by Libba Bray
“No one is dead,” her father assured her. “Your mother and I want to talk to you. I heard from Micah from the IWW. He says that you have been going to the strike at Jake Marlowe’s mine.”
“Doesn’t Micah have better things to do than act like an old gossip?” Mabel grumbled as she perched at one end of the sofa.
“Mabel. Is this true?” her father pressed.
“Yes,” Mabel said, her stomach sinking.
“It’s that riffraff, Arthur Brown. It’s his fault,” Mrs. Rose said, the ghost of her former aristocratic life creeping into her tone. Mabel wished she could tell her mother how much she sounded like Nana Newell just now.
Mabel folded her arms across her chest. “You don’t know him.”
“I know of him. He’s got more passion than sense,” Mabel’s mother snapped. “The last thing we need is Arthur and his hotheaded friends in there making a mess of our efforts.”
“Why? Because they’re not your acolytes? Because it wasn’t your idea to go out to Marlowe’s mine?”
“Mabel Rebecca. Apologize to your mother,” her father warned with rare sternness.
Mabel looked down at her hands in her lap. “Sorry, Mama. But you don’t know the whole story.”
“Mabel, darling.” Mrs. Rose moved closer to Mabel. With both hands, she swept Mabel’s hair back and cradled her daughter’s face with her palms, like she’d done when Mabel was a little girl. Mabel had spent her life running to catch up in the hope that her mother would notice her. But not anymore. She wasn’t living in her mother’s shadow. She’d moved past her. Mabel was the future, and the future was with Arthur and the Six.
“Darling, rules exist for a reason. Even within disobedience, we need order,” her mother said.
“Do we? It seems like all you ever do is fight at these meetings, and change is too slow. Meanwhile, people are starving and freezing in tents! They’re being beaten up by bullies hired by the rich!”
“I appreciate your passion, my shayna, but you must marry passion to purpose and purpose to reason. Change takes time.”
“That’s what you always say, and it feels like we never get anywhere. Papa, Arthur got those people food. And he helped to set up a small school for the children. He even found a doctor to see to some of the pregnant wives. He’s making—we are making a difference.”
“We?” Mrs. Rose scoffed. “I see. Did you know he’d been in prison?”
“You mean his brother,” Mabel said.
“No. I mean Arthur.”
It was as if her mother’s words had cut off the oxygen in the room. Why hadn’t Arthur told her? Above all, she didn’t want her mother to suspect that she hadn’t known. “You and Papa know plenty of people who’ve gone to jail!”
“For peaceful protest. Arthur and his brother blew up a factory! A foreman died in that explosion. A man with a family.” Mrs. Rose’s eyes glinted. “This is what comes of reform without rules: chaos. And children without their fathers.”
Mabel’s stomach hurt. Arthur wouldn’t do that. He was so very kind. He’d been looking out for her, protecting her. From the start, he’d taken her seriously, brought her in, respected her ideas. She was sure he’d been waiting for the right moment to tell her about his time in prison. No doubt it was embarrassing for him—why wouldn’t he want to keep it hidden? Mabel would let him know that she was his true friend, that he could trust her. If her parents had meant to dissuade her by blurting out this bit of gossip, they’d miscalculated. If anything, she was even more committed to Arthur and their mission. They were treating her like a child.
“I forbid you from seeing Arthur Brown,” her mother said, as if Mabel had absolutely no say over her own life.
“Isn’t that what your mother said to you when you wanted to marry Papa?” Mabel shot back.
“Mabel!”
“Shayna, we don’t want to see you get hurt,” her father said, the peacemaker again. “If you want to work the picket line, you can volunteer with the IWW or the AFL. They always need help.”
“They’ll have me making coffee. Not on the front lines.”
“The front lines. Do you hear yourself?” her mother said. “As if this were a war!”
“Isn’t it?” Mabel asked.
“Sweetheart—” her father started, but Mabel had had enough.
“You don’t understand! You don’t know me! You only see me the way you want to see me—as another part of you. Well, I’m not you and I am not a child! I am my own person. And I wish you could see me, the true me.”
