The Diviners (63 page)

A creaking sound roused Mary from her memories and she lay listening, alert, until she was satisfied that it was only the wind and rain lashing the bungalow.

It was on a stormy night that she’d first met Johnny. It was six months after she’d gone to hear the great Theosophist Madame Blavatsky speak at Cooper Union. Mary was captivated by the Russian lady, with her ideas of ever-evolving mankind, of union with the divine and the spirit realm. She met privately with the great woman, offering funding in exchange for esoteric knowledge. “You will meet a man who will offer you a door into another world,” Madame Blavatsky told her, and the very next day, during a downpour in which she was without a hansom, an imposing man with mesmerizing blue eyes offered her a ride. His name was John Hobbes, and he shared her fascination with the mystical. He was descendant, he confessed, of a holy tribe called the Brethren, favored by God, and had been chosen among them to fulfill their sacred mission on earth. He showed her wonders she could not explain and shared knowledge she never dreamed possible. He converted her to his faith and promised her a shining path, for she would be his Lady Sun.

It was this sense of destiny, of self-importance, that joined Mary and John. They were above all rules. They existed on a higher plane and for a higher purpose. Before her adventures in the spirit world, Mary had been haunted by occasional doubts about what she’d done to Ethan. But with John’s help she saw that it had the sense of rightness about it, a plan preordained: Had she not punished Ethan’s wickedness and inherited his money, she would not have been able to help John in his mission. Therefore, it was good and right and meant to be that she’d killed her husband that night in his bed.

A floorboard creaked in the house, but Mary was only vaguely aware of it; she was lost to her reverie. She thought back on John showing her the old book with its eleven offerings, explaining what he meant to do—what he had been chosen to do. At first,
she’d admit, she’d had reservations. Fear, even. But he’d kissed her sweetly, then fiercely, overpowering her in the way she liked, the way she craved, and she was utterly his. He was a golden god. And she, Mary White, was his sacred consort. The Beast would rise. The world would burn. A new society would evolve from the ashes. They would rule it as king and queen. She, little Mary White, who came from nothing. And when John saw that he would be taken, a sacrifice like a lesser one two thousand years before, she’d followed his instructions, paying off the guards and a driver, secreting his body through New York’s cobblestone streets in the night. She’d had him buried up in the hills behind the ruins of the old village, and, as promised, she’d kept Knowles’ End from the wrecking ball or new owners, paying the taxes every month even though she’d had to spend down her fortune and live in a shack to do it. He’d been very specific about that, and when she’d asked why, he’d never answered. It was the one mystery he would not share with her.

The floorboards groaned loudly.

“Who is it? Who’s there?” She drew the bedsheets up to her neck. “I’m an old woman! What do you want?”

The creaking came again. It was not the wind playing havoc with a shutter. It was definitely inside, definitely a floorboard. Oh, why had she told Eleanor she could go out tonight?

The creaking sound stopped on the other side of the curtain. Mary’s blood pounded against her ears.

“Who… who?” she croaked like an owl.

The curtain opened very slowly and the dark was filled with a golden glow. Mary White let out a small cry of happiness.

“I knew you’d come!”

John Hobbes moved to the foot of the old woman’s bed. His shirt was gone, and she gazed at the black ink of the symbols
rippling against the glow of his skin. Why was he not rushing to embrace her? Had she grown so old that he was repulsed by her? But her form, her visage, was only a shell; they were joined in spirit. Soon, he’d make her his queen, his Lady Sun! He had come back to her, just as he’d said he would.

“I’ve been faithful, as I promised. The old house kept.”

Silence from him. Nothing but the
tap-tap-tap
of the rain, the banshee wail of the wind. Lightning sparked outside her bedroom window, lighting the side of his face. His eyes. There was something not right about his eyes.

“Johnny. Johnny, my love…” Tears pooled at the corners of her eyes. “It’s been so long. Let me look at you.”

Still he said nothing. Mary was angry. Hadn’t she kept her end of the bargain all these years?

