Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (58 page)

“Congratulations, Evil,” Theta said, shuddering. “Seems like your can is a compass after all.”

Evie stared at the mummified remains—the sunken eyes and the exposed, rotted teeth and the tattered, bloodstained dress. “I don’t want to touch a thing on that.… that…” she said, wagging a finger generally in the corpse’s direction. “That.”

“Evil, we gotta know.”

“Okay,” Evie said after a pause. “For Henry, okay.” She struggled to take her gloves off. The half-empty sheaths flapped at the ends of her fingers. “These have stopped working.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake.” Theta tugged the gloves free.

Evie’s mouth twisted into a pained grimace, the scream perched behind her teeth, as her fingers landed on the skeleton. “Why couldn’t I have been a dream walker?” she squeaked. “Why’d it have to be object reading?”

“Come on, Sheba. You can do this.” Sam nudged her.

Evie grasped the dead thing’s wrist, breathing in and out as she tried to relax. The vision began as a tingle that spread up her arms,
tightening the muscles of her neck. And then she was under, the vision playing out like a movie across a bright screen.

“A ship. I’m on a ship,” Evie said. She gagged. “Seasick.”

“You okay?” Sam’s voice.

“You care,” Evie murmured.

“What?” Sam said.

“Nothing,” Evie mumbled. She allowed herself to ease back a bit until she felt better. “There’s a ship unloading passengers,” she said in a detached voice. “And a sign… Port of… San Francisco.”

Guards funneled passengers toward a building for processing. Evie felt unmoored. She could feel the girl’s fear pressing against her, making her heart race, so she tried to distance herself by concentrating on the paper in the girl’s hand. It was printed in both Chinese and English: “
O’Bannion and Lee, Matchmakers
.” Two men entered the stuffy building. One was a big, burly white man with muttonchop sideburns and a handlebar mustache. The other was a Chinese man in a Western-style suit who smiled without showing his teeth. They paid the immigration official fifty dollars to look the other way, and took the girl and two others with them. The reading threatened to slip away.

Evie gripped the bony wrist tighter and a squalid New York City slum came into view: Streets thick with mud and horse dung. Filthy ragamuffins begging for scraps. A toothless, grime-coated woman talking sweetly to a rag-enrobed baby at her bare breast. Flies swarmed her.

“Shhh, that’s a good boy,” the woman said, and Evie could see that the baby was dead.

A drunk hoisted his tankard and, in a thick Irish brogue, shouted, “Welcome to Five Points, hell’s backyard.”

From atop a soapbox, a man harangued the crowd. “… close our borders to the wretched Chinese, whose loose women pollute our young men, destroy our families, take the white man’s job…”

“Sheba? Anything?” Sam’s voice floated to Evie from far away.

Evie’s vision settled on a disheveled woman lying on a cot, clutching a music box. She had the glassy eyes of an opium addict. But it was the same girl. Evie sensed it.

“I think I found her,” Evie murmured.

She could feel the opium in her veins, making her woozy and sick. Distance. She needed distance.

The man with the muttonchops pushed back the curtain. “Put aside your dreams. It’s time to get to work, Wai-Mae.”

A man waited with his coat off. Evie knew why he was there and what Wai-Mae was expected to do for this man. She couldn’t stay in this vision any longer. She tried to break the connection, but it seemed the vision had something else to show her.

With a small grunt, she bit down on her back teeth as she traveled further under.

The filthy streets again. The muttonchop man dressed in a fine suit. Wai-Mae’s hand on the knife. Wai-Mae racing toward him, plunging the dagger into his chest again and again. The man’s blue eyes, surprised, shocked. The blood spreading across his white shirt, pulsing through his fingers. The man falling to the street. Police whistles. Shouts.

“Murder, murder,” Evie mumbled.

Evie could feel her own heart beating with the girl’s as she ran from the mob and down the steps into the basement of Devlin’s, into Beach’s pneumatic train station. She hid inside the stilled train car, beneath a velvet sofa, where she slept, and in her dream, there was the sound of men working. Wai-Mae opened her eyes only once, to see the light dimming down to nothing, but she was too weak to do anything but sleep.

