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“The doors are sealed shut to the other wards,” a male attendant said.
A physician in a tweed suit came out of his office. “Here, now, what’s all this? What’s happening?”
“Oh, doctor, we don’t know!” the terrified nurse said.
Down at the far end of the hall, the faulty lamps began winking out one by one, plunging the passageway into deep shadow. Faint wisps of blue-gray mist pushed in around the window frames and curled along the floor. Darkness crawled up the walls like a fast-growing mold.
“What is that?” Ling whispered.
“It’s them,” Conor said. “The Forgotten. They’re here.”
The storm still howled over the barrenness of Ward’s Island, but Henry didn’t care. He set off across the muddy fields toward the wispy lights of the Hell Gate Bridge, peeking out from behind a veil of heavy fog. The wind was an assault and the rain soaked him through. He welcomed both; they matched his mood. He walked fast and without purpose, as if he could outrun his feelings. Feelings were dangerous. Feelings could trick you. They’d tricked his mother. Trapped her. Imprisoned her inside her own head. He just couldn’t be in there. It made him think of his mother, like nails across his heart.
“To hell with you!” he yelled into the battering rain. He was glad it was raining because he was crying. “To hell with… you,” he said again, but it had lost the bite, and now the goddamn feelings were flooding in along with his memories.
When Henry was a child, he’d adored his mother, Catherine DuBois, above all others. When Catherine was up, she was bright and sparkling, a pretty, talkative woman who would play exhaustive games of hide-and-seek with her son in the family’s elegantly decaying mansion on one of the Garden District’s finest streets. “I’ll find you! You can’t hide from me!” And she did find Henry, every time. Because Henry always wanted to be found. On a late spring day, she’d gather wildflowers and arrange them in a vase. “Doesn’t that look pretty, Bird?” she’d say, calling Henry by her pet name. “Why do you call me bird, Mama?” Henry asked once. His mother smiled. “Because you remind me of a little songbird, singing to the sky. Besides,” she’d said, her smile lessening, “birds are free to go.” The best of times with Catherine, though, was when she’d sit with him at the piano, showing Henry how to pull music from the heavens through Chopin, Debussy, Schumann, and ragtime, her fingers making unfettered runs up and down the keys. “That’s it, Bird. Open yourself wide up, dahlin’,” she’d say in her sweet drawl when he’d take his place at the piano. “Let the music move through you.” To Henry, his mother was magical.
But when “the howling dogs” came to visit, his bright, magical mother faded by degrees. “Depressive,” the doctor whispered. “A nervous condition,” his aunts said. Henry hadn’t known what the words meant, but he came to think of it as a harsh winter that would not leave his mother’s soul. When the howling dogs arrived, Catherine would sit for hours in the ancestral cemetery, slim fingers working the beads of her rosary, as she stared beseechingly into the weathered faces of stone saints. When the howling dogs curled up inside his mother’s mind, dark-eyed and hungry, Henry would watch his mother smiling in that empty way at the endless guests seated around his father’s dining table, all the while her hand shaking on her butter knife. When the howling dogs settled in atop the bones of former happiness, Catherine could scarcely rouse herself from her bed. She’d sleep the day away. And when Henry came to visit, sitting gently on the side of the bed, she’d open her tear-swollen eyes. “I’m sorry, Bird,” she’d say, and close them again. Once, in th
e middle of the night, Henry woke to a racket in the kitchen. His mother had taken every piece of silver from the drawers, convinced there was a poison she had to polish clean from their shining surfaces. “Tainted,” she’d muttered, scrubbing at the tongs of a fork, the hollow of a spoon. “All tainted.”
“Maman, let me help,” Henry said, taking the silver from his mother’s grip and placing it back in the case.
She’d cupped his cheeks between her shaking hands. Her face was his face, same long nose and delicate mouth. But there was so much pain in hers; her blue-green eyes watered. “They were thieves, you know. We are descended from thieves and vagabonds and murderers. Oh, little bird. You should fly away from here. Far, far away. My bird, my bird, my bird…”
And Henry hated himself because he’d wanted to do just that. He’d wanted to run from his mother’s pain, his father’s lies and cold silences, and the slow rot of his family’s aristocracy. They were sinking, and Henry didn’t want to sink down with them. Was it wrong to want to live? His mother’s first act of rebellion had been to encourage her son’s music, to make sure he had a voice for everything inside him—music to soothe the howling dogs so they couldn’t hurt him in the same way they’d hurt her. Her second act of rebellion had been to push him from the sliding, sinking nest.
Fly away, Bird. Fly, fly away…
The day her mind broke, his mother had taken one of those shining knives and crawled into the bath. She’d meant to silence the howling dogs for good. Henry had found her, pale and bleeding. The doctor had come to dress her wounds. Henry’s father refused to admit his mother to a sanitarium for fear of gossip. “She needs rest.” The doctor agreed, a bond sealed between men. They gave her opium. They looked away. And Henry’s mother became the unofficial ghost of their ancestral mansion, floating through the elegant rooms where, if you looked too closely, you saw the tears and worn spots in the papered walls, the soot on the velvet drapes, the fraying along the seams of the antique dining chairs.
This was what Henry ran from. This was what the jokes masked. It wasn’t callousness. It was pain and loss so great he could only let it in a little at a time, filtered through the safety of melody and rhythm. It was the way he survived. And to hell with his friends if they didn’t understand that. And to hell with anybody who couldn’t feel for those people in the asylum, people like his mother, struggling valiantly against their demons. He was tired of keeping everything in for everybody else’s sake.
Henry tripped over a rise in the ground. “Oh, I hate this place!” He kicked at the muddy mound. God, it felt good. He kicked again, violently, splattering himself with muck and not caring. That was for the howling dogs! And that was for the suffering of his mother! That was for the hurt deep inside! Kick, kick. Kick. Ki—
His stomach realized it first. A carnival-ride swoop of raw, primal instinct that dizzied him with dread. He’d tripped over a new grave. He was kicking at a new grave. In his anger, he’d wandered aimlessly through the fog into the potter’s fields. All around him were piles of freshly packed earth.
“Okay, Hen. Time to exit stage left,” he joked to himself to keep his fear at bay.
Carefully, he stepped across the fresh earthen mounds. They’d been tightly packed by the prisoners’ shovels. The rain was still coming down. In the heavy fog, he could just make out the hazy yellow glow of the asylum’s dotting of windows. He’d made it halfway through the potter’s fields when he felt a slight rumbling, like a train approaching underground. But this was not the city and there was no subway on Ward’s Island. Henry took another step, and another. Don’t look, just keep moving. His pulse throbbed in his ears; he could actually hear it in time with the rain—quick. And scared. Henry felt something brush his ankle. Don’t look, don’t look, don’t—
He stood perfectly still and cast a glance to his right and down.
There was dirt on his shoe.
No. Dirt was falling onto his shoe, tumbling down from the shifting top of a new grave.
Henry chanced a look around him.
Graves. Everywhere.
And they were beginning to crumble.
“What the hell is that?” Sam whispered.
At the end of the hall, the mist thickened into a dense bank of living fog, shadows among shadows. Vague forms emerged, indistinct from one another: The same pallid skin peeling off in ribbons of rotting flesh. Diseased mouths dripping with oily black drool. Rows of thin, razor-sharp teeth. Their eyes were the gray-white of pond ice and seemed to see nothing. Instead, the ghosts swept their heads left and right, sniffing in the way an animal hunting prey would.
“The Forgotten,” Conor whispered urgently.
