Chapter 5

The Germans have a good word for nightmare, or a nightmare dreamscape.

Schreckensvision.

The word itself is like shrieking when what enters your vision is too terrible to describe, and a long cry is the only thing to do. But I’ll try to put words to the terrible.

If one could find a profession in nightmares, I’d have quite a career.

The hallway again, all medicinal sharpness and low-trimmed lamps. My every sense alive, I feel the damp moisture of the cool basement humidity on my face and on my arms below the sleeves of my robe. I’m traveling a frightful corridor in my dressing gown. I see a door marked with a word to chill any sane soul: MORGUE.

I really needed to stop reading Edgar Allan Poe before bed.

I enter the room, which is gray-white and cold.

There are bodies under sheets, laid on tables. Four of them, vague human shapes below the sheets. They are either being kept for family before transferred to a funeral parlor, or perhaps they’ll be used as cadavers for science. Who knows?

Regardless, the vision was unpleasant. I hadn’t been in a room with a dead body before, much less several, so my mind could only imagine what the stale smell of beginning decay was like. It was an unwelcome detail nonetheless. My dreams are nothing if not thorough.

And then, all at once, the dead bodies sat up.

Their white sheets slid down to reveal bare, gray flesh. With a raspy gasp, their blue mouths fell open.

And as they began to shriek, the bodies turned to me with sightless eyes, and yet they knew I was there or that I would be coming.

And I, like those bodies, shot up upon the train, glad to be alive and not under a morgue sheet myself.

With a gasp, I opened my eyes. I was on the train. With a cup of tea in hand. Jonathon had nodded off to sleep in our compartment shortly after nightfall. I, however, had been too restless for sleep. I’d made my way to the dining car for a calming cup of mint tea. Apparently it had soothed me right into sleep; unfortunately, it hadn’t been able to lull my dreams.

An older woman a table away must have noticed my frightful expression. “Bad dreams?” she queried.

“Always,” I replied.

“I advise you to pray.”

“I do.”

“Good, then.”

I was relieved by the mercy of not being questioned further and excused myself to attend my sleeping “cousin.” The moon had turned wide expanses of cornfields into dark plains of rustling velvet.

Mrs. Northe once told me that the spirit of my deceased mother told her that “the mysterious and wondrous and, yes, the truly terrible” would be laid at my feet. And that it would be best if the world left me to it. She had spoken grandly of a future, but what sort of future was this, veiled in nightmare? Is this what my mother wanted for me?

I’m seventeen. Eighteen in nine months. What match am I against dark forces?

***

There have been such advances since the transcontinental rail was completed more than a decade ago. Some trains reach eighty, nearly a hundred miles an hour on their express routes. It’s nearly inconceivable that the whole of the country is laid open so swiftly.

Ever eastward, the behemoth steam engine roared me home. With every mile the towns grow more populated, the gravity of New York City calling souls from every walk of life. It was as if everyone in the whole world, if they strained to hear it, could feel the heartbeat of New York. Gazing out the windows, I saw the density of the city exploding around us as if we were plunged into a forest of brick and cast iron.

All tracks led to Grand Central Depot. From there, Jonathon and I will part ways. The thought has cast a pall over the entire trip; neither of us has wanted to speak of it.

As if Jonathon could hear my thoughts, he turned to me. “I’ll miss you,” he breathed as he brushed his lips against mine. I caught that tantalizing taste of bergamot from his Earl Grey tea.

This parting was inevitable. The pit of my stomach wrenched. I had to let him go to England alone, but since his welfare had been my personal responsibility since we met, letting him go was not easy. But he was no longer trapped in a painting, and I couldn’t treat him as if he were. “Promise you’ll return to New York—” I choked out.

That was my great fear: I’d lose him to London and he’d never come back, as if he were a dream that never really existed after all.

“You’ve got to show me Central Park, remember?” he said. “And all our adventures? At least ten world tours? It’ll take years. We’ve so much to do.”

He pulled me into his arms, as if the tighter he held me, the surer he would be to return. “If you don’t come back, Jonathon Whitby, I will hunt you down—”

He drew back with a laugh. “Oh, I know you will. In disguise, no less. Wielding a dagger. I know better than to cross you, Natalie Stewart. You’re too clever for me by half! And I love you for it.”

Love. I blinked back tears. We gathered our belongings and opened the train car, our last vestige of privacy for a long while. It took everything inside me not to shove him back inside, lock the compartment, and hide us away from the world and everything in it that could harm us. But Jonathon, full of determination, was already heading down the aisle.

“I miss you already, so you’d better write soon,” I warned, watching him move further up the aisle, a hat low over his beautiful face. “And keep a low profile.”

He reached into his breast pocket and pulled out and put on the ridiculous eyeglasses. “Of course, my Wilhelmina…”

I laughed. The depot clattered and roared, thronged with passengers from every walk of life. Cornelius Vanderbilt needs to expand his station here, much like in Chicago. Jonathon stepped back to take my hand and lead me down the train steps onto the platform.

“Will you be all right to go home on your own?” he asked.

I nodded, gesturing to the streetcar line. “Shop girls and garment workers. It’s the close of their shifts. Working- and middle-class girls, we ride together all the time with strangers as chaperones. Although I wish you could just stay the night—”

“This isn’t the time to meet your father. I want to be on better footing.” Glancing at the large clock on a depot truss, he sighed. “I’ll just catch the next departure.”

“Go…” I say quietly.

“Kiss me,” he demanded. I obliged. We got a scolding from a woman in a Salvation Army uniform. We kept kissing. A train whistle screamed. He pulled away.

“Keep busy.” He flashed a grin, stepping away and up the platform. “You’re less troublesome when you’re busy.”

“I am not troubleso—” My protest trailed off at his grin. He was absolutely right.

He blew me a kiss. I caught it and sent one back. He caught it and turned away, putting my kiss in his pocket and disappearing into the crowds.

The tears I had held back now rolled down my cheeks. I loved him more than I could say. Indeed, I hadn’t even said those three words to him during this journey. I wanted to call to him, but the station was so loud and my voice failed.

“I love you,” I murmured with a fervent prayer that he’d return to me in one piece.