Mabel stormed from the apartment with no clear idea of where she was headed. She walked to Fifty-seventh Street and boarded the train, and before she knew it, she was running up the back stairs of the Bohemian Reader and pounding at Arthur’s door.
He opened up, rubbing his eyes. “Heya, Mabel. Sorry. I was asleep. What is it?”
“When were you going to tell me about the explosion at the factory? The foreman who died? About the time you spent in jail?”
Arthur chewed at his lip, then opened the door wide. “I suppose you’d better come in.”
Mabel took a seat at the table. Arthur lowered the blinds halfway, then poured Mabel a cup of lukewarm coffee from the percolator and sat across from her.
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know what you’d think of me. I was afraid you’d stop coming around.”
“I…” Mabel didn’t know what to say. The inside of her was at war: He wanted her around; he’d killed a man. There should be no balance between the things weighed in those two scales, but she liked Arthur. She liked him a lot.
“You killed a man,” she said quietly.
“I know. Not a day goes by that I don’t regret that choice. Not a day goes by that I don’t wish that man were still alive. Not one, Mabel.”
His eyes were pained. She believed him. Mabel got up and moved across the room to the safety of the window. “You should have told me,” she said, turning to face him.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“What you did, that was terrorism.”
Arthur’s eyes flashed. “What do you call it when they shoot up our camp with machine guns and terrify the workers? Why does no one hold them accountable? Where are the prisons for them, huh?”
Mabel wanted to say something, but she had no easy answer. It was all so confusing.
Arthur came toward her with his loping boxer’s stride. “You want the truth, then here it is: The time for placards and peace and newsreels is gone. We have a plan. We’re going to sabotage the works at Marlowe’s mine.”
Mabel’s head was light, as if it had come loose from her neck. “What… what do you mean, sabotage?”
“We’re going to blow up the mine and the company store so they can’t keep hiring scabs. We’re sending a message to Marlowe.” Arthur cupped Mabel’s face in both hands. “More than anything, I want to share this with you, Mabel Rose. But it’s all or nothing from now on. No half measures. So I need to know: Are you in? Or are you out?”
Mabel broke from Arthur’s caress, but already she wanted him back. On the windowsill, a pigeon pecked for what it could get. Mabel watched it hopping around and thought about something Jericho had asked her once. He’d asked her if she’d ever faced a true moral dilemma, and she’d had to admit that she never had. And now, here she was, trying to figure out what was right—or the least wrong. If there was one lesson Mabel’s parents had drilled, it was this: Never stoop to violence. But how did you fight an enemy who never fought fair? Didn’t you have to break the rules to win against the Devil? Mabel’s head was spinning. They were trying to keep Jake Marlowe from hurting the workers. That was good, wasn’t it? They were destroying property. That was bad. Wasn’t it? If you did the wrong things for the right reasons, did that make the wrong things right? Or did that just mean you had turned your back on finding a more right way? And once you justified violence, did that make it easier the next time and the next, until you’d become the villain of your own story?
Wh
at was good?
She thought she’d known once, but now she wasn’t so sure.
Arthur was waiting for her answer.
“And no one will get hurt? You promise?” Mabel said.
Arthur put one hand on his heart. “I promise.”
With a great fluttering of wings, the pigeon pushed away from the windowsill and disappeared. “Okay,” Mabel said.
“Okay?”
“Okay,” Mabel said. “I’m in. All the way.”
GUILLAUME JOHNSON
When the Diviners weren’t testing their abilities, they were reading through Will’s notes from his time with the Department of Paranormal and searching through the library’s thousands of books for any hint of Liberty Anne Rathbone’s unholy correspondence. So far, they’d found nothing. But Memphis enjoyed squirreling away on the second-floor gallery in a patch of sunlight behind bookcases brimming with dusty volumes whose musty smell and crackling pages were a comfort. He wondered if someday someone like him or Isaiah would be sitting in a library reading a Memphis Campbell book.
