Lair of Dreams

“Good. What else?”


The woman’s shuddering had progressed to shaking as her mind flooded with terror.

“No! You can’t let it happen. You mustn’t. Not again.” With a cry, she broke off and fell against her bed, sweating and crying.

“You must tell us where they are, Miriam.”

“N-no.”

The Shadow Man sighed. “Very well. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

The woman wept into her palms. “We never should have done it.”

“What’s done is done,” the Shadow Man said. “You have the thanks of a grateful nation.”

Fear showed in the woman’s eyes, followed quickly by hate, and then she spat in the Shadow Man’s face. The man removed a neat pocket square and calmly wiped the insult from his cheeks. With the same air of calm, he pulled a wrench from his pocket. The woman fell onto her cot, backing into a corner, hands up. The man walked to the other side of the room. He arced the wrench around the knob to the radiator, cutting off the heat.

“It gets rather chilly at night here, I’m afraid,” he said, yanking the blanket from her bed. “When you’re ready to cooperate fully, Miriam, do let us know.”

The man closed the steel door behind him. The lock slid into place. A moment later, the loud babble of a radio flooded the quiet of the small room, growing louder and louder until the woman curled up into a ball and cupped her hands over her ears. But more than the radio, it was what she had seen in her trance that would make sleep impossible tonight.

The Shadow Man had left the newspaper. Miriam smoothed out the front page and placed a hand on the picture of her son and Evie O’Neill.

“Find me, Little Fox,” she whispered. “Before it’s too late. For all of us.”





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Author’s Note


While Lair of Dreams is steeped in actual history, it is also a work of fiction and, as such, some liberties have been taken for dramatic license. (“Stand back, everyone! She’s got a license for fictional drama!”) The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult is a creation from my imagination, just in case you tried to find it on TripAdvisor. And as far as I know, there are no carnivorous ghosts haunting the subway tunnels of New York City. I’m pretty sure. Well, mostly sure. Okay, not at all sure. You know what? Ride at your own risk.

The Beach Pneumatic Transit Co. really did exist—though, sadly, the little fan-powered train only ran for a few years. Alfred Ely Beach’s subway prototype was long gone by 1927, but with plenty of abandoned tunnels and stations in New York City’s underground, it’s fun to imagine that some ghostly vestige of that old subway station could have existed for our Diviners. If you’d like to know more about Beach Pneumatic, I recommend reading Joseph Brennan’s excellent publication on the topic at columbia.edu/~brennan/beach.

Sadly, the Chinese Exclusion Act was all too real. Passed in 1882, it sharply restricted immigration to the United States from China. Even more restrictive legislation followed, and these discriminatory, xenophobic laws stayed on the books for decades. If you’d like to read more about the Chinese Exclusion Act and its impact, I highly recommend Erika Lee’s At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). If you’d like to read a personal family history of Chinatown, I also recommend Bruce Edward Hall’s Tea That Burns: A Family Memoir of Chinatown (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998). And if you find yourself in New York City, please do visit the wonderful Museum of Chinese in America (mocanyc.org).

The story of America is one that is still being written. Many of the ideological battles we like to think we’ve tucked neatly into a folder called “the past”—issues of race, class, gender, sexual identity, civil rights, justice, and just what makes us “American”—are very much alive today. For what we do not study and reflect upon, we are in danger of dismissing or forgetting. What we forget, we are often doomed to repeat. Our ghosts, it seems, are always with us, whispering that attention must be paid.





Acknowledgments


This was a Busby Berkeley production of a book, and over the past few years, quite a few folks have seen me through it all. (Thanks for the kaleidoscopic legwork, y’all.) I owe a debt of gratitude, a fruit basket, and a One Direction lunch box to the following lovely people: