Dreamquake

  Grace shook her head. She had once thought that way about Laura, but Laura had changed.

  “Anyway,” Sandy said, “at least I didn’t totally waste my time. When I got to Debt River, I met a ranger who was walking the border from Tricksie Bend, mostly on the outside, ducking In only at those earth ramps they use as lookouts. Do you know what I mean?”

  Grace nodded. She’d seen the ramps on the border the few times she’d gone along it rather than heading straight In. They were ten to fifteen feet high and made of piled earth tamped down by spadework. Each ramp was a vantage point over the surrounding country.

  “The ranger told me about a dream on Foreigner’s North,” Sandy said.

  Grace knew that Foreigner’s North was a landmark on maps of the Place. It was on the farthest western border, just Inside. It was in the north as well as the west—possibly also the farthest northern point of the invisible territory—she would have to check a map of Coal Bay to be sure. She had always presumed that it was a compass reference of some kind.

  “The dream, Quake, is something only a few dreamhunters can catch. The ranger told me that it was alarming but not exactly a nightmare. No one has claimed it, because it isn’t commercial—supposedly.” Sandy looked smug. “Though I think I’ve uncovered its commercial potential.” He laughed. “I saw that, Mrs. Tiebold, your eyes lit up.”

  “I’m intrigued,” Grace said. “How can a dream be ‘not exactly a nightmare’?”

  “Well—if something alarming happens in it but the person whose point of view it is isn’t alarmed. Quake is from the point of view of a child, like The Water Diviner. I’m wondering whether that’s my affinity—dreams in which the audience gets to be a child again. The boy in The Water Diviner is about ten. This is a much younger child, maybe four or five.”

  “That’s very unusual.”

  “Perhaps you’d like to come to my performance tonight? I’ve spent the last two days chewing Wakeful and getting together an audience—mostly scientists from the University. Geologists and so forth. I’ve rented a whole floor of a hotel here on the Isle. Eight bedrooms. I’m charging twenty dollars a head.”

  Grace was a little embarrassed for Sandy—standing in the aisle of an outfitter’s and advertising his prices. But she still asked for the name and address of the hotel, and at what time the doors closed before the performance.

  “Will you come?” Sandy said, eager to impress her.

  Grace considered. She closed one eye. She very much wanted to come and try Sandy’s Quake. She hadn’t been four or five since she was four or five, and she couldn’t remember it very clearly. She’d been to a performance of The Water Diviner and had thought that, although Sandy’s penumbra was still quite tight, his dream was very clear, and exact in all its details. He was promising, and he was catching new things, which the majority of dreamhunters didn’t even try to do. She said, “If I attend, you’ll be boosted.”

  “Then perhaps you could come at a reduced price.”

  “Reduced?” Grace didn’t believe her ears. He was so brazen. He’d even folded his arms and tilted his head back. He was bargaining. He wasn’t going to be flattered by her interest. She said, “A discount then, for me and my husband.”

  “Done,” said Sandy.

  “We’re fashionable people, you know,” Grace said.

  “Yes, I do know. And I know I’m supposed to fawn upon all the fashionable people.”

  He was thinking of Laura, Grace thought. What had the girl done to him? What was in that letter he tore to pieces? She said, “We’ll see you tonight then. I’m looking forward to it.” She patted his arm and took her new pack up to the counter.

  “A letter! And he destroyed it?” said Chorley. “Was it a letter to some man?”

  “He didn’t say it was to a man. You’re jumping to conclusions—the conclusions you’re always jumping to these days.One moment you’re fretting about Laura and Sandy Mason, the next you’re fretting about Sandy’s supposed rival. Honestly, Chorley!”

  “Young men can’t be trusted with girls.”

  “This is the voice of experience, I suppose?”

  “Rather remote experience, but still.”

  “You’re turning into such a reactionary. It’s that old man with the beard—your new best friend.”

  There was a scorched silence from Chorley. He put his coat on over his silk robe. He put boots on over his tasseled slippers. He fumed. “The Grand Patriarch is not a replacement for Tziga,” he said.

  “I’m sorry, dear. But you can be so silly about Laura. She’s no more likely to be seduced than Rose is. Less likely, since she’s sequestered on So Long Spit. Conveniently,” Grace added. “Till I cool off.”

  Chorley ignored this remark. “Laura doesn’t have many barriers left in her behavior. That seems to be something dreams do to some dreamhunters. And—let me remind you—I was right to worry about Tziga.”

  “You weren’t worried that he’d be seduced.”

  “I was worried that none of us, and nothing he had, would ever be enough for him.”

  “I’m like that too,” Grace said.

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am. The only difference between me and Tziga is that I love all the dreams I catch. I love them. And without them I’d be nothing. I’d be a withered apple on a windowsill.” Grace pulled her image from a dream, one of her sad ones, in which a widow returned home after her husband’s funeral, and a short time staying in the houses of relatives, to find nothing much changed, but her house empty and stale, and her stored apples withered.

  Grace said, “I love being borne up by my big audiences—everyone breathing together, breathing in time with my breathing. It’s not just that I enjoy what I do, or that I’m proud of how good at it I am. It’s this—when I’m carried up on the high tide of a full house at the Rainbow Opera, when I’m not myself, that’s when I’m most fully alive.”

  Chorley put his arms around his wife and kissed her. He said, “Dear, none of that is under threat. Your audience fell off for a time, but you got them back again. You had a bad patch, but it’s over.”

