by Libba Bray
“Where to, Miss?” the cabbie asked, flipping his meter on.
“The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult, please.”
“Oh. The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies.” The cabbie chuckled. “Good thing you’re goin’ to see it while you can.”
“What do you mean?”
“They say the place is in arrears on its taxes. The city’s had its sights set on that spot for years. They want to put some apartment buildings there.”
“Oh, dear.” Evie examined the photograph her mother had given her. It was a picture of Uncle Will—tall, lanky, fair-haired—standing in front of the museum, a grand Victorian mansion complete with turrets and stained-glass windows and bordered by a wrought-iron fence.
“Can’t happen soon enough, if you ask me. That place makes people uncomfortable—all those crazy objects s’posed to be fulla hocus-pocus.”
Objects. Magic. Evie drummed her fingers against the door.
“You know about the fella that runs the place, don’t ya?”
Evie stopped drumming. “What do you mean?”
“Odd fella. He was a conscie.”
“A what?”
“Conscientious objector,” the cabbie said, spitting the words out like poison. “During the war. Refused to fight.” He shook his head. “I hear he might be one of them Bolsheviks, too.”
“Well, if so, he never mentioned it to me,” Evie said, pulling the wrinkles from her glove.
The cabbie caught her eye in the mirror. “You know him? What’s a nice girl like you doing with a fella like that?”
“He’s my uncle.”
At that, the cabbie fell blessedly quiet.
At last the taxi turned onto a side street near Central Park and pulled up to the museum. Tucked away among the grit and steel of Manhattan, the museum itself seemed a relic, a building out of time and place, its limestone facade long since grimed by age, soot, and vines. Evie glanced from the sad, dingy shadow before her to the beautiful house in her photograph. “You sure this is the joint?”
“This is the place. Museum of the Creepy Crawlies. That’ll be one dollar and ten cents.”
Evie reached into her pocket and pulled out nothing but the lining. With mounting alarm, she searched all her pockets.
“Whatsa matter?” The cabbie eyed her suspiciously.
“My money! It’s gone! I had twenty dollars right in this pocket and… and it’s gone!”
He shook his head. “Mighta known. Probably a Bolshevik, like your uncle. Well, little lady, I’ve had three fare jumpers in the past week. Not this time. You owe me one dollar and ten cents, or you can tell your story to a cop.” The cabbie signaled to a policeman on horseback down the block.
Evie closed her eyes and retraced her steps: The tracks. The druggist’s window. Sam Lloyd. Sam… Lloyd. Evie’s eyes snapped open as she recalled his sudden passionate kiss. There’s just something about you…. There sure was—twenty dollars. Not an hour in the city and already she’d been taken for a ride.
“That son of a…” Evie swore hard and fast, stunning the cabbie into silence. Furious, she pulled her emergency ten-dollar bill from her cloche, waited for the change, and then slammed the taxi door behind her.
“Hey,” the cabbie yelled. “How’s about a tip?”
“You bet-ski,” Evie said, heading toward the old Victorian mansion, her long silk scarf trailing behind her. “Don’t kiss strange men in Penn Station.”
Evie rapped the brass eagle’s-head door knocker and waited. A plaque beside the museum’s massive oak doors read HERE BE THE HOPES AND DREAMS OF A NATION, BUILT UPON THE BACKS OF MEN AND LIFTED BY THE WINGS OF ANGELS. But neither men nor angels answered her knock, so she let herself in. The entry was ornate: black-and-white marble floors, wood-paneled walls dimly lit by gilded sconces. High above, the pale blue ceiling boasted a mural of angels watching over a field of Revolutionary soldiers. The building smelled of dust and age. Evie’s heels echoed on the marble as she made her way down the long hall. “Hello?” she called. “Uncle Will?”
A wide, elaborately carved staircase wound up to a second-floor landing lit by a large stained-glass window, and then curved out of sight. To Evie’s left was a gloomy sitting room with its drapes drawn. To her right, pocket doors opened onto a musty dining hall whose long wooden table and thirteen damask-covered chairs looked as if they hadn’t been used in years.
