Before the Devil Breaks You Page 10

  The typing stopped. “That’s a heavy sigh for such a nothing.”

  “Have you heard anything about workers disappearing?”

  Her father’s thick brows came together in concentration. “Do you mean walking off the job or being held by the police without being charged?”

  “No, I mean disappearing. Being taken away by strange men. Government men. Or maybe not government men. I don’t know.” She wasn’t making sense. The whole thing seemed unreal the more she thought about it. “You heard anything about some men wearing a lapel pin—an eye with a lightning bolt?”

  Her father shook his head. “Never. What’s all this about, Maideleh?”

  “Nothing, Papa. Just… nothing,” she said, and he resumed his typing.

  “Why don’t you like Arthur Brown?” she blurted out at last. “He seems like a very smart fellow.”

  Her father’s fingers paused above the Underwood’s keys. “Smart, yes. And very… ambitious,” her father said. Ambitious wasn’t a compliment from her father. It usually meant “reckless” or “arrogant.” “So, who’s asking about Arthur Brown?”

  “Oh. I ran into him on Bleecker Street the other day.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all, Papa,” Mabel said, stepping into the cramped bathroom to check her reflection.

  “Good,” her father said under his breath. Mabel could hear him cranking a fresh sheet of paper around the typewriter’s cylinder and thwacking the metal bar back to hold it in place. “How is your friend, the student? Reads all the time? Jacob?”

  “Jericho,” Mabel corrected. She dabbed on a bit of the lipstick Evie had given her. It didn’t look bad, but it didn’t turn her into Gloria Swanson, either. “He’s more interested in Diviners than me.”

  “Ach, Diviners.”

  “What do you have against Diviners?”

  “Nothing, it’s only that I don’t understand why people will put their faith in soothsayers but not reformers. They will go out of their way to believe what they can’t see rather than change what’s right before their eyes!” As she came out of the bathroom, her father looked up at her, squinting. “Lipstick?”

  “I like it,” Mabel said defiantly.

  “You don’t need it. You’re already beautiful.”

  “You’re just saying that because you’re my father,” Mabel said, rolling her eyes.

  “I’m saying that because it’s true,” her father said above the din of his typing, and even though the compliment had come from her father, which rendered it mostly moot, Mabel still appreciated it.

  Mabel took a big bite of her father’s uneaten hamantasch. It was poppy seed, her favorite. “Wha ahr you wridding abouw?”

  “A textile strike in New Jersey. A few nights ago, someone sabotaged the machinery at the factory so they couldn’t hire any more scabs.”

  “Who did it? The workers?”

  “No one knows. Possibly the Secret Six, that group of anarchists trying to make a name for themselves in the worst possible way. They’re causing us no end of headaches.”

  Mabel swallowed the hard lump of pastry. “They would never do that.”

  Her father stopped typing. “And you would know this how?”

  Mabel looked down at the plate to hide her face from him. “I mean, it just doesn’t seem like something they would do. Is that all they did? Sabotage the works?”

  “Yes. For now. But this sort of destruction breaks down talks and makes it hard for the rest of us trying to help the workers. And it can lead to greater violence. I’ve seen it.” Mabel’s father frowned. “You know the Secret Six was the name of the six men who subsidized the raids of John Brown, the abolitionist, just before the Civil War. These anarchists must think mighty highly of themselves to take that name.”

  Mabel pretended to be very interested in the pastry. “You want the same things the Six do, though.”

  “We share the same goals, yes, but violence is never the answer. An eye for an eye is supposed to be a deterrent, not a prescription, shayna. You want to help your mother and me paint picket signs tomorrow?”

  Mabel sighed. That was all she was good for here. Serving coffee to socialist leaders. Handing out pamphlets. Painting signs. Boring. “I can’t. I’m meeting Evie,” she lied.

  “Tell the troublemaker I said hello,” her father said, using his pet nickname for Evie.

  “Maybe I’m the troublemaker,” Mabel said.

  “You? My Maideleh Mabeleh? Never!” her father said, getting back to his typing.

  Oh, Papa, Mabel thought. If you only knew.

