“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.
“Hungry!” Chauncey’s soldier friends dug into his belly with forks as he screamed.
“Enough!” he cried.
The nightmare vanished. Chauncey was back in the train station. The too-bright things waited in the tunnel, watching.
“This land is so full of dreams. I feel all your longing. So much longing. Dream with me…” the woman said.
“Y-yes,” Chauncey managed to say.
She lifted her veil, and her beauty was a terror to behold, a vengeful angel. Her sharp mouth hovered above his face. A glint of metal shimmied through the air. Pain speared Chauncey’s chest. Then she put her lips to his, and her dream poured into him, pushing through Chauncey’s veins, making his body twitch, robbing his mind of the will to fight. She breathed her dream into his lungs until their dream was the same and it was all he could see, all he would ever see, forever.
“Not enough,” the veiled woman said as the station glowed. “More.”
Clipboard in hand, the mission nurse made her nightly rounds. When she came to Chauncey Miller’s bed, she drew closer. His sweat-drenched face wore the oddest expression, something between pain and ecstasy, and his eyes moved frantically beneath his closed lids. It made her uneasy to look at him.
“Mr. Miller? Mr. Miller!”
She couldn’t wake him. That was when she saw the angry red patches bubbling up on his skin like radiation burns. In the bed beside Chauncey’s, an old wino named Joe Wilson moaned. His forehead was slick with sweat and his eyelids twitched with fevered dreaming.
“Mr. Wilson?”
“Dream… with… me…” he gasped.
“Mr. Wilson!” The nurse nudged him, then tugged on his arms, to no avail.
The room filled with whispers uttered in sleep, “Dream with me… dream with me… dream…”
The frantic nurse moved quickly from bedside to bedside. Of the twenty men on the ward, twelve of them would not wake. Her clipboard clattered to the floor as she ran to inform the doctor that they’d better call the health inspector straightaway.
The sleeping sickness had come to the mission.
Damp wind gusted against Mabel as she hurried along Central Park West ahead of the rain. She kept one hand on her hat and the other on her nervous stomach as she practiced what she’d say when she knocked at the museum.
“Good afternoon, Jericho! I was just passing by.”
“Oh, Jericho, are you hungry? There’s a swell diner down on Broadway.”
“Jericho! Fancy meeting you here. At the museum. Where you work. Every. Day.”
Mabel growled. She was lousy at this sort of coy game-playing. If only she could say what she really wanted to say, flat out.
“Kiss me, you fool!” Mabel exclaimed, lifting her arms skyward. A passing postman tipped his hat and gave her a hopeful smile, and a horrified Mabel shoved her hands deep into her coat and marched up the sidewalk, muttering to herself the whole way.
As Mabel approached the museum, she slowed, noticing the two men in the brown sedan. A life on the front lines of the labor movement had trained Mabel to keep alert for oddities, and something about these men seemed off. They were just sitting, watching the museum. Well, they weren’t the only ones who knew how to watch. Mabel stopped beside the driver’s-side window and tapped gently on the glass.
The driver rolled down the window, scowling just slightly before correcting his expression with a smile. “Yes, Miss?”