Lair of Dreams

His friends were unbothered. They had abandoned their utensils and scooped up handfuls of food, shoveling it in faster and faster, with desperate strokes, gorging themselves, too fast to chew and swallow. Bertie choked, vomiting up what he’d just eaten, then started in again.

“Slow down there, Bertie,” Chauncey warned, but Bertie kept gorging.

Teddy smiled at Chauncey. There was something off about it. Like looking at a picture where another picture is trying to break through, and the image breaking through was of Teddy’s mustard-gas rictus grin.

A thread of fear tightened around Chauncey’s guts.

Clem cocked his head, listening. His fingers were slick with egg and saliva. “Still hungry,” he said in a raw, croaking voice.

The others’ heads snapped up. Food scraps hung from their wet mouths. Chauncey’s heartbeat accelerated. Around him, the French saloon began to unravel, revealing the dark, cold brick of the tunnel.

“Hungry,” they chanted, showing rows of pointed teeth in oily mouths. Soulless eyes stared out of cracked, pallid skin. Chauncey backed away. These were not his brothers. Not Clem or Rolly or Joe and definitely not sweet Teddy. What were these things?

“Hungry for dreams with us hungry dream with us dream dream hungry dream…” they chorused.

The tunnel crackled with pulses of light that reminded Chauncey of gunfire on the battlefield. There were more of them hiding there in the dark. Dear god. They squeezed out of holes and slithered down the brick, nails click-click-clicking in the gloom, beasts waking from slumber. Their hungry growls and screeches echoed in his head, turning his blood cold.

Wake up, he told himself. Wake up, old boy. Wake now!

Then, suddenly, there was a train! Chauncey threw himself against its doors. “Open up! Open up! For the love of god, please open!”

The doors hissed apart and Chauncey fell in and pushed the doors shut. Outside, the shining wraiths clawed at the window, mouths snapping. As the train sped away, their angry howls resounded in the tunnel. Chauncey put his hands over his ears. He just wanted to wake up now. Tomorrow, he’d talk to the mission director about a job. Maybe he’d even go home to Poughkeepsie, find a kindhearted girl. He’d give up the drink and then his liver would be all right again. Anything. Anything but this.

Slowly, he became aware that something was on the train with him. An eerie stillness descended. It was like the time during the war when he turned a blind corner in the trench only to come face-to-face with a German soldier. For a second, the two of them had stared, neither knowing what to do. And then Chauncey had pummeled the soldier with his fists, beating and beating until the soldier’s head was as pulpy as a dropped melon. Afterward, he’d gone through the boy’s pockets with shaking fingers. All he’d found was a picture of the boy with his mother and a sweet-faced dog.

Swallowing down his fear, Chauncey turned his head in the direction of the figure. It wasn’t a German soldier or one of those wretched spirits riding with him, but a woman. She wore a high-necked gown of the sort worn once upon a time. A veil covered her face.

“P-please. Please help me,” Chauncey said. He barely recognized the voice as his own.

“This world will break your heart. Stay with me, inside the dream.”

The woman rose from her seat, and he saw the bloodstains blossoming across the front of her gown. Her mummified hands clasped his face. Her nails were sharp. Through the veil’s fine netting, Chauncey could see the woman’s dark eyes, set in a leathery face. A skeletal mouth showed double rows of pointed teeth.

“Such a pretty dream we are building. We must all keep it going. There’s not much life in you. Still. It will do. We must keep building. The dream needs you.”

Chauncey’s cry thinned to a quavering whisper. “Please. Please just let me wake up.”

“You promised. To break a promise is dishonorable.”

“I didn’t understand.”

“Then I will make you see the world in all its horror.”

The train fell away. The battlefield returned—soldiers blown apart, blood-drenched mud flying up, the sky crying tears of terrible light. But this time, Chauncey lay on a table in the middle of it all, his arms and legs gone. And around him, there were men riding into the night with burning crosses. And there were bedazzled people bathing in tubs of Wall Street money while other people dug in the frost-hard ground for sustenance. And there were slaves sold on auction blocks and starving tribes marched away from their homes and witches pressed under the weight of stones. And there was a gray-faced man in a feathered coat and a tall hat who laughed and laughed.