Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (54 page)

The boy sat on the other side of the kitchen and kept his eyes fixed on the spout of the kettle, waiting for steam. He’d make some beef tea. While he waited he picked up his violin and tuned it. He didn’t watch his mother burn her letters, or glanced only once and saw the fire turn one packet into a black-striped brick, then a kind of paper chaff, flakes of soot circling in the stove.

She burned all of them—the letters from her cousin who lived in another country. One letter a week for eight years. She had never read any of the letters to the boy, and so it didn’t matter, nothing was different, the cousin in another country knew all about him and he knew nothing about her. But his mother was burning the letters, and that mattered. And then she didn’t want beef tea, and
she wouldn’t let him touch her or help her as she dragged herself back to bed.

He washed his few dishes, because there was hot water. Then he returned to his bed, where he tried to stay awake and listen, as though his attention was a rope—a rope that keeps a boat tethered to a jetty as the river rises. His waiting turned into a dream. In his dream the rope wasn’t long enough to keep the boat afloat when the river rose. It was the rope that drowned the boat.

In the morning the house was silent, so silent that, as he strained to hear, the boy heard a plum fall from the tree in the yard—landing with a soft thump on the neglected lawn.

After the dream, Laura didn’t go back to sleep. She stayed down, her cheek turned away from the bulk of the grave and her eyes on the bleak, ashy peaks of The Pinnacles, so near but hazy, standing in a white ground mist of dead grass.

Time went by. Then the ground vibrated, and Nown said, “Laura,” in his low, musical voice.

Laura sat up. Nown pulled off his hat, as if removing it out of good manners. Then he began to undress. He stripped off and abandoned all the clothes but handed her Sandy’s coat and told her to put it on.

She didn’t argue with him, even though the request was strange. She had a coat on already. And she somehow knew he didn’t mean for her to take off the one she was wearing. Laura simply put Sandy’s coat on over hers. It was hot and heavy, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to walk anywhere dressed like that. But she obeyed Nown because it was the first time he’d ever given her instructions.

She rummaged in her now blanketing clothes for the apples Rose had picked for her in the Dorans’ orchard. And for her bottle of lemonade. She pulled on the wire that loosened its china stopper and took a mouthful. “I wish we could sit down and share a meal,” she said to Nown.

“With this grave as a table?”

Nown was easier to look at in the light of the Place. The light was even, and his skin threw off no dazzling reflections. He did kneel by her, kept quiet as she ate an apple and the crack of each bite echoed off The Pinnacles.

Once the apple was gone, Laura licked its juice from her fingers and touched Nown’s chest. She saw her fingers suspended only inches from his heart. She could recall distinctly the velvety feel of the rust-stained lump of gravel she had picked up from between the rail lines at Sisters Beach Station. “Nown,” she said. “This grave is the heart of the Place. Its unhappy, horrible heart.”

“My heart isn’t me,” Nown said. “It’s only what you put into me.”

Laura closed the space between them and leaned on him. He held her tight. After a time he started to speak, in his beautiful new voice, as clear as he was. It was like hearing fresh air speak.

“Laura, this Now—the Place—is so immense and powerful, what must it have as its heart?”

Laura shivered.

“A person,” Nown said.

Laura pressed her face against his shoulder and opened her eyes wide. She saw her own arm through his body, her bone bent as though she’d suffered poor nutrition in childhood.

“Someone is buried here,” Nown said.

Laura whispered, “I knew it.” Though her nose was pressed against him, he had no smell. When he was sand, he’d sometimes smelled of heat and moisture; now the air near him was empty of odor. She said, “I hated this grave when I first saw it. I thought of the grave in The Water Diviner—rustling and moaning.”

“Yes. What is buried here isn’t a body, it’s a living person.”

“Buried alive!” Laura said, and began to cry. “But I don’t hear anything.” She mashed her mouth and nose into Nown’s hard, impossibly flexible shoulder. He didn’t taste of anything either, left neither flavor nor matter on her tongue. “You’re not
there,”
she grieved. “And I can’t change you.”

“My own,” he said. “My sweet—you must try to be calm.” He said, “Listen—leaves don’t fall from the trees here unless someone walking by them brushes them off. Nothing is alive, and nothing is dead.”

Laura pushed herself away from Nown. She propelled herself backward and knelt, her arms wrapped around her stomach, stooped so that the crown of her head touched the dirt of the graveside. “I can’t bear this,” she said. Then, a moment later, “What will happen?”

“What will happen when you ask me to dig up this grave?”

Laura laughed, wildly. “You’ll refuse me, because you can’t
know
what will happen. Isn’t that the rule for you?”

Nown was silent.

“Your free will has laws. That’s what you told me.”

Nown said, “I think this Now is keeping promises I made to you.”

Laura clenched her body into a tighter ball. She cried out as though he had struck her. Above her head, dulcet, clear, the glass Nown kept on with his pitiless reasoning. “I promised to do everything to save whoever you loved.”

Laura gasped for air between sobs. The pressure of tears behind her eyes was so great she thought she might literally cry them out. She shouted at Nown, “Who is being saved?
Who
do I love?”

