The Book of Speculation: A Novel

After a difficult section of road thick with mud and overrun with brush, the menagerie rested along the Catawba before their approach to Charlotte. Amos practiced a six-line spread with Evangeline, working with the undealt cards from a prior cross. At the end of the fourth line Amos’s left hand had darted out to snatch a card just as it had been turned. Evangeline grasped both the card and his fingers. “Why do you hide them from me?” she asked. “How am I to learn to do a proper reading if you insist upon taking all the interesting cards?” She saw he was troubled and had meant to be gentle, but he flushed and looked to the floor. “Please,” she said. She turned his hand palm up to reveal the card. The Devil.

Amos did not know that secrets bred their own sort of uneasiness, or that when Evangeline pressed her belly to meet his back she was beset with dark thoughts. He wondered if Ryzhkova’s anger with him lived in cards, corrupting and warping his words. He looked at his hand in Evangeline’s, not much more than a filthy paw.

He put away the cards they’d been working with and began to speak in earnest. He showed Evangeline the High Priestess—Ryzhkova. He flipped, shuffled, and turned, telling her of Ryzhkova’s worry and how he was afraid she’d left it in the cards. He laid himself, the Fool, atop Evangeline’s hand, to show her he wished to protect her from what Ryzhkova had feared.

“The Devil is it?” She took the cards from Amos’s hand and set the six-line spread they’d been practicing. The Devil landed soundly at the fourth row’s finish. There could not have been a less auspicious position. The downward turn of her mouth told him that she knew. “There was a woman who believed me Devil possessed,” she said. “And a woman I loved believed that the Devil might be beaten back with a wooden spoon.” Her laugh was high and mirthless. “Anyone defeated by a spoon is not worth fearing. You’ve no need to hide things.” She did not mention what became of the spoon or the Devil who had wielded it.

Amos nodded but did not agree.

Well into the night they were awoken by pounding at the cart. Amos cracked the door to find Benno, lit by the wavering flame of an oil lantern and scarcely recognizable. The tumbler’s normally placid face was distorted by dread, the scar tugging his mouth tight.

“Get Evangeline,” he said. “Please.” When Amos made no move, he continued. “The river. It has turned foul, gone dead—everything. Your woman, she swims there at night while you sleep.”

Amos blinked at this revelation. She’d managed to leave him without his knowing. Benno had been watching.

“I will say no more, it would only anger you. Please, get your woman.”

Sleep rumpled and twisting her hair, Evangeline appeared behind Amos. “Hush. I will come.”

They followed the flickering light of Benno’s lamp through the bulrushes and cattails that ran to the water’s edge. Amos held Evangeline’s hand and kept her close, watching her steps as Benno’s light ducked between reeds, vanishing and reappearing, blinking in the wind. How little he knew her. When they reached the riverbank the light stilled.

“I have seen you swim this river,” Benno said. “Do you know anything of this?”

Decay weighted the night, making breathing difficult for the stench of it. Evangeline had swum the river that morning, reveling in its sweetness. The lamp cast a glow over where land met water. The shore shone in a wash of silver and the air buzzed thick with flies. Piled high at the river’s edge were rows upon rows of fish, dead and dying, gills gasping. Their eyes were clouded, sinister opals. She covered her face to block the smell, stumbling from the reek.

“Or this thing. Have you ever seen its like?” Benno crouched to pick something up from the ground. A dark brown stonelike creature with a leathery shell and a tail like a switch. It twisted in his hands, knocking itself from side to side. “Wicked-looking devil, is it not?”

Her stomach lurched. Though larger and more disturbing, it was the same creature she’d found in the salt river in Virginia. “I’ve never seen such a thing before,” she said.

Amos’s arm went around her shoulders and she wondered if he could feel the cold that had rooted in her bones, if he could feel her lie.

“Of course you’ve not.” Benno’s words were heavy and sad. “But they line the banks now. Do you see them? Like demons from the water. You swim here. I have seen you as recent as this very morning,” he said, dropping the strange creature to the sand. Hundreds like it filled the shore, burrowed underneath the dying fish, hidden among the stones.

“The water was clear when I swam,” she said.

Benno’s eyes roamed over Evangeline as if cataloging the parts that made her. His frown snapped into a flashing smile. “Of course. What could you have done? I thought you might have seen something; that is all. I’m sorry to have woken you.” He glanced back at the river. “However, it is certain we must leave this place.”