lazarus.

Lazarus waited in the doorway. He stood very still, and his extreme exhaustion only added to his presence. His face was cadaverously thin and pale, and Chorley, looking at him, was
tempted to make some joke about Poe’s raven—because the man really did look like he might start croaking “Nevermore!” at them.

Rose took Lazarus to the upstairs bathroom. She put the plug in the tub drain and turned on the taps. The water splashed, then began to chime as the tub filled. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Laura so sad,” Rose said.

“Laura is sad because she believes in fate,” he said.

Rose was trying to figure him out. She kept staring at him, and the longer she stared the longer she wanted to stare. He was grimy and abrupt and, she thought, violent in some way she couldn’t quite work out, but he was mesmerizing to her—the mysterious
fact
of him.

He said, with a kind of exhausted eagerness, “But I think what happens is that when anyone does anything absolutely extraordinary—great or terrible—then, when they change the world, they make
another
world. When God separated light from darkness and made the world, perhaps he left the dark world behind him. And, because the dark world is still there—”

“You really are a Hame, aren’t you?”

A little color came into his cheeks, rosy gray under the dirt. “Meaning?”

“Quaintly religious.”

“Who are you calling quaint, you old-fashioned girl?” he said.

Rose turned off the taps and tested the water. She couldn’t tell whether it was a comfortable temperature. Her hands still felt warm as hot and hot as burning. But this man wasn’t an infant and could look after himself. “Throw your clothes outside
the bathroom door and I’ll bring you something to wear,” she said, and bustled out.

Mamie was in the guest room, sorting through some of Rose’s clothes to see what she could fit into. Chorley had gone out to send a telegram to Mamie’s mother, saying she was safe and staying at Summerfort. Laura was still asleep.

Rose had taken up the task of listening to her mother’s lamentations, which were a little less intense now and interspersed with thoughts about Laura’s baby. “If I wasn’t so worried about how we’re going to make a living, I’d be happier about it. Your father and I always wanted another baby, but it didn’t happen. I do love babies.”

“Ma, we don’t owe anyone money. And we have two properties. Everything is mortgage free, and there’s money in the bank. We’re not going to be poor.”

“But I don’t know who I am if I can’t catch dreams,” Grace said.

“Then you’ll find out, Ma.”

“Hello!” Chorley called from the front door.

“He has good news,” Rose said. “He sounds really happy.”

A moment later Chorley appeared, his arm clasped protectively around the waist of a figure in yellow pajamas.

“Sandy!”
Grace and Rose shouted together. They rushed him and hugged him. Grace cupped his whiskery, grinning face and cried. Rose held his hand, noticing as she did the shiny, red, hairless patches that matched her own scorch marks.

“He was limping barefoot along the promenade,” Chorley said.

“I’m all right,” Sandy said. “I only walked from the Awa Inlet to Sisters Beach.”

“Forty-five miles,” said Grace. “Nothing for a dream-hunter.”

“Are you all Contented?” Rose said.

“A little. I feel much less serious than I know I should. I
should
feel like tearing off Secretary Doran’s head.”

Chorley gave a gleeful laugh and pulled a telegram from his pocket. He gave it to Rose. It was from her uncle, Tziga. It said that Cas Doran was under arrest on charges of abduction.

“That’s a start,” Rose said. She felt only grim relief. She knew that she’d have to carry this news to Mamie, and that Mamie might feel she should go back to Founderston at once, to stand by her mother. And Rose knew that sometime in the near future there would be a trial, and that her family would be called to give evidence against her friend’s father. Mamie already had difficulties with the world and its expectations, and this could only make it all worse. Remembering how she’d said to Mamie, proudly, that she would go to university to study “Law—for justice,” Rose thought that it was all right for
her
, she had committed herself to a struggle, had spied, plotted, carried a copy of the damning film. But Mamie hadn’t made any choices, yet she would have to suffer for those her father had made.

Rose touched Sandy’s arm. “Laura is in bed,” she said. “You know where her bedroom is, don’t you?”

“Um, yes,” Sandy said.

Chorley poked Sandy in the arm with a stiff finger. He said, with a prod for every word, “She. Is. With. Child.”

Sandy opened his mouth, swallowed, then shut it again.

“Precisely,” said Chorley, and pointed to the stairs. “Go,” he said.

Laura woke up, still tired, with the heavy, sickening feeling that comes when you know something terrible has happened. Then she remembered that the terrible things were still ahead of her—her whole future mapped out already in the story Lazarus had told her. She longed to speak to Nown. She badly wanted to tell him what it was like to
know
what would happen. To know, and to have to choose to be alone in knowing.

She opened her eyes—and looked straight into Sandy’s. He had been lying with his head beside hers, waiting for her to wake up. He smiled and touched her cheek.

And in that moment everything changed for Laura. The world became world-sized again, and full of surprise.

Sandy said, “There’s a strange man in the upstairs bathroom. A strange man who looked at me strangely.”

“Well, he would,” Laura said.

“I wasn’t dead,” Sandy said. He gathered her in his arms.

Laura took a deep breath of Sandy’s own odor—with its overlay of dust and sea salt. “It’s not
true
, then,” she said, through her tears. “Here you are, my baby’s father. I thought I was going to have to go through with it all—do all the lonely things. Say bon voyage to Uncle Chorley. Let Rose go away and live in another country. Nurse Father. Live quietly. Wait to die. I thought I had to do what fate dictates. Follow its laws as my poor Nown had to follow my orders.”

“Shh, darling,” Sandy said, and stroked her hair. “It’s all right.”

“Yes,” she cried. “It
is
all right. Here you are. That poor man out there must come from a different world than this one. God is merciful. God has given us a new world to live in—like The Gate. There
is
a first time for everything.”

Sandy smiled at Laura, moved by how moved she was but completely bewildered. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, love.”

She laughed, and her last two tears were squeezed out of her eyes by a smile. “I’ll tell you,” she said.