Don't Sleep with the Dead

by Nghi Vo

Genres: Historical Fantasy; Historical Fiction; LGBT & Pride; Gothic

Synopsis

From award-winning author Nghi Vo comes Don't Sleep with the Dead, a standalone companion novella to The Chosen and the Beautiful, her acclaimed reimagining of The Great Gatsby.

“A vibrant and queer reinvention of F. Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age classic. . . . I was captivated from the first sentence.”―NPR on The Chosen and the Beautiful

Nick Carraway―paper soldier and novelist―has found a life and a living watching the mad magical spectacle of New York high society in the late thirties. He's good at watching, and he's even better at pretending: pretending to be straight, pretending to be human, pretending he's forgotten the events of that summer in 1922.

On the eve of the second World War, however, Nick learns that someone's been watching him pretend and that memory goes both ways. When he sees a familiar face at a club one night, it quickly becomes clear that dead or not, damned or not, Jay Gatsby isn't done with him.

In all paper there is memory, and Nick's ghost has come home.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Release date: April 8, 2025

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 112

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

The good thing—the only good thing—about the worst finally happening is that it has happened.

That was something the first sergeant said on the morning before the final push for Cantigny, when the sun unexpectedly rose up silver instead of gold. It was a bad omen—before the day was over, the worst came, and many men I knew did not survive it. With the situation in Europe, I found myself thinking more and more about the war, and what I came up with twenty years later and sometime after three in the morning on the edge of Prospect Park in Brooklyn, was that the first sergeant had lied.

The worst had happened, and there was nothing good about it.

The police herded us into a blind alley at the head of Tenth Street, apartments on one side and a tailor’s shop on the other. It was only blank walls that faced the alley, and with the rear blocked off by a chain-link fence and the alley’s mouth guarded by a pair of policemen with bristling, overeager dogs, it would be a very fine killing field indeed.

Oh come now, said a jolly voice in my head. They certainly won’t kill you. They’ll take your name and your picture, and tomorrow or the next day, it’ll all be out where you were and what you were doing. Perhaps they’ll beat you a little, knock a club into your mouth to loosen your teeth like they did for poor old Pickett. No one’s going to kill you, old sport, not on purpose, anyway.

That was a voice that I had been hearing more and more as well, and it was not welcome.

There was a blizzard coming on, a few stray flakes already falling from the sky. I wrapped my wool coat more firmly around my body against the chill, but the boy next to me was shaking in a cloth jacket that was too light by far. He shrank against the brick for all that it must have been frigid, and there was a glassy look to his eyes, like a horse that had run itself wild. He was younger and poorer than usually came to Prospect Park; not unhandsome, but lost. He caught me looking at him and tried for a brave smile, but I shook my head with irritation. My teeth felt too sharp in my mouth, as if I might like to bite.

The type that usually came to Prospect Park would have taken the hint. We were mostly professionals, men with jobs that kept our hands clean. I wasn’t the only columnist who took the subway across the river—I wasn’t even the only one from the Herald Tribune. We knew how to conduct ourselves, but this boy didn’t.

“Rough night,” he said tentatively.

“I suppose.”

“Think we can slip them some cash to look away?”

“Do you have any cash?” I asked pointedly. I didn’t. I had subway fare to get back, maybe enough to pick up a sandwich on the way. Cortland from the sports desk had gotten mugged a few months ago.

He shook his head, running his bare bony hands up and down his arms.

“My ma’s going to kill me,” he sighed, and I looked up at the broad flat way he said ma, his vowels longer than anything a native New Yorker would have time for.

“St. Paul?”

“Altoona,” he said, as if it should mean something to me, but it did. Altoona down by Eau Claire, just under a hundred miles from St. Paul, and I scowled reflexively.

“Are you from St. Paul?” he asked, searching my face for a sign of anything familiar. I didn’t answer, instead looking up at the glass salamandrina that hung suspended from the side of the apartment building. It was about the 

size of a goldfish bowl, hobnailed white on the top, but clear below. They were the faddish thing when I had first come to New York in 1922, and people hung them in rows and clusters for how cheap and pretty they were. They were mostly gone now, taken down in favor of the electric lights that lined the streets with a chemical avidity. Inside the glass, the faint suggestion of a whip-tailed lizard still stirred weakly, emitting a soft mauve glow that was the next thing to invisible.

