The Diviners (51 page)

“With this.” Evie placed Gabe’s rabbit’s foot on the table.

Sam’s eyebrows shot up. “You intend to catch a killer with a hunk of dead fur?”

“It belonged to Gabriel Johnson. It was on him the night he died.” Evie looked at Will. “Unc, I can read it. I know I can. Just give me a chance.”

“Read what?” Jericho asked.

Will glowered. “Where did you get that?”

“From a friend of his.”

Will shook his head. “It’s too dangerous, Evangeline.”

Evie leaped up from her seat and pounded a fist on the table. She’d had it with Will’s reluctance. They’d tried it his way, and all they had to show for it was another dead body. “It’s too dangerous not to at least try!”

Jericho looked to Sam, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I don’t know from nothing,” Sam said.

“There’s a killer out there and we have to stop him, any way we can,” Evie pleaded. “Please.”

“This is madness,” Will whispered. He raked a hand through his hair.

“Will somebody tell me what’s going on?” Jericho said.

“I’m a Diviner,” Evie said.

“Evangeline!”

“They might as well know, Unc! I’m tired of keeping it a secret.” She turned back to Jericho and Sam. “I can read objects. A ring, a letter opener, a glove—they’re more than just things to me. Give me your watch and I might be able to tell you what you had for dinner… or I could tell you your deepest secrets. It just depends.” She looked to Will again. “What do you say, Unc?”

His hands behind his back, Will walked a full lap of the library. He stopped beside Evie, looking at her for an uncomfortably long time. “We will do this in a controlled manner. Do you understand?”

“Anything you say, Unc.”

“I will guide you. Do not go too far under, Evangeline. You are to remain detached. A spectator.”

“I’ll see what I can find and let go.”

“If you feel the least bit threatened, you are to drop it immediately.”

“I’m on the trolley, Unc.”

“I’m glad somebody is,” Sam said, shaking his head.

“It will become evident in just a moment,” Will answered. “Evie, come have a seat.”

Evie settled into a leather club chair.

“Comfortable?” Will asked.

“Yes.” Her heart beat quickly and her mouth was dry. She hoped she was ready for this.

“Remember, if you feel at all frightened…”

“I
understand
, Will,” Evie assured him.

“Will, is this safe?” Jericho asked.

“I’ll keep her safe,” Will assured him. “You may begin whenever you’re ready, Evie.”

Will placed the rabbit’s foot in her waiting hands. Evie closed her eyes and felt along the seams of it, waiting.
Come on
, she thought.
Please…
It took a few seconds for the connection, but once it was made, pictures of Gabe’s day came at her in a dizzying jumble. It was like Evie had plunged into a cold lake and was splashing her way up to the surface. “I can’t… I can’t make them out….”

“Slow down. Take your time. Breathe and concentrate,” Will instructed.

Evie’s breathing slowed. She could hear that and the gentle coursing of her blood. The earlier, inconsequential scenes of Gabriel’s day were gone. She was with him on the night-gloomy streets of Harlem. The scene had a haze to it, like a photograph not fully developed, but she could make out Gabriel walking under the El tracks, and she could feel what he felt.

“He’s angry about something….” Evie said haltingly.

“Not too close,” Will warned.

Evie took another deep breath. The street became a little less hazy as she concentrated. The flicker of distant neon, even the
smell of smoke and garbage began to come alive in her mind. She heard the tread of footsteps, a strange hollow clicking.

“Someone’s following him.”

“Careful, Evie.”

“It’s gotten very foggy all of a sudden, but there’s someone there.” She saw the walking stick first, a silver thing with the head of a wolf. The man carrying it was still shrouded in shadow and mist. Gabe called out, and, hearing nothing, kept walking under the great shadow of the elevated tracks. Evie could only see what he saw. But she could hear the slow, deliberate footsteps on the street. She felt Gabe’s first stab of apprehension. And then she heard the whistling.

Evie gasped. “It’s the same song!”

