by Libba Bray
Bessie was beside herself with worry. “There’s all manner of things in that water—telephone wires and snakes! They can’t go alone!”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. Orders are orders.”
Henry wanted to say to him, You know this isn’t right, so why are you playing along? But he knew the answer: Rules. That was always the answer: Because this is the way of things. But the way of things was wrong.
“I’ll go with ’em,” Henry said, staring down the guard, who, with a nod, allowed it.
“Thank you,” Nate said to Henry.
Bill clapped a hand on Henry’s shoulder. “Best be quick about it. Go and come back fast as you can. We got to pack up and slip out tonight.”
With Henry on board, Moses and Tobias took a pirogue from its mooring, paddling back toward the town they’d had to abandon when the flood set in. The sky had grown ominous again, and Henry feared rain would pour down before they could get back. Moses steered the boat through Greenville’s mostly sunken streets. The flood had been a capricious god: some houses had taken on water up to the roofline; others had come out relatively unscathed. Likewise, there were streets passable by car, while some streets lay under a good five or six feet of flood. They passed a grocery store where the water reached to the bottom of a sign advertising ice-cold Coca-Cola for a nickel. Henry thought about how good that soda would feel sliding down his parched throat. At each corner, the boys called Buddy’s name and listened for his bark, their little shoulders sagging when there was no reply. To keep their minds off their dread, they scavenged for useful scrap—some timber or tin, maybe a lantern, if they got really lucky.
Henry watched snapped branches and twigs float by helplessly in the current. He was a lot like those sticks, he thought. He’d been drifting along in life, allowing himself to be pushed by tides, telling himself he was helpless against it all. That was a convenient lie. He might feel powerless at times, but he was not. This realization struck him with such great force it was almost as if a hand had reached into his chest and thumped a finger against his heart, making it beat with new urgency.
If they survived this journey, if they put a stop to the King of Crows, Henry meant to make something of his life. He meant to be someone worthy. No more of this frittering his time and talent away because he was scared to put himself out there, and that included with David. He didn’t know if he and David were a true match, but he would never know as long as he kept his guard up in order not to be hurt again. That’s what he always did, tell a joke or find someone else when things began to feel like something genuine. Well, he was tired of feeling haunted—by Louis, by his father’s disappointment, and his mother’s illness. He’d let himself fill up with ghosts of shame until there was no room for love. No more. No more.
A song was beginning to take shape in Henry’s head. It was a song with the silt and sway of the river in it. It was a love song to the country and its people; it was an elegy for the country and its people. It was a song for himself.
The boat pulled on, past houses where rich landowners lived, houses with grand front porches that were completely underwater now.
Tobias leaped up suddenly, rocking the boat. “There he is!”
“Hey now!” Henry yelped, pulled from his reverie.
“Land a’mighty, Toby! You wanna turn us over?” Moses fussed.
But Tobias was waving his arms. “Buddy! Buddy!”
A loud barking came from the porch of one of those grand houses where the water was only up to the porch steps. A bedraggled yellow hound dog paced back and forth on that porch, wagging its tail excitedly, making little rolling jumps.
“All right, Buddy. Here comes the cavalry,” Henry said. Thinking about David and seizing life had given him new strength. He grabbed Tobias’s abandoned paddle and steered them even with the porch. Buddy jumped into the water, splashing everyone.
“Thanks, Buddy,” Henry said, shaking the water from his sodden sleeves. Moses pulled the sopping dog into the boat. Buddy repaid both him and Tobias with vigorous face licks. Moses fed the hungry dog the half a sandwich, and Buddy gobbled it down greedily.
“All righty, then. We’ve singlehandedly saved Greenville’s muddiest dog. Let’s head back,” Henry said.
A mighty crack of thunder sounded.
“Not more rain! Come on, now!” Tobias grunted and slapped a hand to his forehead with the dramatic flair particular to children.