“Hey—”

“Shut up,” I advised, because there was a policeman making the rounds. The alley was crowded now, at least thirty men who stood miserably alone in the mob. I recognized Perry Sloan from the attorney general’s office and Henry Kent from Kent and Sons. I wondered what the Sons would make of this, reading it in the paper first thing.

Sloan had a few bills out, and the policeman was already shaking his head, insisting on the whole wallet. He would have the money in it, and Sloan’s identification as well, and I idly waited to see how long it might take Sloan to figure that out. I was numb, which is different from being calm, but one was as good as the other, said the soldier bunking with the French boy and the French girl.

The war again. This was becoming unbearable, and while I do not take pride in much on the wrong side of forty, I had at least prided myself on being able to bear most things.

“Look,” I said suddenly to the boy at my side. “Speak when you’re spoken to. Yes sir and no sir, like you’re at school. You don’t know anything. You’re white and young and not too much a fairy. You’ll be fine.”

He actually looked more alarmed at that, and I shook my head again when he started to speak.

“And for the love of Christ, don’t let on that you’re with anyone. You’re alone, understand?”

He nodded, but I was already pulling away. It was only a matter of a half step to the side and a slight change of posture before it looked as if we had nothing to do with each other. God only knew there was no help in being in this together.

Sloan was looking redder by the moment, the men around him edging away. Christ, but he was going to make this worse. He never knew when to shut up, and by the looks of things, he had already had his wallet taken. As I watched, the policeman snaked his pen from his pocket as well, no doubt something terribly expensive chased with gold. Stupid as well, to have things he liked with him, and probably more out of instinct than insight, he reached to take it back.

That wasn’t the way it was supposed to go, and the night tipped. What was just going to be one more dreary lot of ruined lives suddenly became something much more dangerous as the police officer drew his club and brought it down hard on Sloan’s hand. Sloan’s cry was shocked and sharp, and I was already drawing back from the beating I was now sure that he and whoever tried to help him were going to get.

Instead of making myself scarce against the rear of the alley, however, when I shrank farther into the shadows, the boy I had been trying to avoid speaking to earlier was there, startled at my back and tripping me up when I stumbled into him. It caused me to lurch forward straight towards the policeman’s second blow, and the thought occurred, crystal-clear and tired as Armistice Day: Well, I suppose this is what we’re doing.

I grabbed hold of Sloan’s arm, dragging him back from the swinging club as it came down, and as I did so, the cry went up, 1police and queers all alike as we realized things weren’t going the way we figured they would.

“Carraway,” Sloan managed.

I let go of him, because Christ, I could never stand the man, and to hell with standing next to him any more than I had to. The police had come in force, and now they poured into the mouth of the alley while the men who had been corralled there saw a chance that they might not end the night with their lives in the trash. There were no lines, no ranks, but something broke, and

suddenly the clubs were lifted and a flying rock shattered the salamandrina behind me, sending a shower of broken glass over my shoulders and plunging the alley into darkness.

Killing floor, I thought, and someone’s outflung arm clipped mine, sending me backwards again. This time my heel slid on some gravel, rolling my foot neatly out from underneath me. I felt myself falling, momentarily looking up at the dimly orange sky above me, and then there was a hand clamped tight around my wrist, hauling me up to my feet again as if I had only slipped on the street.

“There, there, old sport,” he said. “Just a bit of trouble, give me a moment.”

Everything stopped, or everything should have stopped. The man holding my wrist let me go, but I tore after him, ignoring the shouts and the blows around me. A cry was trapped in my throat, a name. Then, next to my ear, I heard a soft laugh, and the alley went up in fire.

The flames climbed the bare brick walls, and by the sudden orange light, I saw all around me faces opened to terror. The screams started, and that reek, burned hair and burned wool, which smell just alike, filled my nose and my mouth. We stampeded towards the mouth of the alley, but we were too many, and I saw someone smashed flat against the wall, the fire catching his hair and, terribly enough, the celluloid of his glasses. They exploded off his face with a birdgun pop, and he fell under the mass of bodies trampling their way to the open air and freedom.

