Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (20 page)

“No. But Anna didn’t look too happy about this letter, Sam. She seemed angry or worried.” The aftereffects of going so deep caught up to Evie. Her knees buckled, and Sam helped her to Mildred’s chair.

“You okay, Sheba?” Sam took out his handkerchief and blotted at her forehead.

“You’ll take all my paint off,” Evie said, angling her face away. The dreaded headache had started. “I don’t understand why Will had this letter. He told you he didn’t know your mother.”

“Maybe he didn’t,” Sam said. “This was in a collection of Rotke’s books. Maybe she was the one who knew my mother. I just hope Anna Polotnik can supply the answers. Once I find her.” Sam tucked the envelope back into his pocket, along with the handkerchief. “One more thing—now that you’ve got two nights a week on the radio, it sure would be swell if you could talk up the Diviners exhibit.”

“WGI and Pears soap don’t pay me to shill for the Creepy Crawly, Sam.”

“Just work it into the act: ‘All ghosts swear by Pears! The cleanest ghosts in town will be attending the Diviners exhibit at the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult!’”

“Sam, how is it that you can take a perfectly ordinary day and turn it crossways?” Evie asked, rubbing her temples.

Sam grinned and spread his hands wide. “Everybody’s got a talent, kid.”

Mildred knocked again. “Miss O’Neill? Will you be much longer?”

“That’s your cue to leave,” Evie said, pushing Sam toward the door. “Don’t forget about our date tonight—the party at the Pierre Hotel hosted by some rich Texan who made all his money in oil. He’s swimming in it—money, not oil. It’s good press.”

Sam winked. “Well. As long as it’s good press. See you tonight, doll.”

“Lucky me,” Evie said, and for a second Sam couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not.

Sam turned up Fifty-seventh Street toward the Second Avenue El. As he walked, he examined the mysterious envelope again. It was his first big break in some time. Hopefully, Anna Polotnik would know something that would lead Sam to his mother. But first, he had to find Anna.

An open-air touring car draped in advertising bunting for Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir advanced slowly. A man stood holding on to the windshield, calling out to people on the street over a bullhorn: “Protect yourself from exotic disease with Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir—every bottle made with the goodness of real radium for radiant health! Do not allow your loved ones to fall to the Chinese Sleeping Sickness! Purchase Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir today!”

Sam shook his head. Nothing made a man richer than exploiting another man’s fears. For a second, Sam considered finding a mark and using his powers to lift the fella’s wallet, but he decided against it. Right now, his luck was good. And if there was anything his superstitious mother had taught him, it was not to press your luck.

Feeling hopeful, Sam climbed the stairs to wait for the train.

He’d never noticed the brown sedan that had trailed him for several blocks.

The hush of the Bowery Mission was interrupted only slightly by the occasional whimper from bed number eighteen as Chauncey Miller dreamed of a war that never stopped. Bullets screamed overhead as two medics struggled to carry Chauncey’s stretcher across a muddy, smoke-shrouded battlefield. A soldier with a choirboy face lay slumped against barbed wire, staring up at the unforgiving sky, his hands resting prayerlike on the guts spilling from the jagged hole in his stomach.

“Stay with me, old bo—” The medic’s words died on his lips as a bullet found its home in his head, and he dropped like a storm-felled sapling. Around Chauncey, the
tat-tat-tat-tat-tat
of machine guns echoed through war-mangled trees while dying men keened for help, for forgiveness, for death.

“Help! Please help me,” Chauncey cried out. He couldn’t move. When he lifted his head, he could see the bloody, frayed ends of skin and bone where his legs had been. Every night, Chauncey prayed that he’d wake with both legs, back home in Poughkeepsie, and find that the past nine years of his life had been nothing but a terrible dream. Instead, he woke screaming, his face sweaty and his eyes wet with tears.

But not tonight. Just under the cacophonous symphony of gunfire and screaming, Chauncey heard something else—the sad, creaking tune of an old music box. Off to his right, the mission doors appeared between two barren trees. When they opened, the song drifted out from them, erasing the din of war.

Chauncey sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His legs! With a small cry, Chauncey rested his hands on his knees, then moved them down the sides of his calves, feeling skin and muscle and bone. He flexed his feet, rejoicing in that small victory of motion. He stepped through the doors and plodded down the darkened corridor of the mission, past the beds of lost souls traveling in their own dreams: pushing a plow on the family farm, making love to the girl left behind, diving into a sun-dappled swimming hole in summer. He looked back at his bed, where what was left of his broken body slept on. That was what waited for him when he woke, so he pushed further into his dream until he came to an old subway station.

