Before the Devil Breaks You

by Libba Bray

  This was what Henry ran from. This was what the jokes masked. It wasn’t callousness. It was pain and loss so great he could only let it in a little at a time, filtered through the safety of melody and rhythm. It was the way he survived. And to hell with his friends if they didn’t understand that. And to hell with anybody who couldn’t feel for those people in the asylum, people like his mother, struggling valiantly against their demons. He was tired of keeping everything in for everybody else’s sake.

  Henry tripped over a rise in the ground. “Oh, I hate this place!” He kicked at the muddy mound. God, it felt good. He kicked again, violently, splattering himself with muck and not caring. That was for the howling dogs! And that was for the suffering of his mother! That was for the hurt deep inside! Kick, kick. Kick. Ki—

  His stomach realized it first. A carnival-ride swoop of raw, primal instinct that dizzied him with dread. He’d tripped over a new grave. He was kicking at a new grave. In his anger, he’d wandered aimlessly through the fog into the potter’s fields. All around him were piles of freshly packed earth.

  “Okay, Hen. Time to exit stage left,” he joked to himself to keep his fear at bay.

  Carefully, he stepped across the fresh earthen mounds. They’d been tightly packed by the prisoners’ shovels. The rain was still coming down. In the heavy fog, he could just make out the hazy yellow glow of the asylum’s dotting of windows. He’d made it halfway through the potter’s fields when he felt a slight rumbling, like a train approaching underground. But this was not the city and there was no subway on Ward’s Island. Henry took another step, and another. Don’t look, just keep moving. His pulse throbbed in his ears; he could actually hear it in time with the rain—quick. And scared. Henry felt something brush his ankle. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t—

  He stood perfectly still and cast a glance to his right and down.

  There was dirt on his shoe.

  No. Dirt was falling onto his shoe, tumbling down from the shifting top of a new grave.

  Henry chanced a look around him.

  Graves. Everywhere.

  And they were beginning to crumble.

  “What the hell is that?” Sam whispered.

  At the end of the hall, the mist thickened into a dense bank of living fog, shadows among shadows. Vague forms emerged, indistinct from one another: The same pallid skin peeling off in ribbons of rotting flesh. Diseased mouths dripping with oily black drool. Rows of thin, razor-sharp teeth. Their eyes were the gray-white of pond ice and seemed to see nothing. Instead, the ghosts swept their heads left and right, sniffing in the way an animal hunting prey would.

  “The Forgotten,” Conor whispered urgently.

  Inside the rooms, some of the residents seemed to sense the danger. They cried out in warning. With a fearsome screech, the Forgotten pressed up against the doors, looking for a living host.

  “Hey!” Ling cried. “Leave them alone!”

  The Forgotten turned as one toward the Diviners, growling hungrily.

  “Ling,” Memphis whispered. “What are you doing?”

  “We can’t let them get to the patients. We have to do something.”

  The Forgotten bared their sharp teeth as they sniffed the air. They let loose with another loud shriek.

  “You certainly got their attention,” Sam whispered. “What now?”

  “Run. Hide!” Conor said, and took off fast as a March hare, darting down a staircase to the right.

  “Wait! Conor! We can’t let him go out there. I won’t let something happen to him,” Evie said, running after him like a protective sister.

  “Dammit, Evie! Stay here. Lock yourselves in. I’ll get her,” Sam said, and gave chase.

  “Isaiah!” Memphis said. Was his little brother all right? Was Theta? “Come on. We can’t wait. We gotta get down those stairs before—”

  “I! Can’t! Run!” Ling howled with all the anger she had inside. She’d never said it out loud like that before. But there it was. Ling never asked for help. Help made you vulnerable. But she was scared. She didn’t want to be alone with those things. She needed a friend. “Please don’t leave me,” she said.

  “Okay, okay,” Memphis promised. The Forgotten were moving closer. If Ling and Memphis stayed in the common room, they were sitting ducks. “Think, Memphis. Think.” There was a wheelchair in a corner under a blanket. Memphis ran to it and brought it to Ling.

