by Libba Bray
“Try ’n’ stop me.” Theta lifted the folded paper from Memphis’s fingers. She opened it. “‘The Voice of Tomorrow.’ Swell title.” She read the first few lines aloud. “‘America, America, will you listen to the story of you? You bruised mountains, purpled by majesty. You shining seas that refuse to see. You, haunted by ghosts of dreams…’” She read the rest in silence, then looked up into Memphis’s hopeful face. “It’s beautiful, Memphis.”
“You’re beautiful. I just…” He shook his head.
“What?”
“I think about this world. Even without this mess from the King of Crows, it feels broken.” He gestured to the other room. “Everybody else, they defeat evil and get to go back to their lives. But you and me?” His body suddenly felt heavier. “What future do we have?”
Seraphina knocked and entered. “Wanted to talk to the both of you,” she said, closing the door behind her. “I had a visit from Dutch Schultz’s boys today. They said Miss Knight’s husb—” She glanced at Memphis. “They said that Mr. Roy Stoughton is looking for you. He’s joined up with the Klan to help him.”
“He would,” Theta growled.
“The Klan is all over this country, in every state of this union, in every small town and at every church picnic. No matter where you go, some man in a white robe will be looking to return you, like property stolen from its rightful owner. You must both be very careful.” Seraphina reached into her pocket. “I have something for you, Memphis.” In her hand was a simple gold band. “Go on.”
Memphis held up the ring so he could read the inscription inside: To my beloved, Viola. Forever, Marvin. “This is my mother’s wedding ring. She said she lost it. How did you…?”
“She gave it to me. As payment for my services,” Seraphina explained.
Memphis closed the ring tightly in his fist. “You might’ve mentioned that last time I was here.”
Seraphina raised one eyebrow, gave a small shrug. “You don’t get to be Harlem’s number one banker by giving it all away. You and I, we had a quid pro quo, and I didn’t know if I might need more information from you. But it’s better that you have it.” She looked from Memphis to Theta. “At some point, I’m going to need this room back, you know,” she said and shut the door.
Memphis examined the ring as if it, too, were a portal to another world.
“There’s somebody who could help you with that, you know,” Theta said.
“Who?”
“Who? Gloria Swanson, that’s who,” Theta cracked wise. “I’m talking about Evie.”
“Nah. I don’t wanna ask her for a favor.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll feel like I’m in her debt.”
“That’s dumb.” Theta opened the door and stuck her head out. “Hey, Evil!” She motioned Evie over. “Memphis has something to ask you. Go on, Memphis.”
“I was wondering if maybe you could read this wedding ring for me. It belonged to my mother. I was hoping…” Hoping what? He settled on a shrug.
Evie seemed to understand. “You bet-ski,” she said. She took the ring and cupped it in her fist, squeezing. Evie had read for many strangers. It kept things impersonal. It was quite another matter to read for her friends. Once she knew something about them, it joined her. It made her feel a responsibility toward them that she wasn’t always comfortable bearing. But the memories bubbling up from this ring were mostly happy ones.
Evie saw the Campbell family in their comfortable apartment in Harlem. It was as if she had entered the room and stood off to the side, watching but unseen. A ghost. Mr. Campbell was a handsome man, lithe and bedroom-eyed, with a trim mustache above a mouth that always seemed on the verge of a mischievous half smile. He spoke in a Southern drawl—hadn’t Memphis said his father’s family was from Georgia?—and it gave everything he said a bemused quality. Mrs. Campbell’s speech had the lilt of the Caribbean in it. There was music in this house, and laughter and stories.
Mrs. Campbell snuggled up on the bed beside Memphis, telling him stories while baby Isaiah slept in his crib. Memphis giggled—giggled! Though she didn’t know it, Evie was smiling as she pressed into the ring.
Another memory: Memphis cuddled a three-year-old Isaiah to himself as if his brother was the thing he loved most. Evie remembered playing hide-and-seek with James, the way he would indulge her as big brothers sometimes do.
“What do you see?” Memphis was asking Evie.
