by Libba Bray
Jacob Call gave a curt nod. “The world has fallen into sin. The Lord will purify it in blood through the chosen one.”
“And you are that chosen one,” Evie tried.
The man’s lip curled in contempt. “Why should I tell you? You ain’t the law or a believer. You’re just a girl.”
“Just like Ruta Badowski was a girl?” Evie snapped. She did not like Jacob Call one bit. “Tell me, did you really mail her eyes to the police as an offering to the Beast, so that he’d know you’d fulfilled the prophecy?” she bluffed.
“I-I done it. May it please the Lord.” Jacob Call wouldn’t make a very good poker player, Evie thought. In that brief, unguarded moment of surprise, he’d shown his hand—he didn’t know she was lying. He didn’t know the details of the murder.
“What about Tommy Duffy’s hands? What did you do with them?” she pressed.
Jacob Call sat stone-faced. “I’ve said all I’m a-goin’ to. I ain’t saying no more.”
“All right, then. I just want to know one more thing. That’s all, and then I’ll leave you alone. Your pendant—what does it mean?”
Jacob Call continued to sit in silence.
“Let’s blouse, Evie,” Sam said. “I hear somebody coming down the hall.”
“It’s just darling!” Evie said, deliberately goading him. “I simply must have one for myself. Where did you get it?”
“The Lord will not be mocked!” Jacob said, glaring.
“Who said anything about mocking the Lord? I just want to know the name of your jeweler. Or perhaps you’d let me buy yours….” Evie reached out a finger as if to touch the pendant, and Jacob Call pounded his fists on the table, making her jump back.
“It’s for me and me alone! And the Lord said, ‘Anoint thy flesh and prepare ye the walls of your houses. Bind your spirit to the Holy Mark and wear it upon your person always and ye shall be protected both in this life and the hereafter. But take care that the Holy Mark be not destroyed. For then shall ye sever the tie to your spirit!’ ”
“I see,” Evie said, trying not to smile. She’d gotten what she needed, though her heart was racing. “I’ll just try Tiffany’s, then. Thanks all the same.”
“What was that hooey about binding yourself to the Holy Mark?” Sam asked after they’d slipped out of the Tombs and were walking briskly back to the spot where they’d parked Will’s car.
“He seems to believe that you can tie your spirit to that pendant, that it’s some sort of magical object that allows you to live on.”
Sam let out a whistle. He shook his head. “The things people will believe. So, you think he’s our killer?”
Evie shook her head slowly. “I don’t think so. The killer didn’t send Ruta Badowski’s eyes parcel post. I made that up, and he went along with it.”
“Maybe he’s only pretending not to know.”
“Maybe,” Evie concurred, but she wasn’t convinced.
A newsie hawked the late edition on the curb. “Extra! Extra! Daily News! Pentacle Killer exclusive! Read all about it!”
Evie tossed the kid some change and gaped at the headline: COPYCAT KILLER! PENTACLE FIEND TAKING GRUESOME PAGE FROM HISTORY? “That fink!” Evie fumed. “I gave him that tip, and he went and used it to make a name for himself!”
“Never trust the press, doll,” Sam said.
Evie flipped to the story and they read it together on the street amid the swirl of pedestrians.
“ ‘In the summer of 1875, the partially decomposed body of an unidentified man was found at the Belmont racetrack. The body bore traces of strange tattoos, including a five-pointed star, and a note was found pinned to his shirt. Most of the ink had been washed away by the elements, but two words were legible: horseman and stars.’ ” Evie gasped. “The Pale Horseman Riding Death Before the Stars. The third offering. He is taking a page from history.”
They hopped into Will’s car and drove quickly back uptown, and while Sam parked, Evie burst into the museum, interrupting Will’s class.
She held up the newspaper. “I found the third offering!” and ran out, leaving Will and his students at a loss.
Will barreled into the library a moment later. “Evie, what the devil do you mean by interrupting my class?”
