“Do… you see… that?” the soft-shoe dancer said in a strangled voice. “Dear god!”
“Hold!” the sergeant ordered through his own pain.
A slap of thunder echoed in the woods. The sky ripped open, a terrible birth. Fractured light pierced the men, pouring through their flesh. Luther could see their whole skeletons as if they were X-rays of themselves. And now they were screaming as they floated up toward the mangled sky and whatever lay inside its dark wound.
Luther’s horror was deep water; he was drowning in it. He could not move, could scarcely breathe. A pinpoint of silence held the moment in place, and then a blast of white raced across the ground with such force it destroyed the trees and knocked Luther through the air. He smelled burning flesh, felt a pain greater than anything he had ever known, hot as a branding iron.
And then he was unconscious.
For days, Luther dreamed. In his dreams, he saw the funny gray man with the stovepipe hat. “Greetings, Luther Clayton. Deserter. Do you hear your brethren crying?”
Luther did. He heard them screaming: Help us. Help us. Help us.
When Luther came to, his head pounded. And his legs were gone below the knees. There were voices in the room. Real voices. Jake Marlowe and a pompous general and a sergeant at arms. Luther saw them through the slits of his heavy eyes.
“Margaret Walker tried to smuggle out documents and expose the operation. We’ve jailed her for sedition.” The general.
“And Miriam?” Marlowe.
“An enemy of the state. We can’t allow such power to go loose. We’ll be keeping her under lock and key.”
“What about Will?”
“He’s a broken man. No threat that we can see,” the general said. “Mr. Marlowe, what happened to my soldiers? Where is the one forty-four?”
“I don’t know. But if I could just re-create the experiment with adjustments—think of the enormous good it could do, all that energy—”
“We’ll be shutting down the division, effective immediately.”
“No! General, just give me a chance to perfect it—”
“That machine is far too dangerous. We’ve already lost Rotke Wasserman and the entire regiment to this disaster. We’ll send the telegrams to the families with our sympathies. We’ll take it from here, Mr. Marlowe.”
“Sir, I think he’s awake.” The sergeant at arms.
They all turned to Luther now.
“Luther? Can you hear me?” Marlowe. He looked a wreck.
Luther nodded. Pain shot through him from his forehead down his spine, but he felt nothing below his waist.
“Did you see what happened to the one forty-four? Do you know where they are?”
“They’re with him,” Luther croaked.
“Who?”
“The land is old, the land is vast, he has no future, he has no past, his coat is sewn with many woes, he’ll bring the dead, the King of Crows.”
The general’s upper lip curled. “What the devil does that mean?”
“He’s gravely injured, General, and shell-shocked. There’s no telling.”
The general stood at Luther’s bedside and patted his arm with confidence. “You’ll be right as rain soon enough, soldier. A grateful nation thanks you for your service.”
But the screaming did not stop. Luther saw his ghostly friends in every corner of his mind. Help us! they begged. Oh, he would go mad!
The Shadow Men came to see him in the dark of night.
“Are we taking him out?” the one asked the other. He straightened a loop of piano wire between his gloved hands.
The other Shadow Man snapped his fingers in front of Luther’s face. “He can’t say anything. His mind’s gone.”
“Still.”
“We wait for orders,” the Shadow Man said. “Needs to look like he died in his sleep.”
Reluctantly, the other Shadow Man pocketed his wire. “See you tomorrow, deserter. Sweet dreams.”
Just before dawn, Will Fitzgerald stole into the ward and crouched beside Luther’s bed. “Luther, can you hear me? It’s Will Fitzgerald.”
Luther turned his face to Will’s. He hadn’t shaved in a few days and his eyes were swollen and red. Will whispered, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.”
In the dark of night, Will helped Luther to a waiting car. “Ben Arnold?” Will asked the driver.
The driver nodded, and Will deposited Luther and his crutches into the backseat.
“Where’m I taking him, Mr. Fitzgerald?”
“Somewhere he can’t be found.” Will handed Ben all the money he had.
“Sorry to hear about your fiancée,” Ben said. “The machine really do that to her?”
