Knox The Dream Quake

Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-30402-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 512 Seiten

The horror of the Rainbow Opera riot is the talk of the country. Dreamhunter Grace Tiebold's reputation is in tatters and Laura is in hiding. Rumours about the government's torture of prisoners have been suppressed and corrupt minister Cas Doran is free to take his plans to shocking heights. For at a secret depot deep within the Place, a new, terrifying dream has been unearthed . . .

Elizabeth Knox is the prize-winning author of numerous adult novels, including the bestselling VINTNER'S LUCK (1999, Chatto). THE DREAM QUAKE is her second novel for young adults. She lives in New Zealand with her husband and son.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Knox, Elizabeth

Leseproben

On St Lazarus’s Eve in 1906 over one thousand people were at the Rainbow Opera to share a traditional feast-day dream. A dream named Homecoming, performed by the dreamhunter Grace Tiebold.

Grace had told the Opera’s manager that she’d been having trouble falling asleep, and that it wouldn’t do to keep her audience awake and staring at the ceilings of their bedchambers. She’d arranged for another dreamhunter, George Mason, to lie in with her. He had caught Homecoming too and so would boost her already famously powerful performance. Also, Mason was a Soporif. He often worked in hospitals, enhancing the effects of anaesthetics. He would enter the operating theatre before the surgeons and their assistants, and bed down near the prepared patient, for anyone who was close to a Soporif when he fell asleep would fall asleep with him.

At ten that evening Grace and George Mason were settled head to feet in the dreamer’s bed, a silk-upholstered platform at the top of the dais in the centre of the Rainbow Opera’s huge auditorium. The Opera had a full house. Founderston’s fashionable people – magnates, generals, politicians, and the President himself – were all in attendence. The manager was happy and, at the time, looked on the dreamhunter’s change in the evening’s arrangements as a good thing.

By midnight the Opera’s four tiers of balconies were empty, and waiters had collected the cups, liqueur glasses and bonbon trays from the little tables and ottomans around each balcony. The padded doors to the bedchambers were fastened shut. Everyone was in bed – all but the President’s and Secretary of the Interior’s bodyguards, and the men from the fire watch, who were either patrolling balconies and backstairs in their soft-soled shoes, or were at their post in the window of the Rainbow Opera’s control room. The fire watch was awake and vigilant. The building was secure and peaceable. A stage was set in the thousand drowsy heads of the Opera’s patrons.

*

Grace Tiebold lay under the thick, down-filled quilt of the dreamer’s bed. She could hear Mason breathing quietly. She waited to fall through the trapdoor of his sleep into their shared dream. It was nice at least not to have to worry about when she’d drop off.

Instead, Grace worried about her husband, Chorley. Chorley had packed a bag and left the house a week before, and hadn’t told her where he was going. Grace worried about her daughter, Rose, who had been boarding for two terms at Founderston Girls’ Academy, a school that was less than a mile from her home. She worried that Rose, having been sent away by her parents, wouldn’t want to come back and live with them again. Grace wanted to do something to reassure her daughter that they were interested in her. Perhaps she should arange for Rose to come out at the next Presentation Ball, instead of having to wait another year and a half.

Grace worried about her dreamhunter niece, Laura. Since Laura’s father Tziga had disappeared earlier in the year, Laura had been quite distant from her family. But at lunch that afternoon Laura had behaved beautifully. She was polite and affectionate. She had even remembered to bring her aunt and cousin St Lazarus Day gifts – the kind of nice gesture that was usually beyond her. Not that Laura nice – only solemn and wrapped up in herself. At lunch Grace had watched Laura smiling as Rose opened her present, a box of musk creams from Farry’s, the family’s favourite confectioner. Grace had thought: ‘She’s finally growing up.’ Rose, even when biting into a musk cream and moaning loudly in delight, didn’t give her mother a moment’s doubt about maturity.

As Grace waited to fall asleep she mused on that lunch. She fretted. True, Laura had brought gifts and behaved herself, but, as Grace gazed into her memory and studied the face across the restaurant table, she could see that Laura had a look in her eyes, a dangerous look – like those her dreamhunter father had often worn – a kind of dark haze made of desperation and determination and power.

Lying in the white cloud of bed at the pinnacle of the Opera’s dais, Grace thought: ‘What is Laura planning?’

She turned her head and looked over at the second-storey balcony, and the doors to the Hame and Tiebold suites, where Laura and Rose were sleeping. Firmly fastened, the quilted doors gave Grace no clues.