They were happy. This was what a happy family looked like. Even when her own family had been whole, before James went away, it had not been like this. With music and dancing and laughter. Her mother, always anxious and judging. Her love was a corrective love—“Evangeline, stand up straight. Evangeline, don’t do that; what will the neighbors say? Evangeline, don’t hug quite so fiercely, dear, you’ll take my breath away.” Her father, always distracted with work, kind enough but needing Evie to be his adoring little girl. Watching Memphis’s family now, Evie felt robbed. The sharpness pinched her breath. Her chest ached.
“Evie?” Memphis.
“Oh, um, nothing much yet,” she answered and pressed in harder.
Now the ring took on a different feeling. Darker. Like a fairy-tale turn into the woods. Viola stood at a crossroads under a full moon. After a moment, the King of Crows emerged.
Viola was confused. “You are not Baron Samedi.”
“I am not many things,” the man in the hat answered. He was not yet the King of Crows, but his power was growing. His rumpled coat was thinly feathered. Evie wished she could read something of his, something that would give away his secrets, but this was Viola’s ring, after all.
What she saw now came in small bursts, like a radio signal flaring and fading.
“I took bad medicine,” Viola said. “I feel it in my body! What if it harms my boys? And… and there are men who would come for them. Bad men.”
“You wish protection from this harm for your boys?”
“Yes,” Viola said on a whisper. “Please.”
“And what will you offer me?”
“I…” Viola removed her pearl ear-bobs. “These were my granmé’s.”
“Not enough. I would have your pledge. Take my hand.”
Viola reached out. In a flash of light, they were in the land of the dead. The sky was the purplish ochre of an approaching storm. The land was as desolate as the pictures she’d seen of the battlefields of Flanders and the Somme. There was a feeling of great emptiness. Even through the distance of an object, that terrible emptiness reached into Evie’s very soul like an infection of which she’d never fully be cured.
“Your son is a healer,” the man in the hat said, and Evie felt Viola’s terror as she peered into those sharklike eyes, now possessed of some new plan.
“Y-yes,” Viola said. “And my other son—”
The man in the hat interrupted her with a wave of his hand. “The other boy is of no consequence to me. He has shown no powers. The healer, though. He could prove useful to me. Or dangerous.”
“Memphis? He’s just a boy. He has no real p-power—”
The man in the hat glared. “Never lie to me.”
Viola’s heart beat so fast Evie felt her own thumping in sympathy.
“Very well,” the man in the hat said with a smile, as if he’d moved on. “I will shield your children for as long as you honor my terms: Upon your death, you will become my servant. You will be under my control.”
Viola bristled. She was a proud woman, Evie could sense. But she was also sick and getting sicker. The cancer moved through her blood. She wrote her name inside the man’s coat. Quickly, he sealed it shut. A nasty cough seized Viola. She hacked and hacked to expel something caught in her throat, spitting out at last a tiny feather fragment, coated thinly with blood.
“You are mine. Soon enough.”
Evie remembered the time she and Memphis had been trapped by ghosts in the subway. She’d thought for sure the ghosts would devour them, but instead they’d sniffed and walk
ed away. Had that been the King of Crows’s doing?
“When…” Viola licked her lips. It was a moment before she could speak again. “When does this bargain end?”
“End?” The man in the hat grinned. “The bargains are only null and void if I am no more. Viola Campbell: What is done is done. Your son has no leave to heal you. Should he try, he will violate the terms of this contract. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Viola whispered.
The ring jostled Evie around through time. There was Viola, looking up and down the street in front of Seraphina’s shop. She doesn’t want to be seen coming here, Evie thought, feeling Viola’s hesitation. In this memory, Viola Campbell was quite a bit sicker. Her hair had thinned; her previously full face was gaunt. She knew her days were numbered.
“I made a bad bargain. I need protection. Not for me. For my boys.”
“You can pay?”
Embarrassment. Fear. Evie felt it all. Viola slid the wedding ring from her bony finger and held it out. “It’s real gold.”
Seraphina tilted her chin up, appraising the ring before she slipped it into her pocket. The ring was Seraphina’s now, and it had her memories fused to it. The perspective changed. That was all.