From Jericho, he’d gotten Cornelius Rathbone’s diary. Memphis turned the yellowed pages with care, hunting for clues to Liberty Anne’s final prophecy. There were riveting revelations—future steam engines and automobiles and assassinations seen from well before they occurred. But to Memphis, nothing was more compelling than young Cornelius’s confessions of his dreams and doubts. People didn’t lie in their diaries. They wrote their true hearts there:
Today is the darkest day of my life. Liberty Anne has left us. Pastor Poole tries to comfort Mother, but she is inconsolable. The light has gone from our family. We will never be the same. Godspeed, dear sister.
An ache pressed against Memphis’s throat. He remembered how unreal the days after his mother’s death had seemed. The procession of neighbors bringing food to the house, patting his back as they cried into handkerchiefs while Memphis appeared numb; there had been a great hole at the center of him waiting to suck him down with pain and grief, and he fought to keep it at bay. Even the sunlight had felt wrong somehow, as if it were trying to shine through a gauze bandage. Sometime during the long visiting hours after the funeral, Memphis had stolen away into his parents’ bedroom. He’d stretched out across the narrow indentation his mother’s body had left in the mattress where she had lain those last weeks, hollowed by the cancer, her cloudy gaze fixed to a spot on the ceiling, as if she were searching for something no one else could see, some link to the next world—a god the mourners crying in the other room believed in so fervently. A god Memphis felt had betrayed and abandoned him.
It wasn’t until his mother was gone that Memphis realized just how much she had been the glue holding them all together. Without her, they were their own familial diaspora, flung apart and into a new land where grief had arrived first and tilled the soil with sorrow. The painful memory of that loss still had a fierce grip. It would drag him under now if he lingered too long with it. Memphis put his own thoughts aside. The diary’s pages were disordered, and he was trying to piece together a history out of time.
Father has forbidden us to allow the slate to Liberty Anne during her fits. I argued that the messages she received from beyond could come from the Almighty himself, for haven’t angels with trumpets appeared to simple shepherds?
“What she draws is unholy. I will suffer no more of it,” Father told us, and he broke the slate into pieces.
Fits and drawings made Memphis think of Isaiah. He read on, growing more excited.
I dare not tell Father about the events of last night.
I had been up late reading by lantern on the porch. Father had traveled to town to deliver the widow Jenkins of a new son. Mother slept deeply, having taken a tincture of laudanum for a painful tooth, though I suspect it was more for the deep ache in her heart. The night was sharp of the sort that turns your thoughts into friendly companions. Looking at the sky stretching out across the tall prairie grass, the stars flung into constellations above me, I felt at one with nature and myself. When suddenly, from inside our cabin, I heard a stirring.
Inside, I found Liberty Anne up from her sickbed and crouched upon the braided rug with Mother’s stationery and pen and ink. She drew as if possessed and had, by my count, finished four drawings, each more terrifying than the one before. These were things far beyond my ken, dark birds filling the skies, strange explosions, clouds torn apart, and men flying through the air like broken angels. Around the edges, fearsome specters haunted the land, and always, there is the man in the hat, watching it all. I could only surmise that these events were yet to be and, should that be true, may God help us all. I fear if Father should find these, he will destroy them and commit Liberty Anne to a sanitarium. For this reason, I have hidden her unholy visions within the pages of my Bible, where they will not be seen—
Memphis sat straight up.
Unholy visions. Unholy. What if Liberty Anne’s lost prophecy wasn’t a letter or diary entry? What if they had been looking for the wrong thing all along?
“Hey, Sam, Jericho. Take a look at this,” Memphis said, bounding down the spiral staircase to the library’s ground floor. He showed them the passage and put forth his theory.
“So they’re drawings?” Sam said.
“It makes sense to me. Just like Liberty Anne, Isaiah’s been drawing his visions. During the sleeping sickness, he had a premonition about Ling and Henry down in the subway with all those wraiths. He drew it in my book and I got sore at him for it,” Memphis said. He felt guilty about that now. “Cornelius says he hid them in his Bible. We need to find that Bible.”
