Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (39 page)

“Pos-i-tute-ly prone and ready to hear this story already!”

“Jericho kissed me.”

There was such a profound silence on the other end that Mabel was afraid she’d lost the connection. “Hello? Evie? Operator?”

“I’m here,” Evie said quietly. “Jeepers. That’s swell news, honey. How… how did it happen?”

“It was after our date this evening and—”

“Wait a minute—you had a date? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well, Evie, you’re awfully hard to catch these days,” Mabel said, hoping Evie caught her drift:
You’ve been too busy for even your best pal.

“Tell me about the kiss. Did he kiss you a lot?”

“No. Just the once. What happened was—”

“Did he say anything to you first?”

“Not… well, he—”

“What was his expression? Could you read anything in his face?”

“Evie! Will you please let me tell the story?” Mabel pleaded into the receiver.

“Sorry, Mabesie.”

Mabel continued. “We went to the Kiev Tearoom—”

“Ugh. They have such sad little blintzes. If blintzes could frown, those would.”

“And in the beginning,” Mabel said, without stopping for Evie, “it wasn’t going terribly well, to be frank. But then, then he asked me to dance, and, oh, Evie. It was so romantic. Well, to be perfectly honest, it was terrible until we got the gist of it. Why, oh, why didn’t I let you teach me how to dance?”

“One of the great mysteries of our time. And the kiss?” Evie asked, biting her lip.

“I’m getting there. He walked me to my door. He was very quiet and—”

“Regular quiet or brooding quiet?”

“Evie, please.”

“Sorry, sorry. Go on.”

“He said, ‘Good night, Mabel,’ and then he… just… kissed me.” Mabel gave a little squeal.

Evie closed her eyes and pictured Jericho’s face in the first light of morning.

“I can’t stop playing it over in my mind like the best Valentino picture ever, except that I’m Agnes Ayres, and Jericho is Rudy.”

“Well, he’s no Rudy,” Evie grumbled, “but I get the gist.”

Mabel was telling her something else, but Evie didn’t want to talk about it anymore. She’d done the right thing by Mabel and, most likely, by Jericho. She’d thrown him over. Why did doing the right thing feel so awful? Did that mean it wasn’t the right thing, or did right things always feel awful, which would in fact be a terrible deterrent to doing right?

“Evie?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Oh. Sorry, Mabel. There was a, um, a spider. On the floor. Dreadful!”

“Eek! You’d think such a fancy hotel wouldn’t have spiders.”

“Yes, I’ll… uh… I’ll just call down for a bellhop. Sorry, Mabesie.”

“Wait! What do you think I should do?”

“I wouldn’t rush into anything. Boys like girls who seem to have other beaus. They’re fickle that way.” Evie sniffed. After all, she’d been pretty easily forgotten.

“Jericho isn’t that sort of fellow,” Mabel insisted.

“Trust me, they’re all that way.” She was mad at Jericho. She had no right to be, but she was anyway.

“Gee, Evie, you really don’t seem very happy for me.”

“Oh, Pie Face, I’m sorry. I am excited for you. Why, I’m pos-i-tute-ly throwing a party for you here,” Evie said brightly, feeling guilty. “I think you should go to the pictures with him and just be your charming self.”

“But I’m not charming. That’s the trouble.”

“Then… this will be good practice?”

Mabel laughed. “You’re the worst friend ever, Evie O’Neill!”

“Yes, I know,” Evie said.

The land has a memory.

Every stream and river runs with a confession of sorts, history whispered over rocks, lifted in the beaks of birds at a stream, carried out to the sea. Buffalo thunder across plains whose soil was watered with the blood of battles long since relegated to musty books on forgotten shelves. Fields once strewn with blue and gray now flower with uneasy buds. The slave master snaps the lash, and generations later, the ancestral scars remain.

Under it all, the dead lie, remembering.

Adelaide Proctor had been on this earth for eighty-one years. She, too, had a history. She was a distant relation of John Proctor, hanged during the Salem witch trials. Witchcraft was her birthright, and as a young girl, Addie had read the accounts with great interest. There
had
been witchcraft, of course—the simple provenance of cunning folk, midwives, and herbalists: Superstitions practiced in the interest of safety. Curses muttered or occasionally offered with a bound lock of hair and cast into an evening fire to be regretted in the morning or not regretted, depending. But none of it had anything at all to do with the Devil and everything to do with the frailties of the human heart. Here were spells for healing loneliness. Curing the sick. Ensuring good fortune. Assuring safe passage on rough seas. Delivering babies into the world with a boon upon their brows. These tales comforted Addie, for she needed comforting.