Will’s mouth was set in a grim line. “Just make sure you help him disappear.”
Ben Arnold set Luther up in a flophouse on the West Side, not far from Times Square. The war ended. An armistice was signed. Bombs exploded on Wall Street. The country raided houses and deported “aliens.” Motor cars rumbled through the skyscraper canyons. Ragtime birthed jazz and jazz birthed an age. Women cut their hair and raised their hemlines to dance. The country outlawed liquor; bathtub gin made outlaws. The neon lights of Broadway had never beamed brighter. People placed their faith in stocks; they were rich and getting richer.
On the streets, Luther Clayton begged for food and spare change. The one forty-four still screamed on the battlefield of his mind. The dead whispered to him, told him secrets. A pretty flapper passed by and tucked a dollar into his tin cup. Her, the dead whispered. She’s the one. Her face was familiar. Like James’s. She smiled. Her smile, like his.
The screaming got worse. The Shadow Men found him. They’d been watching for some time. They came with their dark suits and false smiles and murdering hands that looked so clean. “We need you to complete one last mission, soldier.” They put the gun in his hand. Told him to shoot the girl. “It will stop the screaming. Do this, and everything will be fine.”
They lie, the dead warned from their graves. They have always lied.
But there were other dead, and they were hungry and mean. The ones who belonged to him. Their voices drowned out the others. “Kill her,” they urged. “Kill her so that we might be free!”
Luther raised the gun. Watched Evie’s face shift to surprise. His hand shook. The screaming reached a fever pitch. The other Diviner, Sam, stopped Luther from shooting. There were police and a ferry ride to the island and the cell. But the screaming hadn’t stopped.
“You failed us!” the hungry dead hissed. “He will punish you!”
But the other dead whispered softly as a mother’s lullaby: Rest. Then speak of what you know. Show them what you have seen. Witness until their comfort yields to questions. Till their eyes cry with truth. Till their ears would hear the voices of tomorrow. Till their hearts, heavy with knowledge, beat in understanding.
DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
When Evie surfaced from her reading with Luther Clayton, her body trembled uncontrollably. Her stomach roiled as if she’d been on rough seas. She’d been under too deep for too long.
“You knew my brother. You…” she said at last between shaking breaths. “You loved him,” she said softly.
Luther’s face was wet. His pale, chapped lips quivered. “Y-yes. James. They never… should’ve d-done it.”
Evie’s throat ached with the bitter truth of what she’d seen. What they’d done. She knew the truth now. She knew, and there was no going back.
Luther looked into her eyes. There was some fire still left in him. “S-save him. Save them. Set them all f-free.”
“How? Where are they? Tell me how to find them!”
“They’re with him. The K-King of C-Crows,” Luther whispered. “Follow the Eye. The Eye keeps it open. Heal… the breach.”
“I don’t understand what that means, Luther. What is this Eye—how do we find it? How can we close it? Please. Please, can you tell us?” Evie pleaded, but Luther had struggled to hold on to tha
t much. He had retreated into his memories again and was lost. Evie tucked the blanket around him and shut the door.
In the common room, the radio in the corner played an opera program softly as Evie told Memphis, Ling, and Sam everything she’d witnessed with Luther. A steely-eyed Sam sat on the edge of an abandoned wheelchair and pounded his right fist absently against the spokes. “They did that. Will and Sister Walker, Rotke and Jake.” He paused. “My mother. They shot those soldiers up with super serum and turned them into an experiment. They might’ve done that to us at some point.”
“Haven’t they already done that to us?” Evie said bitterly. She was pacing again, like Will. She didn’t care.
Memphis straddled the piano bench, his arms folded across his chest. “There’s something about us and that other world. Don’t you feel it? Like we’re joined in some way. We’re the ones who can talk to the ghosts and the King of Crows. We’re the ones who’ve seen that eye symbol in our sleep.”
“Seems like that would make us awfully valuable,” Evie said.
“And dangerous, like I said,” Sam chimed in. He jerked his head toward the hallway. “Looks like we got company.”