“Holy smokes. Who died?” Evie muttered. She wandered till she came to a long room that housed a collection of objects displayed behind glass.
“ ‘The Museum of the Creepy Crawlies,’ I presume.”
Evie passed from display to display, reading the typewritten cards placed beneath:
GRIS GRIS BAG AND VOUDON DOLL,
NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA
BONE FRAGMENT FROM CHINESE RAILROAD
WORKER AND REPUTED CONJURER,
NORTHERN CALIFORNIA, GOLD RUSH PERIOD
CRYSTAL BALL USED IN SÉANCES OF
MRS. BERNICE FOXWORTHY DURING
AMERICAN SPIRITUALISM PERIOD, C. 1848,
TROY, NEW YORK
OJIBWAY TALISMAN OF PROTECTION,
GREAT LAKES REGION
ROOT WORKER’S CUTTINGS,
BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA
FREEMASON’S TOOLS AND BOOKS, C. 1776,
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA
There was a series of spirit photographs populated with faint figures, gauzy as lace curtains in a wind. Poppet dolls. A ventriloquist’s dummy. A leather-bound grimoire. Books on alchemy, astrology, numerology, root workers, voudon, spirit mediums, and healers, and several volumes of accounts of ghostly sightings in the Americas starting in the 1600s.
The Diary of a Mercy Prowd lay open on a table. Evie turned her head sideways, trying to make sense of the seventeenth-century handwriting. “I see spirits of the dead. For this they hath branded me a witch….”
“They hanged her. She was only seventeen.”
Evie turned, startled. The speaker stepped from the shadows. He was tall and broad-shouldered and had ash-blond hair. For a moment, with the light from the old chandelier shining down on him, he seemed like some severe angel from a Renaissance painting, come to life.
“What crime did she commit?” Evie said, finding her voice again. “Did she turn the gin to water?”
“She was different. That was her sin.” He offered his hand for a quick shake. “I’m Jericho Jones. I work for your uncle. He asked me if I could keep you company while he teaches his class.”
So this was the famous Jericho with whom Mabel was so besotted. “Why, I’ve heard so much about you!” Evie blurted out. Mabel would kill her for being so indiscreet. “That is, I hear Uncle Will would be lost without… whatever it is that you do.”
Jericho looked away. “I highly doubt that. Would you like to see the museum?”
“That’d be swell,” Evie lied.
Jericho led her up and down staircases and into preserved, musty rooms holding more collections of dull, dusty relics, while Evie fought to keep a polite smile.
“Last but not least, here is the place where we spend most of our time: the library.” Jericho opened a set of mahogany pocket doors, and Evie let out a whistle. She’d never seen such a room. It was as if it had been transported here from some spooky fairy-tale castle. An enormous limestone fireplace took up the whole of the far wall. The furnishings weren’t much—brown leather club chairs worn to stuffing in places, a dotting of old wooden tables, bankers’ lamps dimmed to a faint green glow at each. A second-floor gallery crammed with bookcases circled the entire room. Evie craned her head to take in the full view. The ceiling had to be twenty feet high, and what a ceiling it was! Spread across its expanse was a panorama of American history: Black-hatted Puritans condemning a cluster of women. An Indian shaman staring into a fire. A healer grasping snakes in one hand while placing the other on the forehead of a sick man. Gray-wigged founding fathers signing the Declaration of Independence. A slave woman h
olding a mandrake root aloft. Painted angels and demons hovered above the historical scene, watching. Waiting.
“What do you think?” Jericho asked.
“I think he should have fired his decorator.” Evie plopped into one of the chairs and adjusted a seam on her stockings. She was itching to get out and see Mabel and explore the city. “Will Unc be long?”
Jericho shrugged. He sat at the long table and retrieved a book from a tall stack. “This is an excellent history of eighteenth-century mysticism in the colonies if you’d care to pass the time with a book.”