Sometimes she’d fall into a dreamy trance. Then she could see into another world of spirits or read messages in the remains of the tea leaves in a cup as clearly as words in a book. She dared not tell anyone these secrets, though she was a little in love with her ability. It made her feel special—almost as special as Elijah Crockett made her feel.

A fine boy was he, her Elijah, with eyes the gray-brown of a river rock. “I’ll take you to wife, Adelaide Proctor,” he’d said, slipping a daisy chain on her head. He kissed her sweetly and marched off to fight in a war of brother against brother.

She could hear the cannon fire and the screams from Harris Farm. The battle raged for two weeks. In the end, thirty thousand casualties littered Virginia’s farmland. A chain of dead boys lay side by side across the field. The boy she loved most lay among them. In his shirt pocket was her last letter to him, caked in blood.

Heartsick with grief, Addie believed that her longing was strong enough to fashion a spell. She wrote her pledge, sealed it with a sprig of laurel and her thumbprint inked in blood, and left it in the hollow of an old elm as she’d read one should do to seek favor of the spirit world. All she asked was to see and speak to her Elijah once more.

This she did and waited.

The war brought other miseries. The men who moved the dead from the battlefields brought typhus back to the Virginia countryside. Whole households fell. On a hot summer morning, pain gripped Addie’s belly, and by evening she was wild with fever. The room wobbled and narrowed, and then she was somewhere else—a colorless world where she could feel the press of spirits about her. There was a lone chair like a throne, and in it sat a tall gray man in a coat weighted with shiny blue-black feathers. His nose was long and hawklike, his lips thin. He had eyes as black as the depths of a country well.

“Adelaide Keziah Proctor. You seek an audience with me.”

Addie hadn’t sought an audience with anyone other than her Elijah, and she told the man so.

“You must speak with me first. Long before your ancestors colonized this land, I was here. The North Star shone its light upon my
face. From its people, I draw my power. This nation feeds upon itself. Such dreams! Such ambition! I, too, have dreams. Ambitions. I can taste your desires upon my tongue. Walk with me, child.”

Addie walked with the man in the stovepipe hat through woods where crows perched in trees like sentient leaves. Where he walked, the grass yellowed and curled up onto itself, brittle and dry. They came to the old graveyard on the hill. Elijah’s grave was not more than three months made. Addie’s latest bouquet wilted upon it.

“What would you give to see Elijah again?” the gray man asked.

“Anything.”

“Every choice has consequences. Balance must be maintained. For what is given, something else is taken. Think well upon your motives, Adelaide Proctor.”

Addie had thought upon her motives every night as she cried softly into her blanket so that her sister, Lillian, sleeping peacefully beside her, would not hear. At sixteen, Adelaide had lost the love of her life. The boy who should’ve been her husband and the father of her children lay six feet under the mocking sweetness of summer clover. She did not waver in her choice.

“Anything,” she said again, and the man in the hat smiled. “May I see him, sir? Oh, bring him to me, please!”

“You shall have your Elijah in time,” the man said. “Sleep. For you are young; your days are many. But know this: You belong to me now, Adelaide Keziah Proctor. When the time comes, I shall call upon the promise you make this day. For your patriotism to me.”

He pressed his thumb to her forehead and she tumbled backward through the grave, unable to stop herself from falling.

Addie woke to a great thirst and sweaty bedsheets. Her fever had broken. The moon was a faded wax seal against the pale gold parchment of dawn. But where was Elijah? The man had promised. For days and days, he did not come, and Addie began to believe her promise was nothing more than a fever dream.

Then came the signs.

She would find her diary open to a page about her love for Elijah.
Warm winds blew through open windows, and with them came the sweet sunshine smell of him. On a moonlit night, she was sure she heard music coming from the tall grass of the field. It was the faintest whisper of a song Elijah used to sing to her. And the daisies: She’d find them on her side of the bed, lying across her hope chest, or beside her music box. Once, when she took her apron down from the hook, she reached a hand into the pocket and came up with a coating of waxy white petals. Only Elijah knew that daisies were her favorite. Her mother accused her of trying to call attention to herself, but Addie knew these small favors belonged to Elijah. Even in death, he remembered her. Her joy was boundless.

