Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (55 page)

As Henry stepped into the tunnel, he was aware of vague shapes in the dark above, and he knew these creatures traveled between worlds—supernatural and natural, dream and reality. Glowing eyes watched his every step. Those same shapes sniffed the air around him, taking in his scent, but for some reason they didn’t follow, and Henry stepped out into the forest and made his way to the bayou, calling Louis’s name. But when he got to the cabin, everything was gray and dull. No sunlight on the river. No smoke coming from the chimney. No sweet music to greet him. He peeked into the cabin’s windows, but it was too dark to see. When he tried to open the door, his hand moved through it like water. A thread of panic wove itself into Henry’s heart.

“Louis Rene Bernard—you better answer me, dammit!” Henry kicked at a tree, but it was like kicking at air. He slumped down on the still-solid ground and let himself cry angry tears.

“Henry?”

At the sound of Wai-Mae’s voice, Henry startled. She stood just inside the mouth of the tunnel. Her dress wavered between states, shifting from an old-fashioned gown to her usual plain tunic. Everything about her seemed ephemeral.

“Is Ling with you?” Wai-Mae asked.

“No. I came by myself. I needed… I need to find Louis. To ask him why he didn’t come to the station today. I waited all day. He never showed.”

Wai-Mae stepped over the threshold into the dead grass. Her cheeks were pale, but her eyes sparkled. “Poor Henry. You want to be with him very much, don’t you?”

“Yes. It’s all I want.”

Wai-Mae put her hands on the lifeless Spanish elm. Where she touched the tree, it blossomed. “It takes so much energy to make dreams.”

She ran a hand through the grass. It sparked with color and spread all the way to the river, a rippling carpet of green. “To make things the way you wish.” Wai-Mae exhaled—three short, fierce breaths—and the air filled with birdsong and dragonflies and blue sky. Slowly, the bayou dreamscape came to life, like a carousel starting up. “To keep the hurt out.”

Wai-Mae stared back at the tunnel, frowning. “Sometimes, I—
she
—remembers. She remembers that they promised her everything—a husband, a home, a new life in a new country—only to break her heart. But they can’t stop her dream now. She wants to help you, Henry. Yes,” Wai-Mae said, blinking, as if she’d just remembered something very important that had been lost for some time. “She wants
me
to help you be with Louis. Do you want to see him?”

Henry felt woozy. The dream blurred around the edges. “Yes,” he said.

From inside her dress, Wai-Mae took out a music box. “What would you give to see him again? To have your dream?”

Dreams. That was what Henry had been living on for most of his life. Never really here, always somewhere in his mind. He was as much of a dream walker awake as he was asleep. He didn’t want to think anymore.

“Anything,” he said.

“Promise?”

“Yes.”

“
Then dream with me
,” Wai-Mae said, offering the music box.

Henry turned the little crank of the music box. The tinny song drifted out and Henry whisper-sang along.
“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me. Starlight and dewdrops are waiting… f-for thee.…”

The alcohol and the exhaustion took hold. As the song played, Henry thought of all he had lost: The loving, strong parents he’d longed for but knew were nothing more than a child’s wish. The easy way things used to be with Theta. The music inside him that he’d never finish, never put out into the world as his story. He cried for poor, sweet Gaspard and those summer-still nights at Celeste’s, the boys with their arms flung carelessly over each other’s slender shoulders. Most of all, Henry cried for Louis. How could Louis have left him like that? How were you supposed to go on if you knew love was that fragile?

“Forget.” Wai-Mae kissed Henry’s cheek. “Forget,” she said, and kissed the other. She raised the dagger high. “Forget.”

Sweetly, she kissed his lips, and then she plunged the slim blade into Henry’s chest, just above his heart. Henry gasped from pain, and she breathed her dream into his open mouth. It flowed into Henry, siphoning away his memory and cares and will, along with his life. For a moment Henry thought about fighting back, but it all seemed inevitable, like finally giving in to drowning after a fruitless, exhausting swim. Already the iciness was spreading through his veins, weighting his limbs, filling him with an aching hunger that could only be fed by more dreams. Henry felt as if he were falling into a deep, deep well. The music-box song came to him, distorted and slow. As his eyes fluttered, he could see glimpses of those radium-bright, broken creatures watching him from the dark.

They opened their mouths—“
dreamwithusdreamdreamdream”
—and their din swelled as it joined the song, a discordant lullaby.

The fight left Henry. The dream army advanced. Henry closed his eyes and fell deep.

