Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (24 page)

Deep below the city, the long metal snakes of the IRT rattled through the dark tunnels, while on the mud-rutted back roads of Connecticut, Sister Walker’s car rumbled toward the dark horizon. They’d been driving for miles, following up on leads. Gray strands of stars stretched out above the sleeping towns and quiet farms they passed.

“Here we are. Just like old times,” Sister Walker murmured.

The car’s headlights bounced off the eyes of a rabbit that sprinted through the winter-dead grass. Will kept a hand on the folder of newspaper clippings in his lap.

“Not quite,” he said at last and kept his eyes on the road ahead.

Just before bed, Ling set her alarm, said her prayers, lit some incense, and slid George’s track medal under her pillow, resting her fingers on top in the hope that she’d be able to make contact with him in the dream world. She kept her eyes on the ticking second hand of the clock, letting it lull her into a hypnotic trance. A moment later she woke, gasping, inside the dream world. Henry was there, doubled over, breathing heavily. “Fancy meeting you here.”

“Are you all right?” Ling asked.

“Sure… just need a minute to catch my breath. I’m… not used to doing so much dream walking. Need to get my sea legs under me.”

“Don’t you carry any jade for protection?” Ling asked.

“I’m plenty jaded all on my own.”

Ling rolled her eyes. “You’re an idiot. Find some jade. It helps me.” While Henry caught his breath, Ling searched for any hint of George, but she didn’t see him anywhere.

“George?” she whispered. “George Huang. George, are you here?”

“What are you doing?” Henry asked, coming to her side.

Ling whirled around. “Nothing. I thought I saw a friend, but I was mistaken.”

The fog lifted on the streets of the old-fashioned dream-jumble city, and the familiar scene started up like a clockwork show: The fighting men falling out of the saloon doors. The children chasing the rolling
hoop, shouting, “Anthony Orange Cross!” The ghostly wagon and driver clopping by—“Beware, beware, Paradise Square!”

“Huh. It’s exactly the same scene,” Henry said.

“So?”

“Well, it’s curious, isn’t it? I’ve had a recurring dream before, but there’s always something a bit different each time—the scarecrow in the cornfield has a different hat, or the house that’s supposed to be your house has unfamiliar rooms. But this has been the same sequence of events in precisely the same order each time we’ve come here. If I’m correct, any second now, there should be fireworks right over… there.”

Henry pointed, and the night sky exploded with pops of light.

“You see? And now…” Henry gestured like a circus barker. “The man in the vest, please.”

Like an old vaudevillian respectful of timing, the man appeared, a glimmering in the haze.

“Ladies and gentlemen! Come one, come all, for a ride on Alfred Beach’s pneumatic train. See this marvel for yourselves and be amazed, ladies and gentlemen—the future of travel, beneath these very streets!”

“It’s like a loop of dream time that’s stuck for some reason,” Henry said.

A shriek reverberated throughout the foggy city, and then: “Murder! Murder! Oh, murder!”

Henry and Ling crowded together.

“Here… she… comes,” Henry said.

Right on schedule, the ghostly veiled woman in the blood-smeared dress emerged from the fog and ran past them and through the wall of Devlin’s Clothing Store. The shimmering portal opened once more.

“C’mon!” Henry said, and he and Ling darted down the steps into the dark underworld of the dream.

As they waited in the train station, Henry told Ling about what happened after they’d been separated, how he’d followed the path to the
cabin and Louis. “But what happened to you afterward?” Henry asked as he sat at the old Chickering, marveling once more that there was a piano he could play inside a dream.

“I met another dream walker last night. Her name is Wai-Mae,” Ling said. “She talks too much. Even more than you do.”

Henry smiled at the jibe. “So there are three of us? It’s getting mighty crowded in this dream world. Tell me,” he said, picking out a melody, “what do you do when you’re not talking to the dead or leading wayward musicians into magical train stations, Miss Chan?”

“I help my parents in the restaurant,” she said, sitting on the edge of the fountain to watch the goldfish darting about. “But I want to go to college and study science.”

“Ah. That stack of books you had with you.”

“I remember the first time I read about Jake Marlowe’s experiments with the atom. It made me think of dreams.”

“Naturally,” Henry deadpanned.

Ling trailed her fingers in the cool water of the fountain. “What are these quantized bits of energy we see inside dreams? When I talk to the dead, where do they come from? Where do they go? Can we change the shape of our dreams? I can feel the Qi all around me. If I could understand this energy, this power, perhaps I could turn it into a scientific discovery in the physical world.”

“Sometimes I can change what people dream,” Henry said.

Ling whirled around. “You can? How? In what way?”

“Well, don’t get too excited. I can’t change the dream directly. I can only give the dreamer a suggestion.”

“Oh. Is that all?” Ling said. She stuck her fingers back into the fountain, smiling as the goldfish nibbled at her fingertips.

“I’m wounded,” Henry drawled. “It can be useful, though. If it looks as if the person’s having a bad dream, I can help them out. I’ll say something like, ‘Why don’t you dream about something more pleasant—puppies or hot air balloons or top hats—’”

“Top hats? No one wants to dream of top hats.”

“How do you know? Perhaps they’re very formal dreams,” Henry
said, smiling. “Anyhow, I give suggestions, and sometimes that’s enough to steer the person away from a nightmare.” He played around with a new melody. “Were you afraid the first time you walked in a dream?”

“A little. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I thought maybe I’d died and woken up in the afterlife.”

“And then you were sorry you hadn’t worn a top hat.”

Ling ignored Henry’s joke. “What about your first time?”

“I thought I’d gone mad. Just like my mother.”

“Your mother is crazy?”

