Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (30 page)

“I was born here. I am a citizen. But we have rights as human beings,” Thomas said. Others joined his protest—not just people from Chinatown, but neighbors she recognized from over on Orchard and Ludlow Streets and Little Italy, too. The man with the bullhorn was shouting, “If you do not comply, we will be forced to put you all in quarantine camps!”

“Ling!”

Ling turned and saw Gracie Leung squeezing through the crowd.

“Ling! Did you hear? Isn’t it awful?” she said once she’d reached her.

“Hear what, Gracie?” Ling asked, irritated. She hated the way Gracie drew out her gossip in breathless fashion.

“It’s George!”

Ling went cold. “What about George?”

Gracie burst into tears. “Oh, Ling. He
died
!”

Everything in the park narrowed to a point. Ling could scarcely breathe.

“That’s why they’re here now,” Gracie said, pointing toward the man with the bullhorn. She wiped away her tears. “His mother found him this morning. His entire body was covered in blisters, like he’d
been eaten up from the inside, and there was nothing left. And when they went to move him, his bones…” Gracie choked back a sob. “His bones crumbled like ash.”

Ling remembered the very end of her dream. Something terrifying had been closing in on George, and he already looked dead, like a man who knows his executioner waits.
Ling Chan—Wake. Up
, he’d said, a command.

A warning.

“You’re awfully quiet tonight, Miss Chan,” Henry said from his perch at the piano as he and Ling waited for the train into the dream world. Down below, Ling sat on the edge of the fountain, her fingers trailing absently through the water.

“My friend George died today,” Ling said numbly. “He had the sleeping sickness.”

She watched the goldfish zipping through the water, an agitation of orange.

“Oh, Ling. I’m awfully sorry to hear it,” Henry said, coming to sit beside her.

“Thank you,” Ling mumbled. “I dreamed about him. Last night.”

Henry was quiet for a moment. “Maybe he was saying good-bye.”

“Maybe,” Ling said. But the dream hadn’t been peaceful in any way. George’s death had hit Ling hard. Somehow, all along, she had believed he would beat it. He was young and strong. But she understood that illness was capricious and unfair. After all, Ling had been young and strong, too. And it hadn’t made a bit of difference to her legs.

The train whooshed into the station. Without a word, Henry offered his arm, and Ling did not refuse it.

“What’s the matter, Little Warrior?” Wai-Mae said the moment Ling got off the train in the forest.

“She lost her friend George to the sleeping sickness today,” Henry
said, and the three of them stood listening to the soft chirrup of birds, not knowing what to say or do next.

“We should give his spirit rest,” Wai-Mae said at last.

“What do you mean?” Henry asked.

“It is very important to honor the dead. To make certain they can be happy in the afterlife, especially if it has been a very hard death,” Wai-Mae said. “Otherwise, the spirit can’t rest.”

Henry thought of his mother sitting in the cemetery working her rosary beads, all those painted saints giving her comfort. He thought, too, of burying Gaspard with a soup bone. Rituals were important. “I’ll get Louis,” he said, patting Ling’s shoulder. “We’ll do this right, Chinatown–New Orleans style.”

Henry, Louis, Wai-Mae, and Ling gathered on the hill above the golden village. Louis played a slow tune on his fiddle and Henry sang a hymn he’d learned as a boy. Wai-Mae plucked a twig from a nearby tree and transformed it into incense, which she lit with a candle made from a stalk of grass. Its sweet, smoky fragrance joined the pine and gardenia.

“How did you do that?” Henry asked, astonished.

But already Wai-Mae had gathered a handful of pebbles and was squeezing them in her fist, a look of fierce concentration on her face. When she opened her hand, it held a cup of tea.

“For your friend,” she said, and Ling left the offering on a bed of wildflowers.

“I don’t have a picture of George,” Ling said to Wai-Mae. “We should have one.”

Wai-Mae handed her a stick. “Draw.”

Ling did as she was told, dragging the stick through the dirt to make a simple representation of a face—a circle, two slashes for eyes, a line for a nose, and another for a mouth. Ling looked to Wai-Mae.

“You know what to do,” Wai-Mae said, guiding Ling’s hands to the image in the dirt.

Ling shook her head. “I don’t think I can do it.”

“Yes, you can,” Wai-Mae assured her.

Ling pictured George’s face in her mind, but all she could see was the ghostly George from her dream. She took a deep breath, and then she saw him as she had known him in life—skinny, hare-quick, mouth in a half smile, brows raised as if he were constantly surprised. That stupid snort. His hopeful eyes darting toward the Tea House door each time it opened, as if someone might walk through with his beautiful future cradled in her hands.

The buzzing sparked across the tips of her fingers. It coursed along her skin everywhere and shot straight up her neck, making her head balloon-light. And then the vibrations resonated deep inside, as if some part of her had joined this dream world, all her molecules shifting toward something yet to be written. Cracks formed in the earth.

Ling opened her eyes, feeling a bit woozy. Where the crude dirt drawing had been, a sapling, yellow-green with new life, now reached toward the sun. Tiny red buds struggled out of white casings. As she watched the light sparking along its fresh tendrils, it struck Ling as both funny and yet so perfect. This was the essence of George: something always on the verge of being born. Something not ready to die. She turned her head away so that the others couldn’t see her tears.

“I did it,” she whispered. And Ling didn’t know if the tears sliding down her cheeks were for her dead friend or the guilty joy she felt at discovering this new power.

Brief lightning fluttered through the dreamscape. The tops of the trees lost all shape and color, as if they’d been erased by an angry child. The whining insect chorus pierced the quiet for just a moment. Wai-Mae said a prayer over George’s symbolic grave. Ling scooped up a handful of dogwood blossoms and placed them near the sapling.

