by Libba Bray
“You want to know about my John,” she said in a voice weak with labored breathing.
“Yes, Mrs. Blodgett. Thank you.” Uncle Will sat in the only chair, forcing Evie to sit on the edge of the bed. The old woman smelled of Mentholatum and something sickly sweet, like flowers dying; it made Evie want to bolt from the house and run toward the hard light of the beach.
“Did you know my John?” Mary White smiled, showing teeth gone brownish-gray.
“No. I’m afraid not,” Uncle Will said.
“Such a lovely man. He brought me a carnation every week. Sometimes white, sometimes red. Or a pink one for special days.”
Evie shivered. From what they knew, John Hobbes had been anything but a lovely man. He’d killed many people and taken body parts from them. He’d terrorized and probably murdered Ida Knowles. And if they were correct, his spirit had come back to finish a macabre ritual and bring forth terrible destruction.
“Yes. Well. Can you tell us about John’s beliefs?” Uncle Will asked. “About the cult of the Brethren and—”
“It wasn’t a cult!” the old woman coughed out. Evie helped her sip water from a grimy glass. “They tried to make it sound diabolical. But it wasn’t. It was beautiful. We were seekers manifesting the spiritual realm on this plane. Jefferson, Washington, Franklin—enlightened men, the founders of our great nation—they knew the secrets of the ancients. Secrets even the Masons in their hallowed halls didn’t know. We meant to free people’s minds, rid them of their shackles. The world we know would die, and in its place a new world would be born. That was our mission—rebirth. John knew that.”
“What about the boarder who went missing? The servant girl?” Will persisted.
“Lies,” Mary spat. “The boarder left without paying his rent. The servant was insolent. She left to see her sister and didn’t bother to say good-bye.”
“And Ida Knowles?”
“Ida?” Mary’s hand fluttered about her mouth and her eyes searched. “Who are you? What do you want?” she said in a raised voice. “I did not say I would receive you!”
Evie took Mary White’s cold, thin hands in hers. “I understand just what you mean about Mr. Hobbes,” Evie started. “The Blue Noses think we flappers are morally indecent. But we’re only trying to live life to the fullest.” Evie glanced at Will, who nodded slightly for her to continue. “Why, I’ll bet if Mr. Hobbes were here today, he’d be celebrated as thoroughly modern.”
Mrs. White smiled. Two of her teeth had rotted away entirely. She laid her damp hand on Evie’s cheek. “He would have liked you. John always did like a pretty face.”
Evie willed the scream in her throat to stay put. “I am just curious, if you don’t mind my asking, why did you hold on to Knowles’ End? I’m sure you could have made a fortune selling it.”
“I would never do that.”
“Of course not,” Evie agreed, nodding vehemently. “I was just curious why not.”
“So that John would have a home to come back to. He said it was very important. ‘Don’t ever sell the house, Mary, or I can’t come back to you.’ ”
Goose bumps danced up Evie’s spine. “But how?”
Mary White laid her head against the worn satin pillowcase and looked toward the light sneaking in around the edges of the window. “Johnny didn’t tell me everything. Only he understood the Almighty’s infinite plan. His body was anointed, you know, just like a work of art—Botticelli’s Venus, Michelangelo’s David. The marks, everywhere. He wore them as a second skin.”
“Why?”
“It was all part of the plan, you see. He would come back. He would be reborn. A resurrection. And once he was reborn, he would bring the end times. The world would be cleansed in fire. He would rule it as a god. And we would be by his side.” She laughed, a schoolgirl sort of laugh, completely at odds with her sagging face. “He called me his Lady Sun. Oh, he was a prince. Here.” With effort, Mary opened her nightstand drawer and removed a tiny black box. “Open it.”
A fat gold band dulled with age lay against the black velvet.
“It’s beautiful,” Evie said.
“It was his,” she whispered conspiratorially. “I gave it to him. Husband mine, I called him, though we’d not yet married. He wore it nearly till the end, my Johnny.”
Evie’s fingers tingled with the desire to take it, to read it. It belonged to him. To John Hobbes.
“Put it back, if you please,” Mrs. Blodgett commanded.
