The King of Crows

by Libba Bray

  Behind him, Henry heard a passenger calling for Nelson. “Oh, George, I need this on board, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Right away.” He whispered to Bill and Henry, “Go!”

  Once they were on board, another porter named Coleman directed them to a private sleeper car at the back of the train. “You should be safe in here,” Coleman said.

  Henry whistled. It was nicely appointed, with two long seats facing each other, a slim table in between. Above each seat, hidden behind drapes, was a sleeper berth that could be opened up into a bed.

  Bill deposited Memphis onto one of the seats.

  “He okay?” Coleman asked.

  Bill nodded.

  “Just sit tight for now,” Coleman told them and pulled the door closed.

  The train lurched forward. Henry watched the platform receding as the train chugged into the darkened tunnel. In his own seat, Bill breathed heavily and stretched out his arms. He hadn’t seen the South in nearly ten years and had vowed never to go back.

  “Guess I’m headed home whether I like it or not,” Bill said.

  “Yeah. I guess we are at that,” Henry said.

  They looked over at Memphis, who was still out. He’d be powerful mad when he woke, Bill knew. But for now, he was safe. They were all safe. For how much longer, he couldn’t say.

  Over cups of hot tea with plenty of honey and lemon, Ling and Jericho told Alma about everything that had happened during the memorial.

  “We need to get out of New York,” Ling explained. “We have to get to Bountiful, Nebraska.”

  Alma made a face. “Nebraska? Why would anybody wanna go there?”

  “There’s another Diviner like us, made during Project Buffalo. We need her help to stop the King of Crows. And we have to get to her before the Shadow Men do. We were hoping maybe you could smuggle us out with your band,” Ling said meekly.

  It took Alma a second to understand, but then her eyes grew wide as she looked first at the six-foot-four-inch Jericho, with a face like a Nordic farm boy’s, and then at tiny, half-Chinese, half-Irish Ling, her crutches resting in her lap. “Oh, sure. You’ll blend right in with the Harlem Haymakers.”

  “Please, Alma?”

  Alma sighed. “Well, I can’t very well leave you here. We’ve got a bus. It’s leaving at nine thirty sharp tomorrow morning. Though Lord knows what to tell the Haymakers. And you can’t use your real names. We’ve got to give you aliases. Something bland and boring.”

  “Sure. How about Laurel and Hardy?” Jericho said, straight-faced.

  Ling frowned. “Was that a joke?”

  “Yes. It was supposed to be a joke.”

  Alma snapped her fingers. “I’ve got it! Ling, you’re now Mary. It’s the most common girl’s name I can think of.”

  “Mary… Chang,” Ling announced.

  “Perfect. And, Jericho, you are now…” Alma bit her lip as she scrutinized Jericho’s face.

  “Hans Andersen,” Jericho shot back, flicking a sideways glance at Ling.

  Alma put a hand to her hip. “Didn’t I just say you needed something bland?”

  “Hans is bland. If you’re in Denmark.”

  “Well, we ain’t. How about John Smith?” Alma offered.

  “Too obvious,” Jericho said. “How about… Freddy?”

  “Isn’t Freddy the annoying nickname Sam gave you?” Ling said.

  Jericho smirked. “Indeed.”

  Alma threw her hands up. “Fine. Freddy Smith it is. Now, it’s a big day tomorrow, what with going out on the road and lying to the band about bringing along wanted criminals. I’m going to need all the beauty sleep I can get.”

  Alma made up the couch for Ling. Jericho took the floor. In the dark, Ling turned her head and watched Alma’s door, wishing she were on the other side of it. Ling shut her eyes and pictured her parents’ restaurant. She stifled a tiny catch in her chest. That was her home, with two loving parents and a clattering kitchen noisy with neighbors. Doyers Street was the known world. Chinatown offered Ling some measure of comfort and security. But what about the country beyond Doyers Street? Even without malevolent spirits, it was frightening.

  But she would get to be with Alma a little while longer. She tried not to feel too guilty about how happy that made her. And just maybe she could get Alma to change her mind.

