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Evie: Once upon a time, in a country much like our own, a terrible evil stalks the land.… The King of Crows and his Army of the Dead approach, as the good citizens of the nation sleep soundly in their beds, oblivious to the danger that awaits them.…
Theta: There’s wickedness in the land. Don’t you see? The King of Crows and his dead are coming. They’re here! Look! I see them glimmering in the corn and on Main Sleet.
“Street!” Evie whispered.
“Work on your handwriting,” Theta whispered back.
Sam: I hear there’s towns being turned into whole ghost towns. Why, didn’t you hear about Gideon, Kansas?
Jericho: No. How come we haven’t heard anything about it, then?
Sam made a face at Jericho’s wooden delivery. Jericho shrugged.
Henry: Maybe they don’t want you to hear about that. They’d rather you think the Diviners are wicked, when they’re simply trying to stop catastrophe!
Evie nudged Isaiah and he strummed his thumb against a saw, making an otherworldly sound.
Isaiah: Gosh Almighty!
Isaiah looked very pleased with himself.
Ling rolled her eyes and whispered to Theta, “This is so corny. I am embarrassed for all of you.”
Evie: Citizens of this land, never fear, for the Diviners are here. But all citizens must do their parts. Beware! Be aware! And now, a message from the Voice! Of! Tomorrow!
They paused for Memphis’s nightly poem. He was getting more comfortable in front of the microphone, adding touches of all he carried with him—the storefront preachers, the rapid-fire cadence of the barbershop, Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes and Bessie Smith, the wild improvisation of jazz. When he spoke, it was like listening to something exciting and new, and Evie hoped they were reaching people out there in the dark. She hoped somebody somewhere was listening.
Someone was listening.
Several schoolteachers in Lincoln crowded around their boarding room radio. An elderly couple in a little brick house in Iowa. The Timmons family, in the front parlor of a cousin’s house in St. Louis, the first stop in their great migration north.
“Daddy, is that…?” Moses asked, eyes alight.
“I’d bet my last nickel it is,” Nate answered, feeling the same hopeful fire.
Someone was listening.
In her cell, Miriam Lubovitch heard and did what she could to boost the signal further. It was reaching into homes in Idaho. The migrant camps of California. The mills of New England. The oil fields of Texas. In his newsroom, T. S. Woodhouse listened; he threaded fresh paper into his typewriter. In one of the many empty rooms of his California mansion nestled among the redwoods, Jake Marlowe heard. He telephoned the Shadow Men, but they were in their brown sedan, also listening.
Someone else was listening.
The dead under the earth.
The dead crawling out of the earth.
The dead streaming into the countryside.
The dead were listening.
“‘Who is the Voice of Tomorrow?’” Evie read from the Omaha Morning World Herald. It seemed that several newspapers had picked up the story about the unusual radio broadcasts being heard all over the nation. No one could tell where this Voice of Tomorrow radio show originated. Where were these people? Who were they? Were they connected in any way with the mysterious poems and letters that had been published by the New York Daily News? Or was this a new outfit who’d been influenced by those poems? Were these folks patriots or traitors?
Evie thought back to Mrs. Withers teaching American History at Zenith High School. Truthfully, she’d paid very little attention in class; she’d been much more concerned with getting Edward Schultz to notice her or daydreaming about being famous one day. Mrs. Withers was telling the story of some American Indian battle and how the Dutch had managed to “subdue them.” Evie had only been listening because Edward was out with mumps, and she’d had nothing better to do. But she had thought at the time, very briefly, about that word, subdue. And she’d wondered, what would the Indians have said about that same battle? Now, reading about herself and her friends, she realized how much it mattered who got to tell the stories that ended up in the newspapers and the history books.
“There is no greater power on this earth than story.…” she muttered.
It was something that Will said once. He’d said that people thought borders and lines on a map made nations, but that in truth it was stories that did. In her memory, she could see Uncle Will pacing the floor in the dusty, wonderful museum. (Oh, how she missed it! Why had she not appreciated it then?) How passionate he had been. How long ago that seemed.
Stories were power. And whoever controlled the story controlled everything. A story could bring people together, or it could tear them apart. It could spread like a sickness, infecting people. It could lead them into battle or shake them into seeing what they had refused to see before. The Shadow Men. Jake Marlowe. Harriet Henderson. Roy and the KKK—they were all trying to get people to buy into the story they were telling. The Voice of Tomorrow was a story, too. And like many stories, it had grown bigger. It was no longer a person. It was a movement.
