The light was unsteady but came from everywhere, and so shone into the empty alcove, shone on the water fountain where the men had seen a statue.
The guards stopped. They gaped at the empty arch, and the fountain. There was nothing there, even the bundled cloth had gone.
One guard clutched the other’s arm. He pointed. The dreamer’s door hung off its hinges, and the carpeted stair within was sprinkled with broken glass from the first of the electric candles.
As the men stood staring they heard another smash, and the faint light shining down the stair diminished. They heard something heavy vaulting up the stairs. Beyond that, from the building’s interior, came the sound of screaming — of a multitude of people calling out in an agony of terror.
The guards shouted for help then ran inside. They sprinted up the short staircase to the first floor, their boots crunching over broken glass. The light ahead of them receded as lamp after lamp shattered. They plunged on.
ROSE HEARD HER cousin call out in horror and despair. She heard Laura’s voice above the horrible cacophony of the others. Rose jumped out of bed and ran to the connecting door. It was locked. Rose hammered on the door and called to Laura. Then she rushed out of the Tiebold suite to try the outer door to the Hame suite.
That door was locked too. Rose gave up twisting its handle. She looked around her and listened.
The first thing Rose saw was her mother — thrashing about in the wavering light that came through the dome. Grace flung herself up in her bed, her movement convulsive. She threw her arms wide and yelled. For a moment Rose heard her mother’s cry soar above all the others — because it was different, because it was a cry of rage. There was blood running on Grace’s face and throat — the ends of her fingers were black in the light, black with her own blood.
Rose shouted to her mother. She saw Grace’s head snap around, and her mother’s eyes find her. Rose saw her mother’s mouth shape her name. Then Grace leapt out of the dreamer’s bed. She upended a carafe of water on to Alexander Mason’s uncle, who had been lying top-to-tail with her, and was now struggling, tangled in the covers, with both hands pushing into his own mouth.
Rose didn’t see him wake up, because her attention had been seized by something else.
On the first floor, in the stretch between the dreamer’s door and the public staircase, someone was in a fast, thundering run. As they ran, they struck out at each light. Rose saw the hot fuses quenched beneath a fist. She saw the spraying glass, and heard each bright smash.
For a mad moment Rose thought she was looking at her father. And then she realised that she was looking at her father’s hat and coat — a black fedora and grey gabardine coat from two years before. But the hat was too high up from the floor, and the coat so strained that its back was splitting. Who was that in her father’s clothes?
Grace was still on the platform. She was shrieking at the fire watch. Above the din Rose heard, ‘Sound the alarms!’ Grace pointed furiously at the control room behind the milling men. ‘The master switch!’ She roared. ‘Wake them up! Wake them all up!’
Rose saw the man in her father’s coat and hat plunge up the stairs from the first to the second floor. He was coming towards her floor, the level sectioned off into private suites, the Hame and Tiebold suites, the President’s, those of the government secretaries, the suites belonging to the men who owned steel mills in Westport, and the one belonging to the man who owned more than half the railways. The fire watch were on the second floor too, and it was for their control room that the man in Rose’s father’s clothes was headed.
He flung himself among them, travelling in the light now, a shadow in a pale greatcoat. The men reeled back, some as he scattered them left and right, others without having been touched. They fell back from him and raised their hands as if to fend off — what? — the sight of him?
Rose saw her father’s fedora float to the floor. She saw the man — the shadow — leap sideways into the control room. As he bounded through the men, his body curved and elongated. For an instant he left his feet on the floor and cast himself out like a net, a net that Rose saw fall on to the man whose hand was clutching the master switch.
Rose could make no sense of what she was seeing.
Above the screams Rose heard the sound of a dry earth falling. Her father’s coat had jumped with the man, but then it twitched, and deflated. The coat lay on the control room floor, and a solid, man-shaped shadow sat astride the man who had reached for the switch. Rose saw the shadow turn back to disentangle its feet from her father’s empty coat.
Grace was running down the spiral stair from the platform, the bright trail of her robe flowing behind her.
