Lair of Dreams

“Not here. I’ll explain later. But I don’t want to be here anymore,” she whispered.

“But we didn’t set our alarms, darlin’. We’re stuck till we wake up on our own.”

“Then let’s see if we can find a different dream somewhere else,” Ling said. “Even if we go back to the streets where we come in. If we enter through Devlin’s, maybe we can reverse it.”

“Sounds reasonable. We just reverse our steps. Which way is the station from here?” Henry asked, looking around.

Through a gap in the trees, he spied the dark mouth of the tunnel.

Ling followed his gaze. “We’re not supposed to go in there.”

“Seems like it’s either through the tunnel or we wait until we wake up.”

“But one of us could wake up first, stranding the other one here,” Ling said, shivering. A question had been lurking in the depths of her. Only now could it surface. “Henry, what happens if you die in a dream?”

Henry shrugged. “You wake up.”

“Even here? Even here, where everything’s real?” she said, feeling the heat from her burn.

Light pulsed against the velvety dark of the tunnel.

“It’s happening again,” Henry said.

The edges of the trees unraveled, as if there was some sort of energy surge.

“What is that?” Henry said.

“I don’t know,” Ling whispered, fear stealing most of her breath. Wai-Mae’s words swam back to her: I’m frightened of that wicked place. If we do not trouble her, she won’t trouble us.

The lights were dimming, as if the dream itself were going to sleep for the night. The hideous growling had returned, though. It made Ling shiver.

“I want to know what’s inside. I need to know,” she said, despite her apprehension.

“We’re just reversing our steps,” Henry agreed. He offered his hand, and Ling took it, and together they stepped across the threshold into the dark.

“Why is it so cold?” Ling whispered, shivering as her breath came out in wispy puffs.

“Don’t know,” Henry said, his teeth chattering slightly. There was something tomblike about the tunnel, as if he and Ling were trespassing on a private crypt, and Henry was relieved to see the station glowing up ahead. “Not too far.” Henry pointed to the distant circle of golden light. “See? ‘Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.’”

“What nonsense are you talking now?” Ling tsked.

“Peter Pan,” Henry said.

“Just keep walking,” Ling said.

Ling stumbled over something in the dark, and when she crouched down to see, the old bricks on the sides of the tunnel flickered, then steadied into a greenish glow, like a mercury-vapor lamp warming up.

“Ling!” Henry whispered urgently, and Ling left whatever lay in the dirt to join him. They drew closer to the wall and the glowing bricks. Something was happening inside the stones, like watching a little show on a nickelodeon screen.

“Is there a film projector?” Henry said, looking around, but it was clearly coming from the wall itself. There were all sorts of stories playing out inside the glowing bricks: A little girl having a tea party with her parents. A soldier laughing around a table with his mates. A man waving to an adoring crowd.

“What is this?” Ling said.

Henry walked from one brick to another and then another, studying the images. “I think… I think these are other people’s dreams,” Henry whispered.

Henry stepped back to take in the whole of the wall. It stretched up and up, glowing screens of dreams as far as he could see. From where he stood, the images reminded him of the circuitry in a vast machine, as if the snippets of lives they watched there were powering the entire dream world—the station; the train; the bayou, forest, and village where Ling and Henry played to their hearts’ content each night. But here and there, a brick would fade out, too, as if all the energy had been drained from it. As if those dreams had died and needed to be replaced by other dreams—more circuitry for the machine.

Something caught Ling’s eye, and she put her face close to the brick to get a better look. Wide-eyed, she turned to Henry, motioning him over. “Do you see it?”

“What am I looking for?”

“Her,” Ling whispered on a puff of cold breath.

Henry got right up on the tunnel wall. In the corner of the flickering image was the veiled woman, watching the dream. She walked from brick to brick, from dream to dream, like a night watchman making sure the factory was safe. The surface of one of the bricks wobbled, as if there were a snag in the film. And in those shards of dark, Ling and Henry saw the nightmare twin of the man’s good dream. In it, he ran from a pack of inhuman creatures through the subway tunnels.