by Libba Bray
It’s too much—the heat and the memory. “Samuel. Let’s go for the plunge,” Mr. Lubetzky says, easing his aching bones from the wooden seat. He tugs on the door, which will not open. The old man’s heart begins to race. He yells for the attendant, first in English, then in Russian. From somewhere in all that steam comes a growl, low and menacing, like a dog gnawing possessively at a bone.
“Samuel?” Mr. Lubetzky calls.
A shape rises in the haze, still growling, and the old man imagines it wearing the Cossack’s uniform—some wicked dybbuk who has followed across the great, vast sea to hurt him in this new world. “Hungry,” it gurgles and opens its jaw.
A private party. The Casino restaurant in the heart of Central Park. The swells huddle at elegant tables while their chauffeurs stand at the back of the dining room, ready to run out for the bottles of champagne stashed away in parked Studebakers and Duesenbergs. It isn’t the dazzling lights of the Casino but the hope of finding stale food in the bins behind the restaurant that draws Oscar Winslow from his sleeping spot on a park bench. Poor Oscar, who fought in the war but came back with a permanent tremor that made factory work impossible. Oscar turned to morphine for the shaking hands and the night terrors, and now he lives in the park, surviving on scraps and the sympathy of strangers.
A rustling draws Oscar’s attention away from the stale bread in the rubbish bin. It’s coming from the dark thicket across the lawn. Oscar thinks of the eerie calm that would descend on the trenches just before hell came down in cannon fire and mustard gas. “A-anybody th-there?” Oscar is surprised by the sound of his own voice. He hasn’t spoken to another soul in days.
On the other side of the bright windows, the bandleader sings a jazzed-up Irving Berlin tune for all he’s worth:
“I had a dream, last night,
That filled me full of fright:
I dreamt that I was with the Devil, below.”
Everybody laughs. The Devil’s their kinda fella. Idealism is for suckers.
“Ain’t we got fun?”
Out back, Oscar is rooted to the spot as he sees the three ghosts moving across the shadowed lawn of Central Park. One wears a filthy hoop skirt. She has cheeks blistered with smallpox. Another, a gray-haired suffragette, gnaws at the still-wriggling body of a squirrel. The third is a young woman, maybe only weeks dead. They are from different eras, different graves, but they have found one another, along with a common enemy—the living. The freshest one trails off into the parking lot, drawn by the lights. She slips into the backseat of a long, sleek Chrysler. “Hungry,” she says and waits. The remaining ghosts take notice of Oscar. They smile, as ladies do, and the bright Casino glow catches the razor-sharp edges of their teeth.
“At the Devil’s Ball! At the Devil’s Ball!”
The bandleader sings. Horns wail. Feet pound the floors with dancing.
No one hears Oscar.
The Diviners climbed through a back window, letting themselves into the shuttered Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult. The beams from their flashlights traveled across what had once been home but now seemed unfamiliar. The glare gave the library’s spiral staircase an otherworldly haze and reflected off the stuffed grizzly bear’s lifeless glass eyes. My uncle was murdered in this room, Evie thought, a shudder passing through her.
“You okay?” Jericho asked.
Evie nodded and stroked the bear’s furry paw. “It’s just… seeing the museum like this, it’s like a body without a soul.”
Will had been the museum’s soul, and now he was gone, and she was learning more and more that life could turn on a dime like that. People you loved could be gone in a breath. So why didn’t knowing that make it any easier to be vulnerable? To tell people that you loved them, that you were hurting, that you were afraid, or that, sometimes, at five in the morning, you were so alone in your skin that you watched the weak light play across the ceiling, willing it toward dawn?
Or perhaps no one else felt that way, and Evie truly was alone.
“See if you can find anything that will help us,” Evie whispered. She didn’t know why she was whispering. There was no one around to hear them. Not anymore. “And if there’s something you want, you should take that, too. It’s all marked for the bulldozer anyhow.”
