Before the Devil Breaks You, Page 4

He hadn’t always believed in ghosts, of course. Not until the Pentacle Murders. Not until the night he and Evie had been trapped in John Hobbes’s haunted house and barely survived. Now he knew the truth: Everything in this museum was real. Evil was not an abstract idea; it was real, too. And no matter what Will and Sister Walker thought, Jericho knew that they were all just ordinary people when it came down to it, the Diviners included. How could ordinary people possibly stop such a threat? He hoped Will and Sister Walker knew what they were doing.

  From his coat pocket, Jericho retrieved a small leather pouch. MARLOWE INDUSTRIES was stamped across the front. Inside was a vial of blue serum. That serum, developed by the great Jake Marlowe himself, kept the tubes and wires connected to Jericho’s damaged heart and lungs functioning. It kept him alive. For that, Jericho should’ve been grateful to Marlowe.

  But now Marlowe had issued an ultimatum: Jericho should leave the museum—his home—and go to stay with Marlowe so that the great man could parade Jericho at his Future of America Exhibition. After all, Jericho was Marlowe’s greatest invention, and no one knew. No doubt that galled Marlowe. He liked all of his victories out in front. So far, Jericho had resisted. But what choice did he have? And why now, just when it seemed that Jericho might finally have a chance with Evie?

  Jericho held one of the vials up to the light. Marlowe’s secret compound. Would Marlowe really cut Jericho off from his supply of lifesaving serum?

  It was possible that Marlowe was bluffing and Jericho didn’t need his “vitamin tonic” at all. Still. That was a big chance to take. He’d seen what had happened to all the others in the Daedalus program. Jericho was the only one who’d survived. But why?

  That, apparently, was what Marlowe wanted to know so desperately.

  Jericho curled his fingers into a fist. Piece of cake. He was fine.

  But without Marlowe, for how much longer?

  Henry left the taxi idling by the curb outside the Tea House on Doyers Street. Steam clouded the front windows of the Chan family’s popular restaurant. Delicious smells wafted into the street, making Henry’s stomach gurgle.

  “You could come in. My mother would plotz to feed you,” Ling said.

  Henry laughed. “Plotz—did Sam teach you that word?”

  “No. Mr. Gerstein up the block. Sam isn’t the only person who knows Yiddish.”

  “Don’t tell Sam that,” Henry joked. “Another time. I’m late for the show.”

  “You’re always late.”

  “Well, at least I’m consistent.” Henry handed over his watch. “Don’t lose it.”

  Ling shot him an annoyed look. “I can go by myself tonight.”

  “No, ma’am. We’re a team. More fun that way,” Henry said, and Ling fought her smile.

  “Around one thirty, then?” Henry said, sliding back into the taxi.

  “One thirty,” Ling agreed.

  Twenty minutes later, Henry raced into the Shubert Theatre on Forty-fourth Street, nearly toppling an easel boasting a hand-lettered sign for THE GREENWICH FOLLIES REVUE! ALL NEW! In a corner by the coat check, Henry’s writing partner, David Cohn, paced, checking his watch.

  “I’m here, I’m here,” Henry announced.

  “Cutting it a bit close,” David said, helping Henry out of his coat. The audience was already piling into their seats. The trills of performers vocalizing scales wafted out from backstage.

  “Sorry. Couldn’t be helped.” Henry smiled. “Spiffy suit, old boy.”

  “Got it for my nephew’s bar mitzvah. Where were you?”

  “A meeting at the Creepy Crawly.”

  “Anything I should know?” David asked.

  “The world is ending and evil is loose in the world?”

  “Sounds like Friday night.”

  Henry grinned, trying to put aside his misgivings. He’d told David about his and Ling’s dream walking, but the scary rest of it he’d kept to himself. He kept a lot to himself. It was called survival.

  “You sure clean up nice,” Henry drawled, giving David an appreciative once-over. He was tall and slender, with a strong profile like a New Yorker cartoon, and soulful brown eyes that sometimes took Henry’s breath away. David nodded to the coatroom and Henry followed. There, in the deep recesses of mink, raccoon, and camel hair, David pulled Henry to him and kissed him, slipping his tongue between Henry’s lips.

  “Missed you,” David whispered, smiling. He reached up to take off Henry’s boater hat.

