by Libba Bray
The girl had delivered a brief message from the other side: Death Valley. May 27. All shall be ready for you. She’d screamed as her head caught fire.
The hour was late now, half past eleven. Jake wandered through the dark, empty house. He’d be leaving for California soon and did not plan on coming back for some time. The servants had covered the furniture in sheets. It was a house full of ghosts. When he reached the ballroom, he had the strangest feeling he was not alone, even though he’d sent the servants home.
He nearly dropped his glass of milk.
“Will…” Jake said no louder than a whisper.
The ghost of his former friend was a pale reflection in the gilt mirror.
Words appeared on the glass.
Destroy the machine.
Break the cycle.
Heal the breach.
Jake’s terror gave way to anger. Will was a ghost. Even in death, Will Fitzgerald had managed to best him.
“Go away, Will!” Marlowe screamed. He threw the glass, and it shattered against the empty mirror.
Jake raced for his telephone. Though it was nearly midnight, he rang Harriet Henderson.
“Mrs. Henderson? It’s Jake Marlowe. I’m terribly sorry to call you so late, but it’s rather important. I wondered if you might be able to write a column for me tomorrow. Ah, you’re too kind. You see, it’s about this new machine I’m working on, something beyond anything we’ve imagined. Oh, I’m afraid I can’t say too much more than that. The military is involved, you see, but don’t print that. When the time comes, you’ll have an exclusive on it, I promise. Yes, just say that you’ve got a well-placed source and you’ve heard that it’s more than just a machine, it’s a revolution. Yes, that’s it—a new American Revolution. And it’s going to make America the jewel of nations for generations to come. Why, I can promise you that’s true, Mrs. Henderson. Harriet. The name? Yes, indeed.
“It’s called the Eye of Providence.”
ASHES TO ASHES
The Harlem Haymakers had been driving across Illinois for hours. “Gonna need to get more gasoline if we want to make it to Chicago,” Doc announced over the noisy engine. “Keep your eyes peeled for a filling station.”
A haze hung on the day; the sun was formless. The land was hillier here. Spring had come up fine and fair. Another five miles down the road, though, the green gave way to patchy, drought-stricken grass that blew across the cracked road in broken tufts. It should have been full spring here. Instead, brittle leaves drooped from ash-pale branches. The grass and shrubs by the road were coated in a fine gray dust. It was like being in a petrified forest, Ling thought. A white sign with black lettering announced that they were now entering the town of Beckettsville.
Lupe wiped gray flecks from Jericho’s shirtsleeve. “Is there a smelting plant nearby?”
“Don’t see one,” Jericho said.
Lupe gave him a flirtatious grin, and Jericho smiled back. He hoped they’d have some private time tonight after the show. Chicago, Illinois, would be better seen with her.
“Gonna take you dancing,” Lupe whispered.
“Well, you know how much I enjoy dancing now,” Jericho said with a wink.
“Lord, the two of you gonna be like this the whole way?” Alma muttered.
Doc turned down another street. It, too, was empty.
“Where is everybody?” he said.
Small clouds of flies were everywhere. Two leering vultures perched on the wires of a telephone pole that had gone white with disease. Newspapers skittered down a sidewalk covered in dead leaves. The street came out on a downtown square surrounding a town hall with a clock mounted to its tower. The clock had stopped. There were plenty of automobiles and trucks parked here, but no people. The town square seemed as deserted as everything else.
Doc parked in an empty spot. “I’ll go ask where we can find a service station. Don’t want to waste too much gasoline. If you’re stretching your legs, be quick about it.”
Most of the girls elected to stay on the bus. “Gotta sleep while we can,” Babe said, shutting her eyes. “And there’s sure nothing here to see.”
Ling grabbed her crutches.
Alma made a pleading face, with her hands pressed together, prayer-style. “Oh, come on, honey. Let’s stay on the bus. We can grab forty winks. Even twenty winks,” she begged.
“You can stay on the bus. I want to see what’s going on,” Ling said and headed for the bus steps, maneuvering them with care.
