It starts small.
Thursday, twelfth April. Fifteen people go missing in New Orleans. No leads.
Monday, twenty-fourth of June, in bone-dry Texas. A huge tree, gnarled, thirty years old at least, leaves green and shivering like laughter. One day there's nothing but two-lane asphalt; the next, sixteen bulky feet of slow-drinking wood, road broken up by roots. However it got there it won't survive- but it does. People are already calling it a miracle. There's a steady stream of pilgrims come to kiss its knots, or at least until the miracle repeats itself in Minnesota. There's rumours of the same thing happening in Britain, in Spain, in Norway, in South Africa.
Wednesday, thirteenth July. Poppies bloom overnight in a field just outside St Louis. Elsewhere, wildflowers turn brown and fragile.
Monday the second of September. The O'Connell family haven't been answering their phones. All doors locked, but there's a little window open; their next-door neighbour bravely climbs through. He kind of expects flies feeding at sticky red pools, blood in the cracks between the flooboards. Instead he finds a tableau; all six O'Connells in the front froom, Kacie and Brian on the beat-up sofa, Brady and Marcus in armchairs, two-year-old Sophie on the floor with her scattered paper dolls. They're all asleep. The T.V blares away. A thread of gossamer connects the tip of Brian's nose to the sofa arm. There's a spider crawling up it.
It's been three days. None of them are dehydrated, malnourished, or inclined to wake. When Sophie is moved, old blossoms fall from her hair.
At first, it's an anomaly. When the case repeats itself in Chicago, in Portland, in Corinth, and when the vanished-without-trace stats are five times what they ought to be, and when poppies bloom for a six-mile stretch along a South Dakota highway, it's an anomaly no longer.
Slowly people are beginning to ask what it all means.