Dreamhunter (3 page)

The ranger lay concealed in a thicket of brown gorse by the dry riverbed. His view of Tziga Hame was unimpeded by haze or shade. The scene was saturated with light, as though the sun had dissolved, whitening the air. It had taken the ranger hours to creep close to his quarry. The Place was silent, so there were no sounds to mask his approach, no birdsong, sawing insect chorus, or wind. For each movement he’d made the ranger had had to wait for Hame to make some covering noise. He’d been patient, and was now in a good position.

Tziga Hame knelt in a damp excavation in the dry riverbed. He had unwound the bandages from his hands in order to use them. His injuries were troubling him, and it was his pained gasping that had served to mask much of the ranger’s stealthy rustling. His hands were
now gloved with a mixture of blood, blue clay from the riverbank and silver river sand. He was sculpting. A form was beginning to emerge from the long mound of sand beside his excavation. He worked quickly, as if against a clock, or in a competition.

This impression jogged the ranger’s memory. He remembered Hame’s picture in the
Summertime Weekly
, the newspaper of Sisters Beach. The ranger had seen the picture among other photos taken at an annual sand-sculpting competition. In the picture, Hame, barefoot, his trousers rolled, stood behind his daughter and niece — girls really too old for buckets and spades — and their competition entry, the recumbent form of a man made of sand.

It occurred to the ranger that this was what Hame was busy sculpting now — a recumbent human figure. Hame’s work was quick, but not crude. It seemed he had practised.

The ranger was puzzled, and attempted to make mental notes for the report he would have to give. A verbal report, since the man for whom he was tailing Hame wouldn’t want anything committed to paper.

For the last seventy-two hours the ranger had been chewing a grainy paste of Wakeful, a narcotic that dreamhunters and rangers used to stave off sleep. The ranger knew he was no longer at his best and hoped his watch would end soon. It must — for Tziga Hame had put his first wad of the drug into his own mouth forty-eight hours before. Hame would need to sleep soon. He
hadn’t any time to muck around, yet here he was, digging, patting, shaping sand, like a child at play — except that he moaned as he worked. For, as he worked, Hame was driving dirt into the wounds on his hands.

The ranger had picked up Hame’s trail the day after the picnic. He followed Hame into the Place. The dream-hunter had led him deeper into that silent wilderness than he’d ever been on his normal patrols. Hame was hard to follow — he’d been followed before, by claim-jumping dreamhunters back in the days before the Place was patrolled. The dreamhunter was wary, and slow, and the ranger had kept nearly overtaking him. Hame was burdened with the usual provisions, food and water and a sleeping roll, but he also carried a movie camera, a big instrument with a collapsible crank and telescopic brass legs. Chorley Tiebold’s movie camera.

Hame had led the ranger deep into the pressing silence of the Place. And, as he walked, the ranger worked on his verbal report. He composed it in his head, and rehearsed it. It was terse. ‘I followed Mr Hame fifty-two hours In. He made camp at a place with a ruin, a burnt timber-frame building of some considerable size, standing at the edge of what appeared to be an expanse of dry seabed. Hame set up his camera, pointed its lens at the building and cranked its handle for two minutes by my watch. After that Mr Hame ate, then settled himself to sleep. He caught a dream.’

A bad dream the ranger could add, were he able to find some way of describing what he had seen.

The ranger had watched Hame struggle in his sleep, moving violently, but as though constrained, as though he were beating his forehead, elbows and knees against invisible walls. The ranger’s report would have to include an explanation of the wounds on Hame’s hands. But how to put it? Perhaps like this:

Mr Hame appeared to be distressed by his dream. He tore at his own hands with his teeth. I could not say for certain if he was asleep or awake when he inflicted these injuries on himself.

A report was required to give directions, to record actions, to measure the duration of events. The ranger had stayed under cover and watched Hame suffer some horrible, mysterious ordeal. He had trembled with the effort of remaining still and hidden, of not rushing to the dreamhunter’s aid. He had never felt more alone — alone with his task and its limitations. Still he composed his notes. ‘At fifty-seven hours Hame broke camp and carried the camera back to grid reference Y–17.’