“No, thanks,” Evie said, suppressing the urge to roll her eyes. She didn’t know what Mabel saw in this fella. He was going to take work; that was for sure. “Say”—Evie lowered her voice—“I don’t suppose you have any giggle water on you?”
“Giggle water?” Jericho repeated.
“You know, coffin varnish? Panther sweat? Hooch?” Evie tried. “Gin?”
“No.”
“I’m not particular. Bourbon’ll do just as well.”
“I don’t drink.”
“You must get awfully thirsty then.” Evie laughed. Jericho did not.
“Well, I should get back to the museum,” he said, walking quickly toward the doors. “Make yourself comfortable. Your uncle should be with you shortly.”
Evie turned to the stuffed grizzly looming beside the fireplace. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any hooch? No? Maybe later.”
Other than Jericho, she hadn’t seen a single soul in the museum. She was hungry and thirsty and a little put out that she’d been left all on her own without so much as a hello from her uncle. If she was going to live in New York, she’d have to start fending for herself.
Evie patted the bear’s matted fur. “Sorry, old sport, you’re on your own,” she said, and left the library in search of food. She heard male voices and followed the sound to a large room in the back of the museum where Uncle Will, in gray trousers, waistcoat, and blue tie, his shirtsleeves rolled to his elbows, stood lecturing. His hair had darkened to a dirty blond over the years, and he sported a trim mustache.
“The presence of evil is a conundrum that has taxed the minds of philosophers and theologians alike….” he was saying.
Evie peeked around the corner to take in the whole of the room. A class of college boys sat taking notes on Will’s lecture.
“Now we’re cookin’,” Evie whispered. “Sorry I’m late!” she called as she breezed into the room. The college boys’ heads swiveled in Evie’s direction as she scraped a chair across the floor to join them. Uncle Will regarded her over the tops of his round tortoiseshell glasses.
“Go on, Uncle Will. Don’t mind me.” Evie perched on the edge of the chair beside one of the College Joes and did her best to look interested.
“Yes…” For a moment, Uncle Will’s bewildered expression threatened to become permanent. But then he found his stride again and began pacing the room with his hands behind his back. “As I said, how does one explain the presence of evil?”
The boys all looked to one another to see who would answer.
“Man makes evil through his choices,” someone said.
“It’s God and the Devil, fighting it out. That’s what the Bible says, at least,” another boy argued.
“How can there be a Devil if there is a God?” a boy in golf knickers asked. “I’ve always wondered that.”
Uncle Will waved a finger, making a point. “Ah. Theodicy.”
“Is that a cross between theology and idiocy?”
Will allowed a small smile. “Not exactly. Theodicy is a branch of theology concerned with the defense of God in the face of the existence of evil. It brings about a conundrum: If God is an all-knowing, all-powerful deity, how can he allow evil to exist? Either he is not the omnipotent god we’ve been told, or he is all-powerful and all-knowing, and also cruel, because he allows evil to exist and does nothing to stop it.”
“Well, that certainly explains Prohibition,” Evie quipped.
The college boys laughed appreciatively. Again Uncle Will looked at Evie as if she were a subject he had yet to classify.
“Any good world would allow for us to have free will, yes?” he continued. “Can we agree to this point? But once human beings have free will, they also have the ability to make choices—and commit evil. Thus, this very good thing, free will, allows the possibility of evil into our fine world.” The room was silent. “One to ponder. But, if I may continue with our earlier discussion…”
The boys sat up straight, ready to take notes as Will paced and talked. “America has a rich history of beliefs, a tapestry woven together by threads from different cultures. Our history is rife with the supernatural, the unexplained, the mystical. The earliest settlers came here for religious freedom. The immigrants who followed introduced their hopes and haunts, from the vampire legend of Eastern Europe to the ‘hungry ghosts’ of China. The original Americans believed in shamans and spirits. The slaves of West Africa and the Caribbean, stripped of all they had, still carried with them their customs and beliefs. We are not only a melting pot of cultures, but also of spirits and superstitions. Yes?”
A boy in a navy blazer raised his hand. “Do you believe in the supernatural, Dr. Fitzgerald?”