The fire drank the air straight out of my lungs, and for one terrible moment, I went down on one knee. I would have gone down on my face, but I threw one hand out to catch myself, and someone trod hard on my fingers, making me shout.

The pain helped. It cleared away the fear in favor of something that wouldn’t let me freeze. I came up, jerking my hand from under someone’s boot heel, and then, almost by accident, I cleared the mouth of the alley to see men scattering in all directions as the police, some singed, tried to get them back.

The neighborhood was waking up all around us, people shouting from the windows, people screaming, and a distant clanging that would eventually summon the firemen. When I looked back, however, the fire hadn’t spread, either to the apartments on one side or the tailor’s shop on the other. Instead, the flames fed on nothing, collapsing in on themselves and then flaring again with magnesium white hearts. I thought I saw figures moving in the white-hot blaze, and I stared as one of the policemen snagged me by the sleeve.

That brought me back to myself, and clear on what I wanted if not clear-headed, I shoved him so he fell sprawling on the pavement, and then I ran.

The snow was falling harder now, thick wayward flakes that caught in my hair and my eyelashes without melting, but I didn’t feel it. Instead something from the fire, some ember, some spark, stayed with me, burning me up from the inside, and it whispered to me, telling me that I need never be cold again,  if only I would let it burn.

 

CHAPTER TWO

I don’t much like to sleep, and in recent years, I had become bad at it. It was hard to fall asleep, harder to stay asleep, and hardest of all to wake up with anything like satisfaction, but after the disastrous raid on Prospect Park, I fell into my bed in my clothes. Until the sun woke me at midmorning, I dreamed badly and in fragments that made even less sense than usual. I was running. I was chasing. Someone seized the front of my shirt, dragging me forward. I was screaming, and something wanted to eat me, and then I rolled over to see the sun slipping through the blinds.

I felt strangely whole, and I stripped and showered, the hot water plentiful by this point, when my more respectable neighbors were already in church. It was Sunday, and I realized sourly that the raid had been planned that way. Saturday night raid, Sunday morning news, but when I opened my paper, there was nothing about either the raid or the fire. Across the city, there were men at their breakfast tables just as I was, swearing that they would never be so foolish or honest again, maybe looking at their wives and their children to remind themselves of what they had almost lost.

I would have lost my job, almost certainly, and it would be difficult to get another. Perhaps I would have been forced out of New York, but that meant less to me than it might have, for all that I stayed when others left.

The Swede who cooked and cleaned for me had left a few slices of ham and a cup of mashed potatoes in the refrigerator for dinner, but I pulled them out for something to chew on as I went through the newspaper. No raid, but the paper was full of news of the war, grave accounts of alliances folding in on themselves like the wings of paper cranes, of who would come and who would not, and through it all, the tanks rolled, and the air was full of smoke and poison.

I couldn’t breathe.

My hands shaking, I went to the kitchen to light the stove. It was an antique, of the type that still needed a match, and the flame leaped up as the gas took. For just a moment, my fingers lingered too close, and I pulled back hurriedly. The flames last night hadn’t hurt me, I realized. These would.

Heedless of the harm, I caught the corner of the paper in the fire, and then tossed the whole smoldering mess into the sink, drawing back with a wince when it went up. The room filled with the sharp sweet smell of burning paper, and just before it was consumed by the line of orange flame, I caught the faces on the front page, delegations from a half-dozen countries come to the United States to seek aid of whatever kind might be given, and I hastily turned away.

I thought for a moment I might be sick, and then a sharp pain brought me back to myself. A spot of ash had landed on the back of my hand, and I watched in horrified fascination as it lit on my skin. There was a moment, still too long, but only a moment, where I waited to see if it would catch, if fire would prove the final lie of my existence, but instead it only stung, wasplike, before extinguishing itself. I swore absently and ran the faucet over the hurt, and the cold water hitting the burning paper sent up a billow of acrid steam.

I let the water run over the back of my hand until my fingertips were numb from the cold, and when I drew it out, the burn was only a reddened sore spot, barely even the beginning of a blister.

