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It is her eighteenth birthday, and if she doesn’t do something to raise this party from the dead, it will be the talk for days to come that her gathering was as dull as a church social. Raising from the dead.
Now spirits are high; the questions grow bolder. They’re drunk on gin and good times and the silly distraction of the fortune-telling. Every mornin’, every evenin’, ain’t we got fun?
Finally, there is movement on the board. “I… will…
She does know how that sort is. It was probably that wretched boy all along, playing them for fools. Well, she is nobody’s fool. She is eighteen now. Life will be an endless swirl of parties and dances. Night or daytime, it’s all playtime. Ain’t we got fun? Her
The wind takes it all in with indifference. It is only the wind. It will not become a radio star or a captain of industry. It will not run for office or fall in love with Douglas Fairbanks or sing the songs of Tin Pan Alley, songs of longing and regret and good times (ain’t we got fun?). And so it travels on,
Something stirs in the deep shadows, something terrible, and the wind, which knows evil well, shrinks from this place. It flees toward the safety of those magnificent tall buildings that promise the blue skies, nothing but blue skies, of the future, of industry and prosperity; the future, which does not believe in the evil of the past. If the wind were a sentinel, it would send up the alarm. It would cry out a warning of terrors to come. But it is only the wind, and it knows well that no one listens to its cries.
“Can you prove your accusations?” her father pressed. She couldn’t. Not without telling them her secret, and she couldn’t risk that. “I will not apologize.”
And Evie needed New York. In New York, she could reinvent herself. She could be somebody.
She was too much—for Zenith, Ohio. She’d tried at times to make herself smaller, to fit neatly into the ordered lines of expectation.
As the Lincoln shrank to a point down the road, Evie felt a pang of sadness, and something else. Dread. That was the word. Some unknowable, unnameable fear. She’d been feeling it for months, ever since the dreams began.
“Next time we see you, you’ll be on trial for some ingenious crime!” Dottie said with a laugh. Evie grinned. “Just as long as they know my name.”
She waved slowly to the passing rooftops of Zenith, Ohio, where people liked to feel safe and snug and smug, where they handled objects every day in the most ordinary of ways and never once caught glimpses into other people’s secrets that should not be known or had terrible nightmares of dead brothers. She envied them just a bit.
The numbers were all around them, patterns waiting to be discovered and turned into riches, luck pulled from thin air—from hymnals, billboards, weddings, funerals, births, boxing matches, horse races, trains, professions, fraternal orders, and dreams. Especially dreams. Memphis didn’t like thinking about his dreams. Not lately.
Memphis knew he was handsome. He was six feet tall and broad-shouldered, with high cheekbones thanks to some Taino blood down the line.
Floyd at Floyd’s Barbershop kept Memphis’s hair close-cropped and oiled sweet, and Mr. Levine, the tailor, made sure his suits were sharp. But it was Memphis’s smile everyone noticed first.
“What about an eye with a lightning bolt underneath?” Memphis asked.
His skin itched with restlessness, a feeling that the world was about to be ripped wide open. And he was sure it had to do with the dream.
For two weeks running, it had been the same: The crossroads. The crow flying to him from the field. The darkening sky, and the dust clouds rising on the road just ahead of whatever was coming. And the symbol—always the symbol. It was getting to where he was afraid to sleep.
On a street lamp, a crow cawed. Blind Bill stopped his song and tensed, listening. The bird cawed once more. Then it flapped its shiny wings and shadowed Memphis Campbell’s steps.
Evie disembarked from the train with a wave to the porters and conductors with whom she had played poker from Pittsburgh to Pennsylvania Station. She was now in possession of twenty dollars, three new addresses in her brown leather journal, and a porter’s hat, which she wore upon her golden head at a rakish angle.
“She was different. That was her sin.”
“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.
‘There are more things between heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy,’
Swell to meet ya, Evil.” “It’s Evie.” “Not anymore,”
Miss Addie turned suddenly to Evie, as if truly seeing her for the first time. Her expression was grim. “You’re one of them, aren’t you, dear?” “Miss O’Neill is Mr. Fitzgerald’s niece,” Mabel supplied. “No. One of them,” Miss Addie said in an urgent whisper that sent a shiver up Evie’s spine.
Around her, the house seemed alive with some evil. There. She’d said it. Evil.
Good old Memphis. Reliable Memphis. Charming, easygoing Memphis. Look-after-your-brother Memphis. Memphis had been the star once. The miracle man. And it had ended in sorrow. He wouldn’t ever risk that again. These days, he kept his feelings confined to the pages of his notebook.
Jo shook her head. “I gotta go on tonight. I need the money!” She looked up at Memphis, her eyes hopeful. “I remembered about you. What you could do. Please, can you help me, Memphis?” Memphis’s jaw tightened. “I can’t do that anymore.” Jo sobbed and Gabe put a hand on Memphis’s arm. “Come on, brother. Just try.…” “I told you, I can’t!”