Waking now. The gnawing hunger for opium. Evie gagged as Wai-Mae retched up bile and shivered. She staggered out of the car to find the tunnel bricked over. The dark was everywhere. Wai-Mae banged her hands against the brick, desperate. She slid down the wall. Evie felt the air thinning, making her head tight. Out. That was what Wai-Mae wanted. Out. Out of this terrible tomb. And the only way she’d been able to escape was through dreams.

Evie broke the connection and fell onto her knees in the dirt, gasping.

“Evil, you okay?” Theta gave Evie’s back a couple of hard thwacks.

“Ow! Quit it!” Evie said, scrambling away.

“I thought you were choking!”

“I’m… tryin’ a… breathe.” Evie gulped down a few lungfuls of air. “She came down here to hide,” Evie said, breathing heavily still. “But it was the day they closed up the station. While she slept there in that car, they bricked it all up. They buried her alive.”

“What a terrible way to die. All alone,” Sam said.

They fell silent as the horror and sadness of Wai-Mei’s death hit them.

“Did you get anything about how we get rid of this dame or her Ziegfeld Ghost Follies?” Theta asked at last.

Evie kept a hand at her neck to calm her racing pulse. “I can’t say for certain, but there was a feeling when I was under. This terrible place… I-I think it’s keeping her here. She can’t rest. We need to carry her bones out of here. She needs to be cared for.”

“A proper burial,” Memphis said.

“Fine. We’ll have a funeral. Where?” Sam asked.

“Trinity Church isn’t far from here. There’s a graveyard. It’s hallowed ground,” Memphis said.

“You think that’ll work?” Theta asked. “Jericho said each culture has its own beliefs.”

“Beats me. I’m a rookie at this ghost game,” Sam said with a shrug.

“We can’t leave her in this terrible place,” Evie said. “That much is clear.”

“Well, I for one am all for getting out of here. Memphis, help a fella out?” Sam said.

Carefully, they lifted Wai-Mae’s skeleton. Some of the bones fell into dust, but others remained intact.

“We can’t put these in our pockets,” Sam said.

Memphis took off his coat. “Here.”

Sam laid the bones inside, and Memphis carefully wrapped them into a bundle.

“Here,” Sam said, handing Evie the skull. “You can carry that. Merry Christmas.”

Evie’s mouth twisted in revulsion. “You’ve ruined the joy of the season for me forever.”

“For Pete’s sake, let’s breeze,” Theta said, gathering the bloodstained dress into a ball and marching back into the decrepit, abandoned station. “Shame,” she said, looking up at the former grandeur gone to rot. But she was thinking, too, of Wai-Mei’s tragic life.

As they cleared the tunnel, a sound came from behind them: soft but steady, like heavy rain dropping down from the ceiling—one, two, three,
fourfivesix
, more and more. Theta chanced a glance behind her and saw the thing that was so like a man squatting in the dark, his mouth open to emit a syrupy howl. Lights winked in the long darkness. In the glow, she saw only flashes: A sharklike tooth. Pale, cracked skin. Unseeing eyes.

“Memphis,” Theta whispered.

The flashlight shook in his hand. He started to raise it, but Theta pushed his hand back down, shaking her head.

“Keep walking,” Sam said. “Up and out.”

“I hate g-ghosts,” Evie whispered. “I really, really do.”

The aged wood of the steps leading up to the passenger waiting platform creaked loudly under the weight of all four of them. Thick whispers filled the station. Above them, the mottled ceiling crawled.

Theta’s voice was whisper-thin. “What do we do now?”

Memphis grabbed her hand. “I think we run.”

Henry opened his eyes to sun. He was lying in the bottom of the rowboat, bobbing on the current. He didn’t know how long he’d been floating there; he only knew that Louis wasn’t beside him.

“Louis?” he called, sitting up. “Louis!”

He spotted Louis sitting under a weeping willow in the wide field of morning glories up on the hill.

“There you are,” Henry said, coming to sit beside him. “Been looking all over for you.”

“Looks like you found me,” Louis said, and his voice sounded hollow.

“What should we do—go out in the boat? Take Gaspard for a walk? Fish?”

“I want to tell you about the morning glories, Henri. I remembered about them. Why I don’t like them,” Louis said quietly, and Henry felt a warning deep in his gut that the dream was turning.

