Reluctantly, Evie closed the box. “Oh, but you can’t be comfortable, Mrs. Blodgett. Dr. Fitzgerald? Could you please help her to a more comfortable position?”
Will looked momentarily flummoxed, but he set about trying to help the old woman, who fought him at every turn. During the distraction, Evie quickly pocketed the ring, then replaced the box and closed the drawer. “Ah. That’s better, isn’t it?”
“Yes, thank you,” Mary said, as if she’d been the one to think of it. Then she continued. “But he had to make the world ready. To purge it of sin. To take it on, like a savior. To eat the sin of the world.” Mary White’s eyes moistened with tears. “They murdered him. My Johnny. He was so beautiful, and they murdered him. Philistines! Philistines.” She hacked again, and Evie helped her to more water. “He never hurt a soul! People were drawn to him—women especially.” She smiled and gave Evie’s arm a pat. The mere suggestion of touching John Hobbes turned Evie’s stomach. “I feel pain. Where is Eleanor with my medicine? Stupid girl. Always late.”
“Yes, yes,” Evie soothed. “We’ll have your medicine in just a moment. But I am ever so curious about something: Did Mr. Hobbes ever mention a ritual for binding a spirit, or sending it back into the other realm once it had done its work?”
Mary White frowned. “No. Will you call her with my medicine?”
“Of course I will! And Mr. Hobbes wore a special pendant, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” Mary White answered, her voice thinning with pain. “Always.”
“And where is that pendant now?”
“The pendant?” She had a faraway look, and Evie feared they wouldn’t get what they needed in time.
“Did he give it to you?” Evie prompted. “As a lover’s gift, maybe.”
“I told you, he wore it always,” the old woman snapped. “He was wearing it when he died. It was buried with him. Eleanor! My medicine!” Mrs. White called out.
“He was buried in a pauper’s grave. It’s long since gone,” Will said quietly to Evie.
“No, no, no! No pauper’s grave for my Johnny,” Mary White corrected him, her hearing apparently much clearer than her memory.
“I beg your pardon. I thought…”
“We paid a guard to give us the body. In accordance with Johnny’s wishes, we buried him at his home.”
“Brooklyn or Knowles’ End?”
“No,” the old woman said, irritated. “His real home.”
“Where was that?” Evie asked.
“Why, in Brethren, dear. Up on the old hill, with the faithful.”
The room seemed to reel. Evie heard her voice as if from far away. “Mr. Hobbes was from Brethren?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“But there were no survivors of the Brethren fire,” Evie said.
“Only one. Could you hand me that hatbox, dear?”
Evie retrieved the hatbox from the dresser. Mary White reached in and removed a false bottom, revealing a leather-bound hymnal underneath. From inside its tissue-thin pages, she retrieved a smaller, folded piece of paper, which she passed to Evie.
It was a county record of birth for the village of Brethren, dated 6 June 1842: Yohanan Hobbeson Algoode, son of Pastor John Joseph Algoode and Ruth Algoode (died in childbirth).
“Such a sacrifice they made for him, the chosen one.”
The curtain snapped back. In the doorway, Mary White’s daughter held the syringe in one hand and a length of tubing in the other.
“I’ve been waiting,” Mary White barked. “You want me to hurt, don’t you? Oh, my life was so good before.”
“Yeah, yeah. When you lived in the mansion on the hill. I know. If you hadn’t been paying the blasted taxes on that old house, we wouldn’t hafta live in this stinkin’ hole. You ever think about that?”
Mary White groaned as her daughter plunged the needle into the bruised crook of her arm, then released the tubing. In a moment, the old woman’s eyes gleamed with the morphine. “He’s coming, you know.” Her speech was becoming syrupy. “He said he’d come for me, and I waited. I kept everything as it was for him. He said he’d come, and I knew he would.” Her eyes glazed over. “Such a beautiful man.” Her eyes closed with the morphine and Evie and Will showed themselves out.
Safe again in the bright sunshine, Evie and Will walked quickly through the strolling families.
“Of course!” Will said. He’d stopped to pace before a colorful sign that advertised the Wild Man of Borneo. Just outside the tent, a man in a red circus master’s jacket and top hat tempted the curious to “Come inside and see the savage—part monster, part man!” Behind them, the roller coaster inched up the incline with a steady click-click-click before plunging down and around, the riders screaming with a mixture of fear and pleasure. It was the last ride of the year before the boardwalk would shutter its amusements until the next summer.
“Of course,” Will said again, admonishing himself. “It all makes sense now.”
“Wonderful. Could you explain it to me?”
“Yohanan is the Hebrew name for John. John Hobbeson Algoode. John Hobbes,” Will said. “Naughty John Hobbes was Pastor Algoode’s son—the chosen one. The prophecied Beast meant to rise. He’s come back to finish his father’s work, to bring about hell on earth.”
They were walking again, Will’s words coming as fast as his steps. “Mary said he had to eat the sin of the world. To take on their sins. That why he takes parts of them in accordance with the seals: He ingests parts of them. It’s an ancient magic, the idea that eating parts of your enemies makes you stronger. They can’t defeat you. Two, please—with relish!” Will had stopped in front of Nathan’s Hot Dogs. He fished out two nickels and gave them to the boy behind the counter, taking two hot dogs in return. He handed one to Evie, who held it awkwardly.
“Ugh,” she said, grimacing at the food. “Honestly, Unc.”
Will wolfed his down, still talking. “In John’s case, it is helping him manifest. Giving him strength.”
Evie tried a small bite of her hot dog. It was surprisingly delicious, and she found that even the talk of cannibalism couldn’t keep her from devouring it. “If that pendant is his connection to this plane, his protection, then all we need to do is destroy it, and we destroy his link to this world. Is that right?”
“It stands to reason.”
“But she said it was buried with him.”
“Yes,” Will said, pausing to think. “That will be messy.”
Evie stopped mid-chew. “You can’t be serious.” She stared at Will. “Oh, sweet Lois Lipstick, you are serious.”
Will tossed his hot-dog wrapper in a garbage can. “We’re going upstate, to Brethren. And we’re going to need a shovel.”
Jericho returned to the Bennington from the records department, where Will had sent him. He didn’t even stop to take his coat off. “I found it! The documentation.”
He handed it to Will and nodded grimly at Sam, who was seated at the dining room table with Evie. “Sam. You’re here late.”
“Just keeping Evie company,” Sam said. He smiled triumphantly at Jericho.
Will read aloud from the document. “Yohanan Hobbeson Algoode was taken to the Mother Nova Orphanage, where he was admitted on October 10, 1851. The director’s entries on him are brief, but they document Yohanan Algoode as quiet but ill-humored, a bed wetter, arrogant, and prone to small acts of cruelty. When brought before the director for discipline, he said only, ‘I am the Dragon of Old, chosen of the Lord our God.’ The other children shunned him. He called himself the Beast. After two thwarted attempts, Yohanan successfully ran away in the summer of 1857. No further documentation exists.”
“So we know it’s him. But we still don’t know how we’re going to stop him,” Jericho said, finally removing his coat and hanging it on the rack. “The last page of the Book of the Brethren—the one with the incantation for binding and destroying the Beast—was torn out. You said yourself that we have to dispatch him according to his beliefs. But how are we going to find that information in time? The comet arrives in two days.”
“I need to show you something.” Evie unwrapped the tissue covering John Hobbes’s ring.