“I don’t get it,” Laura said.
“Does it matter? All it means for us, Laura, is that no one tries sleeping here because it’s too uncomfortable. And since The Gate is on just this confined site, no one else has ever caught it. Your father said he only found it because he was always able to sense where healing dreams were. When he walked by Foreigner’s West, he knew the dream was here.”
Laura began to twist her hair. Her curls were matted at the back, she had been lying down for so long. “But this isn’t a compass mark,” she said. She spoke so softly Sandy had to lean forward to hear her. Finding himself near, he kissed her on her earlobe. He said, “The idea that these are compass marks is the only reason rangers suppose the pioneer was a foreigner. French. They think the marks stand for north and west in French. The dream Quake is right on top of Foreigner’s North. Foreigner’s North is an N carved in the ground. ‘Nord.’ This is an O, for ‘Ouest.’”
Sandy went on with what he was doing, lengthening one shoulder strap of Laura’s pack so that he could carry it for her. It took him a moment to notice how still and silent she had become. He looked up at her.
“It’s a Nown,” Laura said. “The Place is a Nown.” Her voice was almost inaudible.
Sandy tried to figure out why she had chosen this moment to correct his grammar. He reviewed what he’d been telling her and couldn’t recall having mentioned the Place at all.
Laura still stood as if entranced. The color had drained out of her face.
Sandy put his hand under her elbow. He was afraid that she was about faint. But she didn’t sway or crumple, she simply stood frozen in place.
Nerves made Sandy giggle. He said, “Love, you are looking like Lot’s wife, white and fixed to the spot.”
Laura could hear Sandy only as a murmur through a wall, one of those sounds that wakes you—a late-night conversation, or muffled crying. She was lost in the past.
She remembered the day she had made Nown. He had stood up out of the dry streambed and shown her his true face, a face she had longed to see. He had gotten onto his knees before her and made his pledge and introduction: “Laura Hame, I am your servant.” She had been exhausted after making him and had slept for a time. When she woke up, she had lain admiring him. He’d stood, surveying the grasslands Inland, engrossed. When she’d asked him what he was doing, he had answered, “Listening.” When she’d asked what he was listening to, he’d said, “I can hear now.” And she had stupidly, wooden-headedly, imagined that, just as she’d made a more handsome sandman, she had also managed to make one with better hearing. He had even repeated himself in an effort to explain what must have bewildered him. “I can hear now,” he’d said. “I am here with myself.”
I can hear Now. I am here with myself.
They were all his selves—the Nowns, and speechless Nows. He’d come alive again and discovered he was standing inside himself—another self—a speechless Now, a Nown who hadn’t had its final letter added, the letter that, in the spell, “gives speech.” He’d tried to tell her, but she hadn’t heard him. She hadn’t heard his name when he used it. “Now” was only a word, and Sandy had just heard her say that “the Place” was a noun. It was an easy mistake, an obvious mistake. One word for another: “noun” for “Nown.”
And to invent some surveying French ranger to explain an N and an O carved on the ground was an irresistible mistake. Because whatever logic such mistakes lacked, they still made some kind of daft sense.
What was the alternative? That someone had walked in a long loop around miles and miles of ground, singing “The Measures” and stopping occasionally to inscribe the letters of the spell: N O W. Someone had brought the land itself to life and tried to make a slave of it.
Sandy found himself holding Laura up. She was overcome, by exhaustion or the elixirlike power of the dream, or with trepidation about how far they had gone. Sandy couldn’t tell exactly what it was that had thrown her into a state of shock. He didn’t know what he could do to help.
She clung to him. Her skin was cold, and she was shivering. Sandy coaxed her to sit back down, and she all but collapsed on him. But then she was asking questions again, and her voice sounded rational. “The N on the site of Quake—is it in one piece?” she asked.
“Never mind that now,” Sandy said, soothing.
“Please tell me.”
“No, it isn’t. The letter is cracked straight across. There really was a quake there at some point.”
“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, FALlow 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 i
t 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.
“I’ve come home every day just to watch for his sign,” Laura said.
She meant her monster’s sign, his five stones in a line. Rose said, “There I was thinking you’d come home to bathe in buttermilk, like me.”
