Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (14 page)

“It’s very difficult for Chinese women to immigrate to America. How did you manage it?” Ling asked.

“Uncle arranged everything through matchmakers, O’Bannion and Lee. Mr. O’Bannion will greet me in immigration in San Francisco. Then he will take me to my husband in New York City. My future husband is very respected and successful there. I hear you must be careful
on the streets, though,” Wai-Mae continued, barely stopping to take a breath. “There is all manner of vice and corruption and murder—opium dens and houses of ill repute!—and a lady has to keep her wits sharp, or terrible misfortune could befall her in the Den of Thieves or Murderer’s Alley and along Bandit’s Roost on Mulberry Bend and—”

“Mulberry
Street
,” Ling corrected.

“Mulberry
Bend
,” Wai-Mae said again, knowingly. “I have heard the stories, Ling.”

And I’ve only lived there my entire life
, Ling thought.

“Of course, I will have a husband to protect me, but…”

Wai-Mae’s mouth never stopped. Through her prattling monologue, Ling kept moving, thinking only one thought:
Kill Henry.

“… it’s the love stories I like best, the ones with the happy endings? I would live inside the opera if I could.…”

No. Ling would need Henry alive for the tongue-lashing she intended to dole out. Then the murder.

“… I know that women can’t perform, but if they could, I would play all the best, most romantic roles, royal consorts, and my gestures would be precise and elegant. And
you
would be the brave Dan. I can already tell you’ve got a warrior’s spirit—”

“Could you be quiet, please? I’m trying to think,” Ling snapped.

“I’m sorry.” Wai-Mae bowed, embarrassed, and Ling felt like she’d kicked a kitten. “It’s only that I’ve been on the ship for such a long time, and the other women are older and not from my village. They want nothing to do with me. It’s nice to talk to someone else. Someone young. With all her teeth.”

“How old are you?” Ling asked.

“Seventeen. You?”

“The same.”

“You see? We are like sisters already!” Wai-Mae bit her lip hopefully. “And do you like opera?”

“Opera is for old men,” Ling said definitively.

Wai-Mae’s mouth opened in shocked surprise. “Oh, Ling. How
can you say that? The opera is wonderful! They are our stories we carry with us, just like dreams.”

“I don’t like fairy tales. I like facts. Science.”

Wai-Mae made a face. “Sounds very dull.”

“Well, if you’re so keen on the opera, you’re in luck. My uncle runs the opera house,” Ling confessed. “In New York. That’s where I live.”

Wai-Mae made a high-pitched sound, and it took Ling a second to recognize it as excitement, not distress. “You are the luckiest girl in the world to have such an uncle! Do you go all the time? Do you sit in the balcony and eat pumpkin seeds and imagine yourself living out those scenes? When I come to New York, you and I will go to the opera, and you’ll see how wonderful it is! Clearly, fate has brought us together. We shall become the best of friends. And in the meantime, while I am on the ship, we can meet up each night, here in this beautiful dream world.”

They’d come to the end of the trees. Ahead, it was only blocks of gray and brown, like a vague sketch waiting for detail. “This seems to be as far as we can go,” Ling said.

“Would you like to go farther?”

“But we can’t go farther,” Ling said, irritated. She really was starting to wonder if Wai-Mae might be a bit simple.

“Then we will change it, make it into whatever we like. Go where we wish.”

“You can’t change a dream.”

“Yes you can.”

Ling spoke as if she were a peeved schoolmarm explaining a subject to a confused child. “I’ve dream walked plenty. It doesn’t work that way. You can walk inside an office building. You can take the stairs, which already exist. But you, yourself, cannot turn that building into, say, a schoolhouse or an automobile.”

Wai-Mae’s expression was quizzical. “What’s an automobile?”

Ling shut her eyes, took a deep breath. “Never mind.” She started back toward the forest. “Henry!
Henry!
”

“Here we can change things,” Wai-Mae said, catching up. “It isn’t like other dreams. Here, I’ll show you.”

Ling stopped and folded her arms across her chest, defiant.

“Think of something you want,” Wai-Mae said. “Something small.”

I want my legs back
, Ling thought.
I want to walk without braces, without people staring at me in pity or fear. I want to wake up without pain.

Ling swallowed against the sudden lump in her throat. “Fine. Shoes. I want a pair of beautiful shoes.”

