Unremembered

Unremembered

The past never forgets. It only waits.

Chapter 1: The Lights Beyond the Field

The cold came down out of the hills on the third Thursday of October like an open cellar door, sour and sudden, freezing the marigolds in Mrs. Finch's flowerbeds until their orange heads dropped into the dirt like rusted iron bolts.

It was not the honest cold of a Bellwether autumn, which arrived slowly with the smell of wet sweetgum leaves and woodsmoke from the chimney sweeps down by the river. This was an interior chill, the sort that seeped through closed sash windows and settled along the baseboards like spilled tallow. In the narrow upstairs bedroom of the Vesper house, Marnie woke at twelve minutes past three with her teeth chattering against her tongue and the distinct, prickling certainty that something heavy had settled upon the chest of the house.

She lay still for several seconds beneath four layers of wool blankets that smelled faintly of moth crystals and dry rot. Above her, on the low ceiling, the water stain that had been there since her seventh year—the shape of a bruised, stooping shoulder—seemed darker than usual, glistening with a thin sweat of condensation.

From the hallway came the floorboard groan that she knew better than the rhythm of her own breathing.

It was the third board past the linen press, the one with the sheared nail head that clicked whenever a heel came down upon its left corner. A second later came the scrape of bare skin against painted pine: the hem of pajama pants trailing across the grain.

"Andrew," she whispered.

The word barely made a dent in the room's freezing air. It hung there, a gray puff of vapor that dissolved against the window glass.

Marnie threw back the quilts. The cold hit her legs like river water, sharp enough to tighten the skin over her shins. She did not bother with her slippers; she had learned during the winter after their mother vanished that slippers made too much noise, that soft soles were clumsy when you had to move fast through a house that seemed to rearrange its furniture in the dark.

She pushed her bedroom door open. The hallway was a corridor of bruised shadow. The runner rug—a braided oval of faded cranberry and green wool—lay straight and stiff between the four doors of the upper floor: her room, the linen closet, the locked room that had belonged to Ruby Vesper, and Andrew's room at the end by the stairs.

Andrew's door stood wide.

Inside, the white iron bedstead was stripped of its counterpane. The mattress, tufted with coarse ticking that pricked through thin sheets, was empty, its center holding only the shallow, cooling indentation of a twelve-year-old boy's spine. The air in his room was even colder than the hallway, smelling sharply of wet ditch grass and the ozone tang that comes before a transformer blows on the county line.

Marnie moved down the hallway without looking at the locked door between them. She never looked at it if she could help it, especially not past midnight, when the brass skeleton keyhole seemed to watch the hallway like a cataract-clouded eye. But as she passed, her sleeve brushed the doorframe, and she heard—or felt, through the soles of her feet in the floor timber—the faint, rhythmic vibration of the old mantel clock inside that had supposedly run down its spring the night Ruby left.

Tick. Tick. Scrape.

She hurried past.

At the head of the stairs, the downstairs darkness was deeper, smelling of cold grease from the skillet on the stove, damp wallpaper paste, and the bitter dregs of chicory coffee their father used to brew before he stopped coming home from the quarry. Down there, the front door of the house stood three inches ajar.

A wedge of silver-gray fog lay across the entryway floorboards, flat and motionless, like a fallen mirror.

"Andrew," she called again, keeping her voice low, hushed beneath the house's creaking silence. "Andrew, stop. Come back inside. It's freezing."

No answer came from the entryway. Only the sound of the fog—a wet, muffled hush that swallowed the distant barking of a dog over on Mill Street.

Marnie took the stairs two at a time, her bare heels slapping the cold pine treads. In the vestibule, the draft cut through her thin cotton nightshirt. On the coat rack, her mother's old corduroy jacket, missing three horn buttons, swayed slightly on its peg, though there was no breeze entering the house—only that flat, creeping cold.

She reached the threshold and stepped out onto the porch.

The yard was a rectangle of dead crabgrass that sloped down toward the gravel access road, bordered on the west by the high, sagging chain-link fence of the old municipal drainage easement. Beyond the easement lay forty acres of scrub oak, sumac, and the weed-choked flats of the fairgrounds that had sat abandoned since the town council shuttered the textile mill in the spring of Marnie's tenth year.

In the center of the lawn stood Andrew.

