Foreverland Is Dead

voices when she’s falling asleep, like someone is right next to her, whispering in her ear. Did she imagine it?
    BANG .
    The front door.
    Miranda scurries out from under the counters and, getting down on her knees, taps the monitors awake. She cycles through the cameras…
    Sid is running alongside the garden, forcing his way through the dinner house front door. Mr. Williams trudges along the path Sid left in the snow, walking as fast as a shrinking old man can walk.
    Miranda punches a key.
    The dinner house interior flickers on one of the smaller monitors. The girls are gathered around the stove. One is leaning against the wall. Her face is agony.
    It can’t be.

58

    Sid’s mouth hangs open. A tooth is missing.
    Kat and Mad scramble to the corner, come up wielding broken table legs like crude swords. Each takes a side of the table, ready to cut him off. Roc stays put.
    He doesn’t come after them, instead acting more like a roadblock, letting the bitter chill steal warmth from the stove. Cyn chatters, looking for an extra club, something she can swing. Nothing’s within reach, not that she could grip it.
    Sid steps aside.
    The old man climbs the porch, limping inside.
    A ball of anger erupts in Cyn’s belly, burning through the fear and hypothermia, a hearth trapped inside, artificially warming her will. If only she had the strength to stand.
    He’s weathered, like the sky leached gray into his flesh. A withering leaf. A decaying soul.
    Sid closes the door behind him.
    Mr. Williams rubs his hands, surveys the room. His dead gaze falls on Cyn. “Your stupidity is my good fortune.”
    “I know who you are,” Cyn says.
    “Your moronic friends could not find their way back to the gate. You will take me there now.” He flicks his hand. “Pick her up.”
    Sid comes around Mad’s side of the table. The club glances off his forearm. He snatches her by the coat, slams her into the wall. The club clatters on the floor. Kat comes over the table, but Sid wields Mad like a shield.
    “Stop!” Cyn tries to shout. “Stop it!”
    Sid charges Kat, using Mad as a battering ram. Kat jumps on the table with a club.
    “Stop.” Mr. Williams raises his hand.
    Sid freezes like he pushed a button.
    “He killed her, Cyn!” Kat points at Mr. Williams without taking her eyes off of Sid. “He killed Jen!”
    Cyn sits up, but all the anger in the world can’t help her stand.
    “He took her out back and killed her, dragged her into the garden. I saw it. I saw her body.”
    Mad sobs quietly, the coat bunched around her face, hiding her tears.
    “This is a dream; she is not dead,” Mr. Williams says to Cyn. “You know that to be true now.”
    “She still suffered.”
    “And suffering will continue unless you take me to the gate !”
    Blood vessels emerge on the old man’s gray complexion. He paces at the front of the room.
    “I am out of patience, girls. Your suffering ends when you get me to the gate. I will leave this world and you’ll be relieved of your suffering.”
    “Kill me,” Cyn says. “I’m not taking you.”
    “There’s a problem with that, young lady. Death will not relieve you of suffering—you will simply be reborn in the dream to suffer again. You will forget, I will find you, and then here you’ll be in the cabin again. But you have a choice. Take me to the gate and you will never see me again. It’s your choice to suffer.”
    Cyn shakes her head. “Liar.”
    “ Use your head! ” He thumps his scalp with a single finger. “Why do you think there are so many marks on your wall? Our worlds were linked. You came to Foreverland, you interacted with the boys, but now Foreverland is dead and this godforsaken place cycles over and over and over. You wake up with no memories and I am sent back to the Nowhere, into the gray, lost until I can find my way back. I will not go back there, not again. This time it ends. I am leaving this world.”
    “Where will you go?”
    He stops pacing. They share a knowing glance. His body is dead. Where will he go?
    She knows.
    He’ll take one of their bodies. He’ll wake in the bunkhouse in Cyn’s body or Kat’s or Roc’s. Linda will be there and Thomas will ask him to remember how he got out and how the girls are doing…
    And they’ll have no idea.
    “Sid,” the old man says, “push her face against the stove.”
    “No!” Kat grabs the back of Mad’s coat. Sid lets go with one hand, pops her in the forehead. Kat grabs Mad with both arms, pulling