Lupe shot Alma a Hey, you picked her look. “Curiosity killed the cat,” Lupe said, shutting her eyes.
“Somebody’s curiosity is a pain in Alma’s rear end,” Alma grumbled and exited the bus after Ling and Doc.
Jericho kissed Lupe’s forehead. “I better go with them. I won’t be a minute.”
With her eyes still shut, Lupe waved good-bye.
In the deserted street, Ling covered her nose with the scarf Alma had lent her. “Smells bad. Like something’s gone rotten.” Gnats garlanded Ling’s head. She batted them away. “Shoo!”
“This is farm country. Maybe it’s manure?” Alma said.
“Doesn’t smell like farmland to me,” Jericho said, coming to stand beside them. “More like a slaughterhouse.”
Alma crossed the quiet street to a bank. “Gotta be people in here,” she said, jogging up the marble steps. A deep gray residue was baked into the limestone façade in varying shapes, almost as if someone had tried to paint a dull mural and abandoned it midway through. The smell was strong here. Alma had to breathe through her mouth. She tried the doors.
“Anybody?” Ling called from the sidewalk.
“They’re locked. Hold on.” Alma came around the side. She cupped her hands over her eyes and stood on tiptoe so she could peek through the bottom of a long, barred window.
“Well?” Ling asked.
Alma stepped back and jogged across the street to rejoin her friends. “I couldn’t see anything in there. Too dark. Looks like some sort of wicked storm came through here.”
“Could be a flood, I reckon, what with all this bad rain and the levees breaking,” Doc said.
“No watermarks on the buildings,” Jericho said. In fact, the land was drought-dry and cracked. Jericho couldn’t imagine anything taking root in that ruined soil ever again.
“Dust storm?” Ling offered.
“If so, it was mighty powerful,” Doc said.
Alma snapped her fingers. “We could check the storm cellars!”
They walked farther on Main Street, past a yard where crepe myrtles, leeched of their bright pink, had dried to a powdery gray. Ling touched one and it crumbled between her fingers like old chalk. The house was a white colonial with black shutters open to the gloomy day. “Hello?” Jericho called as they crept up the long brick walkway that led to the grand front porch, which held a ceiling fan whose blades were stilled. A ball of yarn and one knitting needle lay splayed beside a rocking chair. The screen door was askew, one of the hinges popped.
“Anybody home?” Jericho called and knocked. There was no answer.
“Storm cellar?” Alma reminded him.
They left the porch and came around the side of the house to a tidy back garden gone to seed, every living thing the same powdery gray as up front. A storm cellar was off to one side. Jericho knocked. No response. “Should I…?”
Ling nodded. Jericho and Doc opened the storm cellar doors and peered into the deep, musty dark. “Hello?” Jericho called. “Is anyone in there?”
An eerie quiet wafted out with the dust.
“Are those… claw marks in the door?” Alma asked, holding fast to Ling’s arm.
Jericho looked on the outside of the door. “Where?”
“No,” Alma said. “On the inside.”
In a spot near the handle, the wood had been scratched to splinters.
“I’m going in,” Jericho said.
“Careful,” Ling said.
Jericho let himself down into the inky dark. A kero
sene lantern hung from a hook on the wall beside a box of matches. He turned the knob, letting out the fuel, struck a match, and brought up the flame inside the glass. He lifted the lantern out in front of him, letting its glow illuminate the dark space by degrees. The dust was everywhere. Several broken mason jars glittered up from the dirt, their contents strewn and rotted, giving off faint traces of tomato and summer peach. There was a woman’s shoe turned on its side, and a dusty teddy bear missing an eye and an arm. Some kind of stain marked the floor. Jericho crouched down and put his hand to it. It was hard and gritty, like a burn. He stood back and held the lantern up high to get a better view. He thought he could almost make out the silhouette of a hand, fingers splayed.
“Hey, kid. Maybe you shouldn’t hang around in this place. Whaddaya think?”
Jericho cried out and nearly dropped the lantern.
“What is it?” Ling yelled down.
