Looking out over the city from the roof of our building usually calmed me, the height a welcome respite from the dirty, crowded streets below. But tonight fear raced around my aching skull. What is happening to me? Am I to end up cloistered away in the Tombs, like my mother?
What I knew of the Tombs was no more than most. It was a notoriously awful prison for the worst criminals of the city. The basement housed an equally horrid lunatic asylum. The asylum’s security officers wore masks that resembled the head of a crow, for no reason I could imagine other than to instill fear. It was cruel, to say the least. People were superstitious about crows, especially the old folks, who spit over their left shoulder at the sight of one. My father said it was stuff and nonsense.
A rhyme about crows suddenly came to me, one that Grace and I used to chant while we were skipping rope.
One for sorrow,
Two for mirth,
Three for a funeral,
Four for birth,
Five for heaven,
Six for hell,
Seven, you’ll see the devil himself.
I’d never noticed the dark nature of our words. It was just a song we all sang. A chill ran over my spine, and I rubbed my arms briskly. Thank goodness for Seraphine. She kept crows from nesting anywhere near our building.
I took a deep breath and focused on the view.
To the east was the navy yard, tall masts in the river, abandoned dirigibles in the field, ribs exposed like dead dinosaurs. I wondered if one of the crumpled heaps was the balloon my father had piloted in the Civil War. To the west, the sun set through the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, emblazoning it, as if the metal were still molten. South—the ever-growing thicket of buildings crowding the steeple of St. Ann’s. And in front of me? I gazed past my work boots, propped up on the parapet, to the island of Manhattan, where my mother was imprisoned. It was beautiful from afar, but unless you were wealthy and lived uptown among the grand estates and wide boulevards, it was a pit of depravity and filth.
If only my mother had kept her visions to herself, the crows might not have taken her. Three years she’d been gone. My eyes burned and I felt the familiar ache inside my chest. My temples pulsed as the pain spread behind my forehead. I had to make this stop. If I go mad, who will take care of my father?
Seraphine chirped at me from her sheltered roost, bringing me back to the rooftop panorama. “I know, Sera,” I whispered. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
The view was the one thing I loved about Vinegar Hill. The river glinted shimmery gold. The nearby bridge tower seemed to belong more to heaven than to earth. A forest of sailships swayed and clanged in front of the blocky Manhattan skyline spiked by church steeples and cupolas. The tallest of them was Trinity Church. Its soaring spire and gilded cross welcomed sailors as warmly as any lighthouse beacon.
But most of all, I loved the airships. Tied up for the night, they hovered above the city like sleeping mammoths, the green glow of their mercury-vapor lamps visible in the night sky. I counted fourteen airships. They came in from all over the world. I imagined climbing aboard the steam-powered Cloud Voyager, the biggest, and setting sail for the West Indies or the Panama coast. I wished for somewhere warm, somewhere with color, away from the grimy gray buildings and congested streets of New York. Out there in the dusk, maybe my mother had the same wish.
The flapping of laundry lines being towed in rose from the narrow alley between tenement buildings, rusty pulleys squealing in protest, echoed by the buzz of women’s voices as they caught up on the day. At least the reek of the air shaft seemed stifled by the cold. Built to bring light to the lower levels, it was used instead as a garbage chute to nowhere, and was filled nearly to the roof. Since we had a shop, our windows looked onto the street. Our neighbors, though, had fetid fluid leaking into their apartments.
I sensed someone behind me before I heard any sound. I spun around, nearly falling off the wooden bench onto the gravel rooftop.
“Khan. Why do you always sneak up on me?” I let out my breath. Thank goodness no visions invaded my mind when I looked at him.
Khan laughed. “Because I can, Little Bird.” When we were kids, he thought my name meant birdcage. The nickname lingered.
Seraphine shrieked and hopped along the low wall. She loved Khan. He took something small and dead out of his pocket and tossed it to her. Quickly, she snared it with her sharp beak, then, gripping it with one claw, ripped it apart, swallowing it piece by piece.
