The King of Crows

by Libba Bray

  “Who is we?” Johnny Barton hadn’t meant to ask his question aloud, but now he had the attention of the King of Crows, whose stare fell on Johnny, making him squirm.

  “What was that, my good man?” he asked.

  Johnny had known lots of bullies, and this man struck him as the worst kind of bully. The kind who pretended to be on your side until he led you behind the school for the beating of your life.

  “You said we. Who is we?” Johnny mumbled. He blinked at the crow on the man’s shoulder, because he could swear it now had a woman’s face. The bird spoke with a woman’s desperate whisper. “Run. Please, please run.”

  “Be still.” The King of Crows pulled his hand across the woman’s mouth and it became a beak once more, cawing into the wind. The King of Crows’s face lit up with a cruel joy. “How smart you are, young man! Who, indeed? How rude of me not to introduce my retinue.”

  With that, he raised his arms and flexed his long fingers toward the sky as if he would pull it to him. Blue lightning crackled along his dirty fingernails. “Come, my army. The time is now.”

  A foul smell wafted toward the town: factory smoke and bad meat and stagnant pond water and battlefield dead left untended. Pastor Jacobs put a handkerchief to his nose. Ida Olsen gagged. The crow strained forward with frantic screaming. From inside the dark clouds, a swarm of flies burst forth, as if the town of Beckettsville were a corpse rotting in the waning sun. On that horizon that had seemed so fine moments earlier, the churning clouds parted like the curtain before the start of a picture show, letting out what waited inside.

  And though it was far too late for him, or for anyone else in Beckettsville, Johnny Barton heeded the crow’s advice; he turned and ran from the horrors at his back.

  THE END OF THE WORLD

  New York City

  The musty tunnel underneath the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult was as dark as the night’s shadow, and Isaiah Campbell was afraid. His older brother, Memphis, lifted their lantern. Its light barely cut into the gloom ahead. The air down here was close, like being buried alive. Isaiah’s lungs grew tighter with each breath. He wanted out. Up. Aboveground. Memphis was nervous, too. Isaiah could tell by the way his brother kept looking back and then forward again, like he wasn’t sure about what to do. Even big Bill Johnson, who didn’t seem afraid of anything, moved cautiously, one hand curled into a fist.

  “What if this doesn’t go nowhere?” Isaiah asked. He had no idea how long they’d been down here. Felt like days.

  “Doesn’t go anywhere,” Memphis corrected, more of a mumble, though, and Isaiah didn’t even have it in him to be properly annoyed by his brother’s habit of fixing his words, which, to Isaiah’s mind, didn’t need fixing.

  “Don’t like it down here.” Isaiah glanced over his shoulder. The way back was just as dark as the way ahead. “I’m tired.”

  “It’s a’right, Little Man. Plenty’a slaves got to freedom out this passage. We gonna be fine,” Bill said in his deep voice. “Ain’t got much choice, anyhow. Not with them Shadow Men after us. Just watch your step.”

  Isaiah kept his eyes trained on the uneven ground announcing itself in Memphis’s lantern light and wondered if the Shadow Men had shown up at Aunt Octavia’s house looking for them. The idea that those men might’ve hurt his auntie made Isaiah’s heart beat even harder in his chest. Maybe the Shadow Men had gone straight to the museum, to Will Fitzgerald and Sister Walker. Maybe the Shadow Men had found the secret door under the carpet in the collections room and were down here even now, following quietly, guns drawn.

  Isaiah swallowed hard. Sweat itched along his hairline and trickled down between his narrow shoulder blades under his shirt, which was getting filthy.

  “How much longer?” he asked for the fourth time. He was thirsty. His feet hurt.

  Memphis’s lantern illuminated another seemingly endless curve of tunnel. “Maybe we should turn back.”

  Bill rubbed the sweat from his chin. “Not with those men after us. Trust me, you don’t want them to catch ya. Around that curve could be a way out.”

  “Or another mile of darkness. Or a cave-in. Or a ladder leading up to a freedom house that hasn’t been that since before the Civil War,” Memphis whispered urgently. “A house that’s home to some white family now who might not welcome us.”

  “Rather take my chances goin’ fo’ward.”

