The Diviners

by Libba Bray

  Tommy scrambled quickly to his feet. The stranger’s laughter startled him. He was suddenly right there in front of Tommy, who backed into one of the pigs and sent it swinging against the others. With shaking hands, Tommy patted the dead pig into stillness, as if he could bring order to this nightmarish turn of events. The stranger was right there. How is that possible? How could he have gotten all the way over here?

  “I… I can’t get it out,” Tommy whispered. He was not aware that he was backing up.

  “Shame. Maybe he could help you?” the stranger said, nodding gently toward the dead dog. Then he frowned playfully. “No. I suppose not.” He drew the stick from the ground without effort.

  Tommy felt his head swim. He wasn’t seeing so clearly anymore. The pigs’ legs jerked like marionettes. They were moving, writhing on their hooks and squealing till Tommy, too, was screaming. The man’s eyes burned with a terrible fire and he seemed to be even bigger than before.

  “Game of chance, my boy. You’ve already rolled your dice.”

  “Paddy! Liam!” Tommy screamed. “Johnny! I’m in here!”

  “Your friends have deserted you.”

  Tommy cut his eyes in the direction of the barred door at the other end of the warehouse, which was now slightly ajar. How far was it from here to there? Two hundred yards? Three hundred?

  “Ah, one last game, I see,” the stranger said, as if reading Tommy’s thoughts. “Go on, then, Thomas. Place your bets. Roll the dice.” His voice echoed in the cavernous slaughterhouse. “Run!”

  Tommy was off. His knees moved like pistons, his elbows jabbing back against the dead air. The door bounced in his vision as his legs gobbled ground. It was known that he was the fastest boy on Tenth Avenue. He’d outrun cops, priests, gangs, and his own mother, who was quick with a belt when he made her angry, which was most of the time. A hanging chain clanged into him and he batted it away, feeling the sting as it hit his wrist, but he did not slow down. Far behind him, he could hear the stranger’s voice ringing out above the clang of the slaughterhouse chains. “ ‘And the sixth offering was an offering of obedience….’ ”

  Tommy could see the door. It was maybe sixty yards away, and still there was no sign of the stranger. A frantic chorus pounded in Tommy’s head as he cleared the last carcass: King of the Streets, King of the Streets, King of the Streets! Fifty yards. Forty. Beautiful moonlight peeked through the crack where the door was slightly open. Tommy didn’t stop to ask himself how it had been opened. All he could think about was pushing through it to freedom, racing for the shortcut to Thirty-ninth Street.

  Thirty yards. Twenty…

  Tommy no longer saw the door. One minute it had been within reach, and now it was gone. Instead, the stranger stood before him. It took Tommy a moment to slow down, for his brain to signal to his legs that there was trouble ahead—a cliff’s edge in the shape of a man with burning eyes. He had run in the wrong direction. How was that possible? How had he gotten so turned around? Nothing looked right to him anymore. Tommy turned the other way and saw hideous shadows crawling along the walls and ceiling of the slaughterhouse, as if devouring it whole, the stranger walking just ahead of the movement like a carnival barker leading a parade of darkness.

  How? Tommy thought. He dashed left, fighting through the smothering pigs only to find himself facing a brick wall that surely hadn’t been there a minute ago. He went right, and there was another wall. When he faced forward again, the stranger was once more before him, standing in a patch of terrible moonlight. He was stripped to the waist, and Tommy stared at the glowing skin, the tattoos like brands, crawling across the man’s flesh and underneath it as well, as if his skin were a false one and the thing underneath was waiting to come out.

  “You lose, Thomas.”

  Devilish growls filled the warehouse. The darkness swirled behind the stranger, blotting out the walls and any hope of escape.

  “ ‘I am he, the Great Beast, the Dragon of Old. And all will look upon me and tremble….’ ”

  The stranger kept talking, but Tommy was beyond hearing. He kept his eyes on the moving dark and the unspeakable things inside it, on the changing form of the stranger who loomed above him.

  “P-please…” he croaked.

  The stranger only smiled.

  “Such perfect hands,” he said as the darkness descended.

