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Sam wiped his eyes quickly so Mrs. Olson couldn’t see. He kissed Evie’s forehead and tucked the blanket up under her chin. He watched her for a few seconds more. Her eyelids twitched. She was sleeping, but her mind was active.
“I wish I knew what she was dreaming,” he said.
Shadow.
And light.
She was in the desert under a bloodred moon.
“It is going to happen soon,” Memphis’s mother said.
The King of Crows sat upon a tall throne fashioned from all manner of bones. Twisted inside this dreadful reliquary was Mabel. Her hands pushed out from between two rows of skulls as if reaching through the bars of a cage.
Miss Addie on the steps of a church. Her eyes widened. “There’s a fox in the henhouse.”
The Eye churned gold. The noise of it was like a dying man trying to breathe and scream at the same time.
James. His eyes were haunted, weary, as if he had lived a thousand lifetimes in a matter of seconds and saw nothing but that for an eternity.
Stop. This. Please. We are trapped inside a loop of time we are trapped we are trapped we are trapped!
Inky clouds snake-whipped the red sky. The mountaintops caught fire. The dead dotted the wasteland. They opened their mouths like radios and the song poured out:
“Pack up your troubles.
Pack up your troubles.
Pack up your troubles.
And smile
Smile
Smile.”
The song was warped and it was everywhere.
“This keeps happening,” they said, and crumbled to ash.
Evie felt their deaths inside. She screamed in pain.
The soldiers’ faces twisted in fresh agony.
James.
“There’s a fox in the henhouse!” Miss Addie shouted. “Everything is connected.”
The dead spoke their lament: “This keeps happening.”
The circle turned. She saw it happening again and again. Each time, the soldiers were sucked up through the portal and into the Eye.
Mabel crouched among the rotting leaves. “The world is a terrible place. It never learns.”
That isn’t true, Evie wanted to say, but her mouth was full of dirt.
The song started again. The phonograph a circle.
Pack up your troubles.
