by Libba Bray
Henry wondered if his parents were still alive. If his mother had gotten any better or if her mind was still broken. He thought of his cold, distant father reading his newspaper at the table as he always did while the servants poured his tea. He wondered when his parents had stopped looking for him. Or if they had ever started. He could never forgive his father for what had happened to Louis.
“From New Orleans, we can get a steamboat to St. Louis, and then catch a train to Omaha, and from Omaha, we’ll get on a train to Bountiful,” Henry said. He didn’t want to think about his family. There was nothing in New Orleans to hold him but old memories—ghosts it was time to put to rest.
“We can’t do that if everybody’s out there looking for us.” Memphis watched the trees, houses, the tiny lights of the distant cities flying past.
“Isaiah’s in good hands,” Henry said.
“You don’t know that,” Memphis grumbled. “What if the police caught up with them? Or those Shadow Men? What if he got separated from Theta and Evie?” Memphis pressed his hands to his temples as if he could squeeze the fear from his mind.
A quick knock at the door. The three of them sat up, alert, only relaxing when Nelson let himself in. “Brought you some sandwiches,” he said, sneaking food from his pockets. Memphis, Henry, and Bill dug in, barely taking time to swallow.
“I’ll try to get you some pie, too,” Nelson said. “If any of us porters come by, we’ll give the knock.” He rapped five times in a syncopated rhythm—one, two, three-and-four. “Otherwise, don’t open up.”
“How long before we get to New Orleans?” Henry asked.
“Tomorrow evening,” Nelson said. “Listen, if you want to keep your mind off of things, you can join the Brotherhood later tonight. Once everybody’s sleeping, ’round three or four in the morning, we get a little card game going, shoot some craps. Small bets mostly. But it passes the time when you’ve got a lot of it weighing down on you.”
“Thank you. Much obliged,” Bill said.
Henry swallowed a bite of sandwich. “Say, why do they call you George if your name is Nelson?”
Nelson snorted. “Lot of these passengers don’t bother to ask our names. They just call us all George, as in Mr. George Pullman, owner of these trains. It’s become, you might say, a bit of a rueful joke we all share.”
Memphis’s jaw tightened. Henry could feel his anger across the table. Though Nelson hadn’t said it, he understood that the passengers in question were white like him.
“We take their tips, though. Their money’s green enough,” Nelson said and winked. “All right now. We’ll bring you whatever you need. Just try to stay in here. I’ll look in on you later,” he said and shut the door behind him.
Memphis and Bill sat on one side, Henry on the other. Henry kept eating his sandwich. He was sensitive enough to know that some private communication had passed between Bill, Memphis, and Nelson, something that wasn’t for him. Henry didn’t know what to say, only that he felt vaguely guilty about Nelson’s comment.
“I’ve never called anybody George unless it was his name,” Henry said, trying to lighten the mood. Memphis crossed his arms and returned to his window gazing.
“Hmph,” Bill grunted.
“What’s that s’posed to mean?” Henry asked.
“Just that there are lots of ways of calling somebody George.” Bill didn’t explain further. He finished his sandwich and closed his eyes again.
The only way for Memphis to stay sane was to write. He watched the little houses peeking up between the trees. A poem began to take shape. Within a half hour, it was done. He was proud of the work, but to what end? No magazine would publish a poem by Memphis Campbell, anarchist agitator. He titled the poem “Scenes from a Window” and signed it The Voice of Tomorrow.
He had an idea.
There was paper on the train. He wrote out the poem on another sheet. Then he folded it and shoved it between the bed and the wall, where it could be found by a stranger.
The train traveled down the eastern seaboard and into the night. In the wee hours, Memphis, Henry, and Bill played cards with some of the porters. Their sleeping compartment was close quarters and thick with cigarette smoke, but, as Nelson had promised, it passed the time and kept their minds from their troubles for a while. The porters were loose here, Henry noticed. They talked freer. None of that “Yes, sir,” “No, sir” radio-soft talk. It was like when the porters stepped outside this room and put on their hats, they’d become themselves once removed, characters in a play. Sometimes you had to become a different version of yourself to move safely through certain spaces in the world. Henry knew something about that.
