Lair of Dreams

“When I die, I hope someone will remember me so kindly,” Wai-Mae said.

Nearby, a small flock of egrets took flight, crying into the shining pink clouds.

Wai-Mae took Ling’s hand. “Look, his soul is free.”

Ling kept her eyes on the sky, and she did not turn around to look at the pulsing light in the tunnel, nor did she listen to the screeching, growling chorus rising in the deep dark.

The dreams were everywhere.

From the moment the people took their first breaths, they exhaled want until the air was thick with yearning.

Jericho dreamed of Evie. Firecrackers exploded in the sky above her. The ragged light gave her face an angel’s glow and framed the outline of her body beneath her flimsy chemise. Her lips were an invitation, and Jericho moaned her name in his sleep.

Sam dreamed that he was a child walking with his mother, his hand in hers, safe and loved. But they were separated by sudden crowds of soldiers filling the street. Sam was lost. And then his mother’s voice drifted out from a radio in a store window: “Find me, Little Fox.”

In Mabel’s dream, she climbed a tall platform and towered above a crowd of people who chanted her name. They were there to see her and no one else.

Isaiah dreamed of the boy in the boater hat and the girl with the green eyes, happy as can be, and Isaiah was afraid for them, as if he could see the storm bearing down on their idyll. He screamed and screamed that they were in danger, but no sound came out.

Drunk on gin, Evie would not remember her dreams come morning.

Theta dreamed of Memphis, and Memphis of Theta, and in both dreams, they were happy, and the world was kind.

But dreams can’t be contained for long. Their natural trajectory is forward. Out. Up. Away. Past all barriers and borders. Into the world.

This is true of nightmares, too.

In the gloomy tunnel, the pale, hungry creatures crawled down the walls and into the old station. They tested the rusted gate. When it opened, they sniffed at the damp air, breathing in the intoxicating fumes from so much want, tasting it on their tongues, pushing out farther, crawling into the city’s sewers and into the miles of subway tunnels, hiding in the archways when the trains rumbled past. They loitered in the shadows on the edges of the stations, where they could watch the bright lights of the people so full of yearning.

“Dreams,” they murmured, ravenous.

In Substation Number Eleven beneath Park Row, the rotary converters shuddered to a halt, flummoxing the two men on duty. They thumped the dials on their control panels but the dials did not respond. “I’ll go, Willard,” said the more junior of the two, whose name was Stan. He grabbed a wrench from the tool board and, flashlight in hand, made his way along a futuristic corridor of humming pipes and tubes, taking the staircase down into the rotary converter room, that marvel of modern engineering, now dark and silent. Flipping the switches on the wall did nothing. Stan’s flashlight beam swept over the hulking converters; in the dark, they were like the rounded backs of sleeping metal giants. On the far side of the room, light pulsed behind one of them—a downed wire, perhaps, or a small electrical fire trying to spark. Stan approached cautiously. He stopped when he heard the sound—a syrupy growl made deep in the throat. The growl shifted into a quick, low-pitched shriek that chilled Stan to the bone.

“Who’s there?” he barked, gripping the wrench tight.

It was quiet for a moment, so quiet that Stan could hear only his own breathing, which was amplified by the cavernous room. And then, without warning, the scream exploded like a storm front. It sounded as if it were being torn note by note from the throats of a hundred damned souls. It filled the room so completely that Stan couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

Behind the converter, the light crackled anew—one, two, three—projecting macabre shadows onto the substation’s high white-tiled wall.

And then the thing stepped out. It appeared to have been a man once. Now it was something else entirely, something not human: pasty skin as cracked as dry earth and blighted by red patches and sores, hair thinned to spindly tufts. Opaque blue soulless eyes stared from its chalky, skeletal face. The glare of the flashlight caught the razor-sharp edges of small, yellowed teeth inside a rotted mouth that hung partially open.

“Help me…” Stan whispered like a frightened child. Because this was the stuff of nightmares left behind in the nursery.

The thing saw Stan. It cocked its head, sniffing. From deep down, the growl started, like a dog giving warning over its food. Black drool dribbled down from the sides of its mouth, and then its jaw unhinged, wider than humanly possible. It shrieked again, and Stan didn’t care that he’d wet his pants or that he was blubbering as he stumbled backward toward the door. He was running now, but it was no use. Because there were more. Quick as beetles, they scuttled around the room. And there was nothing—no wrench, no flashlight, no reason—that could save him as the bright things closed in.