Before the Devil Breaks You by Libba Bray
A PUNCH IN THE GUT
After a sleepless night, Evie called Mabel and asked to meet her at the Bennington.
“What’s the matter?” Mabel said, taking a seat across from Evie at a table under the faulty Victorian chandelier. “You sounded dire on the telephone.”
“I have a confession to make,” Evie said. She took a steadying breath and readied herself for Mabel’s anger. “I read Arthur’s card. Wait! I’m sorry. I know that I shouldn’t have, but you were so mysterious about him, and I was worried—”
“You had no right!”
“It was wrong of me, I know. But, Mabesie, I was right to be worried. Arthur’s not on the level.”
Mabel tensed. “What do you mean? Is there another girl?”
“No. Not that I saw.”
Mabel went back to being irritated. “Well, what, then?”
“He’s in some sort of trouble. I saw him in a police interrogation room. I think he was with an agent of some sort.”
“That’s ancient history. His brother went to jail. They questioned Arthur, but he was innocent so they let him go. That’s probably what you saw.”
“No. No, this felt more recent, Mabesie—”
“Evie… please stop.”
“This man was trying to get Arthur to do something that felt very wrong and very dangerous.”
“I don’t want to know—”
“Mabel, Arthur’s lying to you—”
“I said, I don’t want to know!” Mabel thundered, stunning Evie into silence. Mabel’s eyes filled with angry tears. “Why do you have to ruin everything?”
“I don’t… I didn’t mean…”
“I loved Jericho and you had to have him. You, who could have anybody! And now you want to keep me from Arthur.”
“No. That isn’t true, Mabesie. I only want to keep you from getting hurt.”
“Well, you can’t!” Mabel wiped at her eyes. “If I want to get hurt, that’s my business.”
“Mabel,” Evie tried. “This isn’t you.”
Mabel grabbed her purse and stood up. “You haven’t known who I am for some time, Evie.”
A miserable Evie sat alone, stirring the undrinkable cocoa. What she’d done had been awful; she knew that. But she couldn’t unknow what she’d discovered about Arthur Brown, either. And now Mabel hated her for it. Maybe what Evie had seen had been from long ago. But Evie couldn’t let it alone yet—not with Mabel’s happiness in the balance. It was time to have a talk with Arthur Brown.
At Evie’s knock, Arthur opened his door wearing only trousers and his undershirt. He was sinewy and handsome in a rugged way. Evie could see why he had swept Mabel off her feet. He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the doorjamb with a bemused smile that irked Evie immediately.
“I don’t remember ordering any Fuller brushes or Bibles,” he said. “Shop’s downstairs, miss. In case you’re lost.”
“Arthur Brown?”
Arthur’s expression went from smiling to wary. “Who wants to know?”
“I’m Evie O’Neill. Mabel’s best friend.”
Arthur laughed. “Well, well, well. The Sweetheart Seer herself. To what do I owe this honor?” He threw a glance over his shoulder. “I don’t think I have any ghosts hiding in my humble abode, but you’re welcome to check.”
Evie balled her fists at her sides. He was being contemptuous, but for Mabel’s sake, she’d swallow her pride. “This won’t take long, Mr. Brown. I wanted to tell you that… that I read something that belonged to you. It was very informative.”
Arthur laughed. “Yeah? I don’t go for that Diviner hocus-pocus.”
“You might if you’d seen what I did. You and a government agent? A man in a brown hat? He had some very interesting things to say to you.”
Arthur stopped laughing. His eyes narrowed, and for a minute, Evie felt afraid.
“Oh, yeah? How’d you get something of mine to read, anyway?”
“I-I took it from Mabel’s room when she wasn’t looking,” Evie lied.
“What a fine friend you are.”
“The point is, I know you’re in trouble with the Bureau of Investigation. I know you’re lying about who you are.”
“That so? Sorry, Miss O’Neill. Like I said, I don’t put much stock in Diviner visions.”
He was trying to be offhanded about it, but Evie could tell he was nervous.
“I only wanted to say that if you do anything to hurt my friend, I’ll come after you. I swear I will.”