After the same pot of money had been lost and won and lost again, Nelson dealt a new hand. “Say,” he said, tossing down cards with a practiced agility. “Tell me something ’bout being a Diviner. See now, I heard y’all could read a man’s thoughts from a mile away. Go on, then. Tell me: What am I thinking now?”
“Probably dirty,” Coleman said, laughing through his nose.
“Definitely dirty,” one of the other porters, Philippe, said, throwing down a two of diamonds.
“I can’t read anybody’s thoughts,” Memphis said.
“Me, either,” Henry chimed in.
Nelson fixed his eyes on Memphis. “You can heal, though, right? The Harlem Healer?”
Memphis nodded.
“Oh, oh! If I cut myself right now, you could fix me up? Is that so?” a porter named Roger said. He was reaching for his pocketknife. Memphis put up a hand.
“I probably could, but I don’t believe we should test that,” Memphis said, and the man put the knife away.
“Last thing we need is you bleeding all over this carpet,” Nelson said, shaking his head. He looked at Henry. “And you? What can you do?”
“I can dream walk,” Henry said.
“Dream walk?” Coleman said, making a face. “What on earth is that?”
“I can walk in people’s dreams,” Henry said, blushing. He felt stupid. His power suited him fine, but compared to Memphis’s healing or Theta’s fire, it did seem kind of paltry.
Coleman waggled his eyebrows. “Ladies’ dreams?” The others snickered at this. Henry blushed again, though this time it had nothing to do with his Diviner ability. “Sorry. We don’t mean any harm. Just don’t seem like much.”
You have no idea how much you can come to know about a person when you see inside their dreams, Henry wanted to say. But it didn’t seem like the time or place.
“Y’all see ghosts, though. Am I right?” Coleman said, changing the subject, much to Henry’s relief.
“That’s right,” Bill said, puffing on a cigar clenched between his teeth.
“Well. I got a story for you, then.”
“Oh, Lord. Here we go.…” Nelson rolled his eyes and shuffled his deck of cards in case anybody wanted to go another round.
“Now, let a man tell a story! It’s a good story, too. You’ll see,” Coleman insisted. “It happened right here on this train. About two weeks ago last Thursday. Now, I had the job of being the porter on duty in the sleeper car. All the curtains were drawn. Folks sleeping off the hooch they snuck on board and were pouring into their ginger ales all night.”
“So many orders for ginger ale!” Philippe said on a laugh.
“Coleman’ll still be telling this story when we pull into N’awlins,” Nelson said to Henry, Memphis, and Bill with a wink. And for a moment, Memphis was entertained enough to put aside his misery.
“We were passing through Alabama, I recall, coming close to Selma. I’m sitting there, feeling a might bit sleepy myself after a long day, when I hear something. I reckon it’s one of the customers having a bad dream. But it’s real whispery. Like silk rubbed across sandpaper…”
“Silk across sandpaper…” Philippe said dreamily. “Why, Coleman, I didn’t know you were a poet.”
“You gonna hush up?”
Still laughing, Philippe motioned him on.
Memphis, Bill, and Henry sat forward in their seats, electrified.
“Well, I was afraid it might be a fire, you see. So I got up to check, but there was no fire that I could tell anywhere. I was just about to alert the conductor, and that’s when I saw her. She was down at the end of the corridor in that haze. A lady in a long dress and gloves and a flowered hat, like she was going to a church supper. She said, ‘Excuse me, porter, is this the stop for Cahawba?’ I put my finger to my lips and motioned for her to follow me into the dining car so she wouldn’t wake anybody. She just kept waiting by the door. The fog was all around her, and now I really was worried there was a fire. ‘I need to get off at Cahawba,’ she told me again. I said, ‘Miss, I’m sorry, but this train doesn’t stop at Cahawba. Selma’s the next stop.’ ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘But I have an engagement in Cahawba. My brother’s in the prison there. I must go to him.’ I didn’t have the slightest notion what she was talking about, but I needed to let the conductor know about that smoke. So I said, ‘Miss, if you’ll wait right here a minute, I’ll be back to help you.’ ‘Oh!’ she said, and she got the funniest look on her face, like she just remembered something important. ‘This is my stop.’ And then, as sure as I’m sitting here, she vanished right in front of my eyes—the Lord is my Shepherd!—and she took all that mist with her. The corridor was clear as could be. And she was nowhere to be found.”