  From their hiding spot in the Ziegfeld Theatre’s costume storage room, Theta, Isaiah, and Evie could hear the show going on out front, people laughing and applauding the pretty chorus girls parading across the stage in elaborate costumes as if there were nothing to worry about.

  “Hold still,” Evie said.

  Theta winced as Evie dabbed at her burned hands with witch hazel before applying a balm and two fresh bandages from a kit on the makeup table. “How’s that?” Evie asked.

  “I wish I had a flask fulla hooch,” Theta said.

  “You and me both.”

  “What are we doing here?” Isaiah asked.

  “This is how we’re getting out of this town. In disguise.” Theta dragged out a wardrobe trunk that held a collection of baggy men’s trousers, threadbare coats, and beat-up bowler hats. She grabbed a handful of makeup and some sponges. “They’re looking for a Follies girl, the Sweetheart Seer, and a Diviner kid. They’re not looking for a bunch of hoboes. Here, Evil. Scrub your face clean. Every trace of powder and lipstick, gone.”

  Evie did as instructed, and by the time Theta had worked her magic, penciling in a mustache and darkening Evie’s brows, and the three of them had dressed themselves in rumpled men’s clothing, it was certain that no one would suspect that they were the fugitives.

  Evie shoved her wavy blond bob under Sam’s Greek fisherman’s cap and asked, “How do I look?”

  “I’d buy a newspaper from you,” Theta said.

  “I can’t tell if that was a compliment or an insult,” Evie said.

  “Wait here,” Theta said and disappeared.

  “Where’s she going?” Isaiah asked.

  Evie shook her head. In a minute, Theta returned.

  “What was that all about, Theta?” Evie asked.

  “I had to call Miss Lillian and ask her to look after Archie.”

  “Who’s Archie?” Isaiah asked.

  “My cat. Didn’t you say that Will had a car?” Theta asked. She winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes. An old Model T. It’s the ugliest flivver you’ve ever seen.”

  “Nobody’ll be looking at it, then. Can you drive?”

  Evie batted her lashes. “Like a champ.”

  Will had parked the car on Sixty-eighth Street. Across the narrow strip of road, the museum sat on its haunches, a wounded animal. The windows were dark. The sign still said MURDERERS.

  “Once, he gave me a piece of candy from his drawer,” Isaiah said softly. “He said I’d been real brave to work on my powers. And then he showed me how to make shadow rabbits on the wall.”

  “He did?” Evie said, surprised. She didn’t imagine Will being sentimental about children. Funny the things you didn’t know about people until it was too late.

  Evie waited until she was on Central Park West before turning on the flivver’s headlights, just in case anyone was watching. “Let’s get to Hopeful Harbor.”

  “Hey, I thought we were going to Bountiful to find Sarah Beth,” Isaiah said.

  “We are. But first we’re going to rescue Sam,” Evie said and pressed the gas so hard that Theta had to hold on to her hat.

  NOT ALONE

  Homestead, Kansas

  Vera Mathers hurried to gather her laundry from the backyard clothesline before the rain set in. There’d been so much of it this spring. Every day, the papers reported on the swollen Mississippi River threatening to break through the levees from Cairo, Illinois, all the way down to New Orleans. This morning, there had been a nice April breeze, warm enough that Vera opened all the windows and hung the washing to dry on the line. Now, though, the back of her tongue tasted like a rusty nail
. The sky was graying up again. So Vera left her five-year-old daughter, Becky, upstairs in the nursery to play with her dollies while she came outside to tend to the wash.

  Vera’s husband was a Fuller Brush salesman. He was on the road rather a lot. It was just Vera and Becky most of the time. Becky had been acting so funny lately. Sometimes the girl would stare off into nothing. Just yesterday, Vera had asked her what was so interesting about that spot on the wall and Becky had said “Ghosts,” then gone right back to staring until Vera told her to leave the table if she was going to act so silly.