  Henry held fast to it with both hands. “You know I never play a show without this. It’s my lucky charm.”

  David’s smile vanished. “When are you gonna let Louis go and give us a chance?”

  “Aww, now, cher—”

  “You only call me cher when you want to sweet-talk your way out of something—”

  “Honey,” Henry said, batting his peepers. “Sugar? Sweet Man o’ Mine?”

  David sighed and hung up Henry’s coat.

  Henry tried to ignore the feeling in his gut that said he was being disloyal to the memory of his first love, Louis. It had only been a few weeks since Henry had spent his nights with Louis inside the dreamscape only to discover the tragic truth: Louis was dead and had been for some time. Maybe it wasn’t fair for Henry to let David love him when his heart wasn’t fully healed.

  “We’ve got a great new song to play tonight, darlin’. Everybody loves it,” Henry said, a peace offering. “Between my music and your lyrics, we’ll be the next Rodgers and Hart.”

  David shook his head and pecked Henry on the cheek. “It’s my heart I’m worried about. Come on. Curtain up.”

  Inside the theater, Henry took his seat at the piano in the orchestra pit. The house lights dimmed. There was a storm coming. Henry and his friends had to meet it head-on. And he was still a little in love with a ghost named Louis.

  David smiled at Henry from the wings, where the actors milled about, ready for their cues. The conductor raised his baton. The show had to go on.

  Adelaide Proctor waited for her teakettle to come to a boil. The steam heat whistled through the radiator of her parlor in the Bennington Apartments, but she could not feel warm. One of her many cats, an orange tabby, threaded through her legs, and she bent to pick him up. “Come, Archibald, you old cuss. Give us a cuddle.” But the cat wouldn’t be contained. He leaped from her arms as if he knew. The dead were coming stronger now. The proof was everywhere. And with them came the man in the hat.

  With management watching her, she would have to be very clever about her rituals. She’d tried to explain to the stupid men about the salt and herbs. About the necessary protections. They’d smiled as if she were a wayward child. Addie was not a child. She was a witch, had been for most of her eighty-one years. And she knew a great evil loomed.

  While she waited for her tea, Addie reached for one of her spell books from the back of her bookshelf. The book was quite old, handwritten by the good cunning folk of Salem. It had been preserved and passed down through the Proctor family line over the generations, coming to rest with Addie and her sister. The pages crackled as she turned them.

  Something fluttered onto the floor.

  Addie cried out as if bitten. She stumbled into her bedroom and yanked open the top of her music box. Beneath the plush red velvet, the secret compartment was empty, the iron box gone. A terrible memory came to her: A few weeks before, Addie had dreamed of the man in the hat. In the dream, he’d been sitting right there in the Morris chair—oh, merciful heaven; it was all coming back to her. The trickster had spoken to her in her sleep. She’d carried the iron box to the garbage chute. She’d untied the binding string and thrown it all—Elijah’s finger bone, the tooth, the lock of his golden hair, and his photograph—down into the incinerator.

  She’d undone the spell!

  “Addie! What’s the matter? What has happened?” her sister, Lillian, called as Adelaide staggered back into the parlor and slumped against the wall. Her heart beat frantically.

  Lillian raced to her
side and placed a nitroglycerin tablet under Adelaide’s tongue to settle her sister’s heart.

  In the kitchen, the teakettle screamed.

  “Addie! You’re frightening me! What is it?”

  A trembling Addie pointed to the floor, to the desiccated daisy petals that had slipped from the book, a gift for her.

  Elijah had come home at last.

  WELCOME TO THE UNDERGROUND

  Mabel was late. Being late made her anxious, and she was already anxious about this evening. As she raced along Carmine Street, she wondered why she had wasted her time at the museum. “You’re not even a Diviner,” she muttered to herself, drawing strange looks from a man selling handmade cigars from a wooden stall. The minute Mabel had set foot inside the museum, she’d known it was a mistake. She’d felt small and out of place and ill-equipped among all those Diviners. Even non-Diviner Theta was on her way to becoming a movie star. Being surrounded by so much special was hard to take—and Sam’s comment about Jericho and Evie had been the icing.

  Mabel wanted to make a difference in the world. But she couldn’t read objects or heal people or see the future. What power did she have? When would it be her moment to shine?

  A throng of boisterous children ran around either side of Mabel like a river, their coats flapping open in the February wind. A woman sweeping the sidewalk yelled to them in Italian, and the children’s faces sobered as they buttoned their coats to the neck and carried on. The same woman eyed Mabel suspiciously.

  No need to worry, Mabel thought. Haven’t you heard? I’m nobody.

  “Pardon me,” Mabel said. “I’m looking for Maria Provenza?”

  With a sharp nod, the woman indicated the building next door. Mabel knocked and read over the note in her hands as she waited: Miss Rose, I meet you in Union Square last October. My sister Anna missing still. Please come? Sixty-one Carmine Street.

  At least she might be able to help someone. But when Maria Provenza opened the door, she glanced anxiously up and down the street. “Quickly, quickly,” she said, leading the way up steep, narrow flights of stairs, and once again, Mabel wondered what she was doing.

  The tenement was cold and dark. It smelled of kerosene and rancid oil. Mabel followed Maria down a skinny, dim corridor past the one bathroom shared by all the tenants of the floor to a tiny apartment with a sink and a coal stove. An old woman and three young children crowded around a small, newsprint-covered table, where they assembled paper roses they could sell on the street. They’d have to sell a lot of paper roses to make ends meet, Mabel knew. Maria said something to the others in Italian, and the children gave up a chair for their guest, making Mabel feel humbled and a little guilty.

  “Thank you for coming,” Maria said.

  “To be perfectly honest, Miss Provenza, I don’t see how I can help. You’re better off going to the authorities if your sister is still missing.”

  Maria shook her head vehemently. “No. You. It must be you. Ever since we are young, my sister sees visions. Who will marry or die or journey far. But then she sees something and she is afraid. That night, she made this.”

  Maria removed a loose brick from the wall behind the stove, inching out a scroll hidden inside the cubby. She unrolled it for Mabel. The charcoal had smeared a bit, and Anna’s talent was not art, but it was disturbing nonetheless: Lightning in the sky. Terrifying creatures looking out from between trees. And some strange metal contraption like a diving bell. Mabel had never seen anything like it.

  “You will help us find my sister?”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” Mabel said. “May I take this drawing?”

  Maria nodded. Mabel noted that the drawing had been made on the back of a pamphlet for the Fitter Families for Future Firesides, one of those eugenics tents they set up at state fairs and carnivals. They usually subjected visitors to a physical examination plus a lengthy questionnaire about heredity. Mabel’s parents had said that it was bigotry dressed up to look like science.

  “There is something else,” Maria said. “My sister, she sees you in a vision.”

  “Me? What did she see?”

  “She sees that you help many people.”

  “Oh,” Mabel said, deflated. “That’s me. Good old Mabel, the helper.”

  “No. She was worried for you. For the trouble to come.”

  “What sort of trouble?”

  Maria shook her head apologetically. “The one who knows is my sister, and the men took her away from the factory.”

  “Who were these men? Management?”

  Maria shook her head. “There are two. Dark suits. I falsi sorrisi, eh—false… smiles.”

  “That’s not much help, I’m afraid,” Mabel said.

  “Wait! They wear a pin like—” Maria struggled for the word in English. She grabbed the pencil, and in a corner of her sister’s sketch, she drew an eye with a lightning bolt coming down.

  Mabel swallowed hard. A few weeks earlier, she had spied two men in a brown sedan across the street from the museum, just keeping watch. A lifetime working with radicals and labor organizers had taught Mabel how to ferret out Pinkerton Detectives, Bureau of Investigation agents, and plainclothes cops, and the men in the sedan had that air about them. When she’d taken a closer look, she noticed that they both wore that same odd lapel pin. Maybe it was time for Mabel to find out more about those men and whomever it was they were working for. So she couldn’t read an object and glean its history, but she could be nosy and ask around.

  The bells of a distant church tolled the hour. “Jeepers! I’m later than I thought!” Mabel rolled up the drawing and shoved it into her handbag. It was too big and poked out of the open top.

  “Miss…” Maria looked embarrassed.

  “What is it?”

  “I am ashamed to ask. Could you spare some money? For the children?”

  “Oh. Um. Of course.” Mabel fished in her coin purse and handed over the quarter she’d planned to use for a Photoplay magazine and a pastry. She’d really wanted both, but it was better that the money go to feed Maria’s children.

  “Bless you, bless you,” Maria said, taking Mabel’s hands in hers. “Please: Be careful, Miss Rose. Those men, I feel they are out there, watching us.”

  The bell over the door of the Bohemian Reader jingled as Mabel blew in. Behind the counter, the bookshop’s owner, Mr. Jenkins, was busy chatting with a customer. Seeing Mabel, he jerked his head toward the back of the shop. Mabel nodded and walked past the shelves and tables stacked high with books she longed to stop and read, and slipped behind the heavy velvet drapes, trotting up the set of rickety wooden steps to Arthur Brown’s attic garret. She gave the secret knock, and a moment later, Arthur opened up.

  “Sorry I’m late,” Mabel said, bustling inside the tiny vestibule, shedding her coat, hat, and gloves as she did.

  Arthur winked. “Don’t worry. You’ve only missed a lot of hot air. Wait right here. I’ll introduce you.”

  Mabel peeked around the corner. Cigarette smoke filled the cramped, nearly barren garret. It wasn’t much: Two dormer windows faced the streets. The low roof leaked into a bucket set up in a tiny kitchenette, which housed a bathtub. There was a water closet, a steamer trunk that doubled as seating, an easel in a corner, and, off to one side, an unmade bed peeking out behind a sheet rigged to a clothesline. The sight of the bed, messy and intimate, brought a blush to Mabel’s cheeks. Sketches had been cellophaned to the walls. They were very good: still lifes and street scenes and some figure drawings of nude women, which only intensified the heat in Mabel’s face. If they were Arthur’s, he had real talent.

  Two men and a woman sat at a chipped table, arguing. “Marlowe doesn’t care about his workers. He just wants his exhibition to go up on time,” a heavyset young man with a mustache and goatee was saying. His cheeks were a mottled pink, and his thick, round glasses made his blue eyes seem enormous. “The workers want to strike!”

  “But they’ve signed yellow-dog contracts,” the other fella said in a s
oft, Spanish-accented voice. A Lenin-style cap topped his shaggy dark hair.

  “Yellow-dog contracts are criminal! You sign away all your rights,” the young woman said. She wore a beret over her thick reddish-brown hair. Her face was delicate and pretty, and as much as Mabel wanted to be above jealousy, she felt its sharp sting anyway.

  “Hey!” Arthur said sharply, and the small room quieted. He gestured toward the doorway. “Everyone, I’d like to introduce you to our newest member. Miss Mabel Rose.”

  Mabel gave a small wave. Her cheeks went hot. “Hello,” she said, her voice cracking on the word.

  The others eyed her suspiciously, except for the girl, who leaned back, appraising Mabel. “Virginia Rose’s daughter?”

  “Yes,” Mabel said, irritated. She didn’t want to be known as her mother’s daughter here. She wanted to be enough on her own. “And it’s Mabel. Just Mabel.”

  The larger boy with the glasses folded his arms across his chest. “You should have talked to us first, Arthur. We make decisions together. We are not an oligarchy.”

  “Sorry, Aron. But Mabel is a real asset. We could use her.” Everyone was silent. “Come on. Where are your manners?”

  “Manners are bourgeois,” the pink-cheeked boy said.

  “Enough, Aron,” the dark-eyed boy in the cap said. He bowed his head. “Luis Miguel Hernandez. Pleased to meet you, Mabel.”

  “Gloria Cowan,” the girl said, shaking Mabel’s hand.

  The pink-cheeked boy only nodded. “Aron Minsky.”

  Arthur offered Mabel a ratty chair. It was one of only two. Gloria sat in the other while Aron and Luis occupied the steamer trunk. “It’s not much. But as you can see, I’m not living in the Waldorf.”

  “I’ve never even seen the Waldorf,” Mabel said, smiling back at Arthur.

  “I’ll bet your grandmother has,” Gloria said coolly. “After all, she’s old New York money.”

  “So, you’re the infamous Secret Six? The ‘anarchist agitators’ the police are looking for,” Mabel said, changing the subject quickly. She didn’t want to talk about that side of her family. “But there are only four of you.”