“All right,” Ling agreed after a pause. “We can always wake up.”
The moment they were aboard, the doors slid shut and the train moved backward with a lurch, throwing Henry and Ling onto the seats. Ling closed her eyes and silently reminded herself: It’s only a dream. It’s only a dream. Soon enough, the train came to a gentle stop. The doors opened onto a misty wood marked by skeletal trees. It lacked the detail of the old New York streets and the pretty train station.
Henry gave the air a good sniff. “Smell that? It’s gardenia. Makes me think of New Orleans.”
“I don’t smell anything,” Ling said.
Henry’s expression had changed from curiosity to something bordering on longing. “There! I hear it. That’s Louis’s playing. He’s here! We found him!” Henry leaped from the train and bolted into the murky expanse of half-formed trees as they bent and folded around him, taking him in.
“Wait!” Ling stumbled after him. “Henry? Henry!” she shouted, her panic rising. She called again and again, but he was nowhere.
It was as if the dream had opened its maw and swallowed him whole.
“Ling? Where are you? Ling!” Henry called, his voice echoing in the fog. He’d thought she was right behind him. But when he turned back, the featureless trees all looked the same to him, and he couldn’t tell which way he’d come.
A soft, warm breeze brought the heady perfume of gardenia, along with other notes—moss and river water, the smells of home. Very faintly, he heard the strains of a fiddle sawing away at “Rivière Rouge.”
“Louis?” Henry called, the lump in his throat swelling.
Up ahead, the vague trees shifted slightly, revealing a dimly lit path through the middle. The fiddle was stronger now.
“Ling!” Henry tried one last time. He didn’t want to abandon her, but he was afraid of losing this vital link to Louis. Perhaps wherever she was, Ling heard the music, too, and would know to come this way. Hoping that was the case, Henry followed the music deeper into the wood.
The sun grew brighter. The fog thinned. The flat trees rounded and grew bark, becoming immense live oaks trailing wispy beards of Spanish moss. Dragonflies pirouetted past Henry’s face and darted toward the surface of a sun-brushed river where a blue rowboat, just like the one Henry and Louis had used for their fishing trips, swayed against the bank. Propped up by wooden stilts at the river’s edge was a rustic cabin. Smoke curled up from its crooked chimney. The music came from inside. Henry’s legs jellied as he approached. What if this was just another cruel trick played on him in a dream? His fist was a weight at his side. He took a deep breath and knocked. The music stopped. Henry put a hand on his stomach to steady himself as the door creaked open.
Louis appeared, as handsome as ever. He blinked—first at the hazy sunlight, then at Henry. “Henri?”
Henry could only nod. He didn’t know if it was possible to faint inside a dream, but he thought he was perilously close to finding out. The moment seemed to stretch forever. And then suddenly Louis was smiling wide. “Mon cher! Where you been?”
As Ling moved through the gray wood calling Henry’s name and getting no response, her panic turned to anger. Their agreement had been clear: Ling was to help Henry try to find Louis in the dream world. That agreement did not include entering strange buildings, wandering through an old train station, and getting lost in a creepy, half-finished forest. She should never have consented to help someone from outside Chinatown—ten dollars or not.
“Henry!” Ling called sharply.
“Are you lost?” a sweet, girlish voice answered.
Ling whirled around. “Wh-who’s there?”
“You walk in dreams but you’re not asleep.”
Ling turned in the other direction, looking for the source of the voice.
“You’ll make yourself dizzy if you keep turning like that,” the voice said, giggling.
“Show yourself!” Ling commanded.
A girl in a wide-sleeved tunic and a long skirt stepped out from behind a tree. She was about Ling’s age, small but sturdy with a wide, open face and very straight brows. Her plaited hair was coiled at her neck, secured with two crisscrossed hairpins. “I can walk in dreams, too. Just like you.”
First Henry, now this girl, too? Soon they’d need to put up traffic signals in the dream world for all the comings and goings. It annoyed Ling. Annoyance was good. Ling preferred it to fear.
“Who are you?” Ling demanded.
“I am Wai-Mae,” the girl said, bowing a little. “What is your name?”
“Ling,” Ling answered. It always fascinated her that inside a dream walk, there was no language or dialect barrier at all, as if in dreams, they all spoke the same language.
Wai-Mae’s brow furrowed. “Just Ling? That’s a funny name.”
“Where are we? What is this place?” Ling demanded.
“Isn’t it beautiful? It’s nothing like ordinary dreams!”
“But what is it?” Ling said, more to herself than to Wai-Mae. “How did you get here? Did you come here on the train?”
“The train?” Wai-Mae’s eyes crinkled as she smiled. “Oh, yes! The train! Did it also bring you?”
“Yes. But I came with a boy, another dream walker, Henry—”
“There’s another?” Wai-Mae gasped, delighted. “But where is he?”
“I don’t know. That’s the trouble,” Ling said evenly. She was beginning to think that Wai-Mae wasn’t terribly bright. “When we stepped off the train, he ran, and I lost him.”
“You lost the dream walker?” Wai-Mae shook her head. “That’s very careless, Ling.”
Ling glared, but Wai-Mae didn’t seem to feel her silent scold. “Can you at least help me look for him?”
Wai-Mae’s eyes widened. “Is this other dream walker your husband?”
“My…? No! No. He is not my husband,” Ling sputtered. “He’s… never mind.”
“I don’t know if it’s proper for you to be walking in dreams with a boy who is not your husband, Ling,” Wai-Mae tutted. “Very well. I will help you. But you really should be more careful with your friends in the future, Little Warrior. Come. This way.”
Ling wasn’t sure whom she wanted to kill more for ruining her night’s dream walk: Henry or this thoroughly irritating girl. She opened her mouth to say something, then thought better of it, and with a heavy sigh resigned herself to following Wai-Mae through the wood.
But once she found Henry again, she’d have plenty to say to him.
Louis’s voice, no longer a memory, unlatched Henry’s emotions. He wanted to throw his arms around Louis but was afraid that if he did, Louis would disappear, leaving him in an embrace of smoke.
“Louis, is that really you?”
“You know another Louis looks like me?” Louis said, just as if they were on the Elysian, headed up the river on a hot day, as if no time had passed at all. “Where are we? What is this place? Looks like the bayou but it isn’t. Not quite.”
“It’s a dream. We’re inside a dream,” Henry explained, wiping his eyes with the back of his hand. He was laughing and crying all at once.