He wore only his gray flannel pajamas, the bottoms frayed and damp where they dragged through the frosted grass. His arms hung loose at his sides, knuckles turned outward, and his head was tilted back at an unnatural angle, his chin pointing toward the sky above the mill's black, saw-toothed roofline.

He was not shivering. That was the first thing that made the skin at the nape of Marnie's neck contract—the boy was barefoot in grass that crunched underfoot with early rime, but his shoulders were as rigid and steady as cedar posts.

"Andrew," she said, stepping off the porch. The frost bit the soles of her feet, sharp needles of ice driving into her arches. "Andrew, look at me."

He did not turn. His mouth was open, his lower lip shiny in the moonlight, and from his throat came a low, singsong murmur, rhythmic and breathless, like water running over rounded stones.

"...over the brier, under the thorn,

black the kettle and red the horn,

three for a penny and five for the blind,

leave what you carry and take what you find..."

The words hit Marnie with the dull, sick impact of a blow to the solar plexus. It was the rhyme Ruby used to sing while paring apples at the kitchen table, using the short-bladed paring knife with the split wooden handle, letting the peelings drop in a single, unbroken green ribbon into her lap. It was not a rhyme found in any schoolbook in Bellwether. It was something Ruby had brought with her from the unincorporated hollows down along the Blackwood Creek, a cadence meant to keep children quiet while the adults talked in the yard after sundown.

"Andrew, don't," Marnie said, reaching him and planting her hands on his narrow shoulders.

His flannel shirt was damp, heavy with mist, but his skin beneath the cloth was burning hot—a dry, unnatural heat that scorched through the cotton into her palms. When she tried to turn him toward the house, his body resisted with the impossible, rooted weight of an iron bollard.

"Andrew, wake up. It's Marnie. Look at me."

She pulled him harder, wrenching his torso half an inch to the left.

His eyes were wide open, the pupils dilated so completely that the pale hazel of his irises was reduced to a hairline ring of muddy green. They were fixed not on the dark silhouette of the mill, but on the fairgrounds beyond it.

And in the fairgrounds, where there had been nothing at sunset except ironweed, rusted oil drums, and the rotting concrete foundations of the old cattle barns, there were lights.

Marnie stopped pulling. Her hands remained glued to her brother's hot shoulders, her breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches that burned her windpipe.

They were not the halogen lights of the county utility trucks, nor the sickly yellow glare of the security lamps mounted to the mill's brick chimney. They were amber, bruised plum, and a dull, oxidized copper green—hundreds of teardrop-shaped incandescent bulbs strung along sagging guy wires that stretched between high, skeletal poles she had never seen before.

Beneath the lights, the darkness was crowded with impossible geometry. High-peaked canvas pavilions, their stripes stained the color of dried liver and tallow, rose like sudden hills out of the brambles. Between them, narrow alleys of midway stalls were jammed together so tightly that their overhanging awnings seemed to touch, creating a low, tunneled roof through which the amber glow stuttered like gaslight.

There had been no trucks.

Marnie had sat on the front porch until ten o'clock finishing her algebra homework beneath the yellow porch light. The gravel road had been empty. The rail spur that ran along the creek had been torn up five years ago, its ties left to rot in the weeds. To bring an operation of that scale into Bellwether would have required a convoy of flatbeds, a dozen diesel generators, crews shouting over the rumble of winches, the clatter of steel pins driven into the hard clay by sledgehammers.

Yet there was no sound.

None at all.

No diesel thrum. No music from a pipe organ. No carnival caller rattling his tin cup against a counter. There was only the wet, low hiss of the autumn fog moving through the sumac, and the dry, rhythmic ticking of Andrew's nursery rhyme slipping between his teeth like dry grain through an auger.

And then, rising above the highest canvas ridge beside the mill's brick chimney, the Ferris wheel began to turn.

It was immense—larger than any portable wheel that had ever visited the county fair in the days before the mill closed. Its rusted steel lattice was painted the dark, matte red of barn primer, and from its spokes hung sixteen open gondolas, each shaped like an iron cradle.

It turned counterclockwise, against the wind that wasn't blowing.

It moved with a sickening, liquid smoothness, without the groan of bearings or the squeal of brake shoes, revolving against the low, starless sky like a clock face stripped of its numerals. In the highest gondola, as it tipped over the apex and began its descent toward the dark, Marnie thought she saw the silhouette of a high-crowned hat, motionless, looking down over the valley.

