The Diviners (72 page)

The wheel of sky turned toward dusk; the stars were not yet lit. An anxious wind worried the tops of trees into a fretful sway. From back doors, mothers called children in from games of hide-and-seek and kick-the-can to wash up and say grace before supper. The children complained mightily, but the mothers remained firm and the games were left with promises of tomorrow. Street lamps flickered on. The factories, the schools, the halls of justice, the churches fell quiet. A soft evening fog rolled in like a balm of forgetting.

In the graveyards, the dead lay sleeping with eyes open.

The gray man in the stovepipe hat stepped from the mist and surveyed the land. He had not stood there for some time, and much had changed in his absence. Much always changed. His skin was the mottled gray of a moth’s wing. His eyes were narrow and black, his nose sharp, and his lips thin as a new thought. His raggedy coat lay upon him like an undone winding sheet. He shook the dust from its many folds. Crows flew out and up, cawing, into the sky now tinged with the ominous clouds of a coming storm. He spoke to the crows in a whisper. Then he spoke to the trees and the rocks, the rivers and the hills. He spoke in many tongues and in a language beyond words.

In their graves, the dead listened.

The gray man strode into the honey-brown field, letting the stalks tickle the leathery cracks of his palms. The worn shine of his hat reflected a hazy miniature of the land. A rabbit leaped from spot to spot, sniffing for sustenance. Curious, it trundled close to
the pointed tip of the gray man’s boot, and the man lifted the startled hare by the scruff of its neck. The rabbit twitched and kicked violently. Quick as a magician’s sleight of hand, the gray man reached through the rabbit’s fur and skin with his long fingers and withdrew its tiny heart, still feverish in its pulsations. The rabbit kicked exactly twice more, a reflex, and then stilled. The man in the stovepipe hat squeezed the heart in his brittle fist. The blood seeped into the fertile ground drop by drop.

The dead heard.

The man in the stovepipe hat closed his eyes and inhaled the sweetness of the air. In his palm, the rabbit’s heart beat faintly.

“The time is now,” he said in a voice as raggedy as his coat.

The heart slipped from his fingers. He threw back his head and raised his long, bloody fingers to the slate-gray sky. The clouds churned. Wind bent the wheat. He spoke the words, and lightning crackled on the tips of his fingers. It arced up and out. The sky was wild with fierce light. A spear of it struck the side of a lone tree and it caught, a burning signal on the great ochre plain seen by no one but the wind, heard by no one but the waking dead.

The man in the stovepipe hat walked across the broken field, toward the sleeping towns and cities, the factories and cotton fields, the train tracks, roads, telephone poles, and ticker-tape parades. Toward the monuments of heroes, toward the longing and disillusion of the people. Light crackled around him as he walked, and behind him, the ground was black as cinders.

At the edge of the fog-shrouded forest, James beckoned. Evie could hear the
huh-huh
of her breathing as she followed him through the snow and the trees. The smell of pine was strong, the air was crisp, and even in her dream state, Evie was aware that this was different. Wrong. She had never heard her breath or smelled the pine before. Evie brushed a hand over a tree, and the bark was rough against her palm. As before, she followed James down into the clearing, with its doomed soldiers. She looked to the right. The heavy fog thinned at the top enough to show her a crenulated roofline and what looked to be turrets.
A castle?
Evie wondered.

The sergeant dropped his cigarette and Evie wanted to cry out to him, tell him to run. But she couldn’t. She was only a spectator in this dream. The flash, when it came, seemed infinitely brighter, more powerful than it had before. Evie pushed up out of the trench and ran through bloody fields of poppies. James waited. In sleep, her muscles tensed, waiting for the moment when he removed his gas mask and became a hideous apparition.

James’s hand went to his mask. When he pulled it away, he was still the golden boy, the favored son.

He opened his mouth and she tensed again, waiting for some new horror.

“Hello, old girl,” he said in a voice she had not heard in ten years. “They never should have done it.”

