“Who?” Evie asked the nervous boy.
He flicked his gaze toward the window. “The Forgotten. They can get inside you. Make you do things. Awful things. They belong to—” His eyes were as large as a fish’s. “Just don’t be here when it’s dark,” he said, and ran back the way he’d come, disappearing down another hallway.
“Evie!” Sam pleaded.
“Not in this room,” Woody said, closing the door to one of the many rooms along the ward’s long hallway. “One minute gone.”
“Thanks. That’s a big help,” Sam said.
Evie peeked through the inset window of room number seven. There was a young man in a wheelchair. “Found him!” she whisper-shouted, and opened the door.
“Don’t… even… lock… the doors.” Woody scribbled quickly on his pad. “Sweetheart Seer put aside concerns for her own safety… gained entry to the cell of violent madman…”
“Luther? Luther Clayton?” Evie said softly into the dim room. It was very still and sparse: only a bed and a bedside table with an unopened Bible on top. Luther Clayton sat in his wheelchair, staring at the wall.
Evie drew closer. “Mr. Clayton?”
“Hold still. I want to get a picture. Evie, lean in, will ya?” Woody urged, taking a long-snouted accordion camera from his reporter’s bag.
“To the man who tried to kill her?” Sam said. “Nothing doing.”
“It’s okay, Sam,” Evie said. “Just make sure you get my good side, Woody.”
Evie moved closer to Luther. He smelled of old sweat. There were bruises on his neck, sores on his chapped lips. War and pain had aged him, but underneath, Luther was delicately handsome, with a face that seemed familiar, as if he might have been a bit actor in a cowboy picture. Evie was jealous of Memphis’s Diviner power; if she could, she would try to heal this man’s broken heart.
This close, she could feel his clothes wanting to whisper to her.
“Hurry,” she said to Woody.
The flash cut the gloom. “Got it,” Woody said.
Evie took a step back. “Do you remember me, Mr. Clayton?” she said softly. “I’m Evie O’Neill.”
He inclined his head toward her. His eyes were still distant.
“I want you to know that I forgive you for trying to shoot me. I only wish I understood why you did it.”
Luther blinked several times, as if trying to wake up from a dream. Evie kept talking: “You once took hold of my hand on the street. Do you remember? I put a dollar in your tin cup and you grabbed my hand. You were trying to tell me something back then. Something about following the Eye. I’m sorry I ran away then. I was frightened. Were you mad at me about that? Is that why you tried to shoot me?”
Luther Clayton’s voice was so soft Evie had to lean forward to hear.
“They… m-made m-me.”
“Who made you do it, Luther?”
Luther’s sad brown eyes were bloodshot. It looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. His whisper gained power. “The Shadow M-men. They said it… would s-stop the sc-c-screaming. I hear them… sc-screaming.”
“I don’t understand—who’s screaming?”
Spit bubbled up on Luther’s bottom lip as if he were trying to birth his words. But nothing came.
“Kid, you got what you came for. Let’s ankle,” Woody said.
“They never should’ve done it! Follow the Eye! He is coming—don’t let him find me!” Luther cried out suddenly, his back arching with tension. His palm came up and pounded the side of his head. “Stop screaming! Stop screaming!”
“Mr. Clayton! Please! You’ll hurt yourself!” Evie reached for Luther’s arm. With surprising quickness and strength, he grabbed hold of her wrist. Evie’s fingers grazed the leather strap of his radium-dial watch.
“Let go!” Sam said. He raced forward and then fell back as if he’d been shoved by a giant’s hand. “What the…?”
Luther Clayton’s eyes locked on Evie’s. Whispers from Luther’s watch crawled up her arm and settled in her head. Her mind flashed with gunfire-quick glimpses of the terrible secrets he carried. She saw a train transporting soldiers through mountains and trees. She saw those same soldiers in a forest clearing. A Victrola playing “Pack Up Your Troubles.” It was a scene Evie knew all too well from her own dreams. Her body shook from the force of Luther’s revelations. She could smell blood and fear and a presence so sinister it made her want to run as far as she could get from the asylum and the demons inside Luther Clayton’s mind.
“Help them,” Luther pleaded. “Please. Help. Him.”
Evie struggled to speak over the whispers inside her head. “Who?”
“Help James.”
Sam and Woody tore Evie loose from Luther’s grip. The whispers floated away.
“Doll,” Sam said, concerned. He dabbed his handkerchief against her nose and it came away bloody. She was still trembling.
“H-how… how do you know James?” Silence. “How do you know my brother? Where is he?”
“We should get outta here.” Sam put an arm around Evie’s shoulder.
She shrugged it off. “Tell me! Tell me!”
Luther Clayton’s eyes were again fixed on the wall. “The Eye has him.”
A thin stream of tears trickled down his cheek. He tapped his head gently against the back of his chair: “The land is old, the land is vast, he has no future, he has no past, his coat is sewn with many woes, he’ll bring the dead, the King of Crows.… He’ll bring the dead, the King of Crows, King of Crows, King of Cr—”
The door flew open. The guard was still a little woozy from Sam’s touch, but that was no match for his fury. “Out,” he said. “Now.”
“I can’t believe we actually got thrown out of an asylum,” Sam said.
“I prefer ‘firmly escorted from the premises,’” Evie said, holding Woody’s wet handkerchief to her aching head, his parting gift to her before he’d decamped for the newsroom. It didn’t help that she and Sam were winding through Times Square, their ears assaulted by the discordant symphony of car horns, clattering trolleys, and the rumble-and-clang of a steam shovel and pile driver pumping away at a nearby construction dig, where men in coveralls busied themselves making way for more skyscrapers in the city that never stopped reaching higher. “Where are we going, Sam?”
“Somewhere safe.”
On Eleventh Avenue, Sam knocked on the basement door of a building that looked to be falling down.
“This is your idea of safe?” Evie said. “It’s probably crawling with thieves and ne’er-do-wells.”
Sam grinned. “Yeah. I’m in my element.”
“As long as they have gin.”
A panel in the door slid open. “All for one, and one for all,” Sam said.
The door swung open, and Sam escorted Evie through the dank basement speakeasy, past a rough crowd to a dark-paneled booth in the very back. It smelled like dust and stale booze wiped up by a stinky rag.
“Okay. Spill. What did you see?” Sam pressed.
“It all happened so fast. But it felt familiar, too. I’ve seen those very images in my dreams, Sam. And he knows James! You heard him—he told me to help James.”