But Henry felt the same unease he did when a dream walk began to edge into nightmare. The strange clouds were bunching together in a familiar, threatening way. Blue-tinged lightning bit at their dark bellies.
“What’s that?” Moses asked, looking up.
Henry’s heart, which had only moments ago felt renewed, began to beat very fast.
“We need to get back,” he said and pushed the paddle against the side of the porch to turn the pirogue around.
Buddy backed up in the boat, growling low.
“Buddy, shush!” Moses said into the dog’s fur, but Buddy wouldn’t be calmed. He growled low in his throat and kept his eyes on whatever lay ahead in the foul water. Henry froze, paddle lifted, muscles tense. Alert. The boys, too, had stilled.
“You hear something?” Moses asked quietly.
“Yeah. Buddy’s growling,” Tobias said.
“Uh-uh. Something else.”
“Quit it, Mose!”
“No foolin’!”
The birds cried out to one another all at once, then fluttered up from their refuge in the trees and took off fast, huddled together in a protective swarm. There was another, louder peal of thunder. Henry lifted his eyes to the sky, which was breaking apart. Buddy barked furiously. He bared his teeth and pawed at the side of the boat. The water, ten feet deep and murky, could be hiding anything.
The muddy surface rippled.
Something was rising up from underneath.
“Boys,” Henry said firmly. “Get in the house. Now.”
Back on the levee, Bill cupped a hand over his eyes and looked up at the storm rolling in. “Don’t like the looks of that sky.”
“That’s some kinda canaillerie,” Remy said. “Mon dieu, we sure don’t need more rain.”
Bill kept his eyes trained on the thick dark clouds fighting with one another. Lightning, blue and sharp, struck out over the wide river. It was followed by a clap of thunder that shook the ground underneath the tents. Whispers floated in its wake. Like the sky had exhaled.
“Never seen a storm quite like that one,” Nate said.
“Naw. I ’magine you ain’t,” Bill said grimly. “Memphis?”
“Yeah. I see.” Memphis turned to Nate and the others. “You need to gather everybody, quick. We’ve got to move out now. We can’t wait.”
Bill came to stand beside Memphis. “What’s comin’ you don’t wanna be here for.”
And something about the big man’s warning seemed to hit home with Nate Timmons, whose grandmother, touched with the sight, had known which mushrooms to avoid and which could be made into a tea to weaken a cruel master—and when the Angel of Death was nearby. A Diviner, through and through.
“Mose and Toby ain’t back yet,” Nate said.
Memphis could picture the boys playing in the knee-high floodwaters, fooling around when they weren’t supposed to, as boys who can make a carnival out of catastrophe will do. He could picture Henry playing the easygoing uncle, splashing along with them, hearing only the whoosh of the river as the dead descended.
It had grown dark suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown.
Some of the women poked their heads out of their tents and looked up. “More rain? Lord, I hope not.”
“We have to go get them. Right now,” Memphis said.
“How we gonna get off this levee?” Nate asked.
“Remy’s boat,” Memphis said.
“We got a boat but no pass,” Nate shot back.
“We’re gonna have to make a stand here,” Bill said solemnly.
“If they’r
e looking for us, we need to take the fight away from all these people,” Memphis said. He wished Henry were there. At least they could try to join their powers together.
“Memphis.” Bill nodded in the direction of the submerged railroad tracks, where the bloated dead of Greenville crawled up out of the water and onto the levee. They glowed like some kind of rare underwater sea creatures who’d ventured too close to the surface. They flickered as if they might disappear, but as they moved toward the others, they solidified into a more corporeal state. These ghosts were a new threat.
“What is that?” Nate whispered.
“That’s what we’re trying to stop,” Memphis said. “How many you count?”
“Maybe a dozen,” Bill said.
“You think the two of us…?”
“Can’t guarantee it,” Bill answered.
“We have to try.”
Memphis reached out and took Bill’s hand.
At the end of the levee, the ghosts did the same.
“What are they doing?” Memphis whispered.
