Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (25 page)

“Oh,” Laura said, and laughed some more. Then she collected herself and said, “Well, obviously. He’s here, isn’t he?”

“Here,” thought Rose, “and shouldn’t be. Shouldn’t exist.” But she said, “I’ll leave you to talk.” She backed away from the willow. She kept backing, kept the monster in sight for a time before turning and hurrying up the hill to the house.

1

EN DAYS LATER, LAURA MADE HER RENDEZVOUS WITH NOWN A LITTLE EAST OF THE LAST REGULAR TRAIN STOP AT
Morass River. They began their journey, weaving In and out across the border. Inside, they tramped through dry but untouched and upstanding meadows, Nown going before Laura and treading the stalks down. The going was easy. Every few minutes they would stop and listen for signs of other travelers. The trail was deserted.

As they went, Laura gazed Inland, across the grasslands to a line of low hills, all in graduated shades of beige. Sometimes she turned her eyes toward what she could see beyond the border, an endless haze of meadow that faded away to a creamy sky. Laura knew that if she walked in that direction she would cross back into the green world. But, as she gazed, she began to imagine facing a second kind of Try, in which she would find that the reliable border had vanished, and she’d never be able to get out again. She saw this so clearly that she had to check, to walk toward the border—

—where she found herself on a path that ran along a bluff above one of the many brilliant blue coves in Coal Bay’s notched curve. The sun was hot and had raised all the perfume of the forest.

Nown stepped out beside her. Almost onto her, since she
hadn’t moved to make room for him. She teetered, and he caught and steadied her.

A light wind was hissing through the scrub and flax between the track and the coast. The sea was calm, the waves idle and sleepy. But it seemed noisy after the Place. Laura said, “We won’t hear anyone coming along this track. We’ll be caught. And your eyesight is better in there, isn’t it?” She said all this but didn’t really want to go back In.

“It’s only because there’s less to see that people are highly visible there,” Nown said. “Laura, we’ll make better progress on this side of the border. And if I carry you, then you can listen while I walk.”

Of course Laura went to sleep in Nown’s arms and didn’t wake till his gait changed. He was stepping from boulder to boulder along a beach heaped with stones ranging from fist-sized to elephantine. “I think I’ll stay where I am for now,” Laura said, and tightened her arms around his neck. “Don’t drop me.” She knew he wouldn’t, said it only to savor how safe she felt.

Nown said, “I want to beat the tide. To get around that headland before the sea comes up.”

Laura wondered what it was like for him, stalking along the edge of a sea that was invisible to him except as a hole in the world, a void that gradually came up to engulf the path on which he made his way. She asked, “Does the sea frighten you?”

“The tide is reliable. And none of these bluffs is too steep to climb.”

“But doesn’t it unnerve you? Don’t you feel threatened? Don’t you think, ‘What if a big wave comes?’”

“No,” Nown said. “I don’t know that I have an imagination.” He gripped Laura firmly and vaulted up a rocky spur in several strides, launching himself across gaps lined with kelp
and thickly beaded with green-lipped mussels. A high swell pushed into a gap and, white with trapped air, lunged at Nown’s legs. Laura squeezed her eyes closed and pressed her face against his gritty neck.

By late afternoon they had rounded the headland at the western end of the Awa Inlet. The tide was still high, and they faced a wide sweep of water. Far away across the Inlet was the lacework of a railway trestle across a river. Beyond that they could see the thick forest in the rain shadow at the back of the Inlet and, against the dark hills, the blond stone of the Doran summer house, shining in the low sun.

“We should go as far as that long bridge over the river mouth, then turn back In,” Laura said. “If I sleep soon, I can be up again before midnight. And I’m sure we can get from the bridge to the house between four and dawn, at your speed.”

Nown pointed at the water directly below them, at a channel, blue between two submerged sandbars. “What is that?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Laura said, looking at it. Then she realized. “Oh, damn—there are
two
rivers. That’s the Sva going out through the reedbeds way over there. The Rifleman must be hidden behind this headland. I’ve gone past here in the train dozens of times, but it all looks different.” She could see that the water in the channel was moving very fast. Even if they waited for the tide to go all the way out, the river would still be there, pushing against the cliff on the far side of the headland.

“The channel is a colder nothingness,” Nown said, to explain how he’d picked out the river from the surrounding seawater. “It is even more nothing.”

