“You damn fool! Get over here and he’p me up!”
Bill’s anger was alive and ready to strike. He strode through the floodwater and stood over the foreman, casting a powerful shadow across the ravaged land. “Told you not to take Samson out.”
“I’ll do what I like with my horse.”
“Ain’t your horse no more. He’s free.”
Tiny motes of electricity danced along the tips of Bill’s trembling fingers. The inside of his head roared like a storm.
“I said he’p me up!” Mr. Burneside commanded.
Bill didn’t move.
“Goddamn it, you gone deaf, boy? I said he’p me up!”
“Yes, sir.” Bill grabbed hold of Mr. Burneside’s hand, tightening his grip, the electricity flowing between them, and Bill couldn’t deny the pleasure he took in seeing the foreman’s eyes widen with fear and knowing.
Mr. Burneside’s son called out: “Hey! Daddy? Daddy, where you at? Guillaume? Whatchoo doing? Hey! Hey!”
Bill had run deep into the trees. Now that his anger had receded like the waters, he was frightened. The men would come for him soon, he knew. Come with their ropes and their brands and their guns and heaven knew what other cruelties. It was another sharecropper, Jed Robbins, who came for him first. “Guillaume, Mrs. Burneside is calling for you. You got to come back.”
“And let ’em hang me from that old oak? No, sir.”
“Ain’t like that. Young Mr. Burneside says he saw you pulling his daddy outta the water. Said you saved his daddy’s life. Say if it wadn’t for you, his daddy mighta died. Looks like he caught a stroke out there when he fell offa that horse.”
Back at the house, Mr. Burneside lay on the cot. His face was slack. His eyes, though, found Bill’s. They were full of fear and accusation.
Jed Robbins looked at him funny, too, and Bill wondered if his sin was out for all to see.
“What you looking at?” Bill said.
Jed pointed to Bill’s head. “You got a stripe a gray right down the middle of your head. Wadn’t there this morning.”
Word got around. There was something of a shine to Guillaume “Bill” LeRoi Johnson, something from beyond. Word got all the way to the Department of Paranormal. Some folks came to ask him questions about his gifts, and Bill heard the word Diviner for the first time. The Shadow Men came after, and Bill went with them. He let Margaret Walker poke and prod him. Test his powers. Then those Shadow Men asked him to do things he didn’t want to do.
“We need you to help your country now, Mr. Johnson,” they said.
He’d done it. It was a time of war. What choice did he have? Most of the men he’d killed were bad men, weren’t they? Men the world was better off without. That was what Bill told himself. But some of those men looked like Bill. Like maybe their only crime was wanting change. It all took a turn with prisoner number twelve.
“What’d he do?” Bill had asked. He was afraid. Deep in his gut, he could tell this didn’t feel right. None of it felt right anymore. His body hurt all the time.
“You don’t need to know that, Mr. Johnson,” the Shadow Man assured him.
Bill took a step toward the man and faltered. “Yes, sir. Believe I do need to know.”
“He’s one of those agitators. We caught him and his coconspirators plotting to blow up a mine in a country pertinent to our interests.”
The man had been beaten. He didn’t seem any more dangerous than Samson. Bill couldn’t bring himself to move against the man. “No, sir.”
The man in the suit sighed heavily. “Have you ever heard of blind justice, Mr. Johnson?”
Bill nodded. The courthouse back home had a statue of the blindfolded lady. He’d seen it once on a trip to town.
“We are the blind eye of justice. Justice that happens out of sight. We are the sword, swift and sure.”
The beaten man at Bill’s feet didn’t speak English. He looked to Bill with a mix of weariness, fear, and contempt. The man spat at Bill’s feet.
“You see?” the man in the suit said, as if that were all the proof needed.
Bill took hold of the beaten man’s neck, and then a strange thing happened. It was as if Bill had been transported to a dream. He stood in a patch of land surrounded by a dark wood shrouded in mist. The trees didn’t look like any he knew. No Spanish moss or mesquite. These were giants with limbs thick as a working man’s arms that spread up and out into a tangled latticework of tinier branches clasped together like a prayerful man’s fingers. No leaves grew here that Bill could see. A snake slithered along a branch and plopped to the ground. Deep in the grainy mist, faces appeared—chalk-pale with deeply shadowed, unseeing eyes. Bill wanted to run, but where?
“Guillaume LeRoi Johnson.”
At the sound of his voice, Bill whirled around. There was a table and a deck of cards. Seated at the table was a strange creature, a thin gray man whose skin was as mottled as a moth’s wings. He wore a magnificent blue-black coat of oil-shine feathers, and on his head was a tall black hat. His long fingers ended in curved, yellowed fingernails caked in dirt, and Bill had a feeling of this man using those fingernails to dig himself out of a grave so deep it led to another world. The man in the hat shuffled a deck of tarot cards, cutting them into neat piles. His hands moved so fast it was like a bird’s wings fluttering.
“Guillaume LeRoi Johnson,” the man repeated. “Bastard son of rape, grandson of a slave mother and the master of the house. Born of violence and despair. Diviner.” And something about the way the man said it, slow and awestruck and menacing, goose-pimpled Bill’s skin. “Do you know who I am?”
Bill shook his head.
“I am also a bastard son. Born of this nation’s dreams and greed. Its idealism and its ignorance. Its hope and its violence. Would you like to be free of the shackles those men have placed upon you?”
“I surely would, sir. Yes, I would.”
The man in the hat smiled. “Make a bargain with me.”
Bill made the bargain under the yellow moonlight in that strange, dark forest where skeleton birds cawed toward the starless night. Where the dead watched and waited for you to fall.
When he came to, he was squeezing the broken neck of prisoner number twelve.
And then it was done. Again and again, he performed his duty without question. Men. Women. One as young as thirteen. Another as old as seventy. Each time took more of him with it. He was no longer Guillaume or Bill. He was no man. He was death. After one year, he looked forty. After two years, he barely recognized himself. His body ached like the devil. The skin of his hands was paper-thin and wrinkled. Veins popped up like tree roots. Two of his teeth rotted. Bill dug them out with his fingers and spat the bloody slivers into the sink. He hobbled to the mirror, but the reflection that greeted him was an old man’s.
And then his vision darkened and disappeared.
“What’s happening to me?” Bill asked. He begged for help. But there was nothing to be done. He was washed up and used. His talents gone for good.