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Alma bit her lip again. “I’m in no rush.” She tucked Ling’s hair behind her ear. “Was that okay?”
Ling smiled. She nodded. “It was nice.”
“Do you like to hold hands?”
Ling unfurled one of her very rare smiles. “With the right person, yes.”
“And am I…?”
“Yes.”
The phone rang. “Diviners Investigations,” Ling answered, still holding on to Alma’s hand.
“Is that your telephone voice? You sound like you’re at a funeral.”
Ling rolled her eyes. “What do you want, Evie?”
“Can you come to Theta and Henry’s? We’re going to try another dream walking.”
“Tell them what you told us,” Memphis said to Isaiah.
Isaiah recounted the vision he’d had of Conor and the cornfields and the strange girl. “I drew this. I think… I think it came straight from Conor. Like he was drawing through me.”
“Like channeling,” Ling said.
The picture was exactly like the one Evie had seen back at the asylum, the Eye and the floating soldiers. “We want to try to reach Conor through this.”
Henry’s eyebrows shot up. “Okay. But Conor didn’t draw that. Isaiah did.”
“I know. It’s a gamble. But we’re down to gambles at this point.”
Henry scooted a chair over, close to Ling. They each held a corner of Isaiah’s drawing. Sam set the metronome in motion, and within minutes, they’d slipped into sleep and dreams.
The first thing Henry noticed when he woke inside the dream was the sweet, bright haze of sunshine, like an egg wash spread over the warm day. He could actually feel the sun on his back, lulling him. The second thing he noticed was that Ling was not beside him.
“Ling?” he called.
There was no answer.
Where was she? Where was he?
Looking around, he saw that he stood on a leafy street of tidy brick houses and white-picket fences. Black-eyed Susans swayed on their stalks. A horse-and-buggy trotted past. The man at the reins tipped his hat at Henry.
“Mornin’,” the man said.
“Mornin’,” Henry answered.
A boy in short pants tossed newspapers from a bag slung over his shoulder. One landed near the porch of a pale brick foursquare—the Zenith Caller. Zenith, Ohio. That was Evie’s hometown. He was inside Evie’s dream, then. The door of the house creaked open. Henry went inside. Filmy Irish lace curtains sucked in through the open windows on a breeze. A fan whirred on a table blowing across a bowl of melting ice. Summer. A small, fair-haired woman rocked in a corner, hemming the edges of an American flag, which pooled on the floor in mounds.
The creak of the rocker, the gentle whine of the fan’s blades, and the hazy sun were hypnotic. Henry felt as if he could stay in this dream forever. A girl in a ruffled pinafore, her hair done up in a large blue bow, jumped out from behind the wall of the dining room. “Find me!” she said, and ran, and Henry knew beyond a doubt that it was Evie as a child. The same mischievous glint in her blue eyes. The white of her pinafore bled into the sunshine streaking through the tall windows, blurring her as she slipped out the side porch door. Henry ran after. In the kitchen, a much younger Will jotted down notes without looking up. The eye-and-lightning-bolt symbol shimmered on the notebook’s cover.
Henry pushed through the side door.
The house had gone now. He was in a forest. Snow dusted the ground. There was a clear lake, a hawk soaring above it. A circle of chairs sat on the pine-needle floor of the clearing. There were boys in uniform, sitting stiff-backed, hands on their knees, waiting—for what, Henry did not know. On a tree stump, a Victrola played an old war song. Through the dense trees, Henry caught sight of Evie wandering through. She was no longer a child but the Evie of today. Henry had a vague, emotional sense of her that stretched back far longer than he’d known her. He knew somehow that she hated licorice and cried when a neighbor boy accidentally ran over a frog with his bicycle.
A tornado of black birds swirled up before Henry; he put up his hands to block their wings, but they were nothing more than figments fading into the air. Panic seized Henry, though he couldn’t say why. It was as if he knew that some terrible fate beckoned, as if this was a dream he had lived through countless times before. He was running through the forest. Trying to get away from whatever unseen monster chased him. Trying to get back to the happy memory of the house. Henry’s heartbeat quickened—he could hear it in his ears, a walloping rhythm, like the clang and whoosh of a great machine. It hurt to breathe. He’d run in a circle, back to the clearing and the Victrola. Trees fell as if trampled. The clanging grew louder. In the chairs, the boys in uniform had become ghosts with skeletal faces. Fierce light blazed through the falling trees, and within it, like an alien sun, was the eye symbol tearing the sky apart while the soldiers screamed and screamed. Pain. So much pain. As if his body and mind were being stretched beyond all endurance. He no longer knew who he was. He had to remember: I’m Henry. Henry Dubois IV. But when he looked down, he saw that a name had been stitched onto the front of his uniform.
JAMES.