  AND DEATH SHALL FLEE

  Evie sat in the tub, two fat cucumber slices placed over her swollen eyes, and sang in contempt of her throbbing head. “We’ll have Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island, too…. I had Manhattan, all right,” Evie mumbled. “And it… had… me.” She slipped under the water and let it carry her until a fierce pounding made her surface.

  “I’m bathing,” she yelled.

  “Will you be long?” Jericho answered.

  Evie let a prune-ish toe play at the hot-water tap. “Hard to say.”

  “I need the… the, ah…”

  “Oh, applesauce,” Evie said on a sigh. “Okay, okay. I don’t want you to die of peritonitis like Valentino. Just a minute.” Evie rinsed the cucumber slices under the tap and popped them into her mouth. She pulled the plug and let the water swirl down the drain while she slipped on her robe and opened the door with a flourish. “All yours,” she said as Jericho pushed past her.

  In the kitchen, Evie squeezed an orange into a glass, fished out the seeds, and gulped down the precious juice along with two aspirin. “Oh, sweet Mary.”

  A moment later, Jericho emerged from the bathroom, scowling.

  “What’s eating you?”

  “Nothing.”

  He sat on the couch and quietly laced up a shoe, but his disapproval hung in the room like the lingering scent of Evie’s perfumed bath salts. Evie didn’t mind yelling, but she hated feeling judged. It got under her skin and made her feel small and ugly and unfixable. She sang cheerily in rebuke of both Jericho and her throbbing skull. “You’re the berries, my bowl of cream, a dream come true, dear…”

  “I was only wondering if this is going to be your usual routine,” Jericho said at last.

  “Usual routine. Hmm, well, I might add a trained monkey. Everyone loves those.”

  “Is that all this is to you? One big party?”

  Evie was angry now. At least she wasn’t afraid to get out and live. Jericho didn’t seem to know life beyond the pages of a musty old book, and he didn’t seem interested in knowing anything beyond that, either.

  “It’s better than spending every night brooding like Byron’s long-lost brother. Don’t make that injured face—you are a brooder! And what good does it do you? You’re eighteen, not eighty, kiddo. Live a little.”

  Jericho got up from the couch. “Live a little? Live a little!” He let out a bitter ha! “If you only knew…” He stopped suddenly, and Evie could see him force an almost mechanical calm to descend. “Never mind. You wouldn’t understand. I have to get to the museum.” He grabbed his dog-eared copy of Nietzsche and slammed the door behind him.

  Evie sat on Mabel’s bed. The aspirin hadn’t helped much, but like a true modern girl, she wasn’t about to lie in bed all day, unlike poor Mabel, who had succumbed to a terrible hangover. She lay curled in her bed, clutching a bowl in case she felt the need to vomit.

  “Hot off the presses, today’s headlines: The love of your life does not approve of my wanton flapper ways,” Evie said in a voice of affected mystery. “Really, Mabesie. You might want to reconsider—he is a bit of a killjoy.”

  “My stomach doesn’t approve of our wanton ways, either,” Mabel said miserably. She hadn’t lifted her head from her pillow. “I am never drinking again.”

  “That’s what they all say, Pie Face.”

  Mabel moaned. “I mean it. I feel dreadful. I am ending my association with liquor.” She raised her right hand. “You may be the notary public to this announcement.”

  “Noted. Public’d.”

  Mabel dropped her hand, her face screwed into an expression of fresh misery. Evie jumpe
d off the bed.

  “What is it? Are you about to blow?”

  Mabel reached under her bed and pulled out what was left of Evie’s headache band. It was bent in the middle, where someone had obviously stepped on it. Several of the rhinestones were missing, and the peacock feathers drooped like spent chorus girls. “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh…” Evie swallowed down a curse word. Mabel’s mouth twitched and Evie could tell she was on the verge of a legendary weep. She tossed the headache band aside as if it were rubbish. “That old thing? I was tired of it, anyway. You’ve done me a favor, old girl, putting it out of its misery like that.”

  Mabel cocked an eyebrow. “You’re lying, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just to make me feel better?”

  “No. To make me feel better. Otherwise I’ll cry.”

  “Thanks.” Mabel managed a weak smile. She crooked her pinkie. “Pals for life-ski?”

