Dreamhunter (8 page)

In a house near the trestle railway bridge at Morass River a man and his wife were eating their dinner. They looked up at each other, their spoons poised, when they heard the approach of a powerful engine. The express and milk trains never took the bridge at such speed. They listened to the engine’s thunder transmitted all the way along the valley by the resonating timber structure of the bridge. Then the engine was across, safe. The man set down his spoon, the woman sipped from hers. They began to count carriages. One, two —

Silence from the bridge, the roar and rattle receded. The man crossed himself. Two carriages. A special train from Sisters Beach. The great dreamhunter brimful with powerful medicine.

Later the train slid past the little town at the foot of Mount Kahaugh. A boy baiting hooks on a line wound out
from a boat in the sea below the mountain saw the train, its windows reflecting the setting sun in long and short flashes as though transmitting a message as it turned and slowed into the spiral. The boy felt the train was signalling to him — a message of farewell. He glanced up now and then to watch for the train’s reappearance, to see it come around the curve of the mountain, labouring now, on the inner spiral, two hundred yards above the village. The light it gave back, window by window, was barely gold. Coal Bay had sunk in blue shadow and only the summit of Kahaugh had fire in its crest of forest.

The train passed through the tunnel that pierced the shoulder of the mountain. It picked up speed, heading east and inland.

It blasted through town stations, hauling the loose leaves of evening newspapers in its slipstream. Stations wired ahead in a relay and, at each, stationmasters came out to see the train hurry through. Stationmasters and porters, and passengers early for later trains, caught glimpses of the figures within the luxury coach — the two men playing cards, the portly man in a bright waistcoat, a white napkin tucked into his open collar. And, alone in the brightest part of the carriage, the slight figure in dust-covered clothes.

The train turned from east to south to west again, the railway line making its miles-wide circle around the place where the Place was.

Near Founderston it travelled sluggishly through a crossing where signs said ‘Slow’ and work was being
done on the line. A small girl, waiting with her mother at the barrier, said, ‘Ma, a man in that train is singing.’

‘Yes, he’s singing to keep himself awake,’ the mother said. She listened to the voice, light, hoarse, carrying, and identified the song. She said to her daughter, ‘It’s an Old Town song — “A Stitch in Time”.’

The train had gone by. The girl asked, ‘Do you know it, Ma?’ And her mother, who had a repertoire of folk ballads and hymns and old prophecy songs, sang ‘A Stitch in Time’ as the crossing guard winched the barrier back out of their way.

A stitch in Time can save us, love, now closed between then and then, a charm to work and spell to prove, a door to shut and dream to end.

But I am just a tailor, my art with cloth and thread; not a dreamer dressed as jailer, or a saviour as the dead.

At Founderston railway yards the train stopped to fill its water tank, and the physician got out and walked along the railway line, from sleeper to sleeper, and up on to the platform. He went into the concourse and bought a
carnation for his buttonhole, and a newspaper. He checked his watch by the station clock. It was twelve thirty a.m. — they were still three hours from their destination. He hurried back to the train, and was hauled on board by one of the men from the Regulatory Body who had come out scouting for him.

Tziga Hame looked sleepy. The shot of stimulant Dr Wilmot had given him eight hours earlier was finally wearing off. The physician went and sat opposite Hame. It was his job to keep the man awake till they reached Westport.

The train left the yards at Central Station. It crossed the iron bridge upstream from the Isle of the Temple. Its occupants looked out on the black river water, the moonlight caught only where its silky surface was flawed by current.

Dr Wilmot read items from the paper to Hame. ‘The Grand Patriarch has been sermonising against you again, I see,’ said the physician. ‘Not you personally, Hame, dreamhunters rather. He is troubled by dreamhunter terminology.’ The physician read: ‘“They speak of a dream’s range as its penumbra. This is a word borrowed from astronomy. A penumbra is the shadow the moon casts on the earth during a total eclipse. It is the course of a shadow.”’ Wilmot sniffed. ‘Perhaps he would rather you called it a blast zone. Or, if we’re describing circles, perhaps a bubo, like the boils of plague.’

Hame’s head, which was propped on his hand, slipped. He jerked awake. He’d been asleep for a second and in the
narrow tenements beside the tracks, in people’s sleep, shapes sprang up — people in black, a group of pale-faced mourners — there for an instant, then quenched, sucked down into the graveside earth again.

