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“It’s been going all morning,” Jake said. He looked as if he hadn’t slept all night, but his smile was ecstatic.
“And you’re sure?” Will asked.
“Positive,” Jake answered. “Go on.”
Will lifted the flowing paper, reading it as it slipped across his palms. There were equations, numbers, words in various languages, and several occult symbols.
“It appears to be some sort of… schematic,” Will said. He could scarcely keep from shouting with excitement.
“Can you and Rotke decipher it?”
“I can’t wait to try.”
Jake leaned in close to Will with a reproachful grin. “You remember what you told me?”
“That you’d never reach the speeds necessary for it,” Will repeated, taking the hit in stride. “But honestly, Bohr and Einstein haven’t even figured that out yet.”
“And I said that I was going to be bigger than Einstein and Bohr put together!” Marlowe’s grin spread even wider. “Because I’m American.”
Will noted the same number and symbol repeating: 144 and a hieroglyph of an eye surrounded by the rays of the sun with a lightning strike underneath at a diagonal. “I’ve seen that symbol before,” Will said. “I have it in my notes. It’s associated with Diviners.”
“Yes, many of them have seen it in their visions or dreams,” Rotke confirmed.
“What about you, my darling? Have you…?” Jake asked.
Rotke shook her head. “Sadly, no.”
Margaret peered over Will’s shoulder. “Yes. I remember. They seemed rather wary of it, though, Will. Something about the man in the stovepipe hat.”
“None of your gloom and doom, Margaret. This is a happy day! What do you think of your fiancé now, darling?” Jake said, pulling Rotke to him and dancing her gracefully around the room. Will watched the two of them, the paper sliding through his fingers.
Margaret whispered low in his ear. “You shouldn’t stare. You’ll only make it obvious how much you care for her.”
Red-faced, Will concentrated instead on the exciting parade of sigils coming over Jake’s wireless, a history-making transmission from an unknown dimension. It was incredible. Unthinkable.
Will stared in awe. “You’ve done it, Jake. You’ve really done it.”
“We’ve done it,” Margaret corrected quietly.
“This is the beginning. Of everything. A new Manifest Destiny.” Marlowe wrapped his arm around Will’s shoulders like a brother. “Congratulations. We are now communicating with the world of the dead.”
CONOR FLYNN
Conor Flynn was a son of Hell’s Kitchen. He’d been born too early and half-sick and laid in a cradle of squalor that was rarely rocked. The streets had raised Conor. From them he learned which corners to avoid, when to back down, and when to hit somebody hard and fast without warning. By the time he was seven, he was picking pockets for the West Side Boys. By the time he was ten, he’d landed in the New York House of Refuge for juvenile delinquents, which wasn’t much different from the streets he’d left behind. Conor was only supposed to stay six months. But then he’d killed Father Hanlon, and the refuge people found out about the ghosts Conor saw and the voices in his head telling him secrets. That was when they moved him to the asylum.
Conor didn’t mind the hospital. He got to draw, and sometimes they brought in special guests like the opera singer they’d had last month. She was real good, with a voice that rose up behind her like a beautiful dragon, though Conor knew not to say that out loud. The doctors and nurses were pretty nice. Most of them. Conor didn’t like Dr. Simpson. He’d heard things. Whispers. Sometimes the lady patients went in for operations. He’d overheard one of the nurses talking, something about “sterilizing them so they couldn’t breed more trouble.” Still other patients went into Dr. Simpson’s office and came out changed. Like Frances. Once, she’d stuck a fork in a guard’s leg because he touched her the wrong way one too many times. Conor understood all about the wrong touching. He was glad when Frances forked the jackass in the leg. When they carried her off, Frances had kicked and screamed like a banshee. But after her visit to Dr. Simpson, she’d come back emptied, a ribbon of drool strung across her chin. Dr. Simpson had cut the fight out of Frances along with everything else.
Conor had been scared of the voices and the ghosts at first. The pictures that showed up in his head when he didn’t want them and made him feel panicked. But he was more afraid of the things regular people could do to one another. He’d run with the West Side Boys. He’d lived in the refuge. He’d seen the way a mess of angry, lost boys could ramp it up for one another. If one cried knuckles another cried sticks and then somebody else had to top that with cries of knives! He’d seen it turn quick as a flash fire. One minute, they were a group; the next, they were a mob. And that was what scared him about the dead things inside the fog: They were the blood-fever of those wild nights on the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. They were the dark corners of the refuge where the priests didn’t bother looking.
The lights dimmed down to slivers, plunging the room into shadow. Conor held his breath until they brightened again. He counted until he felt safe. The lady told him to be careful. He heard her talking inside his head as if she were a voice on the radio. Like the Sweetheart Seer. The lady in his head told him there were others like him in the world. Sometimes, when he closed himself off and dove deep into his mind, he could sense them. He could feel their power as if it were connected to his own. It was the lady in his head who told Conor to be afraid of the things in the fog. The things that belonged to the man in the hat.
Conor stole a glance at Luther Clayton. Right now, he was in his chair staring at the wall and living through whatever terrible memories wouldn’t leave him alone. Conor knew about bad memories.
In the corner, Mr. Boschert stared at the checkers board. His memories were leaving him, and as peaceful as that forgetting sounded to Conor, he could see that it wasn’t. Sometimes Mr. Boschert didn’t know where he was. It frightened the old man something awful, and Conor would pretend to be the person Mr. Boschert imagined he was, somebody from long ago. There were ghosts and then there were ghosts.
Outside the room two attendants sat at the desk talking baseball. The season was starting up soon, and Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were promising to make it a season to remember. Conor sure missed baseball.
“Pssst. Luther,” Conor hissed.
