by Libba Bray
Now Memphis was worried for a whole different set of reasons. All the time Memphis had told Isaiah he needed to start growing up and become a man, maybe Isaiah really was becoming a man. But he hoped Isaiah wasn’t foolish enough to practice on the Olsons’ daughter.
That night before bed, Memphis took Isaiah aside. “Isaiah, I don’t think you should play with Sarah Beth so much.”
“But she’s my friend!”
“She’s the Olsons’ daughter.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Memphis bit down on all the worry and anger climbing up into his mouth: Because you never know if the farmer who seems friendly suddenly reaches for his gun because he has the gun and the power and you don’t have either one.
“We don’t know these people,” he said,
“Sure, we do.”
“No. We don’t. They’re letting us stay on till Evie’s better, and we need to show them we appreciate it by working.”
“But Mr. Olson said—”
“Never you mind what Mr. Olson said. I know different. We’re here to work on our powers and stop the King of Crows, and then we’re gone. I don’t want you playing with her all the time. Tomorrow, you’ll help Bill and me paint the barn.” Memphis hated that it had to be said, but he needed to protect his brother in a world that wasn’t going to do it for him.
Isaiah crawled into his bed. He turned away from Memphis, facing the wall.
“Hey. Ice Man. You want me to tell you a story?” Memphis asked.
“No,” Isaiah said angrily. “Too old for bedtime stories.”
And that cut Memphis the most.
Jericho dreamed of Lupe. She was standing in a beautiful garden with the sea behind her. The wind lifted her dark hair, and in his sleep, Jericho moved his fingers as if they might stroke that hair. She carried a bouquet of flowers. She walked past a Ferris wheel turning slowly. Evie sat in one of the Ferris wheel seats. She opened the little door to welcome Jericho, but he let the chair take Evie up and away. Lupe was ahead on the path, and he would follow her wherever she was leading.
Jericho woke panting. Seeing Lupe, even in a dream, really got his heart beating. It was racing, in fact. He sat up to try to get it to calm down. His hands were shaking, too. Why were they shaking? Out of habit, he tried to make a fist. Only his pinkie and ring finger curled in. With his other hand, he forced the fingers down, and after a moment he was making a fist just fine. He was tired was all. He hadn’t done farmwork in a long time. All that milking and roping and plowing. Anybody’s hands would ache. Some fresh air was what he needed. He tiptoed out of the farmhands’ quarters and into the cool, clear night. The stars were extra shiny. He spied Taurus and Canis Major making a show of it. He made another fist. A little stiff, but fine. In a few weeks, he’d meet up with Lupe. They’d made a plan to go to Coney Island and stroll the boardwalk. She was going to make him mofongo, which was a dish that had plantains, which were like bananas, she’d said, but sweeter and better.
“Hey, kid. Mind if I join you?” Sergeant Leonard was there in the grass. His dark-ringed eyes shone out from his dead face, and he was smiling.
“You’re not here.”
“Okay. Have it your way.” Sergeant Leonard’s smile disappeared. “Go on. Make a fist.”
Jericho looked down at his hand as if it were a snake ready to bite. “I’m going to beat it,” he said. He dropped to the cold ground and did fifty push-ups without stopping, and when he stood again, the apparition was gone.
PUT THE WORD OUT
Missouri
Roy Stoughton rolled down his sleeves as he left the Fitter Families tent.
“That Diviner know anything?”
“A little. He got a feeling. He saw her somewhere in Nebraska, on a farm.”
“Nebraska is lousy with farms, Roy.”
“He said this farm had a girl on it. Another Diviner. Sarah Beth something-or-other. He thought it might be near a town with a B.”
“That all we got to go on?”
“That’s all he could say before he passed out.”
“We know the klaverns in Nebraska. Let me call the Grand Dragon, put the word out we’re looking for a farm and a girl named Sarah Beth. We’ll find her. Hey, Roy? You got blood on your cheek.”
