Penelope had given up on Sivart, but Unwin could not. You’re the best chance I’ve got, the detective had told him in the dream Unwin twice dreamed, first in his own bed and then in the third archive. Try this time, would you? And so he would try. It was possible that Penelope had underestimated Sivart’s stubbornness.
Unwin took the alarm clock from his briefcase, wound it, and turned the hands to match those on his wristwatch. It was six o’clock exactly. He set the alarm as far in advance as he could and carefully placed the clock on the table, next to the near-empty bottle of brandy.
Eleven hours, fifty-nine minutes: that was how long he had to set everything in place. It was just a matter of timing now. If his plan worked, it would be like Miss Greenwood’s story about all those spindles, and the one the king had missed. Only in this version of the story, instead of someone falling asleep, someone was going to wake up. A few people, actually.
A shadow moved over the floor. Unwin turned to see Cleo Greenwood standing by the window, her red raincoat dripping on the rug. She had been watching from a corner of the room—had come in, maybe, through one of Colonel Baker’s old secret passages. The pistol in her hand was steady in spite of her exhaustion. It was another one of Baker’s antiques; she had taken it from the wall.
“You’re standing in my way,” she said.
Unwin stood straight and kept himself in front of the magician. “Hoffmann is already spoken for, Miss Greenwood. And anyway, he’s only half of the problem. If you’ll give me the chance, I can deliver the overseer to you.” Unwin was making bold promises again. He knew that it was more likely he would soon find the overseer’s fingers at his own throat the next time he slept—if he ever slept again. But he went on talking.
“Those eyes at the back of your skull,” he said. “You’ve had to work hard to keep your secret hidden from them. I understand now why you don’t want him to know about your daughter. He would torment her as he’s tormented you. And if she were turned to his side, nothing would be safe from the Agency’s eye. Arthur thinks he’s close to breaking you.”
“He is,” she said.
“Then let me help you.”
“What do you get out of it?”
“Sivart. My old job back, maybe.”
She held still a moment, then covered her face with her free hand. “You’re a clerk,” she said, her shoulders shaking. “Oh, God, you were his clerk.”
“Not a very good one,” Unwin said. “My files are full of errors. I’m just trying to make corrections now.”
Hoffmann mumbled in his sleep again. On the table beside the magician, Unwin’s alarm clock ticked faintly.
“All those years you played the magician’s assistant,” Unwin said. “I know how you tricked Colonel Baker out of his fortune. And you were there that night on The Wonderly, to make sure Sivart took the wrong corpse back to the museum.” He gestured toward the display case at the back of the room. “There’s the real Oldest Murdered Man there. And it’s Caligari’s corpse in the museum, isn’t it?”
She did not deny it, and Unwin knew that his guess was right. Hoffmann would have needed the old man’s carnival to seize control of the city’s underworld. And he needed it more after striking his deal with the Agency: where else to find so dependable a supply of performers to act as the agents, goons, and spies who would be thwarted by Travis T. Sivart? Getting Caligari out of the way, and hiding his body in plain sight, must have been the first scheme on which the magician and the overseer colluded.
“I got out when I could,” Miss Greenwood said at last.
“But now you’re back in. Hoffmann needed you to make everyone sleep. Just as he did on November twelfth. Your song was on the radio that time. We all heard it, we all slept. But putting people to sleep wasn’t enough. He could get into their dreams, but that wasn’t enough either. He needed to plant a single suggestion in all their minds, all our minds: cross that one day off the calendar. That’s where your daughter came in.”
“It was Caligari who realized what she could do,” Miss Greenwood said. “He took an interest in her from the beginning. He said that she was a natural hypnotist, that it would be dangerous to allow her talents to develop unschooled. Once, when she was only six or seven, I caught her watching me in my own dreams—just standing there, staring. Those eyes of hers, Mr. Unwin. When I saw them, I knew that my daughter no longer belonged to me, would never belong to me again. I was frightened. So was Enoch.”
“Not too frightened to put her talents to use.”
