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I’ve just arrived at Hopeful Harbor and am settling in fine. Mr. Marlowe informs me that all correspondence is reviewed to make certain I’m not giving away important Marlowe Industries secrets. You might keep that in mind when writing unless you want the details of your wild parties to end up in the newspapers. Please give my regards to everyone. I’ll write as soon as I have anything worth reporting.
Fondly,
Jericho
Jericho placed his elbows on the desk and brought his fists together, resting his chin across the little trough created by his knuckles as he considered his thoroughly ordinary letter. He wished he had Memphis’s skill with words or a fraction of Sam’s charm. He wished for much more these days, and had ever since Evie had shown up, bursting with ambition. Her appetite for life had unearthed the dreamy boy he’d been before he’d taken sick and nearly died. Before he’d been cast off to the state by his family. After that betrayal—first by his body, then by his mother and father—he hadn’t allowed himself to wish for much.
No, Jericho realized quite suddenly as he watched the weak sun trying to make its presence felt behind the thin cover of clouds on the other side of the leaded-glass window. For most of his eighteen years, he’d been guarding against the brutality of disappointment. This time at Hopeful Harbor was a new start, then. A chance to become the hero of his own life. Perhaps this experiment of Marlowe’s would free him at last from the secret fear that he didn’t deserve happiness.
He’d start tomorrow by working at improving his letter writing, because, ye gods, another one like this, and he’d put Evie straight to sleep. Chuckling over that, Jericho tucked the note into an envelope, addressed it, and left it for the morning’s mail.
Most of the gloom had burned away, leaving a blue sky patched with gray above the rounded backs of the distant mountains. It was a fine afternoon for a walk, and so Jericho wandered into the velvety woods surrounding the property. A hawk circled far above, flying higher until it was an outline against the sun-drenched clouds. Down in the cover of trees, it was dim and quiet except for the rustlings of animals. The heels of Jericho’s boots sank into the leafy thatch with a satisfying thwick, and for a moment, with the smell of pine and earth so close, he was reminded of his childhood on the farm. Were the men tilling the soil for spring planting now? Was his mother letting the lambs out to pasture? Did she and his brothers ever think of Jericho, or had time erased him from their lives the way a river recuts the shape of the bank till its original contours are forgotten?
He looked back to see the faint line of his footprints in the soft earth, a small marker of his quiet presence. “I will not be erased,” he said to the silence of the forest. His words echoed back to him: “not be erased, be erased, rased, rase.”
Farther in, the woods thinned. There were smaller, newer trees here, and some spots where the pine and birch had burned down to nothing more than blackened sticks. Curious, Jericho pressed on, coming to a large clearing that bordered a lake. The area was charred and flattened, as if a great fire had roared through once upon a time.
Soft voices carried on the wind. Jericho whirled around, searching for the source.
“Hello?” he called. “Is someone there?”
Silence. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be here. What if this part was restricted? The feathery-distant conversations returned with the wind. Laughter. Muffled talking. And just underneath, a faint thread of music: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile!”
“Hello?” Jericho called again.
Whispers whipped through the forest with the force of a wind gust, everywhere at once, Jericho at the eye of a sound storm. From the corner of his eye, Jericho caught movement in the trees. He whirled around—“Who’s there!” he demanded, and all at once, the whispering din, the fluttering movement, was gone, as if it had been sucked from the world and contained in a jar. He hadn’t been able to make out what the whispers said, but deep in his gut, he had the same foreboding he’d felt when trapped inside John Hobbes’s murder house: Some memory of bad death lingered here. A silent scream seeking release. And then, very faintly, he heard a last, soft echo on the wind: “The time is now!”
Jericho ran back the way he came and didn’t stop until he was safely inside the mansion.
That night, Jericho lay in the kingly bed in the room Marlowe had arranged for him and reflected on his strange encounter in the clearing. It had felt as if he’d trespassed on holy ground and was being asked to bear witness, though to what, he couldn’t say. He wished that Evie were down the hall so that he could knock at her door with a You won’t believe what happened to me today.… Jericho rolled onto his stomach, only then realizing how utterly exhausted he was. It had been a long day of travel. Most likely, that accounted for what had happened in the woods. Just before he fell deeply asleep, Jericho heard a woman’s soft crying, but he was so tired even that was suspect.
He dreamed he stood in the charred ruins of the forest. The song he’d heard that afternoon came to him: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile!” Staticky light lit the sky, splitting the dark clouds like a serrated knife. The wind picked up, blowing dirt into Jericho’s face. He spat and swatted at his face, recoiling as his fingers came away streaked with blood. Blood seeped up from the ground in thick, oozy puddles. It streamed down the hillside and eddied at his feet. Hands reached up from the blood and clutched at his trouser cuffs. Jericho tried to run away from the horror, but the hands’ grip was strong. With a cry, he broke free and ran. The blood flowed past like a river. The music was everywhere. “While you’ve a lucifer to light your… light your… you’ve a lucifer… a lucifer… lucifer… lucifer…”
The sky was tearing apart. Flocks of screeching birds poured out in a wave. And from inside the tear, Jericho heard an insect drone that made his very soul quake. And underneath it all was a machinelike sound, like an automated heartbeat fueled by screams of pain and terror. What was that?
In front of him was the faint impression of a girl with a long braid. Her brown eyes were huge with some unnameable dread. Her voice was like a memory that had taken years to reach him: “Help… please…”
And then Sergeant Leonard stepped out from inside the blighted hollow of a decomposing tree crawling with flies. His face was white as a grease-painted actor’s in a motion picture; dark shadows circled his black eyes. “Hey, kid. Remember me? Your
old friend?”
Jericho moaned in his sleep.
Behind his thin lips, Sergeant Leonard’s teeth were rotten. “You’re behind enemy lines, soldier. Abort your mission. Before it’s too late.”
The following morning, Ames brought Jericho his breakfast on a silver tray. Jericho didn’t fully remember his dreams, only that he’d had them and they’d been disturbing.
“Good morning, sir. I trust you slept well.”
“Yes,” Jericho said, because that was what he was supposed to say.
“Mr. Marlowe will call for you in an hour. Shall I draw you a bath?”
“Thank you.”
Jericho ate his breakfast, took his bath, dressed, and read from Walden: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately… and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. In an hour, as promised, Marlowe knocked at his door.
“Are you ready to make history?”