Laura said, “The rail line is in a tunnel here. After the tunnel it runs along a ledge above the river and turns onto a bridge.” She pointed at the hill they stood on. “The tunnel runs through this hill, and the bridge must be just beyond it.”

She knew the view out the train windows very well, the long curve of graded track that passed down a channel of rock roughly formed by dynamite, then chiseled out by the pickaxes of—she now knew—convict laborers. The bridge over the Rifleman was iron, and very strong. It had to be. The Rifleman was a short river, fed by streams draining from a range of rainy mountains. It arrived at the sea swift, chilly, and full. Ten miles farther along the rail line was the other, bleached-ironwood structure, which picked its way across the braided channels and low sandbanks of the Sva mouth. The Sva where it reached the sea was a much gentler river than the Rifleman, its stream hastened only a little as its valley narrowed between the foothills and solitary Mount Kahaugh.

Laura said, “Put me down.”

Nown lowered her to the ground, and she leaned against him and stretched and shook her legs to get her blood moving again. Then she took his hand to encourage him and began to scramble up the hill through the scrub, grabbing at the slender trunks of Hebes and brilliant waxed sea laurel. She let go of Nown to haul herself up the steepest part of the slope. She could hear him following her, the foliage making a flinty scraping against his hardened body.

Laura reached the top of the hill and went on carefully after that, peering till she saw where the scrub abruptly came to an end. She crept forward and arrived at a drop. She craned over and saw the brick buttresses of the tunnel mouth and the railway line twenty-five feet below.

She turned to Nown. “If we climb down beside the tunnel,
we can go along the track and cross the bridge. It’s the quickest route.” Then, “Can you see in the dark?”

“I don’t know dark, Laura. ‘Dark’ is what you say to explain not being able to see.”

“Oh,” said Laura. She lay down on her stomach, unscrewed the copper cap of her water bottle, and held the bottle under a steadily dripping fringe of moss. Her arm tired, but she managed to get a drink.

“I have water,” Nown said, and shook one of the two big skins he carried.

“I’ll need that later, when we go In.”

Laura rolled back from the bluff and onto her sandman’s feet. She pulled at his arm to let him know she wanted him to sit. He folded himself carefully into the little space there was, branches snapping as he lowered himself onto them. “I’m going to sleep for a while,” Laura said. “Please make sure I don’t roll off the drop.”

He lifted one leg and placed it, crooked, over her body. She rearranged herself, her back to the drop and her head pillowed on his other foot. She said, sleepy, “You know to stay still, don’t you?”

“Yes, Laura.”

She closed her eyes and let herself drift off.

Laura slept for a few hours and woke up, stiff and cold. The sun had gone, and Nown was nearly the same temperature as the air. It was summer, but she had let herself fall asleep on the ground without wrapping herself in her bedroll.

Though all the sunset color had gone, the sky in the west
had a pithy pallor, and there was still enough light for Nown and Laura to climb safely down the bluff onto the track.

The tunnel mouth breathed at their backs, smelling of wet brick and coal smoke.

They began on down the long, shallow incline of the track. Both were walking as far from the drop as they could, Laura leading and Nown following. They stepped from tie to tie and built up quite a rhythm, hurrying, only sometimes steadying themselves against a pickax-pockmarked rock of the cliff face.

They reached the place where the track turned away from the cliff. It ran onto an iron trestle that curved to join the span of the rail bridge. There was nowhere to pause and step off the track. Still, Laura put her hand back to halt Nown. He stopped instantly at her touch, didn’t blunder into her as most people would have. She glanced back and saw him frozen with one foot raised. He looked like a photograph of himself.

Laura listened to the night. She couldn’t hear the river. The tide was high, slack, and silent. She heard one of the little rain-forest owls giving its two-note cry. She heard oyster-catchers out over the Inlet. She didn’t hear any trains.

Laura stepped onto the bridge. It wasn’t a very long span, probably no more than fifty yards. It was easier to walk on than the track by the cliff had been; there were girders under the timber ties of the bridge, a firm skin of rivet-studded iron. It was a good surface, and Laura hurried.

Then she stopped again to listen. The headland behind them was booming. Laura looked back at Nown, her eyes wide.

An engine burst from the tunnel, braked on the incline, and came sliding and panting down the track toward them.

Laura took off. She closed the distance between herself and safety—but then her foot slipped and she sprawled across the
tracks, slamming her elbow hard. Her arm lost all feeling, then seemed to fizzle back into existence as if it was breaking out of a numbing foam.