Evie came out of her trance and handed the ring back to Memphis.
“Well?” Theta asked.
“Memphis,” Evie started. “Did you… try to heal your mother?”
Memphis’s face showed surprise, followed by pain. “She told me not to do it. Begged me not to.” Memphis paused for a moment. “But she was my mother. In the end, I couldn’t. I wasn’t powerful enough. She died anyway. And I lost my healing.”
“But it came back,” Theta reminded him.
“I don’t think that was your doing,” Evie said, rubbing at the back of her neck where the headache was just starting. “She went to him for protection against the Shadow Men, I believe. The King of Crows made your mother promise you couldn’t heal her or the deal was off. I think he was trying to trap you.”
“Why?”
There was something there. Some reason the King of Crows wanted Memphis.
“I don’t know. I know this sounds pos-i-tutely batty, but I almost had the feeling that he’s afraid of you. Your mother would’ve done anything for you, though,” Evie said, swallowing down her jealousy. All mothers love their children, it was said. Not all mothers, Evie thought bitterly. But Viola Campbell had loved her sons desperately enough to bargain away her soul for them.
Memphis held tight to the ring. “All the more reason why I’m gonna get her back from him.”
WITNESS
The street lamps were just winking on as Margaret “Sister” Walker approached her house. She was jittery and exhausted. Will Fitzgerald was dead. She’d heard him struggle for breath as the Shadow Man tightened the wire around his neck. The full weight of the horror hit her, made her bones feel like lead. She remembered meeting Will at the Department of Paranormal in the first years of this new century. They had come from different families, different backgrounds, but in Will she had sensed a kindred spirit when it came to the supernatural. How excited they’d all been by this venture into the unknown, into other dimensions. Through contact with another world, they had hoped to change their own. Naively, Margaret hadn’t realized just how different that change looked to each of them, exciting for some, threatening for others. How terribly it had all ended. Of the original members of the Department of Paranormal, only she and Jake Marlowe were left alive. Jake, with his ideas of racial purity and America first; Margaret herself, playing advisor to the ragtag crew of man-made Diviners who could stop him from making a catastrophic mistake if the Shadow Men or the King of Crows and his Army of the Dead didn’t get there first.
Margaret willed her tired feet to walk faster. She’d go to T. S. Woodhouse at the Daily News, then. The truth would be exposed. Yes, that was the way. The power of the press. She just needed those files. She hadn’t been entirely honest with the Diviners. There were also files hidden away in her house. Files that implicated her in Project Buffalo. They were all guilty, Jake most of all, but Margaret knew he would never take the fall for their crimes. She fumbled with her keys in her pocketbook. Almost there. Margaret looked up and clamped a hand over her mouth to stifle her scream.
“Will,” she whispered through her trembling fingers.
He stood on her brownstone stoop, wispy as early morning fog. The ligature marks from the piano wire glowed at his neck. The ghost of her murdered friend glanced up at her front door, then back at her. He shook his head slowly. A warning. She found herself nodding. And then he was gone. Margaret crept into the front yard and pressed herself against the garden-level door, out of sight, hidden by the falling night. Seconds later, she heard the front door open and close. Footsteps on the stairs above. They landed with the arrogant surety of men not used to being questioned about their comings and goings. Margaret pressed herself farther into the deepening shadows. At the gate, one Shadow Man stopped to light his cigarette.
“Guess she’s flown the coop,” he said to the other, and Margaret scarcely breathed as those sure footsteps carried the men all the way down the block. Margaret made herself count to ten, and then she tore up the stoop and, with shaking hands, let herself in through the front door of the brownstone, into the small foyer. The door to her apartment was ajar. Her sofa and chairs had been slashed to ribbons. Their feathery innards dusted the floor and fell across the ruined furniture. The entire place had been ransacked. They had wanted her to know they were looking.
She raced to the far wall and removed the painting of Paris. She stuck her hand into the hole there, exhaling in relief as she dragged the files from their hiding place. A crow cawed outside her window. Loud. Insistent. Margaret crept to the window. The bird flitted on the ledge. “Viola?” Margaret whispered. The crow squawked something fierce. Too late, Margaret heard the footsteps racing back up to her door. The Shadow Men had returned.
