by Libba Bray
“I will have an act!” Evie said loudly, letting the gin do the talking. “I’ll turn my living room into a salon, and every night, people will come up and I’ll tell them what they had to eat. All the columns will write me up. I’ll be the Sandwich Swami.”
Everyone laughed, and their laughter tucked itself around Evie like the warmest of blankets. This was the best city in the world, and Evie was diving right into the thick of it now. Within the hour, she’d gotten a read from about a dozen objects, and she was positively woozy. The hour was late—or early, depending on how you read it. Some fella had wrapped his striped tie around her head and tied it off in a half bow. Mabel had fallen asleep on the sofa. The hostess had left a tray of sandwiches balanced on Mabel’s stomach, and from time to time a partygoer would stagger by and steal one. Near her feet, a passionate couple embraced in a never-ending lip-lock.
Henry settled next to Evie. “Say, sugar, that’s some party trick you’ve got. Tell me the truth: You were a magician’s assistant.”
“Uh-uh,” Evie said, grinning.
“Well, how did you learn how to do that?” Henry pressed. “Have you always been able to…” He put his fingers on her forehead and mimed reading her thoughts, making Evie laugh. She was drunk enough to tell him the truth, but some tiny voice inside told her not to. The evening had been so perfect. What if it turned sour, like the last party?
“A lady never tells,” Evie slurred.
Henry seemed like he was on the verge of asking her something else. Evie could feel it. But then he got that smirk again. “Of course she doesn’t.”
“Do you want me to tell you your secrets, Henry?”
“No thanks, darlin’. I love living in suspense. Besides, if I told myself all my secrets, I’d lose my mystery.” He raised one eyebrow and pursed his lips like John Barrymore in Don Juan, and Evie felt she’d made the right call.
She giggled. “I like you, Henry.”
“I like you, too, Evil.”
“Are we pals-ski?”
“You bet-ski.”
Theta crashed next to them on the thick zebra-skin rug. “I’m embalmed.”
“Potted and splificated?”
“Ossified to the gills. Time for night-night.”
“Whatever you say, baby vamp.”
“Theta.” Evie waved a finger in Theta’s general direction. “You didn’t let me tell your secrets.”
Theta wavered for a minute, but she was too drunk to say no. “Here ya go, Evil,” she said, passing over an onyx bracelet shaped like a jaguar. “My birthday is February twenty-third, and I had one of those limp sandwiches in the kitchen for dinner a million hours ago.”
Evie squeezed the bracelet and felt an overpowering sensation of sadness, and a trace of fear. She saw Theta running in the dead of night, her dress torn and her face a wreck. Theta was afraid, so very afraid.
Evie had to let go. When she opened her eyes, Theta was looking at her strangely, and all Evie could see was the other Theta, the scared girl running for her life. “S-sorry. I couldn’t get anything,” Evie lied.
“Just as well,” Theta said, taking the bracelet back. But she gave Evie a wary glance, and Evie hoped she hadn’t gone too far. Maybe it was best to keep her party trick under wraps for now.
A vase flew just over their heads and smashed against a wall, thrown by the blond from the Ba’al number. Daisy somebody. Now she was shouting. “Nobody ’preciates what I do for the show! Not Flo, not anybody! I’m a star and I could go out to Hollywood and be in the pictures anytime I wanted!”
“Good old Daisy,” Henry said knowingly.
“Time to blow,” Theta said.
Evie roused the sleepy Mabel, and Henry grabbed their coats. Evie kept diving for her sleeve with her left arm but missed it each time, and Henry finally had to put the coat on her.
Evie patted his face. “Send me the bill for your services, Henry.”
“Free of charge.”
Arm in arm, the four of them wound through the bohemian streets of Greenwich Village, past the tiny nightclubs and artists’ garrets. As they did, they sang a song Henry had made up, a ridiculous ditty that rhymed “she sat her fanny on a boy named Danny,” which broke Theta up every time. The first tentacles of a monstrous headache were creeping up the back of Evie’s neck, tightening across her skull and making her eyes hurt. She couldn’t quite shake what she’d experienced while holding Theta’s bracelet. She didn’t know what terror Theta had been running from, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know, so she sang louder to drown out the voices in her head. At the edge of Washington Square Park, Henry stopped and hopped onto a park bench.
