Before the Devil Breaks You (The Diviners #3)
Libba Bray
For the truth-tellers
PART ONE
ASYLUM
Thick evening fog clung to the forlorn banks of Ward’s Island, turning it into a ghost of itself. Across the dark calm of the East River, the glorious neon whirl of Manhattan was in full jazz-age bloom—glamorous clubs, basement speakeasies, illegal booze, all of it enjoyed by live-fast-forget-tomorrow flappers and Dapper Dons eager to throw off their cares and Charleston their way into tomorrow’s hangover. On Ward’s, it was quiet and dark, just a fat fist of neglected land housing the poor, the addicts, and the mentally ill, all of the city’s great unwanted, kept well out of sight, the rivers separating the two worlds—the living and the dead.
Inside the gothic expanse of the Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane, in the common parlor on the third floor of ward A, Conor Flynn sat with his frail arms wrapped around his knobby knees listening to a radio program. It was called the Pears Soap Hour featuring the Sweetheart Seer, and it starred one of those Diviners, a young gifted girl who claimed she could read the secret histories of objects through her touch: “Now, don’t tell me anything about this watch, Mrs. Hempstead. I’ll divine its very soul tonight. Just you wait!”
On Ward’s Island, that was called insanity. On the radio, it was called entertainment.
At the piano with the two missing keys, Mr. Potts, a cheery soul who’d murdered his mother at the breakfast table with a hunting knife, now plunked out a tuneless old beer hall song. Sad Mr. Roland worked his jigsaw puzzle with shaking hands. His shirt cuffs slid up, revealing the puckered scars running the width of each wrist. The squeak of a wheelchair announced an arrival to the parlor. Conor looked up to see a nurse wheeling in a newer resident, one of those shell-shocked veterans of the Great War. There were lots of broken men like that in the asylum—fellas who’d gone off to fight but hadn’t fully come back. A wool blanket covered the soldier’s lower half to disguise the fact that his legs ended at the knees, though Conor didn’t know why they should hide it.
“Here we are, Luther. Nice view from here,” the nurse said, patting his shoulder. “Bit of fog, but you can still see the river.”
Conor glanced toward the barred windows at the bruising sky and the distant steel arch of the Hell Gate Bridge. It would be night soon. Night was when they came.
The thought gave Conor the shivers, so he counted.
“One, two, t’ree, four, five, seven. One, two, t’ree, four…”
Mr. Roland squinted in his direction. It startled Conor and he lost his place. Now he had to start over. He flexed his fingers exactly three times and tapped the tips of his fingers to his forehead and lips, up and down three times, each in rapid succession. Then he counted to seven until it felt right, until the uneasy sentinels on watch inside his mind gave the signal that it was okay to stop. Counting kept him safe. There were rules: Seven was the best number. Threes were good, too, but counting a six was bad. He didn’t know why these were the rules, just that they were, and he followed them and had ever since he could remember.
“Evenin’, gentlemen!” The night attendant, “Big Mike” Flanagan, strolled into the common parlor, all loose gait and sharp smile. Mike had been a guard at the penitentiary on Welfare Island. He looked at all the patients as if they were guilty of some crime, and he had a habit of doling out his own sentences in secret slaps, trips, and pinches.
“What’s the matter, Mr. Roland? You’re jumpy tonight.”
Mr. Roland glanced over his shoulder toward the windows and the night pressing its ominous thoughts against the barred glass.
“What’s out there, then? You expecting something?”
“G-ghosts,” Mr. Roland said.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Mr. Roland.”
Mr. Roland reached for a new puzzle piece. “Tell that to Mr. Green.”
Big Mike gripped Mr. Roland’s shoulder in what might’ve seemed like a brotherly hold. Mr. Roland’s pinched face said it clearly was not. “Whaddaya know about Mr. Green, boyo? Eh? D’ya see what happened? Do you know how he got that razor? Tell me!”
“Told you: ghosts.”
Big Mike let go of Mr. Roland’s arm. “Aaah, what am I even listening for? You didn’t see nuttin’. I’ll be as loony as you if I keep it up. You oughta be careful, boyo. Faye talked about the ghosts coming through. Wouldn’t shut up about it. So Dr. Simpson took that thought right out of her head.” Big Mike tapped the tip of his index finger just above Mr. Roland’s left eye. With a meaty paw, he crumbled apart Mr. Roland’s hard-won progress on the puzzle. “Lunatic,” he huffed, and walked away.
In his head, where dark imaginings often spread their bladed wings, Conor imagined Big Mike’s blue eyes widening with surprise, the blood bubbling up at his throat where Conor had taken a razor to it. That was a bad thought, Conor knew. It scared him, and so he counted to seven several times, a penance of numbers, until he could feel safe inside his skin again.
Outside, the wind howled mournfully. By the window, the soldier with the haunted eyes moaned softly and kept his gaze trained on the ceiling. Conor often got feelings about people—who could be trusted, like Mr. Roland, and who was rotten, like Big Mike or Father Hanlon, who was dead now and Conor was glad of it. Conor had a bad feeling about the soldier, too. There were unsettling secrets swirling around him. Someone or something was chasing Luther Clayton.
“The natives are restless,” Big Mike joked to one of the nurses. He was standing just outside the common parlor in the long hallway lined with doorways that hid the patients’ cramped rooms.
“Oh, you!” the nurse, whose name was Mary, flirted back.
A razor. Blood at Big Mike’s throat. An animal eating him down to the bones while he screamed. One, two, t’ree, four, five, seven. One, two, t’ree, four, five, seven.
“D’you hear old Mrs. Liggett nattering on about ghosts now? Claims they’re all over the island, with more coming. ’Course, she also thinks she’s a bride and every day’s her wedding. Still. Awfully dark out,” Big Mike said. “Better let me walk you to your dormitory tonight.”
“I might do,” Mary said coyly. Her smile disappeared. “Why do you think they’ve been talking so much about ghosts?”
Big Mike shrugged. “We’re in a madhouse, whaddaya expect? Ooh. Stuffy in here, idn’t it?”
Big Mike stepped back into the common parlor and cracked open a window.
“D-don’t!” Conor yelled. Under the table, his legs shook.
Big Mike scowled. “What’s that, boyo?”
“D-don’t open it.”
“And why not? Stifling in here.”
“They can get in,” Conor said.
Mary looked worried. “Maybe we shouldn’t.…”