Part 7 (1/2)
5.
O LONG SPIT'S ”BLINKING BOB” WAS NOT ONE OF THOSE LIGHTHOUSES THAT people lived in, a tower of mortared STONE, CONTAINING A SERIES OF CYLINDRICAL ROOMS AND TOPPED WITH A ROOM HOLDING THE LAMP. ALL THERE WAS TO BLINKING BOB WAS FOUR STEEL LEGS, FOUR LONG FLIGHTS OF STEPS GOING UP IN THE CENTER, AND A SQUARE ROOM WITH GLa.s.s AROUND THE TOP HALF OF ALL FOUR WALLS. THE ROOM HOUSED ONLY THE LAMP, THE MECHANISM THAT MADE THE LAMP REVOLVE, AND SEVERAL CANS OF BENZENE. THE LIGHTHOUSE KEEPERS AND THEIR FAMILIES LIVED IN THREE WEATHERBOARD AND CORRUGATED IRON HOUSES THAT STOOD AROUND THE TOWER. THE HOUSES WERE IN A WINDBREAK, THE TOWER ON A SLIGHT RISE, ITS LEGS ANCh.o.r.eD IN CONCRETE. BLINKING BOB WAS THE SECOND TOWER BUILT ON THE SPIT; THE FIRST HAD BEEN WRECKED BY DRIFTING SAND.
One day, a few weeks before the summer solstice, Laura sat with her back to the rivet-studded wall of the lamp room at the top of the lighthouse.
Her father, Tziga, was cleaning smoke stains from the lamp. The lamp was bigger than her father's torso, a structure of cut crystals in a copper frame, four bull's-eyes surrounded by curved ribs of crystal. The whole thing was shaped like a glittering bishop's miter.
Laura's father's hands were gloved with rags. He was running them back and forth between the crystal ribs. It was rather like trying to clean the blades of an eggbeater without first immersing it in water. He worked with the sun behind him, so as not to be dazzled by the light s.h.i.+ning through the lamp. And in that light his scars seemed nothing but the shadows his hair threw across his face, his smeared eyebrow only the blurring obscurity of shadow.
Laura had been with her father, sleeping and waking, almost every minute since she'd arrived six weeks before. She was beginning to be used to the changes in him.
She had been warned, as well. A priest called Father Paul had taken charge of Laura at Westport and had brought her to So Long Spit. She hadn't crossed paths with her uncle Chorley-he'd left several days before she arrived. Chorley had apparently been there when Tziga read the newspaper accounts of the riot at the Rainbow Opera. He had witnessed Tziga's fit. He had talked to Father Paul about Tziga's frailty, and Father Paul had prepared Laura.
It was only when they boarded the schooner Morningstar at Westport that Father Paul had told Laura who was waiting for her at the lighthouse. Her father-who she'd been allowed to think was dead. Who had been kept from her, and on whose behalf she'd acted, hurting Aunt Grace and Sandy, infuriating Rose and earning her cold shoulder. If only she'd known her father was alive. If only someone had told her. Laura had said all this to Father Paul-raging at him, at first too resentful to feel relief or happiness.
And Father Paul had patiently explained some things to her.
He told her that, over the last few years, a handful of dreamhunters had come to the Church-the inst.i.tution most loudly critical of dreamhunting-to express their worries about some of the Regulatory Body's uses for dreams. ”We lost touch with a few of these persons,” Father Paul said. ”They disappeared. Too many dreamhunters do disappear. So, Laura, when your father turned up, his famous face swollen beyond recognition, at the Magdalene Charity Hospital in Westport, in what doctors call a 'coma' but still able to infect other patients sleeping near him with terror, we thought it best to report him dead and spirit him away. It was cruel to his family, but after the other disappearances, the Grand Patriarch deemed it necessary. When we heard that Tziga Hame was supposed to have vanished while attempting a crossing of the Place, we knew he had to stay hidden.”
The other thing Father Paul had said to Laura, just before they climbed down the rope ladder from the deck of the Morningstar to the platform by the lighthouse, was that her father's health was very fragile and that she must take care not to upset him.
Laura had been forewarned, and she hadn't upset him. She'd treated him tenderly, waited on him, and, whenever he just sat staring into s.p.a.ce, would sit pressed up against him. Her uncle Chorley had dispatched a doctor to the light-house-and paid a fortune to keep him quiet about where he was going and whom he was treating. The doctor prescribed Laura's father drugs that did help reduce the intensity of his seizures, if not their frequency.
Father Paul had stopped by only the day before with letters for Laura and Tziga. He told them that Chorley wanted them both back at Summerfort by Christmas. (Christmas was three weeks away, a few days after the solstice.) ”The Grand Patriarch says that now that the government has set up its Commission of Inquiry into the riot, if the Regulatory Body wants to speak to either of you-to question you, or call you to account-then, equally, the Commission might subpoena you. The Grand Patriarch thinks that the Body will think twice about doing anything to call Tziga Hame's existence to the Commission's attention.”
Of all this, Laura's father had seemed to take in only that he'd be back at Summerfort by Christmas. He appeared baffled by anything beyond immediate practicalities. For him it seemed there was only ever the task at hand-the crystal clouded by smoke coming clean under his cloth. He'd become slow and remote. There were people to smile at, or listen to with somber attention. There were things that must be remembered-for instance, he was always reminding Laura not to go out in the sun without her hat. But there was no larger world for him anymore, no public life, or any matter of real consequence.