“Did you know this used to be a potter’s field? There are thousands of bodies buried under this land.”
“I might be one of ’em soon,” Theta said on a yawn.
“Look at that,” Henry said, gazing up at the golden moon bleeding its pale light into the inky spread of sky over the Washington Square arch. They tipped their heads back to take in the full beauty of it.
“Pretty,” Evie said.
“You said it,” Theta agreed.
“Oh, god,” Mabel whined. She turned toward the gutter and threw up.
GRIEF LIKE FEATHERS
Memphis sat in the graveyard, near a headstone that read EZEKIEL TIMOTHY. BORN 1821. DIED FREE 1892. He took his lantern from its hiding place, and beside its yellow glow, he set to work on a new poem. She wears her grief like a coat of feathers too heavy for flight. He crossed out heavy, wrote weighted instead, then decided that was downright pretentious and put heavy back in. Out on the Hudson, a boat skimmed the surface, trailing streamers of light. Memphis watched it for a while, gathering inspiration, but he was tired, and at last he rested his head on his arms and fell asleep.
In the familiar dream, Memphis stood at a crossroads. The land was flat and golden brown. On the road ahead, the dust kicked up into a brumous wall that turned the day dark. There were a farmhouse and a barn and a tree. A windmill turned wildly with the billowing dust. The crow called from the field and beat its frantic wings just ahead of the tall, spindly man bending the wheat into ash with his every step.
Memphis jolted awake. The candle in his lantern had burned out. It was very dark. He put the lantern back in its secret tree hold, gathered his things, and walked past the house on the hill. Don’t look; keep walking past, Memphis thought as he reached the gate. Now, why had he thought that? Why were his arms breaking out into goose pimples? Superstition. Dumb, backward superstition. He wasn’t having it, and as if to challenge himself, to separate himself from a long line of fearful ancestors, he purposely walked through the gate and stood on the cracked, weed-choked path that led to the ruined mansion. He willed himself to walk, drawing closer and closer to the scarred front doors. Maybe he’d even go inside, put this foolishness to rest once and for all. He was nearly there. Only five more steps. Four. Three…
The doors swung open, releasing a sound Memphis could only describe as a hellish groan. Memphis fell back, scrambled to his feet, and set off running at full speed, not slowing until he reached the bright lights of Harlem.
It was the wind; that was all, Memphis reasoned as he crept into Octavia’s house. He’d allowed himself to be spooked by a gust of wind. He shook his head at his softness, then stifled a yelp as he came upon Isaiah standing in the doorway to their room. “Lord almighty, Ice Man!” he whispered. “You almost gave me a heart attack. What’re you doing out of bed? You need a glass of water?”
Isaiah stared straight ahead. “Anoint thy flesh and prepare ye the walls of your houses. The Lord will brook no weakness in his chosen.”
“Ice Man?”
“And the sixth offering shall be an offering of obedience.”
A chill skipped up Memphis’s arms and neck. He didn’t recognize what Isaiah was saying. It was almost like he was receiving those words. Memphis wasn’t sure what to do. If he went to Octavia, she’d drag Isaiah and Memphis down to church and keep them there
all day and night praying.
Sister Walker. Maybe Sister Walker would know. He’d ask her about it tomorrow. Memphis took Isaiah’s hand and led him back to bed. The boy was still staring into the distance.
“The time is now. They are coming,” Isaiah said, drifting back into dreams, his last word barely a whisper: “Diviners.” And then he was asleep.
A RIND OF MOONLIGHT
Several blocks and a thousand years from the city’s ritzy nightclubs and theaters, a rind of moon sweated in the sky, but its glow did not reach the gloom of the tenements along Tenth Avenue, where Tommy Duffy and his friends welcomed the feel of the cool night air as they swaggered through Hell’s Kitchen. They called themselves the Street Kings, for they were rulers of the rubble piles and the railyards. Makers of mischief. Sultans of the goddamned West Side.
“… I heard dere’s a cellar ’round here where dey take snitches,” one of the boys crowed. “I heard ’a floors is covered wit teeth ’at you can pry da gold right outta and sell it over to da pawnbroker on Eighth and Forty.”