I took a cloth from the neatly folded stack by the stove and dried my hands, and before I could quite convince myself not to, I went to my desk to flip through my address book. Some gentlemen of my acquaintance kept two, one for one life and one for another, and others left no paper trail at all. I have never had much of an imagination, and kept only one.

The operator told me she would call me back when she had my party on the line, and I busied myself at my desk as I waited for her to do so. There were the expected Christmas cards from my mother and the Minnesota cousins as well as the usual invitations to dinner or drinks. The former I put aside to deal with later because some rituals could not be forgone, not if you hailed from the better part of St. Paul, and I picked through the latter, discarding

those that could be discarded and pulling out the ones that might actually be interesting. I was unpleasantly startled to see among them a letter from Ross Hennessey, who knew me from Yale, and when the phone rang, I put the missive down gratefully.

“Connecting to Paris,” said the operator, and there was a hard crackle followed by a soft hiss. For a moment, I thought there had been no connection at all.

“Well, fuck you, Nicholas Carraway,” said Jordan Baker.

“I see you’re still angry with me.” Smiling, I pulled the phone cord as far as it could go so I could sit at my desk again.

“You see correctly for once. Honestly, as if I was going to forgive you for that mess.”

I imagined her as she had appeared in Harper’s last fall, bathed in the afternoon light in her Left Bank flat, leaned so far back in her chair that it was only a miracle that kept her from tipping over entirely. When I knew her best, she’d carried herself with an athletic tension, as delicate as glass that might be shattered with one high note. On the cusp of forty, she looked stronger, her black eyes giving the camera back look for look and a sly smile on her lips. I could hear the photographer pleading with her to turn her head and gaze out the window so he could get her in dreamy profile, and I could just as easily hear her saying “Oh, I don’t think I will” with the kind of gaiety that nevertheless meant she would do precisely what she pleased.

“I hadn’t thought I did anything that needed forgiving,” I said. “It’s my story, isn’t it?”

“It never was. Do you know that one of your friends at the Herald Tribune actually called me last week?”

“You know very well I don’t have friends. Who was it?”

“I don’t care. Someone. He pretended he forgot about the time difference to call me at three in the morning, and he wanted to know all about Daisy and Gatsby. You and Tom,” she finished, “were of only secondary interest.”

“And what did you tell him?”

“That I couldn’t speak English,” she said flatly.

I had been surprised at her English as well when I first met her at Daisy’s. Tom of course hadn’t prepared me for Vietnamese Jordan Baker of the Louisville Bakers, and she was so quiet at first, I thought maybe she was just a pretty ornament Daisy kept around, like the Lalique glass cat that stretched and yawned on its velvet cushion by the fire or the baby blue coupe. I hadn’t said anything, talking with Tom and Daisy, who tended to command the room, and by the time I thought of Jordan again, I had made it into her good graces by saying nothing immediately idiotic. It’s truly amazing sometimes, how well you can do if only you keep your idiocy to yourself.

“I’m sorry people have been bothering you,” I said. “I’m still not sorry for writing the book.”

“Then what is the point of calling me now?” she asked, though I could hear her making herself more comfortable.

“I missed you.”

She did laugh at that, because Jordan had always liked to be missed, possibly better than she liked being liked.

“Really. Then that means you must have been doing something that you shouldn’t have been

Oooh, Nicky, did you finally hold a boy’s hand?”

I had done rather more than that last night, but I couldn’t help an irritated embarrassment at her words. She wasn’t twenty anymore, but she couldn’t help acting like it when she was around me.

“Jordan, please.”

“Jordan, please, what?” she asked, more sharply than she usually got with me. “After you hit the bestseller list, I should hardly think you need my permission to do anything.”

I rubbed my eyes, realizing that I could crawl back into bed with very little provocation and sleep out the day.

“I saw him. I think. Last night.”

There was a soft breath, followed by a flinty click. I imagined her using that heart-shaped platinum lighter she’d stolen from Daisy some twenty years ago to light her cigarettes. I hadn’t smoked since that summer, for a number of reasons.

“Who?”

“Are you going to make me say it?”

“I think I had better, don’t you?”

She was probably right. It was harder than I imagined it would be.

“Gatsby.”