They spread out, moving through the museum for the last time. Evie kept an eye on Jericho as he gently picked up each object, saying good-bye to the museum and Will in his silent fashion.
“He really cared about you, you know,” Evie said as they made their way across the leaf-and-paper-strewn floor, avoiding the spot by the fireplace where Will’s body had been found. Whoever had murdered Will had gone to great lengths to make it look as if someone had been searching for valuables inside the museum.
“Thank you,” Jericho said, smoothing the crinkled pages of a damaged book and laying it properly on the table. He spied something shiny underneath one of the long library tables and stooped to retrieve it. Will’s silver lighter. How many times had Jericho watched Will flicking the wheel, a nervous tic, as he paced a thinning path into the Persian carpets? Jericho rubbed a thumb across Will’s engraved initials.
“You should take it,” Evie said softly. “He’d want you to have it.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“You could start.”
Jericho grinned. He flicked the wheel, which sparked but did not catch. “Did I ever tell you about the first day I saw this place?”
Evie shook her head.
“After Marlowe… did what he did,” Jericho said. He couldn’t bring himself to talk about the machinery inside his broken body just now. “Will brought me here first, before the Bennington. Can you imagine being a kid and walking into this place? It was even more of a mess. There were crates stacked up in the butler’s pantry, and sawdust and packing hay on the floors. But I loved it from the very first minute I saw it. I don’t believe in God, but I believe in history.”
Evie gave a small, fond hmm of a laugh that threatened to become emotional. “You, um… You really do sound like him.”
Jericho inhaled. He wanted the smell of the place in his memories forever. He remembered sunlight streaming through the stained-glass windows. How thrilled he was when Will would give him an absentminded order while he was hunched over some ancient text: Jericho, up in the stacks, find me J. M. Reginald’s Taxonomy of Spiritual Sensation, please. And off Jericho would run, pounding around the spiral stairs, racing from bookcase to bookcase until he found it. The excitement when he and Will would pry open a crate containing some new piece of supernatural ephemera: A weather vane that was said to spin whenever spirits were near. A slate that had been used by a Diviner for automatic writing. A silver spoon for the dispensing of herbs to protect against evil. A velvety seventeenth-century broadsheet proclaiming “wonders and portents”—animals born disfigured and comets streaking across skies. Jericho also remembered the sadness that would shade Will’s face toward the end of some afternoons. The witching hour, Jericho had come to call it. How Will would say he needed to be alone to think, and he would go into his study, close the door, and not emerge for hours.
That was why Will paced so much, Jericho had come to realize. Will had thought he could outrun his own grief over both what he had done and what he had allowed to happen during the war. Regrets were like hauntings, Jericho knew, visitations people tried to dispel with busyness or the bottle, with blame heaped on others, or with a relentless urge to reframe and retell their own histories, to make up stories that haunted them less than the truth.
Will had died with all his ghosts intact. And though Jericho did not believe in God, he had seen evidence that there was an afterlife of a sort, a transmutation of energy. He wondered where the newly deceased Will Fitzgerald would fit into a Taxonomy of Spiritual Sensation.
The witching hour. He’d seen that same melancholy descend over Evie at times. It was part of what drew him to her as much as her liveliness—that ragged hem of sadness showing. He fantasi
zed about being the balm for her sadness the way Memphis could heal a wound. As if it were a quest and once Jericho had fixed her pain, he would in turn fix his own. He would finally be strong and useful and worthy of love. He wished that he could talk to Will one last time to ask if he had ever felt that way about Rotke.
Jericho remembered something that now, with Will dead, took on great importance. Seized by emotion, he raced into Will’s study.
“Jericho? Jericho! Why are we off to the races?” Evie called.
Theta poked her head out of the collections room. “What is it?”
“Leave this to me,” Evie whispered back. She followed Jericho into Will’s study, shutting the door behind her.
