Dreamhunter (4 page)

He didn’t want it, he’d argued against it, but he hadn’t stood a chance against everyone else’s wishes. For a while it had seemed as though Tziga was in two minds about his daughter’s Try, but now he was in just as much hurry as everyone else.

Chorley lost sight of the dead bird. The sea dazzled him. He trudged back up the beach to Summerfort, where he stood listening in the lower hall. There was no noise from upstairs; the girls had fallen asleep.

The ranger thought he was finally safe, with the balding earth and pale, trampled vegetation of the border before him. But he still jogged on, his feet dragging and sweat dripping past his belt. He was gasping for breath, and making a lot of noise, but when
it
came, he still heard it. He heard the whisper of his mineral pursuer.

The ranger put on a burst of speed. The nightmare that was chasing him must belong to the Place, he reasoned. Once he was across the border the monster would vanish.

He felt the creature’s heavy, semi-solid hand drop upon his shoulder. He let out a raw scream.

The hand solidified enough to grip, and jerk the ranger about. He faced the creature, its dry, lumpish face and the horrible swarming attention in its holes-for-eyes. The ranger felt the creature fumbling at him, and
imagined that it was searching him. As he tried to tear the creature’s hands from him, the ranger’s own hand found the remnant of his letter of instruction. He took the paper and stuffed it in his own mouth and began to chew. At the same time he threw his weight backwards, and hauled himself away towards the border.

The sandman’s muddy, fused-together fingers separated. He poked two into the ranger’s mouth.

The ranger tried to swallow the letter and began to choke. He and the sandman rocked back and forth, fighting, but moving ever nearer to the border.

The ranger bit down on the fingers. His mouth filled with loose sand. Sand packed down the partly chewed letter.

The sandman released the ranger, who saw the monster’s bitten fingers reform, grow from a trickle of sand running like veins down the surface of its arm. He saw the fingers lengthen, till the hand was whole.

The creature was holding a fragment of the letter.

The ranger saw all this before he staggered, gagging, through the border, into the heat and colour and noise of the world.

The noise was that of running horses, and iron-rimmed wheels rolling on sun-baked earth.

The ranger turned towards the sound, and threw up his arms to ward off what instantly overwhelmed him — the Sisters Beach stagecoach, which had come, at full tilt, around a bend in the road above the village of Tricksie Bend.

The day after their camp-out, at around four in the afternoon, Laura and Rose were on the infants’ beach. For the last few weeks of that summer the cousins had made a daily visit to this sheltered spot. There was a lifeguard they liked to look at. The girls tried not to be conspicuous in their admiration, so would park themselves at the edge of the ranks of for-hire sunbeds. The beds were usually empty at that hour — the infants and their minders having packed up and gone home. The sun was well past its zenith and the sun umbrellas cast their streaks of shade along the sand behind each slatted bed.

That day the handsome lifeguard wasn’t at his station, but was prowling up and down before the shallows in the shelter of the breakwater. Rose and Laura ambled as near to him as they dared, finally settling down partly concealed behind a sunbed.

The bed they chose was occupied, but Rose and Laura were looking elsewhere, and scarcely noticed its occupant. He was quiet, reading. But, as the sun settled towards the horizon, and the shade of his umbrella thinned and swooped eastward, the girls moved to stay in its shadow.

EVENTUALLY, THEY
were lounging on the sand to one side of the bed.

Rose craned and squinted. She shuffled a little closer to the sunbed. Then she said, ‘We have that book in school.’ She turned to Laura. ‘Well, next year we do. It’s Dr King’s
A History of Southland
.’

Laura peered at the book. People usually read magazines on the beach, or didn’t read, but draped their faces with them.

Rose said, ‘He’s up to chapter sixteen, “Tziga’s Fall”.’

The occupant of the sunbed grunted. He sat up, swung his feet down on to the sand and looked at Rose. He looked to be a few years older than the cousins. He was already sporting a small, experimental moustache, a thin strip of brassy whiskers, a shade darker than his hair. He was fair skinned and freckled — and very pink.

Laura said to him, ‘You’re getting a sunburn.’

‘I’d say, judging by your colour, that you are a little more practised at beach holidays than I am. This is my
first
, and I’m making the most of it. I hired this sunbed for the afternoon, and I’ll not leave it till the afternoon is over.’

‘I can never read on the beach,’ Laura said.

‘I’m not at leisure to choose when I do my reading,’ said the boy.

‘Won’t you at least take my towel?’ Laura said. She rolled off it and held it out to him.

‘That’s hardly necessary,’ he said.

Rose said, ‘You could get off your sunbed and drag it into your shade. Your shade is oozing away from you — it doesn’t seem to understand that it’s been hired for the whole afternoon.’ She asked him where he was staying.

‘My uncle has an apartment in Bayview.’

‘Oh!’ Rose said. ‘Someone was killed there last year! A pot plant fell from the terrace on the sixth floor and killed a man on a first-floor balcony. It was dreadful!’ Rose mused for a bit. ‘But they did manage to re-pot the geranium,’ she said.

