A shimmering hole opened in the wall.
“What was that?” Ling asked, but Henry didn’t answer. He stood at the edge of the hole, which was glowing with whatever energy lay inside. The opening wavered uncertainly, as if it might snap shut at any second.
“There are steps leading down. Come on! We have to hurry!” Henry said, nodding toward it.
“Are you a lunatic?”
“Please. I don’t think I can find him without you, Ling,” Henry pleaded. “It’s just a dream, darlin’. If something bad happens, all we have to do is wake up.”
“I should’ve doubled my fee,” Ling groused.
And with that, they raced inside and down the steps just as the portal closed behind them.
“Ling?” Henry called in the darkness.
“Here,” Ling answered. “Wherever here is.”
Dim yellow lights sputtered on and rippled through the black as if someone had flipped a switch, illuminating a long brick corridor that narrowed into darkness farther on. Pipes ran above their heads. There were no other helpful distinguishing features.
A thread of cool wind drifted toward them.
“It’s coming from up ahead. So I guess that’s the way we go.”
They walked quietly for a while, the silence proving every bit as uncomfortable as the dream walk’s unnerving strangeness.
“What’s it like to speak to the dead?” Henry asked at last, a stab at conversation. “Is it frightening?”
“They don’t scare me. They only want to be heard. Sometimes they have messages for the living.”
“Like what?”
“‘Marry on the eighth day of the eighth month of next year.’ ‘This is not the time to test your luck—you must wait one month.’ ‘Tell him I know—I know what you did,’” Ling said, recalling some of the information she’d carried back from the dead.
“You’re like the Western Union of ghosts,” Henry joked.
Ling shrugged, annoyed. She wasn’t in a mood to explain herself to Henry. All day long, she’d been able to think of little other than George. “Don’t you ever worry about this sleeping sickness when you walk?”
Henry raised an eyebrow. “Do you? That is, would it stop you?”
Ling shook her head. “Still, do you think we’d know if we were walking in a sick person’s dream?”
Henry had been in all sorts of dreams before. When people were drunk, their dreams were a bit bleary and slow. When people had a fever, their dreams were particularly strange and vivid, and there was always one person in the dream complaining about the heat. Henry had even walked in the dream of a man on his deathbed once. They had been passengers on a ship. The man had been at peace as he looked out at the calm sea and the far horizon. He’d smiled at Henry, saying, I’m headed over there. But I’m afraid you can’t come along.
“I think we’d know,” he said at last.
“So, how did you lose this friend of yours, Louis?”
Henry sobered. “My father didn’t approve of our… friendship. He thought Louis was a bad influence.”
“Was he?” Ling asked.
“No. Never,” Henry said firmly. He wondered just how honest he could be with her. “What would you do if your parents forbade you from seeing your dearest friend?”
“What choice would I have?” Ling said. “They’re my parents. I owe them everything.”
“You don’t owe them everything,” Henry said a little defensively.
“Yes, I do. They’re my parents,” Ling said again, as if that settled the matter. “Besides, the question is academic. I don’t have a dearest friend.”
“No one?”
The closest Ling had come was George, and they hadn’t been close for some time. “Some of us don’t need friends.”
“Everyone needs friends.”
“I don’t,” Ling said.
“Well, now, that is pos-i-tute-ly the saddest thing I’ve ever heard. I am compelled as a gentleman to insist that you come to lunch with my friends and me this week. We’ll make it a party.”
Ling imagined the faces of Henry and his fashionable set as she hobbled toward them in her cumbersome braces. The way their mouths would open in surprise, their discomfort peeking out beneath the sympathetic smiles they’d paste on too quickly. That was never going to happen.
“Pos-i-tute-ly isn’t a real word,” she said.
“Why, it pos-i-tute-ly is! It’s in the dictionary, just before prob-a-lute-ly.”
“You’re doing that simply to annoy me.”
“Abso-tive-ly not.” Henry’s smile was pure innocence.
“Keep listening for your friend’s fiddle,” Ling said and marched on.
The first time Ling had been visited by the dead, she’d been dream walking down a rainy street among people who were no more than dull splotches against the gray day. Ling was drawn to a pair of beautiful doors painted with the fearsome faces of evil spirit–banishing gods. The doors opened rather suddenly, and standing there beneath a paper parasol was her great-aunt Hui-ying, whom Ling had only known through photographs sent from China. The rain flew upward around her aunt, leaving her untouched. The outlines of her soft body carried a faint shimmer, which Ling would come to know marked the dead from the living. “Daughter: Tell them to break my favorite comb, the ivory one, and bury me with half,” her aunt said. “It’s in the painted chest, the second drawer down, in a hiding spot at the back behind a false partition.”
A day later, her parents received the telegram informing them that Auntie Hui-ying had died on the very night Ling had seen her. The family was frantically searching for Auntie Hui-ying’s comb, which they knew was her favorite, but they’d been unable to find it. “It’s in the painted chest, the second drawer, behind a false back,” Ling had said, parroting her aunt’s words.
Later, Ling’s father had taken her with him to the farm on Long Island. Under the warm sun, they worked side by side, gathering long beans. Ling’s father was a quiet man who tended to keep his thoughts to himself. They were alike in that way. “Ling,” he’d said, stopping to smoke a cigarette while Ling ate a peach, savoring the sweetness on her tongue. “How did you know about Auntie’s comb?”
Ling had been afraid at first to tell him the truth, in case it was some sort of bad luck she’d brought to their house. There’d been a baby before Ling, a precious son dead at birth, the cord wrapped around his neck. Two years later, Ling had come along. There’d been no other children after her, and both parents doted on Ling. She was their everything, and Ling often felt the burden of carrying her parents’ hopes and dreams, of being enough for all that love, of shouldering the obligation alone.
“Whatever it is, you can tell me,” her father had promised.
Ling had told him everything. He had listened, smoking his cigarette down to nothing. “Do you think I’m cursed, Baba?” Ling had asked. “Have I done something wrong?”
There had been tenderness in her father’s smile. “You’ve been given a gift. A link between old and new, between the living and the dead. But like all gifts, you must accept this with humility, Ling.”