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“Freddy?” Ling said, more careful this time.
Jericho made a fist and it was no trouble. He was fine. Completely fine. “I’m not going crazy,” he said to reassure himself. “I’m not.”
Quickly, he climbed back up and slammed the heavy wooden doors on the empty cellar.
“What’s the matter?” Ling said. She never missed a trick.
“N-nothing,” Jericho stammered. “Just got spooked down there in the dark is all. It’s empty. Let’s move on.”
“Wherever this town went, it sure went in a hurry,” Alma said as they walked through empty streets, passing vacant houses and abandoned storefronts. “It’s giving me the heebie-jeebies.” She coughed. “So much dust. Say, do you think there was some kind of explosion?”
“If there’d been an explosion, seems like it would’ve taken out some of the buildings, or the windows at least,” Doc said.
Ling was reminded of Eloise’s ghost story. She pushed the thought from her mind.
They passed by a library and a Methodist church. Jericho hopped up onto the sidewalk and approached McNeill’s Hardware. He cupped his hands around his eyes as he peered through the dirty window. There were shadows inside, but when he pushed open the door, the shadows fell away. There was nothing inside but shelves of untouched dry goods and piles of that same ashy dust.
“Nobody there, either,” Jericho said, coming out to the street again.
The small town looked to have been vibrant once, and not that long ago. The dust was everywhere now, though. Ling transferred her crutches to her left hand and bent as low as her braces and pain would allow. She scooped up a handful of the everywhere-dust. It was heavier and grittier than sand.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” she said, spooking herself.
Cradling both crutches under her left armpit to hold herself up, she brought the palmed dust to her stomach, peering at it as she rubbed her thumb through. Her thumb caught on a sharper bit. She dusted away the excess to examine it. There. Hidden inside. A sharp sliver of bone. She showed it to the others.
“Looks like a dog’s tooth,” Jericho said, holding it up.
“What killed the dog?” Alma asked. Then: “Doc, can you please find some damn gasoline?”
Under a little hill of dust, Ling spied a smashed model airplane. The wings were sheared off; it was mostly a mess of balsa wood.
“Feels… haunted,” Ling said. “Like a graveyard.” But graveyards were full of the dead. This felt slightly alive, as if the dead were part of the bricks and mortar and husks of trees, as if, were she to expel a mouthful of air, all of it would crumble and she would see what was behind it. She got a sudden chill. When she turned around, she saw Will Fitzgerald in the middle of the street. He shook his head slowly. And then, in a wink, he was gone.
“What is it? What’s the matter?” Alma said.
“We should go,” Ling said, trembling. “We’re trespassing here.”
Jericho looked around at the empty storefronts, cracked sidewalks, and weedy brown lawns. “Trespassing on what? There’s not a soul here.”
“I don’t think that’s true,” Ling whispered.
“We can’t go anywhere. Gotta find some gasoline first. Here. Let’s go this way,” Doc said.
It had gotten colder. The messy sun had been swallowed up by bleak clouds that seemed to be keeping watch like sentinels as Ling and the others wandered past pleasant, preserved houses behind white picket fences guarding neatly trimmed, very dead hedges. For all of Ling’s belief in science and evidence and fact, she also had a Diviner’s sense of the otherworldly. There were mysteries that could not be quantified. There was instinct, and intuition, and Ling’s were screaming at her now.
“Hey, look!” Doc called, rounding a corner.
At the end of Poplar Street, yellow light seeped out from a large house whose front door hung open. As they got close enough to see, Alma stopped short. “Perkins and Son Funeral Home.” She stepped back, hands up. “Oh, no. Uh-uh. No, no, no, sir.”
Jericho started up the walk.
“Are you out of your mind?” Alma planted her feet firmly and folded her arms. “The United States Treasury doesn’t mint enough money to make me go in there.”
“Suit yourself,” Jericho said. The front steps creaked under the weight of his feet. Ling followed behind.
“Ling…” Alma glanced at Doc and back. “Mary Chang! Don’t you do it.”
“If there’s somebody inside, I want to ask them what happened,” Ling explained.
