Lair of Dreams

“You’ve summoned me, my love.”

“Yes,” Addie said, eyes brimming with tears. “I’ve paid the price for you, too.”

“Don’t you know that every soul you give him increases his power? That it binds you to him forever?”

Addie didn’t understand. Why wasn’t Elijah happy? “I did it so that we could be together always.”

“And so we shall. For I cannot rest until you do. I am bound to love you till you die.”

His mouth opened in a scream then. From it fell beetles and maggots and all manner of death. In the trees, the crows cawed, and it sounded like cruel laughter. This creature before her was not Elijah, not the Elijah she’d kissed under the sun. He was something else entirely, and she wanted no part of him. Adelaide ran. She ran past the tombstones and the scarecrows, all the way back to the safety of her bed, which was no safety at all.

In the morning, when she threw back the blanket, she screamed loud enough to wake her sister. There in the covers was a dead mouse with its eyes missing and its entrails ripped out. It lay on a blanket of browned daisy petals.

Addie read the books. She learned the spells. At midnight, she went to Elijah’s grave and dug up what was left of him, breaking off a sliver of finger bone, prying out a tooth, cutting off a lock of his hair, scooping up a handful of graveyard dirt. These she placed in an iron box, and then she performed the ritual to bind Elijah’s spirit so that he could not come to her anymore. He could not harm her.

But what of the King of Crows, the man in the stovepipe hat?

Addie had given him power when she asked to see Elijah once more. She’d tied herself to him by an invisible thread that she could not sever. She had entered into a bargain blindly. No, not blindly. She’d made the choice. She’d pledged her allegiance to that man in the hat. In the years since, she’d had time to reflect. To question the vow hastily made for love, fashioned from grief, from a need to believe in something grander than herself.

Adelaide Proctor was old now. She had watched them bury the boy she loved in the muddy soil of Virginia, and she had buried her family soon after. On a day in April, she read about the president, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, and of the assassin’s death, too. When President McKinley also fell to an assassin’s bullet, she was there. She’d seen the birth of the automobile and the aeroplane. The steam trains crossed the country, the gleaming tracks clumsy sutures across wounded miles of stolen land. In New York Harbor, the ships sailed in with their precious, hopeful cargo gaping at Liberty’s torch. The towns spread and grew; the factories, too, belching smoke and ambition into the air. The wars continued. Hymns were raised to the glory of the nation. The people were good and fine and strong and fair, hardworking and hopeful; also, vain and grasping, greedy and covetous, willfully ignorant and dangerously forgetful.

Addie Proctor had seen much in her eighty-one years in this magnificent, turbulent country impossible with possibility, and so she knew to be afraid now, for they’d reached a tipping point. There were ghosts everywhere in the country, and no one seemed to notice. People danced while the dead watched them through the windows. And all the while, the man in the stovepipe hat gained power. He was coming.

Though she had been warned against it, Addie went to the basement, where she drew the marks upon the floor in chalk and muttered the prayers, performing the small ministrations of salt and blood, rituals to keep the dead away.

She hoped it would be enough.

“Henry!” Ling called as she walked the familiar path past the giant Spanish elms of the bayou. Henry and Louis, bathed in sunshine, sat on the weathered dock. Henry responded with a wave. “Hurry! Before our alarms go off,” Ling said.

“Be right there!” Henry called back.

“’Evenin’, Miss Ling!” Louis shouted and waved to her. The sun shone brightly down on him, and Ling got a funny feeling in her stomach, some warning she couldn’t yet name.

“All good dreams must come to an end,” Henry said, joining her, flushed and happy as they walked the forest path. “What’s that mark on your dress?”

“Dirt,” Ling said, snapping back to the moment. She brushed at the stubborn stain.

“I thought it was another experiment. Like the ash.”

“No, but I do need your help. I want to see if I can wake you from inside the dream.”

Henry shrugged. “All right. I’m game. What do you want me to do?”

“You only need to stand still.”

“Sounds like my music career so far.”