  “I think we gotta try to get out of here while we can,” he said.

  Ling helped herself into the wheelchair and angled her crutches like sabers. “Ready.”

  Despite his fear, Memphis managed a smile. “Yes, you are.”

  He peeked around the corner. They were coming. “Any ideas?”

  “Conor said that counting kept them out of his head. I’m guessing at this, but I think there’s something about a constant noise that blocks out emotion and keeps them from locking onto whatever’s inside your head, like, Old MacDonald had a farm,” Ling sang, and motioned to Memphis to continue.

  “E-I-E-I-O,” he finished. “Okay. We sing nursery rhymes. You ready?”

  “No.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O…” they sang in unison.

  The Forgotten were all around them in the fog. As Memphis pushed Ling’s wheelchair down the long corridor, he could feel their powerful emotions and stories searching for a host. But the singing was working. It kept the ravenous ghosts at bay.

  “And on that farm he had some ducks,” Ling sang just as Memphis sang, “pigs.”

  “Ducks,” he corrected quickly as Ling went for “pigs.”

  The confusion was only a few seconds, but it had allowed their fear to spike. The Forgotten sniffed it out.

  “Hold on tight, Ling,” Memphis said, pushing Ling’s chair and running for all he was worth. Behind him, he could hear the terrifying screech of their collective anger. His legs burned but he didn’t stop until he’d reached the safety of a large broom closet. He squeezed them both inside and locked the door behind them.

  “Quick—count in your head,” Memphis urged.

  Ling shut her eyes tightly, silently counting to one hundred. The screeching moved farther away. At last, she stopped and let out a shaking breath.

  “They gone?” Ling asked, panting.

  “I-I don’t know. Think so,” Memphis answered, sagging against the wall.

  “It’s always ducks first,” Ling said in a tight whisper.

  “What?” Memphis whispered back.

  “Old MacDonald. It’s ducks, then pigs, then cows.”

  “Maybe in Chinatown. But in Harlem, I learned it pigs first.” He put his ear to the door, listening. “I think they’ve moved on.”

  “I’m sorry,” Ling said quietly. “I shouldn’t have asked you to stay. I can’t expect you to risk your life for me.”

  “You’d do the same for me. I know you. Besides, you’re the smartest person on this team. We need you.”

  “Thank you. I think you’re pretty smart, too.”

  “Something I always wondered about, though. How come you never once asked me to heal you?” Memphis asked. “Did you ever think about it?”

  Had she thought about it? Just every time she saw Memphis. She imagined herself walking up and down the streets of the Lower East Side as she once did, no buckles digging into her skin, no crutches callusing her palms, no pain. There were times when it was all Ling could do not to beg Memphis to change her back to the way she had been.

  But she wasn’t the same person she had been. It felt, somehow, as if a healing by Memphis would unmake who she was now. As if she would lose what she had come to know about herself in the past few months, about her strength and resilience. And if there was to be a cure for her paralysis, then science would find it. Not just for her but for others, too. Maybe she’d even be a part of that.

  “I do. But I don’t. Do you understand?” Ling said.

  Memphis thought about it. “Not really,” he said
.

  It dawned on her that this was the first real, in-depth conversation she and Memphis had ever had. Sometimes it seemed as if he lived a world away, uptown in a place she barely knew, far removed from the narrow streets of Chinatown. She liked Memphis. There was so much she wanted to ask him, about their powers. About healing. About his life. She hoped they’d survive this terrible night and she’d get the chance.

  Memphis risked a look out. The corridor was clear. No ghosts, no fog. “Find the others?” he asked.

  Ling nodded. “And it’s ducks first,” she said definitively.

  Sam and Evie had run after Conor, who had led them on a chase down into a basement of dark corners and low ceilings.

  “You see him?” Sam asked as they peeked around a noisy boiler.

  “Huh-uh. And I don’t like basements. Nothing good happens in basements. That’s where one-toothed murderers always live,” Evie whispered. “In basements.”

  “Well, my mother used to put pickled herring in our basement,” Sam said, inching forward.

  “See what I mean? If it’s not ghosts and one-toothed murderers, it’s pickled herring.”

