The King of Crows

by Libba Bray

  Clutching her baby to her, Bessie Timmons ran over to the outboard motor and pulled the string. “Tired of this nonsense,” she said and steered a path out toward the swollen expanse of the Mississippi River, leaving the dead behind.

  “Is Remy hurt real bad?” Moses asked.

  Remy’s muscles contracted involuntarily, reminding Memphis of the worst of Isaiah’s fits. Remy’s face was a mask of fear. His eyes were wide and he was pale, nearly gray. Puncture wounds marred his arms where the ghosts had bitten him. Thick dark veins crawled up the man’s arms.

  “What is that?” Henry asked.

  “I don’t know,” Memphis said. “But it’s moving fast. He’ll be gone in minutes if we don’t do something.”

  Memphis moved toward Remy, but Bill grabbed hold of his arm. “That ain’t no ordinary healing, Memphis. You don’t know what that is. Best to let me lay him down gentle.”

  Memphis was afraid. He didn’t know this otherworldly infection that was taking over Remy’s body. He was afraid to touch his hands to it. Maybe Bill was right. He didn’t have to take it on, even though Remy had been very brave. Even though he had saved them twice with his boat. In the corner Moses was crying softly. “Nonk Remy,” he said.

  Memphis shook off Bill’s hold. “I can do it. I’ve got to try.”

  Memphis kneeled beside Remy. Under those spreading, twisting veins of rot, Remy’s flesh had gone gray. The wounds seemed to be choking him from the inside. Memphis could see clear through to the bones under the man’s skin. Remy was trying to talk, his voice no more than a whisper. “I… see… everything… Too… much… too… much.”

  Memphis placed his hands on Remy’s chest. “I’m gonna help you, Remy. Just let me—”

  “N-no. D-don’t,” Remy whispered.

  Don’t try to heal me, son.

  But already, Memphis was drawing the sickness into his own body. It curdled inside him, rot and decay and hunger. His eyes turned the black of the dead. And then he was falling down into an endless grave. He saw Marlowe’s golden Eye taking the screaming soldiers up into its mechanical heart to play out the same pain endlessly. He saw Adelaide Proctor nearly swallowed up by a giant oak that imprisoned her. He saw a dying town of dried rivers and topsoil gone to dust and a half-starved child pawing at the ground for the last turnip. The King of Crows’s disembodied face loomed, moving closer and closer. Vines of the grave slithered through his eye sockets and still the King of Crows laughed, and in the next flash, it was Memphis’s own face he saw atop the King of Crows’s stiff collar. The snakes encircled his head like a scaly crown. A skittering disturbed the fine white linen of his sleeves. Something moved fast under it, and then beetles peeked out from the lace-trimmed cuffs, pouring out in streams of black-backed shine, swarming his body. He walked across a carpet of ash. Bony hands reached up from that carpet, scrabbling for Memphis’s ankles, tearing at his trouser cuffs. He yelped and kicked them away. He opened a door and saw the hungry dead descending on town after town until there was nothing left. The pain was suffocating. As if Memphis were absorbing hundreds of years of it. It lashed him. He was breaking. He cried out in agony. The voices swirled inside him: You’ll never heal this. You cannot heal. Never. Never heal this. We will pull you under with us. With us. Memphis was losing his strength. Remy had been cursed. He was dying and taking Memphis down with him.

  “Memphis, let go!” Bill Johnson yanked Memphis free seconds before the rot overtook Remy, turning him into a petrified man. The boat was silent with horror. There was only the sluice of water, the purr of the motor.

  “Memphis,” Henry said.

  Memphis shook all over. He bent over the side of the boat and vomited. He had never experienced a healing like that. Nothing he could have done would stop the rot.

  Bill Johnson let Remy slip into the flood. His body crumbled into the churning water and was gone. They hung their heads and said a prayer for their dead friend. The boat sailed up the Mississippi, headed north. Nate took over the steering so Bessie could nurse the baby and get some rest. The boys, exhausted, slept inside the little house.

  “What was that that got Remy?” Nate asked once he knew the boys were sleeping.

  “I don’t know,” Memphis said. “I never felt anything like it.” He’d seen and felt terrible things. Still saw them. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.”

  Nate was quiet for a long time. “Nothing to be done.”