Evie woke with a small, strangled gasp, her forehead damp with sweat. Her hands shook. He’d spoken to her! Air. She needed air. She climbed the fire escape and found her spot on the roof. The night air dried the sweat on her arms. She was chilly—it was November now; summer had fled for good—but she couldn’t face going back to her little room and her troubled sleep. On the edge of Central Park, a drunk zigzagged from curb to street, howling out a girl’s name and crying. Occasionally, he turned his face toward the sky, as if pleading with an unseen court for mercy, then shook his head.

A sound from behind startled Evie. Jericho was there, his coat over his pajamas, book in hand.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Jericho said.

“I’m already disturbed.”

“You’re shivering.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not.” He took off his coat and put it around her shoulders.

“Now
you’ll
be cold.”

“I don’t feel it so much.”

“Oh,” Evie said.

“Did you have the dream again?”

She nodded. “But it was different. He spoke to me, Jericho. He looked right at me and said, ‘They never should have done it.’ ”

“Who? Done what?”

“I don’t know. But I can’t help feeling that this is more than a dream, that he’s trying to tell me something very important.”

“Or it’s just a dream because you miss him. I still dream about my family sometimes.”

“Maybe.”

Jericho took her hand in his. The thrill of his touch traveled the length of her arm, and this, too, she tried to ignore.

“I didn’t think… I didn’t dare to hope that you’d understand. I assumed you’d think I was a freak,” he said.

“We’re all freaks. We could get jobs on the boardwalk. Come see the Misfits of Manhattan! Small children and pregnant ladies not permitted.” Evie laughed bitterly, blinking back tears.

“All this time, I thought I was alone. Different. But you’re different, too.” He was looking at her in a new way. “For the longest time, I wanted to die. I figured that I was dead inside already, that they’d killed me when they turned me into a machine. But I don’t feel dead anymore.” His face was so close to hers. His hand was on her back. “I know what I want now.”

“What’s that?” Evie whispered.

There was nothing awkward or tentative about Jericho’s kiss. He pressed his mouth against hers with a ferocious insistence. Every part of her felt awake and alive.

Evie pushed him away. “I can’t.”

“Why not?” His expression hardened. “Is it because of what I am?”

She shook her head. “It’s because of Mabel.”

He was looking into her eyes. “Well, I don’t want Mabel. I want you. Tell me you don’t want me to kiss you, and I won’t.”

Evie said nothing. Jericho pulled her close and kissed her again. Evie kissed him back, happy for the feel of his lips on hers. Happy for his hands knotted in her hair, happy for his shirt gripped
in hers. That was how the world worked, wasn’t it? You set your sights on something, and life came along with a sucker punch. Mabel wanted Jericho; Jericho wanted Evie. And right now, Evie wanted to forget. Kissing Jericho tonight didn’t have to mean anything. Tomorrow, the crank would be turned anew, and the gears of the world would lurch into motion. She could still fix things tomorrow or the day after. But this was right now, and right now she needed this. She needed
him
. Evie nestled against Jericho’s broad chest and let him cradle her in his arms. He kissed the top of her head as they looked toward the east, where the sun rose, staining the buildings with a faint watercolor hope.

But something was coming. Something she didn’t understand. Something terrible. And she was afraid.

“You all right?” Jericho murmured, his lips against her neck.

“Yeah. Everything’s jake,” she lied.

Down on the street, the drunk stopped calling for his girl. He sank to his knees, rested his head against the hard cobblestones, and cried. “What we lost, what we lost…”

Somewhere in one of the faceless buildings, a radio played, Al Jolson’s cheery voice drowning out the misery of the drunk in the gutter:
“I’m sitting on top of the world… just rolling along—just rolling along….”

The sun cleared the horizon. The light stung her eyes. “Kiss me,” Evie said.

He took her face in his hands and his kiss blotted out the sky.

A lot of research went into creating the world of
The Diviners
. Many hours were logged in various libraries and archives or spent pouring over books, PDFs, primary sources, and photographs. No historians or librarians were harmed in the making of this book, but some were badgered extensively with questions. I am grateful for the aid and expertise of these wonderful, knowledgeable people.

