Lair of Dreams

Evie grasped the dead thing’s wrist, breathing in and out as she tried to relax. The vision began as a tingle that spread up her arms, tightening the muscles of her neck. And then she was under, the vision playing out like a movie across a bright screen.

“A ship. I’m on a ship,” Evie said. She gagged. “Seasick.”

“You okay?” Sam’s voice.

“You care,” Evie murmured.

“What?” Sam said.

“Nothing,” Evie mumbled. She allowed herself to ease back a bit until she felt better. “There’s a ship unloading passengers,” she said in a detached voice. “And a sign… Port of… San Francisco.”

Guards funneled passengers toward a building for processing. Evie felt unmoored. She could feel the girl’s fear pressing against her, making her heart race, so she tried to distance herself by concentrating on the paper in the girl’s hand. It was printed in both Chinese and English: “O’Bannion and Lee, Matchmakers.” Two men entered the stuffy building. One was a big, burly white man with muttonchop sideburns and a handlebar mustache. The other was a Chinese man in a Western-style suit who smiled without showing his teeth. They paid the immigration official fifty dollars to look the other way, and took the girl and two others with them. The reading threatened to slip away.

Evie gripped the bony wrist tighter and a squalid New York City slum came into view: Streets thick with mud and horse dung. Filthy ragamuffins begging for scraps. A toothless, grime-coated woman talking sweetly to a rag-enrobed baby at her bare breast. Flies swarmed her.

“Shhh, that’s a good boy,” the woman said, and Evie could see that the baby was dead.

A drunk hoisted his tankard and, in a thick Irish brogue, shouted, “Welcome to Five Points, hell’s backyard.”

From atop a soapbox, a man harangued the crowd. “… close our borders to the wretched Chinese, whose loose women pollute our young men, destroy our families, take the white man’s job…”

“Sheba? Anything?” Sam’s voice floated to Evie from far away.

Evie’s vision settled on a disheveled woman lying on a cot, clutching a music box. She had the glassy eyes of an opium addict. But it was the same girl. Evie sensed it.

“I think I found her,” Evie murmured.

She could feel the opium in her veins, making her woozy and sick. Distance. She needed distance.

The man with the muttonchops pushed back the curtain. “Put aside your dreams. It’s time to get to work, Wai-Mae.”

A man waited with his coat off. Evie knew why he was there and what Wai-Mae was expected to do for this man. She couldn’t stay in this vision any longer. She tried to break the connection, but it seemed the vision had something else to show her.

With a small grunt, she bit down on her back teeth as she traveled further under.

The filthy streets again. The muttonchop man dressed in a fine suit. Wai-Mae’s hand on the knife. Wai-Mae racing toward him, plunging the dagger into his chest again and again. The man’s blue eyes, surprised, shocked. The blood spreading across his white shirt, pulsing through his fingers. The man falling to the street. Police whistles. Shouts.

“Murder, murder,” Evie mumbled.

Evie could feel her own heart beating with the girl’s as she ran from the mob and down the steps into the basement of Devlin’s, into Beach’s pneumatic train station. She hid inside the stilled train car, beneath a velvet sofa, where she slept, and in her dream, there was the sound of men working. Wai-Mae opened her eyes only once, to see the light dimming down to nothing, but she was too weak to do anything but sleep.

Waking now. The gnawing hunger for opium. Evie gagged as Wai-Mae retched up bile and shivered. She staggered out of the car to find the tunnel bricked over. The dark was everywhere. Wai-Mae banged her hands against the brick, desperate. She slid down the wall. Evie felt the air thinning, making her head tight. Out. That was what Wai-Mae wanted. Out. Out of this terrible tomb. And the only way she’d been able to escape was through dreams.

Evie broke the connection and fell onto her knees in the dirt, gasping.

“Evil, you okay?” Theta gave Evie’s back a couple of hard thwacks.

“Ow! Quit it!” Evie said, scrambling away.

“I thought you were choking!”

“I’m… tryin’ a… breathe.” Evie gulped down a few lungfuls of air. “She came down here to hide,” Evie said, breathing heavily still. “But it was the day they closed up the station. While she slept there in that car, they bricked it all up. They buried her alive.”