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“Something feels strange to me,” Ling said.
“We’re fighting ghosts and trying to figure out how to repair a hole between dimensions. You might have to be more specific,” Sam said.
“Why Gideon? It’s just an ordinary town,” Ling said.
Jericho folded his arms. “I just said that.”
“No, you didn’t. You said it didn’t seem like anyplace special.”
“That is quite literally the same thing.”
“Maybe because it’s so ordinary, it was a safe place to meet,” Henry speculated. “Mabel said, ‘That is where we will meet.’”
“She also said, ‘That is where you will understand,’” Ling said.
“Understand what?” Sam said.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” Ling started. “It’s about us and the ghosts…”
Isaiah…
The voices of Memphis and his friends faded to a murmur. It was Sarah Beth he heard now.
Isaiah, talk to me.…
His eyes rolled up in their sockets and his body went rigid as the vision swept through him like a brushfire, pulling him into their shared space of the dark room. There, Sarah Beth kneeled and brushed the pale yellow hair of her porcelain doll. She glanced up and smiled. “Isaiah! Where are you? When are you getting to Bountiful?”
“We’re on our way, but we had to stop in another town first.”
“What do you mean?” Brush. Brush. Brush.
“Our friend Mabel, she came to us in a dream and told us to meet in Gideon, Kansas.”
Sarah Beth stopped brushing the doll’s hair. “Who?”
“Mabel Rose. She’s passed on, but—”
“Why did you listen?” Sarah Beth said. She seemed angry.
“She’s our friend.”
“Why did you listen?” Sarah Beth repeated. No, not angry. Scared.
Behind Sarah Beth, the dark was not a nothing. It was full of terrors. It dropped away, and Isaiah began to shake as if the world were tilting off its axis. He saw himself back at Jake Marlowe’s Future of America Exhibition, in the Fitter Families tent, holding fast to the bronze medal he?
??d wanted but that they wouldn’t let him have, the one that read, YEA, I HAVE A GOODLY HERITAGE. All the things he’d seen with that medal in his grip came rushing over him in their horror now: Visions of bone-thin prisoners behind barbed-wire fences. Tall smokestacks belching a foul pollution into the air. Boxcars with hands reaching out of the slats. Now there was more coming: Gray skies choked with smoke. Humans struggling for survival among shriveled crops and polluted streams. Piles of dead bodies, so many that it made it hard to weep. As if people were no more than stones and there was no point in crying anymore because there was nothing to be done. The horror rolled over everything, unstoppable. Behind it all, Jake Marlowe’s golden machine churned eternally. The Eye symbol beamed out from the forehead of the King of Crows. Isaiah could see him lurking inside its golden body, like he was part of the machine, and he was grinning, and his eyes, his eyes were a forever night that nobody could wake up from no matter how hard they tried.
Isaiah came out of his vision. He was lying on the ground with his head in Memphis’s lap and all his friends crowded around him.
“Is that boy all right?” some lady was asking, and Bill was telling her that the boy was fine, just having a fit that would settle in a minute, no need to worry none, and it all sounded like a conversation underwater. Isaiah needed to warn them that Gideon wasn’t safe. But he couldn’t seem to speak.
The low rumble of thunder reverberated through the town. Jericho squinted up at the sun. “Doesn’t look like rain.”
But the thunder answered differently.
“Gracious,” a woman on the street said. “Sounds like we’re about to get a storm, Frank. You’ll want to pull in the rugs.”
“Oh, it’s just some clouds squabbling, Florence. It’ll pass.”
