Page 12 of Lair of Dreams


  Pop-pop-pop! Fireworks exploded over the sketchlike rooftops, and a phantasmic man in an old-fashioned vest and coat flickered against the haze as if he were a motion-picture projection.

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” the apparition called. “Come one! Come all for a ride on Alfred Beach’s pneumatic train. See this marvel for yourselves and be amazed—the future of travel, beneath these very streets!” The apparition gestured to his right, and the limestone building appeared.

  “Devlin’s! That’s the spot where I heard Louis’s fiddle last night!” Henry ran toward it, listening, but no music drifted out from inside its old brick walls tonight. “But I heard it so clearly last night.”

  “I told you there was no guarantee,” Ling said. “This is still a dream, remember?”

  “But I know the sound of his playing like my own. It was him. Louis! Louis!” Henry felt like he might cry. Having come so close, he couldn’t bear this new disappointment. With a grunt, he swung at the building, hitting it with a hard thwack.

  “Ow!” he cried, shaking out his hand.

  Ling’s mouth opened in shock. “You… you just touched that. That’s impossible.” Cautiously, Ling reached out and trailed her fingers across the bumps and grooves in the brick. “Impossible,” she said again. “Have you ever been able to touch something while dream walking before?”

  “Until yesterday when I grabbed your hand? No. Never.”

  “Me, either,” Ling said.

  A piercing scream rang out, sending shivers up Henry’s and Ling’s spines: “Murder! Murder! Oh, murder!”

  A ghostly figure broke through the haze, heading straight for Henry and Ling: a veiled woman in an old-fashioned, high-necked gown. She ran as if frightened, as if being chased. As she drew closer, Henry and Ling could see that the front of her dress was red with blood. The woman whooshed past in the space between them, trailing cold in her wake. Then she moved through the facade of the limestone building as if she were made of smoke.

  A shimmering hole opened in the wall.

  “What was that?” Ling asked, but Henry didn’t answer. He stood at the edge of the hole, which was glowing with whatever energy lay inside. The opening wavered uncertainly, as if it might snap shut at any second.

  “There are steps leading down. Come on! We have to hurry!” Henry said, nodding toward it.

  “Are you a lunatic?”

  “Please. I don’t think I can find him without you, Ling,” Henry pleaded. “It’s just a dream, darlin’. If something bad happens, all we have to do is wake up.”

  “I should’ve doubled my fee,” Ling groused.

  And with that, they raced inside and down the steps just as the portal closed behind them.

  “Ling?” Henry called in the darkness.

  “Here,” Ling answered. “Wherever here is.”

  Dim yellow lights sputtered on and rippled through the black as if someone had flipped a switch, illuminating a long brick corridor that narrowed into darkness farther on. Pipes ran above their heads. There were no other helpful distinguishing features.

  A thread of cool wind drifted toward them.

  “It’s coming from up ahead. So I guess that’s the way we go.”

  They walked quietly for a while, the silence proving every bit as uncomfortable as the dream walk’s unnerving strangeness.

  “What’s it like to speak to the dead?” Henry asked at last, a stab at conversation. “Is it frightening?”

  “They don’t scare me. They only want to be heard. Sometimes they have messages for the living.”

  “Like what?”

  “‘Marry on the eighth day of the eighth month of next year.’ ‘This is not the time to test your luck—you must wait one month.’ ‘Tell him I know—I know what you did,’” Ling said, recalling some of the information she’d carried back from the dead.

  “You’re like the Western Union of ghosts,” Henry joked.

  Ling shrugged, annoyed. She wasn’t in a mood to explain herself to Henry. All day long, she’d been able to think of little other than George. “Don’t you ever worry about this sleeping sickness when you walk?”

  Henry raised an eyebrow. “Do you? That is, would it stop you?”

  Ling shook her head. “Still, do you think we’d know if we were walking in a sick person’s dream?”