“Margaret Andrews Walker.” The man with the small teeth. The one who’d murdered Will. Jefferson was his name. The other, bigger man was called Adams. Looking at them, Margaret felt both hatred and fear.
“You’re under arrest,” Jefferson said.
They escorted her down the front steps. Her neighbors had come out. Some were just returning from work. They were watching as these men dragged her away. Good. She needed witnesses. Adams pried the files from Sister Walker’s hands. She let them go, allowing them to scatter across the front yard.
With a growl, the big Shadow Man reached for one of the Project Buffalo papers.
“Viola!” Sister Walker cried. “Viola, now!”
The crow zoomed down from the window ledge and bit the man’s fingers.
“Ow! Goddamned crazy bird!” he said, shaking out his injured hand.
“You’ll live. Put some iodine on it,” Jefferson scolded as he gathered the fallen files.
“Easy for you to say,” Adams said, sullen.
The crow dove down again and snapped up one of the sheets of paper in its beak just before the Shadow Man chased it away with a loud, “Shoo! Or I’ll wring your neck.” It hopped onto a newel post and blinked at Sister Walker.
“You know what to do,” Margaret whispered as Adams retrieved the scattered files. “Keep them safe.”
“Talking to birds, Margaret?” Jefferson tsked.
“It’s Miss Walker to you,” she said, and then she sat down so that they were forced to drag, then carry her to their waiting sedan. As they did, she looked into the eyes of her neighbors. “Make sure you tell it how you see it. Don’t let them murder me and get away with it like they did Will Fitzgerald.”
The Shadow Man forced Sister Walker into the backseat of the sedan and locked the door. He turned to the witnesses. “This woman is wanted for the murder of William Fitzgerald, and for treason against the United States of America.”
Some on the street looked away, convinced. But others showed doubt.
The bird was al
so a witness. With a great flapping of its mighty wings, it flew away, the paper still clutched in its beak. It soared above the rooftops of Harlem’s Jazz Age magnificence, swooping over Miss A’lelia Walker’s mansion, where inside Langston Hughes hobnobbed with the editors of the Crisis, who listened to Duke Ellington play and rolled their eyes at Carl Van Vechten. It flew above the neon sky of Times Square, where the city was already preparing for tomorrow night’s Sarah Snow memorial, and then all the way downtown to Newspaper Row, near City Hall, where the crow came to rest on the front steps of the New York Daily News building. It waited until a door was opened, and then it flew past the startled heads of reporters—“Hey, now!”—who were filing stories for tomorrow’s paper. The bird hopped onto the desk of T. S. Woodhouse, where it deposited the file at last.
“You got a visitor, Woody,” one of the reporters said with a laugh. “Maybe it’s come to collect for your bookie.”
Woody tried not to let his reaction to the barb show on his face. And then, as he read through the file on his desk with trembling hands, he tried not to let that show, too.
NIGHT OF THE GHOSTS
Night steals into New York City carefully at first, then falls hard and fast. City neon shows off its shine, hazing the sky with man-made stardust. Street lamps burn. Amber eyes glow in the skyscrapers. Tugboats turn on their navigation lights. And one lady in the harbor hoists a torch. People need light in the dark. They think it will keep them safe from the things hidden there.
In the Russian Baths on East Tenth Street, paunchy old men gather in the basement steam room for a shvitz. It is said that gangsters come to the back rooms to trade secrets while deaf masseurs beat their broad backs with oak branches and hear nothing. Eight blocks south is Marble Cemetery, one of the city’s oldest graveyards. Records list the reasons for burial: Puerperal fever. Consumption. Dropsy. Aneurism. Hepatitis. Exhaustion. Croup. Broken heart.
So many ways to die.
The basement is a hot cloud. Steam hisses and curls in the corners. Mr. Lubetzky can barely make out the silhouette of his friend Mr. Adleman. Mr. Lubetzky is a million miles away. He’s remembering the village he left behind many years ago.