It was quite beautiful here; an amber glow suffused the entire place, warming the fancy brass sconces and floral oilcloth wall covering, making the tracks gleam. But if Chauncey turned his head just so, the whole picture seemed unstable, as if this lovely, warm scene were trying to write itself across a dark, decaying canvas that peeked through in spots. Chauncey could swear that he heard sounds deep inside the vast dark of the tunnel—sharp clicking noises and thready, low growls made by some nightmare beast he could not name or imagine. But then, just as he had the impulse to turn back, a voice whispered sweetly to him in overlapping waves, “
Dream with me.…
”

“Yes,” he answered. “All right.”

“Promise.”

“I promise.”

He stepped into the tunnel and found himself outside Le Bon Reve in rural France. He and his mates had gone drinking there one September evening before they’d been lost to the trenches along the Western Front. The saloon’s windows were alight. Chauncey put his face to the glass, but he couldn’t see anything. Hearty laughter erupted on the other side of the saloon door. And then a chorus of drunken voices took up a song that had been popular during the war. Chauncey could still remember the words.

“
Over there! Over there!
” came a strong tenor. That was Clem Kutz
singing! He’d know that voice anywhere. Somehow, his old pal Clem was here.

Chauncey pushed through the door and went inside.

Seated around a long, rustic farmhouse table were all the friends Chauncey had lost during the war. Why, there was Teddy Roberts! Poor Teddy, whose mask had sprung a leak and he’d choked on mustard gas, dying with eyes bulged out, a hideous, unnatural grin stretching across his thin face. There was Bertie Skovron from Buffalo, who’d taken a bellyful of shrapnel and bled out, one hand still gripping the field telephone. Medic Roland Carey—funny old Rolly, who’d tell you a right filthy joke as he checked your gums for scurvy or poured stinging alcohol over a nasty cut. The same Rolly, cut down by influenza, was sitting right in front of him. And Joe Weinberger was there, too. Joe, who’d made it back home to Poughkeepsie after the war with a bad case of shell shock. He’d lasted eight months before he went into the barn on a fresh spring morning, threw a rope over a rafter, and hung himself. All of Chauncey’s friends were here, alive and young and whole. Brothers. They had their whole lives ahead of them, and the dreams they’d nurtured before the war—to be husbands, fathers, businessmen, heroes worshipped by a grateful nation—were still untouched and waiting to be used.

Clem sang out, “
Johnny get your gun, get your gun, get your gun / Take it on the run, on the run, on the run.…
”

The other fellas joined in.
“Hear them calling you and me, every son of Liberty.…”

“
Over there, over there… Hoist the flag and let her fly, Yankee Doodle, do or die
,” Chauncey said, though he’d gotten the verse and chorus mixed up. He sniffed back happy tears. “You’re here. How are you here?”

His mates welcomed him with smiles.
“Dream with us.”

Chauncey laughed. “All right, then. All right.”

He took a seat at the table, which had been laid out with an enormous feast: boiled eggs and slabs of bread and butter on silver platters, a roast pig surrounded by shiny apples, beer, and cake. Those cold nights
when they’d burrowed into trenches in France, their bellies rumbling with hunger and their heads itchy with lice, they’d talked incessantly of the food they’d eat when they returned.

“Who are we fighting this war for?” Teddy had asked once under a cold, starless sky as they passed a lone cigarette among the unit. “What are we doing here?”

“Defending democracy,” Chauncey had answered.

Teddy had let the next question out with his smoke. “Whose democracy?”

That had been long ago. They’d died, horribly, all of them. All his friends. But somehow, they were here now, healthy and smiling, as if the war had been a dream and this was truth. Chauncey felt drunk on gratitude and profound relief. Even though just last week the doctors had told him there was something wrong with his liver, and he might want to get his affairs in order—as if he had any affairs to put in order! Well, they were wrong. His liver wasn’t failing. He was being granted a second chance at life. Chauncey imagined getting married in the church where his parents had been married, raising a passel of rambunctious kids who liked to fish in the creek. And if anyone asked his future sons to fight a war, he’d tell them to go to hell.

Clem patted his arm and made a funny face. “Sick,” he said. “Not much life. Bad dreams.”

Chauncey smiled. “Clem, old boy, this is the best dream yet.”

The food looked delicious, and even though the past few weeks his appetite had been flagging, Chauncey found that he was eager to eat.

“Bad dreams,” Rolly said, and for just a moment, the dream wavered.

“Cheers, boys!” Chauncey said, willing the dream to continue. He spooned potatoes into his mouth and spat them out again just as quickly. The potatoes tasted bitter and dry, like eating a mouthful of sawdust. He looked more closely at the lump. It was moving. Maggots. They were maggots.

“My god,” Chauncey said, gagging into his napkin. He wiped furiously at his mouth. “Say, wh-what sort of joke is this, fellas?”

His friends were unbothered. They had abandoned their utensils and scooped up handfuls of food, shoveling it in faster and faster, with desperate strokes, gorging themselves, too fast to chew and swallow. Bertie choked, vomiting up what he’d just eaten, then started in again.