"Andrew," she choked out, her fingers digging so violently into his collarbones that the boy let out a small, wet gasp. "Inside. Now."

The boy's knees suddenly buckled. The rigid tension went out of his frame all at once, as if a cord had been severed between his neck and his heels. He collapsed against her, his forehead striking her sternum with the weight of a sack of wet flour. His eyes rolled upward into his lids, fluttering against the silver light, and his lips went slack, the rhyme dying into a soft, wheezing snore.

Marnie dragged him backward across the frosted yard, her bare heels leaving dark, jagged ruts in the rime. She did not take her eyes off the midway lights. Even as she hauled his limp, dead-weight body up the three wooden steps of the porch, she watched the red wheel complete its silent circle, its empty gondolas rocking gently in the still air, like cradles waiting for something small enough to fit inside.

She did not sleep.

She laid Andrew on the horsehair sofa in the parlor and piled four quilts over him, tucking the edges beneath his shoulders until he was swaddled like an infant. His breathing was deep, rattling slightly in his bronchial tubes, his face slick with the cooling perspiration of a fever that had broken the moment his head crossed the threshold.

Marnie pulled the parlor armchair to the front window, drew back the yellowed lace curtain with one finger, and sat with her knees pulled up against her ribs.

The lights beyond the mill did not go out. They did not flicker with the uneven power surges common to Bellwether's rural grid. They burned with a dull, unwavering intensity, amber and plum, staining the belly of the low clouds until the entire western horizon looked like a healing contusion.

Every forty seconds, the top of the red wheel cut through the amber mist, dipped downward into the shadow of the mill's boiler room, and vanished behind the roofline before reemerging on its upward climb.

Around four in the morning, she went into the kitchen to put the kettle on the gas ring.

The kitchen was the coldest room in the house. It sat on the northwest corner, over the uninsulated crawl space where the old cistern lay capped with concrete. On the wall beside the refrigerator, the telephone—a heavy, black rotary unit mounted to the beadboard by her grandfather—hung silent.

Beside the phone was the small, cork bulletin board where Ruby used to pin dry-cleaning slips, receipts from the feed store, and school lunch menus. Most of the paper had yellowed until it was brittle as dried skin, the ink fading into illegible brown tracks. But pinned in the center, held by a brass thumbtack that had rusted into the cork, was a single index card with three lines written in Ruby's round, forward-slanting hand:

Dr. Annerley – 442-J

Deputy Crowe (Home) – 118-R

Kettle on at six. Do not let the boy out after the streetlamps.

Marnie touched the bottom edge of the card. The paper felt cold and curiously greasy, as though it had been rubbed with paraffin.

Seven years.

Seven years since the November morning Ruby had walked down the front steps wearing her dark wool coat, carrying nothing but a wicker sewing basket with a broken latch, and turned left toward the mill instead of right toward the grocery store. There had been no tracks in the light snow that had fallen before dawn. Deputy Crowe had walked the fence line along the drainage easement three times with two men from the fire brigade, poking long ash poles into the retention ponds, their boots breaking the thin crust of ice with loud, hollow snaps.

They had found nothing. Not a button, not a bobbin of thread from the basket.

At the end of the second week, Crowe had sat at this very kitchen table, his uniform jacket unbuttoned to reveal his sweat-stained undershirt, his service revolver resting heavy and black on his thigh, and told Marnie's father that sometimes women from the hollows simply took a notion. That the valley was narrow, the work at the mill was uncertain, and people who wanted to be lost in the hills stayed lost until they were ready to be found.

Her father had nodded. He had not argued. He had merely looked down at his own thick, oil-stained thumbs and asked Crowe if he wanted another cup of coffee.

Two years later, her father had gone down to the quarry in his truck and simply failed to turn the ignition key when the shift ended at four, sitting behind the wheel with the windows rolled up until the night watchman tapped on the glass with a heavy flashlight. He had left for Ohio the following Tuesday, sending back forty dollars in a money order every second Friday, mailed from a different post office box between Akron and Youngstown, until the letters stopped altogether in the spring of Andrew's ninth year.

The kettle began to whistle.

It was not a clean, sharp sound, but a choked, bubbling hiss. Marnie lifted it off the burner before the noise could carry into the parlor. She poured the boiling water over an old tea bag in a chipped mug with a picture of the state capitol on the side.