“Very well,” Wai-Mae said, pleased. She reached down and scooped up a rock, and her hand dropped as if the rock had real weight.

“How did—”

“Shhh. Watch.” Wai-Mae shut her eyes. Her mouth went tight with concentration. She moved her hands over the rock, skilled as a magician with a well-worn trick, and as Ling watched, astonished, the rock shifted beneath Wai-Mae’s hands, no longer solid but something between states, a moment of becoming, observed. Wai-Mae’s edges blurred as well, as if she and the rock were joined in this alchemy. The rock wavered for a moment more, and then it was gone. In its place lay a pair of elegant embroidered Chinese slippers.

Ling ran her thumb across the raised thread at the tips of the shoes and felt just the tiniest static, some lingering charge. “How… how did you do that?”

Wai-Mae wiped sweat from her brow. “It’s this world. Our dream-walker energy is like magic here.”

“Not magic,” Ling murmured. Her mind whirred: She knew the dream world was not the real world, and yet, as fantastical as it all was, she’d never been able to change or create anything within it. This seemed unbelievable—as if Wai-Mae had altered the atomic structure of the dream landscape somehow.

“This place makes whatever you dream come true. It makes me very tired, though.” Wai-Mae trembled, breathing heavily. For the first time, her mouth wasn’t running amok. “Come back tomorrow night, and I will show you how to do it, too.”

“But how do I come back?”

“Take the train from the old station, of course. Just as you did tonight,” Wai-Mae assured her, grinning. “We will be friends, you and I. I will show you how to change dreams. And you…” Wai-Mae twisted her mouth to the side and looked up to the trees, thinking. “You will tell me stories of your New York City so that I will know it when I get there. So that I will not feel like such a stranger.”

Ling couldn’t stop staring at the slippers. “Tomorrow night,” she said.

The first sharp ring of Ling’s alarm clock roared across the dreamscape. Her body grew heavier, a signal that she had begun her ascent into the waking world.

“Till tomorrow, Little Warrior!” Wai-Mae called.

Tomorrow
, Ling thought, and like the flapping wings of a dove, the night whitened and twitched, then blurred into a great cottony nothingness.

At the first peal of the alarm, Gaspard barked furiously.

“No! Not yet!” Henry yelled. He thrust a hand out toward Louis as if he could grab hold of him and keep his lover from disappearing. But it was no use. Henry gulped in huge lungfuls of air as he woke in his chair at his tiny table in the Bennington. The alarm clock screamed and shook on the floor where it had fallen. Henry lay in the chair, paralyzed, unable to wipe away his tears. From the other room, he could hear Theta yelling. In a minute, she’d come out and growl at him. But Henry didn’t care about any of that. He’d seen Louis. He’d talked to Louis.

But would Louis even remember their conversation? People didn’t always remember their dreams, and even if they did, even if one crawled under the skin for a little while, it didn’t linger for long. Details were forgotten. People brushed them aside, busy with their lives. But Louis didn’t have a telephone, and if Henry’s father was somehow keeping
his letters and telegrams from reaching Louis, then calling for him at Celeste’s was useless.

He’d found Louis in a dream, so it was possible to do it again. All he had to do was go back in and give him a suggestion, the way he’d done with Theta when she had a nightmare. That was it! Through the dream world, he could get Louis to come to
him
. But that meant he’d need Ling once more. That was the key—the two of them together. Tomorrow, he’d ask Ling to help him, no matter how much it cost.

“Henry Bartholomew DuBois the Fourth!” Theta marched in, her sleep mask pushed up haphazardly on her forehead so that she resembled a drunken pirate. She slapped off the alarm clock and turned on Henry, furious. “What’s our deal, Hen?”

“Now, Theta…”

“Don’t you ‘Now, Theta’ me. What’s our deal?”

“No more than—”

“Once a week,” Theta finished.

“Theta—”

“This is two nights in a row, and after you promised me today—”

“Theta—

“If you think I’m gonna lose my beauty sleep while you—”

“Theta!” Henry croaked out her name with the last of his strength.

Theta snapped out of her temper. Worried, she fell to her knees beside Henry. “Whatsa matter, Hen? Holy smokes, you okay?”

Henry smiled with chattering teeth. “I’m s-swell. Theta, I f-found him. I f-found Louis,” Henry managed to say before he fell, utterly exhausted, into a dreamless sleep.