Rose leant over the balustrade and yelled at her mother — she didn’t want Grace to come up to the second floor. She didn’t want her mother to come anywhere near that thing. But Grace didn’t hear Rose, for at that moment the howling voices of the maddened dreamers reached a crescendo, a scream like a rip, a sound of such misery that it slapped tears from Rose’s eyes. Rose felt the dream leave the building, like a devil taking flight and carrying souls away with it.
In the control room the men of the fire watch cowered as the shadow got up to rip the electrical cable away from the board of switches that would have sounded an alarm in every room. The figure stood for a moment in a fountain of sparks, then dropped the cable. He waded through the cowering men and ran out of the room.
Rose turned around to see her mother appear at the head of the staircase. Grace paid no attention to the fire watch but ran straight to her.
Rose staggered back from her mother. Grace’s face was streaked with blood. Her cheeks were gouged by nail marks, her lips bitten and bloody, her hair savaged, her scalp bleeding. This bloody apparition grabbed Rose and stared at her, checking her all over. A look of relief filled Grace’s mutilated face and, despite all her injuries, she began to look sane.
The door to the Hame suite opened. Rose and Grace turned to see Laura. Laura walked out on to the balcony, slowly and unsteadily. She looked tiny, with her thin limbs and short, sweat-soaked hair clinging to her skull. She looked childish in her white pyjamas with forget-me-nots embroidered on the collar. Laura was clumsily unwinding bandages from one hand with the opposite hand, which was itself still half-bandaged. Spirals of gauze hung from both her hands. There was blood on her lips. And there were bruises on her arms. Dark bands of bruise, as though she had been tied, but not rope-burnt. Rose remembered that, all day, Laura had kept her arms covered, sometimes holding the ends of her sleeves in her hands in order to do so.
‘Laura,’ Grace said.
Laura looked up at her aunt and cousin. She looked, but didn’t react to what she saw. Her face was blank, closed. She shook the bandages from her fingers’ ends and looked about. Then she began to shout.
Rose couldn’t make any sense of what her cousin was yelling, though she could hear Laura clearly, since the screams behind all the Opera’s padded doors had, for the most part, subsided to sobs. What Laura yelled was maddeningly ridiculous and, briefly, Rose felt like joining in — or adding, ‘Verb! Adjective! Adverb!’ Because Laura was shouting, ‘Noun!’
The shadow appeared. He burst through one of the doors from another private suite. He had run around the balconies through all the partitions. He had broken down all the doors.
Rose saw a massive, glittering, silvery statue. A statue that moved, and looked about with eyes banded black, as though encrusted with tiny flakes of jet. The calm, noble face turned her way, then swung towards Laura as she stretched out her arms to him.
Rose tried to tear herself away from her mother, who was clutching her, grappling with Rose as she tried to struggle free and go to Laura. To save Laura.
Laura held her arms out to the statue. It swooped on her, caught her up and rushed away into the nearest stairway — the one that led down to the dreamer’s door.
Rose ran after them, then stopped when she saw the sparkle of broken glass on the carpeted stai
rs. She had bare feet.
LAURA COULDN’T SPARE her aunt — the dreamer she had to mount. She couldn’t spare Sandy — who she hadn’t imagined would be there — or any of the other innocents. She couldn’t spare the pregnant woman, the sight of whom had appalled and very nearly stopped her. She had still gone through with it. She had followed her father’s letter. She had stuck to her resolve.
But, early that morning, before her train came into Founderston, and after she had seen Nown off it — pushing him on to the track near the muddy riverbank — Laura sat down to mix Wakeful into the jar of Farry’s musk cream before spooning it into the toffee shells. She did that so that Rose, Rose at least, would be spared waking up in her coffin.
Six
The police who arrived at the Rainbow Opera, summoned to quell a riot, discovered many of the Opera’s patrons spilling out into the freezing street. They seemed desperate for air. Many were brushing at their faces, as though to remove some obstruction only they could see. Some had clawed long, red channels on their own faces and necks.
The police entered the building through hallways marked by bloody handprints. They encountered men and women who were still gnawing at their own hands — some fortunately restrained by calmer friends. The Opera stank of vomit. Many of the Opera’s patrons were sitting on the balconies, pale and stunned, their luxurious nightclothes torn. But, the police found, it was no riot. For while some people were shouting and flinging themselves about, most simply sat, holding one another and crying quietly.