The boy stared at Rose, baffled and sceptical at once. ‘What are you girls doing on the infants’ beach?’

Rose tossed her head. ‘I am the mother of one of those infants, naturally,’ she said.

‘Only
one
?’

Laura asked, ‘What are
you
doing on the infants’ beach? Can’t you swim?’

‘I thought I’d get some peace and quiet — get away from youths stuffing sand down one another’s fronts. All those splashing, dunking, shrieking,
sidling
,
flirting
nuisances.’

‘Laura and I are only interested in what you’re reading,’ said Rose.

‘Really?’

Laura said to her cousin, ‘He’s here to Try. He’s doing research.’ Then she asked the boy, ‘Are you Trying at Tricksie Bend?’

The official Tries took place at two locations. One was at the village of Doorhandle, an hour and a half by coach from Founderston. The Try at Doorhandle took place on a strip of land cleared from the forest a mile out of the village. The clearing followed the border for a short way before letting it go in the thick woods that — with patrolling rangers — helped to guard it. The second location was some fifteen miles away, across Rifleman Pass, on the Place’s seaward border. There the candidates Tried in a meadow that sloped up to a bluff above the river at Tricksie Bend.

‘No,’ said the boy, ‘I’m going back to Founderston tonight and I’m Trying at Doorhandle.’

‘Uh-huh,’ said Laura. Then she asked him, ‘Do you have that book in your school?’ She wanted to establish how old he was, and where he went to school.

‘We
had
this book at my school.’

Laura and Rose exchanged a look — he was perhaps more a young man than an oversized boy. ‘What school?’ Rose asked. Founderston Girls’ Academy’s annual ball was attended by the seniors of several boys’ schools and military academies. Rose was trying to place him on her social map.

‘A school in a town south of The Corridor.’

The Corridor was a wide valley that cut through the mountains which divided their country. The south was
all plains and grain, vineyards, small towns, pasture and cattle. The north had the capital, Founderston; the nation’s next largest city, Westport, with its mines and industries; forested mountains; and beautiful Coal Bay. The north also had the Place.

Rose said, ‘What does Dr King have to say about Tziga’s fall?’

The boy leant his forearms on his knees and opened the book. ‘He seems to be saying that it was no accident. And I keep feeling sorry for Hame’s sister, Marta. She’s “just folks” in this story. Everyone else is special and involved.’

‘Yes, poor her,’ Laura said, of her Aunt Marta. She was fond of Marta, whom she never saw often enough. It was Laura’s impression that her father didn’t invite his sister over because she and Chorley didn’t see eye to eye. Marta was very religious, and Chorley, a firm atheist, was rude about her beliefs. He wasn’t rude to her face, but Aunt Marta seemed to be able to tell that Chorley said things behind her back.

Rose wriggled a little closer to the boy, put her finger on the corner of the book and pushed it down so she could see it. Laura hoped Rose wasn’t going to do her show-off’s upside-down reading. Rose could read upside-down in mirrors too. ‘So,’ said Rose, ‘you live in the south, but I suppose you’ve shared dreams.’

‘One or two. My uncle is a dreamhunter.’

‘Which one? Is he famous?’

‘George Mason. He usually only works in hospitals. Pike Street, and St Thomas Lung Hospital.’

‘Well — that’s good,’ said Rose, in the tone of someone thinking of something nice to say.

‘I think we might have King’s history at home, in the library,’ Laura said.

‘You have a library so large that you’re not sure what’s in it?’ For some reason the boy seemed to find the idea of a large library offensive. Or perhaps it was only the idea of a large library largely unread by girls who had access to it.

Laura could see that Rose would strike back at the boy’s remark; she had sparks of white in her blue eyes. ‘Actually we have
two
libraries too large to know what’s in them. One here, and one in Founderston.’

Laura said, ‘
Rose
!’

‘Rose,’ said the boy. He said it as if he had a pen and was writing it down.

‘My cousin has had too much
afternoon
this afternoon,’ Laura said. Rose said, ‘We can look for the King if you’d like, Laura — and check his history against the facts. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever
read
about dreamhunting.’

When Laura and Rose were four they had been told what Laura’s father and Rose’s mother did for a living. That simple explanation went something like this: ‘Laura, your father and, Rosie, your mother go to the Place to catch dreams. Other people pay to go to sleep with them and share their dreams in hospitals and dream palaces.’ The little girls had accepted this explanation because they were very happy with the
arrangement. Laura’s Da and Rosie’s Ma were only sometimes at home in the evening, and so Laura could climb into bed with her Ma, and Rosie with her Da. There was room in each adult bed for
two
girls, if that’s what they felt like. But, for Laura, who had this lovely privilege explained to her only a few months before her mother fell ill with the cancer that killed her, her knowledge about what her father and aunt did for a living became connected in her mind with the terrible changes that came later. She had questioned how things worked in her world, and then things changed for the worse. Laura was careful about asking questions after that. She kept looking at her life, her family — her
happiness —
only out of the corner of one eye.

