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“D-don’t!” Conor yelled. Under the table, his legs shook.
Big Mike scowled. “What’s that, boyo?”
“D-don’t open it.”
“And why not? Stifling in here.”
“They can get in,” Conor said.
Mary looked worried. “Maybe we shouldn’t.…”
“Aww, go back to your countin’, why don’tcha, Conor?” Big Mike said. “Now, Mary, don’t let it bother you.…” He took the opportunity to put his arm around the pretty nurse’s shoulders.
At the piano, Mr. Potts’s fingers stilled for a moment on the sickly keys. Then his quavery voice sang a new song. “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile!” In his chair, the war vet twitched and whimpered in a way that made the hair on the back of Conor’s neck stand at attention.
“What’s the use of worrying? It never was worthwhile,” Mr. Potts sang, really getting into it now. “So pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile!”
Luther Clayton’s head whipped in Conor’s direction, eyes wide, haunted. “Don’t let them in. They belong to him!”
And suddenly, Conor understood what had made him so uneasy about the soldier: He knew.
Big Mike hurried over to the veteran’s chair, Mary following. “Now, now, what’s the racket for, eh, Luther?”
“The time is now,” Mr. Potts said, resting his hands flat on the tops of his thighs. He stared out the barred windows, one open just a crack, open just enough. And now Conor could see it, too: the odd bluish fog rolling across the dark lawn like a magician’s best trick.
They were coming.
“The time is now, the time is now, the time is now,” Luther said, his voice escalating.
The door slammed shut. Mary tugged at the handle. “It won’t budge!”
“Ring the alarm!” Big Mike called.
The nurse pulled the string. “It isn’t working!”
The fog pushed in around the window cracks.
“What in the name of—” Big Mike’s voice cut off with a gasp.
The nurse screamed and Conor wanted to cry, wanted to wish it all away, but he didn’t dare turn around to look. He was waiting for the lady in his head to tell him what to do.
“Onetwot’reefourfivesevenonetwot’reefourfiveseven!”
A curtain came down over Conor’s fear. His muscles relaxed. In his head, the lady’s voice guided him. Bear witness. He picked up the pencil. Behind him, there was the crack of overturned chairs and Big Mike crying, “No! Please, no!” and Mr. Potts screeching like a frightened monkey and Mr. Roland making sounds no human should make. There were the nurse’s terrified, pleading screams dying to a gurgle and Luther Clayton shouting, “The time is now!” till his vocal cords strained into hoarseness. Down the long hallway, running footsteps approached, though it was already too late. The tang of fresh blood fouled the air.
“Onetwot’reefourfiveseven,” Conor murmured over and over, like a prayer, as he kept drawing.
The fog slipped back through the windows and stretched its arms around the edges of Ward’s Island, the lights of the asylum barely visible in the murk. There were terrible things waiting in that fog, Conor knew. And just before the door to the common parlor creaked open of its own accord—Strange, they’d say later, as if it had never been locked to begin with—before the alarms and shouting and cries rent the night—“Oh, sweet Jesus! Oh, dear god!”—Conor heard the whispers traveling through the fog like current along a telephone line no one uses much:
“We are the Forgotten, forgotten no more.…”
THE COMING STORM
At five o’clock on a cold February afternoon, Memphis Campbell and his little brother, Isaiah, mounted the steps of the ramshackle Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult on West Sixty-eighth Street.
Isaiah peeked into the museum’s dusk-dark front windows. “Looks closed. Says it’s closed.”
Memphis pulled on his brother’s arm. “Quit it, now. You’ll get arrested for being a Peeping Tom.”
