Dreamhunter Read online

  ‘It is better to be careful,’ the ranger said. He focused on a point above Rose’s bleached straw sunhat and composed himself into a stiff state of official dignity. He looked block-headed.

  ‘Come on, girls,’ Grace said. She turned Rose and Laura around and propelled them back along the track.

  Laura swallowed hard to suppress her sigh of relief.

  The ranger hovered for a moment. He seemed to realise that Tziga Hame meant to stay put, so followed Grace and the girls.

  AT WHYNEW FALLS, Laura’s uncle Chorley Tiebold filmed the other picnickers as they requested. He shot them pointing up at the waterfall, wet from spray. He filmed them jostling and giggling at the pool’s edge.

  When he was finished Chorley packed up his movie camera, hoisted it on to his shoulder and followed his neighbours back along the track. He was itching to get back to his workshop in Summerfort, the family’s house at Sisters Beach. He wanted to see whether he’d managed to capture on film the scales of shadow pushing down the white face of the cascade. Chorley picked up his pace to catch up with the others. He passed the orange-painted circle of tin tacked to a tree trunk — the border marker. He went on a few steps then, for some reason, glanced back. He saw the track, tree ferns, grey knotted sinews of a red-bush vine. Then he saw a flicker of colour and shadow in the air, and his brother-in-law Tziga materialised on the track behind him.

  Chorley flinched. He had filmed this phenomenon — of people passing into and out of the Place at its busiest border post, the cairn beyond Doorhandle. It was Chorley’s best-known film; he’d sold copies to all corners of the world. Everyone wanted to know just what it looked like — and that it didn’t look like trick photography. It didn’t. It was a quiet, unfussy, terrifying sight. The only time Chorley had seen it and hadn’t felt frightened was when, shortly before they married, he and Grace had played a stalking game in the long grass on the bluff above the river at Tricksie Bend. Grace, inside the Place, hadn’t known where Chorley would be outside it, and he hadn’t known where she would emerge. She jumped back and forth, sometimes startled to find he was close by and could grab her. It had made Chorley anxious, made his heart ache to see Grace come and go like that — to go where he couldn’t follow. But it was magical too.

  ‘There you are,’ said Tziga. ‘You always come last when you’re carrying your camera.’ Tziga stepped around Chorley and walked ahead of him, turning back now and then to speak. Looking up, for Chorley was quite a bit taller. ‘You know — there’s far too much interest in Laura and Rose’s Try,’ he said.

  Chorley couldn’t remember anyone mentioning the girls’ Try at the picnic. Not even Rose, who was more excited the nearer the event came. Chorley said, ‘I may be following you, Tziga —’ he poked his brother-in-law with the legs of his camera ‘— but I don’t follow you.’

  ‘There’s too much interest in the outcome of their Try. That’s all I’m saying. I don’t want them besieged with publicity, or contracts.’

  ‘That’s why we’ve bought them hats with veils; to keep their faces out of the newspapers,’ Chorley said. ‘To keep it all as private as possible. We could, at least, all agree to do that much. You do realise that I’ve been trying to talk to you — and Grace — about this for months now?’

  ‘I know. But there was never any question that they’d Try as soon as the law allowed.’

  Chorley took one hand off his precious camera to grab Tziga’s arm. ‘I questioned it,’ he said. ‘The law can say what it likes, but I think they’re still too young.’

  ‘They want to Try,’ Tziga said. He looked very unhappy.

  Chorley said, ‘Rose wants to — Laura just doesn’t want to be left out.’ He watched Tziga’s face go remote. Even Chorley, who knew his brother-in-law better than anyone, couldn’t tell if Tziga was offended, angry to be told something about his own daughter that he should know himself, or whether he had just dropped down into a colder and deeper reach of his usual sadness. ‘Tziga,’ Chorley said, and gave the arm he held a little shake. He was annoyed with himself for poking the chisel of his complaints into this crack in Tziga’s certainty. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘it’ll soon be over. It’ll be decided one way or the other.’

  ‘Yes.’