  “Maybe we should let him take his chances and go back upstairs with the others. Frankly, I’m not so sure I wanna be alone in a basement with Conor Flynn, the priest murderer.”

  “Just one more minute, please? I’m worried about him,” Evie said.

  “Okay, Baby Vamp. Okay.”

  The basement was dank and smelled of the river. Several empty stretchers lined the hallway, and Evie shuddered to think of what could be hiding under those wadded sheets. Just keep walking, she told herself. Off to the right was the plunge bath cut into the floor. Water pushed inside and sluiced up the walls in violent spasms. The lights weren’t working. The storm had seen to that. There was a washroom, and Evie realized rather suddenly that she had to go.

  “Stay right here. I need to iron my shoelaces,” Evie said.

  “Now?”

  “Sam. I need to go!”

  “Fine. But could you be quick about it? Creepy down here.”

  “I wasn’t planning to write epic poetry,” Evie grumbled, and shut the door behind her.

  Sam leaned against the cold brick to wait. “Swell. If it ain’t ghosts, it’s weak bladders.”

  There was a thud and a crash. Sam’s heartbeat quickened. He didn’t want to leave his post outside the washroom with Evie inside, but he needed to know what might be down there with them. Cautiously, he crept through the dark basement, blinking to let his eyes adjust. He heard a faint mewling off to his right. Stray cat? No. More like soft crying.

  Sam peered around the corner. Conor sat on the floor with his knees drawn to his chest and his arms wrapped around his knees. Sam was light-headed with relief.

  “Conor. Hey. We, uh, we were looking for you,” Sam said, strolling over and taking a seat next to the boy.

  Conor turned his face away, and Sam had the idea the kid would be embarrassed if Sam mentioned the crying, even though he shouldn’t be.

  “I was wondering if you could tell me more about the lady in your head. About Miriam,” Sam said.

  Conor sniffled and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “She started talking to me ’bout a month ago. She tol’ me how to keep the ghosts and the man in the hat out of my thoughts with my counting. And I can always feel when it’s not right and I gotta count. No sixes, though. I can’t land on a six. Sixes are bad,” Conor whispered.

  “Got it. Sixes are bad. This lady say where she might be?” Sam asked.

  Conor nodded vigorously. “She says they keep her underground where her powers don’t work as good. But they don’t know that she’s been working on getting stronger. They don’t know that. She says if she can get aboveground, she can talk to all the Diviners.”

  Sam’s head was spinning. Could Conor really be talking to his mother? Was it the same Miriam? He didn’t want to hope, but he couldn’t help it. A lump had formed in his throat.

  “You’re sad,” Conor said.

  “No. No, I’m not.”

  “You’re sad and you’re lying about it.”

  “Everybody lies. It’s how we get along in this world. I don’t talk about sad things,” Sam said, irritated, then felt bad for it. “So where is this underground place where Miriam lives?”

  “Dunno.” Conor fell silent. He tore at his cuticles. They were raw, all of them, as if he picked at them daily. “I ain’t seen my own ma in years.”

  “Oh. What about your pop?”

  “Ain’t seen him since I was five. No matter. ’Fore he left, he used to beat me wit’ whatever was around.”

  Sam flinched. His old man had a temper, but he’d never once hit Sam. Mostly, his father was stubborn and sure he was right. He liked things to go his way. Who didn’t? But Sam remembered other things about him, too, like the time his father had taught him Torah and helped him learn to ride a bicycle. Sam hadn’t called or written his father in a year. Now he had the sudden urge to do that. Maybe his old man would bellow at him to give up on his mission to find his mother and Sam would hang up the telephone, angry and disappointed to be right. But maybe not.

  “I’m bad. I’m wicked,” Conor said, and chewed at his cuticles.

  “You’re not bad,” Sam said, even though Conor had murdered a priest, which seemed like the very definition of wicked.

  “They want me to be sorry ’bout how I done Father Hanlon, but I ain’t. He shouldn’ta tried to take Jimmy for ice cream.”