He held up an oil lamp and studied my face, then carefully placed the lamp on the end of the bench. I hadn’t realized it had gotten so dark.
Khan continued to stare at me, his intensity unnerving. “Why do you hide up here?” he asked, in his slow, deep voice.
“Whatever do you mean, sir? I am not hiding.” I swept my arm toward the expansive view of the city. “I’m surveying my kingdom.” When he didn’t laugh, I looked across the water, in the direction of the Tombs. “I don’t know. I can think up here.”
He removed his hat, the worn brown Stetson he always wore. “Heard the whistle earlier. Someone told me there was an explosion. I came as soon as I could. Are you all right?”
“It’s . . . it’s nothing,” I stammered. “Banged my head pretty hard, is all.” I rubbed the painful lump under my hair. “Good thing for my helmet.”
“There’s something else bothering you. Isn’t there?” He spoke to me as if I were a child, even though he was only a few years older than me. “I know you too well, Avery. Tell me.”
When I didn’t answer, Khan sat down beside me and took my hand, his thumb absently massaging my palm. Down in the streets, he would never touch a white girl. But I’d known him my whole life, and up here on the roof we could be ourselves. Khan was my closest friend, really my only friend, other than the boys at work. A wave of pain cut through me as I thought of the disgust in Grace’s eyes that morning.
Khan’s full name was Khaniferre Soliman. At the Battle of Fort Pillow, Tennessee, in 1864, my father, a Civil War Balloon Corps aeronaut, saw a group of black slaves being gunned down as they tried to flee. So he disobeyed direct orders and landed his balloon in enemy territory. He’d rescued little Khan and his grandmother, but the rest of their family was killed. My father’s discharge papers did not mention them or the black Union soldier he’d also managed to get to safety, only the fact that the balloon had been damaged beyond repair. In recognition of his bravery and heroism, my father lost his military pension and his right leg, shattered by Confederate fire aimed at the low-flying balloon.
Once, I asked my father if he regretted his decision. He’d placed his hand on his metal leg and said, “Had I left them to die, Avery, had I watched and done nothing, then I would’ve lost my soul instead of my leg.”
My father had survived ground fighting in many of the war’s bloodiest battles—Shiloh, Antietam, and Stones River. Ironically, when he joined the Balloon Corps, he thought he’d be safer. In his typically positive way, he told me a benefit of losing his leg was that he was spared fighting at Gettysburg, where over fifty thousand men had died.
I traced my finger over the black ink tattoo on Khan’s muscular forearm. “This one new?” The complex design spiraled and swirled, connecting seamlessly with the rest of the patterns on his arm. They disappeared under the pushed-up sleeve of his muslin work shirt.
“Um-hum.” He looked out over the river toward the city as the gas lamps sputtered to life, outlining the streets in a beautiful and intricate pattern—rather like his tattoos.
“She plan to cover your whole body?” His grandmother was systematically tattooing Khan in the ways of the old world. Among his people—descendants of the black pharaohs of ancient Egypt—he would have been a prince. With the knives he wore crisscrossing his body, he looked more like a rogue than royalty.
“It is who I am,” he said.
Must be nice, I thought, to know who you are. These last few years I felt like I was living someone else’s life, someone w
ho scrounged for every penny, whose hands were dry and cracked from doing the wash and the cooking and the cleaning after welding all day. Someone who’d lost her mother and seemed increasingly disconnected from her father. And worst of all, someone who had, quite possibly, inherited her mother’s madness.
I laid my head on Khan’s shoulder. “Remember when we used to pretend you were Paul Revere and you’d flash a lantern at me from your house?” My old bedchamber window in Brooklyn Heights had a direct view of the wharf where he lived with his grandmother. “I wonder if I could see it from here, too.”
“What does it matter?” Khan said. “I am not Paul Revere.” As if he’d made his point, he stood, pulling me with him. “Come on, you’re shivering.”
Somewhere along the way, the streets had hardened Khan. I understood; it was survival of the fittest out there. Still, I missed the Khan who told me magical stories of his faraway ancestral land, tales passed down to him by his grandmother.