A sound from outside: the Rooks’ steam truck had arrived. It spluttered to a halt, and the door opened and slammed closed.
Miss Greenwood heard it, too. She squeezed the handle of the gun. “I would have stopped him if I’d known how he intended to use her. It’s why I’m here now.”
“And why is Penelope here?” Unwin asked. “Why would she want to rebuild Caligari’s Carnival?”
The ancient pistol shook in her hand. Unwin could not tell if she was surprised by the question or by the fact that Unwin knew her daughter’s name. “To give it back to her father,” she said, “or to take it from him.” Miss Greenwood swayed slightly, struggling to stay awake even as she stood there. The front door opened, and heavy footsteps sounded on the stairs.
Unwin glanced down at Hoffmann, saw the magician’s eyes darting behind their lids. A fever rose up from him, and Unwin thought he detected the sickly burning odor of kettle corn. Sivart was still in there—trapped in that other carnival, the spectral one Hoffmann had built in the dream of the city. What would happen to Sivart if Miss Greenwood pulled the trigger?
“Cleo,” Unwin said. “Please.”
The door slammed open, and Jasper Rook burst in, his green eyes feverish under the brim of his immense hat. With every step he seemed to grow in size, until they were all gathered up in the great black heat of his shadow. Unwin opened his umbrella to shield himself, but Jasper flung it aside, and Unwin stumbled backward, landing hard on the floor.
Jasper reached for him with those enormous, suffocating hands. They filled Unwin’s vision, and he felt himself drowning in the monster’s shadow, which was bottomless and the color of headache.
Then Miss Greenwood was there, her arms around Jasper’s shoulders. She had her lips to his ear as she embraced him. Jasper’s eyelids fluttered, his body slackened, and he staggered back. Miss Greenwood eased him down, until finally he lay across the rug with his head in her lap. She took off his hat and smoothed his hair with her hand, still whispering sleep into his ear.
“He’s tired,” Miss Greenwood said to Unwin. “He’ll sleep for a very long time, I think.”
Unwin stood and found his umbrella, then leaned himself against the back of Hoffmann’s chair. The air in the room was cooling again. “I will too, when this is over.”
Miss Greenwood said nothing, but through her exhaustion Unwin saw something else, something she could not speak of, even now. She had loved those two men, and both had tried to destroy her—Hoffmann when he let her take the fall for November twelfth, Arthur when he began to besiege her dreams. A kind of order and a kind of disorder: Miss Greenwood had suffered in the tempest between the two.
In the refuge of her lap, Jasper Rook started to snore.
TOGETHER THEY dragged the sleeping body out of the room and down the stairs. Nothing woke Jasper—not the steps striking the back of his head when Unwin lost his grip for a moment, not the rain falling full on his face outside. With much effort they managed to get him up into the bed of his truck. Miss Greenwood found an oilcloth tarp and laid it over him. It was just after seven o’clock when they left the grounds of the Baker estate.
Miss Greenwood was familiar with the peculiar controls of the steam truck. She kept her eye on a row of gauges over the dashboard while regulating the engine with a row of levers under the wheel, which was enormous and had the spokes of a ship’s wheel. The boiler thumped and hissed at their backs.
Unwin gazed silently out the passenger wi
ndow. On one corner a young boy was shaking a woman’s arm and crying, “Wake up, Mom! Wake up!” Lights were on in some apartment buildings, and Unwin glimpsed nervous, confused faces in the windows. Some people had woken and gone home. Was Hoffmann’s grip beginning to loosen?
“It will come in waves now,” Miss Greenwood said. “He can’t keep them asleep all the time, so some will get a reprieve. But most who do will doubt whether they’re really awake.”
It was hot inside the cab, and sometimes the needles on the dials strayed into the red. Miss Greenwood drove south past the Agency office building and into the old port town. They left Jasper and his truck in front of the Forty Winks, where someone from the carnival was sure to find them. At eight twenty-seven, Unwin and Miss Greenwood went together into the cemetery.