“Unc, listen to this!” She read to him from T. S. Woodhouse’s article. “Fifty years ago! The third offering happened fifty years ago….”
“Evie,” Will said.
“That’s why the killer started with the fifth offering—because the other four have already taken place, and he’s just finishing up the job!”
“Evie, Evie!” Will interrupted. “Jacob Call confessed.”
“He… what?”
“Just a half hour ago. Terrence phoned me. He confessed to all of it. Said he’s the chosen one, meant to bring about the end.”
“But he’s not the killer. He can’t be.”
“He is, Evie. The police in New Brethren confirmed that he’s been preaching about the coming of the Beast and the arrival of Solomon’s Comet for the past six months. He’s admitted his crime. It’s over,” Will said with finality. “Why don’t you give yourself a night off to go out dancing with your friends? You’ve earned it. Now, I must return to my class.”
Evie sat on the wide staircase and listened to Will’s voice floating out from the classroom as he talked about the nature of evil.
Jericho came to sit beside her. “Murnau’s Faust is playing at the Palace.”
“Swell,” Evie said, still turning things over in her mind.
“I was just wondering if you might—”
There was a knock at the door.
“I’ll go,” Evie said, sighing. “Probably another reporter.”
“Want to go with me,” Jericho finished as he watched Evie walk away.
The Negro woman standing on the steps of the museum was tall and broad-shouldered and smartly attired in a brown plaid suit and a beige hat with a red band. She didn’t seem like a reporter; in fact, she carried herself more like a queen.
“May I help you?” Evie asked.
The woman’s smile was polite but formal. “I am looking for Dr. William Fitzgerald.”
“I’m afraid he’s teaching just now.”
“I see.” The woman nodded, thinking something over. “May I leave my card?”
“Of course.”
From her pocketbook, the woman retrieved a simple cream calling card. Evie rubbed a finger over the lettering. Miss Margaret Walker, with an address uptown. “Do you work for Mr. Fitzgerald?” the woman asked. There was something strange in the way she said “work,” with an air of suspicion that left Evie feeling guarded.
“I’m his niece, Evie O’Neill.”
“His niece,” Miss Walker said in wonder. “Well. Isn’t that something?”
Evie didn’t quite know what to make of Miss Margaret Walker. It wasn’t often that someone left her feeling so undone. “And do you work with my uncle, Miss Walker?”
Miss Walker’s mouth twitched, flirting with a semblance of smile before settling into something far harder. “No.” The woman started down the steps, then turned back. “Miss O’Neill, if you don’t mind my asking, how old are you?”
“I’m seventeen.”
“Seventeen.” The woman seemed to consider this. “Have a pleasant day, Miss O’Neill.”
Evie turned the card over and was surprised to see that Margaret Walker had left a note in script that was as precise and clipped as she appeared to be.
It’s coming back.
What was coming back? Who was Margaret Walker? And who was she to Will?
Upon returning to the library, Evie was surprised to find Will there. “Oh, you’ve finished already. Someone was just calling for you. A woman. She left her card.”
Will stared at the name on the card. He turned it over and read the other side.
“Who is she, Unc?”
“No one I know,” Will answered and tossed Margaret Walker’s card in the wastebasket.
PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES
Evie was dreaming.
In the exotic, looping logic of dreams, she sat on the old wooden swing behind her family’s house in Ohio while James pushed her. She felt the desperate need to look behind her, to make sure he was there and to whisper a warning to him, but the swing rose higher and higher and she could do nothing but hold on tightly. On the fourth push, she swung so high that her pendant flew from her neck. Evie reached out a hand to grab it and fell down, down, down into a velvety forever.
A crow snatched it from her grasping fingers and flew with it into a churning, dark-gray sky above a vast wheat field. Lightning shot from the clouds and struck the land. The wheat burned. Evie put up an arm to shield herself from the heat.