  Chorley told Tziga to get a move on. The others would wonder where they were. ‘You do know it will be all right whatever happens,’ Chorley said, as they went along. ‘I’m not a dreamhunter and I’m all right. Grace and you are dreamhunters, and you are too — all right, I mean. Aren’t you?’ Chorley gave Tziga yet another chance to confide in him, to tell him why, lately, he’d seemed so hunted.

  Tziga just made a faint affirmative noise, then asked his brother-in-law if this was the camera he wanted him to take into the Place.

  Chorley immediately forgot his worries. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Are you saying you will? Finally?’

  Tziga said yes, he’d take Chorley’s camera In tomorrow.

  Chorley was rapt, and for the next hour, long after they caught up with the others, he talked. He gave instructions, advice, almost gave a shooting script for the film he most wanted to make, but couldn’t make himself.

  Tziga only interrupted once, when they reached the cars, which were parked at the gate of the farm beside Whynew Reserve. Tziga said to Grace, ‘There he is,’ and tilted his head in the direction of a man in a brown dustcoat, a shadow against the tangled trunks of the whiteywood forest.

  ‘He’s seeing us off,’ Grace growled.

  ‘Who is it?’ Chorley asked.

  ‘A ranger,’ said Rose.

  Chorley saw Grace give Rose and Laura a sharp look. The girls got into the car. Chorley said to the dreamhunters, ‘Do you think that ranger is watching you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said Grace.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tziga, ‘I’m being watched. The Regulatory Body has a big investment in me. Contracts. That sort of thing.’ Tziga made one of the gestures peculiar to him — a gesture of crumbling something in his right hand and casting it away into the air. Then he went around the front of the car to crank it for Chorley.

  Two

  The ranger came in at the end of the day and shut himself in his hotel room. It was a room without a sea view, but looked along the Strand towards the hill at the western end of Sisters Beach, and the gates of Summerfort, the Hame and Tiebold beach house. The ranger opened his windows — dragged an armchair across the room and sat facing the view. He pulled a crumpled paper from his coat pocket. It was a letter containing his instructions. He looked again at the figures pencilled on its back. He had been doing sums, figuring how best to spend his extra cash.

  The letter told the ranger to tail Tziga Hame.

  … the dreamhunter has failed to register the location of a dream about which I have grave concerns. Keep close to Hame at all times. As he is concealing a site, it is reasonable to suppose that he will attempt to enter the Place on a quiet section of the border, and without registering his intentions at a rangers’ station. Follow him and find out where he goes.

  And — this cannot be stressed enough — do not sleep when or where Hame sleeps.

  The ranger had spent that day lurking in the beech forest near Hame’s picnic party. The picnickers fortunately hadn’t any dogs and the ranger had been able to position himself between the group who went up the track to admire the Whynew Falls, and the two dreamhunters and their unTried daughters. He hadn’t expected to run into the four right by the border. He’d been just as surprised as they were. It was an awkward moment.

  As he sat at the hotel window, the ranger decided that he would not report today’s incident. He was afraid that he’d be taken off his lucrative job, a job he was no longer the best man for, now he had been seen by his quarry. If Hame spotted him again, the dreamhunter would know for sure that the ranger hadn’t just stumbled upon him. He would know he was being followed. The encounter near the falls was unfortunate, but the ranger decided that he would not let it ruin his opportunity to earn some good money.


  He produced matches from his coat pocket and tore the letter in half, kept the portion with his calculations and set a burning match to the other half. He held it while it flared up, then released the flaming fragment on to the evening breeze and watched it blow away, shedding threads of floating embers.

  Three

  Laura dragged herself out of bed early and went downstairs in order to see her father off on his latest foray into the Place.

  As she pushed through the padded doors to the kitchen Laura heard singing. The song was strange, and the sound of it made her scalp prickle. She reacted to the music before she recognised the singer’s voice. It was her father — singing something disturbing and incomprehensible.

  When Laura appeared her father stopped in the middle of a phrase. The air in the room smelt of porridge, and brown sugar, and something else — moisture and electricity. It was as if her father had been joined for breakfast by a thunderstorm.

  Laura pushed a chair up next to his, sat down and leant against him. She said, groggy, ‘Has someone left a door open? Is it going to rain?’