“Slow down there, Bertie,” Chauncey warned, but Bertie kept gorging.

Teddy smiled at Chauncey. There was something off about it. Like looking at a picture where another picture is trying to break through, and the image breaking through was of Teddy’s mustard-gas rictus grin.

A thread of fear tightened around Chauncey’s guts.

Clem cocked his head, listening. His fingers were slick with egg and saliva. “Still hungry,” he said in a raw, croaking voice.

The others’ heads snapped up. Food scraps hung from their wet mouths. Chauncey’s heartbeat accelerated. Around him, the French saloon began to unravel, revealing the dark, cold brick of the tunnel.

“Hungry,” they chanted, showing rows of pointed teeth in oily mouths. Soulless eyes stared out of cracked, pallid skin. Chauncey backed away. These were not his brothers. Not Clem or Rolly or Joe and definitely not sweet Teddy. What were these things?

“
Hungry for dreams with us hungry dream with us dream dream hungry dream…
” they chorused.

The tunnel crackled with pulses of light that reminded Chauncey of gunfire on the battlefield. There were more of them hiding there in the dark. Dear god. They squeezed out of holes and slithered down the brick, nails
click-click-click
ing in the gloom, beasts waking from slumber. Their hungry growls and screeches echoed in his head, turning his blood cold.

Wake up
, he told himself.
Wake up, old boy. Wake now!

Then, suddenly, there was a train! Chauncey threw himself against its doors. “Open up! Open up! For the love of god, please open!”

The doors hissed apart and Chauncey fell in and pushed the doors shut. Outside, the shining wraiths clawed at the window, mouths snapping. As the train sped away, their angry howls resounded in the
tunnel. Chauncey put his hands over his ears. He just wanted to wake up now. Tomorrow, he’d talk to the mission director about a job. Maybe he’d even go home to Poughkeepsie, find a kindhearted girl. He’d give up the drink and then his liver would be all right again. Anything. Anything but this.

Slowly, he became aware that something was on the train with him. An eerie stillness descended. It was like the time during the war when he turned a blind corner in the trench only to come face-to-face with a German soldier. For a second, the two of them had stared, neither knowing what to do. And then Chauncey had pummeled the soldier with his fists, beating and beating until the soldier’s head was as pulpy as a dropped melon. Afterward, he’d gone through the boy’s pockets with shaking fingers. All he’d found was a picture of the boy with his mother and a sweet-faced dog.

Swallowing down his fear, Chauncey turned his head in the direction of the figure. It wasn’t a German soldier or one of those wretched spirits riding with him, but a woman. She wore a high-necked gown of the sort worn once upon a time. A veil covered her face.

“P-please. Please help me,” Chauncey said. He barely recognized the voice as his own.

“This world will break your heart. Stay with me, inside the dream.”

The woman rose from her seat, and he saw the bloodstains blossoming across the front of her gown. Her mummified hands clasped his face. Her nails were sharp. Through the veil’s fine netting, Chauncey could see the woman’s dark eyes, set in a leathery face. A skeletal mouth showed double rows of pointed teeth.

“Such a pretty dream we are building. We must all keep it going. There’s not much life in you. Still. It will do. We must keep building. The dream needs you.”

Chauncey’s cry thinned to a quavering whisper. “Please. Please just let me wake up.”

“You promised. To break a promise is dishonorable.”

“I didn’t understand.”

“Then I will make you see the world in all its horror.”

The train fell away. The battlefield returned—soldiers blown apart, blood-drenched mud flying up, the sky crying tears of terrible light. But this time, Chauncey lay on a table in the middle of it all, his arms and legs gone. And around him, there were men riding into the night with burning crosses. And there were bedazzled people bathing in tubs of Wall Street money while other people dug in the frost-hard ground for sustenance. And there were slaves sold on auction blocks and starving tribes marched away from their homes and witches pressed under the weight of stones. And there was a gray-faced man in a feathered coat and a tall hat who laughed and laughed.

“Hungry!”
Chauncey’s soldier friends dug into his belly with forks as he screamed.

“Enough!” he cried.

The nightmare vanished. Chauncey was back in the train station. The too-bright things waited in the tunnel, watching.

“
This land is so full of dreams. I feel all your longing. So much longing. Dream with me…
” the woman said.

“Y-yes,” Chauncey managed to say.

She lifted her veil, and her beauty was a terror to behold, a vengeful angel. Her sharp mouth hovered above his face. A glint of metal shimmied through the air. Pain speared Chauncey’s chest. Then she put her lips to his, and her dream poured into him, pushing through Chauncey’s veins, making his body twitch, robbing his mind of the will to fight. She breathed her dream into his lungs until their dream was the same and it was all he could see, all he would ever see, forever.

“
Not enough,
” the veiled woman said as the station glowed.
“More.”