A dog’s insistent barking woke him. Henry opened his eyes to blue skies sponged with shimmering pink-white clouds. He felt as if he’d been sleeping for ages. The prickly points of grass blades scratched against his arms and neck where he lay; his surroundings smelled of
warm earth and river, sweet clover and Spanish moss. Another bark caused him to turn his head to the right. In the tall green grass, an excited, puppyish Gaspard snuffled closer. He smeared Henry’s cheek with his slobbery tongue.

“Gaspard. Hey, boy.” Henry sat up and buried his face in the dog’s velvety fur. Down the dirt path, smoke puffed from the cabin’s chimney. Henry could smell it now. Woodsy and sweet, it burned the back of his throat just right. A pot of jambalaya was on. Henry could almost taste the spicy roux.

He heard Louis’s fiddle sawing away on “Rivière Rouge.” Gaspard ran toward the cabin and Henry followed. Dragonflies floated on the feathered edges of sunflowers. Birds chirruped their June song, for it was high summer. It would always be summer here, Henry knew. The old hickory steps creaked beneath the weight of his feet. He was back. He was home. The door opened in welcome.

There was a bed against the wall, and a small table with two chairs and a stool, where Louis sat, handsome as ever, the fiddle nestled under his stubbly chin. Shafts of sunlight poured through the windows, bathing Louis in a golden shimmer. He smiled at Henry. “
Mon cher!
Where you been?”

“I’ve been…” Henry started to answer but found he couldn’t quite remember where he’d been or what that other life was like, if it had been important or lonely, wonderful or awful. He had a vague feeling that he was angry with Louis. For the life of him, he couldn’t think why. It no longer mattered. All of it floated away the moment Louis crossed the sun-drenched floor to kiss him. It was the sweetest kiss Henry could recall, and it made him want another and another. Henry pulled Louis down onto the bed and snaked a hand up his shirt, marveling at the warmth of his lover’s skin.

“I will never leave you again,” Henry said.

Outside, the morning glories bloomed fat and purple and spread across the ground in a widening bruise.

“Did you find Evie?” Mabel asked as Sam stormed into the library, tossed his coat on the bear’s paw, and threw himself on the sofa.

“Yeah. Sorry, kid. We have to do this without her.”

“She’s not coming?” Jericho asked. He removed Sam’s coat from the bear and held it out to him, waiting patiently until Sam rose from the sofa, took the coat, and hung it properly in the closet.

“Remind me to give Evie a piece of my mind,” Mabel fumed.

“Save it,” Sam advised. “She doesn’t deserve any piece of you.”

There was a knock at the door, followed by a series of progressively more urgent knocks.

“I knew she’d come!” Mabel hurried down the hall and opened the door not to Evie but to a bedraggled Ling.

“Oh. If you’re here for the party, I’m afraid you’re early,” Mabel explained.

“I’m looking for Henry DuBois. I’m a friend of his. I tried his apartment, but he wasn’t answering. Then I remembered that the Diviners exhibit was opening tonight, and I hoped… Please, may I come in? It’s urgent—”

A taxi screeched to a halt at the curb and Theta jumped out, still in her stage makeup and costume. She tossed money at the cabdriver through the passenger window and shouted, “Keep the change!”

Memphis crawled out from the backseat, holding Henry in his arms.

“What’s the matter?” Mabel asked as they reached the steps.

“It-it’s Henry.” Theta sputtered, wild-eyed. “I came home and the metronome was going. He’s dream walking. But look—” Theta pointed to the faint red blisters forming on Henry’s neck. “I can’t wake him up. I think he’s got the sleeping sickness.”

Henry’s lips were parted; his eyelids twitched. Another mark bloomed on his skin.

“Should I call a doctor? Should I call my parents?” Mabel asked.

“A doctor won’t help. Neither will your parents,” Ling said. “It’s her. She’s got him. You’d better let me in.”

The angry wind howled at the windows and across the roof of the museum as Ling sat in the library among strangers while the dreaming Henry lay on the couch, precious minutes ticking by.

“My name is Ling Chan,” she started. “I’m a dream walker.”

“The other Diviner,” Mabel said.

Ling briefed everyone about her walks with Henry and all they’d seen and experienced there, from the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company to the strange loop they’d seen each time with the veiled woman. She told them, too, about the Proctor sisters’ revelations to Henry, and what she’d learned about the veiled woman haunting the site of her past and the dream machine she’d been building brick by brick, ghost by ghost, a grand architecture of illusion meant to keep painful memory at bay. “Henry is in trouble. He needs help.
Our
help.”

