Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (34 page)

As Memphis Campbell made his runner rounds, his thoughts were elsewhere. He and Theta hadn’t spoken since their disastrous night at Small’s Paradise. Memphis didn’t understand how you could tell a fella you loved him and then run out like that. He missed her
terribly, but he had too much pride to call. Theta would need to come to him first.

“Memphis, you listening to me, son?” Bill Johnson asked. “You get that number right?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Johnson. One, four, four,” Memphis said. “I’ll put it in for you, just like I did yesterday and the day before that. Don’t know why you keep playing it if you’re not winning.”

“Call it a hunch,” Bill said, but he sounded angry. The bluesman cocked his head, angling it toward the sound of Memphis’s voice. “Heard a peculiar story this morning over to Floyd’s. You know that ol’ drunk, Noble Bishop?”

“I know him some,” Memphis said. His stomach had gone to butterflies.

“Never known him when he’s not stone-cold drunk or shaking like a old dog from the lack of it. But this morning, he showed up to Floyd’s sober as a deacon and asking could he work around the shop sweeping up. Said he had a visitation from an angel. A miracle.” Bill paused a moment to let his next words sink in. “A healing.”

“Is that so?” Memphis said, trying to keep his voice even.

“It is.” Bill’s lips twisted into a sneer. “Seem like a waste of a miracle, you ask me. What’s that old no-account drunk gonna do with a gift like that? He prob’ly be back in the gutter by next Tuesday,” Bill spat out. “The Lord sure works in mysterious ways.”

“That’s what they say,” Memphis said and smiled.

“That is, in fact, what they say,” Bill said, and did not smile.

When Memphis got home, there was a telegram waiting for him.

“Who sent you a telegram?” Isaiah asked, wide-eyed. “Somebody die?”

“Nope. Everybody and everything is very much alive,” Memphis said, feeling like there had been two miracles.

That night, Henry and Ling set their alarms for their longest dream walk yet—a full five hours. The next day, Henry woke to Theta sitting at the foot of his bed, glaring at him through a cigarette haze. Light seeped under the roller shades.

“What time is it?” Henry asked. His mouth was dry.

“Half past three. In the afternoon,” Theta said tersely. “You look like hell.”

“Why, thank you, Miss Knight.”

“I’m not kidding. How long before you can get up outta that bed?”

Henry’s muscles ached like he’d been moving furniture all night long. He ran his tongue across chapped lips. “I’m right as rain. Just got a little cold, that’s all.”

“No, you’re not okay.” Theta slapped down a piece of paper. It was an advertisement cut from the newspaper for a lecture by “Dr. Carl Jung, renowned psychoanalyst” at the New York Society for Ethical Culture. “This egghead fella, Jung—he knows all about dreams. Maybe he knows about dream walking. Maybe he could help you, Hen.”

“I’m fine.”

“I think we should go.”

“You go.”

“You could at least hear what he has to say—”

“I said I’m fine!” Henry snapped.

Theta flinched. “Don’t yell,” she whispered.

“Sorry. Sorry, darlin’,” Henry said, feeling guilty and angry at the same time. His teeth chattered and his stomach hurt. “Come sit next to me. It’s so cold.”

For a second, it looked like Theta might give in and lie down next to him with her head on his chest, like old times. Instead, she swiped back the newspaper advertisement and headed for the bedroom door
without looking back. “I gotta bathe. Rehearsal’s in an hour. In case you care.”

At rehearsal, Henry was so exhausted he could barely concentrate.

“Henry! That was your cue!” Wally barked from the front row.

Henry looked up to see the dancers glaring at him.

“Sorry, folks,” Henry drawled, snapping back to the present. For a second, his eyes caught Theta’s. He saw the worry there just before it edged into anger. He tried to make her laugh with a silly face, but she wasn’t having it.

“If there’s anything I hate, it’s having my time wasted. Let’s get this show on the road,” she announced to no one in particular, though Henry understood the comment was meant for his ears.

Other stories appeared here and there: A couple of subway workers vanished underground. Their lanterns were found still glowing in the tunnel they’d been hollowing out for the extension of the IRT. A pocketbook belonging to a Miss Rose Brock mysteriously ended up on the tracks near the Fourteenth Street station. Despondent over a failed love affair, she’d gone to a speakeasy on the West Side with friends and disappeared. Suicide was feared. A token booth clerk was suspended on suspicion of drinking when he swore he saw a faintly glowing ghost down at the dark end of the tracks. One minute, the pale thing was crouched on its haunches, he claimed, and the next, it skittered up the walls and out of sight. Some riders reported seeing odd flickers of greenish light from subway train windows. Diggers working on the construction of the new Holland Tunnel refused to go below. Down in the depths, they’d heard the terrifying swarming sounds of some unnameable infestation. A Diviner had been called in to give his blessing; he insisted it was all clear, but the workers knew he’d been paid to say it, and now they would only go down in groups and wearing every one of their charms against bad luck. The vagrant population was down; all the unfortunates known to frequent subway platforms,
sewers, and train tunnels for warmth in the winter had seemingly disappeared in a matter of days.