Jericho was pawing through Will’s shelves. “Aha!” he said, selecting a book. “This is it.” Jericho flipped through the pages, opening the book at last to a soft watercolor of a young man, naked and smiling, with his arms outstretched, as if he wanted to greet the world, then gather it up and hold it to himself. A wheel of light—fiery reds, soft blues, warm gold—shone behind him, and all at once, Evie thought of Mabel’s flowery letters describing Jericho as a bright angel. Evie had giggled over Mabel’s idealistic view of him. Her heart ached doubly, for the loss of her friend and for Will, murdered here in the museum he loved, which would now be torn down to make room for another anonymous apartment building to house the smart set and their bevy of brats.
But when she looked at the naked man in the painting, she thought of Jericho. She remembered petting with him on the four-poster bed at Hopeful Harbor, the way he’d groaned on top of her with his lips against hers. And she remembered fighting him off in the woods when he’d been in the throes of Marlowe’s serum. Was the serum to blame for his behavior? Sam didn’t think so. Sam. She’d done more than pet with him. Much more. Why had she come in here alone with Jericho? What knife’s edge was she dancing on now?
“What, um, what is this book?” Evie asked, her face hot.
“William Blake poems and paintings. I found them fascinating when I was younger. And a little terrifying. There are a lot of utopian drawings, but a lot of apocalyptic ones, too. Blake would’ve made a great Diviner,” Jericho said with a half smile.
“Perhaps he was,” Evie said. “What is this called?”
“The Dance of Albion. Looking at it made me envious.”
“Envious? Why?”
“Because he was so free. I wanted to be as free as this painting.”
Evie moved closer to Jericho in order to see the painting more clearly. Her perfume wafted up, a powdery floral smell. Jericho wanted to cradle his head in the space between her shoulder and neck and kiss the softness there where her pulse thrummed. He wondered if she was sad now, the way he was. He moved an inch closer. With his enhanced hearing, he could hear her heart beating fast and sense her fear even before she took a step back. He couldn’t blame her, after what had happened up at Hopeful Harbor. Still, it hurt.
“I used to think death would be like that,” he said a bit coolly. “You’d disintegrate into all that light, become joined to it. But now…”
Ling opened the door.
“You know, sometimes people knock first?” Evie said.
Ling made a show of lifting her fist. She banged it against the door once. “We should go. Somebody might see us.”
Evie sighed. “Fine. I don’t think there’s anything in this museum to help us anyway. We’re just going to have to figure it out for ourselves.” She nodded at the book in Jericho’s hands. “You might as well take that, too. They’ll just throw it out. Like the rest of it.”
They gathered in the library one last time. “Feels like we should have a toast to him,” Memphis said.
“You got any hooch?” Evie asked with obvious excitement.
“No.”
“Applesauce,” Evie mumbled. She was sorry she’d given away her flask.
Memphis lifted his hand. “Everybody raise an imaginary glass to Mr. William Fitzgerald. May he rest in peace.”
“To Will,” Jericho echoed.
“To Will,” everybody said.
“To Will,” Evie said quietly. She pretended to drink, then tossed her imaginary glass into the fireplace and shrugged. “Seemed like the time for a grand gesture.”
The others pretended to throw their glasses as well, except for Ling.
“Aren’t you going to, uh…” Memphis mimed tossing his.
“I pretended to toast,” Ling said and left it at that.
Jericho took one last look around. This was the second time he’d had to say good-bye to his home. Maybe that was what growing up was—learning to let go again and again.
“Jericho, are you all right?” Evie asked.
Was anyone ever actually all right? Jericho wondered.
“Sure,” he said, turning back toward the way they’d come in. “This place is just another ghost.”
