What Moves the Dead (19)

“Oh,” I said, startled. “It’s you.”

Denton looked at me in mild surprise. “You were expecting someone else?”

“I thought you might be Madeline.” Belatedly it occurred to me how that must sound, as if I was expecting Maddy to visit my rooms in the night. “I found her sleepwalking the other night.”

“Really.” Denton frowned. “I had not known that she did that. Roderick said something about her walking the halls, but I thought…”

“I know,” I said, closing my door behind me. “She doesn’t seem well enough to walk much of anywhere without help. I was afraid she would faint or fall down.”

“Did you wake her?”

“I did. I know you’re not supposed to wake a sleepwalker, but she thanked me. Said she’d been dreaming.”

“This place breeds nightmares,” said Denton, with unexpected savagery. “I need some air.”

“I’ll join you,” I said. The livrit was burning off and I had no desire to sober up in the closeness of my room. The balcony overlooking the lake had little appeal, but it was at the back of my mind that perhaps Denton would see the strange lights, too. “I haven’t been sleeping well myself.”

Once we were outside in the open air, I asked, “What did you mean, this place breeds nightmares?”

“Roderick,” said Denton, leaning against the stone railing. “He complains of nightmares. Says the walls breathe them out.”

I did not know about the walls, but I could definitely imagine the lake doing so. No matter how innocent the water looked right now, I could not shake the memory of those strange, transparent sheets and the outlines of rippling light.

“Have you had any?” It was not a question I would normally ask someone that I knew as little as I knew Denton, but there are things that two old soldiers can talk about in the dark after drinking that ka would never discuss in daylight.

“I had a nightmare last night,” said Denton, not looking at me. The lake reflected the stars back, dark and still. “I was back in the surgical tent, amputating. After a battle … the way the rifle bullets shattered limbs … we would take off dozens in a day. One of the orderlies would carry them away, but we had to move so fast, before the men bled out, so they would end up outside the tent, in a pile. I was looking at the pile, and there were so many severed limbs, but they were alive. They were moving.”

“Good God,” I said, horrified.

“They were still alive, and I realized we shouldn’t have cut them off. If I could just take them back to their owners, I could put them back. I could make those men whole again. But there were so many, and there was a crowd of soldiers begging me to help them, and I didn’t know which leg or arm went with which person and there were so many men, and I couldn’t help any of them.…”

His voice trailed off. I shuddered. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“I don’t dream about the war much anymore,” he said. “It was a long time ago. A lot longer for me than yours was for you, I imagine. But you won’t always dream of it. If you’re worried.”

I nodded. I certainly wasn’t going to bother to deny it. I had been good at being a soldier. Better than I had been at being anything else. And I had always thought that if you were going to have stupid bloody wars, it was better to have people who were good at it doing the fighting. People who knew what to expect and when to dive for cover and when to run. People who knew what it looked like when their buddy took a bullet and could staunch the bleeding instead of standing around with their mouths hanging open.

But there’s a price you pay for being good at some things. The war is the backdrop to most of my dreams. The house I grew up in, my grandmother’s cottage, and the war, as if it was a place that I lived. I can’t even say they’re all nightmares. Sometimes it’s just where the dream is happening.

Denton knew. Roderick might. I don’t know. He had always been jumpy. Nothing wrong with that. Jumpy means you survive. It also means you wear yourself out faster and drive the rest of your unit nuts, but everybody copes in their own way. He was never going to be a career soldier, but that’s fine. Not everyone should be. Ideally nobody would have to be, but that’s a bigger problem than I could tackle today.

I looked down into the still water. No glow tonight. I wondered if I could convince myself it had been a dream. This place breeds nightmares.

No. I knew what I had seen. I am not a particularly fanciful person. (A Frenchwoman once told me that I had no poetry in my soul. I recited a dirty limerick to her, and she threw a lemon at my head. Paris is a marvelous city.) If I was no longer able to distinguish between dreams and waking then something was wrong with me, as well as with the Ushers.

“What do you think of this lake?” I asked Denton abruptly.

“It’s a dismal thing,” said Denton. If he was surprised by my change of topic, he didn’t say anything. “You’d think a pristine mountain lake would be picturesque.”

“The ones in Gallacia are.”

“I only popped over the border once, I think. Place with the turnips on the shutters, right?”

I muttered something in defense of the turnips and stared into the water. “It’s like it doesn’t reflect right.”

“The lake?” Denton leaned forward over the balustrade and gazed down. “Possibly. Or what it’s reflecting is so depressing that it doesn’t help. I don’t know. Reminds me of some of the springs we have in the States. Fantastic colors from the minerals leached into it, and it’ll kill you dead if you drink from it.” He straightened up. “Though I suppose it would have done so by now, since I imagine it’s where all the water’s drawn from.”