Unwin read the names on tombstones they passed: Two-Toe Charlie, Theda Verdigris, Father Jack, Ricky Shortchange. Saints’ Hill had always been the place where criminals went to bury their own, and these were the outlaws, thieves, and grifters of an earlier era. It ended with the rise of Enoch Hoffmann and was familiar to Unwin only through the oldest of the Agency’s files.
“Caligari took Hoffmann in when he was a boy,” Unwin said. “It couldn’t have been easy for him to plot the old man’s murder.”
“They always disagreed on how the carnival should be used,” Miss Greenwood said. “I think Caligari saw it as a tool for stirring up trouble—but only for those he felt deserved it. He would go ahead to each town we visited, get a room somewhere, and ‘scout things out,’ as he used to say. He was delving into the dreams of the people there.”
“Looking for what?”
“He never really explained, and there wasn’t always a logic to it. But most of time he found people who had something to hide. Caligari could be ruthless once he’d chosen his subject. Sometimes, though . . .” She paused and rested with one hand against a tombstone, catching her breath.
Unwin waited, and for the first time since he had met her, Miss Greenwood smiled. “Sometimes the carnival was just a carnival,” she said.
She led him through the door of one of the mausoleums. Together they strained against the lid and moved it aside, revealing a set of tiled stairs where a cadaver should have been. There were lights on down there. Miss Greenwood climbed in first, and Unwin followed after her, sliding the lid back into place behind them.
At the bottom of the stairs was a dank subway platform. Roots grew through the cracked and dripping ceiling. The eight train was already in the station, its doors open. Unwin and Miss Greenwood were its only passengers. Once the train was moving, he said, “What about Hoffmann? He saw the carnival as a means for profit?”
“That’s what he saw when he met Arthur: the potential for profit, for control. What Enoch’s doing now resembles a plan he used to talk about sometimes. A way to seize the city entirely if his deal with the Agency ever went sour. The understanding he’d had with Arthur fell apart on November twelfth. Then, when Sivart bumbled into his head, he must have assumed the worst.”
“Which is what your daughter expected,” Unwin said. “That’s why she gave Sivart the stolen copy of the Manual.”
“I understand now what she’s doing. She always considered Caligari her true father and wanted to follow in his footsteps. There was a saying of his she liked to repeat, about those who belong to the carnival. ‘We’re just some people who lost their house keys, and everyone who loses their house keys are neighbors.’
“You see, Mr. Unwin, she intends to give the carnival back to the remnants. To steal it from the man who bent it from its true purpose.”
The train squealed on its tracks and swayed as it rounded a corner, and they both held tightly to the straps.
If Penelope succeeded, Unwin thought, then part of Miss Palsgrave’s changing of the guard would be complete.
“Well,” Miss Greenwood said after a while, “don’t you think it’s time you told me your plan?”
Unwin was figuring parts of it out as he described it to her, but Miss Greenwood listened patiently. When he was finished, they were both quiet a moment.
“It’s not a very good plan,” she said.
THEY GOT OFF at Central Terminal and went up the stairs to the concourse. Some of the trains from Central Terminal were still running on time. The one they boarded moved into the tunnels a few minutes after ten o’clock: less than eight hours, now, before the alarm at Hoffmann’s side would ring. When the conductor reached their booth, Miss Greenwood paid for her ticket and Unwin handed him the one he purchased nine days before, on the morning he first saw the woman in the plaid coat. The conductor punched it without looking and moved on.
It was dark, but Unwin did his best to memorize everything he saw outside the windows: the city thinning and then giving way to trees, the bridges spanning the river, the rise and fall of the mountains on the far side. He tried to imagine what it would look like in the daytime.
Miss Greenwood read magazines to stay awake. Whenever Unwin caught her drifting off, he reached under the sleeve of her red raincoat and pinched her. She swore at him, though they both knew that even a momentary slip could cost them everything.
They reached the end of the line with less than five hours left. No one met them at the station. The town was just as Unwin had imagined, and seeing it was like remembering. Maybe he was remembering. Maybe this was where he had come once, as a boy, to play that game with the other children. Seek-and-find? Call-and-hide?
