by Libba Bray
Theta knew the end of the story, but a sense of dread filled her anyway as she turned the pages, reading quickly:
There were petals on the doorstep again. Lillian was cross with me. But I am beside myself. It is a sign, just as the man in the hat promised. Elijah is coming for me.…
…What have I conjured?
…Father and Teddy are gone. Dead from the fever. This is my doing. I cannot meet Mother’s or Lillian’s eyes. I have brought about an abomination. Or perhaps it is I who is the abomination. He will never let me be. “Till death do us part.” That was the bargain I made, and the man in the hat means to keep me to it until I am driven mad by my sins or taken by my dead lover, to what terrible fate, I cannot say, I dare not imagine.…
…Tonight, I shall go to Elijah’s grave to perform the binding spell. To the devil with the man in the hat.
An entry later that same night said simply, It is finished.
And then Addie’s entries stopped altogether, as if she wanted no further record. No proof of what she’d done.
“How do you bind somebody?” Theta wondered aloud. If the spell had been done before, then it could be performed again.
Theta returned to the spell book. There were spells reaching back generations, but the language was stiff and formal and very hard to understand. Was shew the same thing as show? But at last, she found the spell she wanted. From what she could gather, you had to set your intention. You had to weave yourself into the spell you cast so that you could not escape your part in it.
“What does that mean?” Theta whispered. She wished Addie had written out exactly what she’d done—and in plain English. Theta shut the book. “This is crackers,” she said to no one. “I don’t know the first thing about being a witch.”
But she was tired of doing nothing while Miss Addie wasted away. Binding Elijah’s angry, possessive ghost from doing any harm to Addie was the best she could do. She read through the spell and gathered what she needed. Then she left the compartment.
In the pale moonlight, the darkened wagons were ghosts of the day that had been. A gentle breeze ruffled the Big Top as it lay on the railroad car.
For her spell, Miss Addie had taken a lock of Elijah’s hair and cut off a finger bone. Theta’s stomach turned at that. Theta had nothing of Elijah’s to use. The spell book said you could write the name of the person you wanted to bind from doing harm on a piece of paper, tie it up with string, and burn it.
“‘What you do shall return threefold,’” Theta read aloud. “Gee, thanks, creepy book. What does that mean?” She was really flying blind here.
She wrote Elijah’s name on a piece of paper. She had no string with which to tie it up. Miss Addie had used Elijah’s hair, so Theta yanked out a strand of her own hair and wrapped it tightly around the folded-up paper. “I bind you from doing harm, Elijah. Go back to your grave and harm no more.” She felt silly saying it, but she had to do it for Miss Addie’s sake—for all of their sakes. She couldn’t bind every single one of the Army of the Dead, but she could take out this one lousy bum.
Theta lit a candle and cupped the flame with her other hand. She dripped the wax down onto the offering. “I bind you from doing harm, Elijah. I bind you from doing harm. I bind you from doing harm.” She touched the flame to the paper. The flame mesmerized Theta, as if she could feel it within her. As if she could feel a generation of women who’d been cast out, hung, stoned to death, and burned alive taking root now. She could swear she saw Miss Addie’s face in the flame. The fire and its vision exploded in a bright flare. With a yelp, Theta dropped it. Out in the night, a hawk called three times. Theta let the hair-and-paper bundle burn until it was a charred mess. Then she buried it in the earth and tamped it down with her foot. Was she supposed to feel different now? Well, she didn’t. How did you know when a spell had worked?
“Buncha bushwa,” Theta said on a sigh. She gathered everything into her pockets, thinking of all the times she’d seen Miss Addie wandering the halls of the Bennington, sprinkling salt from her own pockets, intoning some spell of protection while the residents shook their heads and called her crazy. “Now I’m the crazy lady,” Theta said.
On her way back to her compartment, the breeze shifted. In it, Theta thought she heard a faint shuffling. The crack of a branch. She surveyed the deserted fairgrounds. It was pretty quiet except for Billy, the world’s loudest goat. Theta went to his stall to check on him. She found him standing in the corner, bleating.
