“You were such a cute little cat the other day,” said Henry, who didn’t seem to notice anything different.
Yes, very true. But in the first place, I’d wanted to turn into a large, dangerous jaguar, not a cute little cat, and in the second place, no one had been following me. Henry and I had just been trying a few things out for fun. It was a mystery to me how you could concentrate and turn into something quickly if you were threatened by a terrifying, invisible creature and your knees were knocking with fright. I guessed Henry was so good at all that transformation stuff because he was never afraid. Even now he was grinning, without a care in the world.
Gritting my teeth, I had finally scribbled Felt slipper pom-pom on the piece of paper, folded it into a triangle, and posted it back through the mailbox.
“Not as neatly written as it might be, but correct,” said Mr. Wu from inside the door, and it opened. I grabbed Henry’s arm, hauled him in through the doorway, and slammed the door behind us. Then I breathed a sigh of relief. We’d made it.
“Could you be a bit faster next time?” I hissed at Mr. Wu. (I’d never have dared to hiss at him in real life.)
“The tortoise can tell us more than the hare about the road it travels, Miss Olivia.” Mr. Wu bowed to me (and the real Mr. Wu would never have done that) and gave Henry a brief nod. “Welcome to Miss Olivia’s Dream Restaurant, young stranger with shaggy hair.”
We really did seem to be in some kind of restaurant, as I couldn’t help noticing, a rather unattractive one with black Formica tables, bright-red runners on them, and orange lanterns dangling from the ceiling. But there was an enticing smell of fried chicken. Only now did I notice how hungry I was. It had been a stupid idea to go to bed without any supper, because that made it harder for me to control my dreams.
Henry was staring at Mr. Wu, baffled. “Is he new here?”
“I am the guardian at the gate tonight,” explained Mr. Wu solemnly. “I am called Wu, the Tiger’s Claw, protector of orphans and the needy. Give a hungry man fish, and he will satisfy his appetite. Teach him to fish, and he will never be hungry again.”
Henry chuckled, and I realized that I was blushing. My dreams were sometimes rather embarrassing. The proverb-quoting Mr. Wu also wore shiny black silk pajamas with a tiger’s head embroidered on them, and a three-foot-long ponytail hung down from the back of his head. His real-life model, my first kung fu teacher, would never have gone around like that, even at Halloween.
“Okay,” said Henry, still chuckling.
“Thanks, Mr. Wu,” I said quickly, abolishing Mr. Wu and the entire restaurant with a wave of my hand. Instead we were now standing in the little park in Berkeley Hills, California, where I’d taken Henry in my dreams a couple of times before. It was the first place to spring to my mind. You had an excellent view of the bay from here. The sun was just setting over it, flooding the sky with wonderful colors.
All the same, Henry looked rather annoyed. “It smelled delicious in that restaurant,” he said, “and now my stomach’s rumbling.”
“Mine, too, but however much we’d eaten we wouldn’t have felt full.” I let myself drop onto a bench. “After all, this is only a dream. Damn it, I ought to have given Mr. Wu a new password. Who knows—someone might have been looking over my shoulder just now when I wrote today’s down.”
“I was. Stuffed kipper coupon is a very creative password.” Was Henry laughing at me again? “I mean, no one would guess it easily.”
“It was Felt slipper pom-pom.” But now I was laughing myself.
“Honestly? Your handwriting’s a terrible scrawl,” said Henry, sitting down beside me. “And now I’d like to know what you were running away from. And why I didn’t even get a kiss.”
I sobered up at once. “It was that … that rustling sound again. Didn’t you hear it?”
Henry shook his head.
“Well, it was there. An invisible, evil presence.” I realized, listening to myself, that I sounded as if I were reading a bad horror story aloud. Too bad. “A rustling and whispering that came closer and closer.” I shuddered. “Just like that time when it followed us, and you got us to safety through Amy’s dream door.”