Lair of Dreams

Sam grinned and spread his hands wide. “Everybody’s got a talent, kid.”

Mildred knocked again. “Miss O’Neill? Will you be much longer?”

“That’s your cue to leave,” Evie said, pushing Sam toward the door. “Don’t forget about our date tonight—the party at the Pierre Hotel hosted by some rich Texan who made all his money in oil. He’s swimming in it—money, not oil. It’s good press.”

Sam winked. “Well. As long as it’s good press. See you tonight, doll.”

“Lucky me,” Evie said, and for a second Sam couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not.

Sam turned up Fifty-seventh Street toward the Second Avenue El. As he walked, he examined the mysterious envelope again. It was his first big break in some time. Hopefully, Anna Polotnik would know something that would lead Sam to his mother. But first, he had to find Anna.

An open-air touring car draped in advertising bunting for Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir advanced slowly. A man stood holding on to the windshield, calling out to people on the street over a bullhorn: “Protect yourself from exotic disease with Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir—every bottle made with the goodness of real radium for radiant health! Do not allow your loved ones to fall to the Chinese Sleeping Sickness! Purchase Morton’s Miracle Health Elixir today!”

Sam shook his head. Nothing made a man richer than exploiting another man’s fears. For a second, Sam considered finding a mark and using his powers to lift the fella’s wallet, but he decided against it. Right now, his luck was good. And if there was anything his superstitious mother had taught him, it was not to press your luck.

Feeling hopeful, Sam climbed the stairs to wait for the train.

He’d never noticed the brown sedan that had trailed him for several blocks.

The hush of the Bowery Mission was interrupted only slightly by the occasional whimper from bed number eighteen as Chauncey Miller dreamed of a war that never stopped. Bullets screamed overhead as two medics struggled to carry Chauncey’s stretcher across a muddy, smoke-shrouded battlefield. A soldier with a choirboy face lay slumped against barbed wire, staring up at the unforgiving sky, his hands resting prayerlike on the guts spilling from the jagged hole in his stomach.

“Stay with me, old bo—” The medic’s words died on his lips as a bullet found its home in his head, and he dropped like a storm-felled sapling. Around Chauncey, the tat-tat-tat-tat-tat of machine guns echoed through war-mangled trees while dying men keened for help, for forgiveness, for death.

“Help! Please help me,” Chauncey cried out. He couldn’t move. When he lifted his head, he could see the bloody, frayed ends of skin and bone where his legs had been. Every night, Chauncey prayed that he’d wake with both legs, back home in Poughkeepsie, and find that the past nine years of his life had been nothing but a terrible dream. Instead, he woke screaming, his face sweaty and his eyes wet with tears.

But not tonight. Just under the cacophonous symphony of gunfire and screaming, Chauncey heard something else—the sad, creaking tune of an old music box. Off to his right, the mission doors appeared between two barren trees. When they opened, the song drifted out from them, erasing the din of war.

Chauncey sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the bed. His legs! With a small cry, Chauncey rested his hands on his knees, then moved them down the sides of his calves, feeling skin and muscle and bone. He flexed his feet, rejoicing in that small victory of motion. He stepped through the doors and plodded down the darkened corridor of the mission, past the beds of lost souls traveling in their own dreams: pushing a plow on the family farm, making love to the girl left behind, diving into a sun-dappled swimming hole in summer. He looked back at his bed, where what was left of his broken body slept on. That was what waited for him when he woke, so he pushed further into his dream until he came to an old subway station.

It was quite beautiful here; an amber glow suffused the entire place, warming the fancy brass sconces and floral oilcloth wall covering, making the tracks gleam. But if Chauncey turned his head just so, the whole picture seemed unstable, as if this lovely, warm scene were trying to write itself across a dark, decaying canvas that peeked through in spots. Chauncey could swear that he heard sounds deep inside the vast dark of the tunnel—sharp clicking noises and thready, low growls made by some nightmare beast he could not name or imagine. But then, just as he had the impulse to turn back, a voice whispered sweetly to him in overlapping waves, “Dream with me.…”

“Yes,” he answered. “All right.”