Lair of Dreams - Page 206/221

Inside Henry, some truth was descending like an avenging angel.

“I don’t want to be here. Let’s go down to the river, baby.” Henry pulled desperately on Louis’s arm, but Louis resisted.

“I need to tell you, cher. And you need to hear it. My head hurt something fierce. A real mal de tête. So I lay down right there on the ground to rest.” Louis plucked a purple blossom from the lush patch of flowers and twirled it in his fingers. “It was a bleed on the brain. Nothin’ to be done about it. The men come back and they found me on the ground, cold and still. And they buried me right there, under the morning glories. And that’s where I am still, cher. Where I been since you left New Orleans, a long time gone.”

“That can’t be true.”

“It is true, cher.”

“You’re here! You’re right here.”

“Where is here, Henri?” Louis insisted. “Remember, Henri. Remember.”

Henry closed his eyes and shut out the world. It was astonishingly simple to do, a birthright, passed down to him from parents who never wanted to see the truth of anything, including their son. But just because someone refused to see the truth didn’t mean it ceased to exist. Henry didn’t want to remember, but it was too late. Already, he was surfacing.

“I waited for you. At Grand Central. But you never got off the train. Just like you never got my letters or my telegrams.”

He remembered. The piano fund. Theta. When he opened his eyes, the tops of the trees were losing color. Dull pain throbbed in his body. His face was wet. “I want to stay with you.”

“Can’t, cher. You got all those songs to write.”

Henry shook his head. “No. No.”

“I don’t know how I got here, or why I got to have this last time with you. I’m mighty grateful for it. But it’s time for me to go now. You, too. You gotta wake up, Henry.”

Henry looked at Louis. His lover was achingly beautiful. In Henry’s memories, Louis would look like this always: young and full of possibility, shimmering around the edges. Something about that triggered other memories. Who had told him about the dead shimmering? He could see a girl with bright green eyes trained on him, weighing.

Ling. Brusque, honest Ling.

She’d told him from the beginning: She could only find the dead.

Ling. And Theta. Evie and Sam.

With each stroke of waking, the pain sharpened. Gaspard whimpered and licked Henry’s hand. The hound looked up at him as if waiting for an answer to a question. Henry leaned his head back and blinked up at the indistinct leaves of an elm until he could find his words.

“I know. I know,” Henry said. He cried out as the pain sliced through him.

“Gonna need some strength,” Louis said. “Kiss me, cher.”

Louis put his lips to Henry’s, kissing the last of his strength into Henry. And when they pulled away, Louis was fading, like a sliver of moon late in the morning sky.

“Gaspard. Come on, boy. Time to go home.” Louis whistled and the dog bounded toward him. The setting sun warmed the river to a shimmering golden-orange. “I’m headed over there. But you can’t come along. Not yet.”

Louis waved from the riverbank, and he was a bright thing, a portion of borrowed sun.

“Write me a good song, Henri,” he called.

Henry’s throat tightened as he waved back. “Sweet dreams.”

Louis mounted the steps to the cabin, fading to gray as he went, and then Henry heard the faint, aching cry of a fiddle. The notes lingered on the wind for a moment more, and then even that was gone.

But some other memory was coming to him—a sense that there was somewhere he was needed, like a twin missing the other.

“Ling,” Henry said as it came to him, and he set off running toward the forest.

On the long Chesterfield, Henry and Ling lay perfectly still, dreaming, while Mabel and Jericho kept watch silently. Mabel took one of the soggy watercress sandwiches from the stack wilting on the fancy plate. Already she’d turned away several angry partygoers at the door. It spelled doom for the museum, though that seemed a moot point now.

“What do you suppose they’re dreaming?” she asked, nibbling a corner of sandwich.

“I don’t know.”

“I hope they’re all right down there.”

“I shouldn’t be here. I should be with them,” Jericho said, and some dam gave way inside Mabel.

“So you could look after Evie?” she asked, looking up at Jericho.

Jericho turned back to watching their sleeping friends. “I didn’t say that.”