  He put his arm around her. There were two places set at the table, two empty teacups and one empty porridge plate. Tziga’s plate was still full. He had gathered the glutinous oatmeal into a mound and had shaped the mound into rough, mealy sculpture, a face.

  Laura picked up a napkin and wiped her father’s fingers clean. ‘Who is that supposed to be?’ she said.

  Tziga smiled. ‘Someone bran-knew,’ he said.

  Laura giggled. ‘Bran new and feeling his oats,’ she said. Then, ‘What were you singing, Da?’

  Laura’s father rested his cheek against her hair. ‘“The Measures”,’ he said. ‘A song my great-grandfather taught me. Or, rather, tried to teach me. He was always trying to teach me and your aunt Marta the old folk songs he knew. I was too young and callow then to understand that the songs were our family inheritance. The songs, and stories, and — other things. I used to say to the old man that I hadn’t time for that ancient stuff, that I was expected to earn a living, and that nobody in the fashionable places wanted to hear “Of His Name” or “A Stitch in Time”.’ Laura’s father sighed. ‘So I never did master “The Measures”. I’ve been trying to remember how it goes.’

  ‘I didn’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘You wouldn’t. It’s koine, demotic Greek, the common tongue of the Roman Empire. Or rather, half the song is in koine, the rest of it is just sounds, what doctors in insane asylums would call glossolalia — articulate, nonsensical noises — noises like words. A priest would call it “talking in tongues”. So — perhaps “The Measures” might be described as a mixture of koine and tongues.’

  Laura leant away from her father to take a good look at his face. She asked him whether his great-grandfather ever told him where he had heard the song.

  ‘Do you know the story about how the survivors from the island of Elprus first came to settle in Founderston?’

  This was something Laura had had in her history classes. She knew that Elprus was an island depopulated some 200 years before by a catastrophic volcanic eruption. Most of the island’s population were poisoned and buried when the volcano in its centre vented corrosive gas and a burning cloud of ash that filled the air for fifty miles and fifteen days. The survivors were either from the island’s fishing fleet, or merchant traders — those who were at sea when the volcano blew. They were gathered together by Laura’s ancestor, one John Hame. The history books said that this John Hame took the Elpra far across the seas to Southland, finally to settle in Founderston, then a small pioneer settlement around a fort and river port. But, before they left their island, the survivors excavated their main holy site, the tomb of St Lazarus. (Lazarus of the gospels, whom Jesus raised from the dead, had apparently spent most of his long, miraculously restored life on Elprus. There he had married, fathered children, worked his own miracles, written his own gospel, grown old and died — again.) John Hame and the other Elpra dug down through the ash to the saint’s tomb, removed his bones and carried them away.

  Laura said to her father, ‘I know the story. Our ancestor brought the relics that are now in the Temple.’

  ‘Yes. “The Measures” was passed down through our family. It’s the oldest of all the Hame songs. Legend has it that John Hame was a descendent of St Lazarus. That’s why “Lazarus” is a family name.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Well — it’s a story I inherited, not one I made up.’

  Laura pulled a face and said, ‘But it can’t be proven, right? It’s what Uncle Chorley would call unscientific.’

  ‘History, unlike science, doesn’t need repeatable proofs. A story can be true if its sources are sound. The gospels are a good source of things Chorley would call unscientific. Saint Lazarus’s gospel mentions a song he heard in the tomb. But the Gospel according to Lazarus is the only documentary source. All the rest of it is lore — family lore.’

  Laura gave her father a worried look. ‘I would have thought that all St Lazarus heard in the tomb was Jesus telling him to come forth.’

  ‘Yes — to return to the land of the living. But perhaps Jesus was singing.’ Laura’s father blushed and pressed his lips together. He’d said something blasphemous, and was embarrassed by it.

  ‘Da, you’d better stop before Uncle Chorley comes back. You wouldn’t want to offend his irreligious feelings.’

  Tziga laughed. ‘Chorley’s getting the car out and putting his camera in it. And, probably, fifty pages of instructions. Perhaps, when I come back, I should pretend I forgot to remove the cap on the lens. See what he does.’