‘Stay awake,’ Wilmot snapped, and slapped Hame across one cheek.

‘Be careful with him,’ one of the officials cautioned the physician.

Hame got up and began to walk, steadying himself on the long polished table in the centre of the carriage. An official opened a humidor and offered Hame a cigar. Hame shook his head.

The train sped through the small hours towards Westport.

Westport was a big industrial city, a city of mines and mills and shipyards, mostly privately owned. But its richest coal mine belonged to the government. The mine’s shaft penetrated a hill to the north of the harbour, a hill wearing skirts of glittering slag. Below the hill and extending out into the harbour was a causeway that, halfway along its length, became a pier. At the end of the pier stood a huge, grim, ironwood structure — Westport’s Shore Prison. The prison supplied the coal mine with labour. Every day, in two shifts, prisoners were conducted in a shuffling column along the causeway and up a cinder-covered road to the mouths of slanting mine shafts. Twelve hours later a shift returned, blackened and bowed down with exhaustion. Every day barges heaped with high-grade coal would set out from the shelter of the
causeway to the foundries across the harbour. Or the coal was loaded into trucks at the railhead and taken away, inland, to Founderston and other settlements, where it was sold for domestic use. Good coal, it burnt quite cleanly, its smoke slower to accumulate as stains on city walls and trees.

The special train arrived at the railhead at four in the morning. The officials jumped out on to the platform. There was a flurry at the station. Someone ran a red flag up a flagpole. The physician climbed from the luxury car and put his hands up to assist his patient down on to the platform.

Tziga Hame looked around. He saw a ground mist softening the stones between the rails, and goods wagons seeming to float on thin white vapour. He saw the men waiting for him — prison guards in black, brass-buttoned uniforms, and the prison governor in a coat with a fox-fur collar. The governor’s breath smoked like a dragon’s — he’d been drinking hot tea.

Tziga said to the people nearest him that he’d like to stretch his legs, to walk before he slept. He’d make his own way along the pier to the prison.

There was a whispered consultation between officials. The prison governor attempted to shake Tziga’s hand then flinched back when he touched the bandages.

Some of Hame’s escort climbed into cars. Others walked with him. The walkers went down from the platform on to the causeway. They left the lights of the
railway yard behind them. It was easier to see where the tide lay on the beach, the water striped one way by electric light and the other by the setting moon. The tide was right out, the seabed bare, stinking not of seaweed but of the sulphur in coal. The beach was coated in a silt of coal dust.

Tziga Hame saw that one wing of the prison was lit up. A light burned in every cell. They had kept those prisoners awake all night — after working them all day. As he watched, the lights began to go out. Now the prisoners could sleep. Now that he was coming.

He was asked, ‘Have you had enough to eat?’

‘Yes,’ Tziga said, ‘I’ve had enough to eat.’

He’d had enough. Enough of his work, his weakness, his mistakes.

He had scooped a cavity in the chest of his sandman, and had hidden his letter to Laura there. He’d put the sand back in and had smoothed the place over. The whole time he’d been singing, softly, the song of making. (‘It’s called “The Measures”,’ Tziga’s great-grandfather had told him and Marta when he taught them it. ‘It’s music and mathematics and prayer too.’)

A letter of apology was all Tziga had to offer as a heart for his daughter’s servant. He hadn’t been able to write, ‘Laura, if I don’t come back …’, and offer a proper explanation. Or any reasonable advice. His mind was filled with murky guilt and misery. He was a fallen man, he knew, and ghostly, as though his sins had sucked the life out of him.

He had practised ‘The Measures’, and played with sand, and felt the facility of magic fizzing in him — but he hadn’t been sure he could make a sand servant. Until the moment when it came to life and stood up before him, his experiments with ‘The Measures’ and hopes for the old Hame magic had seemed only a desperate wish, a wish for someone stronger than himself, someone fit, to whom he could pass his unbearable burdens.

Laura would go to the Place. She would find her servant and Tziga’s film of the gutted building — the site of the dreadful dream. She would discover what he and other wicked adults had done. The dream would make it clear to her. She would stop sulking and mooching and living in Rose’s shadow. She would catch the dreadful dream, the dream with the great, eclipsing penumbra. She would blot out the sun.