  They pressed on. Around the bend, their tunnel branched into two. A smell like rotten eggs filled the air and Memphis tried not to gag.

  Bill coughed. “Look like we just met up with the sewers.”

  Isaiah pinched his nose shut with his fingers. “Which way should we go?”

  “I don’t know,” Memphis said, and that scared Isaiah, because if there was anything his brother was good at, it was acting like he knew everything. “Bill?”

  Bill held up a finger, feeling for air. He shook his head. “Ain’t no way to know.” He took out a nickel, tossed it, and slapped it down on his arm. “Heads we go left; tails, right.” Memphis nodded. Bill took his hand away. “Tails,” he said, and they entered the tunnel to their right.

  “Maybe those Shadow Men left Harlem and went back to wherever they come from,” Memphis said. Water swished over their shoes and trickled down the narrow brick walls. It stank.

  “Doubt it,” Bill panted. “They never stop. I know ’em.”

  “I didn’t even get to tell Theta good-bye. What if they went to her apartment to find me? What if… what if they hurt her?”

  “Only thing we can do is keep going,” Bill said. “Soon as we get somewhere safe, you can put in a call to her, and to your auntie.”

  Memphis snorted. “Somewhere safe. Let me know where that is.”

  Isaiah chanced another look over his shoulder. Tiny motes of light fluttered in the vast dark. Isaiah blinked, wiped at his eyes. The muscles from his neck to his fingers twitched. Suddenly, his feet wouldn’t move. Isaiah felt as if a giant were squeezing him between its palms. The spots of light came faster, and then Isaiah knew.

  “Memphis…” was all Isaiah managed before his eyes rolled back and he was falling deeply into space as the vision roared up inside him, fast as a freight train.

  Isaiah stood on a ribbon of dirt road leading toward a flat horizon. To his left, a slumped scarecrow guarded over a field of failing corn. To his right sat a farmhouse with a sagging front porch. He saw a weathered red barn. An enormous oak whose tire swing hung lax, as if it hadn’t been touched in a good while. Isaiah had seen this place once before in a vision, and he had been afraid of it, and of the girl who lived here.

  He heard his name being called like a voice punching through miles of fog. “I, I, I, IsaiAH!” And then, close by his ear: “Isaiah.”

  Isaiah whirled around. She was right there. The same girl as before. A peach satin ribbon clung to a few strands of her pale ringlets. Her eyes were such a light blue-gray they were nearly silver.

  Who are you? he thought.

  “I’m a seer, a Diviner, like you.”

  She’d heard his thoughts?

  The girl curled in on herself like she’d just stepped into a bracing wind. “Something awful has happened, Isaiah, just now. Like a fire snuffed out, and it’s so, so cold. Can you feel it?”

  Isaiah couldn’t, and that made him jealous of this strange girl. He was fixated on the horizon, where an angry mouth of dark storm clouds gobbled up the blue sky. The clouds cracked like eggshells, letting out a high, sharp whine, a sound so full of pain and fear and need that Isaiah wanted to run away from it. What is that?

  “The King of Crows and his dead,” the girl answered as if Isaiah had spoken. “He’s come, like he promised he would. He’s come and we’re in terrible danger.”

  Wind snapped the corn on its stalks. Birds darted out from the roiling, dark sea overhead. Their cawing mixed with the gunfire bursts of screaming. The noise stole the breath from Isaiah’s lungs. So much hatred lived inside that sky. He could fee
l the threat trying to gnaw its way out into their world.

  The girl reached for Isaiah’s hand. Her hands were small and delicate, like a doll’s. “He tells lies, so many lies, Isaiah. He’s been lying to me this whole time, pretending to be my friend. But I had a vision. A lady named Miriam told me the truth. She told me what he did to Conor Flynn. He wants all of us, Isaiah. He wants the Diviners.”

  Why?

  “Because we’re the only ones who can stop him.” The girl kept her unearthly eyes on the unholy sky. “I know how to stop the King of Crows, Isaiah.”

  Where are we? Isaiah asked. He didn’t know why he couldn’t speak here.

  “Bountiful, Nebraska. That’s where I live.”

  Isaiah saw a mailbox bearing the name “Olson” and the number one forty-four. That number came up a lot. He remembered Evie saying it was the number of her brother’s unit during the war. But her brother and his whole unit had died, and it had something to do with Will and Sister Walker and Project Buffalo and Diviners.