That said, this is a work of fiction, and in order to serve the gods of story, certain liberties must be taken. The author assumes sole responsibility for this willful act of narrative tinkering. (Narrative Tinkering is my new band name. I imagine it’s a postmodern hipster band of varying degrees of beardification. But I digress.)

What sorts of tinkering, you might ask? Well, there was an actual Hotsy Totsy Club run by the famous gangster Legs Diamond. It was located near the Theater District of New York City, not Harlem. But that name proved too irresistible to give up, and so I chose to keep it. There is no secret African graveyard in Upper Manhattan, or else it’s so secret even I don’t know about it; no Museum of the Creepy Crawlies; and no Bennington apartment building occupied by strange, old cat ladies and illuminated by dodgy lighting, except for the one that exists in the imagination.

But much of what you read is straight from the history books, with some of the most disturbing set pieces based on fact: The eugenics movement was quite real, as were those chilling light-up boards at state fairs. Ditto the Fitter Families for Future Firesides, the KKK, the Chinese Exclusion Act (and the Immigration Act of 1924), and the Pillar of Fire Church. Often, the monsters we create in our imagination are not nearly as frightening as the monstrous acts perpetrated by ordinary human beings in the aim of one cause or another.

I’ve tried to remain as faithful as I can to the time period and actual history while crafting a story that includes mystery, magic, monsters, and the unexplained—or as we call that around my house, just another Tuesday.

There are some dynamite resources out there if you’re interested in further research about the time period. A full bibliography can be found on the
Diviners
website:
TheDivinersSeries.com
. Happy creepy reading.

Many people were instrumental in getting
The Diviners
from the initial chaotic impulse of “I’ve got this crazy idea…” to the finished book, and it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge their invaluable contributions here. Huge thanks are due to the whole gang at Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Megan Tingley, Andrew Smith, Victoria Stapleton, Zoe Luderitz, Eileen Lawrence, Melanie Chang, Lisa Moraleda, Jessica Bromberg, Faye Bi, Stephanie O’Cain, Renée Gelman, Shawn Foster, Adrian Palacios, and Gail Doobinin.

My editor, the amazing Alvina Ling, works even harder than James Brown (especially now that he’s dead), and she guided this manuscript with a sure hand, brilliant insight, and an occasional karaoke interlude. Ditto to editorial assistant Bethany Strout, who has a terrific eye for detail and who sings a mean version of “Baby Got Back.”

My agent, Barry Goldblatt, is, as always, a total mensch, and I’d say that even if we weren’t married. But, lucky me, we are.

Copy editor JoAnna Kremer is most likely some sort of government agent created in a lab for the purpose of keeping manuscripts free from egregious mistakes. No doubt fact checker Elizabeth Segal came from the same lab. My eternal thanks, ladies.

I could have done none of this without the derring-do of my incredible assistant, the aptly named Tricia Ready, who helped with everything from research to scheduling, manuscript reading to Dr Pepper wrangling.

I am always gobsmacked by the generosity of experts who are willing to help hapless writers with research. To that end, I must thank the incomparable Lisa Gold, research goddess. I want to be selfish and keep her to myself, but she’s too awesome for that:
www.lisagold.com
.

New York City has many wonderful libraries and librarians; quite a few of those librarians came to my aid like superheroes, minus the ostentatious capes. Many thanks and a life-size Ryan Gosling cutout to librarian pals Karyn Silverman, Elisabeth Irwin High School, and Jennifer Hubert Swan, Little Red School House. More thanks and a fruit basket to Eric Robinson
at the New-York Historical Society; Richard Wiegel and Mark Ekman at the Paley Center for Media; Virgil Talaid at the New York Transit Museum; Carey Stumm and Brett Dion at the New York Transit Museum Archives; and the staffs of the New York Public Library, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and the Brooklyn Public Library.