  Evie hooked her pinkie with Mabel’s. “For life-ski.” Evie kissed Mabel’s forehead and turned off the bedside lamp. “Get some sleep, Pie Face.”

  Evie left the Bennington and walked down Broadway, past the shops. A radio store played its latest model, letting the sound drift out onto the sidewalks to entice customers. Evie idled for a moment, listening as she painted her lips in the window’s reflection.

  “… This is Cedric Donaldson, reporting from Roosevelt Field, Long Island, where just moments ago Jake Marlowe landed his American Flyer, an aeroplane of his own invention. You can hear the enthusiasm of the crowds who’ve gathered here on this fine autumn day to give the millionaire inventor and industrialist a hero’s welcome! And here is the Bayside High School marching band playing ‘The Stars and Stripes Forever.’ ”

  The man in the shop peered disapprovingly at Evie through the glass. She pumped her arms and legs up and down in imitation of a marching band, gave the man a salute, and continued her meandering walk to the museum. At the newsstand, Evie stopped cold. The front page of the New York Daily Mirror trumpeted MADMAN OF MANHATTAN STRIKES AGAIN! She grabbed the paper and flipped past a store advertisement for Solomon’s Comet binoculars to the story on page two.

  “Hey, doll, you gonna pay for that?” The newspaperman held out his palm.

  Evie tossed him a nickel and, clutching the paper, ran the rest of the way to the museum.

  Will was sitting in the library with Sam and Jericho. He looked pale.

  “I… I just heard….” Evie said, out of breath. She held up the newspaper.

  “Tommy Duffy. Twelve years old,” Will said quietly. “The killer took his hands.”

  The horror of it made Evie’s stomach roil. “Is it the same killer?”

  Will nodded. “First he posted a warning note to the papers.”

  Jericho opened the previous evening’s late-edition Daily News. “ ‘And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. For the Beast will rise when the comet flies.’ ”

  “He seems to like attention, this fellow,” Will said. “He left another note with the body.”

  Evie unscrolled the thin parchment, which resembled the first, with strange sigils along the bottom.

  “Careful with that—it’s on loan from Detective Malloy,” Will explained.

  “ ‘And in those times, the young were idle. Their hands were absent from their plows and they did not raise them in prayer and praise to the Lord our God. And the Lord was angry and commanded of the Beast a sixth offering, an offering of obedience.’ ” Evie read. “The hands. With Ruta, he took the eyes, and with Tommy Duffy, the hands. Why?”

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” Will agreed.

  “The murder of a child could never make sense.”

  “I meant the symbology.” Will was up and pacing the room. “Tommy Duffy was posed. He was hung upside down with one leg bent. That’s not a Christian symbol. It’s pagan. The Hanged Man, as seen on the tarot. It hints at magic or mysticism. Yet, this was found shoved into the boy’s back pocket.”

  Will slapped a pamphlet down on the table. On its cover, a man in white robes and a pointed hat stood below an open Bible and a cross, ringing a liberty bell, while the ghostly face of George Washington looked on in approval.

  “The Good Citizen,” Evie read. “What’s that?”

  “It is a monthly publication of the Pillar of Fire Church,” Will said. “It’s also a strong endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan.”

  “You think the Klan might have killed that boy?”

  “It’s possible. Of course, it’s also possible it was on the scene before the murder. However, it’s worth nothing that Tommy Duffy was Irish. Ruta Badowski was Polish. The killer could harbor a hatred of foreigners.”

  “He could be anti-Catholic,” Jericho said.

  “They don’t need much reason,” Sam grumbled.

  There were men back in Zenith who were Klansmen, Evie knew. People like Harold Brodie’s father supported them. But Evie’s father and mother had been Catholic once. The Irish O’Neills. And her father had repeatedly railed against the Klan and the thuggish bigotry for which they stood.

  “When do we leave?” Evie asked.

  “Leave for what, doll?” Sam said.

  “We are going to this Pillar of Fire Church to sniff around, aren’t we?”

  “I can’t,” Will said. “I once helped bring charges against the Grand Dragon of the Klan out there. I’m known to them.”

  “What about Detective Malloy?” Jericho asked.