Conor Flynn stood in the open doorway, twirling a piece of his hair. “I need to draw,” he said, marching to his spot at the table and taking out his paper and the pencil Isaiah had given him.
“If these ghosts are a hive mind being controlled, then who’s the puppet master? Somebody has to be whipping them up,” Ling said from her spot on the divan.
The scratching of Conor’s pencil distracted Evie.
“What are you drawing, Conor?” she asked.
Conor didn’t answer. He drew as if he was channeling, his pencil moving with quick strokes. The others crowded around, watching in horror as the picture took shape. On Conor’s page, an army of hungry ghosts advanced on a boy in a boater hat just like the one Henry wore.
The lights winked. On. Off. On. Off. As if blinking out a message.
“The Hell Gate?” Sam asked.
Memphis shook his head. “Nobody’s blasting in this storm.”
“Maybe it’s the storm, then,” Sam said.
Conor’s head snapped up. “They’re coming. Onetwot’reefourfiveseven…”
Memphis, Sam, and Evie raced to the windows. Dusk had given way to dark very quickly. Lightning arced violently above Ward’s Island. A giant hand of blue-gray fog reached over the top of the Hell Gate until they could no longer see the bridge at all.
“You ever seen fog move like that before?” Memphis asked.
“No,” Evie whispered.
“Onetwot’reefourfivesevenOnetwot’reefourfiveseven…”
Memphis hurried from window to window, checking to be sure that they were tightly latched. And then he backed away from the view of the fog spreading across the island like an avalanche.
“Henry’s outside in that,” Ling said.
“One two… One. Two. T’ree… onetwot’reefourfiveseven…”
“We can’t go out there now,” Sam said.
“And we can’t leave him there!” Ling insisted. She swiped Conor’s picture and held it up to prove her point.
“What about Isaiah and Theta?” Memphis said. “I should’ve stayed with him!”
“… Fivesevenonetwot’reefourfivesevenone…”
“All right. We go back to the main building for Isaiah and Theta. And then we get Henry,” Sam said.
There was a breath of sudden quiet in the room.
“Why has he stopped counting?” Ling asked.
Conor’s eyes were huge and he was breathing in short bursts like a frightened pup. A cacophonous burst squawked from the radio, as if it were moving rapidly through stations in search of a signal. There followed a long hiss, and then, softly at first but growing ever louder, a buzzing like a swarm of flies.
“Turn it off,” Evie said.
Sam did but the sound persisted. Shrieks and sobs burst through the buzz as if the history of the asylum itself was trying to make itself heard through the machine. The flickering lights bounced shadows over them all. Through the open door, the Diviners could see bewildered attendants rushing frantic patients into their rooms, soothing them as best they could. “It’ll be just a moment; I’m shutting the door.”
At a desk, one nurse pressed the bar on the candlestick phone repeatedly. “Hello? Hello! Gee, I can’t get anyone to answer. It’s gone dead!”
“The doors are sealed shut to the other wards,” a male attendant said.
A physician in a tweed suit came out of his office. “Here, now, what’s all this? What’s happening?”
“Oh, doctor, we don’t know!” the terrified nurse said.
Down at the far end of the hall, the faulty lamps began winking out one by one, plunging the passageway into deep shadow. Faint wisps of blue-gray mist pushed in around the window frames and curled along the floor. Darkness crawled up the walls like a fast-growing mold.
“What is that?” Ling whispered.
“It’s them,” Conor said. “The Forgotten. They’re here.”
The storm still howled over the barrenness of Ward’s Island, but Henry didn’t care. He set off across the muddy fields toward the wispy lights of the Hell Gate Bridge, peeking out from behind a veil of heavy fog. The wind was an assault and the rain soaked him through. He welcomed both; they matched his mood. He walked fast and without purpose, as if he could outrun his feelings. Feelings were dangerous. Feelings could trick you. They’d tricked his mother. Trapped her. Imprisoned her inside her own head. He just couldn’t be in there. It made him think of his mother, like nails across his heart.