Fever visited the Proctor household once more, this time with a vengeance. When it finally took its leave a week later, it had claimed Addie’s father and younger brother, two servants, and the foreman’s wife and baby daughter.

Balance.

Addie attended their funerals mute and pale, fearful of what she’d done, of what might still come. That night, she heard her name whispered so sweetly that she woke with a fresh tear upon her cheek. Beyond her window, the moon bled bright behind passing clouds. A nightingale chirruped a warning.

Her name came again, soft as moonlight. “Adelaide, my love. I am here.”

Awash in silvery moonlight, Elijah stood at the edge of the field. He’d returned to her, as the man had promised. Addie rushed out after him, following the firefly glimmer of him through the woods, into the old churchyard, past tombstones, until she came to his grave marker. Whispers sounded around them in the September dark. It was cold here, so cold. Elijah shone like a coin in a pond. He was her beautiful love, but there was something of the grave about him now. Weeds wove into his thinning hair. Shadows ringed his eyes and made gaunt his cheekbones. His shirt wept blood where the bullet had done its work.

“You’ve summoned me, my love.”

“Yes,” Addie said, eyes brimming with tears. “I’ve paid the price for you, too.”

“Don’t you know that every soul you give him increases his power? That it binds you to him forever?”

Addie didn’t understand. Why wasn’t Elijah happy? “I did it so that we could be together always.”

“And so we shall. For I cannot rest until you do. I am bound to love you till you die.”

His mouth opened in a scream then. From it fell beetles and maggots and all manner of death. In the trees, the crows cawed, and it sounded like cruel laughter. This creature before her was not Elijah, not the Elijah she’d kissed under the sun. He was something else entirely, and she wanted no part of him. Adelaide ran. She ran past the tombstones and the scarecrows, all the way back to the safety of her bed, which was no safety at all.

In the morning, when she threw back the blanket, she screamed loud enough to wake her sister. There in the covers was a dead mouse with its eyes missing and its entrails ripped out. It lay on a blanket of browned daisy petals.

Addie read the books. She learned the spells. At midnight, she went to Elijah’s grave and dug up what was left of him, breaking off a sliver of finger bone, prying out a tooth, cutting off a lock of his hair, scooping up a handful of graveyard dirt. These she placed in an iron box, and then she performed the ritual to bind Elijah’s spirit so that he could not come to her anymore. He could not harm her.

But what of the King of Crows, the man in the stovepipe hat?

Addie had given him power when she asked to see Elijah once more. She’d tied herself to him by an invisible thread that she could not sever. She had entered into a bargain blindly. No, not blindly. She’d made the choice. She’d pledged her allegiance to that man in the hat. In the years since, she’d had time to reflect. To question the vow hastily made for love, fashioned from grief, from a need to believe in something grander than herself.

Adelaide Proctor was old now. She had watched them bury the
boy she loved in the muddy soil of Virginia, and she had buried her family soon after. On a day in April, she read about the president, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, and of the assassin’s death, too. When President McKinley also fell to an assassin’s bullet, she was there. She’d seen the birth of the automobile and the aeroplane. The steam trains crossed the country, the gleaming tracks clumsy sutures across wounded miles of stolen land. In New York Harbor, the ships sailed in with their precious, hopeful cargo gaping at Liberty’s torch. The towns spread and grew; the factories, too, belching smoke and ambition into the air. The wars continued. Hymns were raised to the glory of the nation. The people were good and fine and strong and fair, hardworking and hopeful; also, vain and grasping, greedy and covetous, willfully ignorant and dangerously forgetful.

Addie Proctor had seen much in her eighty-one years in this magnificent, turbulent country impossible with possibility, and so she knew to be afraid now, for they’d reached a tipping point. There were ghosts everywhere in the country, and no one seemed to notice. People danced while the dead watched them through the windows. And all the while, the man in the stovepipe hat gained power. He was coming.

Though she had been warned against it, Addie went to the basement, where she drew the marks upon the floor in chalk and muttered the prayers, performing the small ministrations of salt and blood, rituals to keep the dead away.

She hoped it would be enough.