“You ever seen ’em do that before?” Bill asked.
“No. It’s like… like they’re imitating us.”
With their hands joined, the dead raised their arms, drawing the lightning to them. It crackled around their flickering, rotting bodies. They opened their mouths, jaws unhinging. An unholy shriek shot across the levee.
“Ahhhh!” Memphis shouted. He dropped Bill’s hand to cover his ears.
It was a chaos of sound inside his head, like the world ending. Barks. Growls. Screams. A radio scrolling through stations so quickly it became cacophony. A fist of noise punching through him. Memphis was brought to his knees. Beside him, Bill staggered, his face contorted in pain. The refugees on this part of the levee were affected, too. Voices swirled through the din:
You did this.
Hunted us down. Annihilated.
We feel you. You are in us now.
We have your power.
The air wobbled and warped. The high-pitched sound pricked a hole in the wall of sandbags protecting the levee. Water gurgled in the cracks, pushing to be let in. If the sandbags gave way, the swollen Mississippi would wash over the levee. National Guardsmen were running into the camp. “Here now! Stop that! Stop that screaming!”
The sound stopped. Memphis wiped drool from his mouth. Gasped for breath. The dead were gone. He saw them slipping back into the water, facing the city. One of the Guardsmen shot his rifle into the air. There was chaos in the camp, too, as they confronted the refugees who pushed back. More Guardsmen were coming.
“Memphis, we got to go now,” Nate said. “My boys.”
It seemed to Memphis that his heart might burst as they raced down to where Remy’s boat was tied to a stump. Quickly, Remy untied the boat and pushed off into the overflowing Mississippi. They watched as the tent city of the levee grew smaller in the distance.
“You think da ghosts out here?” Remy asked, face grim as his eyes darted left and right, watching.
“Yes,” Memphis said. He didn’t know what these new, powerful ghosts were capable of, and he hoped they’d be in time to save Moses, Toby, and Henry.
Remy steered the boat through the flooded town, toward the silent edges. Shadows deepened the spaces between the abandoned, half-drowned houses. Any one of those houses could be hiding the dead.
“No birds,” Bill said ominously.
Memphis could feel the stillness pressing in.
“This would go a whole lot faster if we could use the motor,” Remy said.
“Don’t want to call too much attention to ourselves,” Memphis said. “Trust me.”
“I think you better tell me the truth now, Memphis,” Nate said. “My boys are out there.”
“He’s coming,” Memphis said, and he took no pleasure in being right. “The King of Crows is sending his dead.”
An iridescent figure appeared at a dark upstairs window. Even from that distance, Memphis could feel the ghoul’s dead eyes trained on them. In the boat, they were completely exposed. The ghoul’s lips peeled back to show its teeth. It beat its hands against the window, thwack.
“Just keep going,” Bill said. “Don’t look back.”
“Allons,” Remy said and paddled faster.
Just like in Memphis’s dream, the dead were rising up, this time out of the water, and crawling onto the roofs and porches of Greenville. There were two more on a sleeping porch, gnawing on the carcass of some animal that had been left behind when the flood hit. Did these dead have powers? Would they open their mouths and drown the boat? Nate’s eyes were wide, wild. Memphis knew what he was thinking: My boys. I’ve got to get to my boys before they do.
When Memphis was running numbers for Papa Charles, he’d met a man who’d been a soldier in the Great War, part of Harlem’s 369th Regiment. He talked about what he’d seen over there: Men being blown apart by machine guns. Dying of mustard gas. Climbing into trenches and stabbing each other to death with bayonets until all humanity was extinguished.
“What it was, we were fighting a war with no rules,” the man had said, staring at his cards and placing his bet. “It was as if all the rules had gone right out the window.”
Memphis and his friends were fighting a war with no rules, too.
“There’s two,” Bill said.
“I see ’em,” Memphis said.
A splash as one of the dead slipped into the water and went under. Where it entered, the water was electrified for a moment.