Adelaide Proctor fished a nitroglycerin tablet from her pillbox, placed it beneath her tongue, and waited for her angina pains to subside. It had been a nightmare that had brought on this spasm—something about an old hand-cranked music box that played a song that had been popular when Adelaide was young. The song’s beauty had stirred her longing, promising her everything she’d ever wanted if only she’d follow it deeper and deeper into dreams. Adelaide sensed it calling out to other sleepers, too, like a radio transmission from a far-off station late at night. But then the dream shifted, the song was lost, and she saw Elijah standing silently on the edge of the cornfield, his face painted in deep moon-shadow. “Addie,” he’d whispered, beckoning, and her heart began to gallop wildly, a riderless horse, until she woke with a start.

The tablet worked quickly on the tightness in her chest. Once her heartbeat slowed to a steadier rhythm, she forced herself from her bed and staggered to her own music box, atop a small oak cabinet tucked into a corner of the room. When she lifted the box’s lid, its tiny Moulin Rouge dancer figurine jerked into motion. With two fingers, Adelaide silenced the dancer’s song before it could wake her sister, Lillian. Inside lay a flannel jewelry bag housing a small iron case with the initials
EJH
. Adelaide opened the case and examined its contents—a lock of dark-gold hair, a tooth, a sliver of finger bone, and a tintype of a young man in a gray uniform. Seeing that everything was secure,
she placed the iron case back in its bag and closed it away, locking the doors of the cabinet once more.

Next she gathered a shallow bowl, matches, a candle in its brass holder, a roll of bandaging, bundled sage, and a small crooked silver dagger. These she added to her handbag. She emptied the salt can into each pocket of her robe, grabbed the handbag, and, with the burden of salt weighing her down, shuffled down the hall to wait for the elevator.

The elevator operator rode Miss Adelaide all the way to the very depths of the Bennington without a word; he’d only been there two weeks and had already learned not to question the Proctor sisters. While the lift rumbled down, Miss Addie chanted softly to herself, “
The land is old, the land is vast / He has no future, he has no past / His coat is sown with many woes / He’ll wake the dead, the King of Crows.
”

The elevator gates clanged open on the Bennington’s underworld. The young man at the elevator’s controls peered into the darkness. “Shall I wait for you, Miss Proctor?” he asked uncertainly.

“It’s quite all right, dear. I’ll ring you shortly. Run along now.”

Shaking his head, the young man closed the gate and the elevator groaned back up, leaving Addie alone in the dim basement. Immediately, she took out the candle and lit the wick, waiting for the glow to brighten the gloom. She fed one end of the bundled sage into the flame and waved it through the air, spreading out in wider circles. Next she wiggled up the sleeves of her robe and nightgown. The paper-thin skin of her wrist glowed nearly blue in the dim light from the narrow street-level windows that ran along the park side. Speaking ancient words, she slid the small knife across her thumb, hissing as she dripped blood into the bowl. She pressed her bloody thumb to the basement’s eastern corner before marking the room’s three other corners. This done, she bandaged her finger, then scooped salt from her pockets, sprinkling frost-thin lines along the windowsills, where she hoped the janitor wouldn’t find them. Night pleaded at the windows to be let in. Addie snuffed the candle, gathered her things, and pressed the elevator’s call button, watching the golden arrow tick down the floors to the bottom.

When the doors opened, the elevator operator helped Addie onto the lift. “You smell smoke, Miss Proctor?” he asked, alarmed.

“It’s only sage. I smudged the basement, you see.”

“Beg your pardon, Miss Proctor?”

“I lit a bundle of sage and smoked the room.”

Curiosity and suspicion proved too much for the young man at the controls. “Now, Miss Proctor, why’d you want to go and do a thing like that?”

“For protection,” Addie said, resolute.

“Protection from what, ma’am?”

“Bad dreams.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Proctor. I don’t follow.”

Miss Adelaide whispered urgently, “I’m keeping out the dead, my dear. For as long as I can.”

The elevator operator kept his thoughts to himself, though he’d be sure to mention this to the building management before his shift ended. No doubt they wouldn’t want the old woman burning down the whole building. With a small shaking of his head, he yanked the gate shut and turned again to the controls, and the gilded doors closed on the dark of the basement.