by Libba Bray
“You okay?” Jericho whispered.
Ling was surprised that he noticed. “Just tired.”
“You’ll see them again,” he promised.
And all Ling could do was nod again so she wouldn’t cry. Alma and the others were still singing. She hoped they weren’t going to sing the whole way. She bunched up her sweater to use as a pillow, placed it where the seat met the window, leaned her head against it, and closed her eyes.
She woke inside a dream. As always, she marveled at the freedom she had when dream walking. She could walk. Run. Dance. Paralysis had no reach here. She hoped she might be able to communicate with Henry.
“Henry?” she called.
She stepped through a doorway and found herself on the evening streets of a Cubist Chinatown. It was like looking into her little part of the world from many different angles. Long blocks of light for windows; soft blobs of red swaying between steeply angled fire escapes. Lanterns. The tenements stretched into points until they were joined to the night, and it was impossible to tell where building began and sky left off. People moved about like shades, quivering shapes with eyes set at odd angles, seeing nothing. Was Henry among these many shapes?
“Henry?” she called again, moving among the faceless crowd.
It wasn’t Henry but Mr. Levi who appeared. He had been their neighbor for many years, but he’d died a month earlier, and Ling had thought it sad to watch them carry out his possessions to the junk man. He looked just as he had the last time she’d seen him, in his white shirt and long tweed coat, a hat on his bald head. His face was thin and gray.
“He’ll test every one of you in time,” Mr. Levi said, then melted like paint.
Whispers bounced through the canyon between tenements, a pressure building inside Ling’s body: We’re coming, we’re coming, we are coming. Around the blind curve of Doyers Street, a monstrous shadow clawed up the fronts of the buildings, reaching over the fire escapes toward the lighted windows and the precious life inside. It swirled around the ghostly figure of Will Fitzgerald. He looked haunted. He raised his hand as if trying to hail her from far away.
“Change…” was all Will managed before the shadow rose up behind him like a wave, blotting out everything.
Ling woke. The bus was noisy with chatter and the hum of the road.
“You were dream walking,” Jericho said quietly.
Ling nodded.
“Anything?”
“I didn’t find Henry, or any of the others,” she said. “But I saw Will.”
“And?”
She shook her head. “It was like he wanted to warn me, but, I don’t know, I don’t know. I keep thinking about what those ghosts said to us in Central Park. You did this. Did what?”
EVERYWHERE
The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult was locked, naturally, but that didn’t stop a good reporter like T. S. Woodhouse. Woody wrapped a rock inside his jacket to muffle the sound, then smashed it against the stained-glass window, picking out enough of the shards to climb inside without impaling himself. The police would be back soon. He didn’t have long. Footprints showed in the dust. Lots of footprints. Police, no doubt. But there were women’s footprints, too. Woody smirked. They’d been here, and he was sure it was Evie leading the charge. Good for her.
Woody had been to the museum a few times. He’d always found it musty and sad. Now he looked for anything that could help him with what he’d seen on the report the bird had brought him. A secret government project to make Diviners was a pretty big story. And Woody intended to break that story.
A bird darted into the museum with a great squawking and flapping of wings. It fluttered up near the painted ceiling, then hovered near the door into the hallway. Could it possibly be the same bird? That was crackers. Then again, strange things were happening.
“Okay,” Woody said. “Okay, I’m on the trolley.”
He followed it into Will’s study. The bird settled on Will’s desk and hopped onto a stack of newspaper clippings, some of them yellowed with age. The bird tapped its beak against the stack and hopped off. Woody skimmed the first four articles, his skin prickling. This wasn’t just a story; this was a terrifying warning.
Woody read through the stories, noting the one thing they all had in common: “Reported seeing a man in a tall hat”; “Saw a man in a stovepipe hat”; “Claims he was visited in dreams by a man in a stovepipe hat just before he saw the world burn.” Woody’s alarm grew when he realized that the clippings went back some ten years. Whatever had been happening had been going on for some time. Building. Woody shoved two handfuls of the clippings into his pockets.
The bird cawed and cawed. It flew out and back into the library.
“You sure keep a guy hopping. What is it that…” Woody’s words died on his lips.
The hazy form of Will Fitzgerald stood beside a chalkboard in the corner. Woody’s mind reached for the comfort of a rational explanation and found none. His reporter’s cynicism deserted him. Woody shut his eyes tightly. When he opened them again, Will’s ghost was still there. Woody’s knees buckled. He grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself.
“W-Will…” he croaked.
The ghost nodded slowly and raised a hand. What if it came after him? Woody had to fight the strong urge to run as words slowly chalked themselves onto the slate:
They need you.
Tell the truth.
Talk to Margaret.
And then, in a flash, it was all gone—Will’s ghost, the words, the bird. Woody stood alone, trembling in the museum with the clippings still in his pockets. He let out the yelp he’d been holding back, and then he ran to the window where he’d broken in, hissing as he nicked his hand on a sharp edge in his hurry to get out.
An hour later, he was camped outside the Tombs in Lower Manhattan along with most of Park Row’s reporters, waiting for a statement from Detective Terrence Malloy on the incident in Times Square, the arrest of Margaret Walker, and the continuing manhunt for the missing Diviners.