  The sky had begun to clear. The sun was poking through clouds.

  “Won’t be no crop. Water took it all,” Nate said, breaking the silence. “Me and my family moving north. Gonna start over, start clean. We’d be proud to take you far as we can.”

  “Thank you,” Memphis said.

  Nate put a hand on Memphis’s shoulder, looking from him to Henry and Bill and back again. “You get in there and fight this wickedness. Know that we’re with you, you hear?”

  “We know,” Henry said.

  The river carried them forward. It was a thing of destruction and a thing of awe, a proud spirit winding through the country.

  “That wasn’t an ordinary ghost,” Henry said. “Usually the ghosts have a deal with the King of Crows—they suck up some power and give most of it over to him. But these ghosts didn’t seem aware of those rules. Or they didn’t care. They just wanted to take as much life as they could. They wanted to hurt us.”

  “I know,” Memphis said, and it made him anxious about what might lie ahead.

  Nate steered the boat straight, chasing sun for as long as they could.

  YOU WILL BE SORRY

  “On the level: Can you really communicate with spirits, Zarilda?” Evie asked late one night as she and some of the other circus folk gathered in the circus train’s dining car.

  Zarilda snapped down cards in a game of solitaire. “Only if the spirits wanna communicate,” she said around the cigarette holder between her lips.

  “And how much do you charge for your services?” Evie asked.

  “As much as I think I can get.”

  Evie rose from her seat. She fished a dollar from her coin purse and laid it on the table beside Zarilda’s deck. “I’d like to speak with a friend.”

  Sam looked up from his Zane Grey adventure novel. “Baby Vamp…” he warned.

  “Evil. You think that’s a good idea?” Theta chimed in from where she was playing checkers with Johnny.

  “What in the hell’s the matter with just playing cards and reading magazines?” Elsie said in her honking Brooklynese. “It was a long day!”

  “Maybe she can tell us something about what’s happening, something we need to know. Oh, look, I just want to know that she’s jake,” Evie pleaded.

  Zarilda regarded Evie through the smoke of her cigarette. “You know, sugar, I’ve done this a thousand times. Mostly, folks want to be reassured that everything’s fine. So that’s what I tell ’em. But if I read for you, I won’t lie. Now. You sure you want the full truth?”

  “She was my best friend. I need to know.” Evie placed a black jack on a red queen that Zarilda had overlooked. “Please?”

  Zarilda pocketed the dollar with deliberateness. Then she swiped the abandoned solitaire game back into the deck and put the cards aside. “What’s your friend’s full name?” she asked.

  Mabesie. Pie Face. “Mabel. Mabel Devorah Rose.”

  “Devorah,” Sam repeated. “Her Hebrew name.”

  Mabel had been Jewish, like him. But unlike him, she’d been a believer. She’d even converted, because her mother wasn’t Jewish. He wondered now if it had ever bothered her that Sam took his Jewishness for granted. Her parents were modern. Socialists. New Yorkers. But Sam’s parents had immigrated from Russia during a pogrom. They had run for their lives, leaving behind their possessions but not their superstitions. Growing up in New York’s Lower East Side and Chicago’s South Side, Sam had been steeped in tales brought over straight from the shtetls of the old country, tales of golems and dybbuks and mazikim. It was meant to keep
them in line, to make them do right. It was to remind them where they came from, how good they had it here. Remind them that no matter where they settled in this world, they were Jews first. But to Sam, none of those stories of demons and restless spirits ever seemed as frightening as what the real world cooked up: Czars who murdered peasants because they could; people who went along with it. Governments who could experiment on innocent citizens. Or Shadow Men who could take a mother away from her son with a threat of deportation, who could hook that same son up to a soul-breaking machine in the name of patriotism and progress and profit.

  He knew now, of course, that there were restless, demonic spirits who meant harm. And still he was more afraid of what people could do.

  Sam put down his book and came to stand beside Evie. “You sure you wanna do this, Doll Face?” It didn’t sit well with him, this raising of the dead, disturbing their rest. Especially Mabel’s rest.

  “Yes,” Evie said, headstrong as ever.

  “All right, then,” Zarilda said on a sigh. She stubbed out her cigarette. “Gather ’round, ever’body. Seems we got some séance-ing to do.”