“I’m confused,” Mabel said. “Your friend Wai-Mae is actually a ghost, the veiled woman—they’re one and the same?”

Ling nodded.

“So she doesn’t even know she’s a ghost,” Mabel said, mulling it over. She looked to Theta. “It’s like what Dr. Jung talked about—the shadow self.”

Sam whistled. “That’s some shadow. Mine just makes me look taller.”

“She doesn’t really know what she’s doing,” Ling said.

“Horsefeathers!” Theta’s eyes glimmered. “That lie’s been around since Adam. She knows. Somewhere, deep down, she knows. I want her dead.”

“She’s already dead,” Sam said.

Theta glared.

Sam put up his hands in surrender. “Just making a point.”

“You said the station was for Beach’s pneumatic train? You’re sure?” Memphis asked.

“Yes,” Ling said.

“That mean something to you, Poet?”

Memphis reached into his coat for his poetry book. “Isaiah asked me about it. In fact, he even drew a picture of it. Isaiah’s my brother,” he explained to the others as he opened the book to Isaiah’s drawing of Beach’s pneumatic train and the glowing wraiths crawling out of the tunnel.

“That’s it,” Ling whispered. “That’s where we go each night. How did your brother…?”

“Isaiah’s got this gift. He can see glimpses of the future, like a radio picking up signals,” Memphis said, echoing Sister Walker’s words to him in her kitchen months before. Hadn’t she said she needed to talk to Memphis before she left? How he wished he’d taken her up on that offer. They’d certainly have plenty to talk about when she got back, and Octavia couldn’t stop him this time. “There’s something else I should tell you. You know that lady who survived the sleeping sickness, Mrs. Carrington?”

Sam shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. Was in all the papers. She took a picture with Sarah Snow.”

Memphis took a deep breath. “I’m the one who really healed her.”

Ling looked up at Memphis. “You can heal?”

“Sometimes,” Memphis said gently. “But I’d never had a healing trance like that one. It was more like a dream than a trance. I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. And… I think I saw her. All I can say is that she had me sucked right in, so I believe you about her power.”

Sam sat up. “I’m trying to understand all this—”

“Don’t strain,” Jericho muttered.

“This ghost, Wai-Mae, or the veiled woman, or whoever she is, she can trap people inside dreams?” Sam finished.

“I think so,” Ling said. “From what Henry and I saw inside that tunnel, it seems that she gives them their best dreams, and as long as they don’t struggle, they stay there. If they fight it, their best dream turns into their worst nightmare.”

“But
why
does she do it?” Jericho asked.

“She needs their dreams. She feeds off them. They’re like batteries fueling her dream world. That’s why the sleeping sickness victims burn up from the inside. Because it’s too much. The constant dreaming destroys them.”

“What happens to those dreamers when they die?” Memphis asked, and the room fell silent.

“They can’t stop wanting the dream,” Ling said at last. “They’re insatiable. Hungry ghosts.”

“Monsters in the subways,” Memphis murmured.

Sam frowned at Memphis. “I don’t like where that’s headed. ‘Monsters in the Subways’ is not the title of a big, happy dance number.”

“Shut up, Sam,” Theta said. “Memphis, what is it?”

Memphis paced the same section of carpet. “Isaiah kept telling me about this bad dream he was having. About a lady making monsters in the tunnels. About ‘monsters in the subways.’ I thought he was making up a story so he wouldn’t get in trouble for drawing in my book. But I got a bad feeling he was telling the truth.”

“The disappearances,” Jericho said. “Missing people. It’s been in all the papers.”

“You think it’s all connected?” Mabel asked.

“I know it is,” Ling said.

Lightning flashed at the windows. A rumble of thunder followed.

“It’s been all around us. We just haven’t been paying attention,” Jericho said.

“Because it wasn’t happening to you,” Ling snapped.

“Yeah? You and Henry were happy to ignore it when it suited you,” Theta said coolly.

“You’re right,” Ling said. “Now that I know, I have to stop her.”

“Yeah? How you gonna do that?” Sam asked. “Ask her pretty please to stop killing people because it’s not nice? Somehow I don’t think she’s gonna be copacetic with that.”

Ling stared at her hands. “I don’t know, but I have to try. I’m going back into the dream world. I’m going to find Henry, and then I’ll face Wai-Mae.”

“What about those things in the tunnel—if they really exist, if Isaiah is right about that—your hungry ghosts?” Memphis asked. “How do we get rid of them?”

“At Knowles’ End, once Evie banished John Hobbes’s spirit, the ghosts of the Brethren disappeared, too,” Jericho said, breaking his silence on that topic. “Like they were an extension of him.” The room fell silent for a moment.

