Lair of Dreams
Page 16

This boy saw her.
He was awake—awake and walking, just like Ling. All of Ling’s scientific curiosity left her. For the first time on a walk, she was afraid.
“Hey!” the boy shouted and moved toward her. And all Ling could hear in her head were the words of Lee Fan’s dead grandmother: It isn’t safe.
Ling turned and ran as fast as she could toward the city.
“Wait!” Henry called, but the girl was swift. She folded into the fog of the city. Another walker! Henry had never come across anyone who could do what he did. He needed to catch up to this girl. He had to talk to her. Maybe she could help him find Louis somehow. Buildings appeared like dark handprints of paint against a primed canvas: apartment buildings, shops, and restaurants. The distant scaffolding of the elevated train. Banners lettered with Chinese characters rippled in the breeze. Henry knew this place. He was in Chinatown.
He spied the girl standing in front of a restaurant with an upper balcony that reminded him a little of the houses on Bourbon Street. A neon sign blinked out THE TEA HOUSE.
“Wait! Please!” Henry called as she again took off running, this time down an alley thick with fog.
On the other side of the alley, the fog thinned. Henry whirled around, trying to get his bearings. He could just make out a line of ramshackle buildings hiding in the gloom. He didn’t see the other dream walker, nor did he see Louis.
Henry was so frustrated he wanted to punch something. “Louis!” he screamed. “Where are you?”
“What are you doing?”
It was the girl, shouting at him. She was close enough that he could see the green of her eyes. She seemed both angry and frightened.
“Get out of my dream! I don’t want you here!”
“Your dream? Now, wait just a minute—” Henry moved toward the girl and she stumbled backward. On instinct, Henry grabbed hold of her arm to keep her from falling and was shocked when he made contact. Electrical sparks danced along their skin. With a yelp, Henry yanked his hand away, shaking it out. The air smelled strongly of ozone.
Pop-pop-pop!
Fireworks exploded over the rooftops, faint sketches of light. Sounds echoed on the cobblestone streets: The clip-clop of horses. The squeak of wooden wheels. Angry shouts and raucous laughter. Crowd noises. Ghostly figures moved inside the fog, too. It was as if the dream itself had been sleeping and now it was coming to life. And then, faintly, Henry heard fiddle music. It was a song so familiar his body knew it before his brain—“Rivière Rouge,” an old Cajun song, Louis’s favorite. Whoever was playing the song played it exactly the same way Louis did, jazzed up, Delta style.
“Louis,” Henry whispered. He whirled around, searching for the source of the music. It seemed to be coming from behind the facade of an old limestone building with the words DEVLIN’S CLOTHING STORE whiskered across the front.
“Louis!” Henry called, running for the building.
“Wait!” the girl called, startling.
A woman’s shriek pierced the dream: “Murder! Murder! Oh, murder!” Something was moving in the fog, coming closer.
A church bell tolled, growing louder and louder. Suddenly, the distant roofs of Chinatown, the impressionistic streets of the old city, the limestone building—all of it curled up as if the dream been thrown into the fire.
“No! Not yet!” Henry cried, but it was too late. The last thing he saw was the girl dream walker’s bright green eyes, and then he woke to the clang of his alarm clock as it tumbled from the windowsill and landed on the floor with a clatter. On the table, the metronome ticked away. His watch showed one minute till four. He’d been under for fifty-nine minutes.
“Horsefeathers, Henry!” Theta marched into the room with her sleep mask pushed up over her short dark bangs and shut off the alarm.
“S-sorry, Theta.”
Sighing, Theta silenced the metronome. “You went looking again?”
“Theta, I think I found him.”
“You did? Oh, Hen!” Theta covered the shivering Henry with a blanket and pulled a chair for herself next to his. “Go on. Spill.”
Henry told Theta about hearing Louis’s fiddle. “Maybe he’s trying to find me, too.”
“Gee, that’s swell news. Hen,” Theta said, sounding worried, “can you move yet?”
For at least five minutes after a dream walk, Henry remained paralyzed, as if his body were still in that other world. With effort, he lifted his arm a fraction, wincing as he worked movement back into the muscles. “See? Good as new.”