Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (12 page)

“What that plant ever do to you?”

But Henry wouldn’t be joked out of his misery. At boarding school, Henry would be stuck in a regimented, colorless life of morning chapel, Latin, bullying upperclassmen, and innuendo about the
way Henry walked and talked. There’d be no jazz or crawfish boils or fishing from the pier. There’d be none of the eccentric characters they knew from their haunts in the Quarter, men and women who looked after the two boys as if they were delightful nephews. There would be no Louis. Henry felt it as a physical ache.

In the dirt, Louis scratched a heart. Inside, he wrote
L + H
. Henry went to erase it before someone saw. Louis stayed his hand. “Don’t.”

“But—”

“Don’t,” he said again.

That night, they’d lain together in the narrow bed, listening to the swooshing tide of Lake Pontchartrain eddying about the pilings beneath the cabin. Louis’s stubble rubbed Henry’s cheeks raw, but he wouldn’t have stopped kissing him for anything. There were hands and mouths and tongues. They were sweaty with exploration and pleasure. Afterward, they lay entwined, Henry falling asleep to the soft warmth of Louis’s breath on his shoulder, while out on the streets of the West End, the party raged on.

Henry’s father returned on a Friday in August as the summer was dwindling to a close. From his chair in the library, he appraised his bronzed and freckled son. “You seem to have recovered your health, Hal.”

“Yes, Father,” Henry said.

“The school will be pleased to hear it.”

Henry’s heart beat so quickly he wondered if his father could hear it from across the broad expanse of Persian carpet. “I was thinking that perhaps I could finish school here. In New Orleans.”

His father peered around the edge of his open newspaper. “Why?”

“I could help with Mother,” he lied.

“We have servants and a doctor for that.” The newspaper barrier went back up.

“I’d like to stay,” Henry tried. He willed himself not to cry. “Please.”

“I’ve posted the check for your tuition already.”

“I’ll pay you back.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I will! I’ll take on whatever work I can. I’ll—”

“The subject is closed, the matter settled.” His father gave him one last, curious look. “Where do you go evenings?”

“I go for a long walk. Dr. Blake advised it. For my health,” Henry lied, feeling, for once, power in the secrecy of his other life.

His father had continued squinting at him for only a moment more. “Well,” he said, returning to his paper, “I suppose Dr. Blake knows best.”

It had been a stupid mistake that trapped them.

Louis had written Henry a letter. A beautiful letter. Henry could almost recite it; he’d read it that many times. He could barely stand to be parted from it, and so he transferred it from pocket to pocket, always keeping it on his person so that he could read it whenever he wanted. But one night, he’d been too tired and had forgotten it in a jacket pocket. The laundress found the note and took it to Henry’s father.

Henry got a sick feeling in his stomach as he remembered being summoned to the parlor, their butler, Joseph, closing the doors behind Henry. It was the only time his father’s calm had ever threatened to become something else, something violent.

“Do you recognize this?” his father asked, holding up the offending love letter. “What is this filth?”

Henry’s fear robbed him of any answer.

“Has this”—his father’s mouth struggled to form the word—“boy… compromised you in some way?”

Louis had made him laugh. Louis had kissed him. Loved him. There had been no compromise in any of that.

“Have you thought that he might blackmail our family, tarnish our good name, in pursuit of money?” his father continued. “Do you assume it is only homely heiresses who may fall prey to fortune hunters?”

Henry wanted to tell his father that Louis was kind and good, romantic and gentle. What they shared was real. But telling his father
such a thing was impossible. His disapproval was so powerful it paralyzed Henry, strangled him in shame.

He’d never felt like more of a coward.

“You will not be returning to Exeter,” his father announced.

“I won’t?” Even in his fear, new hope surged in Henry. He could stay here. With Louis.

“If you are unconcerned with protecting your family’s reputation, I shall be forced to do it for you. I’ve made some calls. At nine o’clock tomorrow morning, there is a train bound for Charleston and the Citadel. You will be on that train. Perhaps they can make a man of you where I have failed. You will never speak to this boy again.”

As Henry watched, his father tore up the beautiful letter and set the pieces ablaze with a match, tossing them into the fireplace, where they flared and curled into ash.