  Vera had put in a call to the doctor anyway—a mother couldn’t be too careful. He told her it was nerves; it would pass. Vera’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Mathers, had died ten months earlier from a broken neck. The old woman had tried to get out of bed in her room up in the attic even though she could barely walk. She’d fallen headfirst down the attic steps and was dead before she hit the bottom. Vera could still see the way her mother-in-law had looked, all broken in a heap. Her eyes open and that little gold cross she wore settled into the hollow of her throat. At the funeral, people said nice things about Mrs. Mathers (wasn’t that what you were supposed to do about the dead?). “Why, Vera, you are a saint, an absolute saint to have cared for that bedridden old woman all these years,” they told her with a sympathetic pat on the arm. Vera had thanked them and never let on how overjoyed she was to be lowering that witch and her little gold necklace into the ground once and for all. She’d hated her mother-in-law. Hated the way that thankless biddy complained about Vera’s housekeeping, hated how she’d wrinkle her nose when Vera brought up the breakfast tray, telling her that the milk tasted sour or the eggs were too soft or the coffee was weak.

  Maybe Vera had forgotten to give the woman her heart pills that day. Maybe she’d even forgotten for a few days. Look here, she couldn’t be expected to remember everything, could she? What with Becky to raise and a house to run and her husband gone most of the time? Maybe she had taken too long to bring the old woman down to the toilet. Maybe she’d decided, this time, to ignore the woman’s grating voice shouting her name. Maybe that was why the old woman had gotten out of bed on her own and tried for the steps. If Vera was supposed to feel shame about it, well, she did not. The past ten months without that criticizing harpy had been some of the best of her life.

  With the first crack of lightning, wind lifted the bed linens on the clothesline. Vera jumped back, startled. Somebody was standing out in the tall grass behind the house. With trembling hands, Vera parted the swaying sheets. The field was empty. Nothing but grass bending in the wind. But she could swear she’d seen him in the flash of light—a man in a tall black hat watching her with cold eyes, with hunger. Just the glimpse of him had given her the feeling of some unimaginable horror bearing down.

  If her husband were home, she’d call for him. But he was in Topeka or Wichita or god only knows where with god only knows whom. She didn’t feel safe. Who did anymore? Just that week at bridge club, Mona Miller had said she’d felt a presence—yes, that was it, a presence—and she’d started locking the door and sleeping with a pistol by her bed. “This country’s going to the devil,” Mona had said, lips pursed. “Anyhow, that’s what Reverend Carden says, and I couldn’t agree more.”

  Mona Miller, that little hypocrite. All those visits to the Reverend Carden while his wife was at her sister’s over in Lawrence? Did she think no one noticed?

  A rumble of thunder brought Vera back to her task. The sky looked like a boxer’s face halfway through a fight, bruised and scowling, hinting at more violence. The laundry. Vera moved quickly, removing the clothespins and dropping the sheets into her basket, though her speed had less to do with the angry sky and more to do with some fear crawling up her spine, making her knees a little wobbly, fumbling her fingers. She had seen somebody; she was sure of it. She’d seen something.

  Now, why did she think that? Why did she think what she’d seen wasn’t entirely human? Her heart was beating very hard. The clouds groaned. She hurried, tearing the clothes from their pins, not caring whether they wrinkled in the basket. Vera had made it to the very last sheet when the back door to the kitchen banged shut. She clutched the last sheet to her chest and watched as, one by one, the first-floor windows slammed closed—kitchen, then powder room, then sunroom. Vera stumbled backward with a cry. Because a gray blot passed behind the last of those windows. A thing so quick it registered to her mind as fog.

  “It’s nothing,” she whispered. “You’re seeing things, Vera.”

  She glanced fearfully at the second-floor windows, which were still open. The filmy white curtains of the nursery fluttered out and sucked back in on a snore of wind. Her little girl was upstairs in that nursery all alone. Not alone, Vera’s mind screamed. The house slid sideways as Vera fought not to faint. She did not want to go inside. She wanted to leave her child and run down the newly paved road to her neighbor’s house a mile away.

  No. She was a mother. She had to go inside, had to get her girl.

  Vera bolted for the back steps. Thunder growled, coming closer. It sounded like a living thing on the hunt. Vera tugged on the back door. The knob wouldn’t turn. It won’t let me in, she thought. Everything in Vera Mathers’s body went tight. She ran into the yard and screamed Becky’s name. Oh, where was her girl? The second-floor window in her bedroom squeaked down slowly with a deliberateness that she knew, deep down in the dark place where reason loses its voice, could not be blamed on the storm. It was as if some unseen force had pressed it shut. Vera ran around to the front porch. Before she’d even reached the porch steps, the front door opened with a sigh, as if welcoming her. Vera stared straight into the foyer, at the staircase leading up to the second floor, to the bedrooms out of sight, the nursery all the way up past the shadowy stairwell.