As she brought the mug to her lips, she looked out the small window above the sink.

The window faced the Finch house, sixty yards away across the gravel drive.

The Finches were an old couple who had raised three sons in that drafty, four-room bungalow, all of whom had moved away to the stamping plants in Indianapolis, leaving behind only nine-year-old Lenny, the son of the youngest boy who had died in a motorcycle wreck on Highway 9. Lenny was a quiet child with large, watery gray eyes and a habit of dragging a red plastic wagon loaded with river rocks up and down the road until the axle squeaked like a trapped sparrow.

In the second-story window of the Finch house—Lenny's room, beneath the low eave—a light was burning.

It was not the warm yellow of a bedside lamp. It was a pale, shifting blue, the color of a television screen left on a dead channel, flickering in steady, rhythmic intervals against the drawn white roller shade.

As Marnie watched, a shadow appeared behind the shade.

It was too tall for Lenny, too narrow for his grandfather. It was a thin, elongated shape that seemed to stoop, its head nearly brushing the sloped ceiling, its long arms hanging down past its knees in the same loose, dead-weight posture Andrew had held in the yard.

The shadow moved once—a slow, sweeping bow toward the windowpane—and then the blue light clicked off.

The house went dark.

A moment later, from somewhere down the road toward the mill, came the first crow of a rooster, thin and broken, sounding more like a child crying out from a bad dream than a herald of the sun.

By seven in the morning, the fog had not lifted; it had merely thickened, turning the color of curdled milk and sinking into the ditches along the road.

Marnie stood on the front porch with a denim jacket thrown over her nightshirt, her arms crossed tight against her chest. Her feet were shoved into her father's old rubber work boots, three sizes too large, the tops flapping against her calves with every shift of her weight.

Down the road, at the edge of the Finch driveway, three people were standing beside an idling county cruiser.

Deputy Owen Crowe stood with his thumbs hooked into his leather duty belt, his sheepskin-lined jacket open despite the freezing mist that beaded on the wool collar. His face was the color of unbaked dough, the skin under his jowls gray and slack with the heavy, sour exhaustion of a man who had spent thirty years watching the same three square miles of bottomland slowly rot into scrub.

Beside him stood Mrs. Finch.

She was wearing a quilted housecoat over her clothes, her hair pinned up in metal curlers that caught the dull morning light like barbed wire. She was not crying. Her hands were tucked deep into her pockets, her small, sharp chin tucked into the collar of her robe, her eyes fixed on the muddy gravel between Crowe's boots.

Mr. Finch was not there. He was sixty-eight and half-blind from forty years of grinding castings at the foundry, and Marnie could see his pale, square face pressed against the glass of the front parlor window, motionless as a portrait behind dusty glass.

Marnie walked down the steps. The gravel on the road was frozen together in clumps that cracked under her heavy boots like dry bones.

As she approached the cruiser, the exhaust pipe spat a wet, rhythmic pulse of blue-gray smoke into the ditch. The radio in the front seat was squawking with static—a low, rhythmic hash of interference that sounded less like a dispatcher's voice and more like a needle dragging through the lead-out groove of an old phonograph record.

"...told him twice about that latch on the screen," Mrs. Finch was saying. Her voice was flat, thin, and brittle as dried grass. It carried no terror, no panic—only that hard, defensive irritation that Bellwether people used when their pipes burst or their roofs leaked during harvest. "The boy's got no sense about latches. He gets an idea in his head about his cousin's place down in Oakhaven and he just takes off down the rail spur. He's done it before. You remember two summers back, Owen."

Crowe did not look at her. He was staring past her shoulder, his eyes fixed on the black brick stack of the mill.

"I remember," Crowe said. His voice was thick with phlegm. He cleared his throat, spat a brown glob of tobacco into the ditch, and wiped his mouth with the back of his thumb. "He went down to his aunt's place by the creek."

"That's right," Mrs. Finch said quickly. Too quickly. The words tumbled out of her mouth like dry beans from a torn sack. "He's got his little coat with the yellow hood. He took his breakfast money off the dresser. Four quarters and two dimes. A boy doesn't take his money if he isn't going somewhere on purpose."

"No," Crowe agreed. "He wouldn't."