  “Where are you?” she asked.

  In the tunnel under the old museum. But we’re lost. There’s people after us.

  “I’m afraid, Isaiah,” the girl said. “We’re not safe. None of us are. You’ve got one another, but I’m all alone. I can’t fight him and his army by myself. None of us can. We need each other.”

  The last time Isaiah had seen this vision, his mama had been here, telling him to get out quick. She had fussed at this girl, told her to hush up. He looked for his mother now but did not see her.

  “Please. Come to Bountiful,” the girl pleaded.

  The Shadow Men are after us. We’re running from them.

  “They don’t know about me. They forgot me. Come here. You’ll be safe. They won’t find you. We must stop the King of Crows before it’s too late!”

  Wait! What’s your name? Isaiah thought.

  “Sarah Beth,” the girl yelled. The dust billowed behind her pale form. “Sarah Beth Olson. Get to Bountiful, Isaiah! Before it’s too late!”

  First we gotta get out of this tunnel. Say, can you see a way out?

  “You’re in a tunnel under a museum, you said?”

  Yes! In New York City. Manhattan.

  The girl shut her eyes. In a minute, she opened them wide. “Isaiah. You’ve got to get out of there right now, you hear? Something’s coming. Go back. Take the other tunnel. Oh, Isaiah, you must hurry. Get out now and come to Bountiful before—”

  Isaiah came out of his vision, dizzy and disoriented. Memphis’s worried face was the first thing he saw, hovering above his own. Isaiah sat up too quickly and caught his brother in the nose.

  “Ow.”

  Bill steadied Isaiah’s face in his strong hands. “You all right, Little Man?”

  “Y-yes, sir.” He tasted blood. He’d bit his tongue. And he was sitting in the fetid water.

  Bill helped Isaiah to his feet. “You had a vision?”

  Isaiah nodded. His head ached. The sewer smell was making him nauseated.

  “What’d you see?” Memphis asked.

  “She said… she said to go back. Take the other tunnel,” Isaiah said, panicked.

  “Who said? Isaiah, you’re not making sense,” Memphis said.

  “Hush. Hush now.” Bill held up a hand. “You hear something?”

  The boys listened for something under the constant drip of water. Memphis nodded.

  “The Shadow Men?” Isaiah whispered. “She said… she said…” The tunnel ahead began to fill with flickering light and deep, guttural growls.

  “Not Shadow Men,” Memphis said ominously.

  The sound was getting closer.

  “Back up,” Memphis said.

  “The hell with that. Run!” Bill said.

  Memphis grabbed Isaiah’s hand, and they raced back the way they’d come.

  “This way!” Memphis said, ducking into the other tunnel, picking up speed as they spied the daylight ahead.

  MEMORIES

  Bennington Apartments

  Upper West Side

  According to the clock on the bedside table, it was nine fifteen in the morning—an ungodly hour to flapper Evie O’Neill, who never got up before noon if she could help it. She’d been having a nightmare, but she couldn’t remember a thing about it now. Evie stifled an exhausted yawn and looked over at her friend, Theta Knight, who snored lightly. Her sleep mask was slightly askew. Evie nudged Theta twice before giving her a solid shove. Theta startled awake, hands patting at the air until they landed on the sleep mask, which she slid up onto her forehead. She blinked at Evie, then at the clock. “What’s the big idea, Evil?”

  “Darling Theta, did anyone ever tell you that you sleep with your mouth open?” Evie impersonated a dead-to-the-world, snoring Theta. “I just didn’t want you to choke.”

  With a groan, Theta pushed herself to a sitting position. “That’s called breathing.”

  “It’s very loud breathing.” Evie snuggled up next to Theta. For a moment, she remembered all the times she’d done the same with her best friend, Mabel. An awful ache ballooned in Evie’s throat. She refused to start the day with tears. “Theta, did you mean what you said last night?”

  Theta arched an eyebrow. “I dunno. What’d I say last night?”

  “That you’d help me find Sam.”

  “Yeah, I meant it, kid.”

  “You’re the berries,” Evie said and kissed Theta’s cheek.

  Theta wiped at the spot. “You probably just got a mouthful of cold cream, y’know.”