“Well. Are you all right?”

“No. Not really.”

There was a tactful silence, and then she sighed.

“Well, he wouldn’t be the only one. The dead are coming back over here, haven’t you heard?”

“I hadn’t, no.”

“Read your own paper sometime. They’re coming back. Old soldiers, mostly. I see them drinking at the Lièvre around the corner. They won’t speak, and they reek of horseradish for some reason—”

“Not horseradish, it’s mustard gas,” I said automatically. “They can’t speak because their throats are blistered shut.”

“They’re French, of course, and if it keeps up, my friends tell me we’ll see the soldiers walking back from Crete and Sardinia as well. It’s old magic. Gatsby’s was too. You didn’t mention that in your novel.”

“I didn’t mention a lot of things. I thought you would be grateful to me for that.”

“Mm. No. I don’t think I will be. But anyway, why did you call me? You can’t expect me to do anything for you from all the way over here.”

“I don’t know. I heard him. I heard his voice or someone who sounded just like him—”

“Oh, don’t do that. You know who you heard.”

“I do. I heard him, and it was Gatsby dragging me up and helping me stand, getting me out of a bad kind of trouble.”

“It seems there’s no other kind these days,” she mused. “So Gatsby’s back. What are you going to do about it?”

It startled me, and I took my time answering as money burned up on the line between New York and Paris.

“I hadn’t thought I was going to do anything.”

“If you really think that,

 you wouldn’t have called me. You want permission or absolution, or something like that, but I know that you aren’t going to just sit there and observe, Oh dear, I suppose Gatsby’s back. So which do you want, Nick, permission or absolution, because no one calls me to be told no.”

She spoke without rancor, exhibiting that kind of patience she had only developed in recent years. It sounded good on her, or at least it was lucky for me.

“Come home,” I said impulsively. “Haven’t you been away from New York long enough?”

“New York’s not home.”

“Neither is Paris. If you stay there, you’ll see more dead men, darling, and they won’t be drinking at the cafes either.”

I was, I knew, committing a faux pas. In conversations where the war was permitted, we spoke of almost nothing else. Jordan didn’t like to have that kind of conversation, at least not with me.

“No, in New York, they spin out gossip columns for the Herald Tribune and write terrible books.”

“I’m not dead.”

“If you say so.”

“… Have a good evening, Jordan.”

“Thank you, I shall.”

She hung up on me with a smart click, and instead of writing my Tuesday column, I found myself looking out the window. It was snowing again or maybe it had never stopped from the night before. There had been no white Christmas this year, but perhaps we would have a white New Year’s just five days from now.

I could write the column easily this evening, I told myself, standing for my coat. I could finish it and have a courier put it on Harold Greenbaum’s desk before it was even late. It was Christmas with Charlie Danvers’s crowd at Herons, and then the traditional midnight celebration at Marrakesh, the same crowds, the same faces, the same petty scandals. I could write it in my sleep these days, and that meant that I was free.

Free to do what? Jordan asked in my head.

Dead men weren’t free, but I wasn’t dead. Instead, I was made of paper, and I walked out into the winter day.

 

CHAPTER THREE

The trouble, I think, began with my grandfather’s brother, Leith Carraway, the patriarch of the American Carraway clan. He and my grandfather came to America almost a hundred years ago, and nearly upon arrival, he was drafted into the Civil War. Of course he would not go, not for a country where he had no roots and for slaves he might have liked to own himself, and so he found Michael Randall, a young man with a needy family living hard on the banks of the St. Croix River.

In the two-room shack with the river roaring in the spring flood, Leith Carraway used his old Sheffield razor to loosen his face from his head and traded it for another. Leith Carraway went to war for the Union and came back a hero. Randall traded my great-uncle’s face back to him in return for a boat and a real house in Eau Claire, and Leith Carraway returned home to St. Paul considering it money well spent.

For many reasons, my father never liked that story, and he liked even less the story my grandmother told me on Christmas Eve when I was ten, that Leith Carraway came home from the war, and when they went to trade, something went wrong.

