Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (13 page)

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.”

“Louis?” Henry called, the lump in his throat swelling.

Up ahead, the vague trees shifted slightly, revealing a dimly lit path through the middle. The fiddle was stronger now.

“Ling!” Henry tried one last time. He didn’t want to abandon her, but he was afraid of losing this vital link to Louis. Perhaps wherever she was, Ling heard the music, too, and would know to come this way. Hoping that was the case, Henry followed the music deeper into the wood.

The sun grew brighter. The fog thinned. The flat trees rounded and grew bark, becoming immense live oaks trailing wispy beards of Spanish moss. Dragonflies pirouetted past Henry’s face and darted toward the surface of a sun-brushed river where a blue rowboat, just like the one Henry and Louis had used for their fishing trips, swayed against the bank. Propped up by wooden stilts at the river’s edge was a rustic cabin. Smoke curled up from its crooked chimney. The music came from inside. Henry’s legs jellied as he approached. What if this
was just another cruel trick played on him in a dream? His fist was a weight at his side. He took a deep breath and knocked. The music stopped. Henry put a hand on his stomach to steady himself as the door creaked open.

Louis appeared, as handsome as ever. He blinked—first at the hazy sunlight, then at Henry. “Henri?”

Henry could only nod. He didn’t know if it was possible to faint inside a dream, but he thought he was perilously close to finding out. The moment seemed to stretch forever. And then suddenly Louis was smiling wide. “
Mon cher!
Where you been?”

As Ling moved through the gray wood calling Henry’s name and getting no response, her panic turned to anger. Their agreement had been clear: Ling was to help Henry try to find Louis in the dream world. That agreement did not include entering strange buildings, wandering through an old train station, and getting lost in a creepy, half-finished forest. She should never have consented to help someone from outside Chinatown—ten dollars or not.

“Henry!” Ling called sharply.

“Are you lost?” a sweet, girlish voice answered.

Ling whirled around. “Wh-who’s there?”

“You walk in dreams but you’re not asleep.”

Ling turned in the other direction, looking for the source of the voice.

“You’ll make yourself dizzy if you keep turning like that,” the voice said, giggling.

“Show yourself!” Ling commanded.

A girl in a wide-sleeved tunic and a long skirt stepped out from behind a tree. She was about Ling’s age, small but sturdy with a wide, open face and very straight brows. Her plaited hair was coiled at her neck, secured with two crisscrossed hairpins. “I can walk in dreams, too. Just like you.”

First Henry, now this girl, too? Soon they’d need to put up traffic signals in the dream world for all the comings and goings. It annoyed Ling. Annoyance was good. Ling preferred it to fear.

“Who are you?” Ling demanded.

“I am Wai-Mae,” the girl said, bowing a little. “What is your name?”

“Ling,” Ling answered. It always fascinated her that inside a dream walk, there was no language or dialect barrier at all, as if in dreams, they all spoke the same language.

Wai-Mae’s brow furrowed. “Just Ling? That’s a funny name.”

“Where are we? What is this place?” Ling demanded.

“Isn’t it beautiful? It’s nothing like ordinary dreams!”

“But what is it?” Ling said, more to herself than to Wai-Mae. “How did you get here? Did you come here on the train?”

“The train?” Wai-Mae’s eyes crinkled as she smiled. “Oh, yes! The train! Did it also bring you?”

“Yes. But I came with a boy, another dream walker, Henry—”

“There’s
another
?” Wai-Mae gasped, delighted. “But where is he?”

“I don’t know. That’s the trouble,” Ling said evenly. She was beginning to think that Wai-Mae wasn’t terribly bright. “When we stepped off the train, he ran, and I lost him.”

“You lost the dream walker?” Wai-Mae shook her head. “That’s very careless, Ling.”

Ling glared, but Wai-Mae didn’t seem to feel her silent scold. “Can you at least help me look for him?”

Wai-Mae’s eyes widened. “Is this other dream walker your
husband
?”

“My…? No! No. He is not my husband,” Ling sputtered. “He’s… never mind.”

“I don’t know if it’s proper for you to be walking in dreams with a boy who is not your husband, Ling,” Wai-Mae tutted. “Very well. I will help you. But you really should be more careful with your friends in the future, Little Warrior. Come. This way.”

Ling wasn’t sure whom she wanted to kill more for ruining her
night’s dream walk: Henry or this thoroughly irritating girl. She opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it, and with a heavy sigh resigned herself to following Wai-Mae through the wood.

But once she found Henry again, she’d have plenty to say to him.

Louis’s voice, no longer a memory, unlatched Henry’s emotions. He wanted to throw his arms around Louis but was afraid that if he did, Louis would disappear, leaving him in an embrace of smoke.