Back on to the known map. But how should the ranger describe what he was watching now, at grid reference Y–17? When Tziga Hame began to dig in the riverbed the concealed watcher had thought that perhaps Hame meant to bury the camera, or the cartridge of film. He saw Hame’s hands bleed, and listened to his hoarse breathing. He saw mad purpose in the man’s actions.

‘At grid reference Y–17 Hame dug a trench …’ thought the ranger, attempting to compose his report, to shape it, as Hame’s hands were shaping the long mound of sand — making a man of it. Hame was using clay as well, to fashion forms too delicate for sand to hold. He made hands from the clay and laid them at the ends of the arms. The shape he’d sculpted on the riverbed was that of a man with a broad torso and powerful limbs, a man half again Hame’s height.

The ranger cowered in the tunnel of dry gorse, his shirt collar clutched over his mouth, although the vegetable dust he’d stirred up had long since settled. He watched Hame scrape the blood and soil from his hands and use this paste to form a face for his sandman. Hame took his time, and took care. But
why
? This waterless crease of unpopulated land, this most remote of remotenesses, was no place to pursue a hobby or perfect an art.

Hame sat back on his heels and surveyed his work. He nodded slowly to himself. He took out his water bottle and splashed the last of his water over his hands to wash them. His injuries oozed blood through scabs of sand. Hame raised his hands up over his head, to ease the flow of blood, the ranger supposed, though Hame seemed to be praying. Indeed, the ranger imagined he heard Hame
singing
softly.

For long moments Hame remained in this incantatory position and the ranger, tormented by
puzzlement and gorse prickles, was only able to get a little relief by formulating a final sentence, at last allowing himself to express an opinion: ‘Hame’s behaviour was highly irrational and I believe he requires further close observation.’

‘I’ve warned them,’ thought the ranger, though he hadn’t. He was miles and hours away from the end of his task — the delivery of his report — and alone with crazy Hame.

Hame finished his appeal to the gods. He put his hands down and stooped over his figure once more. He hesitated, one finger pointed at the figure’s face. Then he leant closer and wrote with a fingertip on its sandy forehead.

The ranger could have sworn that the air became suddenly humid, as on certain sorts of summer days the sun uncovers itself and creates a heat sink from the water vapour in the air. But it wasn’t waterborne heat that thickened the parched air. It was something else. Something as stifling and invisible as humidity, but not made of water.

The figure, the man made of sand, got up out of the excavation. It stood up before Hame — stood up to face its maker. It shimmered, its surface blurring, the sand there in motion like smoke rising.

The ranger gasped and flung himself back through the tunnel in the gorse. He rolled free of the thicket, out into the open and ran. He heard Hame call out — an angry summons, or perhaps an order.

The ranger was fit and fast, and there were times, as he fled, when he imagined he’d finally been able to outstrip what followed him — till he caught again its soft approach, the hissing, sifting sound of its walk.

The first thing Laura saw when she opened her eyes was a seabird, a shag, standing in the shelter of a big log at the high-tide line. It stood with one wing tucked into its side, and the other drooping, tip trailing in the sand. The bird was injured. Laura wriggled out of her bedroll and crawled towards it. She came closer, but it seemed not to see her, didn’t even turn its head until she was right beside it, and her human shadow was at its feet. Then it looked at her, dazed and exhausted, and shuffled a few feet away from her. It moved slowly, stumbling as it went.

Laura shook her cousin awake. For the next quarter of an hour they discussed the bird, what to do about it, what might have happened to it. There had been a big blow four nights earlier — perhaps the bird had been hurt then. They were planning to catch it in a blanket
and carry it up to the house, when Rose’s father appeared.

The girls had lain awake talking and thinking until dewfall, then until the cool perfume of dew gave way to the smell of bread from the two bakeries along the seafront of the resort. They’d had only a few hours’ sleep, so it was easy for Rose’s father to talk them out of their plans of rescue. He asked which of them knew how to set a broken wing? And, if the wing was only wrenched, perhaps the bird might still gather its strength and fly away. He suggested that, if they wanted to go to bed till lunchtime, he could check on the bird now and then.

