“Did you know your grandfather was one of the first two peculiars I ever met?” said Joseph. He had cleaned his plate and was leaned back in his chair, rocking slightly on its rear legs. “I was uncontacted at the time, living in Clarksville, Mississippi, 1930. Thirteen years old, my parents dead from Spanish flu. I didn’t know the first thing about peculiarness. But I knew something was changing inside me—that was my divining coming in—and soon after that I could feel something hunting me. But before it could get to me, your grandfather and H did. And they brought me here.”
“Gandy and H brought more than one child here, over the years,” said Elmer.
“But why come so far?” Millard asked. “Weren’t there loops closer to where you grew up?”
“Not for diviners,” said Joseph.
I scanned my friends’ faces, and they all seemed to have the same question in mind.
“So, only diviners can live here?” I asked.
“Oh no, no, no, we’re not like that,” said Fern. “We allow any type of peculiar in our loop.” She pointed at a house across the yard. “Smith over there is a wind-shaper. Moss Parker next door to him is a telekinetic, but only for foodstuffs. Which does help when it comes to setting a table.”
“For quite a few years we had a boy who could turn gold into aluminum,” said June, “though it wasn’t a skill much called for.”
“There are some loops that don’t allow outsiders, though,” said Elmer. “They’ll chase you right out.”
“They don’t trust anybody but peculiars like themselves,” said Alene.
“But we’re all peculiar,” said Bronwyn. “Isn’t that alike enough?”
“Seems not,” Reggie said. He tossed a scrap of gristle into the grass, and his puppy went bounding after it.
“Isn’t it against the ymbrynic codes for only one type of peculiar to live together?” said Bronwyn.
“Of course not,” said Enoch. “Remember the sheep-speakers in that Mongolian loop and the town of floaters in North Africa?”
“There are lots of reasons peculiars of one ability might band together,” said Millard. “I know of several invisible communities, for instance.”
“Oh,” said Bronwyn. “I thought it was illegal.”
“Partitionment according to ability is discouraged under the ymbrynic codes, because it can promote clannish thinking and unnecessary conflict,” said Millard. “What’s expressly forbidden are closed loops, in which only one type of peculiar is allowed to live and all others are banned.”
“All due respect,” said Elmer, “but there aren’t many ymbrynes around anymore. Their codes don’t hold much water.”
“But why aren’t there ymbrynes around?” asked Bronwyn. “No one’s been able to explain what happened to them, and it’s really starting to wind me up.”
“It’s just how it’s always been, for as long as any of us can remember,” Reggie said.
“Some of us remember,” said a voice from behind us.
I turned to see the old lady with the eyepatch hobbling toward the table. “You all started without me, I see.”
“Sorry, Miss Annie,” said Fern.
“No respect for your elders,” Miss Annie muttered, but it was clear, as the diviners all stood up from the table to greet her, that she commanded a great deal of respect. We followed their example and stood up, too. Fern darted out and helped Miss Annie to the table, where a seat right at the head had been reserved, and when she reached it she gripped the edge and lowered herself slowly into the chair. Only then did the rest of us sit down again.
“You want to know how things got the way they are.” Her voice had such grit and gravitas, it sounded like it was bubbling up from the depths of a muddy river. “What happened to our ymbrynes.” Miss Annie folded her hands on the table. A hush fell over the group. “They used to be the heart of our society, just like they are yours. The seeds of their downfall were planted a long time back. Back when the British and French and Spanish and native peoples were still fighting over who owned this country. Before it had occurred to anybody to fight over whether or not people should own one another.”
“Miss Annie’s old as the hills,” Fern whispered. “She was probably there.”
“I’m one hundred and sixty-three, give or take,” Miss Annie said, “and still got ears that work, Fern Mayo.”
Fern stared into her potatoes. “Yes, Miss Annie.”
“Some of you aren’t from here”—Miss Annie was looking at my friends—“so maybe you don’t know. But this nation was built with the stolen labor of black people and on the stolen land of native people. A century and a half ago, the southern part of this country was, by itself, one of the richest places in the whole world, and the vast bulk of that wealth was held not in cotton nor gold nor oil, but in the form of enslaved human beings.”