  Chorley Tiebold was hard to tease, even-tempered and too quick to fool easily. But the fact that Chorley was so hard to tease meant that it was a challenge — a challenge which his wife, children and brother-in-law frequently took on.

  ‘No one thinks you’re that vague, Da. And you shouldn’t start acting vague in case you do forget something important, like coming back in time for my Try!’ She let go of her father and drew back so that she could hold his gaze.

  ‘You will make sure to be back in time, won’t you?’

  Tziga nodded.

  ‘You can just go In and get something therapeutic for the old ladies who go to matinees at The Beholder. A nice dream for the afternoon naps of vacationing biddies. Promise,’ said Laura.

  ‘Sweetheart …’

  ‘Just promise.’

  Tziga put his hands, still slightly tacky with porridge, on either side of Laura’s face. He said to her, ‘Darling — do you want to be a dreamhunter?’

  ‘Yes!’ She was surprised, but answered instantly. ‘And before you ask me — no, I don’t mind being tired all the time; being in and out of different worlds; being weirdly imperilled. I’ve heard you say that to Aunt Grace — “weirdly imperilled”. And she always says, “Some things are worth the risk.” I am very nervous about my Try, but dreamhunting is worth the risk — isn’t it?’

  Laura’s father sighed. He looked sad. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is. But not to supply tonics for old ladies at matinees.’

  ‘But, Da, that’s just this week. So you’ll be back in time for my Try.’ Laura kissed her father on his cheek. Then Chorley came into the room, grinned, said, ‘Good girl, I’m glad you got up,’ and ruffled her hair. Then he began to hustle Tziga out of the house. Laura went with them. She carried her father’s bedroll. Chorley carried Tziga’s pack and water bottles. They put everything in the car and Laura stood, dew soaking the hem of her nightgown, waving until the car disappeared down the drive.

  Four

  A week after Laura’s father had left on his latest expedition, she and Rose lay bundled up beside a fire on the beach beneath Summerfort. They had a pile of firewood near at hand and were nursing the flames stick by stick so that they would provide a pleasant heat. Rose had scorched her blanket earlier in the evening, and when her father came to check on them before he went to bed, he noticed the black-edged holes in th
e material and said, ‘If you can’t be more careful then you’d better put out your fire and come indoors.’ They’d promised to be more careful and, before he left, Chorley had filled a pail with seawater so that they could douse the fire and decamp any time they wanted.

  All the other beach fires had been put out. The stars were coming clearer as the land cooled and the forest on the high headland to the east finished breathing out a day of sun in the form of heat distortion. Those stars at the zenith were steady, cold, and piercing.

  The sea was calm. The tide had turned only an hour before. The girls could hear an occasional flipping splash as a small fish feeding on insects was startled up into the air by a larger fish hoping to feed on it. Laura, who lay facing the curve of the bay, could feel heat on the back of her neck radiating from the rocks at the skirt of Summerfort’s headland. There was flax growing on the rocks, and Laura could smell its baked black flowers, and the perfume of the tea tree scrub.

  Earlier in the evening they had done a round of other fires, chatting with this and that friend — people they saw only in summer. They cooked potatoes in the embers of their own fire — then peeled them in the shallows and let seawater cool and salt them. They baked clams open on a sheet of tin, then balanced a pot on the embers to brew black tea. They toasted marshmallows and scalded their lips with molten sugar. They sang songs and cooled their overheated feet in the sea. Now they were tired, and taking slow turns to speak about what they had ahead of them.

  The trip back to the capital, Founderston, was quite a journey, ten hours by rail, for when the railway line to Coal Bay had been built, fifteen years before, it was built to safely skirt the borders of the Place. The family travelled back on an overnight train and their arrival in Founderston always seemed an abrupt end to the summer. Founderston was inland, and colder. Their house, the Tiebold town house, was grand but old, built of stone, not timber like Summerfort. It faced the river, the bright Sva, but its windows were small, leaded and composed of tiny panes of greenish, uneven glass. The house had electricity, and a fireplace in every room, but seemed close and gloomy. Its walls and doors were thick, and anyone closed in a room alone felt alone.