Roy checked his face in the rearview mirror. Two flecks of fresh blood had settled in the lightly scarred flesh along his jaw. Theta had given him that scar. With the back of his hand, he wiped till his face was clean.
“Start the car,” Roy said. “Make sure we got enough gas to get to Nebraska.”
SACRIFICE
T. S. “Woody” Woodhouse had come up from nothing. From a cold-water tenement with six siblings, and an Irish father too sick with tuberculosis to work. Woody had shaved the lilt from his Bronx-Irish brogue and remade himself into the sort of fellow who might get invited to fancy Manhattan parties. Except that none of those fellows ever did invite him. Woody was too ambitious. Too Street. Too Irish. The smell of Bronx tenement hung on his suits like the wrong aftershave. The idea that America didn’t have a class system was a lie. Woody had liked the idea of journalism. Of sticking it to those stuffed shirts by telling the truth and ratting them out in the pages of the Daily News. But somewhere along the way, after all he’d learned about Diviners, Project Buffalo, the lies, and the walking dead, he’d become a real journalist, committed to telling the truth no matter the personal consequences.
He’d done as Margaret Walker instructed. Deep in the bowels of some musty forgotten archives, he’d removed box after box until he found what he was after. The file, the proof, was tucked inside his jacket now. Woody had pursued the truth for personal glory. Now that he’d finally found it, he felt hollowed out. Truth had a way of doing that. It had a way of making you question everything.
Woody stood before the Lincoln Memorial in the rain. He’d needed comfort, and that need had brought him here. He tried to imagine the president’s pain as the nation had come apart. Abraham Lincoln, like anyone, had been a complicated man who had done both harm and good. He wasn’t the easy hero the history books made him out to be. Nevertheless, eventually he’d taken the words all men are created equal to heart and had been willing to shoulder the hatred and scorn of half the country in order to try to make it come true. Along the way, he had buried a beloved son and lost his wife to a melancholy that turned to madness. Still, he carried on. For an idea of freedom, true justice, and equality. To steward the nation toward its stated ideals. In the end, he’d taken a bullet for it.
Sacrifice.
Woody’s Irish grandparents had left behind the potato famine to try their luck in America. They’d sacrificed everything to get here. What they’d found were NO IRISH NEED APPLY signs. It was always somebody’s turn. The Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Negroes or Chinese or Mexicans. A great wheel of bigotry, ever turning. Who got to decide what made somebody an American? America, the ideal of it at least, was its own form of elusive magic.
Overwhelmed by the vastness of the emotion inside him, Woody sat at the marble feet of Abraham Lincoln. Thomas Seamus Woodhouse knew that he was not a great man. Possibly not even a good one. But he was a darned good reporter. He’d changed over the past several months. It was no longer just about seeing his byline in print. About becoming famous. It was about telling the truth. It was about making sure that Jake Marlowe and the members of the Founders Club had to answer for their crimes, and about preventing them from creating an even greater catastrophe. It was about fighting back against Evil, yes, but also against all the small evils, too. It was about saving the nation that, Woody was surprised to discover, he believed in so fervently. And Woody knew that if somebody like him could change for the better, anything really was possible in America.
“‘We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and h
earthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature,’” Woody murmured, a quote he’d had to memorize in school. Why had it come to him now? The better angels of our nature… the better angels of our nature…
“Woodhouse…”
With a rabbit jump, Woody leaped up. “Hello?”
He was alone. Just him and the monument of a dead president in the rain. Still, he was sure he’d heard his name whispered.
“Hello?” he said again into the rain.
The hour was late, far later than he’d realized. He should be getting back to Union Station. He’d catch the next train back to New York. He’d stay up all night to write this story if necessary, because it needed to be told.
“Woody…”
“Wh-who’s there? Show yourself!” T. S. Woodhouse gripped his umbrella tightly, ready to use it as a weapon if need be. Down at the base of the steps, the ghost of Will Fitzgerald glimmered in the rain. His mouth opened and closed frantically, as if he were trying to shout a warning in a dream. And then, finally, as he faded from sight, he managed two words: “Go. Quickly.”
