Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (12 page)

The letter was from Miss Hame, of course. Mrs. Lilley had recognized Laura’s handwriting. “Yes. And that’s their business—but I must say that girl’s had the slowest start of any dreamhunter I’ve ever lodged.” Mrs. Lilley went into her kitchen, leaving her girls in peace, and smirking at each other.

Laura’s letter was careful, coded, and chatty.

Dear Sandy
,

I’m sorry I didn’t have more to say to you last time we met. I just hadn’t expected to see you there. I’m sorry for the trouble, and for any worry I caused you.

I am mostly quite contented just now. It is very peaceful here. And I keep myself busy. Today, for instance, we all took a cart out along the shore to pick up the seaweed that came up with the king tide on the last full moon. It’s had a week now to dry and reduce. The men bale it up and store it all summer under the houses. It sits between the house piles in stiff tangles with shiny glass fishing buoys here and there among it. They use seaweed here as kindling and burn coal all winter. There’s hardly any firewood.

I helped gather seaweed, but it was more my job to keep an eye on these two little girls—six and eight. They really know more than I do about (for example) the quicksand one should never walk on, or how one should never get between a sea lion and the sea. (There are sea lions resting up along the coast here. Sick or injured ones among them. We saw one seal yesterday with huge gashes from a shark, or a killer whale.)

There’s a big boy here too—actually, he’s about my age but seems younger. He applauds diving gannets as if they are performing for him. He is a little odd and wrapped up in himself. He talks and talks and never seems to know when anyone has had enough. On the seaweed expedition, we girls were supposed to be having a nap under the cart, but he kept us awake telling us that
this
was why motorcars were no good and how Southland could never have been settled at all if people on the plains hadn’t been able to take shelter under their wagons. He reminds me a little of you in that he is so full of information. But you are far better at imparting it!

I will write to Rose too, and Aunt Grace, but it is you I have chosen to trust with a task. I want you to do one thing for me. I want you to take the enclosed letter to a certain place. You must catch a train going out toward Westport and get off at the little station at Glass Eye Creek. Then walk up the road past my aunt Marta’s house. As you come past the house, you will see a hill with a pine plantation on it. I want you to climb up to the forest and go a short way into the pines and leave the letter lying on the ground. Then go away immediately.

Sandy read the letter several times. He realized Laura had given him enough clues for him to guess that she might well be at the lighthouse on So Long Spit. But was she giving him directions? Did she want him to visit her?

As he stood reading, a blush of pleasure had crept through him, heating his skin and robbing his legs of strength. He sat down on his bed and turned his attention to the sealed envelope, which was addressed simply: “From Laura.”

Sandy stared at the white square, the two black-inked words.
From Laura
—as if Laura was the only real attachment the intended recipient of the letter had in all the world.

Sandy thought, “Someone walks up to the wood every day to check for a message from Laura.” But surely not Marta Hame, whom, after all, Laura had mentioned in her instructions for the letter’s delivery.

Sandy’s skin began to cool. He seemed to cool and congeal all over. He went sour, sitting there.

Eventually he got up, stuffed the unopened letter into his pocket, and went down to the kitchen, where he was fed tidbits by Mrs. Lilley and courted by her daughters, and where he helped peel potatoes till, finally, he was left alone with the steaming kettle.

Sandy held the envelope in the steam from the kettle’s spout until the already dimpled paper dimpled more, and its glue softened. He unsealed the flap of the envelope, then fled upstairs, shut himself in his room, drew out the single sheet of paper, and unfolded it with hands shaking so violently that
the Lilley girls would have been amazed by it—and frightened of him.

He read:

Partway through reading the letter, Sandy went cold, and his gorge rose, and he had to press his hand to his mouth. He tried to control himself but couldn’t. A moment later he was groveling under his bed after his chamber pot, which he never used and which was covered in dust. He vomited into it. He stayed on his hands and knees till the retching had passed. Then he began to cry, dropping clear tears into the mess of regurgitated tea and toast. He hadn’t cried in years, so he did it perilously, like a busted machine whose cogs no longer meshed; painfully, straining his scalded throat; helplessly, because his feelings had him completely—grief, and jealousy as burning and bitter as acid.

2

HE TROUBLEMAKER WAS TAKEN ON A LONG TRAIN JOURNEY FROM HIS PRISON IN CANNING TO ANOTHER, A PRISON
at the end of a long pier. He knew he was in the north because it was warmer. Westport was where they sent all the hard men. Westport and the government mine.

