She stays in the wardrobe until everyone has stopped tidying and stopped packing and gone back to their own flats. She knows that Mum is sitting in the front hall of their flat, waiting for her, so she sits in the big deep window on the stairs for a long time. To ensure that Mum has to keep waiting. She sits there until the lights in the stairwell automatically switch off.
After a while the drunk comes stumbling out of a flat farther down in the house, and starts hitting the banister with her shoehorn and mumbling something about how people aren’t allowed to take baths at night. The drunk does this a few times every week. There’s nothing abnormal about it.
“Turn off the water!” mutters the drunk, but Elsa doesn’t answer.
Nor does anyone else. Because people in houses like this seem to believe that drunks are like monsters, and if one pretends they are not there they actually disappear.
Elsa hears how the drunk, in a passionate exhortation for water rationing, slips and falls and ends up on her ass with the shoehorn falling on her head. The drunk and the shoehorn have a fairly long-drawn-out dispute after that, like two old friends at loggerheads about money. And then at last there’s silence. And then Elsa hears the song. The song the drunk always sings. Elsa sits in the darkness on the stairs and hugs herself, as if it is a lullaby just for her. And then even that falls silent. She hears the drunk trying to calm down the shoehorn, before disappearing into her flat again. Elsa half-closes her eyes. Tries to see the cloud animals and the first outlying fields of the Land-of-Almost-Awake, but it doesn’t work. She can’t get there anymore. Not without Granny. She opens her eyes, absolutely inconsolable. The snowflakes fall like wet mittens against the window.
And that’s when she sees The Monster for the first time.
It’s one of those winter nights when the darkness is so thick it’s as if the whole area has been dipped headfirst in a bucket of blackness, and The Monster steals out the front door and crosses the halfcircle of light around the last light in the street so quickly that if Elsa had blinked a little too hard, she would have thought she was imagining it. But as it is she knows what she saw, and she hits the floor and makes her way down the stairs in one fluid movement.
She’s never seen him before, but she knows from his sheer size that it must be him. He glides across the snow like an animal, a beast from one of Granny’s fairy tales. Elsa knows very well that what she’s about to do is both dangerous and idiotic, but she runs down the stairs three steps at a time. Her socks slip on the last step and she careers across the ground-floor vestibule, smacking her chin into the door handle.
Her face throbbing with pain, she throws the door open and breathlessly churns through the snow, still only in her socks.
“I have mail for you!” she cries into the night. Only then does she realize that her tears have lodged in her throat. She’s so desperate to know who this person is that Granny secretly talked to about Miamas.
There’s no answer. She hears his light footfalls in the snow, surprisingly agile considering his enormity. He’s moving away from her. Elsa ought to be afraid, she should be terrified of what The Monster could do to her. He’s big enough to tear her apart with a single tug, she knows that. But she’s too angry to be afraid.
“My granny says to tell you she’s sorry!” she roars.
She can’t see him. But she no longer hears the creaking of his steps in the snow. He’s stopped.