Under the steady rain, Woody heard the even cadence of footsteps coming closer. Two pairs of footsteps, just slightly out of time, but deliberate. Careful in the rain. On the marble. Woody could practically feel Mr. Peterson gripping his hand and delivering his warning.
Woody hurried down the steps and walked quickly away from the monument, breaking nearly into a run. The footsteps followed. Frantically, he hailed a taxi, exhaling in relief as they pulled away from the curb. “Gotcha, you bastards,” he muttered. The traffic was murder. By the time the taxi reached Union Station, Woody was sure he’d missed his train. The station was mostly deserted at this hour. The ticket windows were closed. A few bums walked through, looking for scraps or a place to sleep. It was another hour before the next train to New York City. Woody took a seat inside an empty telephone booth and shut the door. The adrenaline left his body, and Woody nodded off from the sudden fatigue. He dreamed of his ancestors on the boat to America, pale and hungry and hopeful. “Seamus,” his grandmother said. “Wake up, boy.”
Woody woke with a start. He didn’t see the Shadow Men, but he felt them. They were here inside the train station, he knew. Some prickling on the back of his neck told him it was so. Woody left the phone booth. He patted the file beneath his suit jacket. If the men caught up to him, he needed to make sure he had no “seditious materials” on him.
A station maid swept the vast sea of floor. On her small wooden cart lay her coat. Woody took out his pencil and scrawled “Attention: New York Daily News—URGENT!” across the folder containing the files, and then stuffed the folder into that coat, marveling at the notion that the fate of this particular piece of truth now rested in the pocket of a cleaning woman in Union Station. He hoped she would get it to the paper. All he could do was trust.
The Shadow Men entered the waiting room, but they didn’t seem to see Woody. Where could he hide? The men’s washroom? If they followed him in there, he’d have no way out. Keeping his head down, he slipped out and hurried to the track to wait for the train.
They were coming. Of course they were. But Woody was a Bronx street kid. He hopped onto the tracks and into the dark stretch of tunnel. He’d find a spot to flatten himself, hide, wait it out. Behind him, the Shadow Men hopped onto the tracks, too. And Woody began to feel real fear. Carefully, he stepped over the rails, moving deeper into the darkness. He stopped short when he saw the ghost of Will Fitzgerald once more. He shook his sorrowful head, and it put Woody in mind of the murdered president whose memorial he’d just seen.
“Good evening, Mr. Woodhouse.”
Woody turned around slowly, thinking of his grandparents who’d come to America to escape the troubles back home.
The Shadow Man’s razor flicked open with an echoing crack. Far down the tunnel, too far, the headlamp glow of the last train to New York began to brighten the gloom. It caught on the razor’s sharp edge—in the dark… so sharp!
It gleamed like a thing you’ve been expecting your whole life.
Sacrifice.
THE STORYLESS GIRL
Theta Knight did not know where she came from. There were no baby pictures of her, no memories shared by relatives, no funny nicknames that could be explained with, “Well, you remember the time…” She had been born, she felt, without a story. There wasn’t even a house; Mrs. Bowers had kept them on the road, performing in vaudeville, for most of Theta’s life. When she’d been young, she’d sometimes run a finger longingly over newspaper illustrations of happy families sitting around a dinner table. They were advertisements for something she couldn’t recall—canned peas or dining room tables. But what it felt to Theta was that they were advertisements for a family and a happiness she’d never be able to buy.
It was why she’d fallen so hard for Roy. Yes, he was handsome. And yes, when he looked at her with those big brown eyes, she swooned. But mostly, she had felt seen and wanted. Chosen. And that was hard to give up, even after the hitting started. If Roy didn’t love her, Theta had thought, then it meant that what she’d secretly suspected about herself—that she was unlovable—was true. When she thought about that, the hole inside her opened wider till she feared it would swallow her, and she tried harder to please Roy so that he would love her again. It seemed better than drowning in the emptiness. That was the trouble with having no story of your own. You tended to believe in whatever story somebody told you about yourself.
