Lair of Dreams
Theta gulped down air. “No. No, I just… I just wanna slow down, Poet.”
“All right. Okay. We can be slow as you like,” Memphis said.
His gentleness made Theta want to cry. “Can we… can we just lie here?”
“If you like.”
They lay side by side on the floor of the lighthouse, and Theta rested her head on Memphis’s chest, where she could hear his heart thumping. More than anything, she wanted to keep kissing him. But in her mind, she heard Roy’s screams, saw the curls of black smoke rising from under his fingers as he clutched at his face and the room caught fire.
“Everything copacetic, Princess?” Memphis asked.
Just tell him. He’s not gonna run. Tell him. Tell him.…
“Sure. Everything’s jake,” she managed to say, and they watched the bright light sweeping back and forth, promising safety.
The moon poured through the flimsy curtains in Isaiah’s bedroom as he half woke and rose slowly from his bed, crossing to Memphis’s desk. His eyes tipped back in their sockets and his mouth mumbled old words. He grabbed the pencil and began to draw.
In a back room of a smoky gambling hall, Blind Bill bargained with two men who didn’t take well to bargains. “Tell Mr. Schultz I’ll get him his money. I promise,” Bill said.
“Mr. Schultz expects interest. Or he takes his own kind of interest, if you get my meaning,” one of the men said, and he kicked at Bill’s cane just to make the point clear.
Jericho yawned as he read over an account from Will’s early days investigating Diviners who sensed danger coming and issued warnings that mostly went unheeded. He looked out his window at the neon night and wondered where Evie was now, and if she ever thought of him, and he hated himself for caring.
Elsewhere in the city, the bright young things danced to feverish jazz in the speakeasies while others stumbled home to sleep off the gin. They went to bed humming songs they were sure had been written just for them, songs they believed they would sing that happily for the rest of their lives. They slept and they dreamed: Sweethearts who’d fallen asleep wrapped in each other’s arms. Bricklayers and bridge builders whose lives were lived in the shadows of the monuments they built to the greatness of others. Newcomers to America whose tongues still struggled with the texture of English words. Midwestern boys who’d set off for the big city to make their fortunes. Teenage girls in cramped apartments who longed to feel beautiful and adored and seen. They traveled deep into the corridors of sleep, following the music-box song, desperate to join the dream that called to them, a great migration to its promising shores.
They heard a voice whispering, “Dream with me.…”
Some said no. They drifted into other, less satisfying dreams from which they woke in the morning with a feeling of great loss, as if they’d been offered a fortune of happiness and had squandered it.
Some answered yes. They chased after their elusive desires, ignoring the terrible sounds in the dark, until they realized their mistake. And by then it was too late. There was no leaving now. They would dream until all that remained was the phantom presence of their insatiable desires. Hungry ghosts, still dreaming.
In a basement speakeasy on West Twenty-fourth Street, two flappers slept with their Marcel Wave heads pressed together, lost to dreaming.
At Vesuvio’s Bakery on Prince Street, the CLOSED sign hung on the door and the lingering scent of yeast and flour wasn’t enough to wake the three young men in baker’s aprons who lay sprawled in their wooden chairs, mouths agape, one worker still clutching the broom from last night’s sweeping in his hand.
Near the Brooklyn Bridge, in the rumble seat of a car whose windows were fogged with frost, a young couple had stopped their heavy petting. Now it was only their eyes that moved feverishly behind their lids as they dreamed and dreamed and could not stop.
On the top floor of a five-story walk-up, across the street from a rival gambling den, one of Lucky Luciano’s hired goons slept beside his Tommy gun while his intended target walked free. Lucky would be furious about the botched job, but it didn’t matter to the assassin, because he would never wake again.
Deep below the city, the long metal snakes of the IRT rattled through the dark tunnels, while on the mud-rutted back roads of Connecticut, Sister Walker’s car rumbled toward the dark horizon. They’d been driving for miles, following up on leads. Gray strands of stars stretched out above the sleeping towns and quiet farms they passed.