Arthur saluted her. “Duly noted. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I was in the middle of getting dressed. So long, Miss O’Neill.”
Arthur tried to shut the door. Evie stuck her foot inside, blocking it. “Please don’t hurt Mabel,” she said a little desperately. “She’s good. And kind. All she wants is to help people. She’s the best person I know.”
Arthur stopped looking smug. “I’ll look out for her, Miss O’Neill. I promise,” he said softly. “You’re not the only one who loves her.”
MISSING MASS
Alma and Ling sat in the cramped Tin Pan Alley music room waiting for the phone to ring, even though it hadn’t for several hours. Ling rested her cheek against her fist, staring at the wall. Alma played the same three notes on the piano. They’d been spending more time together lately, going to the pictures or stopping at the confectionery to share an ice-cream sundae. Ling had come to look forward to their time together. But today she was distracted. She couldn’t stop seeing those twins’ ghostly faces. How confused they were. How scared. It gnawed at Ling’s conscience. What were they doing? This hunting and interrogating ghosts hadn’t gotten them any definitive answers, just more riddles. The whole quest felt more like an elaborate game designed to keep them busy.
“What are you thinking so hard about over there?” Alma asked Ling at last.
“Atoms.”
Alma raised her eyebrows. “Uh-huh.”
“We’re all collections of atoms. All of us. But what happens to those atoms after we die? Does our matter become a different energy? Is that what ghosts are? And is that energy a soul, or is it only an echo of a human?”
“Uh-huh,” Alma said.
“Energy can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be transformed from one kind of energy to another. And as matter—all those atoms—is converted into energy, some mass goes missing. That’s Einstein’s theory of relativity, E equals MC squared.”
“Oh, sure. Everybody knows that.”
“What if the Department of Paranormal’s experiment during the war produced some incredible new form of energy? If the soldiers were the mass, what happened to them?” Ling mused. Some theory was fighting to take shape, but she wasn’t there yet.
“And here I thought you might say, ‘I was thinking about you, Alma. What a delightful companion you are.’”
“Sorry. I’m boring you.”
Alma swung around on the piano bench to face Ling. “You’re not boring me. I just don’t understand a lick of it. And I don’t want to know about ghosts. I only want them to go back. They frighten me. They don’t scare you?”
“They didn’t used to,” Ling said. She’d drawn comfort from them and their messages. It had made her feel that her ancestors were looking on after death. She liked that. Liked the idea that whatever she was would live on in some fashion. That death was not final. It had given her a sense of a beautiful, ordered universe. But now she’d angered the ghosts. The ancestors weren’t speaking to her. And she was beginning to wonder if hunting ghosts was a mistake.
“Let’s talk about something else,” Ling said. She wasn’t good at this.
Alma bit her lip and looked up at Ling through her lashes. “Well. Let’s see what happens when our atoms collide.” With that, Alma leaned forward boldly and kissed Ling softly on the lips.
Heat spread across Ling’s cheeks.
Alma smiled seductively. “I do believe you’re blushing, Miss Chan.”
“Yes,” Ling whispered. “I am
Alma leaned in for another kiss. Ling pulled back. Alma looked confused.
How to explain that the blush wasn’t passion, but embarrassment and discomfort? The truth was that Ling didn’t feel what most people seemed to feel. She rarely felt truly aroused beyond the theoretical. The idea of kissing was just that—an idea. Not unwelcome, but it didn’t seem to reach into her depths. At least, it hadn’t yet. Alma was beautiful and sensual and warm. Ling liked her so much. She was attracted to the idea of Alma, to her spirit and wit. She wanted to be around Alma. But she didn’t know if she wanted to pet with Alma, and if she truly didn’t want to make love to Alma—fizzy, alive, gorgeous Alma—then it was the proof to Ling’s hypothesis that she simply didn’t have the sexual drive that most people did.
“Is it me?” Alma asked, straightening her spine.
“No! No,” Ling said.
“Is it because I’m a girl?”