  Henry had been in all sorts of dreams before. When people were drunk, their dreams were a bit bleary and slow. When people had a fever, their dreams were particularly strange and vivid, and there was always one person in the dream complaining about the heat. Henry had even walked in the dream of a man on his deathbed once. They had been passengers on a ship. The man had been at peace as he looked out at the calm sea and the far horizon. He’d smiled at Henry, saying, I’m headed over there. But I’m afraid you can’t come along.

  “I think we’d know,” he said at last.

  “So, how did you lose this friend of yours, Louis?”

  Henry sobered. “My father didn’t approve of our… friendship. He thought Louis was a bad influence.”

  “Was he?” Ling asked.

  “No. Never,” Henry said firmly. He wondered just how honest he could be with her. “What would you do if your parents forbade you from seeing your dearest friend?”

  “What choice would I have?” Ling said. “They’re my parents. I owe them everything.”

  “You don’t owe them everything,” Henry said a little defensively.

  “Yes, I do. They’re my parents,” Ling said again, as if that settled the matter. “Besides, the question is academic. I don’t have a dearest friend.”

  “No one?”

  The closest Ling had come was George, and they hadn’t been close for some time. “Some of us don’t need friends.”

  “Everyone needs friends.”

  “I don’t,” Ling said.

  “Well, now, that is pos-i-tute-ly the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. I am compelled as a gentleman to insist that you come to lunch with my friends and me this week. We’ll make it a party.”

  Ling imagined the faces of Henry and his fashionable set as she hobbled toward them in her cumbersome braces. The way their mouths would open in surprise, their discomfort peeking out beneath the sympathetic smiles they’d paste on too quickly. That was never going to happen.

  “Pos-i-tute-ly isn’t a real word,” she said.

  “Why, it pos-i-tute-ly is! It’s in the dictionary, just before prob-a-lute-ly.”

  “You’re doing that simply to annoy me.”

  “Abso-tive-ly not.” Henry’s smile was pure innocence.

  “Keep listening for your friend’s fiddle,” Ling said and marched on.

  The first time Ling had been visited by the dead, she’d been dream walking down a rainy street among people who were no more than dull splotches against the gray day. Ling was drawn to a pair of beautiful doors painted with the fearsome faces of evil spirit–banishing gods. The doors opened rather suddenly, and standing there beneath a paper parasol was her great-aunt Hui-ying, whom Ling had only known through photographs sent from China. The rain flew upward around her aunt, leaving her untouched. The outlines of her soft body carried a faint shimmer, which Ling would come to know marked the dead from the living. “Daughter: Tell them to break my favorite comb, the ivory one, and bury me with half,” her aunt said. “It’s in the painted chest, the second drawer down, in a hiding spot at the back behind a false partition.”

  A day later, her parents received the telegram informing them that Auntie Hui-ying had died on the very night Ling had seen her. The family was frantically searching for Auntie Hui-ying’s comb, which they knew was her favorite, but they’d been unable to find it. “It’s in the painted chest, the second drawer, behind a false back,” Ling had said, parroting her aunt’s words.

  Later, Ling’s father had taken her with him to the farm on Long Island. Under the warm sun, they worked side by side, gathering long beans. Ling’s father was a quiet man who tended to keep his thoughts to himse
lf. They were alike in that way. “Ling,” he’d said, stopping to smoke a cigarette while Ling ate a peach, savoring the sweetness on her tongue. “How did you know about Auntie’s comb?”

  Ling had been afraid at first to tell him the truth, in case it was some sort of bad luck she’d brought to their house. There’d been a baby before Ling, a precious son dead at birth, the cord wrapped around his neck. Two years later, Ling had come along. There’d been no other children after her, and both parents doted on Ling. She was their everything, and Ling often felt the burden of carrying her parents’ hopes and dreams, of being enough for all that love, of shouldering the obligation alone.

  “Whatever it is, you can tell me,” her father had promised.

  Ling had told him everything. He had listened, smoking his cigarette down to nothing. “Do you think I’m cursed, Baba?” Ling had asked. “Have I done something wrong?”

  There had been tenderness in her father’s smile. “You’ve been given a gift. A link between old and new, between the living and the dead. But like all gifts, you must accept this with humility, Ling.”

