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A splash as one of the dead slipped into the water and went under. Where it entered, the water was electrified for a moment.
“Remy, can’t you make this thing go faster?” Bessie said urgently.
Memphis grabbed a paddle and kept his gaze on the murk, alert for movement.
“There! That’s our boat!” Bessie cried, pointing to the empty pirogue out in front of the plantation. “Where are they?”
Upstairs in the big house, Henry guided Moses and Tobias over waterlogged carpets, past gilt-framed oil paintings of plantation owners and their wives going back generations. Henry knew their kind, men like his father. Whether it was land or people, they enjoyed owning. Henry could see it in their expressions: These were people who expected.
It smelled overwhelmingly of mildew and rot. The stench burned at Henry’s nose. There was no electricity due to the flood. The house was thick with shadows. The only illumination came from the bursts of lightning at the windows. It had a disorienting effect, coming in quick flashes that reflected off a silver candlestick or the edge of a mirror, revealing an open doorway that had been hidden in the gloom. The house had many rooms. The dead could be waiting in any of them. Near the top of the grand, wide staircase, Buddy growled.
“Don’t move,” Henry whispered to the boys.
A familiar voice rang out: “Moses? Toby? You in here?”
“Daddy!” the boys shouted. Nate Timmons bounded up the stairs in three seconds flat and crushed his boys to him in a fierce hug. Memphis and Bill, Bessie and Remy were right behind them, wading through the water. Loree burbled inside the cradling sling across Bessie’s chest. “It’s all right, little one,” she cooed.
Memphis wanted to tell Henry about the levee and the ghosts they’d seen, but it would have to wait. They needed to get out of Greenville right away. A heartbeat of lightning illuminated the gloom for two seconds. Buddy growled, teeth bared again. His fur stood on end.
“Memphis…” Henry whispered.
They were at the far end of the hall. A man with side whiskers and a woman in a hoop skirt. Their eyes were black shine, their pale skin iridescent as a bucket of silvery minnows. Henry recognized them from the oil paintings he’d seen.
“My house,” the whiskered man said. “My. House.”
Even in death, these people gave off a desire for domination, as if they could rot for a thousand years and the violence still wouldn’t leave their bodies. They had no conscious thought beyond their rapacious greed. They spoke as one, their voices crackling and hissing like a scratched phonograph record through a megaphone.
“Boys, get behind me,?
? Nate said, guiding them gently with his arm. Beside her husband, Bessie held tightly to her baby. She grabbed a candlestick from the drenched mantel and raised it high.
“What do you want?” Memphis asked.
“All that we are owed and then some. This world belongs to us. My house.” The ghostly couple hissed.
“If you hurt us, the King of Crows will be angry. He needs us,” Henry said.
“We do as we please. We answer to no one. My house. My house. My house.”
The police had called the Diviners anarchists, but these ghosts were the true anarchy, Henry thought. People who made the rules only to break them at will.
“Trespassers,” the man said. “My house.”
With that, the couple lunged. Nate yanked the boys out of reach. Undeterred, the ghosts grabbed Remy, who screamed as they bit into his arms with their teeth. His eyes rolled back in his head. They were sucking the life from him, wavering between flickering illusion and something more corporeal and much more dangerous. Memphis and Henry had never seen anything like it, and they were afraid of these new ghosts.
“Remy! Remy!” Nate shouted.
Bessie Timmons brought the candlestick down against the head of the ghostly mistress of the house. The ghost put a hand to her head, staggering. She vomited black bile down the front of her high-collared, frilly gown. Her eyes burned with both hunger and hatred.
“Move!” Bessie screamed and tore down the wide staircase of the ruined house with Tobias’s hand in hers, Moses quick on her heels. Bill threw Remy across his broad shoulders and followed after. Remy twitched like a caught fish.
“Hold on, hold on,” Bill grunted.
They raced to the boat, still hearing the cries of the ghosts: “My house!”
Greenville’s unsettled dead were coming up out of the flood now. Their hunger spilled off them along with the water.
“We’re like sitting ducks out here,” Henry said.