Reluctantly, Evie closed the box. “Oh, but you can’t be comfortable, Mrs. Blodgett. Dr. Fitzgerald? Could you please help her to a more comfortable position?”
Will looked momentarily flummoxed, but he set about trying to help the old woman, who fought him at every turn. During the distraction, Evie quickly pocketed the ring, then replaced the box and closed the drawer. “Ah. That’s better, isn’t it?”
“Yes, thank you,” Mary said, as if she’d been the one to think of it. Then she continued. “But he had to make the world ready. To purge it of sin. To take it on, like a savior. To eat the sin of the world.” Mary White’s eyes moistened with tears. “They murdered him. My Johnny. He was so beautiful, and they murdered him. Philistines! Philistines.” She hacked again, and Evie helped her to more water. “He never hurt a soul! People were drawn to him—women especially.” She smiled and gave Evie’s arm a pat. The mere suggestion of touching John Hobbes turned Evie’s stomach. “I feel pain. Where is Eleanor with my medicine? Stupid girl. Always late.”
“Yes, yes,” Evie soothed. “We’ll have your medicine in just a moment. But I am ever so curious about something: Did Mr. Hobbes ever mention a ritual for binding a spirit, or sending it back into the other realm once it had done its work?”
Mary White frowned. “No. Will you call her with my medicine?”
“Of course I will! And Mr. Hobbes wore a special pendant, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Mary White answered, her voice thinning with pain. “Always.”
“And where is that pendant now?”
“The pendant?” She had a faraway look, and Evie feared they wouldn’t get what they needed in time.
“Did he give it to you?” Evie prompted. “As a lover’s gift, maybe.”
“I told you, he wore it always,” the old woman snapped. “He was wearing it when he died. It was buried with him. Eleanor! My medicine!” Mrs. White called out.
“He was buried in a pauper’s grave. It’s long since gone,” Will said quietly to Evie.
“No, no, no! No pauper’s grave for my Johnny,” Mary White corrected him, her hearing apparently much clearer than her memory.
“I beg your pardon. I thought…”
“We paid a guard to give us the body. In accordance with Johnny’s wishes, we buried him at his home.”
“Brooklyn or Knowles’ End?”
“No,” the old woman said, irritated. “His real home.”
“Where was that?” Evie asked.
“Why, in Brethren, dear. Up on the old hill, with the faithful.”
The room seemed to reel. Evie heard her voice as if from far away. “Mr. Hobbes was from Brethren?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“But there were no survivors of the Brethren fire,” Evie said.
“Only one. Could you hand me that hatbox, dear?”
Evie retrieved the hatbox from the dresser. Mary White reached in and removed a false bottom, revealing a leather-bound hymnal underneath. From inside its tissue-thin pages, she retrieved a smaller, folded piece of paper, which she passed to Evie.
It was a county record of birth for the village of Brethren, dated 6 June 1842: Yohanan Hobbeson Algoode, son of Pastor John Joseph Algoode and Ruth Algoode (died in childbirth).
“Such a sacrifice they made for him, the chosen one.”
The curtain snapped back. In the doorway, Mary White’s daughter held the syringe in one hand and a length of tubing in the other.
“I’ve been waiting,” Mary White barked. “You wa
nt me to hurt, don’t you? Oh, my life was so good before.”
“Yeah, yeah. When you lived in the mansion on the hill. I know. If you hadn’t been paying the blasted taxes on that old house, we wouldn’t hafta live in this stinkin’ hole. You ever think about that?”
Mary White groaned as her daughter plunged the needle into the bruised crook of her arm, then released the tubing. In a moment, the old woman’s eyes gleamed with the morphine. “He’s coming, you know.” Her speech was becoming syrupy. “He said he’d come for me, and I waited. I kept everything as it was for him. He said he’d come, and I knew he would.” Her eyes glazed over. “Such a beautiful man.” Her eyes closed with the morphine and Evie and Will showed themselves out.
Safe again in the bright sunshine, Evie and Will walked quickly through the strolling families.