“ ‘Behold and the Beast was made flesh, and when he spake it was as tongues of fire, and the heavens trembled at the sound.’ ”

Mary White made a small, strangled cry of joy. His voice! After all these years, still so resonant. Still so magnificent.

“Yes, yes, my love… Speak to me, your humble servant….”

“I need you to write a note, Mary.”

“Yes, love. Anything.”

The paper appeared as if by magic under her hands. The pen, too. He told her what to write, told her to tuck it into her pocket, where it could be found.

“Found? I don’t understand, Johnny….”

“ ‘At the lamentation of the widow, every tongue was stilled and the heavens opened at her cries….’ ”

No. That couldn’t be right. Not the tenth offering. He meant the eleventh: the Marriage of the Beast and the Woman Clothed in the Sun. She was his Lady Sun. They would be joined. She would be made immortal, like him. They would be…

“And thus was the tenth offering made.”

“John. John!”

“Look upon my new form and be amazed.”

All the love she’d felt before turned to a cold fear. In the pulses of lightning, he emerged: A wing. A talon. Tips of teeth sharp as razors. And the eyes, the burning, bottomless eyes, the windows of the soul, but there was no soul in those twin pools of flame. In them, she saw the sham of her life laid out like a book, the foolish belief that she, that anyone, could escape the consequences of this world, could flee from death. That was the deceit. The true serpent in the garden.
And dust you shall eat all the days of your life….

“Look at me.”

Mary White looked and was amazed and could not tear her gaze away from the sight of him, could not stop the dry catch of breath in her throat as her scream died there before it could reach her tongue.

Along the shore, the wind swirled sand into small hills and broke them down again, carrying the grains on. The sideshow workers packed up their cards and dice. A dog barked and was rewarded with hot-dog scraps. The bearded lady sighed at her window; her lover was late. The globe of the world spun and wobbled, set in motion by some invisible finger. A thin cloak of gray clouds passed in the night sky; the moon ducked behind them and hid its face for grief.

Jericho pulled himself to a sitting position and hissed with pain. He was sore and his shirt was off. The faded scar, which snaked down the front of his broad chest, was now partially hidden by a layer of soft down. There was a new wound—a stitched hole above his left pectoral muscle—and Jericho remembered being surrounded in the woods, remembered the gun going off and the impact. He pieced together what must have happened and realized with growing horror that Evie must know everything now. But there she was on the other bed, asleep in her clothes, her shoes still on. She’d stayed with him, he realized. She’d found out and chosen to stay.

Jericho lay back down on his side, watching her breathe just an arm’s length from him. She was not beautiful while she slept; her mouth hung open and she snored very lightly, and this, despite everything that had happened, made him smile. Dreaming, she stirred and stretched, and he looked away. The first glimmerings of dawn showed through the window. The tiny tin clock on the bedside table read ten minutes past five. Evie’s eyes fluttered open, and Jericho quickly pulled the sheet up to cover his scars.

“Jericho?” Evie asked, her voice still sleep-caked.

“What happened, Evie?”

“You were shot. Unc and I got you back here,” she said carefully. “Jericho, what’s in those blue vials?”

“How many did it take?”

“Three.”

“Did I… did I hurt you or Will?”

“No,” she lied. “Jericho, please.”

“You won’t understand,” he said softly.

“Please stop telling me that.”

“You won’t.”

“I won’t unless you tell me.”

“The infantile paralysis. There was no miracle. It burned through me just like it did my sister. It shut down my legs, then my arms, and finally my lungs. They put me in the metal coffin and told me I’d be in it for the rest of my life. Trapped. I’d never breathe on my own. Never walk or ride a horse again. Never touch anyone.” His gaze flicked over the curve of Evie’s body. “Never do a thing but stare up at that ceiling till I died. After the war, there were soldiers coming back with their arms and legs missing. Men blown apart. They had a secret innovation they were trying—the Daedalus program—to help the soldiers coming back.”

“What sort of innovation?”