When she took her arm away, she found herself on the streets of a deserted Times Square. Under the giant billboard for Marlowe Industries, the hollow-man war veteran sat in his wheelchair, rattling his cup. “The time is now,” he said.
The pretty woman in Uncle Will’s photograph skated past, laughing. “That’s you all over, William,” she said. Evie heard laughter and turned to see that it was Will, the young Will of family pictures. But when she looked again, it was James, standing on the edge of the familiar forest in the mist. He was pale. So very pale. Dark shadows lay beneath his vacant eyes. He waved to Evie, and she trailed him through the woods and into the army camp. Atop a barrel, a Victrola played, the record going round and round: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile….”
Sandbags formed a wall in front of a long trench. A barbed-wire fence stretched for miles. And the fog sat heavily over it all.
“Don’t let your joy and laughter hear the snag. Smile, boys, that’s the style….”
Above the tree line, a long, serrated roof appeared, like a forgotten fairy castle in the mist. Where was James?
The record spun: “What’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile….”
The soldiers stood around talking, eating from tins, drinking from canteens. She blinked, and for a split second, the boys became skeletal specters. Evie screamed and hid her eyes, and when she looked again, they were just soldiers. One toasted her with his canteen. He smiled, and locusts hopped from his mouth.
“So, pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, s—”
An explosion rattled the ground. A column of fierce white light pierced the sky and spread out in rapid waves, decimating the trees and the soldiers where they stood—flesh peeled back from bone, sockets missing eyes, limbs melting, mouths open in unheard screams while the Victrola turned on a hiss. Evie ran. Her bare feet squished through fields of bloody mud. It splattered her nightgown, face, and arms. The blood became poppies, which rose beside the scorched trees. She saw James up ahead, his back to her. He was alive and unharmed!
James. She called his name, but in the world of the dream, she made no sound. James, James! She was close. She would reach him and they would run away from this horrible place. Yes, they would run. They would be all right. They—
He turned slowly toward her and removed his gas mask and she saw that his beautiful face was ghastly pale and skeletal, his teeth garish now that his lips were gone.
And then he was melting, like all the others.
Evie woke shaking. She sat up and pulled her knees to her chest and waited for her breathing to return to normal. She knew there’d be no more sleep tonight. Exhausted, she took herself to the kitchen for a glass of water, then settled into Will’s office chair and tried to comfort herself by straightening the mess that was his desk. She picked up a crystal paperweight. A letter opener. A framed picture of the woman she’d seen when she held Will’s glove. If she wanted to, she could press any of these things between her palms, concentrate, and draw out Will’s secrets. Jericho’s, too. And Sam’s and Mabel’s and Theta’s. The list was endless. But it was a form of stealing, knowing people’s secrets without their consent. And she wasn’t sure she wanted the responsibility of knowing.
She put the photograph back in its protected place and let her palm rest against the half-dollar pendant at her neck, feeling warmed by its presence. She’d never been able to read it; the coin was too imbued with her own memories. But she liked the weight of it against her neck. It was her last connection to James, and James had been her connection to everything good. She remembered the birthday note that had accompanied the gift:
Happy birthday, old girl.
Are you seven already? Before I know it, you’ll be pinning gardenias to your frocks and sitting with gentlemen callers on the front porch—under the watchful eye of your dear brother, of course. France is miserably muddy, I’m afraid. You’d have a grand time of it, making mud pies and throwing them at the Germans. Big day tomorrow, so I won’t write again for a while. Here is a little something to remember your old brother by. Don’t spend it all at Hale’s Candy Store.
Fondly, James
A week later, they’d received the horrible telegram that James was dead, and her family had broken and been taped back together, a posed photograph kept behind fractured glass.
On Will’s desk, the Daily News lay folded open to T. S. Woodhouse’s latest article on the Pentacle Killer. Her brother was long dead, and somewhere in this city a murderer was breaking hearts. Evie twirled her pendant and thought about the grieving families of Ruta Badowski, Tommy Duffy, and Eugene Meriwether. She knew what it was to wait for someone who would never come home. She knew that grief, like a scar, faded but never really went away. 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. Not that it mattered, now that Jacob Call had confessed. Why couldn’t she feel better about that?