Tziga Hame limped between his watchful retinue to where the causeway became pier and their footsteps sounded hollow. Perhaps he pulled a little ahead of them, despite his limp. They imagined he was eager. How could they imagine
that —
they, who had all taken care to sleep earlier that day, or to chew some Wakeful, who had all done whatever they could to avoid sleeping with him?

Tziga didn’t want to sleep. He didn’t want what was before him, the strict prison of his dream, nine nights of torture for himself, and for the hand-picked prisoners who would share his dream — unrepentant murderers, and the men who persistently threatened public order
then, when locked up, started prison strikes or riots. Tziga wanted the horror of the dream
out of him now
. He wanted to break himself open and have it leave him at once, and for ever.

Hame’s escort saw him draw a little ahead of them. They heard him say, ‘Enough.’ Then he veered to one side, limping but swift — a slight man, and fit from twenty years of walking inland in the Place after dreams. He ran to the edge of the pier and flung himself off it, head first, like someone diving into deep water. Except that the tide was right out, and there was no water, only slick black stones at the base of the thirty-foot piles.

The family entered the dream palace by the dreamer’s door only fifteen minutes before it was time for the patrons to retire to their rooms.

Grace stopped in the hallway before the stage door, which led to the oval floor of the palace’s amphitheatre and the dreamer’s bed, under the huge central chandelier and painted silk canopy. Grace kissed her family. Her clean, plain face was shining with excitement. ‘You wait. You just wait,’ she said to her husband. ‘I don’t know whether you’ll run off with the woman in love, or with her jealous brother. I like them both. I particularly like the way the brother feels everything in his lips.’ Grace touched her own mouth.

‘Oh dear,’ Chorley laughed. ‘But I have your assurance that no one is me.’

‘Of course not.’

He wiped his brow in mock relief. Rose and Laura smiled at each other. They knew Chorley was referring to a time before he and his wife were introduced, when Chorley’s friends had alerted him to the fact that his face was appearing on the heroes in the dreamhunter Grace Cooper’s romantic dreams. Chorley was disgusted. It was an invasion of his privacy, he thought. Not only had Grace Cooper been eyeing him up, she was now using him like a mannequin and dressing him up in her dreams. He confronted the dreamhunter, who at first claimed that his face appeared in her dreams as a result of a poll she’d taken among the society women of Founderston on who they thought was the town’s most eligible bachelor. She went on to point out that she’d changed things about him — for example, in her dreams he never spoke. ‘Your function is simply to be handsome,’ Grace had said. And she said, ‘The heroes who look like you dress differently too — for instance, they would never wear such
big
cufflinks.’ At this point in the interview Chorley decided the dreamhunter was teasing him, and retaliated by asking her out. The story of how Chorley Tiebold’s face turned up on the heroes in Grace Cooper’s dreams was Rose’s parents’ story of how they met.

To Rose and Laura, Grace said, ‘This really is at the upper limit of what you’re allowed, girls.’ She was warning them not to be shocked, and reminding them how lucky they were. ‘You’ll be the youngest here.’

‘That’s so silly, Mother,’ Rose said. ‘Next week we’ll
be in the Place, and I’m sure
it
makes no fine distinctions about what’s suitable for young ladies.’

Laura opened the door for her aunt, who stepped out into shouts and applause.

‘She’s so excited we’ll all be lying awake for hours,’ Chorley said.

‘It’ll be worth it,’ said Rose.

Chorley and the girls climbed the stairs and emerged on to the first-floor balcony through a door in a mirrored panel.

Laura looked up at the massive crystal central chandelier. She squinted through its dazzle at the two tiers of balconies, upon which the wealthy visitors to Sisters Beach strolled about or sat on padded benches. People were keeping an eye out for their friends, waving to one another across the space. Most people were in sleepwear — pyjamas, nightgowns and dressing gowns, all in brilliant colours and rich fabrics. The women wore their hair threaded with ribbons, or caught up into silk bags and loosely turbaned around their heads. The only people not in sleepwear were waiters, who wove among the patrons carrying refreshments — or, now, rather more empty glasses. People craned over the balconies to watch Grace Tiebold speaking to the dream palace’s manager. He handed her up the steps to her dais, and its huge bed. A bed like an altar. (Laura had overheard one of her teachers say that — in a disparaging way — to one of her classmates.) Grace climbed into her cloudy bed and sat, looking small and businesslike. She looked up at
the crowded balconies and tucked her hair behind her ears. Chorley kissed his hand to her and one of his friends called out that they hoped that he, Chorley, wasn’t on the program tonight. Chorley laughed. He turned away from the pit of the stage and opened the door to the Hame suite. He stood aside for Laura and Rose. ‘You girls can go in together, so that when Grace joins me for breakfast we won’t have to put up with your chatter.’ He went through the door to the Tiebold suite.

