“Maybe it’s the Huns!” Johnny said and scraped his plane through the air. His skin prickled, though he didn’t know why.
“Looks like a big old ball of dust,” the Rotary Club president said in wonder.
“Should we ring the church bell and get to the storm cellars?” Pastor Jacobs asked.
“Let’s wait and see,” the president said. He did not like making decisions until he knew what the popular vote would be.
The mothers had left the butcher shop. Their children stopped squabbling and moved close to their mothers’ sides. The town crank slowed his chew. The restless young people greeted the arrival of the storm with excitement—finally, something! Euline Winters’s rocking chair stilled; her knitting needles lay in her lap. “I saw a dust storm like that once when I was a girl. When it was over, little Polly Johansen was missing. They never found her,” Euline called, though no one listened.
The clouds had spread out. The citizens of Beckettsville could no longer see the horizon. The high-pitched whine of insects filled the charged air. The birds shrieked and flew away from Beckettsville with a startling suddenness. Ida Olsen left her hiding place and came out of her yard, dragging her dolly behind her. Even though her mother had told her that pointing was rude, she jabbed a finger toward the spot of road still visible. “What’s that?” Ida asked.
A lone man emerged from those billowing clouds. He was imposing in stature, with a stovepipe hat atop hair that was kept longer than was the fashion in this part of the country, and an old-fashioned undertaker’s coat made of blue-black feathers that fluttered in the gusty wind. The people of this small town were unaccustomed to strangers—there wasn’t even a train depot here—and this man was strange, indeed. He walked with a deliberate stride, and that made the people wonder if he might be important. A beautiful crow perched sentinel-straight on the man’s left shoulder, cawing like a town crier. To Johnny Barton, it seemed the crow wanted to fly away from its master but stayed as if an invisible chain held it firmly in place.
The man trailing the storm reached the citizens at last. His skin was the patchy, peeling gray of a rotting shroud, and Cora Nettles tried to hide her distaste. She hoped it wasn’t catching, some foreign disease. The man tipped his tall hat with easy formality. “Good afternoon.”
The president of the Rotary Club stepped forward. “Afternoon. Walter Kurtz, president of the Beckettsville Rotary Club. And who might you be?”
“I might be many things. But you may call me the King of Crows.”
The citizens chuckled lightly at this. The Rotary Club president heard and grinned. “Well, we don’t get much royalty in these parts,” he said, playing to his bemused neighbors, happy to know the popular vote at last. “You on your way through somewheres?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“We don’t get many strangers here,” Cora Nettles explained.
“I am not a stranger,” the man replied, and it left Cora unsettled. She could not place his face.
“You might want to take shelter, sir,” Pastor Jacobs said. “There’s a storm right behind you.”
The King of Crows glanced over his shoulder at the mass of dark clouds hovering on the edge of town, and turned back, untroubled. “Indeed there is.” With eyes black and lifeless as a doll’s, he surveyed the little town. He inhaled deeply, as if he were not merely taking in air but breathing in the full measure of something unknown. “What a fine claim you have here.”
The Rotary Club president beamed. “Why, there’s no town finer. You can have your Chicago, your San Francisco and Kansas City. Right here in Beckettsville—this is the good life!”
“We’ve even got a hotel,” Charlie Banks said, and he hoped Cora thought he was clever to mention this.
The corners of the stranger’s mouth twitched but did not extend into a smile. “My. And how many souls live here?”
“Four hundred five. Almost six, seeing as Maisy Lipscomb is due any day now,” Charlie answered.
“And how many dead have you?”
“I… beg pardon?” Charlie said.
“No matter.” The King of Crows smiled at last, though there was no warmth in it. “You’ve sold me. We’ll take it.”
“Take what?” the Rotary Club president said.
“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.