  Cold fear trickled through Sam. He was alone with a boy who, Diviner or not, was capable of murder. “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “I didn’t want him to do to Jimmy what he done to me,” he mumbled.

  “What did Father Hanlon do to you?”

  Conor put his thumb in his mouth, chewing at the damaged skin along his nail bed. He twirled a section of his hair, tugging hard, as if he could make himself come apart and disappear. His voice was thick with unshed tears. “He tol’ me nobody would believe me. His word against mine, an’ he was a priest. Who’d take the word of a street kid over a priest?”

  The full horror of it rose up from Sam’s stomach. He struggled to catch his breath. “So, you tried to stop him from hurting anybody else?”

  Conor nodded.

  “I understand. You’re not wicked, kid. Somebody is, but it ain’t you.”

  The washroom door creaked open and slammed.

  “Baby Vamp, stealthy you are not,” Sam muttered. “Wait here,” he said to Conor. Sam ventured back out into the dark, open basement, but he didn’t see Evie. There was a tap on his shoulder, and Sam yelped and whirled around to see Evie right behind him. “Don’t sneak up on me like that, Sheba,” he said, putting a hand to his chest. “You nearly scared me half to death.”

  “I’m so cold,” Evie said.

  “Yeah. It’s freezing down here.”

  “Warm me up?” Evie asked, biting her lip on a smile.

  Sam raised an eyebrow. “This is a bad time to be pulling my leg, Sheba. We’ve got ghosts to figure out.”

  Evie drew closer to Sam. “What if I’m not pulling your leg? What if I’ve missed you?”

  “I’ve missed you, too,” Sam said, confused. “Wait. On the level?”

  Evie smiled. “Mm-hmm. But I thought you didn’t want to be with me.”

  “Me not want to be with you?” Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “Are you kidding?”

  “Does that mean you do want to be with me?”

  For weeks, he’d tried to put Evie out of his mind and heal. Their pretend romance hadn’t been pretend for him at all. But he had his pride, and he wasn’t about to let her know just how deeply he’d fallen. And then, when he’d seen her go off with Jericho to the collections room, he’d figured that was it. She liked the giant. The big, beautiful giant.

  “Sheba, are you sure?” Sam asked.

  Evie pulled his face toward hers with both hands. And then she kissed him. Deeply. The kiss was a surprise, but it only took second
s for it to rip away the scab on Sam’s heart, for him to lose himself to it. His brain was fighting to make sense of things: I’m in an asylum. Being chased by ghosts. Evie is kissing me. He didn’t know which of those seemed the most far-fetched.

  Evie took his finger and put it in her warm mouth, sucking on it. It felt incredible. Sam gasped. “Do you like that?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”

  “How about this?” She unbuttoned his shirt and moved her mouth across his chest, licking up his neck. He could feel himself hardening.

  “Say… um. Where’d you learn to do that? I, uh, I wanna send that person a thank-you note.” Sam’s eyes fluttered.

  “Kiss me,” Evie said again.

  Sam cursed their timing. “I’d love to. But I left Conor around the cor—”

  “Kiss me,” Evie said, pushing Sam against the brick wall.

  He thought he saw just a hint of blue-gray smoke behind her and felt a chill that doused his passion fast.

  “Say, Sheba. You find anything interesting in that washroom?” Sam said, moving slowly toward it.

  “Why aren’t you kissing us?” Evie said, more insistently. But her voice sounded funny, like several voices speaking at once.

  Sam yanked open the door to the washroom. There was a cracked window down at the end. The room was thick with vapory ghosts. Their teeth shone in the dark.

  “Definitely not pickled herring,” Sam whispered.

  Evie’s eyes tilted up. She shook as if learning a new dance.

  “Oh, no. No, no, no.” Sam grabbed Evie. “Come on, Sheba. Fight it.”

  “We just want a kiss! A kiss to remember us by!” the ghosts inside her shrieked.

  “They got inside her!” Conor said, racing toward her with a long hook he’d found.

  “Whoa there!” Sam said, holding Conor back just as the ghosts inside Evie slipped out, leaving her dazed and staggering.