“You’re gonna wake everybody up,” Theta said. She tossed him a little bit of feed. He stopped making noise long enough to eat it. “Get some sleep, pal. Big day tomorrow.”
As a bone-tired Theta nestled her head against the pillow, she thought she heard that same shuffling sound. She held her breath, listening.
“Just the wind,” she whispered and shut her eyes.
Isaiah spoke into the dark, careful not to wake Sam. “Sarah Beth? You out there?” He closed his eyes, willing her to appear, and in a moment his arms tickled. His body trembled. And he was in the dark space.
She was standing with the storm at her back. “Isaiah! How long before you’re in Bountiful?”
“Dunno. Still with the circus. Sure does take a long time to cross this country.”
“The King of Crows is up to something bad. I can feel it. Can you?”
Isaiah couldn’t feel it, and that upset him. He’d always been able to sense danger. Why not now? “Mm-hmm,” he said. He didn’t want to admit this to Sarah Beth. What if she didn’t think he was special? What if she didn’t want to be a team? “What do you see?” Isaiah asked, fishing.
“There’s something in the towns. Places nobody else sees,” she said. “I don’t know what, precisely, but I’ve got a pain in my belly over it. Oh, you’ve got to hurry, Isaiah! I don’t know how much longer we’ve got.”
“I promise we’re coming, Sarah Beth,” Isaiah said.
“I can’t wait to meet proper,” she said.
“Likewise.”
The moon kept watch over the sleeping circus. Over the painted wagons. Over the long snake of railroad cars waiting for morning. Over the empty food stalls and the muddy fields trampled by thousands of footprints. The moon kept watch over the sleeping circus and the deep, dark shadow passing over it.
The next morning, as Sam was getting dressed, he saw Zarilda marching toward the animal cages in a determined way with her hair still in rollers and her robe on. Johnny the Wolf Boy trailed her, crying inconsolably. Sam hurried out after them barefoot, his suspenders loose and thwapping against his trouser legs.
“What’s the matter?” Sam asked, catching up.
“It’s… Billy,” Johnny said between hiccuping gulps of tears. “He’s… dead.”
The performers, still in their robes and pajamas, came out of their compartments and gathered around the animals’ cages on the open train car. The goat lay in the straw. His neck had been torn out. There was a jagged slice down his belly, and his intestines had been dragged out through the hole. His heart was missing. Elsie the equestrienne turned and vomited into the mud while one of the acrobats patted her back. Sam felt a little green himself.
Johnny wiped his nose on his furred arm. “Who would do such a terrible thing?”
“What is it?” Theta asked, coming up behind Sam. She gasped when she saw the mutilated goat.
“I’ll get a shovel,” Johnny said. “I’ll bury him out yonder.” He walked away, still saying, “Who would do such a terrible thing?”
“I fed him last night,” Theta was saying to Sam and Evie as the train finally got under way. “He was kind of agitated. I think there was somebody in the camp. I kept hearing noises. Last night I’d have said it was just some drunkard, but not after this.”
“Shadow Men?” Evie asked.
“Why would Shadow Men go after a goat and not take us?” Sam said. “I’ve spent time with those fellas. And while I’m sure they’d kill anything, I’m also sure they’d come for us over a goat
.”
Heavy-hearted, Theta returned to the compartment she shared with Evie. Dry leaves littered the floor. “For Pete’s sake, Evil, you are the biggest slob,” Theta said. She swept up the debris, opened the train window a sliver, and dumped it out.
Evie found she enjoyed circus life. She was particularly enamored with the circus’s grande dame, the flamboyant Zarilda. When Zarilda laughed, her whole face laughed. It was a cackle that started low and deep, then rumbled up through her lungs and out of her mouth bright and sharp as machine-gun fire. Sam had told Evie he loved Zarilda’s laugh so much he would tell jokes just to hear it. She dressed in flowing, jewel-toned dresses and capes that swished and swayed as she moved among her circus family, giving a cheek a pat of encouragement or delivering cups of strong Turkish coffee served in delicate china cups that she swore had been carried to this country in a basket strapped to the strong back of her Roma great-grandmother. It was hard to know if anything Zarilda said was true, but when it was so much fun, who cared? Zarilda’s caravan traveled in style.
