AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Theta. You knew all about us,” Evie said. “Why—”
“Don’t you get it? The rest of you got good powers. Memphis heals! Ling and Henry can help people in dreams. Isaiah and Evie can read the future and the past and figure stuff out. Me? All I can do is destroy.”
Isaiah sidled up to her. “You saved my life. Twice.”
Impulsively, Isaiah threw his arms around Theta, and she returned the hug, grateful for it.
“We can sort this out later. Right now we gotta figure out how to get these ghosts to go away,” Sam said. “Who’s got ideas?”
No one spoke.
“Don’t all jump in at once. Form an orderly line,” Sam said.
“Uncle Will said that ghosts used to be human, and that humans want things. The question is: What do these ghosts want?” Evie asked.
“They don’t want to be dead,” Henry offered. “They won’t accept the finality of death.”
“’Cause they been forgot,” Conor said. “They’re angry. That’s all they feel all the time. Angry and mean. They want youse to feel it, too.”
“So… they’re bullies,” Sam said.
“They’re a mob,” Memphis said. “How do you stop a mob?”
“With a lot of guns and things that blow other things up?” Sam said.
“Not for long,” Evie said. “And anyway, it won’t work on ghosts. They’re already dead, remember?”
Memphis tapped his finger against his lips and stared out the window at the night. “The Forgotten. The Forgotten,” he muttered.
“Uh, Memphis? You going ghost on us?” Sam asked.
Memphis turned away from the window and faced the others. He folded his arms across his chest and nodded, as if he were having a private conversation with himself. “Conor just said the ghosts are angry. That they’ve been forgotten.” A thought was fighting to take shape in Memphis’s head. He was thinking of the 135th Street library. All those books, all those stories waiting to be discovered. Stories that needed telling. “Will says that we have to see them ghost by ghost. We need to break up the mob. Draw the ghosts out.”
“How do we do that?” Evie asked. “There are hundreds of them!”
“We get them to talk,” Memphis said. “We let them know we’re listening.”
Sam snorted. “Did you see what they did to that doctor with the ax? What they did to the nurses? They don’t wanna talk; they wanna invade. Take over. They wanna hurt us.”
“I wish we’d had more training with Sister Walker,” Ling said. “We don’t know what we’re doing.”
“I don’t think they knew what they were doing, either,” Theta said, popping her chewing gum.
“Look,” Sam said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I’m just saying, what do we do if they decide to climb inside any of us and take us for a bad ride? What if, while we’re listening to their spooky bedtime stories, the Forgotten get us to act on our worst fears and”—Sam glanced at Evie—“hidden impulses.”
“Yeah. How will we know if it’s us or a ghost?” Isaiah asked.
“Preferably before we start eating each other’s faces,” Henry said. “‘Oh, pardon me, I thought you were my pal, Ling. But now that you’re trying to eat my face, I can see I was wrong about that!’”
Ling grimaced. “If I were going to eat a face, it would not be yours.”
“I’ll have you know my face is quite edible,” Henry insisted.
“Anybody in this asylum could be infected. Anybody could be somebody other than who they claim to be,” Theta said. “You can’t be sure that a friend is a friend.”
“So what now?” Evie asked.
“Seems like whatever we do, we’ve got to take the fight to the source. To the potter’s fields,” Henry said.
