The Hungry Dreaming, page 11
part #3 of Ghosts of Gotham Series
“My Little Pony.”
Tyler pursed his lips. Slow, eyes darting to one side, his cheeks taut. A giggle burst out as she lightly punched his arm.
“Dick,” she said, but her smile mirrored his.
“Sorry, sorry.” He paused, sly. “I mean, there’s nothing to laugh about. The magic of friendship is serious business.”
“Last time I tell you anything. I will remain a mysterious enigma from this point forward. So how does an artist end up working for a newspaper instead of…you know, arting?”
There was something wistful in his eyes now, a haze of mingled regrets.
“Not much support for the arts in my house, growing up. My old man was a teamster, and he didn’t have a lot of respect for anybody who didn’t make a living with their muscles. My mom…well, she agreed with whatever Dad said. Survival mechanism. Then I met the love of my life, and her folks told me there was no way in hell I’d ever marry their daughter if I didn’t have a stable career.”
“Like they could stop you?”
Tyler shrugged. “No, but…you get enough people in your life telling you that you’re crazy for chasing a dream, it’s hard not to start thinking they might be right. It’s easy to just take that dream and put it aside for a while. Just a while, until you find your footing in the world.”
He left the rest unspoken, but Seelie heard it in the silence. “A while” had a way of turning into forever. A small photograph stood framed on the television stand. Tyler hugging a beaming woman from behind, his younger, tighter face nestled in her flow of curls. The woman cradled an infant in her arms.
“Is that her?” Seelie asked.
“Yeah,” he said.
This was a one-bedroom apartment, no space for a kid, no sign of the woman in the photograph. She didn’t ask for details, the story of what went wrong, and he didn’t offer. She took the blanket and pillow from his arms.
“You know,” she said, nodding to the comic pages, “it’s never too late to make a change.”
He didn’t have an answer. She wasn’t sure if he didn’t have one for her, or if he didn’t have one for himself. He made a vague gesture toward the couch.
“We should get some sleep,” he said, “maybe get an early start in the morning.”
“Yeah.” She watched him pad to the bedroom door. “Hey, Tyler?”
He turned in the doorway.
“Thanks,” she said. “For letting me crash tonight.”
“Sleep good,” he said.
The bedroom door glided shut. Seelie spread the blanket out on the sofa and kicked off her shoes.
It wasn’t until she was reaching for the lamp, clicking it off to plunge the living room into darkness, that she noticed the spot on the television stand was empty.
* * *
Tyler slipped into his bedroom. He shut the door behind him.
There wasn’t much to it, just an old queen bed with a squeaky brass frame he’d picked up at a block sale and a dresser from somebody’s attic. The dresser and the walls were painted in institutional shades of beige and the only pop of color was the quilted bedspread, a flowered monstrosity from the mid-1970s. He kept telling himself he was going to have to replace it once he started dating again. He just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.
Someday.
He glanced down at the treasure cupped to his chest. The framed photograph. Him, and June, and little Megan, one week after they came home from the hospital together. He set it on the dresser. A memory of better days, when the world was bright and boundless.
Not really a memory, though. He couldn’t actually recall when the picture had been taken; it just existed, an artifact that had been with him for years, carrying the hazy aftermath of emotions more than concrete recollection. His actual memories of his wife and daughter had all been distilled into a single hour on a single day in the high summer heat, five years ago.
He looked to the bed, his limbs leaden, feeling heavy and numb as he unbuttoned his shirt. He’d be back there soon enough, remembering it all, reliving it all over again. Just like every other night.
18.
Seelie lay on a strange couch, in a strange apartment, in the pitch darkness. It was okay.
There was a mindset for couch-surfing. It was tricky at first, awkward, but she’d mastered the sleight-of-brain trick with practice and time. You just had to give up the idea of “home” being anything but where you were in that given moment. No attachments but you and your backpack. Traveling light, no expectations, no hopes, gliding along with the flow of the day. You just had to be comfortable in your skin.
That part she still had trouble with. But she was getting there.