Was it? Ling’s mother would have a conniption fit if she even suspected. She’d drag Ling to confession and probably never let her out of the house again. But Ling lived in the scientific world. She’d long since stopped believing what her mother believed. And Ling knew deep down that her attraction was not to boys. Her time with Wai-Mae in the dream world had awakened that part of her. Being around Alma had proven it beyond all doubt. “No. It isn’t because we’re girls,” Ling said shyly.
“Then what is it?”
In her lap, Ling clasped her hands tightly. She didn’t like sharing herself. Holding herself in check often felt like her only weapon for navigating the unforgiving, intrusive world. If you told people about yourself, what was to stop them from using those private hurts and joys against you sometime? Once you let people in, you were vulnerable. Nothing frightened Ling more than that—not ghosts with teeth or Shadow Men or the man in the stovepipe hat. But she owed Alma truth, she knew.
“I feel very deeply. Even romantically. But those feelings live inside my heart and my head. I can’t translate them to the rest of me.” Ling said “the rest of me” quickly and quietly. “I don’t know if I want to be touched in that way. I don’t know if my love is a physical love.”
Alma was disappointed, Ling could tell. She didn’t really understand. Few people did. Sex sold everything. It was in every advertisement, song, and Hollywood movie. Who was the freak who didn’t want to make love?
“Oh, Lord, Ling.” Alma let her breath out in a long exhale.
“I’m sorry,” Ling said, ashamed.
“Don’t be,” Alma said. She snorted, gave a weary smile and a shrug. “C’est la vie. I gotta stop falling for these girls who don’t fall for me, though.”
“I didn’t say that!”
“Now I am confused.”
“Can we… take it slowly?” Ling asked.
Alma bit her lip again. “I’m in no rush.” She tucked Ling’s hair behind her ear. “Was that okay?”
Ling smiled. She nodded. “It was nice.”
“Do you like to hold hands?”
Ling unfurled one of her very rare smiles. “With the right person, yes.”
“And am I…?”
“Yes.”
The phone rang. “Diviners Investigations,” Ling answered, still holding on to Alma’s hand.
“Is that your telephone voice? You sound like you’re at a funeral.”
Ling rolled her eyes. “What do you want, Evie?”
“Can you come to Theta and Henry’s? We’re going to try another dream walking.”
“Tell them what you told us,” Memphis said to Isaiah.
Isaiah recounted the vision he’d had of Conor and the cornfields and the strange girl. “I drew this. I think… I think it came straight from Conor. Like he was drawing through me.”
“Like channeling,” Ling said.
The picture was exactly like the one Evie had seen back at the asylum, the Eye and the floating soldiers. “We want to try to reach Conor through this.”
Henry’s eyebrows shot up. “Okay. But Conor didn’t draw that. Isaiah did.”
“I know. It’s a gamble. But we’re down to gambles at this point.”
Henry scooted a chair over, close to Ling. They each held a corner of Isaiah’s drawing. Sam set the metronome in motion, and within minutes, they’d slipped into sleep and dreams.
The first thing Henry noticed when he woke inside the dream was the sweet, bright haze of sunshine, like an egg wash spread over the warm day. He could actually feel the sun on his back, lulling him. The second thing he noticed was that Ling was not beside him.
“Ling?” he called.
There was no answer.
Where was she? Where was he?
Looking around, he saw that he stood on a leafy street of tidy brick houses and white-picket fences. Black-eyed Susans swayed on their stalks. A horse-and-buggy trotted past. The man at the reins tipped his hat at Henry.
“Mornin’,” the man said.
“Mornin’,” Henry answered.
A boy in short pants tossed newspapers from a bag slung over his shoulder. One landed near the porch of a pale brick foursquare—the Zenith Caller. Zenith, Ohio. That was Evie’s hometown. He was inside Evie’s dream, then. The door of the house creaked open. Henry went inside. Filmy Irish lace curtains sucked in through the open windows on a breeze. A fan whirred on a table blowing across a bowl of melting ice. Summer. A small, fair-haired woman rocked in a corner, hemming the edges of an American flag, which pooled on the floor in mounds.
