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Memphis kissed the top of her head. “We’ve done all we can.”
“I’ve been reading Miss Addie’s spell book. There’s beaucoup folk medicine in it. I might be able to mix up a poultice for her.”
“All right. But I don’t think you’d better tell Mrs. Olson it’s witchcraft. Doesn’t seem she’d take kindly to that.”
“Gee, and here I was gonna go and ask for her broom,” Theta joked, then went solemn. “She has to be all right, Memphis. She just has to.”
“I know.” What they’d faced in Gideon had been worse than any of them could’ve imagined. Like David facing Goliath without even a slingshot. Memphis kissed Theta again and again, as if to reassure himself that she was in his arms at last, and not a dream. “I was afraid I’d never see you again,” he said, looking into her big
dark-brown eyes. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever known. Theta kissed him back and burrowed into his side, her nose against his shirt so that she could smell the musky tang of the day on him. She didn’t care that they were both still dirty from the road and sweaty from what they’d done earlier.
“What happened in Gideon… what happened to all those people and the town,” Theta said. “Will that happen everywhere?”
“From what Ling and Jericho told us about Beckettsville, it sure sounds that way.”
“How come nobody’s taking notice?”
“Well, boomtowns come and go. Or the railroad bypasses a town and that town is forgotten, I s’pose. There’s a new scandal in the papers every day to keep everybody entertained, or people are so busy paying attention to what’s right in front of ’em they don’t see what’s going on with their neighbors,” Memphis said. After all, they’d been the only witnesses to the attacks in Gideon. But there was more to it than that: People had to want to see. Memphis thought about the porter’s story on the train from New York, and Ling and Jericho’s account of Beckettsville, told to them on the furious drive to Bountiful. He thought back to those newspaper clippings Will Fitzgerald used to keep, all those stories printed in small columns in back pages, written in a sneering tone that said it was so much nonsense and people didn’t need to pay it any mind. And he thought about all he’d experienced since leaving New York City—the refugees on the levee, the National Guard, sundown towns, the great big mansions sitting like kings on the land not far from the small shacks where folks didn’t even have running water or shoes. The way people could look at you like you weren’t the same as them, like you didn’t belong on their side of the street. Or the way their eyes could glance off you, like you were a ghost in your own country. Again and again, it came back to what Will had said—that stories, not borders, made nations. Ghosts were stories.
He inhaled deeply and let his breath out slowly with his words. “It’s hard enough to get people to pay attention to the monsters we live with in plain sight every day. The ones in the mirror. How we gonna get people to see ghosts they don’t want to believe in?”
Theta knew they should be getting back. They couldn’t risk being found here. “At least Elijah won’t be bothering Miss Addie any longer,” she said, moving toward the ladder. She’d go inside first. Memphis would count to fifty and follow.
“Hey.” Memphis laced his fingers in hers.
“Hey.”
“I love you, Theta.”
They kissed, and Theta felt as if that kiss was the only thing that made sense.
As the sun set, Theta gathered salt, garlic, and honey to make a thick paste. She applied the mixture to Evie’s angry skin and covered it with a cloth she’d soaked in a tub of water with silverware in it. Sam wanted to stay all night by Evie’s bedside, but Mrs. Olson insisted it wasn’t proper for a young man to spend the night in a young lady’s room. She allowed everyone to look in one last time on Evie, who slept fitfully, her hair damp with sweat as she shivered under her quilt. “I’ll pray for her,” Mrs. Olson said. She handed the men an oil lamp and directed them to the farmhands’ sleeping quarters near the barn while she led Ling and Theta to a narrow room off the kitchen before heading upstairs to her own bed.
Wind rattled the bones of the old farmhouse. The early dark pressed its curious face against the windows of Evie’s room as she dreamed.
Her eyes fluttered open to a narrow strip of gray high, high above. It flashed with light and shadow. Dirt walls surrounded her. Cold tickled the inside of her veins, making her flesh ache. Her body felt weighted with invisible stones.
Did she have a name? She could not recall.
With difficulty, she sat up, shifting the dirt. It tumbled down in a deluge, splattering her legs, hands, and face. Her heart was sluggish. Her lungs were heavy and tight. She opened her mouth for more air and coughed up tiny clumps of wet dirt. What was inside her? Above, the gray sky cycled swiftly—lightdarklightdark. A pale girl in a yellow dress appeared. She looked down. Both the girl and the dress were familiar.
“I tried to tell you,” the girl said sadly.
Lightdarklightdark.
There was the drone of an approaching insect swarm, and the high, mechanical whine of some engine lurching toward disaster. A choir of screams rising like an angry river. Her earlier sleep had dissipated. In its place was a growing dread.
Where am I? Help me!
The girl shook her red curls. “I told you that you’d be sorry. Oh, why wouldn’t you ever listen, Evie?”
Mabel. Mabel. Mabel.
And she was Evie.
And they had been in Gideon with the King of Crows and oh god oh god oh god! Evie scrabbled desperately at the earthen walls till her fingernails broke off. That was the heaviness inside her. The dead were a part of her. She could hear their voices all at once, thousands strong. She could feel them; she knew their pain and hunger. She, too, was hungry. A panicky nausea gripped her guts. She heaved and heaved. Four pale pink maggots fell from her lips and into her filthy lap.
“I told you. I told you!”