With a shaking hand, Jericho lifted the lantern, peering into the darkness where, seconds before, he’d heard Sergeant Leonard’s voice issuing a warning. There was nothing there.
“Jericho?” Ling’s called down. “Are you all right? Answer me!”
“Who’s Jericho?” Doc asked Alma.
“You’re dead,” Jericho whispered to the empty dark. “You’ve been dead for years.”
“Freddy?” Ling said, more careful this time.
Jericho made a fist and it was no trouble. He was fine. Completely fine. “I’m not going crazy,” he said to reassure himself. “I’m not.”
Quickly, he climbed back up and slammed the heavy wooden doors on the empty cellar.
“What’s the matter?” Ling said. She never missed a trick.
“N-nothing,” Jericho stammered. “Just got spooked down there in the dark is all. It’s empty. Let’s move on.”
“Wherever this town went, it sure went in a hurry,” Alma said as they walked through empty streets, passing vacant houses and abandoned storefronts. “It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies.” She coughed. “So much dust. Say, do you think there was some kind of explosion?”
“If there’d been an explosion, seems like it would’ve taken out some of the buildings, or the windows at least,” Doc said.
Ling was reminded of Eloise’s ghost story. She pushed the thought from her mind.
They passed by a library and a Methodist church. Jericho hopped up onto the sidewalk and approached McNeill’s Hardware. He cupped his hands around his eyes as he peered through the dirty window. There were shadows inside, but when he pushed open the door, the shadows fell away. There was nothing inside but shelves of untouched dry goods and piles of that same ashy dust.
“Nobody there, either,” Jericho said, coming out to the street again.
The small town looked to have been vibrant once, and not that long ago. The dust was everywhere now, though. Ling transferred her crutches to her left hand and bent as low as her braces and pain would allow. She scooped up a handful of the everywhere-dust. It was heavier and grittier than sand.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she said, spooking herself.
Cradling both crutches under her left armpit to hold herself up, she brought the palmed dust to her stomach, peering at it as she rubbed her thumb through. Her thumb caught on a sharper bit. She dusted away the excess to examine it. There. Hidden inside. A sharp sliver of bone. She showed it to the others.
“Looks like a dog’s tooth,” Jericho said, holding it up.
“What killed the dog?” Alma asked. Then: “Doc, can you please find some damn gasoline?”
Under a little hill of dust, Ling spied a smashed model airplane. The wings were sheared off; it was mostly a mess of balsa wood.
“Feels… haunted,” Ling said. “Like a graveyard.” But graveyards were full of the dead. This felt slightly alive, as if the dead were part of the bricks and mortar and husks of trees, as if, were she to expel a mouthful of air, all of it would crumble and she would see what was behind it. She got a sudden chill. When she turned around, she saw Will Fitzgerald in the middle of the street. He shook his head slowly. And then, in a wink, he was gone.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Alma said.
“We should go,” Ling said, trembling. “We’re trespassing here.”
Jericho looked around at the empty storefronts, cracked sidewalks, and weedy brown lawns. “Trespassing on what? There’s not a soul here.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Ling whispered.
“We can’t go anywhere. Gotta find some gasoline first. Here. Let’s go this way,” Doc said.
It had gotten colder. The messy sun had been swallowed up by bleak clouds that seemed to be keeping watch like sentinels as Ling and the others wandered past pleasant, preserved houses behind white picket fences guarding neatly trimmed, very dead hedges. For all of Ling’s belief in science and evidence and fact, she also had a Diviner’s sense of the otherworldly. There were mysteries that could not be quantified. There was instinct, and intuition, and Ling’s were screaming at her now.
“Hey, look!” Doc called, rounding a corner.
At the end of Poplar Street, yellow light seeped out from a large house whose front door hung open. As they got close enough to see, Alma stopped short. “Perkins and Son Funeral Home.” She stepped back, hands up. “Oh, no. Uh-uh. No, no, no, sir.”
Jericho started up the walk.
“Are you out of your mind?” Alma planted her feet firmly and folded her arms. “The United States Treasury doesn’t mint enough money to make me go in there.”
