But some sins were boasted still:
“… It was mine—mine!—and I’d have it no matter what.…”
“… So we gave ’em the blankets. What’s one less Indian in the world…?”
“…’Twas Mercy Good turned the milk sour. And thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.…”
The confessions swirled around the tall, dark hat of the King of Crows. He smiled. “Yes. Oh, yes,” he murmured, as if listening to sweet chamber music. “More. Give me more.”
Strings of hot blue energy crackled along the tips of his fingertips. He bared his teeth. “I hunger.”
The dead brought forth a young doe they’d found. It had been separated from its mother. They fell upon it, feasting, and then the King of Crows sucked the power from the dead.
He scowled. “Not. Enough.”
In the cold of the graveyard, Conor Flynn shivered in his filthy nightclothes. The King of Crows fixed his soulless gaze on the young Diviner. “What is it to see the world? To see beyond death and destruction into the heart of humanity? Tell me my future, young Conor Flynn, and if it pleases me, I might spare you.”
Conor wished the lady were in his head now. But she could not reach him where he was. All around, the dead waited. Conor could feel their hunger. Their need. It all came from the man in the hat. His very presence sowed discontent. Oh, yes, Conor could feel it now, the way the man joined to the dissatisfaction and petty old hurts the spirits had carried with them to the grave. Human. Human till the end and beyond. The man made them believe they should not end but have more. Made them crave it: We would have everything! It is our due! Oh, this world is not enough, not enough, not enough!
Conor had a bad feeling in his gut, like on the day Father Hanlon asked Jimmy if he wanted to go for ice cream. There were terrible things in the world, and nobody seemed to care. But Conor did, despite everything. He’d saved Jimmy, hadn’t he? He heard that a nice family adopted him, and now Jimmy lived in a house with a mom and a dad and a dog named Teddy. Conor’s legs shook as he tried to imagine it: Jimmy on the front porch of that nice house, his fingers in Teddy’s fur while the dog licked at his face and made him laugh. A good life. The lady, Miriam, had told Conor something once as he lay on his cot in the asylum, rocking himself to sleep. Just before he’d drifted off, she’d spoken to him like a mother. “Whoever saves a life, it is as if he has saved an entire world,” she’d told him. That had stuck with Conor. The idea that anybody, even a kid like him, could make a difference.
Conor slipped into his vision. He could hear the souls of those poor soldiers crying out to him to be set free at last. He wished he could save them, but they were beyond his reach. He waited, and the voices quieted. The vision took hold. The sun was the color of an old dog’s pus-smeared eye. Conor stood at a crossroads under that dodgy sun. Two possible futures stretched out before him. He could not say which path would win. But he feared for his friends.
“What do you see? I would know,” the King of Crows demanded.
If Conor told, his friends would be in even greater danger. He would tell the man just enough to appease his appetite.
“There’s a girl,” Conor said. “She’s a seer, too. Sarah Beth.”
“And what of our Diviner friends, hmm?”
“Didn’t see nothing,” Conor lied, tapping his fingers one, two, three against his skinny thighs, again and again.
The King of Crows’s dead stare bored into Conor’s until he nearly fell down weeping. “I ask for more and you give me nothing,” he said. The man in the hat rested his dirt-caked fingers around Conor’s slim neck. Beetles crawled from the demon’s pointed sleeves and scuttled up his arms till he seemed sewn from them. “I’m bored with you,” he said. “I would have new thrills. More. More, more, more.”
Conor looked to the woman in the black-feather cape. Her eyes held the grief of the whole world. Those eyes more than anything made Conor afraid.
“Shut your eyes, baby,” the lady said, and he’d never heard a sadder voice in all his brief life.
The King of Crows released Conor, pushing him toward the hordes of hungry dead. “Do as thou wilt!”
The dead began to advance.
Conor trembled. “Onetwot’reefourfiveseven. Onetwot’reefourfiveseven. Mother Mary, full of grace… No! No! No!”
Conor’s last desperate cry was ripped from his throat as the dead fell upon him with their greedy hunger. Viola Campbell could not stop it, but she would not look away. She screamed, and her screams sounded like frightened birds.
“Feed me!” the King of Crows demanded as Conor’s screeches dwindled to gurgling and then nothing. Dutifully, the dead approached and opened their terrible mouths. Lightning crackled around the man in the hat. His head tipped back as he sucked up the energy from his army of dead. He licked his lips. The scar-like veins pulsed with new blood. His eyes shone, cold and dead as black diamonds.
“Yes. Yes. The time is now,” the King moaned, and laughed up to the starless sky.
Viola Campbell buried her eyes in her hands. “Oh, my son, my son. Would God I had died for thee…” she said, and hung her head and cried.
The glow of the electric lamps backlit Jake Marlowe as he sat in his bedroom, cradling his bruised head in his hands. Several days’ beard growth darkened his cheeks. The secretaries had been fielding calls every day from the newspaper boys who wanted Jake’s comments for the morning hot sheets. They had been informed that Mr. Marlowe wasn’t speaking.
Jake poured out more of his family’s one-hundred-year-old Scotch from the old cellar. He didn’t usually drink, but he’d been at it for several days now. Time blurred. He stank. He didn’t care. On the table was the model for Marlowe’s utopian American exhibition. “Here’s to the future,” Marlowe said, and poured his Scotch over the whole thing.
Down the hall, fast footsteps rang out.
“Mr. Marlowe! Mr. Marlowe!” One of the scientists. He rattled the locked doorknob.
“I’ve told you, I don’t want to be disturbed,” Marlowe said flatly. Everything he’d built lay in tatters. He didn’t think he could take another blow.
“Mr. Marlowe! Please, may I come in?”
Reluctantly, Marlowe left his chair. He staggered to the door and unlocked it, leaving it open as he moved back to his chair and sat with a plop. “What is it?”
The excited man stopped to catch his ragged breath. “The machine, sir. It’s switched on. It’s receiving.”
Marlowe was suddenly alert. “Is there any word from him? Any new message?”
The young man nodded.
“What does it say?” Marlowe asked.
“‘I am ready. The time is now.’”
Author’s Note