“Mabel, could I sleep here tonight?”
Mabel’s eyes widened. “You want to sleep through that?”
Evie nodded. She needed the noise. It might be enough to drown out the nightmares.
Mabel shrugged. “Suit yourself. Here, have a nightgown.”
Evie held up the chaste, high-necked gown, examining it with a scowl. “If I should die in the night, please remove this.”
“Could you please remind me why we’re friends?”
“Because you need me.”
“I think you have that reversed, Evie O’Neill.”
“Probably.” Evie kissed Mabel’s cheek. “You are an absolute doll of a pal, Mabesie, my girl.”
“Don’t you forget it.”
They crawled into Mabel’s bed and watched the light make patterns on the ceiling in the dark. They talked of Operation Jericho and poor dead Rudolph Valentino, and they talked, too, of their futures, as if they could shape the glittering course of their destinies with secret confessions offered like prayers to the room’s benevolent hush. They talked until their words grew sparse with their drowsiness.
“Have you ever known something that you were afraid to tell?” Evie asked. She was more tired than she ever remembered being.
“Whaddaya mean?” Mabel slurred.
“I’m not sure,” Evie murmured. She wanted to say more, but wasn’t sure how to begin, and Mabel was already fast asleep.
Under a crumbling eave in the old house, a spider waited and watched as a hapless fly ventured into its web. When it became clear that the fly was hopelessly trapped, the spider scuttled forward, entombing the creature in a shroud of silk.
Like the spider, the house was also watching. Waiting. It had waited for many years, through the deaths of presidents and the fighting of wars. It had waited as the first motorcar roared down dirt roads and the aeroplane defied gravity. Now the wait was over.
Deep in the bowels of the old cellar, the furnace flame coughed to life. Behind the furnace lay a secret passageway to a hidden room whose walls glimmered faintly with symbols painted long ago in preparation. The stranger turned a crank and, high above, a metal grate, rusty with neglect, screeched open to reveal a night sky untouched by the phosphorescence of city lights. It was the perfect place to watch listless clouds drift by. To gaze at the stars. Or to catch the full glory of a prophecied comet as it burned past. The stranger stood naked beneath that sky. His shimmering skin was also a tapestry of symbols. He placed the eyes upon the altar and bowed his head, waiting, like the spider, like the house.
Whispers filled the room, soft at first, then louder, like the sound of a thousand devils loosed upon a desert. The gloom moved. The shadows surged, pressing against the stranger and the offering while the cold distant stars looked away.
OMENS
The morning’s Daily News sold the story of Ruta Badowski’s death with a three-inch headline—MURDER IN MANHATTAN!—atop a grainy photograph of her grieving parents. Evie read the accounts in every newspaper while she waited for Will to come back from the police precinct. The stories mentioned that it was a ritual murder and that the killer had left a note with a Bible quotation and occult symbols, but didn’t divulge what the symbols were. Detective Malloy had obviously held back details. Evie wished she didn’t know the details. She’d woken with that terrible whistling melody in her head.
None of the newspaper accounts mentioned that Will had been consulted, and Evie wished that they had. It was terrible, she knew, but there was no such thing as bad publicity, and a mention of Uncle Will in connection to a murder investigation might bring people to the museum. It was nearly one o’clock. They’d been open since half past ten, and the only visitor they’d had was a man from Texas who’d really wanted to sell them cemetery plots. Evie had seen the bills piling up on Uncle Will’s desk, along with the letter from the tax office and another from a realty company. If they didn’t start getting a steady flow of visitors, they’d all be out on the streets. And Evie would be back in Ohio.
“It is always like this?” Evie asked Jericho, who was absorbed in some religious text that smelled of dust.
Jericho looked up, puzzled. “Always like what?”
“Dead.”
“It’s a little slow,” Jericho allowed.
Evie couldn’t do much about the museum just then, but she could do something about Operation Jericho. She scooted her chair closer to him and put on her best pensive face.
“Do you know who would be pos-i-tute-ly wonderful at this sort of thing? Mabel.”