“Or you fell asleep and that was all a dream,” Roger said. “Hey, maybe you can ask the dream walker here to find your lady friend tonight.”
The other porters busted up laughing.
“Go on, go on, have yourselves a good laugh. But you ain’t heard the other half of the story.”
Nelson shook his head and spread out the cards in his hand. “Like I said, all the way to N’awlins.”
Coleman ignored him. He leaned forward. There was an intensity in his eyes. “When I got to Selma, I asked the stationmaster if he knew of any place called Cahawba, and if so, was there a prison in the town, ’cause I’d had a passenger asking to get off at Cahawba to go see her brother there. Well, I tell you, that man turned pale as an old slug. He said, ‘There used to be a prison in Cahawba. It held three thousand Union prisoners during the Civil War, and it hasn’t been in use since. Cahawba’s abandoned, mister. It’s a ghost town, home to nothing but weeds and the dead.’” Coleman straightened his spine with that and raised a hand. “My right hand to God.”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Nelson let out a big, booming laugh. And all the porters joined in once more.
“It happened. I’m telling you it happened,” an indignant Coleman insisted.
“I believe you,” Memphis said, and the laughter quieted down some. “There’s things out there. And they’re coming for us. You need to know this.”
The mood in the compartment shifted from ease to a charged discomfort.
Nelson held tightly to the deck of cards. “Seraphina mentioned something about a trickster in the crossroads, a King of Crows. What is that?”
Bill blew out a perfect ring of smoke. “The Bogeyman. ’Cept this one ain’t somethin’ your mama made up to keep you in line. This one is the real McCoy.”
“Well, what does he want?”
“Chaos. He wants us good and scared,” Henry said.
The train rushed past the clanging bells of a crossing. The sound swam past the windows and faded into nothing.
Nelson shook his head. “There’s no order anymore, I tell you. It’s like this poem I read by this Irish fella. Something about a falcon not being able to hear the falconer—”
“‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity,’” Memphis quoted. “W. B. Yeats. ‘The Second Coming.’”
“That’s the fella. Yes, sir. No order. No order.”
But more and more Memphis had begun to ask himself if there had ever been order, or if order was one more myth people repeated so they didn’t have to think too much about the violence lurking just under the surface of every polite exchange, every façade of “civilization.” And just whom did “order” serve?
Dawn was sneaking up over the cotton fields. Those first golden stirrings imbued the land with an ethereal beauty. If there were any restless ghosts out there right now, Memphis couldn’t see them. He was the only restless thing as far as he could tell.
“This country is haunted. Don’t let anybody tell you differently,” Coleman said.
As the porters went back to work, Memphis, Henry, and Bill settled into their beds. Exhaustion had found them at last. Memphis could barely keep his eyes open. Already, Henry was snoring.
“Memphis,” Bill said from his side. “This place in Bountiful. The farm Isaiah talked about. I seen it before.”
“You did?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“When?” Memphis said on a yawn.
Bill looked uncomfortable. “When I was taking from the boy.”
Taking. That was one way of putting it. Memphis knew that Bill was a changed man, but thinking about who he’d been before, someone who weakened his brother by stealing power from him, made Memphis angry all over again. He flopped onto his back so he wouldn’t have to look at Bill. “What about it?”
“I saw into Isaiah’s vision. There was a big tree, and dust coming up so thick on the road you couldn’t see through it. There was something inside that dust, though. Something that made my neck go cold. And Isaiah was hollering out a warning.”
Bill was quiet for so long that Memphis was afraid he’d fallen asleep. “What warning?”
“‘Ghosts on the road,’” Bill said.
“What do you think it means?”
Bill shook his head slowly, like he was losing an internal argument. “Cain’t say. Wherever we’re going, though, don’t feel like we’re heading away from the storm but steering into it.”