“To hell with you!” he yelled into the battering rain. He was glad it was raining because he was crying. “To hell with… you,” he said again, but it had lost the bite, and now the goddamn feelings were flooding in along with his memories.
When Henry was a child, he’d adored his mother, Catherine DuBois, above all others. When Catherine was up, she was bright and sparkling, a pretty, talkative woman who would play exhaustive games of hide-and-seek with her son in the family’s elegantly decaying mansion on one of the Garden District’s finest streets. “I’ll find you! You can’t hide from me!” And she did find Henry, every time. Because Henry always wanted to be found. On a late spring day, she’d gather wildflowers and arrange them in a vase. “Doesn’t that look pretty, Bird?” she’d say, calling Henry by her pet name. “Why do you call me bird, Mama?” Henry asked once. His mother smiled. “Because you remind me of a little songbird, singing to the sky. Besides,” she’d said, her smile lessening, “birds are free to go.” The best of times with Catherine, though, was when she’d sit with him at the piano, showing Henry how to pull music from the heavens through Chopin, Debussy, Schumann, and ragtime, her fingers making unfettered runs up and down the keys. “That’s it, Bird. Open yourself wide up, dahlin’,” she’d say in her sweet drawl when he’d take his place at the piano. “Let the music move through you.” To Henry, his mother was magical.
But when “the howling dogs” came to visit, his bright, magical mother faded by degrees. “Depressive,” the doctor whispered. “A nervous condition,” his aunts said. Henry hadn’t known what the words meant, but he came to think of it as a harsh winter that would not leave his mother’s soul. When the howling dogs arrived, Catherine would sit for hours in the ancestral cemetery, slim fingers working the beads of her rosary, as she stared beseechingly into the weathered faces of stone saints. When the howling dogs curled up inside his mother’s mind, dark-eyed and hungry, Henry would watch his mother smiling in that empty way at the endless guests seated around his father’s dining table, all the while her hand shaking on her butter knife. When the howling dogs settled in atop the bones of former happiness, Catherine could scarcely rouse herself from her bed. She’d sleep the day away. And when Henry came to visit, sitting gently on the side of the bed, she’d open her tear-swollen eyes. “I’m sorry, Bird,” she’d say, and close them again. Once, in th
e middle of the night, Henry woke to a racket in the kitchen. His mother had taken every piece of silver from the drawers, convinced there was a poison she had to polish clean from their shining surfaces. “Tainted,” she’d muttered, scrubbing at the tongs of a fork, the hollow of a spoon. “All tainted.”
“Maman, let me help,” Henry said, taking the silver from his mother’s grip and placing it back in the case.
She’d cupped his cheeks between her shaking hands. Her face was his face, same long nose and delicate mouth. But there was so much pain in hers; her blue-green eyes watered. “They were thieves, you know. We are descended from thieves and vagabonds and murderers. Oh, little bird. You should fly away from here. Far, far away. My bird, my bird, my bird…”
And Henry hated himself because he’d wanted to do just that. He’d wanted to run from his mother’s pain, his father’s lies and cold silences, and the slow rot of his family’s aristocracy. They were sinking, and Henry didn’t want to sink down with them. Was it wrong to want to live? His mother’s first act of rebellion had been to encourage her son’s music, to make sure he had a voice for everything inside him—music to soothe the howling dogs so they couldn’t hurt him in the same way they’d hurt her. Her second act of rebellion had been to push him from the sliding, sinking nest.
Fly away, Bird. Fly, fly away…
The day her mind broke, his mother had taken one of those shining knives and crawled into the bath. She’d meant to silence the howling dogs for good. Henry had found her, pale and bleeding. The doctor had come to dress her wounds. Henry’s father refused to admit his mother to a sanitarium for fear of gossip. “She needs rest.” The doctor agreed, a bond sealed between men. They gave her opium. They looked away. And Henry’s mother became the unofficial ghost of their ancestral mansion, floating through the elegant rooms where, if you looked too closely, you saw the tears and worn spots in the papered walls, the soot on the velvet drapes, the fraying along the seams of the antique dining chairs.