“Of course!” Will said. He’d stopped to pace before a colorful sign that advertised the Wild Man of Borneo. Just outside the tent, a man in a red circus master’s jacket and top hat tempted the curious to “Come inside and see the savage—part monster, part man!” Behind them, the roller coaster inched up the incline with a steady click-click-click before plunging down and around, the riders screaming with a mixture of fear and pleasure. It was the last ride of the year before the boardwalk would shutter its amusements until the next summer.
“Of course,” Will said again, admonishing himself. “It all makes sense now.”
“Wonderful. Could you explain it to me?”
“Yohanan is the Hebrew name for John. John Hobbeson Algoode. John Hobbes,” Will said. “Naughty John Hobbes was Pastor Algoode’s son—the chosen one. The prophecied Beast meant to rise. He’s come back to finish his father’s work, to bring about hell on earth.”
They were walking again, Will’s words coming as fast as his steps. “Mary said he had to eat the sin of the world. To take on their sins. That why he takes parts of them in accordance with the seals: He ingests parts of them. It’s an ancient magic, the idea that eating parts of your enemies makes you stronger. They can’t defeat you. Two, please—with relish!” Will had stopped in front of Nathan’s Hot Dogs. He fished out two nickels and gave them to the boy behind the counter, taking two hot dogs in return. He handed one to Evie, who held it awkwardly.
“Ugh,” she said, grimacing at the food. “Honestly, Unc.”
Will wolfed his down, still talking. “In John’s case, it is helping him manifest. Giving him strength.”
Evie tried a small bite of her hot dog. It was surprisingly delicious, and she found that even the talk of cannibalism couldn’t keep her from devouring it. “If that pendant is his connection to this plane, his protection, then all we need to do is destroy it, and we destroy his link to this world. Is that right?”
“It stands to reason.”
“But she said it was buried with him.”
“Yes,” Will said, pausing to think. “That will be messy.”
Evie stopped mid-chew. “You can’t be serious.” She stared at Will. “Oh, sweet Lois Lipstick, you are serious.”
Will tossed his hot-dog wrapper in a garbage can. “We’re going upstate, to Brethren. And we’re going to need a shovel.”
Jericho returned to the Bennington from the records department, where Will had sent him. He didn’t even stop to take his coat off. “I found it! The documentation.”
He handed it to Will and nodded grimly at Sam, who was seated at the dining room table with Evie. “Sam. You’re here late.”
“Just keeping Evie company,” Sam said. He smiled triumphantly at Jericho.
Will read aloud from the document. “Yohanan Hobbeson Algoode was taken to the Mother Nova Orphanage, where he was admitted on October 10, 1851. The director’s entries on him are brief, but they document Yohanan Algoode as quiet but ill-humored, a bed wetter, arrogant, and prone to small acts of cruelty. When brought before the director for discipline, he said only, ‘I am the Dragon of Old, chosen of the Lord our God.’ The other children shunned him. He called himself the Beast. After two thwarted attempts, Yohanan successfully ran away in the summer of 1857. No further documentation exists.”
“So we know it’s him. But we still don’t know how we’re going to stop him,” Jericho said, finally removing his coat and hanging it on the rack. “The last page of the Book of the Brethren—the one with the incantation for binding and destroying the Beast—was torn out. You said yourself that we have to dispatch him according to his beliefs. But how are we going to find that information in time? The comet arrives in two days.”
“I need to show you something.” Evie unwrapped the tissue covering John Hobbes’s ring.
“Is that what I think it is?” Will asked. Evie nodded. “This is becoming a habit, Evangeline.”
“Will, if I can see him, understand him, we can be one step ahead of him.”
“Do you think that’s a good idea, doll?” Sam asked. “This fella’s a killer.”
“And a ghost,” Jericho added.
“What good is it to have this power and not use it?”
“I salute your spunk, but I question your sanity,” Sam said.
Will crouched beside Evie. “Evie, this isn’t a party trick. This ring belongs to the Beast himself.”
“I understand.”
“Get in, get what we need, and then get out,” Will advised. Evie nodded. “I’ll clap three times to help bring you up. If at any time you feel as if you are in danger—”
“I don’t like the sound of that. Do you like the sound of that, Frederick?” Sam muttered.