A moment later she was drifting. Something passed through her mind, a proud happiness about her home, her city, her country, the golden age in which she was living, the fine people she’d chosen to manage her world. The thought pleased her – and amused her too, since it was so unlike her. Why should she be thinking of President Wilkinson when she had so much on her mind?

Then Grace saw the crisped, brown, late-summer leaves of oaks in a grove by the road that would take her . George Mason had fallen asleep and had dropped her into her dream.

And then – suddenly – she wasn’t at home. She was in a coffin, and under the ground, and she could not get out.

*

The Rainbow Opera was oval in shape. One of its longer curves faced the River Sva, the other a paved, crescent-shaped plaza. The building and plaza were enclosed in a high fence, built to keep out anyone hoping to get near enough to the auditorium to pilfer dreams. But the Opera patron’s chauffeurs and coachmen parked overnight in the plaza could go to sleep if they needed to, for dreams very rarely spilled beyond the Opera’s walls.

A dreamhunter’s projection zone was known as his or her ‘penumbra’ – a term borrowed from astronomy, where ‘penumbra’ describes the partial shadow the moon casts on the face of the earth during a total eclipse. (The ‘umbra’, or totality, was the dreamhunter him or herself, asleep, and haloed by the shade of a dream.) Grace Tiebold’s three-hundred-and-seventy-five-yard penumbra could comfortably fill all the Opera’s rooms and spill only a little beyond its walls. If one of the Opera’s security men, patrolling between fence and walls, did happen to hunker down and doze off, he might well find himself involved in one of Grace Tiebold’s dreams. Grace’s brother-in-law, the great dreamhunter Tziga Hame, had had a four-hundred-and-fifty-yard penumbra. Dozing guards or chauffeurs could find themselves immersed in any dream Tziga Hame performed at the Opera. However, city ordinances and cautious supervision by the Dream Regulatory Body had, for years, guaranteed that none of the households above shops in the streets surrounding the Opera would feel the faintest bit of colour from any of the Opera’s performances.

That was until the early hours of St Lazarus’s Day, 1906, when sleepers in those houses found themselves snagged by the rim of a great screeching wheel of nightmare. Only its edge – and although they woke with their hearts pounding, and gasping for breath, their distress quickly passed, to be replaced by something else. Fear. They sat up in bed and strained to hear. Some ran to their windows and threw them open and looked towards the festively lit Opera, from which came the sound of screams – a hellish howling that filled the still, chilly spring night.

*

Grace Tiebold knew that she was caught in a nightmare, and wasn’t really in her coffin. She was a skilled and experienced dreamhunter who’d had to free herself from nightmares before. She fought to be free of this one. At first she fought it on its own terms – she struggled with the shroud, tore at the padded satin lining of the coffin, and finally with its undressed wood. She made the futile repeated movements – the clawing, thrashing, hammering – of the person she was in the dream. , she reminded herself, and kept in mind as the spark of her experience, her mastery of other dreams, brought her back to herself.

Grace finally burst right out of the battered limbs and welter of blood and filth – out of that miserable, suffering self. She jumped like a spectre out of the trapped body, the grave, the dream. For a moment she was paralysed by sleep, then she struggled free of the silk quilt, panting, and found that her face and fingertips were torn and slick with blood.

She fell off the bed, got up, and looked about the auditorium.

The balconies were empty. Electric candles around the walls of each tier, and the unsteady glow of the gas jets beyond the stained glass dome, showed Grace her beautiful Rainbow Opera – just as it always was, but as though turned inside out. Its beauty looked ghastly. The men of the fire watch looked monstrous. George, lying rigid, his face contorted, mouth alternately straining open and snapping shut, looked monstrous too.

Grace picked up the water jug and tipped it over him. For good measure, she slammed the jug itself down onto his chest. The Soporif woke, then rolled onto his side to spit out blood and a piece of cracked tooth. He struggled to rise, but kept flopping back as if stunned.

Grace shouted at the fire watch to sound the alarm bells. She could barely hear her own voice over the storm of screaming that came from the fastened bed chambers.

A door had opened on the second tier, the door to the Tiebold suite. Grace saw her daughter Rose lean over the balcony, her hands gripping its rail. Grace felt herself swoop towards her daughter. She nearly jumped from the dais, stopping herself only just in time. As Rose’s...