Sam looked at the two full floors of bookcases. “You gotta be kidding me.”
“At least we know what to look for now,” Memphis offered.
“Spooky spirit sketches,” Sam grumbled.
“Nice alliteration,” Memphis said.
“Nice what?”
“Alliteration. It’s when you repeat the same consonant in a phrase,” Memphis explained.
“Huh. I was hoping it was something dirty.”
“Ignore him, Memphis,” Jericho said with a roll of his eyes. “We all do. Come on. We might as well get started.”
As the first hour stretched into two and they’d still found no sign of Liberty Anne’s possibly prophetic drawings, Sam groaned and tossed aside another book. “If I have to look through one more of these, I’m throwing myself off that balcony,” he moaned.
“Let me know if you need help,” Jericho said as he calmly restored Sam’s discarded book to its rightful place on the shelves.
Memphis laughed. Those two. They were like squabbling brothers. Their arguments were better than going to the pictures.
“Maybe it’s not even here. Maybe it’s in a collection somewhere. I could always ask Mrs. Andrews for help,” Memphis said, closing another heavy book with a thump of dust.
“Who’s Mrs. Andrews?” Jericho asked.
“She’s my favorite librarian at the One Hundred Thirty-fifth Street library. If she can’t find it, it can’t be found.”
Sam smirked. “You have a favorite librarian?”
“You’ve got a favorite speakeasy, don’tcha?” Memphis shot back. He raised his voice like a sidewalk preacher: “As for me, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes!’”
“Who said that? Calvin Coolidge?”
“Walt Whitman.” Memphis’s grin spread slowly, sweetly. “You’d know that if you had a favorite librarian.”
“I like having you around, Memphis,” Jericho said. He stood and stretched his cramped muscles. “Come on. Let’s try the cellar.”
Sam cocked his head, squinting. “You’ve got a funny idea of fun, Freddy. Ha!” He pointed at Memphis. “Alliteration! Besides, we already hauled up all the crates that were down there.”
“Maybe there’s something we’re missing. Let’s look again.”
Jericho kicked the Persian rug back and lifted the trapdoor set into the floor of the collections room. Memphis peered into
the dark hole.
“It’s just as charming as it seems. Dark. Damp. Tubercular. Possibly haunted,” Sam said. “Come on! I’ll give ya the grand tour!”
The three of them climbed down the rickety steps, dropping onto the dirt floor. Memphis coughed up a lungful of dust. He wiped his filthy hands against his trousers. The damp smell of the earth was close.
“Here,” Sam said, handing over a lantern.
Memphis struck a match and turned up the flame, and the cellar flared with dancing light. They were in a large room whose bricks were covered in fading murals. Ahead, though, the cellar’s brick gave way to the earthen walls of a tunnel that seemed to stretch for a mile. Memphis paused in front of a mural of a slave family reaching their hands toward the sun, the word freedom painted above it.
“Cornelius’s house was also a stop on the Underground Railroad,” Jericho said, coming up beside him.
“God bless Mr. Rathbone,” Memphis whispered. He put a hand to the cool, painted stones bearing witness to so many names, so many histories. In the mural, there were painted lines for the Underground, like scars stretched across the skin of the infected nation. There were wounds and then there were wounds. Some were so great Memphis had no idea how they could ever be healed.
“Where does that tunnel open up?” Memphis asked.
“Don’t know. And I can’t say I’m too keen on tunnels after those things chased us through the subway,” Sam said, coughing.
Memphis lifted the lantern. Its light could reach only so far. “I need to see. Just a little.” He started down the narrow passageway, ducking his head as he came to a low beam. “Watch out there,” he cautioned.
“Watch out for what?” Sam said.
“Your…” Memphis looked over his shoulder. There were a good couple of inches between Sam’s head and the low ceiling. “Head,” Memphis said, fighting a smile.
“Some of us have to duck,” Jericho said, clearly happy to have a reason to needle Sam.
Sam folded his arms. “You’re really enjoying yourself, aren’t you?”