Sighing, I ran my hands over Seraphine’s silky feathers and placed her on her roost. Before we headed down, I turned back to Khan. His brown skin gleamed in the moonlight. His mane of hair, braided into long thin tubes, brushed past his shoulders, and his golden-brown eyes, lion’s eyes, made me feel warm and safe. I could trust him with my secret.
“Khan, I must ask you something.” He’d known my mother as well as anyone had. “Do you remember the things folks said about my mother? How they whispered about her, called her a witch?” I looked down at my feet as he waited for me to continue. “How after she was gone, no one mentioned her name, as if she’d never existed?”
As I spoke, other painful memories bobbed to the surface of my mind, like dead fish in a bucket. I recalled the shopkeepers’ sympathetic stares and the hushed whispers of the neighbors. I felt tears on my face and swiped them away.
“I remember, Avery,” Khan said.
“Well, I . . . I think I might have what she has. I don’t even know what it is, but I’m scared.” He was silent, listening. I wanted him to tell me I was wrong, that I was imagining it. He didn’t. “What if . . .” I took a deep breath. “What if I’m going mad, too?”
There. My secret was out. I almost flinched, as if the crow men could swoop out of the sky and snatch me from the roof.
Khan looked at me for a long while. “I was beginning to wonder if you’d turned to stone in there.” His smile lifted me momentarily, but my heart did feel like stone. He took my face in his hands, wiping my tears with his thumbs. “My ouma says fear itself does not make one weak, only the denial of it.”
This was the old Khan talking now. His hands were warm on my face. I looked up at him, the gold of his eyes dancing in the flickering light. My breath caught in my throat. His face was close. I let my gaze fall to his full mouth, the strong jaw shadowed with stubble.
When did my friend become so handsome? As kids we’d pretended one day we would marry, but I’d never really thought of him as anything other than a friend. So, why is my skin tingling under his touch?
Distracted, I removed his hands from my face and went over to the parapet wall. I rested my chin on my fists and stared out into the darkness. The hour after twilight, when night cloaked the streets and the lamplighter had not yet made it to our area on his rounds, the shadows were as thick and black as coal tar. They oozed into crevices and puddled in the alleyways. The only light came flickering warily from the windows facing the street.
“What brought these feelings on now?” Khan asked.
“It started around my birthday,” I said. “I . . . I began to see things. After the explosion today . . . it was dreadful, worse than ever. I know this sounds absurd, but I fear I may have somehow caused the explosion. And this afternoon I had the strangest dream, one I think I’ve had before. There was a hideous man. He—”
I was about to describe the dream to Khan, but the words caught in my throat. Something shifted in the shadows below.
Chapter Four
A Coin for a Boy
I fixed my eyes to the spot where the darkness seemed to lengthen into a pointy beak-like shape. The hair on my arms rose. “Khan,” I whispered. “Come here. Do you see anything across the street?”
He leaned over, squinting. “No. There’s nothing there.”
I pointed. “Near that alley.”
He shook his head. “Avery, this dream you had is giving you paranoia.”
Whistling drifted up from the street and a little bobbing light approached: the lamplighter. He lifted a long pole with a wick on its end, touching it to the gas lamp. Poof, the lamp sprung to life. The shadows shrank back as if afraid of the light. There was nothing there.
“I could have sworn . . .” I rubbed my strained eyes. “Never mind.” Now that the darkness was dispelled, people emerged from their homes. “Thank you for coming to check on me, Khan. What would I do without you?” His friendship for me had never wavered. Once again I recalled my encounter with Grace. If I’d been dressed in finery, would she have treated me differently? I was the same person on the inside, wasn’t I?
“Will you be all right alone?” He pulled me into a hug. I felt the muscles of his chest tighten.
“I’m fine,” I said, leaning into his embrace, although I trembled when we made our way down the stairs.
“I have business in Manhattan tomorrow, but I’ll come by again soon.”