“It was stuck, you see. It was stuck hard and fast, and no cutting or screaming would work it loose either, and oh, Nick, my dear, they tried. In the end it was all blood and a dead man on the floor with his face cut to ribbons, and your grand-uncle, why, he’s no one but Mikey Randall, trash jumped up—”

That was my grandmother’s last Christmas at home before my father sent her to live at the hospital in Grand Rapids, and I never learned for sure which the dead man was. Whether the man who lives in my distant memory was the well-off Englishman from Liverpool or a fisherman’s bastard from the St. Croix River, he was Leith Carraway, and that was the end of the matter so far as my father was concerned.

Still, I think that was where it started, the Carraway belief that duty could be put off on someone else, and that if you only made the right sacrifice, spilled the right blood using the right name, that fate might be delayed or even distracted.

Two generations later, fate came calling again, and when beloved son Nicholas Carraway was called up for the first war to end all wars, this time it was my mother’s grandmother who stepped in. I remembered her, really remembered her, her bent back, her white hair and her old-fashioned dress. She was born in Bangkok, adopted or stolen by missionary parents just as Jordan had been, and the Carraways pretended so hard and so fervently that she was white that hardly anyone in St. Paul believed otherwise.

They summoned her from her tiny apartment in Milwaukee, and even newly recovered from pneumonia, she came because what other family did she have? I imagine they must have hauled down Nick Carraway’s yearbook for her, got her a map of Minnesota and pictures of the clan all together in their Sunday best.

Paper magic ran in her blood just as it does in Jordan’s, and she made me on the floor of the second-best parlor one Tuesday morning, her shears flashing in the weak spring light as she cut through newsprint and cardstock, snipping out hair and eyes, hands, and muscle and bone and wit.

When she was done, I gave her a hand up, and she was so delicate, so small. They shouldn’t have brought her from Milwaukee, not as ill as she was. She was so short I had to bend to look her in the eye, and when I did, she threw her arms around me, hugging me with a frail ferocity. She trembled, and she cried, dampening my shoulder with her tears.

“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you, I love you.”

Maybe she thought I would never hear it otherwise. I don’t know.

They sent her back to Milwaukee. They sent their son to Canada. They sent me to muster at Fort McCoy, and against all common sense, I was the one that came back. My great-grandmother died not long after I shipped out. Nicholas Carraway was killed in a car accident two weeks after Armistice, coming back from Canada for his first Thanksgiving home.

They are gone, and I was left, and two days after Christmas, I got on the subway for the Henry Street Station. Once I arrived, I got on the train going back towards Wall Street, and then back to Henry Street Station again. I repeated the process four times, and I wondered if they had missed a payment or lost another magician. They would probably do better if they got rid of the old enchantment entirely—these days, no one cared about secrecy.

Finally, on the fourth trip, the train stopped at Columbia Street Station, which didn’t rightly exist, and I stepped off to make my way to the Gates.

Back in the twenties, it had been the Lyric, and a better sort of place. Jordan had taken me there first, and I came back on my own off and on until it shut down in ’34. No space goes too long empty in New York, however, and less than a year later, it opened again as the Gates. There was a pair of intricately forged iron gates mounted over the recessed door, and now it catered to a different sort of clientele. I had been a few times since the change in ownership, once with a colleague looking for information, a time or two on my own, though in the end I hadn’t had the nerve for more than a few tense talks and some drinks. It was one of the last places in the city where you could get real demoniac, the demon’s blood drink that had been so popular in the twenties. Demoniac puts you out of your head, lets you see ghosts and monsters, and no one could afford that kind of thing right now.

Inside the Gates was paneled with dark wood and lit with old-fashioned gas lamps. The glass shades had been removed and the gas turned up so that the flames sprouted blue and sharp, giving the whole place a lost and underwater effect. Just past noon, there were only a few patrons: a devil romancing the wife of a city alderman, another with a garishly cut throat arguing with the bartender, and two university students trying to look worldly at a table by the record player. As I had hoped, there was a jacket and hat I recognized hung off one of the far booths.

“If you’re going to ask me for a favor, you should at least buy me a drink,” March said, and I went to the bar. I returned with two shots of whisky, setting them down on the slick brass table before taking my seat opposite.

Agents of Hell in the United States were technically required to keep a regular face that matched  their travel documents, ...