The creak of the rocker, the gentle whine of the fan’s blades, and the hazy sun were hypnotic. Henry felt as if he could stay in this dream forever. A girl in a ruffled pinafore, her hair done up in a large blue bow, jumped out from behind the wall of the dining room. “Find me!” she said, and ran, and Henry knew beyond a doubt that it was Evie as a child. The same mischievous glint in her blue eyes. The white of her pinafore bled into the sunshine streaking through the tall windows, blurring her as she slipped out the side porch door. Henry ran after. In the kitchen, a much younger Will jotted down notes without looking up. The eye-and-lightning-bolt symbol shimmered on the notebook’s cover.
Henry pushed through the side door.
The house had gone now. He was in a forest. Snow dusted the ground. There was a clear lake, a hawk soaring above it. A circle of chairs sat on the pine-needle floor of the clearing. There were boys in uniform, sitting stiff-backed, hands on their knees, waiting—for what, Henry did not know. On a tree stump, a Victrola played an old war song. Through the dense trees, Henry caught sight of Evie wandering through. She was no longer a child but the Evie of today. Henry had a vague, emotional sense of her that stretched back far longer than he’d known her. He knew somehow that she hated licorice and cried when a neighbor boy accidentally ran over a frog with his bicycle.
A tornado of black birds swirled up before Henry; he put up his hands to block their wings, but they were nothing more than figments fading into the air. Panic seized Henry, though he couldn’t say why. It was as if he knew that some terrible fate beckoned, as if this was a dream he had lived through countless times before. He was running through the forest. Trying to get away from whatever unseen monster chased him. Trying to get back to the happy memory of the house. Henry’s heartbeat quickened—he could hear it in his ears, a walloping rhythm, like the clang and whoosh of a great machine. It hurt to breathe. He’d run in a circle, back to the clearing and the Victrola. Trees fell as if trampled. The clanging grew louder. In the chairs, the boys in uniform had become ghosts with skeletal faces. Fierce light blazed through the falling trees, and within it, like an alien sun, was the eye symbol tearing the sky apart while the soldiers screamed and screamed. Pain. So much pain. As if his body and mind were being stretched beyond all endurance. He no longer knew who he was. He had to remember: I’m Henry. Henry Dubois IV. But when he looked down, he saw that a name had been stitched onto the front of his uniform.
JAMES.
XAVIER.
O’NEILL.
“Henry? You copacetic?” Evie’s face swam into view.
“Yeah. Rough… landing.” He felt as if he might vomit. “Where’s… where’s Ling?”
“I’m here. I couldn’t get inside the dream.” She didn’t sound happy about it.
Henry gagged. He had sweated through his shirt.
“Here. Hold on.” Memphis laid hands on Henry’s arms, and soon, Henry’s sickness began to subside.
“Thanks,” he said, gingerly rotating his arms.
“Hen, you sure you’re jake? You scared me,” Theta said, sitting at his side.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“What happened? What did you see?” Evie asked.
Henry took in a few deep breaths. “I wasn’t just an observer in somebody else’s dream. This time, I was actually inside the dreamer’s body. Sort of a kidnapping.”
“Has that ever happened to you before?” Memphis asked.
Henry shook his head. It still hurt a little. “I saw terrible things. Worse, I was living them. And I was powerless to stop them. Except that, as I said, I wasn’t me. I was someone else.” Henry looked over at Evie. “I’m fairly certain that I was having James’s dream.”
There was a whine in Evie’s ears, as if she were on the verge of fainting. She steadied herself by grabbing the edge of the table. “But you said that Ling wasn’t with you.”
“Right,” Ling said, and Evie could see from the look on her face that it was dawning on her, too.
“And… when you dream walk, you only see the living. So how…?” Evie trailed off, letting Sam say what she couldn’t seem to manage.
“How’s that? James is dead.”
Henry nodded. “I know. And dead men don’t dream.”
How could Henry have experienced James’s dream? That was impossible. Unless James was still alive. But he’d been killed during the war. Evie had seen it in Luther’s memories. Hadn’t she?
“Are you sure?” Evie asked.
“I… I don’t know. But I’ve never walked in a dead person’s dream before.”