“Louis, is that really you?”

“You know another Louis looks like me?” Louis said, just as if they were on the
Elysian
, headed up the river on a hot day, as if no time had passed at all. “Where are we? What is this place? Looks like the bayou but it isn’t. Not quite.”

“It’s a dream. We’re inside a dream,” Henry explained, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He was laughing and crying all at once.

Louis let out a long whistle. “Well, then. Got to be the nicest dream I ever had.”

Henry couldn’t take it another second. He wanted to kiss Louis, to hold him in his arms. He’d never been able to do that in a dream before, but he’d never been in a dream like this one, either. Carefully, he reached out to touch Louis’s sleeve, and his heart sank when he couldn’t quite make contact. It was as if the thinnest pane of glass separated them. How could it be that he could smell gardenia and feel the grain of the wood but not touch his lover? The logic of dreams was unknowable and cruel.

Sharp barking sounded from the river, and a moment later, a freckled hound came sniffing up to Henry through the grass, its tail wagging.

“Gaspard?” Henry said, amazed. The dog circled him twice before tearing after a mourning dove.

“It’s all so real,” Henry said, but his wonder soon gave way to anxiety. “Louis, where have you been?”

“What d’you mean, where I been? ’Cept for some trips up the river, I been where I’ve always been. You’re the one who left, not me,” he said, and Henry heard the note of recrimination in it.

“Only because I had to. Because of my father,” Henry said. He told Louis what had happened the day his father found the letter. “I tried to get word to you, believe me. I’ve been looking everywhere for you—even in dreams.”

“And here I thought you’d gone and forgotten me.” Louis played it light, but Henry knew him too well. He was hurt. Maybe even angry.

“Never. I could never forget you, Louis,” Henry said, and he wished once more that this weren’t a dream and that he could hold Louis.

“I went on over to your house lookin’ for you. Thought Flossie might know somethin’.”

Henry’s heartbeat quickened. “What happened?”

“Found your
maman
sitting in the cemetery talking to the angels. She didn’t know nothin’. About ’at time, your daddy come out and found me talkin’ to her. He knew who I was, all right. Told me I’d better never come ’round there again or he’d shoot me as a trespasser. Not that that woulda kept me away.” Louis’s smile was short-lived. “He told me you’d left town and that you didn’t want nothin’ to do with me no more—you didn’t even want to say good-bye.” Louis’s voice went feathery. “He told me you hated me.”

“That bastard,” Henry spat. “But what about all those letters I sent you? And two telegrams—one when I reached St. Louis, one from New York. When you didn’t write me back, I thought…”

Louis shook his head. “Didn’t get no letters. No telegrams, either.”

“My father,” Henry said. He didn’t like to think that anybody at Celeste’s would sell them out, but money was money, and his father had a lot of it. It would be just like him to pay someone to intercept Henry’s letters and make sure they were thrown out before they could even be delivered. If so, that meant his father had Henry’s return address in New York and had done nothing to try to find him. It was a relief to know that his father wouldn’t drag him off to military school, but it stung, too, knowing that it was easier for his father to erase his
only son’s existence than it was for him to tolerate the disappointment of who his son really was.

“But you’re here now,
cher
,” Louis said. “We’re here now.”

Louis raised his palm toward Henry’s and Henry followed suit, their fingers nearly touching.

Wai-Mae’s mouth hadn’t stopped moving the entire walk through the wood. “Do you know the story of Mu Guiying? She is my favorite of the Dao Ma Dan. When she battles with Yang Zongbao and falls in love with him, saving his life? It’s the most beautiful love story,” she said, huffing alongside Ling like an excited puppy. There’d still been no sign of Henry. “I think it’s my favorite. Except for the Courtesan Yu Tang Chun. Or the Drunken Beauty. Or possibly the Romance of the Three Kingdoms.”

“Henry!” Ling called again, more desperately. “Henryyyy!”

“I’m sorry, Ling. Uncle says that I talk too much, and I’m a silly girl and my head is too full of romantic stories to be much good,” Wai-Mae said in cheerful apology. “Would you like to know a secret?”

“Not particularl—”

“I am to be married soon!” Wai-Mae exclaimed. “We’ve never met, but I have heard my husband-to-be is very handsome, with kind eyes and a high forehead. He is a wealthy merchant in America, in New York City, and once I’m there, I’ll live very well with servants to wait on me and plenty of money to send back to my family. I’m traveling to San Francisco now on the
Lady Liberty
. I hate the ship. It makes me so sick,” Wai-Mae said, putting a hand on her stomach.