“Ah. It would seem illogical, wouldn’t it? After all, we live in the modern age. It’s difficult enough to get people even to believe in Methodism.” Will smiled as the boys chuckled. “And yet, there are mysteries. How does one explain the stories of people who exhibit unusual powers?”
Evie felt a tingle down her spine.
“Powers?” a boy repeated in a skeptical tone bordering on contempt.
“People who claim to be able to speak to the dead, such as psychics or spiritual mediums. People who say they have been healed by the laying on of hands. Who can see glimpses of the future or know a card before it is played. The early records of the Americas talk of Indian spirit walkers. The Puritans knew of cunning folk. And during the American Revolution, Benjamin Franklin wrote of prophetic dreams that influenced the course of the war and shaped the nation. What do you say to that?”
“Those people need the services of a psychiatrist—though I’ll make an exception for Mr. Franklin.”
Another round of chuckles followed, and Evie joined in, though she was still discomfited. Uncle Will waited for the laughing to subside.
“This very museum, as you may know, was constructed by Cornelius Rathbone, who amassed his fortune building railroads. How did he know that the age of steel was coming?” Will paused at the lectern and waited. When no one answered, he continued pacing, his hands behind his back. “He claimed he knew because of the prophetic visions of his sister, Liberty Anne. When Cornelius and Liberty were young, they spent hours in the woods playing at all sorts of games. One day, Liberty went into the forest and was lost for two full days. The men of the town searched but could find no trace of her. When she emerged at last, her hair had gone completely white. She was only eleven. Liberty Anne claimed she had met a man there, ‘a strange, tall man, skinny as a scarecrow, in a stovepipe hat and whose coat opened to show the wonders and frights of the world.’ She fell ill with a fever. The doctor was sent for, but there was nothing he could do. For the next month, she lay in a dream trance, spouting prophecy, which her worried brother transcribed in his diary. These prophecies were astonishing in their accuracy. She claimed to see ‘the great man from Illinois taken from us while visiting our American cousin’—a reference to the assassination of President Lincoln in the balcony of Ford’s Theatre while he watched a production of the play Our American Cousin. She spoke of ‘a great steel dragon criss-crossing the land, belching black smoke,’ which most interpret to mean the Transcontinental Railroad. She predicted the Emancipation Proclamation, the Great War, the Bolshevik revolution, and the invention of the motorcar and the aeroplane. She even spoke of the fall of our banks and the subsequent collapse of our economy.”
“Clearly, she couldn’t see everything
,” the boy in the golf trousers said. “That will never happen.”
Will rapped his knuckles on the desk. “Knock wood, as they say.” Will grinned and the College Joes laughed at his superstitious joke. He fidgeted with a silver lighter, turning it end over end, occasionally flicking his thumb across the flint wheel so that it sparked. “Liberty Anne died a month to the day after she emerged from the woods. Toward the end, her prophecies became quite dark. She talked of ‘a coming storm,’ a treacherous time when the Diviners would be needed.”
“Diviners?” Evie repeated.
“That was her name for people with powers like her own.”
“And what would these Diviners do?” the boy in the golf pants asked.
Will shrugged. “If she knew, she didn’t say. She died shortly after making the prophecy, leaving her brother, Cornelius, bereft. He became obsessed with good and evil, and with the idea that this was a country haunted by ghosts. That there was something beyond what we see. He spent his life—and his fortune—trying to prove it.”
The boys fell into heated discussion until one of them shouted over the others. “Yes, but Professor, do you yourself actually believe that there is another world beyond this one, and that the entities from that world can act to help or hurt us? Do you believe that our actions here—good or bad—can create an external evil? Do you believe there are ghosts and demons and Diviners among us?”
Uncle Will took a cloth from his pocket and wiped the lenses of his spectacles. “ ‘There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’ ” Will said, hooking the spectacles over his ears again. “That quote is from William Shakespeare, who seemed to know a thing or two about both humanity and the supernatural. But for your examinations, you will need to know the following concrete information….”