The police first established that the President of the Republic had been taken to safety by his own bodyguards. Then they located the Secretary of the Interior. Cas Doran was leaning on his balcony rail, his arms rigid and shaking. He was surrounded by his own bodyguards, who were jumpy and kept glancing nervously about, but were listening to Secretary Doran as he issued instructions.
The constables then noticed that a large group of angry men were clustered around the door to the President’s private balcony. They persuaded the crowd to disperse, then broke down the door and found Grace Tiebold and her daughter. The dreamhunter was placed under arrest, and escorted from the Opera through angry crowds, gathering ambulances, jostling reporters and a stampede of black-suited officials from the Dream Regulatory Body.
Seven
Laura and Nown left the Isle of the Temple by the railway bridge to the east. Nown carried her. He walked from board to board along the top of the bridge, over the running water that was deadly to him.
He cradled her, his arms so long in comparison to her body that he could warm her bare feet in one hand — a cold hand, but it kept her toes from the night air. He held her as he could hold heat, and her breath blowing against his fake collarbone warmed him all the way to the back of his neck.
Nown strode on, stepping on every third sleeper on the track, passing beneath the barred windows of the houses that backed on to the railway line in the Old Town. There was no one looking out of those windows. Not a soul to see them go by.
It had been raining and the sleepers were wet, the rainwater sitting on spills of engine oil. But Nown’s sandy soles never slipped, and their progress was smooth.
They passed through the Old Town and into the suburbs, over crossings whose striped warning barriers were up, saluting the sky. Nown stepped aside for one train. They went on past backyards where damp work clothes and aprons and nappies hung from clothes lines. They passed properties where dogs erupted from their kennels only to baulk, whining, then scuttle back into shelter again.
Nown carried Laura beside ditches choked with brambles, and banks covered in newly planted trees — budding birches and willows.
The railway line would, eventually, take them to the stop near Marta Hame’s house. That was where Laura had asked Nown to take her.
She lay quiet. She didn’t stir till they reached the country. Then her head moved from where it rested against his shoulder to look around at the slender birches that clacked and ticked in the night breeze.
‘Nown,’ she said, ‘in the train last night, did I tell you to stop talking to me?’
‘No.’
‘I think I did.’
‘You said, “You’re hurting me.” You had told the eighth, “Don’t hurt me.”’
Nown had let himself be guided by an order she’d given his earlier self. He’d tried to help her, and she’d silenced him.
Laura hitched herself up in his arms. She felt the smooth bandage of sand that wrapped her feet separate, and round out into fingers once more. She climbed Nown, flexed her legs so that she could get her arms up over one of his shoulders. Laura looked behind him — not back along the track — but at the back of his neck. She looked at the letters of his name. NOWN. She thought of the words of the song her father taught her:
Two letters remain within,
death and freedom.
Make his name his Own and he is.
She reached around and used one finger to erase the first N in his name. His name now read: ‘OWN’. She knew that, if she properly understood the way the spell worked, she had just set her servant free.
Nown hesitated; he broke stride. He faltered, but he didn’t stop walking.
Laura sank back into the cradle of his arms, and he once again picked up his pace, kept on steadily striding along between the rails.
Shortly before dawn it began to rain. Laura watched the big drops absorbed by Nown’s sandy skin. She saw the rain spots join together to become dark patches. Nown stooped his shoulders, and bent his head down over Laura to shelter her from the rain. His face was near to hers.
She said to him, ‘You might melt.’
And he said, ‘If I melt, you can make me again.’
Story concludes in Book Two: Dreamquake
* * *
Dare to sleep …
if you can …
until Elizabeth Knox’s Dreamquake,
the breathtaking sequel to
Dreamhunter
* * *
Copyright
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, Australia
First published in Australia in 2005
This edition published in 2012
by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Limited
ABN 36 009 913 517
www.harpercollins.com.au
Copyright © Elizabeth Knox 2005
The right of Elizabeth Knox to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000.
This work is copyright.
Apart from any use as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced, copied, scanned, stored in a retrieval system, recorded, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Knox, Elizabeth.
Dreamhunter.
ISBN 0 7322 8193 8
ISBN: 978-0-7304-9856-8
I. Title.
A823.4
Dreamhunter Page 30