“It’s a long story,” Sister Walker said. “And not important at the moment.”
“That Metaphys—needle thing—is all fine and dandy. But what about weapons? What do you have that gets rid of ghosts? Is there a Jake Marlowe ghost container lying around somewhere?” Evie asked.
“Ghosts were once people,” Will said. “People want things. Even dead people. You have to figure out what that thing is. John Hobbes believed he was the anti-Christ and that he could only be banished by luring his essence into a holy relic and destroying that relic. Wai-Mae could not rest until she could face the trauma of her death, until her bones had been given a proper burial. There isn’t one solution. You have to see them ghost by ghost.”
Theta reached into her pocketbook for a stick of gum. “No offense, Professor, but if I run into a ghost, I’m not asking it to dinner so we can talk things over.”
“Why don’t we begin?” Sister Walker led the group to the rug and the circle of chairs she’d put out.
“Say, how come Memphis and Isaiah call you Sister?” Sam asked, settling into his seat.
“We know her. She was friends with our mama. She lives near us,” Isaiah said.
Sam tried out his most charming smile on Sister Walker. “So can I call you Sister, too?”
“You may call me Miss Walker,” she answered, turning her attention to the Metaphysickometer’s dials.
“Was she ever a nun or a cop?” Sam whispered to Memphis.
“No. But I was a government agent,” Sister Walker said with a hint of a grin.
For the next few days, the Diviners reported to the museum when they could, in varying configurations, while Sister Walker and Will worked with them, pushing the boundaries of what they’d been able to do. There’d been small gains: By keeping a hand on Henry’s arm, Memphis could lessen the duration and intensity of Henry’s post-dream paralysis. If Evie read an object when Sam was near, she was somehow able to reach much deeper into the object’s past. “It’s almost as if your don’t see me routine has the opposite effect on my reading, Sam.”
“I’ll send you a bill,” he joked.
“I’ll deduct twenty clams,” Evie shot back.
But nothing so far had made a truly significant or lasting change in any of the Diviners’ powers. Sister Walker reassured them that this was all a normal part of the process, but it still felt like failure.
“We’ll just try again tomorrow,” Sister Walker said gently each time, but everyone knew that she and Will were concerned, and the Diviners themselves were growing frustrated. Whatever storm Liberty Anne had prophesied was still on the horizon, and they were no closer to knowing what it was or how to stop it.
It wasn’t just that the testing of the Diviners’ skills was going poorly that had everyone on edge. Ghost sightings had increased in the city. Every day, there was new, worrying gossip—disturbances heard in apartment hallways late at night. Rooms that went so cold that condensation formed on every surface. Objects gone missing only to be found later far from where they belonged. A diner cook had come in early one morning to find a towering stack of cans in the middle of the kitchen. All the windows and doors had been locked from the inside. A honeymooning couple at the Plaza Hotel left in the middle of the night, insisting that something shook their bed and whispered terrible things as they tried to sleep.
Ghosts, they all insisted. Ghosts, the people repeated.
The fear caught like a spark in wind and spread across the city. It was laughed at in speakeasies. Discussed down at the fish market and in the stands of Yankee Stadium, where the locals stopped to watch Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig practice. It was whispered about behind the perfume counters at Macy’s and Wanamaker’s and among the pushcart peddlers of the Lower East Side. Numbers were played for it in Harlem. At Webster Hall, a phantom-themed drag ball was planned. And in the noisy rooms of Tin Pan Alley, songwriters capitalized on the spooky phenomena with danceable ditties—“Goo-Goo-Googly-Eyed Ghosts!” “The Revenant Rag!”—because, after all, a buck was a buck. Switchboard operators’ fingers ached from patching in frightened callers to the police stations. Most reported pale faces spotted in mirrors or wispy movements glimpsed on the other side of fogged windows.
Ghosts.
The reporters followed up—it made for good morning copy:
—What were they doing? they asked.
—Watching us, the people said.
—Just watching?
—Just watching. Closely, though. Like they were studying us.
Sometimes there were more frightening sightings that made the back pages of the tabloids: A night watchman making his rounds in Brooklyn followed noises to the weedy lot behind the factory. When he lifted his lantern, its weak glow fell upon a pack of glowing things, hairless and deformed, their wan bodies covered in sores, their sharp mouths smeared in blood as they feasted on squirming rats. Before he ran for his life, he thought he heard them whisper, More. Late on a chilly night, the caretaker of Prospect Cemetery heard an animal’s cries. He stepped onto the path in time to see the ghost of a woman in Puritan gray floating between the tombstones, the hangman’s noose still tight about her neck, a mewling cat tucked beneath her incandescent arm. The hanged woman stopped suddenly, turning her head completely around on her broken neck until it faced backward. And then she hissed at the caretaker, and he saw that her eyes were clay-pale and soulless in her pallid, peeling face.
On his way into the 21 Club with yet another starlet on his arm, Mayor Jimmy Walker tried to soothe the city’s fears. “Seems like most of these so-called ghost sightings can be traced back to poisoned bathtub gin. If you see ghosts, you might want to call your bootlegger instead of the mayor’s office,” he joked.
There were reassurances: The honeymoon couple at the hotel didn’t want to pay for the room. The diner cook was angry with his boss and had likely stacked the cans himself for attention. The poor night watchman hadn’t slept in two days. The caretaker’s wife had left him for another and he was not himself. That was good enough for most New Yorkers. People who hadn’t felt the air go cold as death’s hand as they passed the flophouse where several forgotten men had died. People who didn’t hear the faint whinny of horses followed by the momentary vision, camera-flash quick, of a funeral carriage driver whipping down the cobblestones along the seaport. Who hadn’t had disquieting dreams, visitations from dead relatives warning that a storm was coming.
“Why aren’t we out there making a name for ourselves fighting these ghosts?” Sam asked after yet another disappointing effort at combining their abilities had resulted in nothing but headaches, nosebleeds, and exhaustion.
“I’ve told you—we don’t want to panic the populace,” Will said.
“But the populace is already panicked,” Sam said.