Adelaide Proctor, on the other hand, had a story. It was all right there in her diary. Her family. Her love for Elijah. A line of ancestors going back to Salem and, before that, England and burning witches. Like Theta, Miss Addie was also from fire.
One line from Addie’s diary stuck out to Theta. Addie had gotten into an argument with her father, about what, the diary didn’t say.
I was so very cross with Father today, and I told him so. For this offense, he took away my books as punishment. “I don’t like you when you’re cross,” Father said to me. “It is unbecoming of a lady, Adelaide.”
Anger made a girl not just unlovable, but unlikable. It got her punished. It could even get a girl killed. If Theta had ever smarted off to Roy, well, she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be around worrying about ghosts and lost witches. Addie had been angry enough at the King of Crows to try to best him at his awful games. And she had, for a while. But just as when her father had taken away Addie’s books, the King of Crows had the upper hand.
“What is it with these creepy fellas who think they can own a girl?”
For months now, Adelaide Proctor had been telling Theta to look into her heart. To know herself. Theta had mistakenly thought the old woman was telling Theta to let go of her anger. Theta’s own shame had misled her. Miss Addie wasn’t telling her to stop being angry. She was telling her to let herself get good and mad.
“When you free yourself, you free me,” Theta repeated, feeling the itch of pent-up fire in her palms.
In Theta’s dreams, a white clapboard church loomed. Miss Addie stood at the top of the church steps. The wind whipped her long white hair around her face. The church doors opened, and in the dark behind Miss Addie were trees with trunks like dried snakes.
“Theta, it’s not a sickness. He has me. Break the spell.”
“How do I do that?”
“Look into your heart, Theta, and you will know what to do. When you free yourself, you free me.”
The tree limbs uncurled themselves from the base of the dead tree and coiled themselves around Miss Addie’s frail body, crisscrossing her chest like the lacing of a corset, and yanked her back inside. The church doors slammed shut.
Theta woke with her heart racing. She blinked against the shadowy room. Nothing seemed amiss. It was the dream; that was all. The door was shut, just as it had been when she went to bed. Unsettled, Theta left the room she shared with Ling and walked thro
ugh the dark kitchen and dining room, coming at last into the front parlor. Moonlight seeped in through the windows. Looking out, she could see the dim silhouette of acres of corn. All calm. Why was she so frightened? All she wanted was to be safe in bed. But what if her bed wasn’t safe?
Theta stood on the rug in the parlor, listening. Wind. The soft rustling of corn. The small creaks and groans of an old house. And something else. A faint hiss, like gas slowly escaping a tire. What was that?
A night fog was rising in the cornfield, making it hard to see. Theta tiptoed out onto the porch. This is nothing, Theta. Don’t be such a baby. Her heart hammered anyway. The hiss grew louder. Crickets? Bees? The smell hit her first. The unmistakable stench of decay. And then she saw Elijah coming through the corn.
Theta stumbled backward. I got rid of you. I got rid of you in Gideon.
She ran back into the house, straight for the kitchen, riffling through the cupboards till she found the salt. Then she raced back to the porch. Elijah had cleared the corn and was in the yard by the swing. Quickly, Theta began pouring the salt along the edge of the porch to keep him out.
“No,” she pleaded as the salt ran out. “No, no.” She bent down and scooped up what she could, tossing it in front of the door. Theta burst into desperate tears; there simply wasn’t enough to protect her. Elijah kept coming. The heat that could be a weapon hid like a frightened child. She needed to stop him somehow.
“Where is Miss Addie?” Theta said. “What have you done with her?”
Elijah stopped. “He has Adelaide. Her heart is weak. He may take her at any time. She’ll become part of our world. A many-eyed tree that watches all but cannot speak. A lowly toad covered in sores. A crow who can travel between worlds but never rest. Or he will let her rot, but her mind will be awake. Voiceless for eternity.”
“Why can’t you let her alone—or better yet, fight for her?” Theta said, horrified. “You loved her once. You loved her.”