“Remy, can’t you make this thing go faster?” Bessie said urgently.
Memphis grabbed a paddle and kept his gaze on the murk, alert for movement.
“There! That’s our boat!” Bessie cried, pointing to the empty pirogue out in front of the plantation. “Where are they?”
Upstairs in the big house, Henry guided Moses and Tobias over waterlogged carpets, past gilt-framed oil paintings of plantation owners and their wives going back generations. Henry knew their kind, men like his father. Whether it was land or people, they enjoyed owning. Henry could see it in their expressions: These were people who expected.
It smelled overwhelmingly of mildew and rot. The stench burned at Henry’s nose. There was no electricity due to the flood. The house was thick with shadows. The only illumination came from the bursts of lightning at the windows. It had a disorienting effect, coming in quick flashes that reflected off a silver candlestick or the edge of a mirror, revealing an open doorway that had been hidden in the gloom. The house had many rooms. The dead could be waiting in any of them. Near the top of the grand, wide staircase, Buddy growled.
“Don’t move,” Henry whispered to the boys.
A familiar voice rang out: “Moses? Toby? You in here?”
“Daddy!” the boys shouted. Nate Timmons bounded up the stairs in three seconds flat and crushed his boys to him in a fierce hug. Memphis and Bill, Bessie and Remy were right behind them, wading through the water. Loree burbled inside the cradling sling across Bessie’s chest. “It’s all right, little one,” she cooed.
Memphis wanted to tell Henry about the levee and the ghosts they’d seen, but it would have to wait. They needed to get out of Greenville right away. A heartbeat of lightning illuminated the gloom for two seconds. Buddy growled, teeth bared again. His fur stood on end.
“Memphis…” Henry whispered.
They were at the far end of the hall. A man with side whiskers and a woman in a hoop skirt. Their eyes were black shine, their pale skin iridescent as a bucket of silvery minnows. Henry recognized them from the oil paintings he’d seen.
“My house,” the whiskered man said. “My. House.”
Even in death, these people gave off a desire for domination, as if they could rot for a thousand years and the violence still wouldn’t leave their bodies. They had no conscious thought beyond their rapacious greed. They spoke as one, their voices crackling and hissing like a scratched phonograph record through a megaphone.
“Boys, get behind me,�
� Nate said, guiding them gently with his arm. Beside her husband, Bessie held tightly to her baby. She grabbed a candlestick from the drenched mantel and raised it high.
“What do you want?” Memphis asked.
“All that we are owed and then some. This world belongs to us. My house.” The ghostly couple hissed.
“If you hurt us, the King of Crows will be angry. He needs us,” Henry said.
“We do as we please. We answer to no one. My house. My house. My house.”
The police had called the Diviners anarchists, but these ghosts were the true anarchy, Henry thought. People who made the rules only to break them at will.
“Trespassers,” the man said. “My house.”
With that, the couple lunged. Nate yanked the boys out of reach. Undeterred, the ghosts grabbed Remy, who screamed as they bit into his arms with their teeth. His eyes rolled back in his head. They were sucking the life from him, wavering between flickering illusion and something more corporeal and much more dangerous. Memphis and Henry had never seen anything like it, and they were afraid of these new ghosts.
“Remy! Remy!” Nate shouted.
Bessie Timmons brought the candlestick down against the head of the ghostly mistress of the house. The ghost put a hand to her head, staggering. She vomited black bile down the front of her high-collared, frilly gown. Her eyes burned with both hunger and hatred.
“Move!” Bessie screamed and tore down the wide staircase of the ruined house with Tobias’s hand in hers, Moses quick on her heels. Bill threw Remy across his broad shoulders and followed after. Remy twitched like a caught fish.
“Hold on, hold on,” Bill grunted.
They raced to the boat, still hearing the cries of the ghosts: “My house!”
Greenville’s unsettled dead were coming up out of the flood now. Their hunger spilled off them along with the water.
“We’re like sitting ducks out here,” Henry said.