Part 9 (1/2)

From far away the substance looked like chocolate sauce from one of his ma's self-saucing puddings. (His ma used to say that she was a ”self-saucing pudding,” which was a joke about how in their family there was no ”Da” like other families had.) The boy squatted to look at the brown substance. The air was hot nearer the ground, as though the ground was cooking something.

He saw that the oozing ma.s.s was ants, thousands of them, flowing in a twisting, glistening brown rope down the grooved tree trunk. He could actually hear them. The ants were making a noise like bursting bubbles in sea foam-except much quieter. The boy could hear them only because the sounds of the world had dropped away. Even the birds in the bushes were silent.

His mother came to the cottage door to ask what he was doing. She was wiping her hands on her ap.r.o.n. He wanted to say to her that the ants were leaving their nest. But he didn't get to say it. He saw her hands grow still, though she continued to hold her ap.r.o.n gathered before her.

They both listened. The boy wondered why the horses in the paddock behind the house had decided, all at once, to gallop down to the back fence.

But the thunder wasn't horses.

The ground began to move; it lurched sideways, and then jolted up in shudders. The boy fell onto his hands and knees. He heard his mother shout. He saw her rush across the porch. At the same time the cottage chimney slammed down onto the corrugated iron roof, then came apart and slid-bricks and boulder-sized chunks of mortar and brick-down the curve of the roof and off its edge. The boy's mother rushed out among the falling bricks. None of them struck her.

She staggered across the yard and picked him up, then stumbled under the yard's one tree, a cabbage tree partly smothered with honeysuckle. The honeysuckle was in flower, and as they stood-he in her arms-the tree dropped honeysuckle blossoms and a thick veil of floral scent down over them. His mother spread one hand over the crown of the boy's head and held him sheltered in the curve of her body. She leaned back against the tree trunk and struggled to keep her footing.

There were crashes and thumps from the cottage-scarcely audible in the thunder from everywhere. And there were high-pitched sounds, the squawk of nails pulled loose from timber, and the painted weatherboards splitting with a sound like gunfire.

Water was jumping out of the puddles and into the air.

Then the heaving and juddering stopped. The yard went quiet, though the air seemed to torque and rustle.

The boy's mother held him tight. Her heart was beating so hard the boy could feel it pus.h.i.+ng against him, fierce and powerful. Her heart was strong-the boy thought-but not nearly as strong as the ground, the angry ground.

Grace was shaken awake by the bed heaving. Beside her, Chorley was sitting up. She heard him fumbling around on the nightstand. He lit a candle.

Grace made a m.u.f.fled noise of irritation. The bedsheets were uncomfortably starchy, and the room was stuffy. She remembered that she was in a hotel-the sort of hotel young Sandy Mason could afford to rent for his performance.

”That was Verity,” Chorley said to his wife.

Grace's next annoyed grunt had, at its end, a mild tone of inquiry. Verity was Chorley's dead sister, Laura's mother.

”The woman on the porch,” said Chorley.

”Sandy isn't a Gifter,” Grace said. She was waking up, reluctantly. She could feel herself shrinking away from something.

Maze Plasir was a Gifter (or, impolitely, a Grafter). He could graft the bodies of real people onto the characters in his dreams. That was why he was in demand by the sorts of men who would send him out to watch-say-their daughters' school friends and then have those school friends stand in for the obligingly friendly females of Plasir's specialty dreams. Gifting was a very rare talent. Some dreamhunters, at certain times in their lives, did make their own subst.i.tutions. As a young woman, Grace had found herself replacing the anonymous handsome faces of her dreams' heroes with Chorley Tiebold's after she first saw him at a ball. It just happened, and was beyond her control.

”But why would Sandy think of Verity?” Chorley asked, bemused. ”Where would he get her from?”

”Laura.”

”How could he get her from Laura?”

”No. It was Laura.” Grace sat up so quickly she threw the covers off them. ”It wasn't Verity; it was Laura.”

Chorley screwed up his face. ”Why would Sandy want to imagine himself as a child and Laura as his mother?”

Grace put her hands over her face. She was very confused, appalled, and, at the same time, deeply moved.

”It's perverse,” Chorley was saying, his voice strained.

