Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet by Elizabeth Knox Page A

for his visit and told him that, since no one expected him to denounce dreamhunting, did he think he could investigate the Place?
    “Rangers go there and make maps and call it exploration,”the Grand Patriarch said. “Philosophers muse about it as a phenomenon and call that—rightly in some ways
—thinking
about it. But none of us are getting any nearer to knowing what the Place really is. You’ve been close to the subject for years; you are familiar with all the distracting facts already. You have a reputation as something of a scientific mind, and an independent thinker. So please, Mr. Tiebold, look into it for me.”
    Chorley had gone away, and for days he hadn’t been able to imagine where to start. He reread some of those philosophers and was struck again by how they all seemed to talk about the Place as if, by coming up with the right metaphor for it, they might be able to say what it was. He found that he liked Dr. King’s account in
A History of Southland.
King’s approach to the Place seemed practical; he tried to find evidence of its earliest appearance. Chorley mused on Dr. King’s speculation that the dreams might be memories of people who had lived in its geographic vicinity. And on his own idea that the Place was like a mirage. Chorley considered all this—as, no doubt, the Grand Patriarch already had.
    And then he remembered the telegraph line that had once run through the Rifleman Pass, from Doorhandle to Sisters Beach. A line that was long ago abandoned. The wire, though intact and visible along its entire length, was finally deemed hopelessly unreliable. Signals were lost, and there were strange interferences, both a patterned tapping that didn’t match any known telegraphic code and bits of code that could be deciphered but that gave the key man on the receiving end bad, mad messages.
    And so it was that, several days after remembering the abandoned telegraph line, Chorley found himself waiting in a poky room beneath the mosaic floor of the Founderston Central Post Office. The man Chorley waited with didn’thave much to say, but he stood at his desk sorting through a bunch of keys on a string. The room was dingy. There were windows only at the top of one wall. Through them Chorley could see people—or their feet at least—passing on the street, scuffed shoes and polished ones, the wheels of a pram, a woman in a hobble skirt, and the lower legs of a small girl in flimsy blue sandals.
    “It’s summer already,” he thought.
    A second clerk, a man with a coat and a complexion the color of manila cardboard, shuffled into the room. The first clerk stopped sorting his keys and tossed them back into an open drawer. He said, “I was just telling Mr. Tiebold here that if any of the bad transcriptions from the Wry-Valley-to-Sisters-Beach line had been kept, you would know where to find them.” He turned to Chorley and said, “Mr. Nevis was a key man at Doorhandle twenty years ago, when the trouble started.” Then—to Mr. Nevis, “Can you help Mr. Tiebold?”
    Mr. Nevis nodded and held the door open.
    As they descended into the cold subterranean corridors beneath the Central Post Office, Mr. Nevis told Chorley that—yes—he had been a key man in Doorhandle. He had sent and deciphered messages to and from Sisters Beach. In fact, he had been at his post in the telegraph office on the evening that the Doorhandle innkeeper came in to wire for a surgeon from Sisters Beach. “For the boy with the broken leg—who later became your brother-in-law, Mr. Hame,” Mr. Nevis said. “The line had been complete then for three years. It was working well, except when the road washed out once and took half a dozen poles with it. The weather in the Rifleman Pass was a challenge, but we hadn’t yet encountered the problem that closed us down. That problem started after Tziga Hame’s fall.”
    Mr. Nevis opened a steel door, located a light switch, andlet Chorley into a room with long avenues of shelves filled