Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (6 page)

The letters were collected and sorted at the Central Post Office. None made the ten-thirty delivery. All three went out at noon.

One landed at twelve-forty in the basket of the assistant to the Director of the Regulatory Body. It was still lying there unopened when the man put on his coat and hat at one p.m.—the beginning of his half-day holiday—and went out to meet his wife at the People’s Gardens.

The second letter was delivered to the Temple at noon, but the Temple was always busy over the feast of St. Lazarus, and the letter didn’t find its way into the hands of Father Roy, the Grand Patriarch’s secretary, until seven the following morning. When the Grand Patriarch returned to the vestry after the celebration of early mass, he was met by Father Roy, with the letter and a telegraph from his friend Marta Hame asking him to send a car to her house. The Grand Patriarch read Marta’s message and dispatched a car. He read the letter, then handed it back to Father Roy and said, “Perhaps this explains the crowd at mass. Much more than the usual St.
Lazarus’s Day throng. There were people wrapped in blankets standing at the back and lining the aisles. They looked like they’d wandered in from the site of a disaster.”

The Grand Patriarch went back to his apartments and sat down to breakfast and the morning paper. The paper carried a red “Stop Press” report of the riot at the Rainbow Opera.

The third letter found its way to the mailroom of the
Founderston Herald
shortly after one on St. Lazarus’s Eve, then languished among dozens of other letters to the editor since the paper was being put to bed early that day—printers working overtime to get out the holiday edition, a paper full of advertisements, announcements of engagements, and the Ladies’ Supplement’s thoughts on hats and tango heels. A paper very light on actual news. At midnight on St. Lazarus’s Eve, the skinny, seedy little man whose job it was to sift through letters to the editor burst out of the nearly deserted
Herald
offices and into the street to jog several blocks and over a bridge to the Isle of the Temple. He arrived in time to see bloodied people spilling out of the Rainbow Opera and the first constables pushing their away in. Despite his protests, he was turned away from the Crescent Plaza by the police. It was hours before he managed to find the
Herald
’s editor, who was at home by then, cleaned up but still gray-faced, and with fresh scabs on his scalp from where he’d torn at his own hair. The skinny, seedy man handed the letter to his editor, who peered at the elongated, backward-sloping handwriting and read:

The accusation was all in one long, mad, bad sentence. The editor frowned and read on:

“The author of this letter has a large vocabulary but is semiliterate in my opinion,” said the editor.

“I’ll deal with this,” said the editor to his assistant. He saw the man to the door, then sat down to compose a note to his friend Cas Doran, the Secretary of the Interior.

The police handwriting expert peered at the two letters, the one that began “Dear Sir, Please publish this letter” and the other beginning “The time has come for the Regulatory Body to submit to judgment …” He said that the writer was left-handed, and secretive. “Look at those backward-sloping letters.” He said that the stationery was the same for both letters but that one page was more yellowed than the other, was perhaps the top sheet of a pad that had sat around in sunlight
for some time. It was export-quality linen paper, manufactured in a certain paper mill in the south. The letters had probably been written at a desk equipped with a writing set, because the ink was blotted with sand. The handwriting was highly distinctive, fluent, and not—the expert thought—a disguised hand. “But, it seems to me that the handwriting is more mature than the composition of the letter—the bad grammar and poor punctuation.”

Having given his opinion, the handwriting expert was shown from the room. Cas Doran, the Detective Inspector from Founderston Barracks, and the Director of the Regulatory Body were left alone.

The Detective Inspector said, “Before we ask Grace Tiebold in here, we should think about charges.”

Doran closed his eyes, saw darkness, winced, and opened them again. His mouth and jaw were sore. It hurt him to speak. “What can she or Mason be charged with? There is no crime called ‘grievous mental harm.’”

“Perhaps there should be.”

“Certainly not,” said Doran. “We’d then have this Lazarus and his allies bringing criminal charges against the Regulatory Body and the Department of Corrections.”

At this the Detective Inspector merely cleared his throat. Then he said, “So, you believe this Lazarus has allies?”

“Yes. The letter says,
‘We
have overdreamed’ and ‘It has come to
our
attention.’ But I doubt that ‘we’ is George Mason and Grace Tiebold.”

“Mason and Tiebold could be charged with disturbing the peace,” said the Detective Inspector.

Doran shook his head. “There are regulations that cover safe practices in dream palaces, just as there are regulations that govern how many fire escapes any new building must
have. But the regulations haven’t thought to ban Soporifs from sleeping in dream palaces. Though—believe me—that’s about to change.”

The Detective Inspector sighed. He would have been much happier if he were closer to an arrest.

The Director of the Regulatory Body said, “Shall we speak to these dreamhunters now? Mason first, I think.”