The boy’s jaw had dropped. He was staring at the cousins as though they’d grown horns. After a moment he collected himself, and glared. ‘You’re a Tiebold,’ he said to Rose. ‘You’re Grace Tiebold’s daughter, aren’t you?’ Then he turned, with a different expression, to Laura, ‘So you must be …’

‘Gosh, it’s nice to be famous,’ said Rose.

‘Honestly, you girls are just playing with me, aren’t you?’ said the boy. ‘Saying “What does the book say?” as though you really are infants. Big joke on the country boy, right?’

Rose tilted her nose in the air. ‘No,’ she said, ‘my motives are completely pure. I only wanted to pilfer your bought-and-paid-for shade.’

He stood, shut the book with a snap and picked up his towel from the sunbed. He stepped through the cousins and began to walk away.

‘Hey!’ Laura called. ‘Good luck!’

He spun back. ‘I suppose you expect me to wish you good luck too? But
you
don’t need luck. After all, like everything else, I’m sure it’s not what you know but
who
you know.’

‘No, it’s who you
are
,’ Laura said, plainly.

He turned away and stalked off.

‘That was interesting,’ said Rose, looking after him. ‘If we say who we are we’re boasting, and if we don’t we’re sneaky.’ Then she said, brightly, ‘Let’s go for another swim.’

HALF AN HOUR
later a wind got up on the beach. It bowled sun umbrellas, flipped picnic rugs and made the wide brims of fashionable sun hats take on unfashionable shapes. Everyone began to abandon the shoreline.

The cousins were very quick to pick themselves up off the prints their wet bodies had made on their hired towels, and sprint up the steps to the Strand. Because Laura and Rose spent three months of every year at the beach they knew that when a westerly set in around five it was bound to blow until the early hours of the following morning.

The girls hurried across the Strand to the corner of Main Street. They tumbled through the glass and
brass doors of Farry’s, the confectioner, and stood shaking sand from their knitted swimsuits and printed cotton kimonos. Rose, seeing her favourite table emptying, made a dash for it. She came around from one side as the previous occupant was leaving by the other. Rose slid into the warmed iron chair and the woman who had just left it looked back at her, rather startled. Rose didn’t notice. She was issuing orders to the countermen: ‘I want my usual — chocolate and ginger ice-cream with candied apple and cream.’ She repeated her order to the waiter who’d come over to clear the table. Then, as he made space, transferring plates from the marble tabletop on to his tray, she stretched her tan, salt-silvered arms out of the sleeves of her kimono and laid them on the table. She said, ‘Do you think my skin looks dry?’ She pinched the taut flesh on her sharp elbow joint.

‘If you like, Miss Tiebold, I can give you a bit of butter to rub on your elbows.’

‘I asked for your opinion, not for assistance,’ said Rose.

The waiter said, ‘Ah.’ Then, ‘I’m sorry to have to admit that my experience of female elbows is rather limited.’

Rose dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

Laura was up at the counter, choosing a cake.

Farry’s had two curved counters at the back of its round room. Behind the glass front of one, sweets were displayed — marzipan in the shape and flavour of every
fruit, and filled chocolates, bitter dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white. There were glistening fruit jellies, and thick slabs of marshmallow dusted with sugar. There were caramels, and fudges, peanut brittle, sugared almonds, sherbet in paper envelopes with liquorice straws, and hokey-pokey stacked high like gold bars in a treasury. The shop smelt of sugar and fresh cream. Behind the glass of the other counter, glittering beneath the light of electric bulbs, were huge slabs of ice and, nestled between them, steel tubs of Farry’s famous ice-cream.

Laura saw that an assistant was waiting for her order. She was having trouble making up her mind. She felt vague, stupefied by sun, weak and watery from swimming. She told the man she’d have the same as her cousin.

‘Again,’ said the man.

This was a little rude, but the girls had practically lived at Farry’s every summer of their lives and, Laura supposed, the staff were entitled to remark on their habits. ‘Again’ was true. Laura was in the habit of following Rose, of letting Rose make arrangements, shape their days, choose their food. The man was telling Laura off. Teachers would do the same. They’d say, ‘Laura Hame, if you don’t come up with your own topic we’re just going to have to separate the two of you.’ Or they’d say, ‘Miss Hame, could you please show a little more initiative?’

It was easy for Laura to follow Rose. Rose always made headway, whichever way the wind was blowing.
And following Rose left Laura free to watch what was going on around her.

As Laura walked back to the best table in Farry’s big bay window, she looked about, her mind floating, unburdened by decisions. She saw a woman come in the front door shepherding a wind-tossed flurry of girls — of three different sizes, but in the same white flounced dresses, their straw hats clapped flat to their heads by their lace-gloved hands. Laura saw the matron take in Rose, slouching in her chair at the front table. Laura saw the woman assess Rose point by point: Rose’s damp kimono, her gold hair clumped in salt-dulled rat-tails. She clicked her tongue against her palate, went ‘tich’ like an angry thrush. Then Laura looked past the woman and saw, through the window, across the road, the manager of the stagecoach posted out on the pavement, looking at his watch, then up Main Street towards the rise to Rifleman Pass.