The Manual of Detection: A Novel - By Jedediah Berry Page 0,62

“It’s the other half you have to worry about.”

Unwin rowed faster. He was getting the hang of it now. The trick was to play each side off the other, but gently. Still, it would take a long time to reach the shore.

“Tell me about Chapter Eighteen,” Unwin said.

WHEN THEY REACHED THE harbor, it was far from the pier of the Travels-No-More. Unwin rowed in the shadows of cargo ships, and each splash of the oar echoed in the vastness between the towering hulls. It was dark, and the air smelled of rust and brine. They landed in a small cove at the base of the lighthouse, where bits of junk had collected among the rocks and seaweed. Together they dragged the boat out of the water.

Unwin noticed something gleaming at the fore of the craft as the light swept past. It was an alarm clock, and it looked a lot like the one that had vanished from his own bedside. Unwin put the clock to his ear, heard its machinery still at work, and wound it. The clock just fit inside his coat pocket.

They walked together through abandoned dockyards. What Unwin understood of Moore’s description of Chapter Eighteen he would have disbelieved entirely if not for the events of the last two days. Oneiric detection, Moore had whispered to him. In layman’s terms: dream surveillance.

This is was what Miss Greenwood must have meant when she spoke of another’s eyes in the back of her skull. Dream spies. Had the Agency’s overseer done this to her? Hounded her through her sleep so she never rested? She said she did not want him to know about her daughter. Would a dream of the girl be enough to betray Miss Greenwood’s secret? Unwin wondered whether he himself could ever sleep easily again.

Edwin Moore, his feet back on solid ground, seemed to have discovered new stores of vitality. He walked with a jaunty step, his cheeks reddening from the exertion. He was still trying to explain how dream detection worked. “You’ve heard the story of the old man who dreamed he was a butterfly,” he said. “And how, when he woke, he wasn’t sure if he really was an old man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or if he was a butterfly dreaming it was an old man.”

“You’d say there’s truth to it?”

“I’d say it’s a lot of nonsense,” Moore snapped. “But the mind struggles with the question nonetheless. How often have you tried to recall a specific memory—a conversation with an acquaintance, maybe—only to determine that the memory was a delusion, spawned in dream? And how often have you dreamed a thing, then found that it spoke some truth about your waking life? You solved a problem that had been impenetrable the day before, perhaps, or perceived the hidden sentiments of someone whose motivations had baffled you.

“Real and unreal, actual and imagined. Our failure to distinguish one from the other, or rather our willingness to believe they may be one and the same, is the chink through which the Agency operatives conduct their work.”

“But what do they do, exactly?” Unwin asked. “Lie down next to someone who’s sleeping? Rest with their heads touching?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You don’t have to be near your subject; you only need to isolate that person’s frequency. It’s work a watcher can do from the comfort of an office chair.” Moore winced and touched the lump on his forehead, which had assumed a purple hue. He sighed and went on. “You know of course that signals from the brain may be measured, even charted. There are electrical waves, devices to read them, people who study these things. Different states have been identified, cataloged, analyzed. What our people figured out is that one brain may be entrained to another, ‘tuned in,’ so to speak. The result is a kind of sensory transduction. Not so different, really, from listening to the radio.

“That’s my metaphor, at least. Those who practice dream detection describe it as a kind of shadowing, only they tail their suspect through his own unconscious mind rather than through the city. If they are after some specific piece of information, they may even influence the dreamer in subtle ways, nudging him toward the evidence they need.”

They left the dockyards a few blocks from the cemetery. They would have to keep to the shoreline now—Unwin did not wish to draw too close to the Forty Winks and be spotted by someone who might inform Jasper Rook of his