“Evie, time to stop,” Will instructed, but Evie wasn’t about to stop yet. She was close. So very close.

Footsteps. Close.
One, two, click. One, two, click.
The stick glinted in the mist. “It’s him. He’s coming….”

“Evie. Stop,” Will commanded.

Evie clutched the rabbit’s foot tightly. The man stepped from the shadows and Evie’s pulse accelerated. “I see him!”

“Evie, stop!” Will thundered. He clapped loudly several times and the trance was broken. Evie dropped the charm and blinked, her eyes watering.

“I know him! I’ve seen him before!” Evie said.

She ran to their vast collection of notes and files, pushing aside papers until she found what she was after. Her stomach was fluttery with excitement and incomprehension. “It’s him,” she said, slapping the newspaper photograph of John Hobbes onto the table. “The man under the bridge was John Hobbes. Gabriel Johnson was murdered by a dead man.”

Will stared into the fire. His jaw was clenched.

“How is that possible, Uncle Will? How is it possible that a man who’s been dead for fifty years killed these people?”

“You saw somebody who looked like him, doll. That’s all,” Sam said.

“I know what I saw!”

“I’m telling you—it’s the power of suggestion. We’ve been all over the legend of John Hobbes. You’d seen his mug in the papers, so that was already in your mind when you went under. You supplied the killer with the first face that came to mind.”

“Will you stop staring at me, please!” Evie said to Jericho, who looked away quickly, blushing. The tiny claws of a new headache raked across Evie’s skull. “Unc, you haven’t answered my question. How could John Hobbes have killed Gabriel Johnson, and possibly all those others?”

Sam put an arm around Evie’s shoulder. “I’m telling you, baby vamp, it wasn’t him.”

“It’s him,” Will said, breaking his silence at last.

The room was quiet except for the crackling of the wood as it was consumed by fire.

“Will,” Jericho said after a moment, “you’re not honestly saying that you believe a ghost is killing these people, are you?”

“Yes,” Will said, his voice hoarse.

“I mean no insult, Professor—you’ve got a swell museum going here—but there are no such things as ghosts,” Sam said.

“Sure of that, are you?” Will turned to them. The firelight cast his face in shadows. “There are doorways between this world and the world of the supernatural. Ghosts. Demonic entities. The unexplained and undefined. The mysterious. I’ve whole books and archives dedicated to it.”

“But those are just stories people tell,” Evie said. The headache was spreading out behind her eyes.

“There is no greater power on this earth than story.” Will paced the length of the room. “People think boundaries and borders build nations. Nonsense—words do. Beliefs, declarations, constitutions—words. Stories. Myths. Lies. Promises. History.” Will grabbed the sheaf of newspaper clippings he kept in a stack on his desk. “This, and these”—he gestured to the library’s teeming shelves—“they’re a testament to the country’s rich supernatural history.”

“But, Will, you’re not just saying ghosts exist; you’re saying they can come back from the dead and kill,” Jericho said.

Will sank into his chair, but his foot tapped steadily against the floor. “I know. Impossible. They shouldn’t be able to….” he said more to himself than to anyone else. “I’ve been keeping watch.”

“Keeping watch over what?” Jericho asked.

The chair couldn’t contain him, and Will was again up and pacing. He swiped another handful of newspaper clippings from
his desk on the way. “These. Ghost sightings. Supernatural activity. In the past year, it has escalated. Instead of a few reports here and there, there have been hundreds, something reported every day.”

“And you think it’s related to our case, that Naughty John has come back from the dead?” Evie sneaked a hand up to rub at her temple.

“I’m sure of it,” Will said. “The question is not whether John Hobbes has come back from the dead, but how and why.”

“Ghosts exist. Ghosts are real,” Evie whispered like a mantra. She looked up and saw Jericho staring at her. “What is it?”

“Nothing,” Jericho said, again looking away quickly.

Will gave in and reached for a cigarette. He took several puffs before speaking again. “The parts of the body,” he said, blowing out a stream of smoke. “I think he needs to ingest them to become stronger. More corporeal. Spirit made flesh. A perversion of transubstantiation. He’s getting stronger with each killing. He’s very strong now. Soon, he’ll be unstoppable.”