  They quietly held each other. Then Grace said, “Shall we go see what this boy has, then?”

  Sandy’s twelve guests gathered in the larger suite to have a drink before they retired. They pulled dining chairs into the space before the hearth, around the sofa and armchairs already there. A waiter wheeled in a trolley with hot chocolate and cakes, port and brandy.

  It fell to Grace to play hostess—she was the only woman present, and the collection of crusty geologists was clearly used to being waited on. She poured hot chocolate, handed around cups and glasses, and spooned cream onto slices of cake. Then she gathered her white silk robe around her bright yellow silk pajamas and sat down with her own cup of chocolate.

  Sandy stood with one arm on the mantelpiece and one foot up on the hearth. He was giving an account of his journey. He seemed to be enjoying himself, speaking well and with a natural authority.

  Chorley leaned toward his wife to whisper. “How old is he?”

  “Eighteen or nineteen, I believe—he Tried late.”

  Chorley nodded and continued his haughty scrutiny of the boy Rose referred to, jokingly, as “Laura’s suitor.”

  “The farther west I went, the poorer the land was. When we think of Coal Bay, we think about Sisters Beach or the dairy flats around Whynew Stream. But beyond Whynew Stream there are only wet paddocks rusty with dock leaf. I slept where it was dry, just Inside the border. But I didn’t walk along on the Inside. It’s pointless to do that.”

  “Yes!” One geologist removed his pipe from his teeth with a loud clack. “I read about those experiments. The ratio of Inside to outside is miles to yards, I gather. He put his pipe back in his mouth with another punctuating clack of tooth enamel on polished walnut. “It’s simply incredible.”

  Sandy said, “Because the Place is so vast, its explorers have tried to make landmarks, as well as record the landmark
s they find. One of the first explorers was a legendary figure—legendary among rangers at least—a man known as the Foreigner.”

  “He was French,” said Grace.

  “He tried to walk the border before anyone else,” said Sandy. “The first mapmakers kept finding his marks. Foreigner’s North is a landmark. A compass mark on the border, at the point farthest north and west, though I understand his west is somewhere else.”

  Grace said, “It’s because of his west that they suppose he’s a foreigner—west is ‘ouest’ in French.”

  Sandy said, “A ranger took me to Foreigner’s North. The dream Quake is right on top of it. The compass mark—a big N—looks like it’s been hit by a quake too. It’s cracked all the way across.”

  “There was a sizable earthquake in Coal Bay in 1886,” a geologist said. “That’s what first uncovered the coal at Debt River. Lumps of it washed downstream and began to turn up on the tide. The forest is very thick in the northwest, but prospectors went in and found the slip, and the seam of coal. Of course folks had already found coal at Whynew Stream over a hundred years before. But that seam was soon exhausted. However, that’s where the name—Coal Bay—comes from.”

  “The quake was twenty years ago?” asked Chorley.

  The geologist nodded, then turned to Sandy and asked, “Is the quake in the dream a good-sized one?”

  Sandy straightened and took his arm off the mantelpiece. “Shall we go and see?”

  The boy was practicing his violin on the porch of the cottage when he saw something pouring out of the dead tree trunk in the yard. He put down his violin—his child’s violin, a fine thing, as precious and clever as he was himself—and brushed his itching jaw against his shoulder. The rosin made a mark on his shirt. He stepped off the porch and wandered across the yard to look at the flood of—what? Sap?

  From far away the substance looked like chocolate sauce from one of his ma’s self-saucing puddings. (His ma used to say that she was a “self-saucing pudding,” which was a joke about how in their family there was no “Da” like other families had.)

  The boy squatted to look at the brown substance. The air was hot nearer the ground, as though the ground was cooking something.

  He saw that the oozing mass was ants, thousands of them, flowing in a twisting, glistening brown rope down the grooved tree trunk. He could actually hear them. The ants were making a noise like bursting bubbles in sea foam—except much quieter. The boy could hear them only because the sounds of the world had dropped away. Even the birds in the bushes were silent.

  His mother came to the cottage door to ask what he was doing. She was wiping her hands on her apron. He wanted to say to her that the ants were leaving their nest. But he didn’t get to say it. He saw her hands grow still, though she continued to hold her apron gathered before her.

  They both listened. The boy wondered why the horses in the paddock behind the house had decided, all at once, to gallop down to the back fence.

  But the thunder wasn’t horses.

  The ground began to move; it lurched sideways, and then jolted up in shudders. The boy fell onto his hands and knees. He heard his mother shout. He saw her rush across the porch. At the same time the cottage chimney slammed down onto the corrugated iron roof, then came apart and slid—bricks and boulder-sized chunks of mortar and brick—down the curve of the roof and off its edge. The boy’s mother rushed out among the falling bricks. None of them struck her.

  She staggered across the yard and picked him up, then stumbled under the yard’s one tree, a cabbage tree partly smothered with honeysuckle. The honeysuckle was in flower, and as they stood—he in her arms—the tree dropped honeysuckle blossoms and a thick veil of floral scent down over them. His mother spread one hand over the crown of the boy’s head and held him sheltered in the curve of her body. She leaned back against the tree trunk and struggled to keep her footing.

  There were crashes and thumps from the cottage—scarcely audible in the thunder from everywhere. And there were high-pitched sounds, the squawk of nails pulled loose from timber, and the painted weatherboards splitting with a sound like gunfire.

  Water was jumping out of the puddles and into the air.

  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.”

  III
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  Summer and Christmas

  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.