Page 27 of Lair of Dreams


  God Almighty, his skin burned! The boy had a grip on him but good. Bill couldn’t break it. “I-sai-ah…” he grunted, biting down on his back teeth.

  “The snake and the tree and the ghosts on the road. The man, the man, the man in the hat is coming.…”

  Isaiah’s body started to twitch and jerk. Another few seconds and it’d be too much. With a yelp, Bill broke the grip, catching the boy in his arms as he fell.

  “Easy now, easy now,” Bill said, though Isaiah was beyond hearing. He put a hand on the boy’s chest. The rise and fall of his breathing was a relief, and a moment later, Isaiah’s voice called out, a little sleepy, “Mr. Johnson?”

  “I’m right here, little man. Your Uncle Bill’s here. You all right?”

  “Mm-hmm. Did I have another fit?” the boy asked, and Bill could hear the fear in his voice as he came around.

  “Nah. Weren’t no fit. Just… when you see that other world, it’s like you go to sleep for a bit. That’s all. Just a little sleep. No harm in it. How you feel now?”

  “Fine. A little tired, though.”

  “But you ’member what I told you now, ’bout this being our secret?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you ain’t gonna tell nobody that we practicing till you can show ’em all how good you got?”

  “No, sir!” The boy sounded light, happy, like a horse that had finally gotten to run wild.

  “Not even your brother.”

  A slight pause. “He’s never around, anyway.”

  “Don’t you worry—I’m here now, son. Right by your side.”

  The boy took his hand as they exited the mausoleum. Bill hugged him close and patted his shoulder just so.

  “What say we go get us some ice cream down to Mr. Reggie’s, then?”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Now. Tell me: Who’s somethin’ special?”

  “I am,” Isaiah said quietly.

  “You sure about that, now? Don’t sound so sure,” Bill teased, and this time the boy came back with a resounding “I am! I am!” that startled the birds into squawking flight.

  “Lead the way, son.”

  One, four, four. Bill would play the number again, see if it came up lucky a second time.

  “Mr. Johnson?” Isaiah asked as they left the graveyard, hand in hand, walking toward the center of Harlem against a bracing, biting wind.

  “Yes, little man?”

  “Who is Guillaume?”

  On the bus ride to the Seward Park Library, Ling’s thoughts were on the previous night’s dream walk. She pressed her fingers to the bus windows, feeling the cold glass and thinking of how those same fingers had transformed the dreamscape, shifting its atoms toward something new and full of energy. It had made her aware of the universe she carried inside, of the ways in which she was both wave and particle, always in flux, always changing. It had all been magical, except for that strange moment with the tunnel and Wai-Mae’s warning. Surely, there had to be a scientific explanation for the bursts of light and sound coming from that tunnel, some energy source worth exploring? No ghosts Ling had ever spoken to behaved in that manner.

  Mrs. Belpre, the librarian, smiled at Ling when she arrived at the library, asking how Ling had liked the books and recommending others. Ling asked if she knew anything about a matchmaking outfit called O’Bannion and Lee, but Mrs. Belpre shook her head.

  “And how is your friend George?” she asked in hushed tones.

  “The same,” Ling said.

  “I hope he wakes up soon,” Mrs. Belpre said, patting Ling’s hand.

  Ling vaguely recalled bits of last night’s dream she’d had about George. Dreams were symbols. Puzzle pieces. For the life of her, she couldn’t quite put this one together yet. There had been something about George in the train station.

  The train station. That was curious.

  When Ling dream walked, she could read words quite clearly. In actual dreaming, though, she never really could. The words blurred or her mind drifted elsewhere. But last night—yes, she remembered now!—she had been able to read perfectly: BEACH PNEUMATIC TRANSIT COMPANY. On impulse, Ling made her way to the card catalog, flipping through until she came to an entry that excited her. There it was on the card, in black and white: Beach Pneumatic Transit Company.

  It was real. Or it had been.

  Ling put aside her science books and combed through old newspapers, reading about a place she thought she and Henry had invented, a place that existed only in dreams.

  ASTONISHING ACCOMPLISHMENT!

  MR. A. E. BEACH AT LAST UNVEILS

  PNEUMATIC UNDERGROUND RAILWAY

  WITH OPULENT RECEPTION!

  Pledges to Extend Line to Central Park

  A marvel of modern transport was unveiled this morning deep below the hustle and bustle of New York’s crowded city streets. The Beach Pneumatic Transit Company, constructed by teams of men working day and night and with great secrecy until recently, was introduced to a curious public by its inventor and architect, Mr. Alfred Ely Beach, editor of Scientific American.

  For a year, the corner of Warren Street and Broadway, occupied by Devlin’s Clothing Store at Number 260 Broadway, has been the subject of much speculation. Passersby have remarked on the shaking ground, the tunneling equipment, and the piles of dirt left behind the store each night. As of today, the entire thrilling enterprise is speculation no more.

  “Ladies and gentlemen! Today we unveil the future of travel beneath these very streets—the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company. See this wonder for yourselves and be amazed,” Mr. Beach crowed to a handsomely furnished waiting room filled with reporters, dignitaries, and city politicians eager for a ride on his underground marvel, which runs the length of Broadway, originating at Warren Street beneath Devlin’s Clothing Store and terminating at Murray Street, traveling a distance of three hundred feet by means of forced air generated by a large fan, though Mr. Beach proposes to build longer tunnels.