George Mason was cooperative—and no real help at all. He spent only half an hour in Doran’s office, then was sent to join the dozen other dreamhunters who had been at the Opera. They had all taken prints of Buried Alive. They were to be transported to Doorhandle and then into the Place so that they could attempt to overwrite the nightmare with something harmless.

The Place was where the dreams came from. It was a territory infinitely more vast than the hundred or so square miles of the mountain range it encompassed. A limitless, lifeless place, a landscape of plains and rolling hills covered in white grass and scrub, where leathery leaves still hung on bone-dry trees but fell if touched; a silent, windless, waterless landscape, where time had apparently stopped. Only a very few people could actually enter the Place. Most, on approaching its invisible borders, would only find themselves going on up into the temperate rain forest of the Rifleman Mountains. Perhaps one person in three hundred was able to pass through into the Place, and of those, only a very few were any good at catching the dreams they found there. These became dreamhunters and made their livings—or their fortunes—from dreams caught, and carried out, and shared with others.

When she was shown into Cas Doran’s office, Grace
Tiebold was still wearing her dreamhunter’s finery, though the peacock-print train of her gown had been trodden to tatters by both the police and the people the police had protected her from. Doran saw that Grace had a bruise on her jaw, as well as the now familiar self-inflicted scratches on her cheeks. And, of course, it hurt her to speak.

The first thing Doran did was push one of the letters across the desk and under her nose. “Is this
your
schoolgirlish false officialese?” he asked. Then, in mocking imitation, “ ‘It has come to our attention …’ ” He waited, then said, “I believe you left school at twelve to work in your father’s tobacco shop?”

The dreamhunter’s eyes flicked up to his face. She showed fright. Then she stared at the letter and looked puzzled. “I don’t recognize the handwriting,” she said. She seemed surprised.

“Should you?” asked the Detective Inspector.

She hesitated. Then, “No,” she said, finally.

“And how does this letter strike you?”

“It’s demented, fantastical,” Grace said. “The writer is defending an act of terror. An act of spectral terror. But apparently, according to the letter, you people all deal in terror too.”

“You
know
what we do,” Doran said. “There’s nothing you don’t know about what we do.”

Grace looked into his eyes. She was exhausted, bleak, but she seemed to have recovered from her moment of fright. She said, “I doubt that.”

“The Intangible Resources Act provides for the use of certain sorts of dreams, including nightmares—punishments that cause pain but not injury—‘for the public good.’ I’m sure we can agree that this is something you already know.”

“I know it,” Grace said. She gestured at her own nail-marked
cheeks, then at Doran’s injured mouth. “But—is
this
pain without injury?”

“There were no precautions. No restraints.”

“So you strap your prisoners down, then give them nightmares?”

Doran leaned back in his chair. “Mrs. Tiebold, are you defending yourself? You seem to be saying that inflicting a virulent nightmare on the general public is no different from the controlled use of nightmares on convicted criminals.”

“It wasn’t my nightmare!” Grace Tiebold’s eyes blazed. “This Lazarus used me! Me
and
George.”

The Director of the Regulatory Body spoke up then. “Why did you ask the Soporif George Mason to lie in with you?”

“I’ve been having difficulty falling asleep. George went In with me to catch Homecoming. We even have a witness. Jerome Tilley was at the site with us, catching it too. Jerome had a booking in Westport for a feast day performance at the Second Skin Theater. George and I walked back to Doorhandle with him, and George drove us all to Founderston. He dropped Jerome at the station and me at my house. Three hours later I met my daughter and niece for lunch, then we went home, changed, and came out to the Opera. I’m sure George can account for all
his
movements that afternoon too. We didn’t hike back In—
days
In—and catch that nightmare. We are not Lazarus. I’m very sorry that this person chose to spill his nightmare out on my penumbra. And I’m sure George is very sorry that he made it difficult for everyone to wake up.”

Doran made a steeple of his hands and gave Grace Tiebold a little pinched smile over the top of them. “That wasn’t your penumbra—it was Lazarus’s. Perhaps five hundred yards. Lazarus wanted your
audience
, Mrs. Tiebold, not your powers of amplification. Lazarus is very probably a more powerful dreamhunter than you.”

“Where has he been hiding himself all this time?” Grace said.

“Has
he been hiding himself?” Doran said, as though she knew who they were talking about.

“Tziga’s dead,” Grace said, and dropped her gaze. “I’m tired, Mr. Doran. I don’t know anything more. I want to go In and erase this, if I can. And first I want to go home to wash and change and check on Rose and Laura.”

“Rose is spending today in the company of my wife and Mamie,” Doran said. “The girls go back to school tomorrow.”

Grace glared at him. “You might have mentioned that first. And if Rose is with Mamie, where is Laura?”

Doran spread his hands and shrugged. “I thought you might know.”

“Laura will have the nightmare too. She might not realize it until she falls asleep.”