Most of the other rooms were just that — hired rooms — sometimes double, sometimes for families, but all with numbers on their doors and, like the rooms in hotels, used by different people at different times. At the Rainbow Opera in Founderston the President of the Republic had a private suite, reserved for his use alone, as did the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the Secretary of the Interior and several very rich men. The Hames and Tiebolds also had suites in the Rainbow Opera, and were the only people with suites in the Beholder — a dream palace only half the size of the Opera.

Laura closed the door. She shut out the sound of the crowd. Rose asked whether Laura would mind if they left the room-wide sliding door open between them.

‘You can come in my bed if you like,’ Laura said. ‘Or we could both curl up in father’s bed.’

So it was that the girls lit the branch of candles in the master bedroom, and climbed into Tziga’s bed (Tziga sometimes had time to catch one of someone else’s
dreams when his own latest dream had been discharged). The girls lay diagonally on the bed, with their feet touching. Laura felt very close to Rose — Rose sleepy, Rose muted and blinking slowly like a cat. Rose told Laura that one thing she’d miss would be sharing all her mother’s dreams. ‘Because my emptiness won’t always coincide with her being full. It’ll be like being a child again, and not being allowed to share every dream. Do you remember what that was like?’ Rose said. ‘We’d come here only once in a blue moon, to enjoy one of those nice, vivid, plotless dreams of your father’s.’

Laura thought of the dreams her father had caught that she had been permitted to share — how
well
they’d made her feel, though she was already whole, healthy and young. Laura had understood for a long time how valuable her father was. He was valuable, so she saw less of him than she’d like to. How
naïve
she had been to imagine that when it came to something vital — her Try — her needs would come before the needs of the ill, mad and dying he ministered to.

A moth had come in through the open window that faced the promenade and the sea. The moth grazed a candle flame and fell, to flop about on the polished table top. Laura closed her eyes. Some time passed and Rose was quiet. Thoughts were sliding through Laura’s head, some bright like sparks in a storm — she wondered where the special train was now — and some obscure — a face she had glimpsed in the audience tonight, a bearded man,
someone she didn’t know but for some reason was thinking of as a good person, solid and equitable. Laura yawned and let the incongruous thought fly away. The wings of the maimed moth whispered on the carpet. Then Laura was walking down the long staircase in the tower at Summer-fort, walking backwards in the dark.

Her parents were dead, and she had been left in the care of her older brother. He always kept her close, as though he, and he alone, should be enough for her. But the day had come when she had to go against him — or give in to him for good. She was in agony, she had to make a choice. Her brother had told her that she must either send her suitor away, or go away with him. She sent him away. She was too ashamed to look into his face, as he’d stood before her begging her for an explanation, for a word. But they weren’t alone. Her brother was by the door, bristling with power, compelling her to be quiet. She didn’t look into her suitor’s face, but at his hands, his slender fingers and clean cuffs.

He fell silent, and walked away from her.

That was the moment into which, it seemed, she was born. The moment when her brother left the room to see her suitor to the door. She looked up after them, through the doors to the hallway, at the tall arched window on the landing. She heard the front door close. She discovered that she had to look at her suitor’s face once more. If she did not, it seemed that he’d only ever appear to her in memory turning away.

She ran after him, out of the room and down the stairs.

From the window on the landing she saw him crossing the lawn to the stables, to where a groom stood ready, holding his
horse. She ran into the lower hall. Someone spoke her name. The hall was full of light and the reflections of light. The servants who tried to hamper her flight appeared only as silhouettes. Her brother’s stern voice sounded behind her. She didn’t pause. She opened the door and sprinted out under the deep portico, down its steep steps, looking back once at the house, its sandstone pillars and pediment.

There was a gale blowing outside, from behind the house, and she was swept up into it. She saw that her suitor’s horse was already at the foot of the hill, at the iron gates to the estate.