She paused to let her words sink in. Emma looked ill. Bronwyn and Enoch were silent, eyes downcast. I tried to wrap my mind around it. This vast, institutionalized evil, unfathomable in scale, swallowing up one generation after the next. Grandparents and parents and children and children and children. It was unimaginable, overwhelming.
After a moment, Miss Annie went on. “All that money and all that wealth depended on one thing: the ability of one kind of people to subdue and control another kind. So think about what happens when you introduce peculiarness into a system like that.”
“It raises hell,” said Elmer.
“And scares the life out of the people in control,” said Miss Annie. “Imagine. A person slaves all day chopping cotton. That is their life, and their life sentence. Then, one afternoon, from out of nowhere, this person—a young girl—manifests a peculiarness. And now, she can fly.” As she said it, Miss Annie’s eyes rose above the table and her hands spread out wide, and the image was suddenly so clear in my head that I had to wonder if she was describing her own experience. Miss Annie’s gaze fell to Bronwyn. “What do you do if you’re that girl?”
“I fly away,” said Bronwyn. “No—I wait until nighttime, then use my power to help everyone else escape, and then fly away.”
“And what if there was one who could turn day into night? Or a man into a donkey?”
“I’d make it midnight at noon,” said June. “And turn the overseer into an ass.”
“So you see why they were frightened of us,” said Miss Annie, her hands settling back onto the table, her voice lowering. “Our numbers were always small. Peculiarness has always been rare. But they were so terrified of even those few that they paid fortune-tellers and quack doctors and exorcists to try and tell us apart from the normals. They invented lies and folk stories about how peculiars were the spawn of Satan himself. Tried to get us to turn one another in. They’d kill you if you even knew a peculiar. If you even said the word peculiar! And the ones they were most frightened of?”
“Our ymbrynes,” said Paul.
“That’s right,” said Miss Annie. “Our ymbrynes. The ones who made our places of refuge. The places no normal could find, or get into. That made it possible for us to survive. They hated the ymbrynes worse than anything.”
“So these normals knew about ymbrynes?” Emma said. “They knew what they were?”
“They made it their business to know,” said Miss Annie. “Because it was their business. Peculiarness threatened their economy, their way of life, the bottom line of the whole wicked establishment, so the slaveowners plotted against us in ways that may not have occurred to normals in other parts of the world. They formed a secret organization devoted to rooting us out, destroying our loops, but especially to killing our ymbrynes. They were ruthless, tireless, obsessed. So much so that their organization continued to exist even after the Confederacy died, even after Reconstruction ended. And it took a toll on us. When I was growing up in the 1860s, we never had enough ymbrynes. They were always spread thin. Always in danger. We’d have one ymbryne to maintain four or five loops, and you’d hardly ever see her. And then one day it seemed like there were none. Instead, we had demi-ymbrynes and loop-keepers—functionaries and mercenaries, not leaders—and in the absence of ymbrynely influence, peculiars in this country gradually became divided and distrustful of one another.”
Something occurred to me, a flash memory of the diner we’d stopped at in 1965, and I asked, “Were loops segregated back then? By race?”
“Of course they were,” said Miss Annie. “Just because folks were peculiar didn’t mean they weren’t racist. Our loops weren’t some kind of utopia. In a lot of ways they were just a reflection of the society outside them.”
“But they’re not segregated anymore,” said Bronwyn, her eyes flicking to Hawley, the white boy wearing headphones down at the other end of the table, and the older white girl across from him.
“It took a good long time to integrate,” said Miss Annie. “But slowly, we did.”
“Hollowgast don’t care what color you are,” said Elmer. “They just want your soul. That helped bring us all together.”
“What about loops in other parts of the country?” said Enoch. “Do they have ymbrynes?”
“Ymbrynes down south got the first of it and the worst of it,” said Elmer. “But gradually, ymbrynes all over the nation disappeared.”
“Every single one?” said Bronwyn. “There are none left at all?”
“I’ve heard there are still a few,” said Miss Annie. “Some who managed to hide. But they don’t have anything like the power or influence they used to.”
“What about Native Americans?” Millard asked. “Did they have loops?”
“They did. But not many, because by and large they weren’t afraid of peculiarness, and their peculiars weren’t persecuted. Not by their own people, anyway.”
“That brings us to the twentieth century, which I can speak to,” Elmer said. “The Organization started fading away, mainly because there weren’t many ymbrynes left to kill. Normals began to forget us. Instead the loops began fighting one another. For territory, influence, resources.”
“It’s something the ymbrynes would never have allowed to happen,” said Alene.
“We heard a bit about what you folks were going through in Europe with the hollowgast,” said Elmer, “but the monsters mostly kept to your side of the pond. That all changed in the late fifties, when the wights and hollows came in with a vengeance. That put a stop to most of the inter-clan battles, but we could hardly leave our loops for fear of being eaten by these damned shadow monsters.”
“That’s when my grandfather and H started fighting them,” I said.
“Right,” said Elmer.
“So the normals in America,” said Bronwyn. “Do they still know about us?”
“No,” said June. “They haven’t for a long time. And it wasn’t many people who knew about us, even back in the 1800s.”
“No, no, no, Junie, that’s wrong,” Miss Annie said, shaking her head vigorously. “That’s just what they want you to think. Mark my words, there are those who still know. There are still normals who understand our power, who are frightened of us, who seek to control us.”
“What on earth are they frightened of?” asked June.
“Of an idea,” said Miss Annie. “The idea of us peculiars as anything other than divided up and scared of one another. The power that a united peculiardom could wield. It’s as frightening to them today as it was back in the day.” She nodded with a sharp finality, let out a breath, and picked up her fork. “Now if you’ll excuse me. You all have finished eating, but I haven’t taken a single bite.”
Everyone waited for Miss Annie to clear her plate before leaving the table, and then we began to clean up. It was obvious to me that Miss Annie was the one I was supposed to give the package to, so when she got up to leave I offered to help her get to wherever she was heading.
She told me she was going back to her house. I offered her my arm. After the short walk to her house, I gave her the package, which was just big enough to fit in my pocket. She seemed to be expecting it.
“You’re not going to open it?” I asked.
“I know what it is and who it’s from,” she said. “Help me up the stairs.”
We climbed the three steps to her porch, her back at nearly a ninety-degree angle, and when we reached the top she said, “Hold on a moment,” and disappeared into her house.
A few seconds later she returned and put something in my hand.
“He asked me to give you this.”
In my palm she’d placed an old, worn matchbook.
“What’s this?”
“Read it and see.”
On one side was an address—a town in North Carolina—and as if that weren’t straightforward enough, the other side read, It’s SMART to stop here . . . you get MORE for your money!
I tucked it into my pocket.
“When you see him, tell him thank you,” she said. “And then tell him to come here his damn self next time, so I can see his handsome face again. He is missed.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t give up on him. He can be frustrating and pigheaded and a pain in the rear end. But don’t let him convince you he doesn’t need help. He’s been carrying a lot of weight for a lot of years, and he needs you. He needs you all.”
I nodded solemnly and raised my hand to her, and she went inside and shut the door.
I went back to gather my friends. I saw Emma talking close with June and strode across the grass toward them. Before they noticed me, June seemed to be explaining something that didn’t please Emma, and Emma was standing with her arms crossed. Her face was drawn and serious. When she saw me, her expression blanked, and she said a quick goodbye to June and ran to meet me.
“What was that about?” I asked.
“Just trading darkroom tips. Did you know she printed most of the photos in that album herself?”
It was clearly a lie, and it had come to her so quickly that I was taken by surprise.
“Then why do you look upset?” I asked.
“I’m not.”
“You were asking her about the girl. The one Abe traveled with sometimes.”
“No,” said Emma. “I don’t care about that.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
Her eyes cut away. “Quit giving me the third degree, will you? Here come Bronwyn and Enoch.”
Millard was with them, too—he had put on clothes and was easy to spot—and June and Fern and Paul, with whom they’d all made fast friends.
“We’ll talk about this later,” I said.