  After Arthur saw Mabel to the Bennington, he rode the subway back downtown and returned to his apartment. He opened the steamer trunk and examined the blueprints, making notes. Then he locked them up again. He lifted the blinds on his dormer window and peeked out. In the upstairs room of a brownstone across the way, an artist in a paint-splattered undershirt worked on a large canvas, and Arthur looked at his own, abandoned sketches with both longing and regret. Down on the noisy sidewalk, the barber, Mr. D’Agostino, stepped out of his shop to smoke. A trio of short-haired women dressed in tuxedos walked toward Macdougal Street, presumably to the famous nightclub that catered to an all-female clientele. Just another Friday night in Greenwich Village.

  The man in the brown fedora was easy to miss at first. Just a man standing under a street lamp smoking a cigarette. But then he looked straight up at the bookstore’s attic, right at Arthur, and Arthur drew quickly away from the window, out of sight.

  Evie read the late-edition article about the reports of HAUNTED HOSPITAL! and realized that she still hadn’t heard from Woody about a trip out to see Luther Clayton at the asylum. She rang the Daily News. “Woody? Evie O’Neill. Say, have you had any luck getting us in to see Luther Clayton?”

  “Not so far, Sheba. What with the murder out there, they’re leery of newsboys like me trying to…”

  As Woody talked, Evie flipped through the newspaper, stopping when she came to a picture of Sarah Snow serving porridge at the Salvation Army: SAINTLY SARAH DISHES UP A BOWL OF KINDNESS.

  “You’ve just got to make it happen, Woody!”

  “I got other stories to chase down, Sheba. There’s a murder every day on this island. Why don’t you decide to forgive Lucky Luciano or Legs Diamond instead?”

  “Hahaha. They didn’t try to shoot me.”

  “Give ’em time.”

  “Woody, are you going to help me with this or not?”

  “I’ll try again with the warden over there, but it may be a lost cause, Sheba. I’m telling you, they’re not letting anybody over to Ward’s except crazy people. Say, on second thought…”

  “Good-bye, Woody,” Evie said, and hung up.

  A CRAZY DREAM

  1916

  Department of Paranormal

  Hopeful Harbor, NY

  “Will, hurry! They’re waiting!”

  Margaret “Sister” Walker paced impatiently at the door to the office of her friend and colleague, Will Fitzgerald. At his desk, Will laid down his pen and closed his notebook. He yanked up his suspenders, slipped on his suit jacket, and slicked a hand through his unruly hair, and then he and Margaret were moving quickly down the maroon-carpeted staircase and through a ballroom aglow in sparkling prisms of chandelier light.

  “It’s transmitting, Will. Do you realize what this means?”

  “I… I didn’t hope to imagine,” Will said as they bustled into the estate’s wood-paneled library. “I thought it was just a crazy dream.”

  “Not anymore.”

  Will rushed to the middle bookcase and pulled down two books in the center of the third shelf, and the bookcase swung open, revealing a private elevator. Margaret pushed a button marked S, and the lift rattled upward. With a shake of her head and a laugh, she reached over and adjusted Will’s off-kilter glasses. “I have never met anyone whose spectacles simply refused to stay put. It’s a wonder you can see at all.”

  “That’s why I’
m lucky to have you as a friend.”

  “And don’t you forget it.”

  The elevator stopped and the door opened. Sunlight poured in from a glass panel in the roof. It glinted off every shiny surface of the top secret laboratory. A metallic hum filled the room and, under that, the steady scratching of some instrument at work.

  “There you are!” Rotke called. She hurried over, grabbing Will by the hands. “This way.”

  “Don’t mind me,” Margaret muttered, and followed, head held high.

  “Will! Come quickly! You must see this,” Jake called to his best friend, grinning. He was talking without punctuation, as if his mouth were a harried stenographer racing to keep up with the dictation of his busy thoughts. “Electromagnetic… boosted the signal… necessary energy field… recalibrated the gyrometer and bam! There it was.”

  “There what was?” Will asked, pushing up his wayward glasses once more.

  “This.”