On the West Side, two boys had been playing near a storm drain when one was suddenly swept away. Police searched the area below the grate, shining flashlights in sewer lines. They found nothing except for the poor boy’s baseball and one of his shoes. But the surviving child insisted that it wasn’t the water to blame, for he’d seen an unearthly pale hand reach up from below and yank his friend down by his ankle, quick as a rabbit snatched by the strong jaws of a trap.

People disappeared. That wasn’t unusual in a city where ruthless gangsters like Meyer Lansky, Dutch Schultz, and Al Capone were as famous as movie stars. But the missing weren’t gangsters “disappeared” after a disagreement or turf war. Handmade signs appeared on lampposts and outside subway entrances, desperate pleas from frantic loved ones:
VANISHED: PRESTON DILLON, FULTON STREET SUBWAY STATION. MISSING: COLLEEN MURPHY, SCHOOLTEACHER, AUBURN HAIR, BLUE EYES, TWENTY YEARS OF AGE. DO YOU KNOW: TOMAS HERNANDEZ, BELOVED SON? LAST SEEN ENTERING CITY HALL SUBWAY STATION. LAST SEEN IN THE VICINITY OF PARK ROW. LAST SEEN LEAVING FOR WORK. LAST SEEN. LAST SEEN. LAST SEEN…

But these were insignificant stories in a city full of them. These random accounts were pushed to the newspapers’ back pages, past flashy reports about Babe Ruth driving his new Pierce-Arrow touring car to Yankee Stadium or a shining picture of Jake Marlowe surveying the marshy ground of Queens for his Future of America Exhibition or exhaustive reports on what the Sweetheart Seer wore to a party with her beau, the dashing Sam Lloyd.

For the newspapers, it seemed, were typeset with dreams of their own.

“You write a lot of love songs. Have you ever been in love?” Ling asked Henry on the eighth night as they waited for the train.

“Yes,” Henry said and did not elaborate. “How about you?”

Ling remembered looking into Wai-Mae’s eyes.

“No,” she said.

“Smart girl. Love is hell,” Henry joked. He sat down at the piano and played something new.

“What is this song?” Ling asked. It sounded different from the other songs Henry had been playing. Those were forgettable. But the piece taking shape now was strange and lovely and haunting. It had weight.

“I don’t know yet. Just something I’m playing around with,” Henry said. He seemed embarrassed, like he’d been caught telling his deepest secrets.

“I like it,” Ling said, listening intently. “It’s a sad sort of beautiful. Like all the best songs.”

“Is… is that a compliment?” Henry put a hand to his chest in a mock-faint.

Ling rolled her eyes. “Don’t get cute.”

Sister Walker had been driving for twelve hours straight, so while she napped in her room back at the motel, Will kept a grip on his coffee cup and stared out the window of the Hopeful Harbor diner. Crepuscular light veiled the tops of the snow-dusted hills. The sky was a distant bruise. A bronze plaque in front of the courthouse across the street commemorated a spot where George Washington had once tasted victory. Quite a few Revolutionary War battles had been fought in this part of the country, Will knew, battles that turned the tide of the war and helped decide the fate of a new country, taking it from an exciting idea of self-governance to possibility and then reality. A government by the people, for the people.

America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn
to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn’t forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required periodic exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.

Will knew this, too.

“More coffee?” the waitress asked Will and poured him a fresh cup anyway. “Shame you’re here at such a miserable time of year. The road up into the mountains is awful treacherous just now.”

“Yes,” Will said. “I remember.”

“Oh, so you’ve been here before?”

“Once. It was a long time ago.”

“Gee, what you ought to do is come back in the spring, drive on up there to the old Marlowe estate. Beautiful grounds. It’s closed now, but they open it up in the spring.”

Will fished out a quarter and left it on the table beside the full, untouched cup of coffee.

“Thank you. I’ll do that,” he said.

Back in the motel, by the weak light of a bedside lamp, Will read through his stack of clippings gathered from newspapers around the country: