The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page A

finally suffer. They always are.”
    Elijah laughed. “What, is that some kind of Chinese curse?”
    “No,” Ming Kai said, flicking the reins. “It is the truth of the world.”
    And off they went into the heart of America, in search of the wild mulberry. The curse preceded them, blown on the wind through space and time. One hundred years would come and go before it found Helen and Rachel McCallister, Elijah’s great-grandchildren, and Markus, the last of Ming Kai’s line. Generations would pass before they could be born into the world, but the curse would find them, nonetheless.

GHOSTS,
PART I
    G hosts were everywhere in Roam, but only two people could see them: Helen McCallister and Digby Chang. Digby Chang was the smallest man in Roam. He had a ruddy, pockmarked complexion and was completely hairless, head to toe. He looked like a sausage with legs. Some people thought he was a midget, but, as he would be the first to tell you, he wasn’t. Not that there was anything wrong with being a midget, but if you weren’t a midget, as he wasn’t, he felt it incumbent upon himself to clarify and elucidate the fact of the matter, which is that he was not a midget, but rather as close as a man could come to being a midget without actually being one. He was simply a very small man, and he never thought a thing about it.
    Digby ran the town bar, a bar he inherited from his father (a somewhat taller man of the same name), who had inherited it from his father and his father before him. In the beginning it wasn’t even a barat all, but just his great-grandfather Wei selling drinks from a bottle of potato vodka he had found on the side of the road as he was coming into town, a bottle of barely potable alcohol that had been accidentally dropped there or, more likely, thrown in anger: it tasted like piss. Wei dragged a half-dead log into what would become the main square, set the bottle on top of it, and in five minutes he had made the first real dollar in this town. In a sense, Digby’s family was one of the founding families of Roam—a kind of royalty, if such a thing were possible, or even desirable, out here in the middle of nowhere.
    People called it Digby’s, or Digby’s Bar, even though it had never had a proper name. Digby didn’t even call it a bar: he called it a tavern , because a tavern sounded like something magnificent and historical, whereas a bar was just a place where people went to drink. Beer, whiskey, even potato vodka—he had it all, though business had gotten so bad over the last few years that if someone came in for a glass of water that was okay, too. He even served ice cream to the kids, when there were any. He had a big tub of vanilla in the icebox, but it had been there so long it was starting to look like chocolate.
    Digby liked to say he had more ghosts in his tavern than he had customers, which used to be funny—until it started being true. Ghosts were his customers. He didn’t call them ghosts, though, because that word summoned up images of ghoulish night-visitors who stole the faces of children while they slept (that’s what his father used to tell him ghosts did), and Digby didn’t believe in that sort of thing. But there was no disputing it: most of his customers had passed away. Age, accident, disease, all those things life tended to throw at a person you either survived or you didn’t and when you didn’t you died and were buried and then—then? Apparently, this: revenants with no clear lines, gray, fading in and out of focus as you looked at them. They didn’t appear to be representatives of the afterlife so much as they were vestiges of this one, so Digby took to calling them either leftovers or old-timers — leftovers when they irritated him and old-timers when he was feeling warmly, the same way his dad called the Chinese Orientals when he liked them and chinks when he didn’t, and those of mixed race combos .
    At any rate, there was nothing to be done; Digby had adapted to