  Jake positioned Will in front of one of the many machines he’d been toying with over the past few months. It was a cube with a whirring gyrometer on top and, in the center of the cube, a large glass tube alive with an erratic, pulsing light. Coming out from the bottom of the cube was a stylus. Its mechanical arm scratched excitedly over a roll of paper that had spooled inches thick on the floor.

  “It’s been going all morning,” Jake said. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night, but his smile was ecstatic.

  “And you’re sure?” Will asked.

  “Positive,” Jake answered. “Go on.”

  Will lifted the flowing paper, reading it as it slipped across his palms. There were equations, numbers, words in various languages, and several occult symbols.

  “It appears to be some sort of… schematic,” Will said. He could scarcely keep from shouting with excitement.

  “Can you and Rotke decipher it?”

  “I can’t wait to try.”

  Jake leaned in close to Will with a reproachful grin. “You remember what you told me?”

  “That you’d never reach the speeds necessary for it,” Will repeated, taking the hit in stride. “But honestly, Bohr and Einstein haven’t even figured that out yet.”

  “And I said that I was going to be bigger than Einstein and Bohr put together!” Marlowe’s grin spread even wider. “Because I’m American.”

  Will noted the same number and symbol repeating: 144 and a hieroglyph of an eye surrounded by the rays of the sun with a lightning strike underneath at a diagonal. “I’ve seen that symbol before,” Will said. “I have it in my notes. It’s associated with Diviners.”

  “Yes, many of them have seen it in their visions or dreams,” Rotke confirmed.

  “What about you, my darling? Have you…?” Jake asked.

  Rotke shook her head. “Sadly, no.”

  Margaret peered over Will’s shoulder. “Yes. I remember. They seemed rather wary of it, though, Will. Something about the man in the stovepipe hat.”

  “None of your gloom and doom, Margaret. This is a happy day! What do you think of your fiancé now, darling?” Jake said, pulling Rotke to him and dancing her gracefully around the room. Will watched the two of them, the paper sliding through his fingers.

  Margaret whispered low in his ear. “You shouldn’t stare. You’ll only make it obvious how much you care for her.”

  Red-faced, Will concentrated instead on the exciting parade of sigils coming over Jake’s wireless, a history-making transmission from an unknown dimension. It was incredible. Unthinkable.

  Will stared in awe. “You’ve done it, Jake. You’ve really done it.”

  “We’ve done it,” Margaret corrected quietly.

  “This is the beginning. Of everything. A new Manifest Destiny.” Marlowe wrapped his arm around Will’s shoulders like a brother. “Congratulations. We are now communicating with the world of the dead.”

  CONOR FLYNN

  Conor Flynn was a son of Hell’s Kitchen. He’d been born too early and half-sick and laid in a cradle of squalor that was rarely rocked. The streets had raised Conor. From them he learned which corners to avoid, when to back down, and when to hit somebody hard and fast without warning. By the time he was seven, he was picking pockets for the West Side Boys. By the time he was ten, he’d landed in the New York House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents, which wasn’t much different from the streets he’d left behind. Conor was only supposed to stay six months. But then he’d killed Father Hanlon, and the refuge people found out about the ghosts Conor saw and the voices in his head telling him secrets. That was when they moved him to the asylum.

  Conor didn’t mind the hospital. He got to draw, and sometimes they brought in special guests like the opera singer they’d had last month. She was real good, with a voice that rose up behind her like a beautiful dragon, though Conor knew not to say that out loud. The doctors and nurses were pretty nice. Most of them. Conor didn’t like Dr. Simpson. He’d heard things. Whispers. Sometimes the lady patients went in for operations. He’d overheard one of the nurses talking, something about “sterilizing them so they couldn’t breed more trouble.” Still other patients went into Dr. Simpson’s office and came out changed. Like Frances. Once, she’d stuck a fork in a guard’s leg because he touched her the wrong way one too many times. Conor understood all about the wrong touching. He was glad when Frances forked the jackass in the leg. When they carried her off, Frances had kicked and screamed like a banshee. But after her visit to Dr. Simpson, she’d come back emptied, a ribbon of drool strung across her chin. Dr. Simpson had cut the fight out of Frances along with everything else.