  Will let out a long sigh. “He sent some men out this morning, but I understand that they were stonewalled. Alma Bridwell White, the bishop of Pillar of Fire, threatens a lawsuit anytime someone breathes a word against her church.”

  Evie sat up. “What if Jericho and I posed as newlyweds interested in joining the church? Then we could snoop around and see what we could find.”

  Jericho looked up. “You… and me?”

  “You pulling my leg?” Sam said. “Frederick the Giant here will get eaten alive.”

  “I can handle myself just fine, thanks.”

  “Don’t get sore, Freddy. You’re a fine fella. But what you need on this is somebody who can work the angles. You need a con man. Besides, somebody’s gotta drive.”

  “I can drive,” Evie said.

  “Evie can drive,” Jericho said. There was challenge in his stare.

  “Fine. We’ll all go,” Sam said. “But if I get us a car, I get the wheel.”

  “As you wish,” Will said. “Evie, may I see you for a moment in my study, please?”

  “No one ever lets me drive. I’m a fine driver,” Evie grumbled as she followed Will into the study. He retrieved a silver flask from a desk drawer and took a belt from it. “So you do have hooch,” Evie said.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you; this is Phillips’ Milk of Magnesia. My stomach is unsettled—not surprisingly, after what I witnessed this morning. You needn’t sit. I shall be brief. Evangeline, I am not your mother, but that doesn’t mean I have no standards of behavior. Coming home intoxicated at all hours will no longer be tolerated.” Will looked directly at her. It occurred to Evie that she had never been looked at with such scrutiny before.

  “But Unc—”

  Will held up a hand to stop her protest before it could gather steam. “I might remind you that the trains travel in both directions between New York and Ohio, Evangeline. Is that understood?”

  Evie swallowed hard. “I’m on the trolley.”

  “I don’t mind if you enjoy what New York has to offer, but I do think you should be smart and safe. After all, there is a killer loose in our city.”

  Evie suddenly remembered the page she’d marked to show Will the previous day. “Applesauce! I meant to tell you—I think I found our symbol in a book in the library. Something about a religious order—the Brothers, the Brotherhood… oh, what was it?”

  Back in the library, Evie searched the stacks, making a mess of Jericho’s
careful work as he moved behind her, righting things.

  “Here it is!” Evie raced down the spiral staircase. “Religious Fervor and Fanaticism in the Burned-Over District. The book is pos-i-tute-ly a cure for insomnia, but it does have this.” She opened to the page with the drawing of the pentacle-and-snake emblem. “The Brethren! That’s it! Do you know what this is?”

  “No, but I know someone who might: Dr. Georg Poblocki at Columbia University. He’s a professor of religion, and an old friend. I’ll telephone him right away,” Will said, walking briskly from the library.

  Jericho cleared his throat. “Would you like to take first shift, or shall I?” he asked, as if at any moment they’d be flooded with visitors.

  “Where’s Sam?” Evie asked.

  “He went to call a friend about a motorcar.”

  “I’ll bet he did,” Evie scoffed.

  “I could take first shift, if you like,” Jericho offered.

  “No, I will,” Evie said. She was still miffed about Jericho’s little lecture that morning and wasn’t about to let him take the martyr points.

  Evie wandered the rooms of the museum, thinking about the murder as well as the previous night’s party. She probably shouldn’t have been so public about her object-reading. What if they expected her to do that every time? What if, in the sober light of day, they thought of her as strange or frightening, somebody who might be able to divine the secrets they’d worked hard to hide? She made a vow that she’d be more careful in the future.

  But she was curious about the Diviners Will had mentioned on her first day at the museum, so she sought out Liberty Anne Rathbone’s book and curled up by the woodstove in the collections room to read it.

  The Prophecies of Liberty Anne Rathbone, as recorded by her brother and faithful servant, Cornelius T. Rathbone.

  To-day, sweet Liberty Anne lay in that same state of which she has been bewitched since her walk into the woods. A’times, she speaks in soft awe at the wonders she beholds; other times, she is troubled and murmurs warnings of terrible things to come. It is as if she sees into that vast, heavenly abyss of which only the angels and the all-seeing eye of Providence are visitors. I have recorded her words forthwith.