She didn’t take the path, but ran across the close-clipped green grass. The wind was frightening and forceful. The tall eucalyptus trees were shedding their dead branches. Bark was flying from the trees in strips like tattered canvas. It was on the ground everywhere, threatening to trip her. She had to run. She must get to him before he was gone. She must have him touch her cheek again. She sped with giant steps down the steep lawn. A tree branch fell in front of her.

She dodged to avoid the fallen limb and lost her footing, dropping on to one knee on the springy grass. As she got up again she looked to one side and noticed that someone was building a new garden wall. She saw red dust, and raw new bricks. She saw labourers in shapeless, grey clothes — their trouser legs gathered at the ankles. Then she was on her feet and ready to run again. Her suitor would never hear her call out to him against this wind. She ran.

The heroine ran on, leaving Laura Hame standing on the lawn of the heroine’s house. She didn’t see a woman run away from her. She only saw the wind, one last fierce gust that
flattened her silk robe against the backs of her legs, bent the trees and cleared a corridor in its own debris. Then the wind stopped blowing, and the garden was silent, but for the insects ticking like a cooling engine.

Laura went to look at the wall the labourers were building.

It was a long wall with arches that made a frame for the view. It was the sort of wall on which gardeners train climbing roses. The men were making bricks. Laura saw a clay pit, and the frames for shaping slick red clay. She saw a kiln with a blackened chimney. She watched a man stamping the drying, unfired bricks, marking each with the flat of an arrowhead. She saw that, while the clothes the men wore were grey and stained with brick dust, they too were marked with arrowheads in a darker grey. And she saw that it was shackles that gathered their dusty trouser legs at their ankles.

Only one of the men seemed to see her. He straightened from his work — mixing mortar — and looked at her. He glanced about him, furtive, perhaps looking for an overseer.

There was no overseer in sight.

The man put his trowel down and came over to Laura. He walked stooped over, seemed at once cowering and eager. He kept looking about him — but none of the other prisoners noticed he’d abandoned his task.

Laura leant towards him.

He opened his mouth. A trickle of silver river sand spilled from it. His mouth stretched wide. It was packed with sand. He thrust his fingers into the sand in his mouth. The day grew suddenly dark, as though thick cloud had crossed the sun. The garden turned the colour of prison clothes — and cold. The
world was leaving Laura. She was dying out of it. She reached out to the man and grabbed his arm. It felt soft, like sand, and yielded, creaking, beneath her fingers.

The man had fished something out of the sand in his mouth. A crumpled paper. He unfolded it for Laura to see, raised it to her eyes.

Before the world grew dark Laura read the few lines at the foot of the page. She was able to read it because the words assembled themselves around a core of letters she’d already encountered:

The light faded. The words, paper, prisoner, all the world sank away.

LAURA OPENED
her eyes on the Hame suite. The stumps of the candles were bearded with melted wax. Rose breathed peacefully beside her. Rose’s eyes moved under her lids, back and forth, scanning some beautiful thing.

Laura lay on her back and looked at the warm pool of candlelight on the ceiling. She knew she couldn’t climb back on to the dream that had tossed her and taken off without her. She could feel it still, like the beginnings of a fever. She was reluctant to go to sleep again, but didn’t want to disturb Rose, so got up and left the room.

The Beholder kept a fire watch, a group of men who patrolled the dream palace’s balconies and stairways on
their soft-shoed feet. Men with keen noses for smoke, who kept the sand buckets filled and their eyes on a board of switches which, if flipped, would set an alarm bell ringing in each room.

At three a.m. the dream palace was hushed, its guests breathing softly, sleep troubled only by the emotions of the dream. Grace Tiebold lay on her back in the dais bed, her face softly visible in the light of the dimmed chandelier. The dreamer wore her heroine’s brother’s face, and was frowning sternly in her sleep.

The eight men of the fire watch were at their station in a cosy room on the second tier of balconies. The room was like those that opened out on to ballrooms, where chaperones sit to keep an eye on the antics of young people on the dance floor. The fire watch’s window opened on to the silent auditorium.

The men spun around, startled, when Laura appeared at the door. ‘Am I dreaming?’ said one of the younger men — a bit of a joker.

The girl blushed. She asked where the manager had got to. She said she was looking for someone to take her home.

The men exchanged glances. One cleared his throat and one scratched his head.