Lair of Dreams

From somewhere in the restaurant, Henry heard a familiar voice. And then he spied her sitting at a table in the back, partially obscured by a screen.

“Do excuse me,” Henry said, walking to the back. He came around the screen and stood beside the girl’s table, his shadow falling across her open book. “So you do exist.”

The girl looked up at him. Her eyes were a hazel-green, greener in the light. Though she was a slight girl, there was something of the boxer’s quality to her, Henry thought; this was someone ready to show knuckles at a moment’s notice. Her mouth opened in an O of surprise, and then, just as quickly, she caught herself.

“I’m afraid you have mistaken me for someone else,” she said with pointed politeness.

“I don’t believe I have. I’ve seen you in my dreams.”

The girl gave him only a disdainful upward glance. “Corny.”

“I did see you in my dreams last night. Didn’t I? I’ve never—”

“Shhh!” she whispered, craning her neck to see if anyone was listening. “Sit down. If anyone asks, I know you from school. Do you understand?”

Henry nodded and lowered his voice. “You’ll have to forgive my astonishment. It’s just that I’ve never met another dream walker before. Have you?”

“No.”

“There must be others, though. Don’t you think? What with all these Diviners coming out of the woodwork now. Oh. Forgive my manners. I’m Henry DuBois the Fourth. Pleased to meet you, Miss…?”

“Ling Chan.”

“Charmed, Miss Chan.”

“I’m not particularly charming,” Ling said, without smiling.

“Well, I make it a point never to argue with a lady.”

The waiter arrived with Henry’s noodle dish and Ling turned suddenly chatty. “As I was saying, the most exciting thing about Mr. Marlowe’s exhibition is the science pavilion. I hear they’ll have a model of the atom on display.…”

As the waiter set Henry’s dish down, he gave Ling a curious look. “A friend of yours, Ling?”

“Yes, Lucky,” Ling said, without missing a beat. “We were in science club together in school. He’s just come to talk about Jake Marlowe’s Future of America Exhibition.”

“Our Ling is very smart,” Lucky said. “As smart as any of the boys.”

“The smartest,” Henry said, playing along.

“I’d better go. Things are very busy without George,” Lucky said before walking away, and Henry saw the girl’s face fall.

“Is everything all right?”

“Fine,” she snapped.

It clearly wasn’t, but Henry had been raised not to pry. “Science club?” he said instead, raising an eyebrow. “I suppose now is a bad time to tell you that I nearly blew up my chemistry lab back at boarding school. It’s an amusing story—”

“Why are you here? I assume it’s not for the egg rolls.”

Henry’s easy charm faded, and his smile with it. “I’m looking for someone I lost.”

“Lost how? How do you lose a person? Why don’t you look in the telephone directory?”

“He doesn’t even have a telephone,” Henry said. To make Ling understand, he’d have to tell her about the letter, his father, running away from home. He would have to explain what Louis meant to him. But he couldn’t do that. Not with a stranger. And she was a stranger. Just because they’d shared a dream walk didn’t make them friends. “I thought if I could find his dream, I could ask him where he was, or let him know where to find me somehow. Have you ever been able to do that? Locate someone?”

“Only with the dead.”

Henry’s fork stopped on the way to his mouth. “You see the dead?”

“In dreams I do. Sometimes someone needs to speak to a departed relative. If I take something of theirs, sometimes I can find them.”

“How long have you been able to do this?”

“It started a year ago.”

“Almost three years ago for me,” Henry said. “But it’s gotten stronger in the past few months.”

“The same for me,” Ling said.

“I learned to set an alarm clock to wake me. I found that if I go longer than an hour, I get ill. You?”

Ling shrugged. “I can go longer,” she said, and Henry detected a note of pride in it. Ling Chan didn’t like to be second, it seemed. “You still haven’t said why you’re here.”

Henry toyed with the noodles on his plate. “Last night, for the first time, I finally came close to finding my friend Louis while we were standing outside that old building. Right after I grabbed hold of your arm, I heard his fiddle. It was Louis’s favorite song, played the way he always played it.” Henry leaned forward. “I want to go back in tonight and see if it works again. I want us to try to meet in the dream world.”

Ling scoffed. “You know how dreams work. They’re slippery. We can’t control them—we’re only observers. Passengers.”