Rose and Laura went up the beach yawning. Chorley bundled up their bedrolls and picked up their picnic basket. He doused the grey but still smoking coals of their fire.

Once his daughter and niece were in bed, Chorley went back down to the beach to find the shag lying face down in the sand. Its head was turned and its smooth feathers and round shoulders made it look like a sleeping baby. Chorley picked it up and carried it down to the water. The tide was still going out, and if he threw the bird far enough the tide would carry its body away. He would tell the girls that it had been gone when he’d checked. He wouldn’t lie for Rose, who would think that the bird’s death was a shame, and might wonder whether or not it might have been better off if she had taken it up to the house — she’d wonder, but she was
tough-minded, and the bird’s death wouldn’t trouble her. Chorley disposed of the small corpse for Laura’s sake. Laura had said, ‘How lonely it looks. How tired.’ Laura was sensitive, and her uncle had the habit of protecting her from upset whenever he could.

Laura was the only child of Chorley’s dead sister — his only sibling. He loved his daughter, naturally, but Laura was all he had left of Verity.

Verity and Chorley Tiebold had been inseparable, and so, after they married they combined their households. The brother and sister were support for each other in their mutual peculiar marriages to the great dreamhunters. Grace and Tziga were friends. Friends who went away for weeks at a time, foraging for dreams. When the girls were born their care naturally fell to Verity and Chorley. It had
made sense
for them all to live together. To throw in together, financially.

But, when Verity’s marriage was only five years old, and her daughter only four, she became ill, and it became apparent that she wouldn’t recover.

The family, so dedicated to one another, and to their unconventional lives, had found themselves facing a slow, creeping disaster. They were already financially overextended by Chorley’s ambitions to restore the Tiebold estates, refurbish the Tiebold town house and build a beautiful summer residence at Sisters Beach. They had to struggle to keep up payments.

Yet, while Grace scaled up her dreamhunting to meet the family’s commitments, there came a time when
Tziga would only leave his wife to catch the kind of dreams that might help restore her health. Later, he caught the kind of dreams that might prolong her life. And, at the last, he sought and pursued the kind of dreams that might help ease her dying. Tziga caught and performed for nobody but his wife. Every night, for Verity alone. She and he would disappear together into her darkened sickroom, and into his dreams. Apart from his hurried forays into the Place, Tziga was always with Verity. His savings ran out. Chorley and Grace supported him, and his neglected daughter. To Chorley it seemed that his sister, in dying, was taking her husband with her. He imagined that Verity would die in her sleep — in Tziga’s sleep — and that neither would wake.

In the end Chorley begged his sister to stop Tziga. He was in anguish, torn in two, but he said to her, ‘Please, dear, you must refuse his help now. You must ask him not to go to the Place again. Please — can you
please
try to go from us awake? Forgive me. But please, Verity, don’t let Tziga go with you in his sleep.’

Verity promised to do what her brother asked. ‘But only when my time has come,’ she said. She postponed her sacrifice, while Tziga worked to banish her pain and stave off her death. Little Laura asked her Uncle Chorley, ‘Is Daddy sick too?’ Even the child could see how it was — that her father was desperately active, but fading.

Tziga went away to get another dream. ‘It’s only overnight,’ he promised his wife. ‘Be brave.’ When he’d
gone Chorley told his sister what her daughter had said. Verity asked to see Laura. They had a little talk. Then Verity kissed her daughter, and sent her off to play. She summoned Chorley and Grace. She said she wanted to get up. She put on a robe and they helped her out on to the terrace. She sat watching the river traffic go by in the afternoon sunlight. An hour later Chorley and Grace carried her in, unconscious. They called the doctor, and watched by her bed, and, in the small hours, Verity Hame died without ever coming around again.

Tziga carried his dream home, and found a hearse parked at his gate.

Verity’s funeral was held three days later. Tziga stood at his wife’s graveside, his eyes sunken in circles of bruises.

HE REFUSED TO
sleep or eat, took nothing at the funeral breakfast and sat in the chief mourner’s chair oblivious to the approaches of friends and relations, who steeled themselves to come up to him and offer their sympathy; oblivious to his daughter, who was ruining her black velvet dress by lying on the floor under his chair.

When the guests had gone, and the girls had been carried off to bed, Tziga prowled about the house. Chorley got out of bed at dawn to find Tziga in the kitchen yard, his head held under the stream from the pump. ‘You can’t stay awake for ever,’ Chorley told him — though he could smell the spice of Wakeful in Tziga’s sweat, and see that his lips were stained mauve from the drug.

‘This dream isn’t anyone else’s,’ Tziga said. ‘It was for her. The best yet. The best I’ve ever caught.’ He raised his wet, white face and glared at his brother-in-law. ‘You can bury me with it,’ he said.

By the next morning he was swaying and stumbling. He stumbled on the stairs and sat on the landing with his head hanging. Chorley followed him about. Tziga called him a vulture, and threw things at him. Grace sent the servants away and sat with the girls in the nursery. She read to them, sang lullabies and put them in their beds. She listened to the house. Rose’s bright, sleepless eyes regarded her mother through the white mosquito net around her bed. Laura poked her head out of her netting — sat veiled in it, like a little communicant. At sunset Chorley found Tziga holding himself up against a doorframe, on which he was rhythmically beating his head. Chorley inserted his hand between the bloodied moulding and Tziga’s oozing forehead. Then Tziga collapsed and Chorley picked him up. Tziga was light, worn thin by walking inland after the consoling beauties of the Place, by watching, by keeping himself awake. Chorley carried Tziga to his and Grace’s bed.

Tziga woke in the morning — at the same time as a whole city block woke weeping with joy at a dream so powerful and beautiful that it altered each one of its dreamers for ever, a dream caught to carry a beloved, pain-racked woman into paradise. Tziga woke, weeping himself, and saw that Grace was beside him, and
Chorley beside her, looking over her shoulder with pouring eyes, and between them were the little girls, Rose laughing at her dream with nervous, puzzled delight, and Laura calling alternately ‘Mummy!’ and ‘Rosie!’ — as though she wanted to share some wonderful news but didn’t know who to tell first. Tziga could feel his dream echoing in the city like a thunderclap. He lay floating in breathing light. Grace cupped his wet face in both her hands, and Chorley’s hands covered hers.

Tziga wasn’t good for much after that. He rested, and the bills mounted up. Grace, meanwhile, foraged deep into the Place, looking for wonders and novelties, overwriting one dream with another till she got something she knew she could sell at a very high price. Sometimes she would encounter dreamhunters who had abandoned their own plans in order to wait for her, dreamhunters who would offer to empty their heads for her. She was exhausted — so they might also offer to carry her out. They’d carry her out, and delete their own dreams, replacing them with what she had — not so that they could part from her and peddle their poor copies of her dreams, but so that they could act as amplifiers, dream in unison with her, lie down with her, share the dreamer’s bed and a small part of her fee. For, remembering with what force her presence in Tziga’s sleep had amplified his last dream, Grace was ready to accept these offers.

Chorley was busy. He reorganised the family’s finances — budgeting and juggling due dates on
payments. He kept Tziga company — Grace had been very clear to him about this. ‘Tziga has to get well,’ she’d said. ‘He’s worth more than we are. He is the beauty of dreamhunting. He is the good of it.’

Chorley had the girls to care for. Grace was clear on that score too. ‘Watch poor Laura. And you know, love, I can work, and work, and work, so long as Rose is happy.’

Chorley did all that he had to — and he failed to notice things. He didn’t see the dubious looks people had begun to give him in the street. He didn’t hear the odd, stifled snigger in acquaintances, or see how an embarrassed, fastidious look would appear on the faces of certain friends whenever he spoke about his wife.

One evening he took Tziga out drinking, to shake him out of his misery. At six in the morning, Chorley and Tziga decided to go quietly — or as quietly as a couple of scuffling, giggling drunks can — through the stage door of the Rainbow Opera. They had decided to wait for Grace in one of the galleries (this was before they owned private suites). They’d carry her off for breakfast. They’d go to a café and eat a pile of potato cakes and sour cream, just like they used to. ‘She must want a change of scene,’ Chorley said. ‘She spends half her life in this place — or the Other.’