She had often imagined Nown sighing, but this time he did and she heard it. “You know that it is difficult for me not to answer your questions, Laura. It is in my nature to answer
whatever I can. So I will give relief to my nature and answer you—though I’m tired of it, tired of my routine obedience.”

Laura looked up and saw through her boiling blur of tears that Nown was counting off the fingers on one of his hands. “Who do you love?” he said. “You love your father and your cousin, your uncle and your aunt. And you love me.”

“I do love you!” Laura said, in the voice of someone begging for mercy.

And still he went on, and she heard him say, “And you
will
love that child you’re carrying.”

Laura bent over again. She howled like an animal. She thought, “God, let me die now. God,” she thought, “if it was God at the beginning and end of all this, in the tomb at Bethany opening Lazarus’s ears when they were stuffed with the silence of death, and, somewhere, not too long, please God, when this music finally falls silent for my cursed family. God,” Laura begged, “let me not have to choose.”

Because Laura did feel she was being asked to choose between her friend and her future.

Nown gathered her up again and held her while she cried, and while the jagged remnants of sobbing shook her, and when she was worn out and looking listlessly through her swollen eyelids at the blue shadows inside his body.

Close to an hour passed that way. Finally Laura stirred and sat up and looked into her servant’s face. “When I ask you to dig up this grave, I’m afraid the world will end.”

“But, Laura, we already know that it doesn’t.”

It was true. They knew that an invalid would ride on the roof of a train, and convicts fleeing through a forest would look down on a bonfire on the beach like the beacon of a better world. They knew a girl would get a beautiful horse, friends would ride together down a wild river, a boy would
find a spring pushing through a seam of coal on his father’s property, a drought would end, and a mother would shelter her child while an earthquake shook the scent of honeysuckle down over them. And they knew that some lost, grown child would wish so hard for salvation that he’d have a vision of his mother waiting for him at the gate to Paradise.

“Laura,” Nown said, “you came here and waited for me so that you could ask me to dig up the grave. You didn’t need me to tell you any of this.”

Laura nodded. He set her away from him and began to delve in the dry earth of the mound, digging quickly with his hard, transparent hands.

“Wait,” she said. There was more to say. She had said it already, but it was one of those things that couldn’t ever be said enough. “I love you.”

“Yes.” Nown waited, reasonable, peaceable, his dust-gloved hands poised above the crumbling rent he’d made in the piled earth. Then he set to digging again.

The man lying in the shallow hollow in the earth looked dead, his face gray with dust over black grime, coal dust in the pores of his skin. His face was familiar. Curiosity made Laura daring. She licked her palm and ran a lock of his hair through her wet hand. His hair was grimy too but showed a trace of a true, bright red.

“I’ve seen him before,” she said to Nown. “He was building a wall in a dream. He crept over to me and pulled a paper from his mouth. It was the bottom part of the letter Cas Doran wrote asking the ranger to follow Da. He was also the man who stopped to help that crippled convict up when they were
being hunted by dogs through the forest. And I think he’s one of the convicts working on the stone bridge in The Water Diviner. And he’s one of the convicts in Convalescent One, in leg irons, standing on the causeway.”

Nown seemed unmoved by Laura’s wonder. He only said, “Remember what I told you about the final N? You cannot end this Nown until you have first given it its voice.”

“Have pity,” Laura said.

“I will.”

Everything she asked her servant to do trapped her further in what had already been done. Nown’s pity was a promise fulfilling itself over time—a long, inhuman time.

“Here, I’ll help you,” Nown said. He took her hands and assisted her down into the shallow trench so that she perched above the body. She kicked toeholds in the wall of the grave, steadied herself, and stooped over.

The man had his hand on the wall, his index finger curled to make a mark. Laura glimpsed the wings of the letter W beneath the hand. She turned her eyes up to her servant, tried to find his eyes in the glowing, glassy nothingness of his face. She said, “What will happen?”

“Ask him,” Nown said.

Laura bent to her task. She scratched an N into the wall beside the man’s hand.

Nothing happened. No one spoke. The Place was as still as ever, a silent desert.

Laura thought of her family, separated, trying desperately to fix things.

She took the man’s thin wrist in her hand. It was like touching a fresh corpse. The temperature of his skin was tepid, too cool for life. She moved his hand away from the wall, so that the W was exposed. Then she used his fingertips to wipe the letter away.

Far Inland, the compound of the Depot imploded. The buildings rushed together like matter in water pouring toward a drain. The timbers of the huts and barracks split as a slope thrust up under them, and all their bolted doors burst open.

Greenery—ferns, trees, vines—burst like fireworks amid the splinters and billowing dust. Fireworks that froze into permanence, startled trees above gouged, wet earth. Forest birds fled shrieking from the mess and circled up over a towering tangle of metal—fifty miles of narrow-gauge rail line concertinaed into fifty yards of mangled mountain forest.

And yet, by some miracle, this violence spared the few people there. A miracle of care and intention. When the barracks dormitories exploded, the yellow-clad bodies were momentarily cradled in huge fists of dust—dust as soft as talcum powder—then released and spilled into the tree ferns on the forest floor.