The prison governor took a look at him, then he was left in his shackles, sitting before a desk in a locked room. After a time a man joined him: a man in a suit and bowler hat with one of those gold fraternity pins winking in his lapel. The man took off his hat, sat down, and studied the papers in the file he carried with him. Then he closed the file, folded his hands, fixed the troublemaking convict with the clouded jellies of his eyes, and began to talk. He talked about “the rehabilitation of an ailing character”; he talked about “criminality” and “being tempted to take shortcuts to prosperity.” He talked about “the cleansing sweat of honest work.” He said, “You have shown an antisocial resistance to what, however
demanding
, amounted to a course of treatment. And so your treatment must be more aggressive, and tailored to your particular difficulties.”

The troublemaker’s particular difficulty was that he didn’t understand why this person was talking to him. Was the man a warden, or a doctor?

The man put his hat back on, gathered his papers, and left the room. The wardens returned and took the troublemaker to another solitary cell. This one had a barred window, a covered bucket, a table and chair—dinner already there, lukewarm but plenty of it—and a bed with a rolled mattress.

The convict ate. His tray was removed. Just before the lights went out, a warden came by and told him he could now unroll his mattress and go to bed. The convict liked the look of the mattress, it was thicker than any he’d had before, and they had given him an extra blanket, though it was the warmest night he’d felt in a long time.

He lay down. Whatever was to come next, the coal mine, or more puzzling talk, it wouldn’t come till tomorrow.

The Lifer was part of a work gang that was building a bridge. For twenty years he had labored on the roads, in the coal mine at Westport, and at the copper mines on Shackle Island. He had worked till he couldn’t straighten his fingers anymore. Now he was among men on lesser sentences—the odd character who had strangled all his neighbor’s hens, a light-fingered storekeeper, and a young man who had smashed the window of a pawnbroker’s shop in order to steal his own hocked violin. He was a murderer among milder men, but old and harmless now, and on easy work. The others laughed when he told them this. One asked, “What easy work is there these days even for free men—with convicts building all the roads and bridges? I started my sentence picking fruit. So who would pay wages to fruit pickers?”

There was something in this. When the Lifer had worked in the coal mine, the only free men were skilled labor engineers and those who set explosives. He told his fellow convicts this. Then they were all talking about the savings a mine owner made and profit pouring back into the penal system. “The whole country’s a prison,” said the violin thief. “I didn’t know that before. But I won’t forget it again.”

The violin thief was a month from the end of his sentence. The guards trusted him. He was the one who got to work in the tent in the water meadow by the
bridge site. They even trusted him to sharpen the mason’s chisels. The thief was fresh that afternoon because he’d been in the mason’s tent and out of the worst of the heat. (When he’d come back to the bridge he’d stood smiling at the Lifer while the guards reattached his shackles. The smile really wasn’t for anyone, but only seemed to say, “Nearly now. I’m nearly free, nearly home.”)

The Lifer was faint with the heat. It was April, and the farmers in the valley had been burning stubble and the stumps of trees in fields freshly cut from the forest. Smoke hung over the valley and magnified the sun rather than filtered it. The Lifer asked for water. A guard brought the dipper. The water had a tang of burned blackwood. The old man tried to take his time but the dipper was snatched out of his hands. Half the water splashed onto the ground.

“Get on with it,” the guard said, and gave him a shove. The Lifer went back to work. He and the violin thief lifted another shaped block from a stack, checked its number, and carried it to the balustrade, to the gap it was made to fit.

“Are you all right?” the young thief said.

And that was when it happened. The Lifer’s head was swimming in the heat; his cramped hands were slippery with sweat and spilled water. His grip on the chiseled sandstone failed and instead of easing the stone into its slot, he let it go so that it slammed down on one corner. The thief’s hands lost it too, and it teetered, then tipped over the rail and into the river. It disappeared into the weeds that grew on the river bottom. Weeds that flowed like combed hair in the channel and, nearer the bank, pressed against the surface of the water like hair bundled into a hairnet.

The guards heard the splash and came to look. They craned over the rail. “Where did it fall?” one asked.

“How do you suppose you are going to fetch that up out of there?” said another.

The guards pushed the Lifer and the thief, jostled them about between their fists and feet and rifle butts.