She absolutely refused to wear a girdle. “Don’t like ’em. They pinch in all the wrong places. Listen here, I’m fat. I know it. I’m fine with it.” She winked. “So’s Arnold.”
Arnold the Painted Man was Zarilda’s great love. Every inch of him—from his toes to his bald head—had been inked. There were even two thick blue-black curlicues around his eyes like Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh. Evie had found the sight of Arnold terrifying at first. But soon she came to see him as a walking story. Every tattoo had a tale to tell. “The whale and anchor are for his days as a sailor,” Johnny the Wolf Boy explained. He spoke for Arnold most of the time, Arnold himself being mute. “That one there, the shamrock, is for an old Irish lover, and that”—Johnny pointed to the inked heart just above Arnold’s own—“is for Zarilda.”
“Arnold saw something he shouldn’t have when he was a kid,” Zarilda told Evie later. “Whatever it was, it shut him up for good. But there are other ways of talking. Arnold makes his point clear.”
Just like Arnold’s tattoos, every person in the circus had a story, too. Polly’s parents and the townspeople had seen her beard as a manifestation of something evil. When she was seven, her parents sold her to a traveling carnival, where the owner beat her regularly. She’d had a baby by the time she was fourteen. The baby didn’t live. Finally, Polly saw her chance. They were in Ireland when she stowed away on a ship bound for America. She met Zarilda the first month.
Theta’s palms heated up as she listened to Polly’s tale. She felt the abuse as her own. “I know what it’s like having somebody parade you on a stage every night,” Theta said, nodding at Polly.
“My fur started when I was nine,” Johnny said. “My mother tried shaving it off. I’d be covered in nicks for a few days, and then it would just grow back. Finally she took me to the priest to see if they could exorcise it from me. They said it was a demon. But it was just hair,” Johnny said. “That’s when I ran away and joined up with the circus. I figured this was the one place they could love me like this.” He gave a small dismissive laugh that was completely undone by a hopeful sideways glance.
Mr. Sarkassian had escaped from the Armenian genocide. His entire family had been shot by the Turks. Elsie, an equestrienne, had left her Boston Brahmin family when her marriage to a wealthy playboy became too much to bear. Flora’s family in Brooklyn was so poor, she said, “I never seen soap till I joined the fuckin’ circus!”
“Flora. Language?” Zarilda said with a nod toward Isaiah.
“Aw, shit. Sorry, kid.”
“Everybody’s running from something,” Zarilda said. “But here, everybody’s got a place.”
Theta had bought a newspaper as they’d left their last town, and she and Evie sat side by side eating stale popcorn and scouring its pages for any mention of their friends. Mostly, the local papers reported on local things, which was a relief. On page three, though, was a slim column about the New York Daily News publishing poems and reports sent to reporter T. S. Woodhouse from some possible anarchist collective called the Voice of Tomorrow.
“The Voice of Tomorrow. That’s Memphis. I know it,” Theta said, grinning. She told Evie about the poem Memphis had shared with her back in Harlem. “He’s alive.”
The article went on to say that the Bureau of Investigation was tracing the postmarks of the letters. The last several had been posted from Greenville, Mississippi, the site of the terrible flood. So Memphis was alive, but he was in danger. Theta knew the Shadow Men would be on their way to Greenville now, and she hoped he had moved on.
“Please be safe, Memphis,” Theta said.
The train was passing through Kentucky, which, Mr. Sarkassian had told Isaiah, was a name derived from an Iroquois word that meant “land of tomorrow.” Isaiah liked the way that sounded. Land of Tomorrow. Sometimes he could see tomorrow, though it wasn’t always happy when he did. The train came around a hilly curve of thick green trees. Morning fog poured down the hillside and settled into the valley below. They were coming up on one of those small depots where the people often came out to wave. The driver blew the whistle to let folks who had a mind to come see the circus passing through do that. The train slowed as it neared the depot.