Laura hadn’t spent the last days washing her hair in chamomile (or rosemary in her case) to brighten it, or having manicures and pedicures. Instead, she would come back from Fallow Hill midmorning, with Sandy Mason in tow, and they’d sit in the library or parlor alone together. Chorley had pointedly opened the door the one time they’d closed it.
“I came downstairs about fifteen minutes ago and heard a knock on the door, then someone tormenting the pump in the yard. He’d come in the back and left the film on the steps. With a note.” Laura pulled a paper out of the top of one glove and passed it to Rose.
The handwriting was in smudgy charcoal, the letters evenly sized and backward sloping. The note read: “I am under Market Bridge.” Rose turned the paper over and saw that it was a paste-scabbed strip from some bill advertising a dream.
“I have a bone to pick with him,” Laura said. “It’s almost as if he knows and is avoiding me.” Then, “Damn ball.”
“Damn inconvenient Presentation Ball,” Rose said. “Damn untimely debut.” Then, waspishly, “Our big milestones are very different these days, aren’t they?”
“Yes.” Laura was blunt. “But you want this film to see the light of day just as much as I do.”
“True,” said Rose. She came all the way into the darkroom, forgetting her fear of the contaminating chemicals. She took the canister from her cousin and stowed it in a drawer. “We’ll hand it over to Da tomorrow. He can deliver it to the Grand Patriarch. Or straight to the Commission of Inquiry. His decision.”
From the hallway Grace called, “Rose! Laura! Where are you?”
Rose swept out of the darkroom, clutching her cape around her. Laura followed, struggling to stuff her hands back into her tight kid gloves. Grace started fussing. “Where’s your wrap, Laura?”
Laura dashed into the kitchen to retrieve it. When she returned to the hall, her father had appeared. He kissed her on the forehead and said, “Have fun.” He kissed Rose too and wished her the very best of luck. “I wanted to go, but I don’t think I can manage the excitement.”
Grace was flustered. “Rose—are you all together under that cape? I didn’t get to inspect you.”
“Ma, I’m a work of art,” Rose said.
Grace hustled her family down the front steps.
Rose was muttering mutinously that it was silly to take the car when the People’s Palace was only five minutes’ walk away.
“You must be delivered to your debut, Rose. You can’t walk there,” her mother said.
“Here, let me help you with that,” Chorley said to Laura. He’d been watching her attempts to fasten the buttons on her right wrist with her left hand. He helped her into the car, sat beside her, and bent over her hand. She felt his fingertips on the inside of her wrist and said, dreamily, “Sandy will be there.”
Everyone laughed. “Yes, we know Sandy will be there,” chorused Rose and Grace.
At the
People’s Palace there was a separate entrance for the debutantes and their mothers. This took Grace and Rose straight up the building’s secondary staircase to the debutantes’ dressing room. It was, in fact, a series of rooms, one where they left their coats, then a large, mirror-lined room with love seats and ottomans, then an innermost room, with attendants in black-and-white uniforms, and lavender-sprinkled towels, big bottles of cologne, and a seamstress—should one be required. Rose looked at all these elaborate comforts and mused on the value Founderston put on the female offspring of its first families. It all made her feel rather like a prize racehorse being transported to an important fair.
The rooms were crowded with slender girls in white and their generally more substantial mothers, in every conceivable color. Grace, accustomed to dream palace finery, had welcomed the chance to get into something plain. When Grace removed her daughter’s white velvet cape, she felt that she was indeed unveiling a work of art. She stood beside Rose and basked in her daughter’s glow. Rose shone, she scintillated, and she towered over most of her peers, even in her flat-heeled dancing slippers. Grace saw various mothers bridle at the sight—the shock—of Rose’s beauty. Rose’s friends’ reaction was quite different. As soon as they caught sight of her through the crowd, they squealed and rushed over to Rose, who collapsed into their cluster, hugging and bouncing around, a giggly girl again. Grace blinked away tears. She was glad Rose couldn’t hold her composure—it was just too much, too soon, and could serve only to isolate her, to set her apart, among older male admirers. Grace could imagine it already, the sterile triumph that was waiting for her daughter, who, she judged, was too young to escape the traps of flattery.