Henry shrugged. “Oh, you mean to tell me it isn’t perfectly normal for mothers to spend all day in the family cemetery talking to statues of saints? Why, don’t you know, Miss Chan? The DuBois family is very respectable!”

“Has she always been mad?”

“No. Sometimes she’s just peeved.”

“It isn’t funny.”

“Oh, yes, it is. It’s terribly, terribly funny,” Henry said. He was used to delivering this patter to the jaded theater crowd, who liked to keep things light and entertaining, with no embarrassing sentiment to force them into pretending to care. Over the years, Henry had gotten pretty good at his act: “My parents?” he’d say, perched at the piano. “Tragic, tragic story. They were circus performers eaten by their own tigers just after a rousing performance of ‘Blow the Man Down.’ Poor Maman and Papa, gone with a roar and a belch and a half-finished chorus.”

But he realized how silly it was to pretend with Ling here inside a dream where everything you kept inside could suddenly show itself without warning. Lying about your emotions, putting on a happy face when you didn’t feel it, was exhausting.

Henry kept his fingers moving, testing various chord progressions. “My mother tried to kill herself. She sent the servants into town, found my father’s straight razor, crawled into the bath, and cut her wrists. But she’d forgotten that I was home. I found her. There was blood everywhere. I slipped and fell in it.”

“That’s awful,” Ling said when she found her voice again.

“It was awful. I loved those pants.”

“Your father must have been grateful that you found her.”

Henry scowled. “My father has never used my name and
grateful
in the same sentence.” He glanced at Ling, ready with another quip. She was looking at him. Really looking. It made him uncomfortable. “I’ve grown a second head inside this dream, haven’t I? Be honest. I can take it.”

“Your family has its own cemetery? You must be loaded,” Ling said.

Henry laughed. “Oh, yes, darlin’. We are, indeed, loaded.” He played a jazzy riff. “We’ve got a family crypt! Inscribed with nonsense Latin! Generations of the
DuBois bourgeoisie
lined up as a feast for the worms!”

Ling allowed a smile, then went serious again. “Generations. Your family’s been here a long time. My parents struggled to get here. I’ve never even met my grandparents. How did you find the courage to leave home?”

Henry had thought himself a coward for running away. It was strange to hear Ling call it courage. “My father was angry with me over my friendship with Louis.”

“Why?”

“He thought it was…” Henry searched for the right word. “Unhealthy.” He could sense Ling preparing a follow-up question that he wasn’t prepared to answer just yet, so he rushed on. “And he didn’t approve of my music. He forbade me to follow my passion. The old man wanted me to become a lawyer. Can you imagine me as a lawyer?”

“You’d make an awful lawyer. Absolutely terrible.”

Henry grinned. “Thank you for your confidence in me.”

“Terrible,” Ling said again.

“Yes, we’ve covered that sufficiently, I believe. Anyway, when he decided to send me to military school, I packed my suitcase and left. I suppose you think I’m an ungrateful son.”

“No,” Ling said, considering Henry’s reasons. “But I could never leave my parents.”

Henry tried to imagine the sort of filial duty Ling felt. If anything, he saw his parents as a burden to be endured. When people talked about “family” as something special, a place where you belonged, a dull anger nipped at Henry, a feeling that he’d been cheated of this basic comfort. Instead, Henry had made his own family with Theta, with his friends in the speakeasies and backstage at the Follies. He imagined that one day he’d hear that his parents were gone and feel only a vague sense of loss. How could you mourn something you’d never really had?

“Well,” Henry said wistfully, “it must be nice to be so loved.”

“Yes, I suppose it is,” Ling said, letting the subject drop. To her surprise, she found that she liked talking with Henry, especially about dreams. Sure, he told too many jokes for her taste. But he was easy and loose, like a gentle stream that carried her along.

For a moment, she considered telling Henry about her plan to look for George tonight. But she decided it was best to keep quiet; that was her mission, not his.

“You asked me if I was afraid the first time I walked in a dream. But what I’m most afraid of is not being able to do it,” Ling said quietly. “Here, I’m completely free. I can be myself. I can do anything.”

Henry nodded. “I know just what you mean. When I’m here, if someone is having a bad dream, with a word, I can help them have a better dream. I can do something. In the waking world, I can’t even get my songs published!”

“Are you sure you’re working hard enough?”

Henry raised both eyebrows. “You are quite possibly the rudest person I have ever met. And I work in show business, so that’s saying something.”

“Fine. I’ll be the judge. Play me a song,” Ling said.

“Heaven help me,” Henry said on a sigh. He played one of his numbers for Ling, a fun little ditty that quite a few of the chorines liked dancing to after hours.

“Well? Did you like it?” he asked.

Ling shrugged. “It’s all right. Sounds like every other song.”

“Ouch,” Henry said.

“You asked.”

“It just so happens they’re gonna put a song of mine in the Follies.”

“Then why do you care what I think?” Ling asked.

“Because…” Henry started. It wasn’t really about Ling. There was something about the song that didn’t feel right to him, but he couldn’t tell what it was anymore. He’d been trying for so long to make other people happy with his music that he’d lost his internal compass.

“Here’s one for you. Just wrote it,” Henry said. He broke into a big ragtime number.
“I’ve got a yeaahn to walk with Miss Chan—”

“Awful.”

“Again and agaaain, round the gleaahnn, at half past teaahn—”

“Corny and awful.”

“See you theaahn! If you’ve a keaahn! Dear! Miss! Chaaaannnnnn!”

The lights flickered wildly for a moment. From somewhere came a strange, gurgling, high-pitched whine, like a distant swarm of cicadas. Henry jumped up from the piano.

“I told you that song was bad,” Ling said, her heart beating wildly.

But then the train’s lamp glowed in the tunnel. It lit up the station as the train came to a stop. The doors opened, and Henry and Ling raced inside.