Memphis couldn’t sleep. Every time he’d get close, he’d see Isaiah, lost in the crowd of Times Square, and he’d startle awake. He narrowed the gap in the curtains to close out the light and lay back down. To soothe Isaiah to sleep, Memphis would tell him a story about two brothers who couldn’t be separated by anything in this world or the next. Now that story felt like a lie. His eyes were getting heavier, each blink a name—Theta. Isaiah. Theta.
A sound pulled Memphis awake, every muscle taut. Bill and Henry were still sleeping, but the train had stopped. Memphis listened. All quiet. He padded barefoot to the door, slid it back, and peeked out. The corridor was dark and empty. Had they slept through till night again? Were they in New Orleans already? Had Nelson forgotten about them?
Memphis wasn’t supposed to leave the compartment and risk being seen, but it felt so still, so strangely quiet, and he was worried. As silently as possible, he crept to the end of the corridor. He paused at the entrance to the dining car. Places were set. White linens draped the tables. The car was completely deserted. Where is everyone? Memphis wondered. And why has the train stopped? At the end of the dining car was an open door leading outside. Moonlight splashed across the steps leading down to the tracks.
“Nelson?” Memphis called.
The steps were cold against Memphis’s bare feet. He dropped from the last one onto the ground, then walked backward, peering up to see into the windows. Not a soul. All around him were cotton fields, their white bulbs like a dusting of snow. Had there been an accident? Was someone hurt? Were there injured people somewhere out there? Memphis left the road and stepped into the fields. The cotton plants were as tall as he was; the rows between them narrow. As Memphis pushed his way through, the branches pricked and poked at him. The night sound of feeding insects was loud. Something landed on Memphis’s shoulde
r. With a yelp, he brushed it away. A bug landed on its back in the dirt, legs circling, a boll weevil. The beetle-like things were everywhere, Memphis saw. They had infested the cotton and were eating it down to nubs. As if sensing him, the insects scuttled down the ruined crop and wriggled fast through the fields, coming together at the end of the claustrophobic row. They crawled toward Memphis in a black-shine wave. Memphis wanted to run but found his feet were stuck fast in the dirt. He glanced behind him. The train seemed a mile away.
The high wail of a trumpet pierced the night. The bugs scattered into the cotton. Far ahead, the tops of the plants swayed violently, then broke with a sickening snap. Something else was coming. Memphis’s blood thumped frantically in his ears. The cotton bent again. Snap. Snap. Snap. The dead were marching through the fields like soldiers.
Memphis pulled at his legs. They wouldn’t budge. The dead were coming. Snap. The trumpet sounded again, and the dead stopped, as if at attention. Hoofbeats shook the ground. A phantom-gray horse galloped forward, and on its back was Gabe. His eyes were a dull black. Embalmer’s thread hung in broken ends from his bloodied lips.
“Brother,” Gabe rasped, making the thread dance. “Heal me. Let me rest.”
The dead growled deep in their throats, a hellish chorus.
“Go on, Memphis,” Gabe said.
“I… can’t…” Memphis whispered.
“Do it! Heal me. Give me final peace. Please.”
Gabe was one of the rotting dead. Gabe had been his best friend. Memphis put a hand to Gabe’s chest and was answered with a sharp electric shock. He cried out and yanked his smoking fingers away.
Gabe laughed and the dead echoed his laughter. “I don’t need your favors, brother. We are powerful now. You’ll see. Soon enough.” Gabe’s voice deepened and warped, as if someone were dragging a finger across the surface of a record to slow it. “How looong will you be aaable to heeeal, brrroootherrr? Howww much powwwer do you reeeally have?”
He raised his trumpet and blew a long, piercing note. It echoed through the countryside. The sky fractured and filled with unnatural blue light that struck the earth, wounding it. From the wounds, more dead rose, wisps of smoke that took spectral form. So many dead—an unholy crop. Their bodies twitched and fluttered like lightbulbs threatening to short out. But their faces were all the same: powder-pale with snarling mouths hinting at their all-consuming hunger. Their teeth were so much sharper than Memphis remembered.