  Ling read the newspaper again: Beach Pneumatic Transit Company; Devlin’s Clothing Store; 260 Broadway; corner of Broadway and Warren. Accompanying the article was an artist’s illustration of the station as it had looked on opening day: the elevated waiting area, the chandeliers and fountain, and even the piano. It was clearly the same station from their dream walks. Furiously, she read through the other clippings until she came upon a second article:

  BEACH’S PNEUMATIC DREAM

  RUNS OUT OF AIR

  City to Close First Underground Station Today

  Ling quickly read the article through. Mr. Beach had a hard go of making his experimental dream come true. And just as it looked hopeful, an economic panic gripped New York and the rest of the country in 1873. There was no money to advance an idea of an underground train system. Mr. Beach’s subway prototype was closed for good in 1873, becoming a shooting gallery for a while. In 1875, its beautiful fixtures were sealed behind rock.

  Future articles only briefly mentioned the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company. The city moved on. Devlin’s Clothing Store became Rogers, Peet & Co., which burned to the ground. Another building went up in its place. In 1904, the first subway station, City Hall, opened near the site of the old pneumatic train. Tunnels were dug. New subways were built, though Mr. Beach would never live to see them. His pneumatic transit dream was long gone, nothing but an obscure footnote in New York City history.

  So why was it showing up in Ling’s and Henry’s dreams now?

  A commotion up front drew Ling’s attention. Police officers had arrived and were asking patrons to pack up and leave. Mrs. Belpre argued in hushed tones with the health inspector, who pestered her for the names of everyone she knew who had visited the library in the past two weeks. “To investigate further,” he said. “After all, it’s a matter of public health.”

  Mrs. Belpre remained firm. “No. It’s a matter of privacy.”

  “What’s the matter?” Ling whispered to a mother gathering her children.

  “They’re closing
the library because of the sleeping sickness,” the mother answered in Cantonese. “They’re afraid the library might be contaminated. They’re calling it a public health emergency. Just this morning, they closed the elementary school and boarded up the temple and the public bath.”

  A police officer came to Ling’s table. “Everyone has to leave, Miss,” he said and seemed apologetic. Ling stacked the articles and books neatly on the table and made her way to the door.

  On her way out of the library, Ling passed a man poised on the front steps with a bucket of glue and a brush. He pasted a bill to the library’s front doors: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE BY ORDER OF NEW YORK CITY DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH.

  As Ling waited for the bus back to Chinatown, her mind raced. The Beach Pneumatic Transit Company had existed. It had been built underneath Devlin’s Clothing Store. And every night, Ling and Henry saw both in their dream walks. The bus arrived but Ling didn’t get on it. Instead, she boarded the Broadway trolley, stepping off at City Hall Park.

  In her dream, George had led her to a drinking fountain, so Ling set off in that direction until she found it. She took a sip and watched governesses pushing baby carriages down the tree-lined path. What, precisely, was she hoping to discover here? Beside the fountain was the grate. Ling stood over it, looking down through the old metal bars into the underground, feeling the breeze coming from below.

  “Spare a penny, young lady?” a vagrant asked from a park bench.

  He reeked of urine. Ling moved just slightly upwind. She stared out at the symphony of movement on Broadway—cars and trolleys and people rushing everywhere without stopping. Last night in the dream, as Ling stood in this very spot, George had been pointing to something behind her. What had he wanted her to see? Ling scrutinized the row of office buildings until she realized that this was the very corner she and Henry saw each night in that strange, repeated dream loop at the beginning of their walk—just from an earlier era. It was as if she and Henry were being visited by a ghost city lost to the pages of history.

  “Hard on the streets in the cold, Miss,” the vagrant said, and this time, Ling dropped a penny into his palm.

  “Thanks, Miss. Yes, cold, cold, cold. Used to sleep down there, in the tunnels,” he said, nodding at the grate. “But I don’t go down below no more. Bad dreams there. You can hear it calling you. Bad dreams was what got Sal and Moses and Ralph. And I ain’t seen hide nor hair of old Patrick and his wife, Maudie, neither.” His eyes widened and he dropped his voice to an urgent whisper. “Somethin’s down there, Miss. Ghosts,” he said, looking up at the spectral spires of the foggy skyline. Then he leaped up from the bench and toddled off, palm outstretched, toward a passing couple, calling, “’Scuse me, kind sir, dear miss, spare a penny?”

  The air smelled of coming rain, so Ling left City Hall Park and took the bus back to Chinatown. On the edge of Mulberry Street, people crowded into Columbus Park, where a man with a bullhorn who was accompanied by a Chinese translator explained that there would be mandatory health screenings starting immediately.

  “All residents must report with documentation,” the man barked.

  There was outrage in the crowd.

  “You can’t treat us this way! We have rights!” Thomas Chung called. He was twenty-eight, a lawyer who’d graduated from Princeton. Watching him there in the park beside his mother and father, Ling thought he looked as much a hero as Jake Marlowe.

  “Citizens have rights,” the man with the bullhorn shouted back.

  “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 k
now 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.”