“You will say a code word. Let’s decide on one now.”
“How’s about no?” Sam said. “Or hooey? Or stop?”
“James,” Evie said. “The code word is James.”
Will nodded. “Very well.”
“Evie, are you sure you want to do this?” Jericho asked.
“Pos-i-tute-ly.” Evie attempted a smile. Her hands shook with both apprehension and excitement; going under was a bigger thrill than a front-row table at the most exclusive nightclub. “Put it in my hand, please.”
“I don’t like this,” Sam grumbled, but he put the ring in her hand anyway.
Evie closed it tightly in her palm and placed her other hand on top, like a seal. It took a moment for her to find her rhythm, and then she was falling through time in her mind.
“I see a town with muddy streets….” Evie said from her trancelike state. “Horses and wagons. I can’t… it’s speeding up….”
“Concentrate. Breathe,” Will instructed.
Evie took three deep breaths and the image stabilized.
“There’s a crowd, and a preacher….”
A tall, heavily bearded man in a black suit stood on an overturned fruit crate as he preached on the edge of a small town. A crowd had gathered. Many ridiculed him. Evie saw their laughing faces as almost satanic. The preacher didn’t stop. If anything, his voice gathered strength. “You must arm yourself that when the day of judgment comes, when the Beast brings forth God’s justice upon the sinners, you will be counted in the Lord’s number and spared. Prepare ye the walls of your houses with his markings to usher in his holy coming and anoint your flesh to bear witness to his glory!” the preacher thundered. At the preacher’s side stood a small boy of no more than nine or ten with a pale face and arresting blue eyes.
The boy held up a leather-bound book. “This be the Word of the Lord! The Gospel of the Brethren!”
Someone threw a tomato. It broke apart on the preacher’s face and slid down, staining his suit with pulp. Everyone laughed. The preacher wiped his face clean with a handkerchief without stopping his fiery sermon. But the boy stared daggers at the tomato thrower, and something in his gaze stopped the man’s laugh cold.
“Evie?” Will asked, for she’d fallen quiet.
“Yes. I’m here,” Evie answered. “It’s changing. I see wagons by a river. It’s cold. The preacher’s breath comes out in white puffs. They’re praying….”
In her mi
nd, she saw Reverend Algoode raising his hands to heaven as he addressed his small congregation. “You are the chosen, the faithful, the Brethren….”
“The angel of the Lord appeared to me in the heavens as a streak of fire and bid me to part ways with the corruption of the old world and build a new Godly body of heaven in this country….” Evie echoed. “The Blood of the Lamb runs in our veins, and in blood will we vanquish our enemies and bring forth God’s true mission on earth.”
The connection became uncertain for a moment, and then Evie was falling again. She concentrated with all her might and saw the boy’s feet as he ran through leaves, heard the huff-huff-huff of his breathing. He lay upon the riverbank and watched lazy clouds overhead, and for a moment Evie felt his loneliness and doubt. A deer ventured out of the trees, sniffing for food. It raised its head, and the boy threw a rock, laughing as the deer startled and broke for the woods.
“Evie, where are you?”
“Inside the church, I think,” she answered slowly as the image in her mind shifted again.
The boy with the blue eyes had been stripped to the waist and strapped to a chair. The faithful surrounded him. He squirmed in the chair, his eyes on the preacher as he turned a brand in the coals of the stove. There were twelve brands in all—a pentacle, and one for each of the eleven offerings.
“Your flesh must be strong. The Lord will brook no weakness in his chosen,” the preacher said. He drew the red-hot brand from the fire and approached the boy, who screamed and screamed.
“Oh, god,” Evie said. She was not aware that tears streamed down her face.
“Will, make her stop,” Jericho cautioned.
“I’m with Frederick the Giant,” Sam chimed in.
Will hesitated. “Just another moment. We’re close.”
Sam didn’t wait. “Hey, doll? Time to come up for air. Can you hear me?”
“I said just a moment!” Will snapped.
Evie’s mind reeled away from the boy’s fear. For a moment, she tumbled madly through a fast stream of pictures. She willed herself to breathe and stay calm, not to run away. Soon, the pictures settled in her mind again.