Jericho had forgotten to draw the shade before bed, and now the weary neon of the night-owl city woke him. He crossed to the mirror and stood shirtless before it, examining himself. He was tall, six-foot-two, with the broad shoulders of a farmer, which he would have been if he hadn’t gotten sick. Silently, he slid his bureau drawer open and took the leather kit from its hiding place under a stack of folded undershirts, unrolled it, and ran a finger along the dark blue vials. He wanted to bring a fist down and crush them all. Instead, he brought his hands out in front of his body and held them there for a few long seconds, watching, before dropping them to his sides again. His hands were steady, his skin smooth, his eyes clear. His heart kept a steady, comforting rhythm. To look at him, you’d never know. Only someone who was very close to him would ever know the truth. And he didn’t intend to let anyone get that close.
He sensed movement in the apartment and opened his door a crack to see Evie leaving Will’s office, on her way back to her room. The bluish light cutting through the windows silhouetted the shape of her body beneath her nightgown and Jericho felt a stirring deep in his belly. He admonished himself for looking, but didn’t stop. When she disappeared from view, he shut the door quietly and dropped into a push-up position, driving himself through a punishing routine of exercises, counting them off in his head: Thirty… fifty… one hundred. When he’d finished, his body glistened with a fine sheen of sweat that gave Jericho a sense of relief. Sweat was good. It was healthy. Normal. He held out his hands again. Steady as a rock. He buried the leather kit under his shirts and closed the drawer.
In a garden apartment in Harlem, Alma’s rent party was in full swing. Gabe’s trumpet wailed and growled like a man on the prowl. The small flat was packed with bodies dancing and drinking, singing and shouting into the night. When Memphis had first stepped into the packed apartment with Theta on his arm, he’d gotten some raised eyebrows, and one or two stares. That ended when Alma’s girlfriend, Rita, walked straight up to Theta and said, in a loud voice, “Got a cigarette?” Theta answered, “I’ve got ten. Which one do you want?” To which Rita laughed and said, “She’s all right,” and it was all fine after that. Soon enough, everybody was lost to the good times. Or almost everyone was.
Memphis didn’t want to get into it with Gabe, so he just said, “It’s a free country.” He walked into the kitchen to buy a couple of drinks, and Gabe followed.
“No, it isn’t. You know that.”
“Well, it should be.”
“Should and is aren’t the same thing. What happens when she gets tired of you, or worse, accuses you of something? You remember Rosewood?”
“Two beers!” Memphis told the man with the liquor. “Why you bringing that town into this, Gabriel?”
“That town got burned to the ground because a white woman said—”
“Gab-ri-el!” Alma called over the din. “You gonna blow that horn or run your mouth all night?”
“Don’t get hot, sugar,” Gabe called back, smiling. He dropped the smile as he turned back to Memphis. “It’s not enough they’re slumming it up here and taking the best tables in our own clubs when we can’t even get a table in theirs! Or that they’re trying to take over our business from the inside, like what happened with the Hotsy Totsy. Now you want to go and parade around with one of them?”
“I am not parading, Gabriel.”
“Brother, you are borrowing trouble. Do us all a favor: Escort her out front, help her to a taxi headed downtown, and say good-bye.”
“Don’t tell me how to run my life, Gabe,” Memphis snapped.
Gabe grabbed hold of Memphis’s sleeve. “I’m not trying to run it; I’m trying to save it. You get caught by the wrong people, and you won’t be able to heal what they’ll do to you.”
“Told you, I can’t heal anymore,” Memphis said through gritted teeth. He twisted out of Gabe’s grip, paid for his beer, and pushed his way through the dancing party to where Theta sat, swinging her leg along to the Count’s crazy piano rolls.