  Ling understood what he meant: Don’t draw bad luck to you with pride. Outwardly, Ling remained humble, but secretly, she loved walking in dreams and talking to the dead. It made her feel special and powerful. Nearly invincible.

  The week before Ling took ill, she’d gone on a picnic outing to Long Island organized by the Chinese Benevolent Association for the students of the Chinese school. It was one of those warm October days that are a parting kiss of summer. Ling and her friends had gone to the water’s edge, taken off their stockings, and waded into the chilly Atlantic, reveling in the soft coolness of mud squished between toes that wouldn’t see the sun again until June. It had been a perfect day.

  That night, her elderly neighbor, Mr. Hsu, died, and Ling saw the old man in a dream, faint and golden, sitting at his favorite table in her family’s restaurant. “One last cup of tea before I go,” he’d said. At the door, which opened onto a vast canvas of stars, he’d looked back at her with an unreadable expression. “We are made by what we are asked to bear, Ling Chan,” he’d said.

  Days later, Ling woke tired, with a fever and a terrible headache. Her mother sent her to bed, but the aching and fever got worse. The muscles in her calves stiffened until she couldn’t move them without pain. And then she couldn’t move them at all. Infantile paralysis, the doctors said. Too much pride, Ling heard.

  In the hospital, nurses held Ling down as the doctor immobilized her legs in heavy plaster casts. “You have to be brave and keep very still, Ling,” the doctor scolded as she cried out against the fire of the infection racing along her nerve endings. Holding still was worse than anything.

  “She has to learn to be strong,” the doctor said.

  “She doesn’t have to learn to suffer,” her mother shot back, shutting him up.

  For a month, Ling had endured the agony of the plaster, unable to touch her skin when it burned and itched or massage the brutal spasms of her dying muscles. And when the casts finally came off, she was no better than before.

  “You’ll need to wear these now,” the nurse said, buckling on the ugly metal braces that caged her shriveled legs and bit into the tender skin above and below her knees till there were permanent scars there.

  But the worst part was the pain it brought to her parents. Ling could hear them just outside the door, asking the doctors and nurses again and again if there was any new hope of a cure, or at least an improvement.

  Stop hoping, she wanted to tell them. It’s easier that way.

  Secretly, she thought: I deserve this. I brought it on myself. No matter how much Ling believed in science, in the rational, she couldn’t escape the clutches of superstition, of luck—both good and bad—shaping her life. After all, she spoke to ghosts. Deep down, she couldn’t help thinking that it was her pride that had brought on her illness. And so, just before Christmas, she’d insisted on working in the restaurant again to help her parents. When the spasms gripped her, she did her best to hide it; she was tired of pity. Every night, she escaped into the dream world, where, for one blessed hour, she could run free. Every morning, she dreaded waking up.

  Far above them, Ling and Henry could hear muted hoofbeats and the clatter of omnibuses rumbling down unseen streets. But these sounds came and went, like postcards of sound sent long ago and only now arriving at their destination.

  “Well, this is certainly interesting,” Henry said.

  They’d come to an iron gate, the bars of which had been fashioned with steel roses. The faintest glow seeped through them, warm and golden.

  “Do you see that?” Henry whispered. “I’ve never seen light like that in a dream walk before. It’s always…”

  “Gray,” Ling finished.

  “Yes,” Henry said and smiled. Being with Ling was like traveling in a foreign country and finding the one person who speaks your native language.

  Ling tested the bars with her fingertips. “The gate. It’s… cold,” she said, more in astonishment than fear.

  “Shall we go inside?” Henry asked.

  At Ling’s nod, he lifted the latch and pushed open the gate.