They walked north along the town’s only street, and Unwin counted his steps, noting everything: the gray cat moving between the slats of a picket fence, the colors of the mailboxes, the breeze coming off the river. They followed a dirt path into the woods. It was cooler here, and Unwin paused to button his jacket. He smelled the pond before he saw it.
“I cut all mention of this place from Sivart’s reports,” he said. “I’d always assumed he made it up.”
“You overestimate his imagination,” Miss Greenwood said.
The water, patched with oak leaves, was dark and cold-looking in the moonlight. A tire swing hung from a tree at its edge. Anyone kicking hard enough could swing far over the water. He could let go if he wanted; he could let himself fall right in.
Beyond the swing a slope covered with blackberry briars and, at the top of the slope, the cottage where Miss Greenwood and her daughter had lived for the seven years of her exile. A rubberized electrical cord snaked down from one of the windows. They followed it east into the woods, away from the water. Unwin recalled his dream of footprints in the mud, of the meeting with the boy who had been Enoch Hoffmann, and shivered.
The clearing was just as Sivart had described it. But there at its center a narrow brass bed instead of a pile of leaves, and on a table beside it a green-shaded lamp and a typewriter. The lamp was plugged in, and the bulb glowed yellow. Sivart was asleep under a yellow cotton blanket, on top of which was spread a second blanket of leaves. He snored with his hat down over his eyes, and his face was stubbled.
A dozen open umbrellas were hung in the tree above the bed, forming a makeshift canopy. He must have used to stepladder to get them arranged that way.
“I told him he could use the place but that I didn’t want him sleeping in my room,” Miss Greenwood said. “I thought he’d understood I meant for him to use the couch, or the spare room in the back. Instead he drags my bed all the way out here.”
Unwin recalled what Sivart had written about this spot: A nice place to take a nap. He removed Sivart’s hat from his head and peered at the man’s eyelids. They were purple and bruised-looking. “Wake up,” he said quietly. “Wake up.”
Miss Greenwood already had hold of the detective’s ankles. “You get his wrists,” she said.
They lifted Sivart off the bed and carried him across the clearing, where they leaned him against the trunk of an oak tree. Unwin put the detective’s hat back on his head, then returned to the bed. The sheets were still warm from Sivart’s body. He settled into the p
illow and closed his eyes, listening to the sound of the rain on the umbrellas above.
“Four hours and a half,” Miss Greenwood said. “You’ll be able to keep track of the time?”
“I’m more worried about falling asleep,” he said. “I should be tired, but I’m not.”
Miss Greenwood leaned close and whispered something into Unwin’s ear. The words fit like a key into a lock he had not known was there, and he fell asleep so quickly he had forgotten what the words were by the time he started dreaming.
EIGHTEEN
On Dream Detection
Among the many dangers associated with this technique—
if it may be so characterized—is the possibility that its
practitioner, upon waking, may wonder whether
everything he has seen was real or simply a construct
of his own fancy. Indeed, the author of this manual
cannot claim with certainty that the technique
described in these pages actually exists.
Unwin dreamed that he woke in his own bed, that he got up and put on his robe. He dreamed himself a nice hot shower (no time for a bath), and because he was a meticulous dreamer, he took care to tie the right tie this morning and to turn off the stove before his oatmeal burned. He did not want to be late. He carried his shoes to the door and put them on in the hall, just as he always did. He almost picked up his umbrella, then remembered that he had dreamed the sun out and the clouds gone.
Outside, the streetlights were still on, and the only vehicles moving were delivery trucks bringing bottles of milk and soda water. The bakery across the street had its door open, and he could smell the bread on the cool air.
Everything was pretty much the way it was supposed to be, but his bicycle was still at the Cat & Tonic, so he walked. At the corner he felt for a moment that someone was watching him. Had he glimpsed a figure standing in the bakery door? He tried to recall what advice The Manual of Detection had for those who suspected they were being tailed. Something, he thought, about being friendly to your shadow. Well, it hardly mattered—he was going only a few blocks.