  Conor had been scared of the voices and the ghosts at first. The pictures that showed up in his head when he didn’t want them and made him feel panicked. But he was more afraid of the things regular people could do to one another. He’d run with the West Side Boys. He’d lived in the refuge. He’d seen the way a mess of angry, lost boys could ramp it up for one another. If one cried knuckles another cried sticks and then somebody else had to top that with cries of knives! He’d seen it turn quick as a flash fire. One minute, they were a group; the next, they were a mob. And that was what scared him about the dead things inside the fog: They were the blood-fever of those wild nights on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. They were the dark corners of the refuge where the priests didn’t bother looking.

  The lights dimmed down to slivers, plunging the room into shadow. Conor held his breath until they brightened again. He counted until he felt safe. The lady told him to be careful. He heard her talking inside his head as if she were a voice on the radio. Like the Sweetheart Seer. The lady in his head told him there were others like him in the world. Sometimes, when he closed himself off and dove deep into his mind, he could sense them. He could feel their power as if it were connected to his own. It was the lady in his head who told Conor to be afraid of the things in the fog. The things that belonged to the man in the hat.

  Conor stole a glance at Luther Clayton. Right now, he was in his chair staring at the wall and living through whatever terrible memories wouldn’t leave him alone. Conor knew about bad memories.

  In the corner, Mr. Boschert stared at the checkers board. His memories were leaving him, and as peaceful as that forgetting sounded to Conor, he could see that it wasn’t. Sometimes Mr. Boschert didn’t know where he was. It frightened the old man something awful, and Conor would pretend to be the person Mr. Boschert imagined he was, somebody from long ago. There were ghosts and then there were ghosts.

  Outside the room two attendants sat at the desk talking baseball. The season was starting up soon, and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were promising to make it a season to remember. Conor sure missed baseball.

  “Pssst. Luther,” Conor hissed.

  Luther rolled his head toward Conor.

  “You seen ’em, right?” Conor patted his lips with his fingertips in quick, rhythmic bursts until it felt safe to keep talking. “You seen them things in the fog?”

  Luther’s eyes were fixed on Co
nor’s, but Conor couldn’t be sure Luther was really seeing him. But then he said, “The d-door, d-d-door is open. Open. Open your eyes, eye, the Eye… d-draws them. D-draw them.”

  “Who are they?”

  Luther didn’t answer.

  “Say, why’d you try to shoot da Sweetheart Seer?” Conor asked.

  “They n-never should have d-done it.” Luther shut his eyes tight. He whispered in his broken voice, “We are the one, four, four. We are the one, four, four. We are…”

  “Good evening, Terrence, Joseph,” Dr. Simpson greeted the attendants at the desk, and Conor whipped his attention back to his drawings. Why was Dr. Simpson here so late? “Mind if I have a word with one of your patients?”

  “Of course, Dr. Simpson.”

  Dr. Simpson made a slow turn of the room. His coat collar was turned up sharply against the threat of rain and wind outside. “Evening, gentlemen.”

  From the corner of his eye, Conor could see Dr. Simpson staring at Luther, the doc’s mouth turned down at the corners in disapproval. Dr. Simpson left Luther’s side and stood next to Conor. “And how are you this evening, Conor?”

  “Good.” Conor kept his pencil scratching on the paper.

  Dr. Simpson sat across from him at the table. He smiled. It was not a warm smile. He wore spectacles that magnified his pupils like an insect’s. Conor began to sweat. He wanted to count. Counting was safety. But he was too frightened to do it in front of Dr. Simpson. What if the doc took him away and he came back like Frances?

  “Now, Conor, I’d like to ask you some questions. Would that be all right?”

  Conor gave a terse nod.

  “It’s about what happened with Mr. Flanagan and Miss Cleary. What Mr. Roland did to them. I understand you saw the whole thing.” Dr. Simpson waited. He was good at that. Waiting. Conor didn’t give him anything, though, so he said, “Is that true?”

  “Wadn’t Mr. Roland done that,” Conor mumbled.

  “Who was it, then?”

  Conor clammed up.