“Okay, Hen. Time to exit stage left,” he joked to himself to keep his fear at bay.
Carefully, he stepped across the fresh earthen mounds. They’d been tightly packed by the prisoners’ shovels. The rain was still coming down. In the heavy fog, he could just make out the hazy yellow glow of the asylum’s dotting of windows. He’d made it halfway through the potter’s fields when he felt a slight rumbling, like a train approaching underground. But this was not the city and there was no subway on Ward’s Island. Henry took another step, and another. Don’t look, just keep moving. His pulse throbbed in his ears; he could actually hear it in time with the rain—quick. And scared. Henry felt something brush his ankle. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t—
He stood perfectly still and cast a glance to his right and down.
There was dirt on his shoe.
No. Dirt was falling onto his shoe, tumbling down from the shifting top of a new grave.
Henry chanced a look around him.
Graves. Everywhere.
And they were beginning to crumble.
“What the hell is that?” Sam whispered.
At the end of the hall, the mist thickened into a dense bank of living fog, shadows among shadows. Vague forms emerged, indistinct from one another: The same pallid skin peeling off in ribbons of rotting flesh. Diseased mouths dripping with oily black drool. Rows of thin, razor-sharp teeth. Their eyes were the gray-white of pond ice and seemed to see nothing. Instead, the ghosts swept their heads left and right, sniffing in the way an animal hunting prey would.
“The Forgotten,” Conor whispered urgently.
Inside the rooms, some of the residents seemed to sense the danger. They cried out in warning. With a fearsome screech, the Forgotten pressed up against the doors, looking for a living host.
“Hey!” Ling cried. “Leave them alone!”
The Forgotten turned as one toward the Diviners, growling hungrily.
“Ling,” Memphis whispered. “What are you doing?”
“We can’t let them get to the patients. We have to do something.”
The Forgotten bared their sharp teeth as they sniffed the air. They let loose with another loud shriek.
“You certainly got their attention,” Sam whispered. “What now?”
“Run. Hide!” Conor said, and took off fast as a March hare, darting down a staircase to the right.
“Wait! Conor! We can’t let him go out there. I won’t let something happen to him,” Evie said, running after him like a protective sister.
“Dammit, Evie! Stay here. Lock yourselves in. I’ll get her,” Sam said, and gave chase.
“Isaiah!” Memphis said. Was his little brother all right? Was Theta? “Come on. We can’t wait. We gotta get down those stairs before—”
“I! Can’t! Run!” Ling howled with all the anger she had inside. She’d never said it out loud like that before. But there it was. Ling never asked for help. Help made you vulnerable. But she was scared. She didn’t want to be alone with those things. She needed a friend. “Please don’t leave me,” she said.
“Okay, okay,” Memphis promised. The Forgotten were moving closer. If Ling and Memphis stayed in the common room, they were sitting ducks. “Think, Memphis. Think.” There was a wheelchair in a corner under a blanket. Memphis ran to it and brought it to Ling.
“I think we gotta try to get out of here while we can,” he said.
Ling helped herself into the wheelchair and angled her crutches like sabers. “Ready.”
Despite his fear, Memphis managed a smile. “Yes, you are.”
He peeked around the corner. They were coming. “Any ideas?”
“Conor said that counting kept them out of his head. I’m guessing at this, but I think there’s something about a constant noise that blocks out emotion and keeps them from locking onto whatever’s inside your head, like, Old MacDonald had a farm,” Ling sang, and motioned to Memphis to continue.
“E-I-E-I-O,” he finished. “Okay. We sing nursery rhymes. You ready?”
“No.”
“Me, neither.”
“Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O…” they sang in unison.
The Forgotten were all around them in the fog. As Memphis pushed Ling’s wheelchair down the long corridor, he could feel their powerful emotions and stories searching for a host. But the singing was working. It kept the ravenous ghosts at bay.
“And on that farm he had some ducks,” Ling sang just as Memphis sang, “pigs.”
“Ducks,” he corrected quickly as Ling went for “pigs.”
The confusion was only a few seconds, but it had allowed their fear to spike. The Forgotten sniffed it out.
“Hold on tight, Ling,” Memphis said, pushing Ling’s chair and running for all he was worth. Behind him, he could hear the terrifying screech of their collective anger. His legs burned but he didn’t stop until he’d reached the safety of a large broom closet. He squeezed them both inside and locked the door behind them.
“Quick—count in your head,” Memphis urged.
Ling shut her eyes tightly, silently counting to one hundred. The screeching moved farther away. At last, she stopped and let out a shaking breath.
“They gone?” Ling asked, panting.
“I-I don’t know. Think so,” Memphis answered, sagging against the wall.
“It’s always ducks first,” Ling said in a tight whisper.
“What?” Memphis whispered back.
“Old MacDonald. It’s ducks, then pigs, then cows.”
“Maybe in Chinatown. But in Harlem, I learned it pigs first.” He put his ear to the door, listening. “I think they’ve moved on.”
“I’m sorry,” Ling said quietly. “I shouldn’t have asked you to stay. I can’t expect you to risk your life for me.”
“You’d do the same for me. I know you. Besides, you’re the smartest person on this team. We need you.”
“Thank you. I think you’re pretty smart, too.”
“Something I always wondered about, though. How come you never once asked me to heal you?” Memphis asked. “Did you ever think about it?”
Had she thought about it? Just every time she saw Memphis. She imagined herself walking up and down the streets of the Lower East Side as she once did, no buckles digging into her skin, no crutches callusing her palms, no pain. There were times when it was all Ling could do not to beg Memphis to change her back to the way she had been.
But she wasn’t the same person she had been. It felt, somehow, as if a healing by Memphis would unmake who she was now. As if she would lose what she had come to know about herself in the past few months, about her strength and resilience. And if there was to be a cure for her paralysis, then science would find it. Not just for her but for others, too. Maybe she’d even be a part of that.
“I do. But I don’t. Do you understand?” Ling said.
Memphis thought about it. “Not really,” he said.