I watched through the window as Khan left. Then I lit all the oil lamps, chasing away the shadows within the shop, but even that did not calm my nerves. To keep busy, I wound the clocks and organized my father’s tools, swept the ashes around the stove, and wiped spots off the glasses. With nothing left to do, I picked through leftover chicken pie. And still Father did not return.
The ticking of the clocks seemed to grow louder with every passing moment. I decided I did not want to stay here alone. My father’s favorite tavern was only a few blocks away, and this was not the first time I’d have to persuade him to come home. But it bothered me that I was afraid. I was acting like a child. Khan was right—the nightmare had shaken me.
I grabbed a coat and hat to hide my hair. Then I snuffed the lamps, locked the shop, and headed north. The night was crisp and clear. Coarse salty air gusted from the river, chilling the tip of my nose. I dug my hands into my pockets, keeping my head down as I walked. It wouldn’t do for a girl to be out by herself this time of night, at least not a respectable one.
The streets of Vinegar Hill degenerated with each hour that passed. Barroom brawls often tumbled out onto the sidewalk, and sailors, sunburned and intoxicated, staggered into the streets. Although Manhattan had the most notorious gangs, here in Brooklyn we had ruthless river pirates who made the nearby docks a treacherous place at night.
I walked in the shadows, skirting the amber pools of light from the gas lamps. People ignored me; probably thought I was one of the homeless who huddled in doorways and hunted through rubbish bins. Darkness offered obscurity. I laughed at myself. One moment I’m afraid of the shadows, the next I’m seeking them out.
At the intersection of Plymouth and Pearl, I peered around the corner and sucked in my breath. The monstrous Brooklyn Bridge tower loomed above like a cathedral in the sky, the moon shining through its gothic arches. On one side of the street were two pubs overflowing with sailors, dirigible pilots, and stevedores from the navy yard. On the other side was the new opium den, brass doors flanked by onion-shaped burners, smoke infusing the air with an exotic odor.
Word on the street was, the government was soon going to prohibit Chinese immigration. Of course, this made the dens more popular. After all, who would feed the addiction if they shut down? I was glad my father did not go there, but I didn’t understand the ban; I’d seen the massive arm and torch of a statue that was being built to welcome all immigrants. Industry certainly seemed to be booming with the available labor, and neighborhoods flourished when immigrants moved in, opening shops and ethnic markets.
The doorman at Sweeney’s Saloon recognized me, de
spite my hat and coat. He tipped his flat cap and spoke in his thick Irish brogue. “Me eyes must be playing tricks on me. How are ye, Miss Avery? Ain’t been here in a while, now, have ye?”
“Good evening, Mr. Craig. I’m trying to find my father. Have you seen him?”
“Aye, I did. Ye just missed him.” He pointed. “Headed up the street with that bloody rough-looking black friend of his.”
“You must mean Mr. Thorn.”
He nodded, his scowl revealing exactly what he thought.
“He looks intimidating,” I said, “but Mr. Thorn’s a good man.”
“Think what ye like, but anyone packing steel and lead like that’s looking for trouble.”
It was no use arguing and no use looking for my father, either. If he was with Jeremiah Thorn, who knows where he’d be? I thanked Mr. Craig and turned back toward home, the walk feeling longer now.
“Mind yerself out there,” Mr. Craig called after me. “If he comes back, I’ll tell’m yer scouting for him.”
I walked fast, eager for bed. I still had a headache, but at least I wasn’t seeing things.
Halfway home, a tall coach, pulled by four black horses, clopped by me. It came to a stop ahead. I glanced behind, then back toward the coach. The block was deserted except for a group of boys squatting around a tin can, flames licking up toward their fingerless gloves. Acting on instinct, I ducked into a darkened doorway. The horses huffed plumes of cold mist and scraped their hooves impatiently.
Hair rose on the back of my neck. Something seemed strange about the coach. It was unlike any I’d seen before. The driver, perched on a high seat up front, wore a hooded cloak instead of the typical livery. But it was the exterior cladding that was most curious. The coach appeared to be made of riveted black metal and had wheels cast of iron. No wonder it required four horses instead of the usual two.
The Tombs Page 3