Lair of Dreams

Clipboard in hand, the mission nurse made her nightly rounds. When she came to Chauncey Miller’s bed, she drew closer. His sweat-drenched face wore the oddest expression, something between pain and ecstasy, and his eyes moved frantically beneath his closed lids. It made her uneasy to look at him.

“Mr. Miller? Mr. Miller!”

She couldn’t wake him. That was when she saw the angry red patches bubbling up on his skin like radiation burns. In the bed beside Chauncey’s, an old wino named Joe Wilson moaned. His forehead was slick with sweat and his eyelids twitched with fevered dreaming.

“Mr. Wilson?”

“Dream… with… me…” he gasped.

“Mr. Wilson!” The nurse nudged him, then tugged on his arms, to no avail.

The room filled with whispers uttered in sleep, “Dream with me… dream with me… dream…”

The frantic nurse moved quickly from bedside to bedside. Of the twenty men on the ward, twelve of them would not wake. Her clipboard clattered to the floor as she ran to inform the doctor that they’d better call the health inspector straightaway.

The sleeping sickness had come to the mission.





Damp wind gusted against Mabel as she hurried along Central Park West ahead of the rain. She kept one hand on her hat and the other on her nervous stomach as she practiced what she’d say when she knocked at the museum.

“Good afternoon, Jericho! I was just passing by.”

“Oh, Jericho, are you hungry? There’s a swell diner down on Broadway.”

“Jericho! Fancy meeting you here. At the museum. Where you work. Every. Day.”

Mabel growled. She was lousy at this sort of coy game-playing. If only she could say what she really wanted to say, flat out.

“Kiss me, you fool!” Mabel exclaimed, lifting her arms skyward. A passing postman tipped his hat and gave her a hopeful smile, and a horrified Mabel shoved her hands deep into her coat and marched up the sidewalk, muttering to herself the whole way.

As Mabel approached the museum, she slowed, noticing the two men in the brown sedan. A life on the front lines of the labor movement had trained Mabel to keep alert for oddities, and something about these men seemed off. They were just sitting, watching the museum. Well, they weren’t the only ones who knew how to watch. Mabel stopped beside the driver’s-side window and tapped gently on the glass.

The driver rolled down the window, scowling just slightly before correcting his expression with a smile. “Yes, Miss?”

Mabel smiled. “I beg your pardon. Could you tell me the time, please?” She made sure to get a good look at the two of them, as her parents had taught her: Gray suits. Dark hats. Curious matching lapel pins—an eye with a lightning bolt.

“It’s just past one, Miss.”

“Thank you very much,” Mabel said and crossed the street, letting herself into the museum. “Steady, Mabel,” she whispered before pasting on a smile and blowing into the museum’s grand library with a cheery, “Hello! Anybody home? Jericho?” She dropped her coat and hat on the outstretched paw of the giant stuffed bear.

Jericho’s blond head poked up from behind the stacks of dusty boxes cluttering the top of the long library table. “Mabel. What brings you here?”

Mabel’s throat felt tight. On the front lines, she had faced hostile union-breakers, men with guns. Why was talking to this one boy so terrifying? “I was just hungry and passing by. Oh! Not that I thought you’d have food here,” she said, wincing at her bungle. Quickly, she gestured to the table. “Gee, it’s like something vomited paper in here.”

Jericho raised an eyebrow. “That’s certainly descriptive.”

Strike two. “Sorry,” Mabel said. “What is all of this?”

“Will’s notes from his paranormal-researcher days. We found them in the cellar. I’ve been going through them for the past hour. Did you know there’s mention of Diviners since the dawn of this country?”

Jericho paused, and Mabel wanted to respond with something clever. But being this close to Jericho made her antsy. “Huh-uh.”

“John Smith writes about a Powhatan brave—a healer and mystic—who visited Jamestown. A Diviner servant in George Washington’s household had a vision that helped Washington narrowly avoid capture by the British. And there’s evidence that a few of the witches at Salem were actually Diviners. But this is when it gets really interesting.”

Jericho jumped up from the table. From behind a bookcase, he rolled out a large chalkboard. Mabel could just make out the faint remaining chalk lines of Evie’s notes from the Pentacle Murders investigation. Quickly, Jericho swiped the eraser across the surface, eradicating the last traces of her presence from the museum. He wrote the date September 1901 on the chalkboard.

“All right. I’ll bite,” Mabel prompted. “What happens in September 1901?”

“The assassination of President McKinley?” Jericho chalked McKinley beside 1901.