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That night, the Diviners went out on their first good lead. The owner of a former flophouse near the seaport that was scheduled for demolition called to say that his workers were too spooked to go inside anymore. They had heard strange crashes, thudding footsteps, and a woman’s crying, but they could never find the source of those noises. Tools would go missing, and later, they’d find those tools had been arranged neatly on the floor of a room where no one had been. Windows latched at day’s end would be wide open the following morning.
The Diviners entered the decaying house with flashlights blazing. It smelled of mold and urine and years of neglect. More than that, there was a great sadness to the house, a palpable storehouse of human misery. They traveled upstairs to the fourth floor, flashlights bouncing off the rotting floorboards.
“Feels cold,” Ling said in warning as they approached the last door on the right.
“Yeah,” Memphis said, watching his breath come out in a bluish puff.
Condensation freckled the tarnished brass doorknob.
“Ready?” Sam asked.
The others nodded. Sam pushed, and the door opened with a creak. Inside the narrow shell of a room hovered the ghost of a woman with disheveled hair and a dress that might’ve been in fashion forty years earlier. The dress bowed out around the middle, revealing her to be with child. A noose had been cinched at her neck, the ligature burns still bright along her broken skin. The rope hung down her side like a braid. At her feet was the winking image of a turned-over chair. She regarded the Diviners with a detached curiosity. Her eyes were dark. She had not turned. Yet.
“Have you come to help me rest?” she asked in a scratchy voice like a last dying gasp.
“Yes,” Evie managed, swallowing down her fear. “We have. But we must ask you some questions first.”
The ghost did not object. She clasped her hands. “I want to rest, but I am hungry, so hungry all the time, like a sickness, and I cannot find rest. It is the Eye. It won’t let me rest. I feel it burning in the dark of me.”
At the mention of the Eye, a tremor passed through the ghostly woman. Veins of rot climbed up one cheek. She shuddered as if with an acute pain.
“We gotta work fast,” Sam said.
“Where is the Eye?” Memphis asked.
The woman regained her composure. She smiled, ecstatic. “Resting in… in a field of… of gold. It shines like… like a promise. It is open! Oh, I would have its promises, for I am hungry!”
“Look,” Ling whispered to the others. The woman wavered between states: One minute, she was a lost soul, a shimmering, faded photograph of the human she must’ve been once. But the next, she had blurred into one of the terrifying dead, sniffing the air with blind hunger, teeth gnashing, eyes going icy.
Already, the Diviners were coming together, ready to tear her atoms apart. “Whatever you’re gonna ask, ask it now,” Memphis said, positioning himself slightly ahead of Isaiah to protect his brother. “I got a feeling we only have seconds left.”
“Where is Conor Flynn?” Evie demanded.
The woman was disintegrating before their eyes. “Would you not even know my name?”
“Where is Conor Flynn?” Evie repeated.
“He is among the dead. Safe for now in the wings of the caged one.”
“She’s answering in riddles,” Isaiah said.
An insect-like whine had arisen. A fly landed on the woman’s nose. Another crawled across her lips. “Hungry…”
“Wait! What keeps the Eye open?” Ling said. She squeezed Henry’s hand, ready.
But the woman was losing her battle. She bared her newly sharp teeth and answered with the plural voice of the hungry ones: “You do.”
With a bloodcurdling screech, she lunged forward, but the Diviners were ready for her. T
he room appeared to warp and bend inward. The tension created raised the hair on their arms and pulled hard at their back teeth, but then there was a release, followed by a sudden swoop of euphoria, and in the next second, the ghost was nothing but a few remaining sparkles of light.
It didn’t take long for reports to spring up of other Diviners joining the ghost-hunting fray. One of them, a psychic in Murray Hill, posed in her fern-laden parlor beside a crystal ball while holding up the supposed ectoplasm of a ghost she claimed to have caught “rummaging through my cupboards like a common criminal!”
“Ectoplasm my foot!” Sam groused. “That’s cheesecloth and some wet noodles. Big phony!”
“They’re trying to horn in on our act,” Henry said, folding up the newspaper. “There are ghost-hunting parties taking place. Well, they’re usually too blotto to do much, but it’s the principle.”
It seemed as if overnight, the Diviner business in town had shifted from “Sees all! Knows all!” to “Protects all!”