Chorley and Tziga stumbled up the back stairs to the first-floor gallery. The Opera was silent. The men of the fire watch, who were sitting one level above and opposite, leant out to gesture, fingers across their lips.
Chorley mirrored the gesture. He put a finger to his lips and shushed Tziga. Then he tiptoed to the balustrade and looked over.

Chorley Tiebold saw that his wife was asleep in the Opera’s dais bed and that there were two strangers lying on either side of her.

THE DREAM
Regulatory Body was set up under a piece of legislation known as the Intangible Resources Act. The Body came into existence six weeks after Chorley Tiebold’s discovery and, in a way, owed its existence to him. For Chorley had caused a scene, he and the fire watch had come to blows and some furniture was broken. Grace, hearing her husband’s drunken bluster, flung herself and everyone else out of sleep. Several hundred people woke up abruptly, before the happy conclusion of their dream. It was, one man later told his cronies, like being thrown into an icy pond while in the act of love. Behind the Rainbow Opera’s padded doors people surfaced shouting, gasping and gagging.

There were complaints to the Rainbow Opera, of course. Some patrons demanded the return of their ticket price. Others cancelled their season tickets. The police considered charging Grace Tiebold with criminal negligence. But no current law quite covered what went on in dream palaces.

The newspapers reported the incident, then refused to let the matter drop. For ten years fastidious fear, suspicion and disapproval had been brewing about
dreamhunters and their performances. Even when dreams were only a therapy, even when Tziga Hame was the only one able to broadcast a dream wider than a room, there were people who said that dreams were wicked seductions, that dreamhunters interfered with people’s souls and that the Place was alien and unhallowed. The public was ready for a moral panic, and the newspapers whipped up the public’s fears.

The President called a special meeting of Congress. This was the meeting at which the young Deputy Secretary of the Interior, after making a number of alert and thoughtful remarks, was appointed head of a commission of inquiry.

Over several months the commission called its witnesses, asked its questions and discussed the testimonies. The commission gave its report and its head, Cas Doran, wrote a draft Bill based on its findings. Doran’s Intangible Resources Bill proposed that a body be set up: to regulate traffic In and out of the Place, to police the Place and its bordering countryside, and to act as a licensing body for dream parlours and palaces — deciding where they could be set up, and how they would be run. ‘The Place is not a mirage that will disappear,’ Doran wrote in the commission’s report. ‘It is a valuable resource belonging to our nation and, as such, it cannot be an ungoverned frontier.’

When the Act was passed, and the Dream Regulatory Body set up, and its regulations written, almost everyone was satisfied.

Chorley Tiebold was not. He complained to his wife that nowhere in the regulations did it say that a dreamhunter wasn’t allowed to sleep in the same bed as any amplifiers she used. The legislation got its start in public concern about public morals. Where was that reflected? All the government seemed to care about was that they got
control
.

CHORLEY TIEBOLD STOOD
on the beach, watching the dead shag floating a foot under the calm surface of the morning sea, slowly drawing away in the ebb tide. Chorley was thinking about the life of a dreamhunter. Not ‘the beauty of it’, as his wife had said to him about Tziga all those years before, but its dangers. His daughter and niece might congratulate themselves on having lived in a liberal, adventurous household, but really they’d led sheltered lives. Chorley had led a sheltered life too — and was very grateful for it. He wanted to see the girls grow up surrounded by pleasant, civilised people. Grace, in her fantasies about Rose’s future, couldn’t seem to see past that magical moment on the border, at a Try, where one child in a hundred walks out of the world everyone can see. Dreamhunting had brought Grace everything — fame, wealth, pride in her work. But the girls already had everything they could ever need. They were well off, and well informed and confident. They didn’t need a job that would see them limping home haunted and hollow-eyed, as Tziga often did.
Increasingly
often. If the girls went into the
Place they would be going where Chorley couldn’t walk after them, couldn’t look for them if they got lost. And he was the parent who’d
done
those things, who’d rounded them up at dusk from the safe little park a few streets from their house in Founderston, who’d called them in from the beach below Summerfort. He was the one who was always there at bedtime. Chorley didn’t want his daughter and niece to Try — especially not Laura, who was small for her age, and always had at least one serious cough every winter.