Evie shuddered just thinking about it. “And then?”

“Armageddon. Literal hell on earth.”

“But he can’t really become some anti-Christ, can he?” Jericho asked.

“He believes he can become the Beast through this ritual. Belief is everything. And we don’t understand everything about what he can do. These are not the rules of our world we’re playing by here, Jericho. They’re
his
rules—the rules of the supernatural world.”

“So how do we stop him?” Evie asked. “How do we stop a ghost?”

“We have to meet him where he is. We have to dispatch him via his own beliefs. If the last page of the Book of the Brethren contained some sort of spell or incantation for getting rid of John
Hobbes, we need to know what was on that page. And we must solve the mystery of his connection to this book. Why does it matter to him?”

Evie opened the Book of the Brethren, running her hand along the rough seam where the last page had been torn away. There were three offerings remaining: the Destruction of the Golden Idol, the Lamentation of the Widow, and the Marriage of the Beast and the Woman Clothed in the Sun. She flipped back to the previous offerings.

“The dead body found at Belmont in 1875—that had to be the third offering, the Pale Horseman Riding Death Before the Stars,” Evie said.

“And besides Ida Knowles, they found exactly ten bodies in the basement of Knowles’ End,” Jericho said.

“The ten servants of the master,” Evie said excitedly. “A laundress and a maid went missing, as did people who boarded there. They could all be considered servants. The second offering. Oh, Unc. It fits!”

“So who was the first offering?” Sam asked. He put up his hands. “I’m just playing along here. I don’t go for ghosts.”

Evie stared at the picture of what looked like a house or barn. “The first offering—the Sacrifice of the Faithful. Ida Knowles was faithful. For a while, at least.”

“But she wasn’t first,” Jericho said.

“True,” Evie said on a sigh.

Uncle Will reached for another cigarette. “I don’t like that you went to Knowles’ End, Evie. Not with what we know now.”

“But it’s just a house, Unc.”

“An awful, awful house filled with dead bodies once upon a time,” Sam said cheerily. “I’m sure it’s swell at Christmastime.”

“It’s
his
house,” Will said. “It’s his lair, and I imagine he
wouldn’t take too kindly to trespassers. Evie, you and Mabel didn’t leave anything behind, did you?”

Evie thought of the small patch of cloth stuck on the laundry chute. It was so small—too small to be of note. Wasn’t it? “No, Unc.”

“Why not just go there and burn it to the ground?” Sam asked.

“Because we don’t quite know what sort of entity we’re dealing with,” Will explained. “What if that only made him stronger? No. Until we’ve satisfied the question of why Naughty John is enacting this ritual, why it matters to him, and we’ve found what was on that missing page, our only hope is to prevent him from killing again. We know he has to complete the murders by the time of Solomon’s Comet—”

“Which is in four days,” Jericho reminded everyone.

“If we can stop him from finishing his task on time, he’ll lose by default. The timing is key.”

Sam played a coin across the tops of his right knuckles, flipped it, and neatly caught it in his left hand. “You planning to tell Detective Malloy you’re hunting the ghost of a killer who hung fifty years ago? I don’t care how good of a pal he is to you, Professor—he’ll lock us all up in the loony bin.”

“Sam’s right,” Jericho said.

Will nodded. “Agreed. We can’t let Terrence know. We’re on our own. Evie, what’s the next offering?”

Evie turned to the correct page. “The Destruction of the Golden Idol. ‘And lo, they did not believe but were seduced by the golden calf. They paid tribute to false idols and were damned for it. And the ninth offering sprang from lust and sin. The golden calf was destroyed, stripped of its skin of shame, and placed upon the altar of the Lord. And the Beast was pleased.’ ” Evie looked up to see that Jericho was still staring at her in that uncomfortable way.
“For crying out loud, Jericho, what is it? Have I grown a second head?”