“For George. May all his dreams be happy now.”

Henry nodded at Louis, and the two of them took up with a good-times song, as if they were joining a funeral procession on Bourbon Street, sadness giving way to celebration of the life lived. Far above, the dream sky settled into its rich golden hue.

“When I die, I hope someone will remember me so kindly,” Wai-Mae said.

Nearby, a small flock of egrets took flight, crying into the shining pink clouds.

Wai-Mae took Ling’s hand. “Look, his soul is free.”

Ling kept her eyes on the sky, and she did not turn around to look at the pulsing light in the tunnel, nor did she listen to the screeching, growling chorus rising in the deep dark.

The dreams were everywhere.

From the moment the people took their first breaths, they exhaled want until the air was thick with yearning.

Jericho dreamed of Evie. Firecrackers exploded in the sky above her. The ragged light gave her face an angel’s glow and framed the outline of her body beneath her flimsy chemise. Her lips were an invitation, and Jericho moaned her name in his sleep.

Sam dreamed that he was a child walking with his mother, his hand in hers, safe and loved. But they were separated by sudden crowds of soldiers filling the street. Sam was lost. And then his mother’s voice drifted out from a radio in a store window: “Find me, Little Fox.”

In Mabel’s dream, she climbed a tall platform and towered above a crowd of people who chanted her name. They were there to see her and no one else.

Isaiah dreamed of the boy in the boater hat and the girl with the green eyes, happy as can be, and Isaiah was afraid for them, as if he could see the storm bearing down on their idyll. He screamed and screamed that they were in danger, but no sound came out.

Drunk on gin, Evie would not remember her dreams come morning.

Theta dreamed of Memphis, and Memphis of Theta, and in both dreams, they were happy, and the world was kind.

But dreams can’t be contained for long. Their natural trajectory is forward. Out. Up. Away. Past all barriers and borders. Into the world.

This is true of nightmares, too.

In the gloomy tunnel, the pale, hungry creatures crawled down the walls and into the old station. They tested the rusted gate. When it opened, they sniffed at the damp air, breathing in the intoxicating fumes from so much want, tasting it on their tongues, pushing out farther, crawling into the city’s sewers and into the miles of subway tunnels, hiding in the archways when the trains rumbled past. They loitered in the shadows on the edges of the stations, where they could watch the bright lights of the people so full of yearning.

“
Dreams,
” they murmured, ravenous.

In Substation Number Eleven beneath Park Row, the rotary converters shuddered to a halt, flummoxing the two men on duty. They thumped the dials on their control panels but the dials did not respond. “I’ll go, Willard,” said the more junior of the two, whose name was Stan. He grabbed a wrench from the tool board and, flashlight in hand, made his way along a futuristic corridor of humming pipes and tubes, taking the staircase down into the rotary converter room, that marvel of modern engineering, now dark and silent. Flipping the switches on the wall did nothing. Stan’s flashlight beam swept over the hulking converters; in the dark, they were like the rounded backs of sleeping metal giants. On the far side of the room, light pulsed behind one of them—a downed wire, perhaps, or a small electrical fire trying to spark. Stan approached cautiously. He stopped when he heard the sound—a syrupy growl made deep in the throat. The growl shifted into a quick, low-pitched shriek that chilled Stan to the bone.

“Who’s there?” he barked, gripping the wrench tight.

It was quiet for a moment, so quiet that Stan could hear only his own breathing, which was amplified by the cavernous room. And then, without warning, the scream exploded like a storm front. It sounded as if it were being torn note by note from the throats of a hundred damned souls. It filled the room so completely that Stan couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

Behind the converter, the light crackled anew—one, two, three—projecting macabre shadows onto the substation’s high white-tiled wall.

And then the thing stepped out. It appeared to have been a man once. Now it was something else entirely, something not human: pasty skin as cracked as dry earth and blighted by red patches and sores, hair thinned to spindly tufts. Opaque blue soulless eyes stared from its chalky, skeletal face. The glare of the flashlight caught the razor-sharp edges of small, yellowed teeth inside a rotted mouth that hung partially open.

“Help me…” Stan whispered like a frightened child. Because this was the stuff of nightmares left behind in the nursery.

The thing saw Stan. It cocked its head, sniffing. From deep down, the growl started, like a dog giving warning over its food. Black drool dribbled down from the sides of its mouth, and then its jaw unhinged, wider than humanly possible. It shrieked again, and Stan didn’t care that he’d wet his pants or that he was blubbering as he stumbled backward toward the door. He was running now, but it was no use. Because there were more. Quick as beetles, they scuttled around the room. And there was nothing—no wrench, no flashlight, no reason—that could save him as the bright things closed in.

Back in the control room, Willard sat in his chair whistling to himself until Stan’s scream echoing up from the substation’s bowels stopped him cold.

“Jesus,” he said on a sharp intake of breath. “Stan?” he called. And again, “Stan, that you?”

There was no answer.

“Stan?”

Nothing.

Willard knew he should get up. He should grab the lantern and go see what was what. One foot in front of the other and down the stairs. Easy.

He didn’t move.

“Stan? You okay?” he called again, a little quieter this time.

He’d count to five. If Stan didn’t come back by then, he’d go see. Under his breath, Willard counted softly: “One… two… three…” He took a shaking breath. “… Four…” And another. “… Fi—”

A shriek answered him. Up and down the corridor outside the control room, the lights flickered wildly. And then they winked out one by one, as if the electricity were being sucked up through an invisible straw. Still, Willard could not make himself go in the direction of the sound, even as he heard the guttural growls and eerie, breathy screeches crawling closer.

So the nightmares came to him.

And like the people and their dreams, they were hungry for more.