Stephens ran inside and cut the stereo off. The rest of us stood below, watching Jack, the moon bright and wild behind him, the heavens full of all their stars.

“The Spirit,” he said, “requests a song. An Irish ballad in the key of D.” He cleared his throat. “Shall we?”

Jack began to sing then in a thick Irish brogue, some old song about a wedding day. You could tell it was one of those hundred-year-old ballads, the melody too sweet and sad and beautiful to be anything new.

And it was beautiful, one of the best things I’d ever heard in my life. By the second refrain, we kind of knew the tune, and everybody raised their drinks and joined in each time it came around. It felt so good to lift my voice up with all those guys, hollering loud as I could some heartbroke ballad about someone who probably never existed. It was better than church, my voice just one among a whole chorus of them, feeling it tangle and mesh with the others until we were a crowd, one loud voice bellowing out into the night sky.

It felt good to belong, is what I’m saying. I was about the happiest I’d ever been in my life.

And then I had a vision.

It was the staggering kind, the sort that threw me to my knees, that made my whole body shake and quiver, a full taste-and-sound-and-sight vision, one where it felt like reality had been torn open and the guts of the world were revealed.

I saw things the likes of which I’d never seen before.

All the singing stopped.

“What is it?” said Cass. And then, like she already knew: “What are you seeing?”

I don’t know why, but I started speaking then. I told them everything.

How I saw the sky become fleshy, pink, and it sprouted eyeballs, big bright blue blinking eyes, and lightning fell down in great musical notes, striking the earth in the sweetest tones. How fire spread across the Farm, lapping up the birch trail and through the woods and into the house itself, the music of the fire a shivering, melancholy sound. How I saw all of us burning but none of us hurting, none of us in pain, all of us lit alive by fire and the sound it made, the words of our hearts turned straight into music. How the ground opened up before me, the great gaping mouth of the world, and from that mouth came a roar like a lion’s, a noise that shook the earth.

When I finished talking I was on my knees, crying, my throat gone scratchy and parched. All of them were staring at me, even Jack, dangling himself half off the roof to better hear.

“Holy shit,” said Luther.