“What happened to your hand, Woodhouse?” A reporter in an ill-fitting hat motioned with his pencil at the bandage Woody had hastily wrapped around the cut from the window glass. “Your bookie come for a finger at last?”
Woody didn’t take the bait. He’d spent the last hour reading through all of Will Fitzgerald’s newspaper clippings. Ghosts. They were everywhere. And who was the man in the hat? What was he?
Detective Malloy sauntered from the jail accompanied by six of his men to face the reporters, who immediately began barraging him with questions. Malloy assured everyone that Jake Marlowe had been taken to safety and that the New York bulls, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were doing everything in their combined power to bring the fugitives to justice. The manhunt had gone nationwide.
“We believe some of these anarchists boarded a train at Penn Station last night. Our agents across the country are working to apprehend them,” Malloy announced. “We’ll get ’em, and that’s a promise.”
A reporter chewing gum noisily raised his pencil. “Where was that train headed, Detective?”
“That’s confidential.”
“Hey, Detective! Has Margaret Walker ’fessed up yet?”
“No comment.”
“You gonna let us talk to that Walker woman?” another reporter asked.
“No,” Malloy said.
“Is that your final word?”
“Sounds like the final word,” the first reporter said around his gum.
Woody raised his hand. “Detective Malloy! T. S. Woodhouse of the Daily News.”
“I know who you are, Mr. Woodhouse,” Malloy sneered.
“What if Diviners aren’t a menace? What if they’re trying to protect us from a much greater danger?”
Malloy folded his arms across his chest. “Yeah? What danger is that, Mr. Woodhouse?”
“Danger from another world.”
“You mean like Canada?” the reporter in the bad hat
asked.
“Yeah, Charlie. Canada.” The gum-chewing reporter laughed.
Woody cleared his throat. “My, ah, sources tell me there was a secret project during the war that opened up a portal into another dimension. The entity from that world, the man in the stovepipe hat, is behind all this unrest.”
It took approximately five seconds before the entire assembly broke into wild laughter.
“Hey, Woody, who’s your source on this—Crazy Al, who talks to the pigeons in the park?”
Another reporter tapped the side of his head. “I think his bootlegger is cutting his whiskey with gasoline and it’s gone to his brain.”
Woody ignored them. “You never did solve the Naughty John case,” he reminded Malloy.
“Sure we did. Officer Lyga was a hero.”
“C’mon, Detective. We all know that’s bunk and you and the boys are covering up what really happened up at Knowles’ End,” Woody pressed.
“Yeah? And what’s that, pray tell?”
“What if it’s like Will Fitzgerald said, and it was ghosts? There are ghosts. They’re here. You can’t deny that.”
“I haven’t seen any ghosts,” Malloy said.
“It’s true. The folks at the Casino were pretty splifficated that night,” a reporter with a ruddy face and a gruff voice posited. “For all we know, the Diviners paid some actors to show up and make ’em look important just to throw us off the scent.”
“Anarchists,” the reporter in the hat said, shaking his head, and Woody wanted to take him by his lapels. This was how it happened if you weren’t careful. Somebody tried to redirect the story, and if nobody challenged it, that story became what everybody considered the truth.
“What about that night on Wall Street a few weeks back? The police were there when the Diviners faced off with—”
“Actors. Stage magic,” the reporter insisted. “C’mon, Woody. Why’re you falling for this bogus, fake medium bunk?”
“Seems like the Daily News’ll print anything these days,” Malloy echoed with a chuckle, earning a few laughs from the reporters.
“It isn’t bunk!” From his pocket, Woody grabbed a stack of newspaper clippings he’d taken from the museum. “These tell a different story. The professor was cataloging these. Ghost sightings and disturbances. Warnings. They’re from all over the country. And guess what? These started showing up just after the war. A lot of ’em mention that man in the hat.”
Malloy glowered. “Where’d you get those?”
Woody shoved them back into his pocket. “An interested party.” He didn’t need to tell Malloy that he was the interested party.
Malloy spread his arms wide. “Now, listen to me: There are no ghosts. There’s no secret project that opened up a door to some other dimension. That’s just plain crackers. But there is a threat to our national security in these Diviners with their unnatural powers palling around with anarchists who bomb innocent citizens and try to destroy this country. This is the greatest nation on earth. We aim to keep it that way. With law and order. So help me god.”
A reporter nodded. “Pretty speech, Detective. Say, you running for governor?”
Malloy puffed up, pleased with himself. “That’s all for today, gentlemen.”
The ruddy-faced man laughed. “Gentlemen? We’re reporters.”
“Hey, Woody! You need a ride to the cemetery to talk to your sources?” the gum-chewing reporter called out, earning another round of chuckles. It burned Woody up.
“I’m gonna blow this story wide open. And when I do, we’ll see who’s laughing.”
“Aw, faith and begorrah, Seamus,” the reporter said, mocking him. “You’re all wet, Woody. Go see your bookie and leave the reporting to the real boys, why don’tcha?”