She had a good feeling about Tyler. Feelings could lie, but she’d honed her survival instincts like a prehistoric hunter with a flint-tipped spear. Meet enough creeps, you started picking up their scent. Tyler felt like one of the good guys. Too good. The kind of guy who could get himself rolled if he opened his heart and his nest to the wrong person, and sooner or later he probably would.
He had Nell, though, and Seelie had the impression Nell would go off like a cannon on anybody who messed with her friends. Hell, she didn’t even know Seelie, and she’d still gotten up close and personal with a hit man to protect her—
Not a hit man, though. With Amber. Who was apparently working for the missionary, doing his dirty work.
It didn’t make any sense. More than anything she’d seen and learned in the last day, that was the one stumbling block that threw Seelie off her stride, making her shift and turn on the couch while sleep danced just out of her grasp. Why would the missionary murder Ducky, then turn around and recruit his girlfriend? Why would Amber say yes? She kept thinking Stockholm syndrome, or that Amber was too scared to say no.
But she’d heard Amber’s voice behind her, in the cinema, and Amber didn’t sound scared at all. Not one bit. And when Seelie turned, there was a piano wire in her grip. Ready to strangle her, just like the woman dying on the silver screen.
The image replayed itself behind Seelie’s eyelids. She curled tight under the fluffy blanket, sofa cushions rustling beneath her. Exhaustion made her thoughts drift. They took on the garish hues of an ’80s noir movie, sex and knives and Technicolor, as she searched for the missing piece that would explain everything.
Without finding it, she tumbled into dreaming.
* * *
Seelie’s feet carried her up a short, groaning staircase. Bent and broken nails jutted from one step, another leaning so far it threatened to slide loose beneath her. Fat black roaches scurried along the rotten wallboards, the hallway crooked and so tight she had to turn sideways to pass. Doorways without doors opened into smoky warrens of rooms, one lit by a lantern draped under gauzy red silk. The stifling air smelled like cheap gin and woodsmoke and vomit.
Bottles clinked somewhere beneath her feet, and wooden cups thumped on tables and braying voices half sang, half shouted a drinking song: “Some say women are like the seas, some the waves, and some the rocks. Some the rose that soon decays, some the weather and some the cocks. But if you’ll give me leave to tell, there’s nothing that can be compared so well as wine, wine, women and wine—”
Seelie turned a bend, past an unlit parlor where bodies slid against one another in the dark, a coughing grunt breaking the silence along with a wet suckling sound. A cracked window looked out over the city. An endless slum, shacks and lean-tos thrown together in a trackless maze for men and rats, with dirty laundry strung like flags from arch to arch. Wooden planks shoved up against walls of mud to carve narrow paths between the wreckage, like trenches in wartime. A wooden tower rose up and leaned hard, a broken finger pointing to the bone sliver of moon in a starry night sky.
Just like she did a dozen times a day, Seelie instinctively dug in her pocket and tugged her token out. The little Monopoly race car was a glimmering blood-red garnet. She looked at the token, glanced away, and looked again. Now it was a sculpture of carved jade.
I’m asleep, she thought.
When she’d first started practicing, following the exercises in her library book about lucid dreaming, this was only half the challenge. Nine times out of ten, the realization would boot her awake, rudely evicted from the precincts of sleep. With time, with practice, she’d found her footing. She steadied herself and squeezed the token in her hand.
Now she was lucid. Fully conscious, in her own dreamscape. Fully in control.
Out the window, down in the trenches, a lantern’s light swayed like a drunkard. Two men in heavy coats and tricorne caps were stumbling against one another, keeping each other on their feet, while one tipped back a jug. Most of it splashed along the sodden front of his ruffled shirt. His partner in crime wore the Rebellious Stripes as a sash, the crudely painted red and white flag adorning his greatcoat.
Dreams were a dumping ground for the subconscious, a place for the mind to rest and sort through the detritus of the day. Her brain was trying to tell her something. She was puzzling it out when a soft humming caught her ear. The melody was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. Seelie followed the sound.
