Lair of Dreams
“Where are you going?” a policeman said, putting up his hand. “Nobody leaves the neighborhood tonight, Miss. Mayor’s orders.”
“I’m just on my way to see my uncle down the street.”
The policeman noted her crutches. He nodded her on. “All right, Miss.”
The opera house was noisy with the banging of hammers. Two of Uncle Eddie’s apprentices pounded the edges of a painted canvas to a wooden frame. The doors of the large wardrobe were open, and Uncle Eddie brushed lint from the colorful costumes inside. Ling ran a finger down the curving pheasant feather of the Da Dao Man’s headpiece. “Uncle, how do you get rid of a ghost?”
Uncle Eddie stopped, mid-brush. “That is a very odd question.”
“Hypothetically,” Ling added quickly.
“Hypothetically? For the sake of science?” Uncle Eddie said, not missing a beat. Ling kept her expression neutral, and after a moment her uncle went back to brushing the costume clean. “Is your ghost Chinese or American?”
“I don’t know,” Ling said.
“Well, for us, we say you have to give a proper burial. In Chinese soil. You must perform the proper rituals and say the prayers to give the spirit rest.”
“What if that isn’t possible?”
“You put a pearl in the corpse’s mouth. For an American ghost…” Uncle Eddie’s eyes twinkled. “Tell it there’s no money in haunting and it will go away. Careful!”
Uncle Eddie’s attention was diverted to the stage, where the two stagehands struggled with the large canvas flat. It wobbled and threatened to fall over.
“Ling, do you want to see something special?”
“Everyone needs training.” Uncle Eddie sighed. “Turn it around, please! This way!”
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Uncle Eddie said. “It’s the original canvas from the last time the opera was performed. They wanted to have an American audience, so they made it more like an American play, with scenery.”
The room seemed to come to a point on the stage. Ling’s chest squeezed tight, as if someone were wringing the air from her lungs. She stared at the painted scene, barely comprehending what she saw: Golden hills. A meadow of colorful flowers. Bright sunshine. The red roofs of a Chinese village and a mist-shrouded forest.
Just as Ling had seen them every night in her dream with Wai-Mae.
They had the most beautiful opera there. I escape to it in my mind whenever I need to.
All of Ling’s uneasy questions shifted into chilling answers: Wai-Mae was waiting for them when they arrived each night. She was never in the station or up above on the streets outside Devlin’s, as Ling and Henry were. When Ling had asked about the dreamscape, what had Wai-Mae said? I made it. She’d talked about Mulberry Bend and Bandit’s Roost, which were nothing more than blighted memories of Five Points, a slum wiped away and replaced by the greenery of Columbus Park. And then there were O’Bannion and Lee. The matchmakers who Wai-Mae insisted were bringing her over had been dead and gone for fifty years. Murdered in 1875. Murder! Murder! Oh, murder! They’d been murdered by the girl in the veil.
The clues had been there for them all along. George had tried to make her see them. In the tunnel, he’d told her to wake up. He’d wanted her to know about the ghost, to see who it really was.
And who had warned them against going inside the tunnel? Wai-Mae. Wai-Mae was the ghost.
But what if some part of Wai-Mae didn’t know that? What if the dream was her way of fighting that knowledge? Ling needed to talk to Henry, desperately. She wished he weren’t drunk. He’d been so upset about Louis… because Louis never showed up.
Louis, too, never appeared aboveground, Ling realized. Like Wai-Mae, he was always waiting for them in the dream world, shimmering in the sun. Shimmering. Ling’s head went light as she realized at last what had been poking at her these past few days. It was Henry’s comment about the hat. She’d thought it was his. But it had been Louis’s first.
She’d told Henry from the start: She could only find the dead.
A chorus of police whistles shrilled in the streets. They were answered by loud sirens. Through the windows, Ling saw a herd of police marching up Doyers Street.
“What’s happening?” Ling asked.
“Shhh.” Uncle Eddie turned off the lights and they kept watch at the windows. Across the way, the police battered down the door of an apartment building. There was shouting as people were forced outside and into police wagons. A truck with a searchlight mounted on its back slunk around the narrow curve. Its white-hot sweep illuminated frightened faces peeking out from behind curtained windows. Two men attempted to escape from an apartment window onto a second-floor balcony. They were met on the fire escape by policemen with clubs at the ready. Police were everywhere in the streets, whistles blowing, as they rounded up the citizens of Chinatown. Many weren’t going willingly, some shouting, “You cannot treat us this way. We are human beings!” A man’s voice came over a megaphone in English telling everyone not to move, that this was a raid.