“Where is everybody?” Isaiah asked. He opened his window and stuck his face out. The air felt wrong somehow, and it smelled bad.
“Whew!” Evie said, waving a hand in front of her nose. “Is there a sulfur stream nearby?”
“Looks like coal mining,” Sam said. He put a hand over his nose.
“Where are all the people? Johnny, did we just chug into a ghost town?” Zarilda asked.
“Bells Junction,” Theta said, reading the sign next to the depot. The fog thinned to a smoky haze. The houses dotting the hillside looked as if they’d been deserted for a hundred years. Ash settled over the rooftops and trees. It was as if a giant dust cloud had come through and wiped the place clear of every living thing.
“I wonder what happened to it,” Theta said.
“One of those boomtowns-gone-bust, I’ll bet,” Zarilda said, snugging the sash up on the train window again. She wiped her hands free of some of the dust that had drifted down the hill. “I once saw a boomtown spring up in the Texas panhandle after they discovered oil there. Shoot, within three months that town went from one thousand to twenty thousand people. And when the oil dried up a few months later, the town dried up with it. There and gone in under a year.”
“Huh,” Sam said. But to him, Bells Junction didn’t look like it had been left behind.
It looked like it had been eaten alive.
As Isaiah watched Bells Junction disappearing from view, he thought about Sarah Beth’s strange warning: There’s something in the towns.
FACE THE FUTURE
“I want you to tell me everything you can about the Eye,” Ling said to Jericho. They were driving west from Knoxville to an Elks Lodge outside Nashville. She and Jericho sat at the back of the bus, feeling the hum of the road under them while Doc drove and the Haymakers caught a much-needed nap.
“It’s a monster. Just like him,” Jericho said.
“But how does it work?”
“Only Marlowe knows how it works.”
“Can you remember any details?” Ling asked.
Jericho searched his memory. He’d been so horrified by what he’d seen that he’d tried to forget. “In the center is the heart of the thing. I hesitate to use that word because that machine is utterly heartless. The souls of the soldiers are inside.”
“And they’re caught in a time loop, living out that same terrible day the rift was opened?”
“Yes. Somehow, that loop, their suffering, powers the machine and keeps the portal between our worlds open. But it needs an extra boost of energy from time to time to keep it open, to stabilize it.”
“That’s where the other Diviners come in.”
“Yes. Marlowe has a control—Sam’s mother. Her energy is a balance between the heart
of the machine and the other Diviner, somehow.”
“What is it about her?”
“I don’t know. Hence my use of the word somehow.”
“You don’t have to get sore. Or use hence.”
“The other Diviner’s energy is sent up into the rift,” Jericho continued. “But in the process, the Eye drains that Diviner’s life force. I think some Diviners are able to withstand the draining for longer than others. And no, I don’t know why or how. It seems to be completely individual.”
Ling shuddered to think that she’d once considered Jake Marlowe a hero. “Seems like he needs to do it more often now.” She tapped her finger against her chin while she thought. “The rift is in danger of collapsing. Or the King of Crows wants Marlowe to think it is. Either way, that uranium- and Diviner-enhanced energy is going straight to him. He’s building up this enormous, possibly catastrophic power, and Marlowe and the Shadow Men are too dumb to see that.”
“But why? What does the King of Crows want?” Jericho asked.
Ling stopped tapping her finger. She sighed. “Good question. He’s raising an army, but for what? What can an army of the dead do?”
“He wants to take over the country, maybe the world,” Jericho offered.
“So does Jake Marlowe,” Ling said pointedly. “But for what reason?”
“What if there is no reason?” Jericho said after a moment.
And Ling found that answer the most chilling of all the possibilities.
“I think tonight during the show, you and I should experiment by trying to combine our powers,” Ling said.