“Suit yourself,” Jericho said. The front steps creaked under the weight of his feet. Ling followed behind.
“Ling…” Alma glanced at Doc and back. “Mary Chang! Don’t you do it.”
“If there’s somebody inside, I want to ask them what happened,” Ling explained.
Doc shrugged and followed, his hands in his pockets. “Don’t wanna be a coward.”
“Am I the only one here with a lick of common sense?” Alma complained, but she hurried after. She wasn’t about to stay behind alone.
“Look.” Ling noted the stripes etched into the funeral home’s wooden door, an echo of the screen’s patterning. “Looks almost like a burn.”
“It’s like what I saw on the side of the bank,” Alma whispered.
“And in the storm cellar,” Jericho said.
“You didn’t say anything about that,” Ling said.
Sergeant Leonard. In the cellar. Sergeant Leonard, making Jericho feel crazy. “It might’ve just been a stain,” he said.
Inside, the foyer was the soft dark of perpetual dusk. A bereavement book lay open on a marble-topped chest. A white ribbon dangled from the book’s center crease. Halfway down the page, the names stopped.
“There’s nothing since this date three weeks ago,” Ling said.
“So… nobody’s died since then?” Alma said hopefully.
The light they’d seen from the street bled through the inset windows of the closed chapel doors and onto the burgundy rug of the foyer. The windows were stained glass, impossible to see through.
“I’ll go in first,” Jericho said.
“I’m not going to give you an argument,” Ling said.
Jericho pushed through the doors. The chapel was heavy with shadows. The light was coming from a room in the back and off to the right. Up front, a casket bedecked in rotted floral wreaths rested on a bench.
Alma whispered to Ling, “I don’t care if we have to walk all the way to our next show, I am not passing that.”
“I’m with Alma,” Doc said. “This doesn’t feel right.”
Jericho marched forward. He rested his hand on the lid of the closed casket, then licked his lips, nervous. “Okay. On the count of three.”
Alma whispered. “Don’t you dare!”
“One…”
Ling nodded. If something awful lurked inside, how would she get away? “Two,” she said, fighting her fear.
“Three!”
; Ling thought her heart might stop as Jericho threw back the lid. Empty.
“Oh, my Lord,” Alma said, one hand on her heart, the other seeking support from the back of a pew.
Doc pointed to the lighted room off to the right. “I believe that’s the mortuary proper over there. Hey, now, wait a minute! That was not meant as an invitation to go in!” Doc called after Jericho, who had started toward it. He turned to Alma and Ling. “That white boy is strange. Creepy. He’s just plain creepy.”
The acrid smell hit them before they even entered the room. “Somebody making pickles?” Ling asked, wrinkling her nose.
“That’s formaldehyde,” Doc said, putting his handkerchief to his nose. “For preserving the corpse.”
Alma gagged and cupped a hand over her mouth and nose. “That’s formaldehyde?”
“Nope. That is the corpse,” Doc said, nodding at the bloated body laid out on a table.
“How come you know so much about this?” Alma asked, pinching her nostrils.
“My uncle Ray is an undertaker.”
On a tiny table, Doc found an open tin of Vicks VapoRub. He swiped a fingerful beneath his nose and handed it to the others so they could do the same. Ling shut her eyes for a few seconds and waited for the nausea to pass.
“This here’s a cooling table,” Doc continued. “It’s got holes in it. You’ve got to drain the fluids so gases don’t build up inside the body. I’m guessing the embalmer was just getting started when whatever happened happened. That’s why the body’s all blown up like that.”
Alma gagged and spat. “I will never eat again.”
“Definitely not aspic,” Jericho muttered.
“Ugh. Aspic? It’s like stiff jelly.” Ling picked up a pair of scissors.
“You had to say stiff?” Alma growled. “No! Li—Mary! Don’t you dare—”
Ling poked the swollen corpse with the tip of the scissors. The skin split open.
“Why did you do that?” Alma cried.
“I don’t know. I just… had to.” Blushing, Ling dropped the scissors in a bowl. “I was… curious.”