“Everyone has a shadow side,” Dr. Jung corrected gently.
“How do we get him to stop and wake up?”
“The only way to correct the shadow is to become conscious of it. To accept it and to integrate it into the whole person. Perhaps your friend will find this solution on his own by exploring his dreams, for our dreams wish to wake us to some deeper meaning. All that is hidden eventually reveals itself, no matter how fervently we fight to keep it locked away.”
Theta thought about her dreams, of the snow and the horses, the burning village. And Roy. Always Roy. How hard she worked to keep her past in the past, where it couldn’t harm her. But now the head doctor was saying she couldn’t keep a lid on it forever. The uncomfortable itching in her palms had progressed to a burning sensation.
“Are you feeling well, Miss Knight?” Dr. Jung said, his brow furrowed. “You seem anxious.”
“It’s, um, awfully stuffy in here is all.”
“Actually, it’s a bit chilly,” Mabel said.
“I-I just need some air. We’ve already taken up too much of your time, Doctor. Thanks. You’ve been swell.”
Panicked, Theta sprang from her seat. As she did, a book fell from a shelf behind the psychiatrist, knocking over a candle. The flame lit a section of Dr. Jung’s coat sleeve, but the psychiatrist snuffed it out before it could truly catch.
“Gee, I’m awful sorry,” Theta said, horrified. “I shouldn’t’ve jumped up so quick.” She tried to conjure cool thoughts—ice cream, winter wind, snow. No. Not snow.
“All fine,” Dr. Jung said, examining his scorched sleeve. He retrieved the book from the spot on the rug where it had landed, spine up, pages fanned, and examined the page. “Hmm. Curious, indeed. Didn’t you say you felt too warm, Miss Knight?”
“Yes,” Theta whispered.
“What is it?” Evie asked.
“A meaningful coincidence. A powerful symbol from the collective unconscious.” Dr. Jung held the book open for them to a drawing of a grand bird consumed by fire. “The Phoenix rising from the flames.”
The book was open to page number one hundred forty-four.
Far below the surface of the city, Vernon “Big Vern” Bishop and his men tried to keep warm while they waited for the bootlegger who’d hired them to store a shipment of hooch. The job was simple: Canadian whiskey came in by boat. Before the boat docked, Vernon and his men rowed out, picked up the barrels, rowed back, and hauled the booze into the cavernous old stone tunnels that snaked below the Brooklyn Bridge. For his crew, Vernon had chosen Leon, a big Jamaican who did a little amateur boxing now and then, and a Cuban named Tony whose English was limited, but Vernon got on with the Cubans okay because his wife had come from Puerto Rico and spoke Spanish. From her, Vernon had picked up words and phrases here and there, enough to make small talk.
It was very dark here. The only light came from the lamp on Vernon’s digger’s helmet, Leon’s lantern, and the flashlight Tony gripped tightly.
“¿Cuánto tiempo más?” Tony asked, pacing to keep warm.
Vernon shrugged. “Till the boss man comes.”
“Don’t like it here,” Leon grumbled, his breath coming out in smoky puffs that evaporated in the lantern light.
Vernon was comfortable in the tunnels. As a sandhog, he’d built some of them. That was dangerous work—deep underground, where a man could only dig a certain number of hours a day or else the pressure could get him. But he took pride in knowing that he was responsible for digging out to make way for the city’s future—the subways, bridges, and tunnels of tomorrow.
“Telling you, it doesn’t feel right,” Leon said.
“Don’t be bringing that island superstition into it,” Vernon chided, borrowing a phrase from his cousin Clyde.
Clyde had served in the all-black 92nd Division during the big war. After it was over, he walked into Harlem decorated and proud, despite the fact that he’d lost a leg to a bullet wound gone to rot. They’d smoked cigars and rolled craps in the back of Junior Jackson’s grocery till the wee hours, laughing and drinking whiskey, listening to two fellas cutting each other on stride piano. But Clyde looked haunted. Later, under the yellow-tinged moon, he’d said, “I saw things in that war that a man shouldn’t ever have to see. Things that make you forget we’re human and not just a bunch of beasts crawling out of the sludge somewhere. And the damnedest part of it all is, I couldn’t for the life of me remember what we were fighting for in the first place. After a while, fighting just got to be habit.”
Five months later, Clyde had gone down to Georgia to visit relatives. He’d walked into town for a cold drink. The local folks hadn’t taken too kindly to Clyde wearing his uniform with its shiny medals and told him to strip it off. Clyde refused. “I fought for this country in this uniform. Lost a leg doing it, too. Got a right to wear it.”
The good folks of Georgia disagreed. They dragged him through town tied to the back of a truck, set him alight, then strung him up from the tallest tree. Somebody said you could hear his screams clear over to the next town. His family never even got his medals back.
Funny that Vernon remembered Clyde just now. For the past few nights, he’d dreamed about his long-gone cousin. In the dream, Clyde had no crutch, and his uniform was crisp and clean. He’d waved to Vernon from the front porch of a house with a garden in front and a fine peach tree in the yard, the very sort of place Vernon had dreamed of running himself. Beside Clyde was a pretty girl in an old-fashioned bridal gown and veil. “Dream with me…” she’d whispered in Vernon’s head.
He’d taken it as a sign that everything was going right, that this job for the bootlegger and the extra money might mean a piece of the pie for Vernon at last. But now something about the dream crawled under Big Vern’s skin like an itch he couldn’t scratch. He couldn’t say why.
Down the long cannon of tunnel, he heard a sound. The men jumped up, alert.
“That them?” Leon whispered.