  “Then my lips will be very soft. I want to try his hat again.”

  “Evil. You’ve read that hat three times now,” Theta said gently.

  “Maybe there’s something I missed! I could sense how afraid he was, Theta. You know Sam—he’s never afraid. I saw those Shadow Men doing something to him, and then I could feel Sam’s body getting cold and slow and numb.”

  Theta brought her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. “You don’t suppose he’s…?”

  “No! He is pos-i-tutely not dead!” Evie insisted. She couldn’t bear the thought of it. There’d been too much loss already. “Besides, if anybody is going to have the pleasure of murdering Sam Lloyd, it ought to be me.”

  Theta chuckled and shook her head. “You two. I don’t know whether to hope you get married or hope you never do.”

  “I only want to know that he’s okay,” Evie said, tearing up at last.

  “I know, kid. Here,” Theta said, reaching for Sam’s hat from the bedside table. “You might as well get started. I’ll have the aspirin ready for after. Just don’t do a number on yourself.”

  Evie sat with Sam’s hat in her lap. The old Greek fisherman’s cap had belonged to him for a long time. With renewed purpose, Evie pressed it between her palms, receiving small glimpses of Sam’s past. These memories played across her mind like brief scenes in a motion picture, but all jumbled up: Sam talking to a redheaded lady who was laying out a spread of tarot cards. Sam lifting valuables from unsuspecting rubes on Forty-second Street. The day she and Sam had met, when he’d kissed her and stolen twenty dollars from her pocket. That one made her smile just a bit. There was even a hint of the countless girls he’d charmed into his arms, and it tempted Evie to unlock even more of those memories. Last, she wandered across a moment of the two of them sharing a perfect kiss. And then that gave way to the Shadow Men dragging Sam toward the brown sedan, his body growing cold. But then the hat fell to the sidewalk, and that’s where Sam’s history with it stopped. If she wanted a deeper read, she was going to need help.

  Evie came out of her trance and looked up at Theta with wide eyes. “Theta, darling Theta.”

  “Uh-oh. I know that tone.”

  “Please? I only need a boost.”

  “My power’s pretty unpredictable, Evil. What if I accidentally set you on fire?”

  “Then I’m glad I’m wearing your pajamas and not my own.”

  “There’s something not right ab
out you, Evil,” Theta clucked. “Now, listen: If this goes badly, don’t you dare come back and haunt me.”

  “Your protest is noted.”

  “Uh, how do we do this? Do I touch you? The hat? Both?”

  “Both, I think.” Evie glanced at Theta’s fingers and thought about them heating up suddenly. “On second thought, the hat.”

  “Here goes nothin’,” Theta said and took hold of the brim with a delicate touch.

  Evie shut her eyes and concentrated. A tiny sliver of electricity worked its way up her arm. It tickled like ants, an unpleasant sensation, and Evie tried to breathe through the worry about what might happen if her power and Theta’s didn’t get along. She hoped that Theta couldn’t sense that worry. In a few seconds, the prickling became a surge of energy, as if someone had plugged Evie in to the same electrical socket as Theta, and now their combined wattage was glowing brighter. She could feel Theta’s strong heartbeat like her own. With her friend at her side, Evie went deeper, searching for anything about one of the Shadow Men she’d glimpsed. Nothing. Just Sam’s memories fighting to get through. What were the limits of memory?

  But then, there it was—a small flicker into the Shadow Man who had taken Sam! Adams was the man’s name, and the wickedness of his soul was terrifying. This was a man who had killed many times. He said it was out of duty, out of patriotism, but really, he enjoyed it. Power was what moved this man, and this was the man who had Sam. Evie gritted her teeth, going deeper still, grasping for something just out of reach. For just a moment while the Shadow Man held Sam, he was thinking of a place. A destination, perhaps? The contact between Sam’s hat and the Shadow Man had been brief. Evie would have to fight to get more, even if it meant a real skullbanger of a headache afterward. Tall trees. A winding drive. And nestled into the thicket, a sprawling manor that Evie recognized. It was a hot day. Strangely hot. A trickle of sweat slipped down Evie’s neck as she pushed for more details. Somewhere in the trance of it all, she felt Theta’s heartbeat speed up and sensed her panic.