“You’re as full of it as yer old man.”
“You take back what you said about my da.”
“Yeah, the only thing his old man’s full of is Owney’s whiskey!”
The two boys fell on each other with fists and curses, more out of habit than a sense of honor, until Paddy Holleran broke them apart.
“Save it,” he ordered. “We might need our knuckles for what we’re doin’ tonight.”
Paddy was fourteen and already running some small rackets for Owney Madden’s gang, so the boys followed him without question, shouting “Street Kings!” and toppling garbage cans and throwing rocks at windows. No one could touch them. This was what it meant to be in a gang. Without your boys, you were nothing. A chump. A nobody.
When they reached the empty yards along the Hudson where the warehouses stood sentry, Paddy shushed them. “Gotta be looking out. Dey got a guard dog, a big German shepherd with teeth a foot long dat keeps watch. He’ll eat your face off.”
“What’s the plan, Paddy?” Tommy asked. He was only twelve and looked up to the older boy.
“See dat warehouse at the end? I heard Luciano’s men got their whiskey from Canada hidden in there. Got a distillery in dere, too. We steal some whiskey, bust up the still, I bet Owney’d be chuffed. Bet we’d look good to him. We’ll let dem Italian bastards know we Irish was here first.”
“Didn’t Columbus discover America?” Tommy said. He’d learned that in school, before he’d quit in fifth grade.
Paddy thumped Tommy’s nose. “Whatsa matter wit you? You wanna run wit the Italians now? Is ’at it?”
“N-no.”
“Hey! Tommy Gun here wants to be Italian! He’s too good for us!”
“Am not!” Tommy shouted over their insults.
“Yeah? Prove it.” Paddy had a mean glint in his eye. “You go in first. Stay in for five minutes, then come out with somethin’ and we’ll believe you.”
Tommy glanced down toward the shadowy end of the yards, where the warehouse sat. Winos slept there. Perverts, too. Sometimes rival gangs patrolled with lead pipes. And there was the threat of the guard dog Paddy had mentioned. Tommy’s stomach knotted in fear.
“Do it or you ain’t part of the Street Kings no more.”
There was no worse fate. Even the thought of some geezer showing his bits was better than being left out of the gang, a nobody.
“Okay, okay,” Tommy said. He walked on shaky legs toward the looming warehouse on the river. Feral cats slunk through the weeds, carrying things in their teeth. One hissed, its eyes gone to glass in the dark. King of the Streets, King of the Streets, Tommy chanted to himself. At the warehouse’s big doors, he hesitated for a second. It wasn’t padlocked. There was only a wooden bar looped through the handles. One of the boys howled like a dog and Tommy’s heart beat fast at the thought of what might be on the other side of those doors.
King of the Streets…
Tommy slipped inside and saw at once that it was not a secret distillery but a slaughterhouse. The place had a terrible smell of river water and dead flesh. Behind him, Tommy heard the wooden bar being slipped back through the handles. He fell against the doors, pounding with his fists. “Lemme out! I’ll kill youse!”
“Give our regards to the Italians, chump,” Paddy yelled from the other side, and the other boys joined in with their own insults. Tommy could hear their laughter moving away from the warehouse, along with their quick footsteps. Tommy threw himself against the doors, with no luck. Unless he could find another way out, he was stuck there till somebody came. That somebody might be one of Lucky Luciano’s men, which was a scarier thought than spending the night alone in the old warehouse. From the riverside, the moon pushed through the building’s high, narrow windows. Its fractured light fell first on the chains and hooks suspended from the ceiling, then across the pale carcasses of the pigs hanging in a long line to the back of the warehouse. A rat scuttled across his foot and he shouted.
“Big fellow, wasn’t he?” a man’s voice said.
Tommy whipped around. “Who’s there? Who said that?”
The man stepped out of the shadows. He was as big as a boxer, and he looked important and out of place in his full suit and bowler hat. Tommy swallowed hard. What if this man was one of Lucky Luciano’s goons?
“It was a dare. M-my friends locked me in,” Tommy managed to say. “I swear, mister. I don’t want no trouble.”