“Go to hell,” Woody said back. He needed to talk to Margaret Walker and find out what was happening across the country. There was a threat coming, he knew. While everybody was dancing in nightclubs and reading Harriet Henderson’s gossip pages and arguing about evolution and Prohibition and how short women’s skirts had gotten. While people were letting themselves get distracted by the latest John Barrymore picture or Mae West sex scandal and telling themselves that everything was the berries because men like Jake Marlowe were making the stock market soar. Woody was twenty-one and as ambitious as they came. That was true. But even more than making a name for himself like his hero, H. L. Mencken, Woody wanted to report the truth. Because he was afraid of what he was learning. Yes, he was afraid.
Woody gazed up at the looming stone fortress that was the Manhattan jail.
How was he going to get in to see Margaret Walker?
As Woody turned the corner, he saw Roy Stoughton, Theta Knight’s supposed husband, talking to some of Dutch Schultz’s henchmen. Woody pretended to be taking notes, but he was listening.
“What do you mean you lost her?” Roy said. He was angry.
“She disappeared, Boss.”
“Did you put out the word with the Empire?”
“Talked to the Grand Dragon myself. They’re telephoning every klavern and asking them to pass along the word. No matter where she goes, she’ll have our boys looking for her.”
Roy Stoughton was in with the KKK. As the son of Irish immigrants, Woody had no love for those cowards with their white sheets and burning crosses. But the Diviners were in a heap of trouble if the Klan was looking for them, too.
Woody reached into his pocket and took out one of the clippings, reading it once more with dread. “They’re everywhere,” he muttered and hurried back to his office.
THE GHOSTS INSIDE THEM
West Virginia
It was lunchtime, and the breaker boys were headed home from their first long shift at the mines. All morning they’d climbed up the noisy, constantly moving chutes, sorting through the day’s haul to separate useless rock from valuable coal.
They’d just come over the ridge and were taking their favorite shortcut through the holler down toward the company town where they all lived. The walk was steep through the trees. The smoke from the coke ovens cooking down the coal hung along the pipe-cleaner tops of the mountains, erasing the sky. The dark seemed to come earlier here. Some said the mountains were haunted by the ghosts of dead miners. There were moonshiners up there, too, and they kept watch over their stills with rifles.
The four of them had been laughing about something that had happened earlier in the day. One of the younger boys, Giuseppe, had picked up two pieces of rock and stuck them in his cheeks like a squirrel gathering nuts. Well, they’d all fallen out over that one, laughing until the foreman barked at them to get back to work. That shared laugh had broken up the long day, though, and they enjoyed reliving it now on their walk.
“Naw, Jakub. It weren’t like that,” Buster said, trying to catch his breath. “It were more like ’is.” Buster dropped to his haunches and hopped around, scratching under his armpits and mewling.
“Buster, you plumb crazy. That ain’t no squirrel—’at’s a dadgum kitty cat!” Buster’s brother, Junior Lee, said, coughing along with his laugh. He was thirteen, and next month, he’d graduate from working the chutes to going down into the mines proper with his daddy and his uncle Joe.
“Do it more!” Gabor said. He was only ten, and his English was tinged with the soft rhythm of his parents’ native Hungarian.
Jakub hopped around, trying to make his pals laugh again, but Junior Lee had stopped short in the blue-gray woods. He held up a hand. “You hear sump’in’?”
Buster’s ears still rang from the constant agitation of the mine’s machinery. “Like what?”
Junior Lee smiled mischievously. “I’ll bet it’s some o’ the other boys playing a trick on us. Let’s hide here and wait for ’em!”
Delighted, the boys grabbed pebbles and pine cones, stuffing them into their trouser pockets, then picked their hiding places—Junior Lee cloaked by a hemlock tree, Buster and Gabor crouched behind a large rock, and Jakub, the smallest, on his haunches in a th
icket of bushes. They waited with coiled glee. What a good time this would be! Those pranksters sure would be surprised when they got hit with rocks and pine cones. But the other boys were taking their sweet time.
Junior Lee was the first to feel that something wasn’t right. In a matter of seconds, the woods had gotten very cold. “Feels right airish all of a sudden,” he said.
They abandoned their hiding places. The mist that had been side-stepping up the mountain had swooshed into the holler and filled up the gaps between the trees. They knew these woods well, and yet, which way was home?
The sound was back, and this time, it was plain that it wasn’t coming from boys playing tricks. There was a high whine like mad hornets escaping a nest and coming to sting. A deep, low growl echoed off the mountains. The boys hunted some, but this didn’t sound like any animal they’d ever aimed for with their daddy’s guns. Whatever it was, it seemed to be everywhere.
The sky had gone dark as a bucket of coal dust. The trees were nothing but skeletons in the gray wool fog. Buster had heard his daddy talking about the time he’d narrowly avoided being trapped by a cave-in, how seconds before, the canary had started screeching; it had made his whole body go tight as a wire. Buster was tight now. The birds flapped up from the trees in one giant wave. There was something here with them in the mist. The boys felt it deep in their bodies, lighting up the parts of their brains that hadn’t changed for humankind since their cave ancestors had hidden from predators in the dark.