  Henry had seen many odd things in dreams before—noblemen with owl faces peeking above their ruffled shirts. Trees made entirely of fireflies. Steamer ships resting on mountaintops. But he’d never seen anything quite so realistic or beautiful as the lovely old train station where he and Ling found themselves now. This was nothing like the mundane subway, with its creaking wooden turnstiles and harried New Yorkers rushing and pushing. It was as if they were trespassing in some wealthy, eccentric aristocrat’s private underground lair. High above their heads, a herringbone pattern of cream-colored brick fanned out in an undulating plain of cathedral-worthy arches. White-hot gas flickered behind the frosted-glass globes of four brass chandeliers. The light spilled across the smooth surface of a fountain whose water seemed frozen in time. The waiting area boasted a velvet settee, three gooseneck lamps, a colorful Persian rug, and an assortment of fine leather chairs more suited to a library than a train platform. There was even a grand piano with a goldfish bowl resting on its broad back. The entire room had a warm amber glow to it—except for the subway tunnel, which was as dark as funeral bunting.

  “Where are we?” Ling asked. She tapped the goldfish bowl and was rewarded with the tiniest quiver of orange.

  “I don’t know. But it’s glorious!” Henry said, grinning. He sat at the piano. “Any requests?”

  Ling scoffed. “You must be joking.”

  “I don’t know that one, but if you hum a few bars…” Henry said, noodling around on the keys. “Now this is the elephant’s eyebrows. Elephant’s eyebrows is in the same dictionary as pos-i-tute-ly, by the way.”

  Ling took the gleaming wooden stairs down to the passenger-loading platform and walked to the tunnel’s entrance. An arc of gas-jet bulbs, long dead, ringed the brick opening.

  “Beach Pneumatic Transit Company,” Ling whispered, reading the plaque on the wall.

  “I don’t suppose the dead are here to tell you which way I should go to find Louis,” Henry called from the piano.

  “No,” Ling said. Her voice carried faintly. “Hello,” she said, more forcefully, and it echoed: Hello, lo, lo. A thread of wind caressed Ling’s face. There was a faint hiss and a pop of blue flame as, all at once, the gaslight bulbs blazed white-hot. A ghost of sound came from inside the tunnel—the whine of metal against metal.

  “What’s that?” Henry leaped up from the piano and bounded down the stairs to Ling’s side.

  A bright light pierced the tunnel’s darkness. The whine grew louder. A small wooden train car rattled down the dusty tracks, its oracular headlamp bright as noonday sun as it whooshed into the station and squeaked to a stop. The doors sighed open. Henry poked his head in, then turned back to Ling with a grin. “Ling, you’ve got to see this.”

  They peered in, gawking at the mahogany paneling and two plush seats
, the delicate kerosene lamps resting on end tables.

  “Come on,” Henry said, climbing inside.

  “What are you doing?” Ling cautioned.

  “What if this takes us to our mysterious dreamer? What if this is somehow Louis’s crazy dream?” Henry’s pale, freckled face was so serious. “I’ve tried everything else. I have to know. Please. We can always wake up, Ling.”

  “All right,” Ling agreed after a pause. “We can always wake up.”

  The moment they were aboard, the doors slid shut and the train moved backward with a lurch, throwing Henry and Ling onto the seats. Ling closed her eyes and silently reminded herself: It’s only a dream. It’s only a dream. Soon enough, the train came to a gentle stop. The doors opened onto a misty wood marked by skeletal trees. It lacked the detail of the old New York streets and the pretty train station.

  Henry gave the air a good sniff. “Smell that? It’s gardenia. Makes me think of New Orleans.”

  “I don’t smell anything,” Ling said.

  Henry’s expression had changed from curiosity to something bordering on longing. “There! I hear it. That’s Louis’s playing. He’s here! We found him!” Henry leaped from the train and bolted into the murky expanse of half-formed trees as they bent and folded around him, taking him in.

  “Wait!” Ling stumbled after him. “Henry? Henry!” she shouted, her panic rising. She called again and again, but he was nowhere.

  It was as if the dream had opened its maw and swallowed him whole.

  “Ling? Where are you? Ling!” Henry called, his voice echoing in the fog. He’d thought she was right behind him. But when he turned back, the featureless trees all looked the same to him, and he couldn’t tell which way he’d come.

  A soft, warm breeze brought the heady perfume of gardenia, along with other notes—moss and river water, the smells of home. Very faintly, he heard the strains of a fiddle sawing away at “Rivière Rouge.”