  “B-Becky,” she said, barely a whisper. Then louder: “Becky! Rebecca Jean Mathers! You come downstairs this instant! Your mother wants to see you!”

  The floorboards on the second-floor landing creaked.

  “Becky! Becky Jean!”

  The girl did not answer. Another sharp crack of thunder broke. Vera raced into the foyer and a gust of wind slammed the door shut behind her. The house was unnaturally still. Sealed like a tomb. Vera had never been so frightened. She wished her husband were home to tell her she was being ridiculous, wished he were going up the stairs instead of her. Her eyes came even with the second-floor landing. She peered around the banister. The door to the nursery was closed. She could hear the girl talking to her dolls. Vera tiptoed toward the nursery. This was the moment she thought she might die of fright. “Please, please,” she whispered. Vera burst into the room. The girl looked up, surprised. She had made a tea party for the dolls and was dressing the last one. The floor was littered with her daughter’s artwork, another mess to clean up.

  “Rebecca Jean, didn’t you hear me calling you?” Vera sounded nearly hysterical.

  The little girl continued to dress her dolly in its fine blue velveteen dress. “Yes, ma’am. But I needed to get Baby Lucy ready for the tea party.”

  Vera’s fear transformed into anger. She had half a mind to turn Becky over her knee and spank her. Why, she would! The girl would learn to mind, by god. She took a step forward and stopped cold. Muddy streaks marred the clean floor. Clumps of dirt dotted the braided rug. There were worms crawling in all that dirt.

  “Did you track all this dirt in on my clean floor, Rebecca Jean?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Liar. The little liar. Oh, she would get such a whupping! Something shiny showed itself in all that dirt. Vera looked closer and clamped a hand over her mouth to stop the scream. She stumbled backward, away from the gold cross necklace on the rug. In horror, she took in the girl’s artwork on the floor: crude pictures of Vera hanging laundry on the line, and in the field beyond, under a sky full of blue lightning, was the man in the tall hat pulling the dead from their graves.

  Long shadows climbed the nursery wall like tho
rny vines growing into something else, something the house could not contain, something Vera did not want to see. A shuffling came from the hallway. Behind them, the door screeched as it began to slowly close, and it seemed to Vera that her heart would explode in her chest as Becky looked over her mother’s shoulder and smiled.

  “Hi, Grandma.”

  THE BROTHERHOOD OF SLEEPING CAR PORTERS

  Memphis leaned his head against the side of the train and stared out the window at the countryside moving past.

  “Where are we?” he croaked. His throat was dry and his neck was sore.

  “Just coming into Maryland on the Crescent Limited,” Henry said.

  “The… Crescent Limited?”

  “That train to New Orleans. How are you feeling?”

  “Like somebody knocked me out and put me on a train,” Memphis said tightly, his gaze still on the shapeless world outside the train window.

  “He’s worried about his brother,” Bill said from the other end of the seat. He had his head leaned back and his eyes shut.

  Memphis turned to face Bill. “Damn right I’m worried about my brother. You had no right to do what you did.”

  Bill kept his eyes closed. “Like I said, live to fight another day.”

  “I saw Theta and Evie with Isaiah,” Henry said. “They’ll look after him.”

  “Not like I will,” Memphis grumbled. “New Orleans. That’s a long way from Nebraska.”

  Bill opened his eyes at last. “We couldn’t be choosy ’bout which train to catch.”

  “I’ve still got some friends in New Orleans. They could get us on a steamboat that’ll take us as far as St. Louis,” Henry said, trying to mitigate the situation. He hated conflict of any kind.

  “You from N’awlins?” Bill said, surprised.

  “I suppose I am,” Henry answered.

  “You got kin there?” Bill asked.

  “I suppose I do,” Henry said tightly, and Bill knew well enough to leave it alone.