Jericho took a deep breath. “A merging of man and machine. A human-automaton hybrid,” Jericho said. “They would replace what had been damaged beyond repair in the war or by disease with steel and wires and cogs. We would be the perfect miracle of the industrial age. The robotnik. You’re staring.”

Evie quickly looked away. “I… I’m sorry. It’s so fantastic. I just don’t understand….” She looked at him again. “Please.”

“We were the test subjects,” Jericho continued. “They wouldn’t
tell us anything except that the machinery would replace our defective parts and, over time, fuse with our very human systems. This was achieved by a new miracle serum—the vials of blue liquid—and vitamin tonic. It was supposed to keep the balance between our two selves. We would change mankind, they promised.”

“That’s astonishing. But why hasn’t it been in the papers? Why isn’t this the biggest story since Moses brought down the Ten Commandments?”

“Because it didn’t work,” Jericho said bitterly.

“But… I don’t understand.”

“I told you there were others.” With one finger, Jericho rolled a spent ampoule in his palm. “Their bodies rejected the formula, or the machinery, or both. It might be a few days or a few weeks, but then they’d turn feverish as the infection burned through their ravaged bodies, proving just how human they were after all. But the ones who died were lucky.”

“Lucky?” Evie said, incredulous.

Jericho’s expression darkened. “Some went mad. They’d see things that weren’t there, talk to nothing at all. They’d rage with prophecies. Or they’d go wild until the orderlies would have to come with the restraints, and even then it took an awful lot of men to hold them down. The doctors doped them while they tried to figure out what to do. I watched them shrink back into themselves. Husks sent off to asylums to die.”

Jericho placed the ampoule on the bedside table. The glass still had a blue cast to it. “There was this soldier in the bed beside mine. Sergeant Barry Leonard, from Topeka. I remember he told me that if I wanted to know what Topeka looked like, I should just imagine hell with a dry-goods store. And the dry-goods store didn’t have anything you wanted, anyway. He was a pretty funny fellow.”

Jericho grinned at some private memory, then went serious again.

“He’d come back from the war with both legs and an arm gone. Less than half a man lying in that bed. People walked right past him. They wouldn’t even look. It was as if they were afraid that if they looked, they’d catch his bad luck. His pain was more terrifying to them than death.”

Evie bent her arm, propped her head up with one hand. Jericho sat up and draped the sheet around him, but not before Evie sneaked a furtive glance at his chest—the soft golden hair, the beautiful muscle, the long older scar alongside the newer one made by Uncle Will. She wanted to touch him, to place a kiss at the center of his chest.

“They took us both for Daedalus, said we were good candidates. They wheeled us in together. Just before I went under the ether, I saw Sergeant Leonard grinning at me. ‘Don’t take any wooden nickels, kid.’ That’s what he always used to say.” Jericho’s smile was wan. “I still remember what it felt like to wiggle my toes for the first time in months. You wouldn’t know that a big toe could be so incredible. The first time I walked outside and felt the sun on my face…” He shook his head. “I wanted to reach up and pull the sun down, hold it like a ball you get for a birthday when you’re a kid, never let it go. Within a week, I was running. I could run for miles and not tire. Sergeant Leonard ran alongside me, daring me to keep up. When we finished, he patted me on the back like a brother. He said we were a new breed, the future. The way he said it, full of wonder and hope…” Jericho shook away the memory. “We would sit together on the bench in the courtyard, looking out at the sun setting over the hills, marveling at the constancy of it.”

Evie felt like she wanted to say something, but she couldn’t
think of anything that wouldn’t sound hollow. Besides, Jericho was talking to her, telling her the story she’d wanted to hear, and she was wary of breaking the spell.

“It started with his hand.” Jericho paused, sipped from Evie’s glass of water, resumed. “One day, he couldn’t make a fist. I remember that moment so clearly. He turned to me and said, ‘It’s like my doggone hand is drunk. Kid, you didn’t take my hand off base for a quick one while I was sleeping, didya?’ He said it like it was a joke. But I could tell he was scared. He didn’t tell the doctors, though. He just kept telling them he felt fit as a fiddle.”