  “Aw, Jesus Christ, Z!” Elsie grumbled, slamming down her Photoplay.

  “The more people, the stronger the signal,” Zarilda responded. “Now, then, place your hands on the table, please, like so.” Zarilda pressed her palms against the small table. The others pulled up chairs and followed suit. Evie sat across from Zarilda, flanked by Theta and Sam.

  “I speak now to the one in the spirit world called Mabel Devorah Rose,” Zarilda intoned. All trace of her carefree spirit was gone. She was deadly serious. “Speak to us now, Mabel.”

  “Yeah, hurry it up, Mabel,” Elsie grumbled.

  “Do you mind?” Evie snapped.

  Zarilda’s eyes fluttered closed as her head bent forward and lolled left to right, from shoulder to shoulder, a turbaned pendulum. She lifted her head with snakelike movements, as if searching for a signal. “Mabel… Mabel… speak…”

  Goosepimples dotted Evie’s arms. The room had grown noticeably colder, and hazy.

  “She’s at peace. I can sense it. A place of deep rest of—”

  Whip-fast, Zarilda’s head snapped back with an inhalation of breath so sharp it seemed to bring pain. Her chest bowed out as her arms shot straight to her sides, then stiffly back, like someone or something had them pinned behind her. Zarilda spoke gibberish. Her warm brown eyes rolled back in their sockets. For the first time, Evie was afraid.

  Wisps of pale gray smoke wafted out of Zarilda’s throat, and with it, whispers. Like several voices talking at once. Just under the whispers were demonic cackles and moans that made Evie shudder. Whatever Zarilda had come into contact with, it was not Mabel. Evie didn’t want to know these spirits.

  We have the old witch. Adelaide Proctor. She is here. She will be ours!

  Theta squeezed Evie’s hand harder. “Miss Addie? It’s Theta! Where are you?”

  Another small voice broke through, like a radio signal fighting static. “Evie?”

  “Mabel,” Evie whispered. “Mabel—I’m here! Oh, please, please talk to me! I miss you so, Mabesie.”

  But Mabel’s voice was gone. In its place was the unholy din:

  You will be sorry.

  You will be sorry.

  You will be sorry.

  Zarilda’s head flopped forward on a mighty groan. The fog dissipated. The voices were gone. Zarilda came to, her mascaraed lashes fluttering open. Arnold raced to the small sink, returning to his lover’s side with a wet rag to cool her face. He nodded emphatically at Johnny, who said, “She’ll need to rest now.”

  Elsie still sat at the table, her eyes big as quarters. “What in the hell was that?”

  “That was Miss Addie,” Theta said on their walk back to their compartments.

  “I’m just saying, we can’t be sure of what’s what anymore. That coulda been, I don’t know, some ventriloquist spirit,” Sam said.

  “Do you trust Zarilda?” Evie asked him.

  Sam nodded. “She’s the real McCoy, all right.”

  “I’m sorry, Evil,” Theta said.

  “Don’t be. I only wish I’d been able to talk to Mabel.”

  Sam slipped his arm around Evie’s waist. “Maybe Zarilda is right and she’s at peace, Baby Vamp.”

  But Evie wasn’t so sure.

  A sleeping circus was like a dream waiting to take flight. The tiger paced in its wagon. It stuck its black nose between the bars, sniffing for freedom, until it gave up at last and settled down in the sawdust. The elephants, too, slept. Evie was envious of their rest. It was her own restlessness driving her now; no matter how far she traveled, she’d never be able to outrun it. Evie pulled Mabel’s favorite ornamental comb from her coverall pockets. Carefully at first, then with abandon, she removed her gloves. The comb was cool between Evie’s palms. It jolted her back in time—just an ordinary day, the two of them walking Manhattan’s congested sidewalks after going to the picture show, past the men selling roasted nuts from a cart, past the Automat with its revolving trays of food for a nickel, past the grand Art Deco façade of Bonwit Teller, where they stopped to swoon over an evening gown of peach perfection. Nothing special at all, really. But here under the stars, with Mabel dead and gone, dead in her grave forever—forever, that terrible word—the memory was like touching a hot stove. Evie could scarcely bear to relive it.

