“Aww, go back to your countin’, why don’tcha, Conor?” Big Mike said. “Now, Mary, don’t let it bother you.…” He took the opportunity to put his arm around the pretty nurse’s shoulders.
At the piano, Mr. Potts’s fingers stilled for a moment on the sickly keys. Then his quavery voice sang a new song. “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile!” In his chair, the war vet twitched and whimpered in a way that made the hair on the back of Conor’s neck stand at attention.
“What’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile,” Mr. Potts sang, really getting into it now. “So pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile!”
Luther Clayton’s head whipped in Conor’s direction, eyes wide, haunted. “Don’t let them in. They belong to him!”
And suddenly, Conor understood what had made him so uneasy about the soldier: He knew.
Big Mike hurried over to the veteran’s chair, Mary following. “Now, now, what’s the racket for, eh, Luther?”
“The time is now,” Mr. Potts said, resting his hands flat on the tops of his thighs. He stared out the barred windows, one open just a crack, open just enough. And now Conor could see it, too: the odd bluish fog rolling across the dark lawn like a magician’s best trick.
They were coming.
“The time is now, the time is now, the time is now,” Luther said, his voice escalating.
The door slammed shut. Mary tugged at the handle. “It won’t budge!”
“Ring the alarm!” Big Mike called.
The nurse pulled the string. “It isn’t working!”
The fog pushed in around the window cracks.
“What in the name of—” Big Mike’s voice cut off with a gasp.
The nurse screamed and Conor wanted to cry, wanted to wish it all away, but he didn’t dare turn around to look. He was waiting for the lady in his head to tell him what to do.
“Onetwot’reefourfivesevenonetwot’reefourfiveseven!”
A curtain came down over Conor’s fear. His muscles relaxed. In his head, the lady’s voice guided him. Bear witness. He picked up the pencil. Behind him, there was the crack of overturned chairs and Big Mike crying, “No! Please, no!” and Mr. Potts screeching like a frightened monkey and Mr. Roland making sounds no human should make. There were the nurse’s terrified, pleading screams dying to a gurgle and Luther Clayton shouting, “The time is now!” till his vocal cords strained into hoarseness. Down the long hallway, running footsteps approached, though it was already too late. The tang of fresh blood fouled the air.
“Onetwot’reefourfiveseven,” Conor murmured over and over, like a prayer, as he kept drawing.
The fog slipped back through the windows and stretched its arms around the edges of Ward’s Island, the lights of the asylum barely visible in the murk. There were terrible things waiting in that fog, Conor knew. And just before the door to the common parlor creaked open of its own accord—Strange, they’d say later, as if it had never been locked to begin with—before the alarms and shouting and cries rent the night—“Oh, sweet Jesus! Oh, dear god!”—Conor heard the whispers traveling through the fog like current along a telephone line no one uses much:
“We are the Forgotten, forgotten no more.…”
THE COMING STORM
At five o’clock on a cold February afternoon, Memphis Campbell and his little brother, Isaiah, mounted the steps of the ramshackle Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult on West Sixty-eighth Street.
Isaiah peeked into the museum’s dusk-dark front windows. “Looks closed. Says it’s closed.”
Memphis pulled on his brother’s arm. “Quit it, now. You’ll get arrested for being a Peeping Tom.”
“Won’t, either. Say, what’s a Peeping Tom?”
“Something that gets you arrested,” Memphis said, opening the front door.
“You’re squawking at me for looking in the windows, and you’re just opening the front door and walking in!” Isaiah said, running to catch up.
“It’s okay. They’re expecting us.”
As they traveled the long hallway, Isaiah gawked at the museum’s many collections—the poppet dolls, the haunted ventriloquist’s dummy, the spirit photographs, and a slate used by mediums in their trances. He stopped in front of a painting of a root worker communing with a trio of wispy ancestors. Spooked, he ran to catch up to his brother.
“I thought we were gonna play ball.” Isaiah punched his fist into his catcher’s mitt. “You told Aunt Octavia—”
“Never mind what I told Octavia. Isaiah, I mean that—don’t tell her about this.”
Memphis slid open a pair of impressive pocket doors, and he and his brother caught their breath at the majesty of the museum’s library. Dark wood shelves stuffed higgledy-piggledy with leather-bound books lined the walls on both the first and second floors. A grand spiral staircase connected the two. High above, a mural stretched across the long expanse of ceiling: houngans, shamans, and witches stood side by side with gray-wigged Founding Fathers against a backdrop of mountains, rivers, forests, and wildlife. America the Supernatural.
“Salutations, Campbell brothers!” a petite blond flapper called from a plump chair where she lay sprawled with her legs dangling over its rolled arm. Evie O’Neill. The radio’s famous object reader, the Sweetheart Seer. Evie spread her arms wide to acknowledge the others in the room. “Welcome to our merry festival of freaks.”
Memphis smiled nervously at everyone in turn. The museum’s faithful assistant, Jericho Jones, nodded from his spot at one of the long oak tables, where he sat with an open book. His large, well-muscled frame dwarfed the chair. Pickpocket Sam Lloyd warmed his hands at the limestone fireplace. “Hiya, fellas!” he called good-naturedly. On the tufted brown sofa, dream walker and spirit conjurer Ling Chan wore a wary expression. She sat very straight, her hands tugging at the hem of her skirt as if she could hide her metal leg braces. Beside Ling, freckled and friendly Henry DuBois IV seemed to be writing a new piece of music in his head, his fingers playing imaginary arpeggios across Ling’s crutches, which he cradled against his shoulder. Mabel Rose sat at the same table as Jericho, occasionally stealing glances at him. She had what Memphis’s aunt Octavia would call a “wholesome face,” which wasn’t a comfort to the girls on the receiving end of that euphemism. Mabel wasn’t a Diviner. She was the daughter of union organizers, and she spent a lot of her organizing skills on trying to keep her best friend, Evie, out of trouble.
That left only one other person in the room. Theta Knight smiled at Memphis, and his breath caught. “Hey, Poet,” she said in her deep purr of a voice. Her sleek black bob gleamed in the warm glow cast by the library’s Victorian chandelier. And suddenly, Memphis wasn’t thinking about the reason they were all gathered in a musty museum of the occult. He was only thinking about Theta and how much he wanted to be alone with her.
“Evenin’, everybody,” Memphis said, but his smile, radiant and hopeful, was for Theta.
“Memphis,” Isaiah said, nestling closer to his brother.