Laura stood up and looked through the lighthouse window. The tide was out along the Spit, and the few patches of scrub in the dunes showed as black flaws on the horizon, wobbling in the heat haze. Scarves of dry sand blew along the surface of the wet. There was sand high in the wind, for Laura could hear the whisper of its grains in the gusts buffeting the windowpanes.
”Da?” she said.
Her father looked at her, then rotated the lamp on its housing so that the cleaned crystals spun scintillating in the sunlight.
”Do you remember I told you about Sandy?”
”Your friend? You mention him often. Did you tell me something particular about him?” Laura's father frowned at her, anxious that he'd forgotten something she'd said.
”No.”
”I liked his uncle, George Mason. As a singer, I mean. Marta and I often went to the opera. We would sit up in the top balcony cheap seats with all the other students. Mason was about twenty-five when I was sixteen. He was young, but he had this big ba.s.s voice, like the father of all fathers.”
Laura laughed at this story, because it was something new, and related to Sandy. And because her father seemed so collected in speaking about his past-his past before the Place.
”Lots of the early dreamhunters were musical. I don't know if that was ever noted as a tendency. No one would think to notice now, since there aren't too many distinguished musicians at fifteen. When George Mason became a dreamhunter, it really was a loss to music in Founderston.” Laura's father knelt to gather the cleaning rags into a bucket, and she noted that once he'd simply have stooped to perform this task. She could see that he was actually concentrating on grasping, lifting, and releasing. But he did keep talking, his memory of twenty years ago exact, even if his movements were not. Laura had wanted to hear his thoughts on Sandy-on Sandy's bewildering p.r.i.c.kliness-but she didn't want to interrupt his remembering. He was usually so quiet now.
”What about you, Da? How good were you?”
”Marta was a better musician than I was. So it was probably just as well it was me and not her who fell.” He hauled himself up, gripping the housing of the light. Then he turned to Laura, and she was forced again to regard the ruin of his face, and that frightening look in his eyes-a kind of tremulous pulling together of his attention. He said, ”Laura, you know I wasn't in my right mind when I wrote you that letter.”
Was this an apology? she wondered. ”That letter was all I had left of you,” she said. ”Of course I took it seriously.”
He touched his scarred forehead. Then he reached for Laura, put an arm around her, and held her.
She closed her eyes and simply basked in being held. She shouldn't ask any more than this. He couldn't answer-wasn't answerable anymore. When she looked into his eyes now, she saw watchfulness and uncertainty. His love for her was intact-but his understanding wasn't.
Laura's father released her.
She said, ”Here, let me give you a hand,” and took the bucket from him. They left the lighthouse. Partway down from the tower, Laura stopped. She had spotted something. She shaded her eyes and squinted into the wavering air.
There was someone out there, standing still and straight on the bared beach. The figure was far off, but Laura felt that he or she was looking at her.
Laura clattered down after her father, checking now and then on that watching figure. At the foot of the steps, she returned the bucket to her father, then took a few bounding steps backward, making excuses. ”I'm just going for a walk, Da-” Then she was off, running barefoot on the springy stems of beach gra.s.s, under the pines, then onto the sand. She ran in a long curve, for the watching figure was moving off the beach and into the dunes, and she had to alter her course in order to intercept him.
As she came closer, Laura could see only bright skin, no clothes. It was Nown, and he was waiting for her, just leading her in among the dunes where they wouldn't be seen. As she closed the distance between them, she could see that his head was lifted and that he was checking the lines of sight between himself and the top of the lighthouse.
Laura came to a skidding stop before him. She staggered, panting, then folded over a st.i.tch in her side. For a moment all she could hear was her own breathing. Then she heard the sea, and a tern crying as it flew along the line of low breakers. She straightened up and faced her sandman. He held out his arms to her.
She looked over her shoulder at the lighthouse.
”There must be things you want to say,” he said.
She went to him and let him pick her up.
He stooped over her and hurried away, skirting the base of the dunes till they were screened from the lighthouse, and from the sound of waves on the western sh.o.r.e.
Nown stopped within the shade of a high, crescent-shaped dune. Below the dune was a salt pan, and when he set Laura down, her feet cracked its crusted surface and she found herself standing in a shallow trench surrounded by sliding, dirty-white plates of salt.
Nown stood watching her and waiting for her to speak.
She said, ”You got my note?”
”No.”
”I sent a note enclosed in a letter to Sandy. I asked him to leave it in the forest.”
”I left the forest when you moved west. I followed you.”
”How did you know where I was?”
”You made me, Laura. You are my compa.s.s.”
Laura sat down abruptly in a patch of smashed salt crust. The air was uncomfortably hot nearer the ground, but she wasn't able to get up again. She had thought of something, and her thought had taken the strength from her legs.
Nown was speaking, volunteering his story-something he didn't do before she freed him.
”There were many rivers to cross,” he said. ”I followed the foothills of the Rifleman Mountains and struck only tributary streams. Sometimes I crossed over into the Place, but the distances there are too great. And at the coal mine beside the river-I don't know its name, Laura-there were miners, and barges coming and going, and a river ford with a ferry on a rope. I had to wait till it was dark and disguise myself under a blanket. I had to steal the blanket. The ferryman was drunk. There was one threatening deluge on my journey-and I had to burrow in under a bank. It took time, but I got here without getting my feet wet.”
”Your literal feet,” Laura said.