Isaiah was nervous. For once, he was the special one. He wasn’t just a kid. But it was scary, too. What if nothing happened? It was odd having everybody’s hands on his shoulders, too.
But slowly, he relaxed. And then he was drifting off somewhere else, like floating down a river on his back, and all around him was the mist and roar of a waterfall. The roar sucked into complete silence. Isaiah found himself on a dusty road. To his left, he saw a farmhouse with a sagging porch. Fields full of corn rotting on their stalks. Crows circled above in a mesmerizing figure eight. And then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, Isaiah entered the world he saw as simply as entering a new room. He could smell the wind, scented with coming rain. Beyond the farmhouse, out in an arid spot of land, an enormous tree, grayed with age, rose up from the earth like a multi-armed god Isaiah had seen in a storybook his mama got from the library one time. No leaves grew there; none looked as if they could. It was a mighty ghost of a tree. From a fat bough hung a rope swing, and when Isaiah put out his hand toward it, he could tell that it had never been used. It had been tethered to the branch with hope, but sadness hung about it now. There was sadness hanging over the whole farm. Fear, too. Something didn’t feel right. Why was he here? What had happened in this place? What was going to happen in the future?
Dust kicked up on the road ahead like a storm moving in. Isaiah thought he heard Memphis’s voice carried faintly in the blowing dust, and then he saw his brother and another man he didn’t know—a big, strong-looking man with broad shoulders and a face like an African prince. Memphis and this unknown man were whispers of bodies flickering in and out with the wind.
“Memphis? That you?” Isaiah called. But the voice and the vision had gone.
The squawking of crows drew his attention back to the porch. A barefoot girl in a nightgown stood on the warped steps. Her pale hair wanted brushing, and the peach satin bow she wore had slid halfway down, stuck in the rat’s nest of it. She looked to be about the same age as Memphis. Just like the farm, there was something a little off about her. A crop turning bad.
“I know you,” the girl whispered, and her whisper slipped inside him like a bad dream. A crow came to rest on each of her shoulders. A third settled atop her head. It blinked at Isaiah, and he gasped to see it had only one eye, right in the middle of its shiny forehead.
“Isaiah…” the girl said, as if tasting his name. “Isaiah Campbell. The one who sees. The clairvoyant.”
“Where am I?” Isaiah asked.
“Bountiful,” the girl answered. “Bountiful, Nebraska.”
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I see, too. Something’s coming. For you and your brother and your friends.”
Her head jerked, crow-like, toward the horizon. Down the long dirt ribbon of road, the great ball of dust had grown bigger, and Isaiah caught glimpses of sharp white glinting in the filthy gloom. There was a demonic whine in the wind, like a choir singing thousands of clashing parts—keening moans and bird shrieks and a high-pitched, whirring hiss that reminded him of cicadas in tall grass. The sound crawled into Isaiah’s chest. It made him want to run. But he wouldn’t. He had to prove to Sister Walker, Will, and the others that he wasn’t a baby. If he did good, they couldn’t leave him behind anymore.
The crows’ squawking startled Isaiah. He gasped and fell back: The girl was on the road with him! How had she gotten there so fast? He saw now that the left side of her face was like melted candle wax that had cooled into a scarred mound of flesh. She only had one good eye, too—the right—and it was so blue it was nearly silver. “They did this to us, you know. It’s their fault. They deserve punishment for their sins. Don’t tell them anything! But he wants to help us.”
Isaiah stumbled backward, away from the silvery-eyed girl. He felt dizzy with her so close. He tried to right himself. Look around, Sister Walker had told him. Remember what you see. So Isaiah looked hard: At the farmhouse. The crows. The tree with its bare, twisted limbs. The crooked mailbox, number one, four, four.
One forty-four!
He opened his mouth in a gasp and tasted dust at the back of his throat. The whine grew louder; it reverberated through his blood, calling. The girl was so close he could feel her breath. She cocked her head, studying him. “Can you feel him calling to you, Isaiah Campbell?” she asked. Her teeth were as mottled as an old piling in a drought-low river.
Who? Isaiah thought, and he knew the girl heard his thoughts.
“The King of Crows. He loves us and our gifts. And if we help him, he will give us everything we want.”
“What kind of help?”
“There’s another seer. A boy who draws. We need him. He won’t talk to us, though. But he’d talk to you.”
The girl attempted a smile, and that frightened Isaiah more than anything. Isaiah didn’t know if this was a dream or a vision of the future. He only knew that he didn’t want to be here anymore with this girl and the farmhouse and whatever lurked down the road in that dust.
The girl turned her head toward the ball of dust. She smiled her rotted smile. “Ghosts on the road,” she whispered.
“Isaiah!”
On the edge of the cornfield, Isaiah’s mother shimmered in the blue-black feathered cape he’d seen her wear in dreams before. She didn’t look sick and tired like she had at the end of her life. But she didn’t look entirely human, either.
“Mama?” he said.
“Isaiah. Concentrate. Wake up.”
“I’m too scared, Mama.”
“You can do it.” His mother’s voice rasped as if she’d had a bad cough. “I want you to imagine a door that you can walk right through, and then you’ll wake up.”
Make a door. He could do that. Isaiah pictured the open pocket doors of the library a few feet away. The strange girl was back, though, and she was screeching like a flock of mad birds at his mother. “He will punish you! You will not glory in his future!”
“Hush up!” his mother snapped like the girl was acting up in church.
But behind his mama, the dark moved like a living thing, and Isaiah was afraid for her.
“Go now,” his mother commanded in her strange, squawking voice. “Tell the others: Follow the Eye. Heal the breach. Protect Conor Flynn. Don’t let—”
The girl screeched and the sky was filled with black birds. Her hair flew up around her face. Her eyes were wrong. “We will meet again.”
The darkness swallowed his mama, the girl, the farm, everything.
“Mama!” Isaiah cried.
Isaiah came out of his trance thrashing and gasping. Memphis’s concerned face hovered just above his. “Isaiah? Isaiah!”
“Memphis!”
Memphis let out his breath in a big whoosh. “You okay, Ice Man?”
Isaiah nodded, coming back to himself, and Memphis pulled him in tight for a long minute.
Will checked his watch. “He was under for three minutes.”