“My name is Ling Chan,” she started. “I’m a dream walker.”
“The other Diviner,” Mabel said.
Ling briefed everyone about her walks with Henry and all they’d seen and experienced there, from the Beach Pneumatic Transit Company to the strange loop they’d seen each time with the veiled woman. She told them, too, about the Proctor sisters’ revelations to Henry, and what she’d learned about the veiled woman haunting the site of her past and the dream machine she’d been building brick by brick, ghost by ghost, a grand architecture of illusion meant to keep painful memory at bay. “Henry is in trouble. He needs help. Our help.”
“I’m confused,” Mabel said. “Your friend Wai-Mae is actually a ghost, the veiled woman—they’re one and the same?”
Ling nodded.
“So she doesn’t even know she’s a ghost,” Mabel said, mulling it over. She looked to Theta. “It’s like what Dr. Jung talked about—the shadow self.”
Sam whistled. “That’s some shadow. Mine just makes me look taller.”
“She doesn’t really know what she’s doing,” Ling said.
“Horsefeathers!” Theta’s eyes glimmered. “That lie’s been around since Adam. She knows. Somewhere, deep down, she knows. I want her dead.”
“She’s already dead,” Sam said.
Theta glared.
Sam put up his hands in surrender. “Just making a point.”
“You said the station was for Beach’s pneumatic train? You’re sure?” Memphis asked.
“Yes,” Ling said.
“That mean something to you, Poet?”
Memphis reached into his coat for his poetry book. “Isaiah asked me about it. In fact, he even drew a picture of it. Isaiah’s my brother,” he explained to the others as he opened the book to Isaiah’s drawing of Beach’s pneumatic train and the glowing wraiths crawling out of the tunnel.
“That’s it,” Ling whispered. “That’s where we go each night. How did your brother…?”
“Isaiah’s got this gift. He can see glimpses of the future, like a radio picking up signals,” Memphis said, echoing Sister Walker’s words to him in her kitchen months before. Hadn’t she said she needed to talk to Memphis before she left? How he wished he’d taken her up on that offer. They’d certainly have plenty to talk about when she got back, and Octavia couldn’t stop him this time. “There’s something else I should tell you. You know that lady who survived the sleeping sickness, Mrs. Carrington?”
Sam shrugged. “Yeah. Sure. Was in all the papers. She took a picture with Sarah Snow.”
Memphis took a deep breath. “I’m the one who really healed her.”
Ling looked up at Memphis. “You can heal?”
“Sometimes,” Memphis said gently. “But I’d never had a healing trance like that one. It was more like a dream than a trance. I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t. And… I think I saw her. All I can say is that she had me sucked right in, so I believe you about her power.”
Sam sat up. “I’m trying to understand all this—”
“Don’t strain,” Jericho muttered.
“This ghost, Wai-Mae, or the veiled woman, or whoever she is, she can trap people inside dreams?” Sam finished.
“I think so,” Ling said. “From what Henry and I saw inside that tunnel, it seems that she gives them their best dreams, and as long as they don’t struggle, they stay there. If they fight it, their best dream turns into their worst nightmare.”
“But why does she do it?” Jericho asked.
“She needs their dreams. She feeds off them. They’re like batteries fueling her dream world. That’s why the sleeping sickness victims burn up from the inside. Because it’s too much. The constant dreaming destroys them.”
“What happens to those dreamers when they die?” Memphis asked, and the room fell silent.
“They can’t stop wanting the dream,” Ling said at last. “They’re insatiable. Hungry ghosts.”
“Monsters in the subways,” Memphis murmured.
Sam frowned at Memphis. “I don’t like where that’s headed. ‘Monsters in the Subways’ is not the title of a big, happy dance number.”
“Shut up, Sam,” Theta said. “Memphis, what is it?”
Memphis paced the same section of carpet. “Isaiah kept telling me about this bad dream he was having. About a lady making monsters in the tunnels. About ‘monsters in the subways.’ I thought he was making up a story so he wouldn’t get in trouble for drawing in my book. But I got a bad feeling he was telling the truth.”
