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The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult was locked, naturally, but that didn’t stop a good reporter like T. S. Woodhouse. Woody wrapped a rock inside his jacket to muffle the sound, then smashed it against the stained-glass window, picking out enough of the shards to climb inside without impaling himself. The police would be back soon. He didn’t have long. Footprints showed in the dust. Lots of footprints. Police, no doubt. But there were women’s footprints, too. Woody smirked. They’d been here, and he was sure it was Evie leading the charge. Good for her.
Woody had been to the museum a few times. He’d always found it musty and sad. Now he looked for anything that could help him with what he’d seen on the report the bird had brought him. A secret government project to make Diviners was a pretty big story. And Woody intended to break that story.
A bird darted into the museum with a great squawking and flapping of wings. It fluttered up near the painted ceiling, then hovered near the door into the hallway. Could it possibly be the same bird? That was crackers. Then again, strange things were happening.
“Okay,” Woody said. “Okay, I’m on the trolley.”
He followed it into Will’s study. The bird settled on Will’s desk and hopped onto a stack of newspaper clippings, some of them yellowed with age. The bird tapped its beak against the stack and hopped off. Woody skimmed the first four articles, his skin prickling. This wasn’t just a story; this was a terrifying warning.
Woody read through the stories, noting the one thing they all had in common: “Reported seeing a man in a tall hat”; “Saw a man in a stovepipe hat”; “Claims he was visited in dreams by a man in a stovepipe hat just before he saw the world burn.” Woody’s alarm grew when he realized that the clippings went back some ten years. Whatever had been happening had been going on for some time. Building. Woody shoved two handfuls of the clippings into his pockets.
The bird cawed and cawed. It flew out and back into the library.
“You sure keep a guy hopping. What is it that…” Woody’s words died on his lips.
The hazy form of Will Fitzgerald stood beside a chalkboard in the corner. Woody’s mind reached for the comfort of a rational explanation and found none. His reporter’s cynicism deserted him. Woody shut his eyes tightly. When he opened them again, Will’s ghost was still there. Woody’s knees buckled. He grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself.
“W-Will…” he croaked.
The ghost nodded slowly and raised a hand. What if it came after him? Woody had to fight the strong urge to run as words slowly chalked themselves onto the slate:
They need you.
Tell the truth.
Talk to Margaret.
And then, in a flash, it was all gone—Will’s ghost, the words, the bird. Woody stood alone, trembling in the museum with the clippings still in his pockets. He let out the yelp he’d been holding back, and then he ran to the window where he’d broken in, hissing as he nicked his hand on a sharp edge in his hurry to get out.
An hour later, he was camped outside the Tombs in Lower Manhattan along with most of Park Row’s reporters, waiting for a statement from Detective Terrence Malloy on the incident in Times Square, the arrest of Margaret Walker, and the continuing manhunt for the missing Diviners.
“What happened to your hand, Woodhouse?” A reporter in an ill-fitting hat motioned with his pencil at the bandage Woody had hastily wrapped around the cut from the window glass. “Your bookie come for a finger at last?”
Woody didn’t take the bait. He’d spent the last hour reading through all of Will Fitzgerald’s newspaper clippings. Ghosts. They were everywhere. And who was the man in the hat? What was he?
Detective Malloy sauntered from the jail accompanied by six of his men to face the reporters, who immediately began barraging him with questions. Malloy assured everyone that Jake Marlowe had been taken to safety and that the New York bulls, along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, were doing everything in their combined power to bring the fugitives to justice. The manhunt had gone nationwide.
“We believe some of these anarchists boarded a train at Penn Station last night. Our agents across the country are working to apprehend them,” Malloy announced. “We’ll get ’em, and that’s a promise.”
A reporter chewing gum noisily raised his pencil. “Where was that train headed, Detective?”
“That’s confidential.”
“Hey, Detective! Has Margaret Walker ’fessed up yet?”
“No comment.”
“You gonna let us talk to that Walker woman?” another reporter asked.
“No,” Malloy said.
“Is that your final word?”
“Sounds like the final word,” the first reporter said around his gum.
Woody raised his hand. “Detective Malloy! T. S. Woodhouse of the Daily News.”
“I know who you are, Mr. Woodhouse,” Malloy sneered.