Grace put a hand on his arm. She was worried he might leap out of bed, wake up Sandy Mason, and start demanding explanations. ”Calm down,” she said, though she was far from calm herself.

”It's so perverse I can't even imagine what kind of perversity it is!” Chorley said. Then, ”Why are you laughing?”

”You're funny.”

”Grace, Sandy Mason finds he's an angelic, violin-playing little boy so he immediately supplies himself with my niece as his mother. And you're laughing. I'm a liberal man. I have an abundance of tolerance for dreamhunters and their peculiarities. But this is going too far.”

Grace wiped her eyes. ”Shhh,” she said.

Chorley shut his mouth and only radiated indignation.

Grace took his hand and met his eyes. ”That was Laura. She wasn't tall or fair like Verity, but she had Verity's sweet, queenly face. Sandy Mason isn't a Gifter. And if he recognizes the woman in his dream, he'll be very upset and angry with himself and suppose it's because he can't get Laura out of his head.” Grace kissed her husband's hand. Her own heart was pounding as hard as the heart of the woman in Sandy's dream, but she tried to be calm for her husband's sake. ”Listen, love,” she said. ”The convict in Laura's first dream remembered being a boy racing a schooner along the sh.o.r.e of So Long Spit, and you saw the lighthouse keeper's boy doing just that. The dreams are set in the future. And that was Laura, grown-up, and with a little boy of her own.”

III.

Summer and Christmas.

1.

HEN SHE WAS ON VACATION IN THE AWA INLET, MAMIE PREFERRED TO SPEND AS LITTLE TIME AS POSSIBLE WITH her brother, Ru, and his friends. She told Rose that the boys were boring. Right after breakfast she and Rose would often walk up the stream and into the beech forest, or set out along the hot mud track through the reedbeds at the eastern end of the Inlet. Mamie would tell anyone who was listening that they were going to gather sh.e.l.ls on the sandbar. Or she'd say they were going swimming and then would go to gather sh.e.l.ls. Ru had once confronted Mamie about it. ”You told us you'd be down by the rocks,” he said, aggrieved.

”So?” said Mamie. ”Why do you suddenly want my company?”

Ru had blushed and hadn't complained again.

Mamie was, in her own brutal way, trying to look after Rose, who had discovered that it wasn't at all fun to be admired by someone she didn't like, especially someone you had to share a roof with. When Ru Doran looked at her, Rose felt at odds with her own body. She felt that there was something wrong with her. She didn't want Ru to think she was beautiful. She felt she should be able somehow to show him that he wasn't allowed to have opinions about her appearance-or, at least, that he wasn't allowed to show them. Being openly admired by someone she found unattractive made Rose feel that her beauty didn't belong to her, was in fact something tricky, a demon hiding inside her, prompting, and making offers, and emitting strange odors when she'd rather just go about being her usual self.

Mamie and Rose's favorite beach in the Inlet was toward the western end, quite a distance from the Doran house.

On a day two weeks into Rose's visit, the weather was very hot, and the girls had swum for more than an hour, jumping from the rocks over and over until their ears began to ache. Then they lay on the sand. Salt p.r.i.c.kled on their warming bodies as their skin grew dry and tight.

”How long can we stay away?” Rose asked her friend. Her room got the afternoon sun and would be too stuffy to retire to.

”I'm going to have to have a word with Ru, aren't I?” Mamie said.

Rose shrugged, her shoulders rasping on the sand.

Mamie picked up Rose's skirt and fished in its pocket for the letter her friend received that morning.

”Hey!” Rose said, but didn't move.

”It's only Patty-Patty is a weakness we share, Rose.” Mamie frowned, then quoted their cla.s.smate's letter: ”I am deprived of society here in the South. I see no one I like.” She laughed. ”But see, a paragraph later she's dancing the military two-step with her cousin. You know, I think they're all cousins in the South. Which is a shame, since poor Patty is one of those girls who is longing to be able to say to someone things like 'An introduction for the purposes of a dance does not const.i.tute an acquaintance.' But she knows absolutely everyone. And, Rose! It says here she already has the pattern for her Presentation Ball gown. Hasn't she got any other interests?”