  Mabel had loved Evie. Mabel had envied Evie’s daring, and Evie had envied Mabel’s goodness. Sometimes it was a bridge between them; sometimes it was a wedge. If only Evie had tried harder to understand that. Would it have mattered? Or were people just who they were, no matter how much they tried to be something or someone else? How many times had people scolded Evie or offered “helpful” advice designed to fit her into a smaller world that would make them less uncomfortable but that would never make her happy? People had to be who they were. The challenge was to love them for it. And to be honest when they’d hurt you. To apologize when you’d hurt them. It seemed pretty simple on the face of it. So why was it always so hard?

  Evie left the train and walked out into the cool, clear night, wandering far from the empty circus camp. There in the tall spring grass of Illinois, she lay on the ground and let herself cry until she was emptied. Then she stared up at the moon for a long time, wondering why she couldn’t seem to make a real connection to Mabel. Maybe it was as Sam said and she was at peace. But Evie was not. It ate her up to know that the last encounter she’d ever had with her best friend had been an argument. If only she could talk to Mabel just one more time. If only she could know.

  Wind whistled through the leaves. A frog croaked nearby. And another sound, faint but very present. Like the low growl of some injured, hungry animal. Evie sat up quickly. Her arms prickled with gooseflesh. Far behind her at the sleeping fairgrounds, the two lanterns hanging from Zarilda’s wagon were like the eyes of a dragon. Thinking of those awful voices coming out of Zarilda’s mouth made Evie shiver. She shouldn’t have come so far all alone.

  “Okay,” she said, smoothing down her dress with a trembling hand. “I’ll simply walk back. ‘Pucker up and whistle / till the clouds roll by / have a happy little twinkle in your eye.…’”

  Evie stopped short. There in the fields: a shimmering ghost, keeping pace with her. Even from this distance, she could see that the eyes were shiny black buttons, soulless. No. Not completely. This ghost seemed to be wavering between states. She looked confused, as if she did not quite know how she’d come to be here. The ghost appeared to be traveling alone, but so was Evie. If she called out to Sam or Theta, the thing could be on her before help arrived. Evie hastened her steps. So did the ghost. It watched her closely, mimicking her movements. It was studying her, she realized, unnerved. She could sense its quickness. The confusion was temporary, Evie felt. Underneath, there was a fast, feral quality to this one.

  Calm, keep calm, Evie thought. She just had to get close enough to call for Sam and Theta. Together, they
could annihilate this filthy thing before it turned. You’ll be sorry, you’ll be sorry, you’ll be sorry.

  “Sorry, sorry,” the ghost echoed in its strangled whisper.

  Evie stopped cold.

  “Sorry. So sorry. Sorry,” it said.

  Had the ghost… read her mind? Evie turned slowly toward the thing. No matter how many dead she’d faced, it never stopped being terrifying. That’s what happens to every one of us in the end, Evie thought. Who wouldn’t want to fight it?

  “I want to talk to you,” Evie said. “I want to ask you some questions.”

  “Questions?” the ghost echoed.

  “Yes. I know you must answer truthfully.”

  “Yes,” the ghost answered. Her tongue caressed the edges of her teeth. They weren’t sharp yet, Evie saw, but they would be soon.

  “How can we win against the King of Crows?”

  “Only the dead can defeat him.”

  “What does that mean? Why do you always talk in riddles?”

  The ghost clutched at her stomach. “We aren’t meant to come back. It makes us hungry. A great sickness deep in the belly. We must feed from the living to stay. That is why we join with the King of Crows. He promises power. He gives us just enough. And he takes the rest.”

  “So why not go back to your graves?”

  “Once we are awake again, we cannot rest.”

  “Why not?” Evie glanced toward the dark train. Her muscles tensed, ready for flight.

  “It’s the Eye. It joins us as one. Its golden energy keeps us here. But it also keeps us hungry. We can never give it enough. Never give him enough.”

  All the ghosts were connected. All of the dead. “Have you seen a girl named Mabel—”

  “Rose,” the ghost finished.

  Tears sprang to Evie’s eyes. “Yes!”

  The ghost seemed to truly see Evie for the first time. “She is important to you?”

  “Yes. Very important. She was my best friend.”

  “What will you give me to know?”