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“Your town, of course. We are hungry.”
The citizens laughed again, uneasily this time.
“The pie at the cafe is delicious,” Pastor Jacobs said, still trying to make everything seem perfectly normal, though his heart said otherwise.
The Rotary Club president straightened his spine. “Beckettsville is not for sale.”
“Who said anything about a sale?” the King of Crows answered. His gray teeth were as sharp and pointed as a shark’s.
“I think you’d best move along now,” the town crank chimed in. “We don’t go for funny business here in Beckettsville.”
“Who is we?” Johnny Barton hadn’t meant to ask his question aloud, but now he had the attention of the King of Crows, whose stare fell on Johnny, making him squirm.
“What was that, my good man?” he asked.
Johnny had known lots of bullies, and this man struck him as the worst kind of bully. The kind who pretended to be on your side until he led you behind the school for the beating of your life.
“You said we. Who is we?” Johnny mumbled. He blinked at the crow on the man’s shoulder, because he could swear it now had a woman’s face. The bird spoke with a woman’s desperate whisper. “Run. Please, please run.”
“Be still.” The King of Crows pulled his hand across the woman’s mouth and it became a beak once more, cawing into the wind. The King of Crows’s face lit up with a cruel joy. “How smart you are, young man! Who, indeed? How rude of me not to introduce my retinue.”
With that, he raised his arms and flexed his long fingers toward the sky as if he would pull it to him. Blue lightning crackled along his dirty fingernails. “Come, my army. The time is now.”
A foul smell wafted toward the town: factory smoke and bad meat and stagnant pond water and battlefield dead left untended. Pastor Jacobs put a handkerchief to his nose. Ida Olsen gagged. The crow strained forward with frantic screaming. From inside the dark clouds, a swarm of flies burst forth, as if the town of Beckettsville were a corpse rotting in the waning sun. On that horizon that had seemed so fine moments earlier, the churning clouds parted like the curtain before the start of a picture show, letting out what waited inside.
And though it was far too late for him, or for anyone else in Beckettsville, Johnny Barton heeded the crow’s advice; he turned and ran from the horrors at his back.
THE END OF THE WORLD
New York City
The musty tunnel underneath the Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult was as dark as the night’s shadow, and Isaiah Campbell was afraid. His older brother, Memphis, lifted their lantern. Its light barely cut into the gloom ahead. The air down here was close, like being buried alive. Isaiah’s lungs grew tighter with each breath. He wanted out. Up. Aboveground. Memphis was nervous, too. Isaiah could tell by the way his brother kept looking back and then forward again, like he wasn’t sure about what to do. Even big Bill Johnson, who didn’t seem afraid of anything, moved cautiously, one hand curled into a fist.
“What if this doesn’t go nowhere?” Isaiah asked. He had no idea how long they’d been down here. Felt like days.
“Doesn’t go anywhere,” Memphis corrected, more of a mumble, though, and Isaiah didn’t even have it in him to be properly annoyed by his brother’s habit of fixing his words, which, to Isaiah’s mind, didn’t need fixing.
“Don’t like it down here.” Isaiah glanced over his shoulder. The way back was just as dark as the way ahead. “I’m tired.”
“It’s a’right, Little Man. Plenty’a slaves got to freedom out this passage. We gonna be fine,” Bill said in his deep voice. “Ain’t got much choice, anyhow. Not with them Shadow Men after us. Just watch your step.”
Isaiah kept his eyes trained on the uneven ground announcing itself in Memphis’s lantern light and wondered if the Shadow Men had shown up at Aunt Octavia’s house looking for them. The idea that those men might’ve hurt his auntie made Isaiah’s heart beat even harder in his chest. Maybe the Shadow Men had gone straight to the museum, to Will Fitzgerald and Sister Walker. Maybe the Shadow Men had found the secret door under the carpet in the collections room and were down here even now, following quietly, guns drawn.
Isaiah swallowed hard. Sweat itched along his hairline and trickled down between his narrow shoulder blades under his shirt, which was getting filthy.
“How much longer?” he asked for the fourth time. He was thirsty. His feet hurt.
Memphis’s lantern illuminated another seemingly endless curve of tunnel. “Maybe we should turn back.”
Bill rubbed the sweat from his chin. “Not with those men after us. Trust me, you don’t want them to catch ya. Around that curve could be a way out.”
“Or another mile of darkness. Or a cave-in. Or a ladder leading up to a freedom house that hasn’t been that since before the Civil War,” Memphis whispered urgently. “A house that’s home to some white family now who might not welcome us.”
“Rather take my chances goin’ fo’ward.”
They pressed on. Around the bend, their tunnel branched into two. A smell like rotten eggs filled the air and Memphis tried not to gag.
Bill coughed. “Look like we just met up with the sewers.”