The trance came on him hard and fast. His eyes rolled back and he felt as if he had left his body and was trapped inside a waking dream. He saw things in that strange empty space he inhabited for those long seconds, things that he didn’t understand: faces in the mist, spectral shadows, and a funny man in a tall hat whose coat seemed to be made of the land itself. There was a bright light and a fluttering of wings, and when Memphis came to, shaking, a crowd had gathered around him in the churchyard.
Miracle Memphis. And then, when it had mattered most, the miracle had failed him. No, not just failed—turned on him.
“Doesn’t take much for the Devil to get inside, Memphis John. You remember that.”
What if there was something terribly wrong, a shadow side to him that was biding its time, waiting? The thought was like his dream—unsettling and unreadable.
In its way, writing was like healing: a cure for the loneliness he felt. Sometimes the cure took; other times, it didn’t. But he kept trying.
He was startled from his concentration by the cawing of a crow perched on a headstone nearby. Memphis’s mother had told him that birds were heralds. Warnings. It was silly, of course—nothing more than some leftover African superstition. Birds were just birds.
Isaiah sat very still, staring into the dark. “I am the dragon. The beast of old,” he said. Memphis raised himself onto his elbows. “Ice Man? You all right?” Isaiah didn’t move. “I stand at the door and knock.”
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.
As he walked the dim corridor, something in Eugene Meriwether’s belly sounded a silent alarm that pulsed through his blood. Something that snaked back to his primitive ancestors and their need to huddle in caves around fires, the kind of warning that no amount of civilization could ever completely eradicate.
Will lectured about belief in the supernatural, but the only ghosts that frightened Evie were the very real ghosts inside her. Some mornings, she’d wake and vow, Today, I will get it right. I won’t be such an awful mess of a girl. I won’t lose my temper or make unkind remarks. I won’t go too far with a joke and feel the room go quiet with disapproval. I’ll be good and kind and sensible and patient. The sort everyone loves. But by evening, her good intentions would have unraveled. She’d say the wrong thing or talk a little too loudly. She’d take a dare she shouldn’t, just to be noticed. Perhaps
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“Why are you asking all these questions?” “I’m trying to understand,” Will said. No one had ever said anything like that to Evie. Her parents always wanted to advise or instruct or command. They were good people, but they needed the world to bend to them, to fit into their order of things. Evie had never really quite fit, and when she tried, she’d just pop back out, like a doll squeezed into a too-small box.
“Solomon’s Comet?” Evie asked carefully. “Yes, that’s it. He told them to. It was his one request.” “John Hobbes asked to be hanged the night of Solomon’s Comet?”
“Comets are powerful portents!” Miss Lillian clucked. “The ancients believed them to be times when the veil between this world and the next was thinnest.” “I don’t understand.” “If you wanted to open a door into the great spirit realm, to assure your return, what better time to plan your death?”
Miss Addie reached out a finger and slid it over the surface of the half-dollar, paling as she did. “Such a terrible choice to have to make.” “What do you mean?” Evie asked. “Addie sees into the eternal soul,” Miss Lillian said. “Addie, dear, you’ll let your tea go cold, and we’ve much to do still.” Miss Lillian stood rather hastily. “I’m afraid we must bid you good day, Miss O’Neill. Thank you for visiting.” “A terrible choice,” Miss Addie said again, looking at Evie with such sympathy that Evie felt quite undone.
Uncle Will hadn’t wanted her to use her talents to help catch the killer; he thought it too dangerous. He was wrong. It was dangerous not to use them.
“But those are just stories people tell,” Evie said. The headache was spreading out behind her eyes. “There is no greater power on this earth than story.” Will paced the length of the room. “People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense—words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions—words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History.”
“At the crossroads, you will have a choice, brother. Careful of the one who works with both hands. Don’t let the eye see you.…” Memphis’s entire body shook. The horn reached a pitch that made him want to scream. The fog swirled around Gabe, and the last thing Memphis heard before blacking out was Gabe’s faint warning: “The storm is coming.… All are needed.…”
“The records keeper told me there’s been a resurgence in the Brethren cult in recent years.” “But why on earth?” “When the world moves forward too fast for some people, they try to pull us all back with their fear,”
She wanted to run. But where was there to run? What place lay beyond the reach of evil?
They had a secret innovation they were trying—the Daedalus program—to help the soldiers coming back.” “What sort of innovation?” Jericho took a deep breath. “A merging of man and machine. A human-automaton hybrid,” Jericho said. “They would replace what had been damaged beyond repair in the war or by disease with steel and wires and cogs. We would be the perfect miracle of the industrial age. The robotnik. You’re staring.”
Evie was exhausted from the ordeal in Brethren and from her night watching Jericho and from hearing his heartbreaking confession. She was unsettled, too, by the feelings she had developed for him.
Jericho rested on the settee, still weak from the previous night’s ordeal. “Are you feeling all right, Jericho?” Evie asked a bit shyly. “Can I get you anything?” “No, I’m… jake, thanks,” he said, trying out the word with a smile. Sam watched the two of them from the sidelines. Something had happened up in Brethren beyond their finding the pendant and escaping from the new faithful. And Sam didn’t like it.