“You know for sure that’s the case here?” Sam asked at last.

“No,” Jericho admitted.

“Swell. Isn’t there some kinda ghost primer in this joint: Reading, Writing, ’Rithmetic, Ridding Yourself of Soul-Stealing Demons for Fun and Profit? Why isn’t there ever anything useful around here?”

Mabel handed Sam a watercress sandwich.

“Thanks, Mabes.”

“Bad death,” Ling murmured.

“What? Wha’ bad deaph?” Sam said around a mouthful of sandwich. “Don’t like the sound of that, either.”

“Wai-Mae said the ghost had a bad death. But we don’t know how she died. All we know is that our dream walk starts the same way each night: Wai-Mae runs past us toward Devlin’s Clothing Store. Beach’s pneumatic train station was built under Devlin’s Clothing Store on Broadway and Warren, near the City Hall station. There’s got to be something down there that’s important to her. But I don’t know what.”

On the Chesterfield, Henry’s fingers stiffened as he was caught in the net of dreaming. Two new burn marks appeared on his neck.

“Whatever you’re gonna do, let’s get started,” Theta said. “Please.”

Memphis put a hand on Henry’s arm. “I could try to heal him.”

Theta reached over and slipped her hand into Memphis’s. “She almost killed you last time.”

“But this time I won’t fall for her tricks.”

“No,” Ling said sharply. “You can’t protect yourself once you’re inside a dream. Anything can happen. You’ll be caught, just like Henry. It has to be me. I’m awake inside the dream. It’s different. I’ll go after Henry.”

“And what if that doesn’t work?” Jericho asked.

“It has to work.”

“But what if it doesn’t?” Jericho persisted.

Ling looked over at Henry. “We go into the tunnels. Find what’s so important to Wai-Mae that it keeps her here.”

Loud, haphazard pounding reverberated through the museum, as if someone was knocking and kicking the front door at the same time. And then a muffled voice yelled, “Hey! Lemme in! ’S freezing out here!”

“Evie!” Mabel said.

They opened the front door to see Evie leaning against the doorjamb. Her mascara was smudged and she reeked of gin.

“As promised, I should like to offer my services to the cause of this swell creepy-crawly party,” she said and gave a flourish of a bow, smacking her head. “Ow! Whennid you put in that wall?”

“Evil, are you blotto?” Theta demanded.

“Cerrrtainly not,” Evie mumbled. She blew out a gust of boozy air, lifting a curl from her forehead. “Well. Perhaps a
soooo-sahn
. That’s French. I know some French…
avous
.”

“Holy smokes,” Theta said, throwing her hands in the air. “Just what we need.”

Evie barged in, knocking a tray of poppet dolls from a side table onto the floor. “Uh-oh. Your poppets are pooped,” she said, giggling.

“Go home, Evie. We got enough trouble here,” Sam said, directing her back toward the door.

Evie wobbled around him. “Unhand me, fiancé!”

“I am not your fiancé. It was a publicity stunt, remember?”

“Right,” Evie said, nearly swallowing the word.

“Your engagement isn’t real?” Jericho said.

Evie peered up at Jericho and quickly averted her eyes. “I can assure you that the feelings Sam Sergei Lloyd Lubovitch has for any girl are nothin’ but an act.”

Evie stumbled a bit, and Jericho caught her. He kept his arm around her shoulders. “I’ve got you.”

Mabel took it all in, a weight in her stomach. “I’ll make coffee,” she said dully and walked the long hall back to the kitchen.

“I have not missed this joint,” Evie announced as she tottered down the hall toward the library. She swilled from her flask, dribbling gin down her chin and onto the front of her dress. “Oops. The Sweetheart Seer did not see that coming.”

Sam replaced her flask with a cup. “Drink this.”

Evie turned doleful eyes to him. “Why you do this? What’d I ever do to you?” She took a sip and grimaced. “Tastes like water.”

“It is water.”

“You know what the trouble with this water is? There’s no gin in it,” she said, shoving the cup back at him. “Say, I thought this was a party! Where is everybody?” Evie said, twirling around unsteadily. She stopped when she saw Ling. “How do you do,” she said, moving toward Ling, her hand outstretched. “I’m Evangeline O’Neill.”

“I know who you are,” Ling said.

“Evie, this is Henry’s friend Ling Chan, the other dream walker I told you about,” Theta said.

“Right. Dream walker.” Evie slapped the chair. “Ever’body an’ his uncle’s a Diviner! ’S gettin’ crowded.”