“It doesn’t matter,” Henry said. He didn’t want to have this conversation. All he wanted to do was float down the river, just the two of them under a portion of sun that was all theirs. “Come on. Fish are biting.”

He offered his hand, but Louis didn’t take it. “I have to tell you now, while I’m brave enough to do it.”

Henry saw that Louis wouldn’t be moved, so he sat and waited.

Louis’s words were slow, as if each one cost him. “’Member when
I told you I stopped by Bonne Chance that one night, askin’ after you? Your daddy sent some men to see me. They told me to let you go. But I couldn’t do that. So they roughed me up some. It’s not like I hadn’t taken plenty o’ blows before, for bein’ different.” Louis scooped up handfuls of dirt, rubbing the grit of it between the pads of his fingertips. “But one of ’em, he hit my head mighty hard. Always thought I had a hard head, but…” Louis offered a ghost of a smile for his joke. It flickered on his lips for a second and then vanished. He looked up to the cruel blue of the sky. “I remember now, I remember…” he said, and it was with equal parts wonder and sorrow.

Inside Henry, some truth was descending like an avenging angel.

“I don’t want to be here. Let’s go down to the river, baby.” Henry pulled desperately on Louis’s arm, but Louis resisted.

“I need to tell you,
cher
. And you need to hear it. My head hurt something fierce. A real
mal de tête
. So I lay down right there on the ground to rest.” Louis plucked a purple blossom from the lush patch of flowers and twirled it in his fingers. “It was a bleed on the brain. Nothin’ to be done about it. The men come back and they found me on the ground, cold and still. And they buried me right there, under the morning glories. And that’s where I am still,
cher
. Where I been since you left New Orleans, a long time gone.”

“That can’t be true.”

“It is true,
cher
.”

“You’re here! You’re right here.”

“Where is here, Henri?” Louis insisted. “Remember, Henri. Remember.”

Henry closed his eyes and shut out the world. It was astonishingly simple to do, a birthright, passed down to him from parents who never wanted to see the truth of anything, including their son. But just because someone refused to see the truth didn’t mean it ceased to exist. Henry didn’t want to remember, but it was too late. Already, he was surfacing.

“I waited for you. At Grand Central. But you never got off the train. Just like you never got my letters or my telegrams.”

He remembered. The piano fund. Theta. When he opened his eyes, the tops of the trees were losing color. Dull pain throbbed in his body. His face was wet. “I want to stay with you.”

“Can’t,
cher
. You got all those songs to write.”

Henry shook his head. “No. No.”

“I don’t know how I got here, or why I got to have this last time with you. I’m mighty grateful for it. But it’s time for me to go now. You, too. You gotta wake up, Henry.”

Henry looked at Louis. His lover was achingly beautiful. In Henry’s memories, Louis would look like this always: young and full of possibility, shimmering around the edges. Something about that triggered other memories. Who had told him about the dead shimmering? He could see a girl with bright green eyes trained on him, weighing.

Ling. Brusque, honest Ling.

She’d told him from the beginning: She could only find the dead.

Ling. And Theta. Evie and Sam.

With each stroke of waking, the pain sharpened. Gaspard whimpered and licked Henry’s hand. The hound looked up at him as if waiting for an answer to a question. Henry leaned his head back and blinked up at the indistinct leaves of an elm until he could find his words.

“I know. I know,” Henry said. He cried out as the pain sliced through him.

“Gonna need some strength,” Louis said. “Kiss me,
cher
.”

Louis put his lips to Henry’s, kissing the last of his strength into Henry. And when they pulled away, Louis was fading, like a sliver of moon late in the morning sky.

“Gaspard. Come on, boy. Time to go home.” Louis whistled and the dog bounded toward him. The setting sun warmed the river to a shimmering golden-orange. “I’m headed over there. But you can’t come along. Not yet.”

Louis waved from the riverbank, and he was a bright thing, a portion of borrowed sun.

“Write me a good song, Henri,” he called.

Henry’s throat tightened as he waved back. “Sweet dreams.”

Louis mounted the steps to the cabin, fading to gray as he went, and then Henry heard the faint, aching cry of a fiddle. The notes lingered on the wind for a moment more, and then even that was gone.

But some other memory was coming to him—a sense that there was somewhere he was needed, like a twin missing the other.

“Ling,” Henry said as it came to him, and he set off running toward the forest.