Henry had been banished to his room, where he found that his suitcase was already packed for him. Military school. If things had been bad at Exeter, the Citadel would be worse. Henry would never survive that. He could save himself, make up a lie: “I had nothing to do with that boy! It’s all a misunderstanding!” Then he could do as his father commanded, give up everything he loved, Louis and music, and go back to Exeter, become a lawyer, then a judge. He could marry the right girl and have a Henry Bartholomew DuBois V and see the same people at the same society balls and dinners, all the while knowing that he was still a disappointment to his father, that this would never be forgotten, only denied. Or he could strike out on his own, be his own man. Wasn’t that what his father was always telling him to be?

There was a gathering that night of his father’s business associates. Henry listened to them downstairs, chuckling with their port and cigars. If that was what “being a man” was, he wanted no part of it. With his father and the servants occupied, Henry knew it was time. He stuffed what he could into a knapsack, climbed out his bedroom window, and shimmied down the tree, sneaking through the
cemetery. Henry froze when he came upon his mother sitting with her rosary before a statue of Saint Michael. For a long moment, his mother regarded him, her eyes moving from Henry to his knapsack, then back to his face as if she were trying to memorize it.

“Fly, fly, sweet bird,” she whispered and turned back to her saints, letting her son slip away from the prison of Bonne Chance.

Henry had sneaked down to the Quarter, to Louis’s attic garret, but he wasn’t there. He tried Celeste’s next. Louis wasn’t there, either.

“I heard him say he might play on the
Elysian
,” Alphonse said.

But by the time Henry made it to the docks, the
Elysian
was well upriver. Henry was near tears. He thought about waiting for Louis to get back, but he had no idea how long that would be, and Henry couldn’t afford to wait. His father would be out looking for him. Once he got safely settled in his new life, he’d get word to Louis somehow.

Luck had been on Henry’s side. A steamer was just about to head up the Mississippi, so Henry talked himself on board, promising to play piano in exchange for a ride to St. Louis. In St. Louis, he posted a letter to Louis care of Celeste’s, along with the address for the Western Union office there. No telegram came. None came in Memphis, Richmond, or New York, either. Henry thought about the day they’d buried Gaspard. Louis had extracted a promise from Henry that he wouldn’t leave. And what had Henry done but run away? Did Louis hate him for leaving like that, without saying good-bye? Did he think Henry a coward? If only he could find Louis, he could explain what had happened.

Henry didn’t give up. He wrote to a few journeymen musicians from the
Elysian
. Only one answered, a cornet player named Jimmy. He said he’d heard from the cousin of a friend that Louis might’ve left New Orleans and found work with a territory band, but he couldn’t remember the name of the outfit. Henry groaned when he heard that—territory bands traveled all over the country. Louis could be anywhere.

That was when he remembered walking in Louis’s dream. If this was the only way to make some sort of contact, then so be it. All he had to do was give one suggestion: “Why don’t you speak with Henry?
He’s waiting for you at the Bennington Apartments in New York City. The Bennington Apartments. Don’t forget, now.”

But first he had to find him.

Every week for the past year, Henry had tried to do just that. He’d walked through landscapes familiar and odd and sometimes downright frightening, chasing after any clue that would lead him back to the boy he couldn’t forget, the boy he’d loved and left. The boy he hoped would forgive him.

Henry checked his wristwatch.

Five minutes until three.

He wound the alarm clock and set the metronome to ticking.

“Please,” he said and closed his eyes.

Ling’s eyes had barely fluttered open inside the dream world when someone tapped her shoulder, and she yelped. She turned to see a startled Henry beside her, his hands up in a gesture of apology.

“Don’t ever”—Ling let out a shaking breath—“do that again.”

“I’m sorry,” Henry said, but he couldn’t hold back his grin. “The hat worked! You found me.”

“Yes. I did,” Ling said in wonder, her mind already at work trying to understand how it had happened. She’d located the living inside a dream. This was a first. “Where are we? Whose dream is this?”

Like magic, the noises began: the
clop-clop
of horses, the distant rattle of an elevated train, the shouts of people hawking wares, and the thin, high squeal of a factory whistle. The bank of fog thinned, revealing the same jumble of worn city streets as in the previous night’s dream walk, but now there was action: Two men fell out of a pair of saloon doors, fighting while a crowd egged them on. Half a dozen street urchins pushed after a hoop with a stick. “Anthony Orange Cross…” Their excited shouts lingered after they’d disappeared like wisps of smoke. A ghostly horse-drawn wagon trotted past. “Beware, beware, Paradise Square! The Crying Woman comes!” the driver called just before he was swallowed by the mist.

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 himself. 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.