“What is your name?” the man asked.
“Tommy.”
“Tommy,” the man said, tasting the name. There was something about his eyes that didn’t seem right. Tommy chalked it up to the weak moonlight. “Thomas the disciple. Doubting Thomas, who had to be shown before he could believe.”
“Huh?”
The stranger smiled. It was an unsettling smile, but Tommy felt drawn to it. “Since you seem to be in a bargaining mood, Thomas, I will also make you a bargain. Tonight is the sort of night in which men of great daring can be made. But you will have to put your doubts aside, Thomas.”
The man pulled a crisp hundred-dollar bill out of his pocket and snapped it taut between fingers blue-black with markings. Tommy’s eyes widened.
“Whaddoo I gotta do?” he asked warily.
“All you have to do is walk to the far end of the warehouse and retrieve my walking stick. It has a silver tip.”
The man waved his hand and Tommy saw the walking stick’s silver knob glinting in the distance on the other side of the pigs.
“What’s the catch?”
“Ah. That would be telling, wouldn’t it? Life is a game of chance for men of daring, Thomas. You must be willing to risk in order to be rewarded. What say you?”
Tommy thought it over. In his brief life, he’d found that most bargains weren’t bargains at all. And the thought of walking through those pale dead pig bodies to get to the stick at the far end seemed daunting. Then he remembered that he was there because his so-called friends had locked him in for laughs. He would not show up without that hundred dollars to rub in their faces.
“Okay, mister. I’ll do it.”
The man smiled his discomfiting smile. “A man of daring after all. May I see your hands?”
Tommy frowned. “What for?”
“A man in my position must take precautions. Hands, please.”
Tommy held out his hands, turning them palms up, then palms down. The stranger’s eyes gleamed.
“You may put them down now.” The man reached into his pocket and produced a leather pouch, shaking what looked like dust into his palm. He blew it into Tommy’s face.
“Wha-what’d you do that for?” Tommy sputtered, wiping at his nose and mouth.
“Upping the ante,” the stranger said, holding the hundred-dollar bill between his second and third fingers like an offering. “Game of chance. Men of daring.”
Tommy snatched the bill from the man’s fingers and stuffed it into his own pocket. The man’s
eyes seemed to burn with a strange fire, and Tommy looked away quickly. He focused instead on the walking stick at the far end of the warehouse. He took a deep breath and entered the long, dark tunnel between the butchered pigs. All those dangling dead bodies, the eyes fixed and staring, the mouths open in a final silent scream, made him feel a little sick and woozy, and he struggled to keep his own eyes on the silver tip, which seemed a million miles away. Tommy chanted to himself quietly, King of the Streets, King of the Streets, King of the Streets.
“That’s it, Thomas. Keep walking. You’re doing very well. Soon you’ll put all those doubts to rest.”
Tommy kept moving. A hundred bucks was a world of money. When he showed up at Paddy’s in new clothes, his hair freshly oiled and green in his pocket, he’d show the others who was really the chump. Nobody’d be locking him in a warehouse again.
The stranger sang an unnerving song: “Naughty John, Naughty John, does his work with his apron on….”
The song made Tommy break out in a cold sweat and he took the last few steps at a clip till he reached the stick. It had been shoved into the ground like a sword. Beside it was a pamphlet for something called The Good something or other—the last word started with C, but Tommy had always had a hard time reading; the letters got mixed up in his head. Tommy gripped the stick with both hands and tugged, but it would not yank free, and the stranger’s song was starting to work on his nerves. It seemed to come from everywhere, and under the melody he could swear he heard, very faintly, terrible growls and hisses, like voices released from the very depths of hell. He had the money in his pocket. He could run. But something told him he’d better see this through. Tommy positioned himself over the stick, wiped his hands on his filthy trousers, and tried again. It wouldn’t budge. He made a third attempt, pulling so hard that he fell backward into the wood shavings. It was wet where he fell, and a drop of something hit his cheek, followed by another. Tommy wiped at his face. His hand came away smeared with blood. Still on his back, he looked up to see a German shepherd dangling on the hook above him, the kill so fresh the animal still twitched. Its belly had been slit open and its insides pulled out.