She stepped through a doorway and into a cramped little room, one wall slanted inward and blotched with spots of damp mildew. A stub of a candle perched on the edge of a sea chest. It shed a circle of flickering light across splintered, rough floorboards and a pair of straw mattresses. The mattresses were flecked with dark stains.
There was a girl here, maybe Seelie’s age, humming and turning on the toes of her slippered feet as she danced alone. Pretty in squalor, with a dirty moon face and big bright eyes and stringy blond hair. She wore a patched camisole and bloomers, the hem adorned with brittle yellow lace.
Seelie’s brow furrowed as she watched her. Usually the people in her dreams were taken from her waking life, faces and voices swapped around like day players in a community theater, cast in whatever parts might fit. She couldn’t remember where she’d seen the girl before.
She stopped dancing and looked to the door. “Oh. I didn’t see you there.”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Seelie said. “What’s that song you were humming?”
Her cheeks dimpled. “It’s a secret song. I’m Patience. What’s your name?”
“Seelie. Where are we?”
Now Patience smiled like she thought Seelie was putting her on. She spread her arms wide—as wide as the narrow, rotting walls allowed—and turned in a grand circle.
“You stand on holy ground, m’lady. Manhattan, jewel of the new world! Is it not glorious? Are we not queens?” She looked back. Seelie noticed that Patience never made direct eye contact: her gaze was always carefully low, just a little off-center. “Are you taking Agnes’s old mattress?”
Seelie glanced at the two mattresses, barely a foot apart on the filthy floor. A flea hopped at the edge of the candlelight, then bounced into the shadows.
“What happened to Agnes?” she asked.
Patience’s smile vanished.
“They come here with diseases, you know. From across the river, from across the sea. They’re not our diseases, not until they spit them into our bellies. Then they blame us. A soldier came down with the pox and his friends blamed Agnes for it. They caught her at the Pig and Whistle, just up the street. I saw it.”
Seelie listened, mute. The flickering glow cast Patience as a phantom.
“They set her on fire,” Patience said. “They do that. Say it’s to burn the disease out, but that’s not why. Worst part was the sound.”
“The burning?”
“The laughing,” Patience said.
Seelie searched for something to say. I’m sorry felt too small, too powerless a phrase to throw in the face of something that monstrous.
“You know what they call us?” Patience asked, her gaze carefully down and left of Seelie’s eyes. “The soldiers, I mean.”
“No,” Seelie said.
“Cracks. They call us cracks.” Patience gave a little shrug. “But you know. You’re like me.”
Sure she was. Seelie felt that innate kinship, the understanding you could only share with someone who walked the same road as you. When she came to New York on a Greyhound bus, a runaway with twenty bucks and a backpack, Seelie didn’t have a plan. She didn’t set out to sleep with men for shelter, for money, for the things she needed. She just set out to survive. And so she did. She wasn’t proud of it and she wasn’t ashamed, either. No reason to feel much of anything about it.
“I think what really happened was Agnes pinched his coin purse.” Patience gave her that looking-without-looking stare. “I don’t steal. That’s a rule.”
“My rule, too,” Seelie said. God knew she’d had opportunities. Drawing moral lines, even tiny ones, kept things clear when her stomach was empty.
Patience had a smile that could light up a room, even one as dismal as this.
“I can tell. You’re like me. The other girls here, they say I’m simple.” Her smile went tight. “I’m not simple.”
“I know,” Seelie said. There was something…off about Patience, her aversion to eye contact, the carefully measured cadence of her voice and her insistence on precision, but that wasn’t it.
“I want to leave, but they make it so hard. Madame Blanchette takes most of what I make. Rent, for the room and the bed. I’ve been robbed, four”—she held up four fingers—“four times. Back to the beginning all over again.”
Seelie understood. “The less you have, the harder it is to get ahead.”
“But I have a plan. It’s a secret.”