"He'll be down in Oakhaven before noon," she continued, her hands twisting inside the pockets of her robe, her knuckles visible as sharp white knots through the thin floral print. "His aunt will call from the general store when the bus comes through. There's no call to go putting it on the county wire. You know how people talk. They start making up stories about the road, about the drainage ditch. We don't need that sort of talk around here."

Marnie stopped five feet away, near the rear bumper of the cruiser.

"Deputy Crowe," she said.

Crowe's head jerked slightly. He did not turn his whole body—only his neck, his small, dark eyes shifting toward her with an expression that was almost vicious in its warning. It was the look he had given the town council three years ago when they asked about the water tests in the south retention pond: a flat, hard refusal to be engaged.

"Marnie," he said. "You ought to be inside. Your brother awake?"

"He was outside last night," she said, keeping her voice level, though her fingers were digging into the denim of her jacket pockets until the seams strained. "At three in the morning. He was sleepwalking toward the fairgrounds."

Mrs. Finch didn't move. She didn't turn her head, but the skin around her mouth tightened until her lips disappeared into two thin, bloodless lines.

"Andrew's always had the night terrors," Crowe said smoothly, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, official cadence he used for traffic citations and livestock complaints. "Just like your mother's people. The Vespers always were light sleepers. Nothing new in that."

"There's a carnival in the scrub field," Marnie said.

She pointed past the Finch roofline, toward the saw-toothed silhouette of the mill.

In the daylight, the fairgrounds looked even less real than they had under the amber lights. The tents were there, but their colors were muted by the fog—the canvas was not red and white, but the yellow-gray of old teeth, stained with long, vertical water streaks that ran from the peaks to the valances like grease. The Ferris wheel stood tall and crooked against the slate sky, its red paint peeling in long, scabby curls that hung down from the girders like strips of dried skin.

And it was still turning.

Slowly. Silently. Without an engine running, without a plume of steam from a tractor boiler, without a single human figure visible along the midway stalls beneath it.

Crowe didn't look at the wheel. He looked at Marnie's boots.

"It's just a traveling outfit," he said. His tone was dismissive, but there was a tremor in the muscle along his jawline, a small, involuntary twitch that pulled the corner of his left eye downward. "Came in late from the northern circuit. They got a permit through the county seat over in Greentown."

"There weren't any trucks," Marnie said. "I was awake until four. There wasn't a single motor on the road."

"You were asleep, girl," Crowe said, his voice dropping an octave, losing its official softness, becoming hard and flat as a slate shingle. "People sleep through things all the time. You think you're awake, but you're dreaming. You've been doing that since you were ten years old. Now get back in the house and see to your brother. Mrs. Finch and I have business to settle."

"Lenny's bedroom window was open," Marnie said, stepping closer, looking directly at the old woman. "I saw a light in his room at four in the morning. A blue light."

Mrs. Finch turned on her then with a sudden, jerky movement that made the curlers in her hair click like castanets. Her face was gray, the skin over her cheekbones drawn so tight that her eyes seemed sunken into two dark, bruised sockets.

"You keep your mouth shut, Marnie Vesper," the old woman hissed, her voice trembling with a rage that had no bottom to it—a rage born of pure, suffocating panic. "You keep your mouth shut about my house. You're just like your mother. Always seeing things in the bushes. Always telling lies to get people stirred up. Ruby was a liar, and she walked off because she couldn't face what she was, and you're heading down the same ditch. Lenny is in Oakhaven. He's with his Aunt Clara. He's having his breakfast."

She turned her back on Marnie and walked toward her front porch, her slippers slapping against the wet gravel with a wet, flat clop-clop-clop. She did not look at the windows of her own house. She went inside and pulled the heavy wooden door shut behind her with a sound that echoed across the empty yard like a gunshot.

Crowe remained standing by the cruiser.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a silver tin of tobacco, and placed a fresh pinch behind his lower lip with slow, deliberate precision. The radio in the front seat let out another burst of hash—a three-toned warble that sounded like an organ pipe choking on water.

"You're making a nuisance of yourself, Marnie," he said quietly, without looking at her. "Your father isn't here to keep you out of the ditches. Dr. Annerley's been talking about whether you and Andrew need to be looked after by the county. You wouldn't want the state people coming down here with their clipboards, asking about why Andrew's out in the frost without his trousers."

"Is that a threat, Deputy?"