On an Upper East Side street filled with lovely limestones, a supper party is under way. The hosts, a young, devastatingly fashionable couple, have invited all their smart-set friends, whom they’ve known simply forever, don’t you know, from their days at the Very Best Schools. The hosts have decided it would be an absolute hoot to bring in one of those Diviner types to conduct a proper séance, especially after hearing the gossip that the Ashtons had conjured a proper ghost at their last party. What a riot. What an ab-so-lute riot, the hostess proclaims between puffs on her cigarette. They sit now, twelve of them, at a round table in the library (books—who has time to read ’em, but my, how they do jazz up a room!) while the Diviner (an actress-turned-soothsayer, don’t you know) shuts her eyes and advises everyone to hold hands. The lights are dimmed and the candles lit before the servants exit, closing the pocket doors behind them. On the other side of those doors, the servants roll their eyes and move through the huge flat, emptying ashtrays.
“Let us call now upon the spirits,” the Diviner intones, using every bit of thespian training she has. She is ready to do her very best work, moaning and writhing. But something is wrong. She can feel something wicked standing right behind her—cold, so cold.
“Turn on the lights!” she screeches. “There is something in the room with us!”
The host leaps up, rushes for the switch. The lights burst their shades with a pop of glass. In the dark, they see him floating there: a man in shimmering waistcoat and riding breeches wearing a severe expression.
“Trespassers…”
The hostess screams to the maid. “Margaret! Margaret! Open the doors at once!”
“Trespassers!” the ghost says again.
“Get out of our house—get out!” the host shouts. He is afraid so he shouts very loudly. His voice is brittle.
“You own nothing,” the ghost answers. “You live on a false inheritance.”
“What do you want?” the hostess screams. She is no longer smug about the Ashtons.
“The Diviners,” the ghost answers.
As the Diviners came to the end of Sixty-eighth Street, they saw a crowd running toward the park. Evie stopped a trio of young men. “What is it?” she asked.
“Ghosts,” they answered, excited. “There’s ghosts in Central Park!”
The Diviners raced with the crowd into the park, toward the Casino restaurant. They could hear the screams before they reached the parking lot, which was overrun by people fleeing. Fancy cars swerved out of park, banging into other cars but driving on without a backward glance. Light spasmed behind the Casino’s pretty windows.
“Are we going in?” Henry asked.
“Of course!” Evie answered.
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Wait a minute! What’s our plan?” Ling asked. Bloodcurdling screams rang out.
“Same as always,” Evie said.
“Same as always?” Jericho asked, confused, but Evie was already charging ahead.
Inside, the beautiful restaurant was a shambles, all overturned tables and palm trees uprooted from their ceramic pots. The
orchestra’s instruments were strewn about the stage. The people who had not been lucky enough to escape hid behind those tables, trembling with fear. In the center of the room were three ghosts. They shimmered around the edges, but Evie detected a difference from the others they’d faced. These ghosts seemed more corporeal, somehow, and that made them even more frightening.
The ghosts turned to face the Diviners and sniffed.
“Diviners. You’ve come,” the ghosts said in one voice.
The Diviners fell in, formed a line.
“What are we doing?” Jericho asked Memphis. He felt as if he’d arrived to take an exam for which he’d not studied.
“What do you want? Did he send you?” Evie asked the ghosts.
“He grows stronger. We grow stronger. You will be tested.” The ghosts drifted closer. They were turning. Dark veins crept up their pallid necks, curving around their cheeks and toward their mouths of jagged teeth.
“Hands,” Evie said, joining with the others.
Jericho took hold of Ling’s hand, though he still didn’t know why.
“You will be tested, Diviner. He will test all of you in time.” The ghosts were very close. Their fetid breath was nauseating. Henry feared he might be sick.
“He whispers to us so sweetly in our graves. He asks us why. Why should we have to die? All of that living, only to rot in the end. So unfair. We would have more. More life. And now, because of you, we shall take it. You’ve made us strong.”
“We haven’t done anything,” Evie said. To the others, she said, “Get ready.”
A constant whine, getting louder, as if all the souls in hell were singing.
“What… what are they doing?” Ling asked.
“He will make you see things,” the ghosts said.
The sound, louder still. Memphis’s body shook from it.