Chapter 3

I grabbed Chloe by the wrist and pulled her away from the crowd.

There were screams and sobs everywhere around us. The police were shouting for everyone to back up, and the firefighters stood around David's body looking completely lost.

I had to get Chloe to calm down.

"Come with me."

I pulled her past the police tape and around to a row of shipping containers behind the construction site.

Chloe slid down against one of the containers and sank to the ground, trembling all over.

I took off my jacket and draped it over her arm, covering the line of words that was still slowly bleeding through her skin.

"Ethan..." She looked up at me, tears sliding down her cheeks. "I'm going to die, aren't I?"

"No."

I crouched down and pulled the crumpled file envelope from my pocket.

The parchment was still inside. I spread it open.

"A rag doll in the mire" — Luke, drowned in the mud.

"Swinging high up to the sky" — David, fell from the crane.

"The rag doll drifts upon the water, once it sinks, it won't be seen again" — the words on Chloe's arm.

"This is the third line." I looked up at her. "It could mean drowning or falling. Both fit."

"Ethan, maybe we should go to the police."

"You saw it too. The police can't handle this."

Chloe froze.

"What do you think we're supposed to tell them? That a nursery rhyme is killing people? That a curse suddenly appeared on your arm?"

I turned the file envelope over and dumped everything out.

Besides the parchment, there were a few yellowed documents I hadn't noticed before.

I pulled out the one at the very bottom.

It was a typewritten report. The edges of the paper had gone brittle with age, and across the top it read:

St. Mary's Orphanage Internal Incident Report

November 1984

Below that was a long list of names, all children, and next to each name was a cause of death:

Toby Horn — drowning

Emily Clark — fall from height

Jesse Parker — suffocation

...

Seventeen names in total.

At the bottom of the list, someone had scrawled a line in ballpoint pen:

The beautiful song will end in seventy-two hours.

End?

Did that mean it would disappear, or that everyone would be dead?

If everyone under the curse died, would that count as the end?

I checked the time on my phone.

Luke's time of death was four in the morning.

It was now seven-thirty.

Three and a half hours had already passed.

"Seventy-two hours..." Chloe's voice shook. "So we have sixty-eight and a half left?"

"About that."

I turned the report over. There was another handwritten note on the back:

It is said that everyone heard this song before they died, and that it was composed by the orphanage director, Margaret Horn.

"So this song..." Chloe bit her lip. "It has something to do with her?"

"Looks like it."

I stuffed all the papers back into the envelope.

"Luke used AI to synthesize the song. That basically reactivated the curse. Now it's killing people in the order of the lyrics."

Chloe suddenly grabbed my hand.

"Ethan, your hand..."

I looked down.

On the back of my right hand, a black symbol was slowly appearing.

It looked like a twisted cross surrounded by five small circles.

"Shit."

I shot to my feet.

"You've been marked too?" Chloe's voice was almost a scream.

"Looks that way."

I forced myself to stay calm.

"Yesterday in the lab, I was there when Luke played the audio. So was David."

"So everyone who heard the song gets cursed?"

"Probably."

Chloe's face went white all over again.

While we were still going through the file, a ball rolled in.

A red rubber ball, caked with dirt.

It rolled across the concrete with a hollow thump, thump, thump, then came to a stop at my feet.

I looked down.

Written across the ball in crooked black marker were the words:

Come back to us.

Chloe let out a scream and clutched my arm.

I looked up.

A child was standing by the police tape.

Maybe seven or eight years old, wearing tattered gray clothes, barefoot.

His head was lowered, so I couldn't see his face.

"Who are you?" I asked.

But in the very next instant, he was gone.

Chloe couldn't even speak anymore. She clung to me, shaking violently.

I knew one thing for sure: if we didn't find out the truth about that orphanage, both of us were going to die.