Crowe looked up then. His small eyes were bloodshot, the yellow whites webbed with broken vessels. For a fraction of a second, Marnie saw something behind his gaze that wasn't anger or authority—it was a deep, sickening exhaustion, the look of a man who had been holding a heavy timber against a cellar door for twenty years and felt the wood beginning to split beneath his palms.

"It's a fact," Crowe whispered. "Go home. Lock your screen door. And keep that boy away from the fence line."

He got into the cruiser, pulled the door shut with a solid, heavy thud, and put the car in reverse. The tires spun briefly in the wet gravel, throwing a spray of gray mud into the weeds, before the car backed down the drive, turned onto the asphalt of Mill Street, and disappeared into the fog toward the center of town.

Marnie did not go back inside the house right away.

Instead, she walked down the perimeter of the access road toward the chain-link fence that marked the drainage easement.

The air was getting colder, not warmer, as the morning progressed. The sun was nothing more than a pale, greasy smear behind the low clouds, casting no shadows, giving no heat. The grass along the fence line was stiff with rime, the stalks of wild chicory and goldenrod snapping like dry twigs as her boots brushed against them.

She reached the corner where the fence turned south toward the mill.

Here, the ground dipped into a shallow gully where the town's storm runoff collected before draining through an iron culvert beneath the old rail spur. The ditch was full of black, rotting leaves from last November, floating on three inches of stagnant, gray water that smelled of iron filings and old wet wool.

Across the ditch, not thirty feet away, the fairground began.

Up close, the carnival was even more grotesque in its silence. There were no paths between the tents, only trampled mud that had frozen into ridges sharp enough to cut leather. The midway stalls were built from weathered gray timber that looked as though it had been salvaged from the interior of the old mill after the fire—the boards were marked with the circular saw marks of nineteenth-century timber mills and bore faint, chalked numbers that had never been washed away.

On the counter of the nearest booth—a ring-toss game with green-painted bottles arranged in a pyramid—something was sitting on the grease-stained oilcloth.

It was a small, red plastic wagon with four white wheels.

The wagon was half-full of smooth, gray river stones.

Beside it, laid out neatly on the counter as if waiting for a customer to claim them, were four silver quarters and two dimes, their faces turned upward, catching the dead gray light of the sky like fish scales.

Marnie felt the breath leave her lungs in a long, shuddering gasp.

She took one step closer to the ditch, her boot sinking into the soft, rotting leaves at the edge of the water.

"Lenny?" she called.

The name sounded absurd in the vast, dead silence of the flats. It didn't carry. It hit the side of the nearest canvas tent and dropped into the mud like a dead bird.

From inside the tent—a low, square pavilion of dark plum canvas with its flaps tied shut with hemp cords—came a sound.

It was not a voice.

It was the dry, rhythmic clicking of a paring knife against a wooden cutting board.

Tock. Tock. Tock.

A steady, domestic cadence. The sound of someone sitting at a table in the morning, peeling fruit, letting the skin fall in a single, unbroken ribbon into their apron.

And then, from high above her head, the Ferris wheel let out its first sound since it had appeared out of the dark.

It was not a screech of rust or the rumble of a motor. It was a long, low, musical vibration that hummed through the steel girders, like the lowest bass note of a cathedral organ played through two miles of deep water—a sound so deep that it resonated in Marnie's teeth, in the bones of her pelvis, in the hollow behind her ears where her old childhood headaches always began.

The red wheel slowed its rotation.

One of the iron cradles—the fifth from the top, its paint peeled away to reveal the dark, pitted metal beneath—came to a halt directly above the gap between the tents, swinging slightly on its iron pins.

Inside the cradle, sitting upright on the narrow bench with his small hands folded neatly in his lap, was a figure wearing a dark blue coat with the hood pulled down over its face.

The coat was too large for the figure. Its sleeves were turned up twice at the cuffs to reveal small, pale wrists. Around its neck was a thin woolen scarf the color of dried mustard—the scarf that Ruby Vesper had knitted during the long winter before she disappeared, the one that had been missing from the cedar chest in the hallway since the morning the sheriff came with his ash poles.

The figure did not move. It did not look down.

It sat in the center of the iron cradle, perfectly still, as the red wheel gave another low, shuddering groan and began to turn once more, carrying the yellow scarf upward into the gray belly of the clouds.