Patience waved her over. She crouched at the girl’s side, shoulder to shoulder before the sea chest. Metal rasped as Patience picked up her prize, turning it to catch the candle’s light, showing it to Seelie. She wasn’t sure what she was looking at, some slender medallion of tin, scrap metal torn and frayed at the edges, like it had fallen off a machine. There was a maker’s stamp, too corroded to read, and a picture: the image of a weaver’s loom. Patience’s cracked fingernail tapped against it.
“A loom?” Seelie asked. “You’re going to be a weaver?”
Patience’s head bobbed. “I can’t get an apprenticeship, no one will take in someone…like us, but if I save up, if I can buy my own loom and pay for lessons from my own purse, then I can leave this place. I can leave this place.”
Her words were confident, but her tone was begging for reassurance. Seelie gently touched her shoulder.
“Yeah,” Seelie said. “You can. And you will.”
Patience gave her a furtive glance, sidelong. “I’ll tell you another secret. If you want.”
“Sure.”
“It’s not so bad here sometimes. Not late at night. When I fall asleep, I’m still awake, inside my dreams. I go to such wonderful places sometimes.”
Seelie almost jolted awake herself. She’d been lulled for a bit, tricked by her mind into accepting this dream as reality. Now she remembered that “Patience” was a figment of her subconscious, an embodiment of something her brain was trying to process.
She still felt real, though.
“This helps,” Patience said, tapping the stamped tin. “See, when I’m awake, it’s always the same. When I’m dreaming, it changes. That’s how I know.”
“I have a token, too,” Seelie told her. She opened her curled fingers and showed Patience the Monopoly car. Now it was tin, same as Patience’s scrap, in the form of a tiny horse-drawn carriage. Patience’s eyes went wide, twin moons in the flickering light.
“You really are just like me. Have…have you met her, then?”
Seelie tilted her head. “Her?”
Patience grabbed her hand, still crouched, turning on her toes. Eyes downcast but she was animated now, almost bubbling over.
“She’s amazing. Her brothers and sisters won’t let her live on the mountain because they say she doesn’t belong, just like us. But she’s going to make a home there whether they like it or not, and she’s going to bring all of us to live with her, the people who don’t belong, the ones who don’t fit—”
“Patience, wait, slow down a little. Who are you talking about?”
“The Lady,” Patience said. She squeezed Seelie’s hand. “Come with me! I’ll take you to meet her. You’ll see, she’s—”
“That’s her,” said a gruff voice behind them.
Seelie jumped to her feet. So did Patience, both of them turning as a pair of shadows loomed in the open doorway. Sweaty-faced men in white bandannas and soot-stained coats, both of them leering at Patience like hunters cornering a prize pheasant.
“This is not how the rules work,” Patience told them, flustered. “You have to pay Madame Blanchette, and she calls me downstairs, and—and—there are rules.”
The men ignored her. They pressed into the tiny room, spreading out, making way for the third arrival. He was tall, gaunt, filling the doorway with his presence and the overpowering odor of his musk cologne.
Seelie knew him on sight. The missionary.
19.
The missionary looked just like he had on Arthur’s doorstep. Cadaverous, reptile-eyed, though now he wore a tricorne and a long brown coat, a rifle slung over his shoulder. Seelie made the mental connection, flashing back to Arthur’s man cave and the miniature figurines warring across a green felt battlefield. He was dressed as a revolutionary, one of the Sons of Liberty.
“Okay,” Seelie said. “Screw this. I am not entertaining any random-ass nightmares tonight.”
She cupped her hands before her, pulling them close to her chest. It was a ritual gesture, practiced over countless nights of banishing her fears, bringing serenity to her dream world. She thrust her arms out and exhaled hard as she opened her hands, intent on banishing the missionary and his men to motes of imaginary dust.
Nothing happened.
They didn’t even look at her, like she wasn’t in the room. One of the men grabbed Patience, wrenching her arms behind her back, and the other clamped his muddy palm over her mouth. A fourth man entered the room, toting a bucket. It sloshed when he plopped it down. Dark scarlet frothed over the top, drizzling down the wooden slats.
