Dreamhunter (27 page)

‘Oh — Sandy!’ Laura said. ‘Sandy —
what are you doing here
?’ It sounded like a lament.

Alexander Mason frowned. ‘You’re not happy to see me?’

Rose thought he was risking an even worse rebuff. She was impressed.

Laura showed more life than she had all day. She jumped up and grabbed Alexander Mason’s hands. She gripped them hard and drew him to her, till they stood chest to chest with their locked hands between them — rather like, Rose thought, singers about to perform a love duet. Rose took a closer look at Mason’s heavy, freckled face, and thought that he wasn’t really her idea of handsome. But Laura looked inspired. Then she
looked confused. She released Mason’s hands. Rose heard him draw a sharp, shocked breath.

Rose said, ‘The Hames can be very dramatic.’ She patted Alexander Mason’s arm. ‘Don’t let it worry you.’

Mason glanced at her, frowned again, then said to Laura, ‘Have you been chewing Wakeful?’ He sounded managing — stern, paternal. If Laura hadn’t been behaving so badly towards him herself, Rose would have been tempted to kick him.

The lights went down another notch. The bells began to chime, the balconies to empty.

‘No, I’ve been sucking a lollipop,’ Laura said. She didn’t seem at all offended.

‘That would be one way of disguising Wakeful,’ said Mason.

‘Why would I? I am going to sleep tonight, to dream,’ Laura said. Her voice was dull.

‘I am here with Uncle George,’ Mason said. He addressed Rose this time — and changed the subject, she was pleased to see. She wasn’t used to being ignored. ‘Your mother asked my uncle to come and help her. She’s been having trouble falling asleep.’ Mason looked over the rail. ‘There he goes,’ he said, and pointed to the balding, burly man climbing the spiral stair to the platform. ‘Since your father’s away,’ Mason said, to Rose, ‘he can’t object. Besides, Uncle’s a portly old gent.’

‘She’s so
sly
,’ Rose said, of her mother. ‘She loves being boosted. Da would have a fit. Your uncle isn’t palsied and doesn’t carry a cane — so Da would
still
object.’

Rose imagined that she could hear people murmuring, even above the bells. She looked about and saw — yes — they were pointing Mason’s uncle out to one another, then looking her way. She resisted an urge to thumb her nose at them.

‘Everyone will fall asleep at once,’ Laura said. ‘Since your uncle is a Soporif. They’ll go down and stay down.’ She looked about, turned her body and her head, as though searching for an avenue of escape. Then she froze, staring.

Rose followed Laura’s gaze and saw that her cousin had caught sight of a pregnant woman. But why should Laura look frozen with fright at the sight of a pregnant woman? Rose reached for Laura’s hand, and her hand collided with Alexander Mason’s — he had reached for Laura too.

Laura turned away from them. ‘I’m going in,’ she muttered. She walked away into the Hame suite and — much to Rose’s surprise — closed the door.

‘I am always upsetting her,’ Mason said.

‘Oh, poor you,’ Rose gushed. Then she said, sharp, ‘And you only sometimes
mean
to.’ She had decided to blame him for Laura’s peculiar mood.

His face went dark. ‘You girls,’ he fumed. ‘You think you own the world.’

‘I shall,’ Rose said, with as much hauteur as she could muster — which was a lot. ‘You had better get back to your nice little room, Alexander.’ Rose said. She turned on her heel and went into the Tiebold suite.

Rose knocked on the connecting door. Laura opened it.

Laura said, ‘I am going to go to bed by myself. My sleeping is all over the place these days. I don’t want to spoil it for you.’

‘All right. If you like.’

‘Have you got your musk creams?’

‘Yes.’ Rose produced the box and opened it. Half the creams had gone already. ‘Take one,’ she offered. ‘They’re very good, though the taste is a little different from the last box I had.’

Laura took one. She said she would eat it in bed. She leant towards Rose and kissed her cheek. Then she closed the door. And Rose thought she heard the sound of the lock turning.

Rose got into bed with her box of creams. She turned the lamp down low. She took one sweet and slowly excavated the musk cream from its cup of toffee. She was cosy, but not at all sleepy. She had too much on her mind. For instance, she’d connected three things in her thoughts — Laura’s sudden inexplicable fondness for raspberry lollipops, her agitation on seeing Alexander Mason and her horrified look at the pregnant woman. ‘
No
, no,
no
,’ Rose said to herself, shaking her head. She had been reading too many ‘educational books’. (Founderston Girls’ Academy had a secret club — the Educational Books Club — which circulated novels that girls their age were not usually allowed to read. Novels in translation with stories where married women had affairs then killed themselves.)

Rose was more excited than worried by the thought that her cousin had ‘got herself into trouble’. After all, if something like that happened they would all look after Laura. Nothing like that could make the family falter in their love. However, Rose’s father might
murder
Alexander Mason … Rose’s thoughts circled, excited and — it seemed to her — loud. Time passed. She finished her musk creams. She tossed and turned. Finally she got up, found a book and turned up the lamp to read. It was one of her father’s books, bought to research a trip the family had planned and hadn’t taken. It was about castles in France.

For a time Rose was lost, floating down a famous river with a guide who delighted in stories of witch trials and walled-up wives.

She heard the clock on Temple Square strike midnight. And, some time after midnight, she heard the screaming start.

SHORTLY AFTER THE
clock struck twelve, the two guards were ambling past the alcove and dreamer’s door, as they had countless times that night. They had just met another pair of guards and exchanged reports. All was well.

The moon was up, its light pulsing through gaps in fast-flying cloud. The wind was higher in the upper atmosphere than on the ground, though the river’s surface was ruffled, its ripples not black, but speckled with the same grey light as the cloud. The torches
on the Opera’s roof had become fluttering banners of fire. They gulped and snapped above the men. The ground was wet and reflected the moon and torchlight.

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.