Getting them into bed is easy. Once there, many get the wrong idea.

“It’s not that kind of club,” Nemo chides, grabbing her hands before they snake below his waistband.

Pouting, the USO girl toys with the filmy mosquito net draping the bed. “I’ll be very quiet.”

“I’m sure you will,” he purrs, playing along. “But first, sleep. It’s part of the experience.” Nemo hands her a NightCap elixir. “Be a good girl. Take your medicine.”

Giggling, she downs the cocktail, flops onto the bed, and drifts off in seconds, nostrils quivering with whistling snores.

He’d like to join her, but Nemo does not sleep, not yet. Rubbing his gritty eyes, he pulls the gauzy fabric closed, watches the black dots of her nightmares swirl into the net, then leaves to find another sleeper.

Morpheus promotes his underground club as a private rest cure for soldiers, but Nemo isn’t choosy. Factory girls and nurses need sleep too, and their terrors are just as powerful, especially with the war. Hitler created a land of nightmares, ripe for harvest. Sometimes, Nemo turns over the beds twice a night, dumping the full nets, black as soot, into the fuel tanks of the midnight train. “Collect nightmares,” Morpheus had ordered when Nemo came to him to escape conscription. “Fuel the train to Dreamland. Collect enough, and you can earn a first-class ticket too.”

Just a few more sleepers. Nemo can almost smell the lavender air, feel the downy pillows.

But the club’s hostess stops him at the door and points him to a private room.

“A guest of the boss. Won’t take the NightCap. Needs a guide.”

Nemo waves her away. Guiding a sleeper into nightmares takes too much effort. NightCaps knock a sleeper out and generate nightmares in minutes.

“She’s a ripe one,” the hostess says. “Probably a full tank, maybe more.”

More than a full tank? That amount of terror could power the train for a month and cover Nemo’s ticket to Dreamland. He could be asleep by dawn.

But when Nemo enters the private room, his fantasies of escape dissolve. A girl, no more than 10, sits in the four-poster bed. This must be a mistake. Children, with their demands for bedtime stories and one more drink of water, are not allowed in The Morpheus Club.

“Hannah Rosenberg?”

The girl nods.

Perhaps Morpheus is expanding his greedy reach. Nemo has heard children’s nightmares are so limitless, the weight can break a net. If he could guide this girl to sleep and sweep up her terror, Morpheus would surely let him go.

Nemo sits on the bed, his voice as sweet as a dream. “You must sleep, Hannah. Do you want a bedtime story?”

She shakes her head, thin shoulders trembling. “Not without Mama.”

Nemo tucks the blanket around her. “Your mama will be cross if you don’t sleep. Don’t you want to go to Dreamland?”

She frowns. “Dreamland?”

“The most wonderful place. Every day is a holiday, and the air smells like flowers. There’s warm milk and cookies and other good things to eat. And the beds are so soft, it’s like sleeping on a cloud full of kittens.” Thinking of the luxury makes his jaw crack wide with a yawn. Hannah yawns too. “Best of all,” he continues, drawing on every detail Morpheus has told him. “There’s no war. It’s not like here; it’s like heaven.”

The girl gnaws her chapped lips. “Is Mama there?”

“Of course.” Nemo chuckles. “All the best people go to Dreamland. But you have to sleep first.”

To his relief, Hannah lays down and shuts her eyes. Nemo takes her hand. She must be exhausted, because guiding her is easy; by the time he’s finished the second verse of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Hannah is asleep, and he is in her nightmare.

It’s a birthday party. Hannah sits before a cake, lit with eight candles, her eyes as wide as her smile. Perhaps she’s afraid of the attention, or social gatherings make her anxious?

“Make a wish,” Mama says. Hannah blows out her candles, plunging them into suffocating darkness.

Then the screaming begins. “Papa! Papa! No!”

The thunder of jackboots and German shouts. The apartment shrinks to a windowless closet, where Nemo crouches with Hannah and her mother on a thin mattress. He cowers with them at the gunfire outside, and his stomach growls as they eat watery cabbage, growing thinner as the war grows closer.

“I’m hungry,” Hannah complains.

Mama’s hands shake as she pulls two bottles from her cardigan pocket. “Medicine to help you sleep.” She strokes her daughter’s braids. “We’ll both take it, okay?”

The girl tilts the bottle to her lips, but only pretends to drink, put off by the bitter taste. Mama drains her bottle and lays down. “I love you, Liebling.”

Mama drifts away, the empty bottle of poison rolling from her limp hand. Hannah wonders why her mother sleeps so easily when she cannot.

“Mama, I’m still hungry.” She shakes her mother’s lifeless body. “Mama, wake up. Mama, wake up! Mama!”

Her screams propel Nemo back to The Morpheus Club, shaking and sweating. It’s been a long time since he’s led anyone into sleep, but even he knows this was not a nightmare. This was a memory.

Beside him, Hannah whimpers, still writhing with terror. No wonder she can’t sleep. She has seen its brother, Death.

Quickly, Nemo gathers the mosquito net, bulging with a thick swarm of horror, and rushes his quarry to the train’s fuel tanks. The indicator rises to a quarter tank, half tank, full, then into the reserve tanks. Hannah’s nightmares fill them all.

The price of Nemo’s cowardice, the price for a restful sleep at last. He stares at the receipt tallying his credits until the train’s warning whistle jolts him into action. Time to depart this land of nightmares.

“One first-class ticket for Hannah Rosenburg,” he says to the ticket clerk. “She’s in the private room, ready to travel.”

– Sara Pauff