Gowan is here all the time now and I’m happy. He’s really nice.
But sometimes I get sleepy because my friend wants to play almost every night now. But I fall asleep during the day because Silla doesn’t notice and we don’t try reading anymore. But Auntie started screaming again one night while she walks up and down her high-up room, and now Silla walks up and down all night, too, and once I saw her pulling at her hair and it made me scared because she looked scary.
But Auntie screamed and screamed and then Silla screamed. But then Gowan came to sit with her and it got better after that because then only Auntie was screaming.
The only bad thing is that Silla shouts at me a lot and that’s a bad thing. But my tummy is so sore that I have to put something in it sometimes and Silla doesn’t like that.
I don’t want to make Silla angry.
And I don’t want to play with the man anymore.
I don’t think he’s really my friend at all.
But it’s too late now.
Gowan is unusually quiet at our mockery of “dinner.” It has been three days now. I think he is realizing how futile it is. The trees grow back each time he cuts them away. We talked about opening the kitchen door to dig a tunnel, but I pointed out that giving the earth entry might allow it to bury us alive. He had closed his eyes and covered his face with hands blistered and broken.
Maybe he is giving in to the HOPELESSNESS that pervades the air. I should feel satisfaction: I told you, a tiny voice whispers inside. Instead, I feel afraid. Please don’t lose hope, too. You are the only one with any vapors of it left.
So now I am the one staring. Staring at the way even his hair seems limp. The slow movement of his hand as he runs his spoon listlessly through the watery soup. The candles burn low and no one speaks. Even Nori isn’t eating.
“Please.”
Nori looks up, but Gowan doesn’t move. I hate the way the corners of his mouth fold down, the tiny wrinkles on either side of his mouth.
“Please,” I say again. “Please, Gowan.”
He looks at me then. But the light is gone from his face.
We are running out of fire.
I say it out loud, and he understands what I mean, because his face crumples and he shoves away his chair, leaving the room before I can see him cry.
Stunned, we sit in silence.
The candles burn low, and then die.
One night, I wake to find Nori gone. I wander out of the library, where we all sleep now, with one of the last candles, the light casting grotesque shadows along the high walls.
“Nori?”
The basement door is open, so I close it and hurry past.
“Nori?”
I hear something upstairs, a scuttling noise, and hesitate. Nori doesn’t make sounds like that.
“Nori…”
And then I hear her footfalls, tiny thumps that I still recognize. I follow them upstairs, but they are above me still. I ascend to the third floor—the abandoned hallway. The door to the wasp room at the end is open, and my stomach lurches with some emotion. Fear? Apprehension?
I find her crouching in the center of the pile of husks.
“Nori, what are you doing?”
She turns to look over her shoulder, her eyes too big in her gaunt face. She has a handful of wasp husks, and she is chewing.
I bend over, the same feeling in my stomach intensifying. Not fear, not apprehension, but disgust.
The C R U N C H I N G sound as she chews seems to echo in my head.
“Nori, don’t!” I scramble forward and open her mouth, scooping out the remains of decade-old dead insects from her tongue.
She bites down on my fingers and I swear, but I keep scooping.
“Spit it out! Spit it out now!”
She cries and tries to grab more of them but I lift her into my arms and I run. I run down the hall, my candle long-extinguished, and I dash into the library. I bolt the top of the door, where she can’t reach, and I hug her tightly as she cries silently, her little fists beating on my chest. She wriggles to get free, and finally manages it, running to lie down with Gowan, who wraps her in his arms in his sleep.
She stares at me from his embrace, eyes accusing.
I hear the Creeper Man scuttling along the halls.
It’s the smell that wakes me. A slow, noxious stench that first infiltrates my dream as a cauldron of bubbling witch’s brew. Then it slowly penetrates and my mind wakes to escape it.
I cough.
Gag.
I stagger to my feet, retching. “What is that?”
Gowan enters the library, fully clothed, looking cleaner and more handsome than he has any right to in this filthy, rotting hovel.
“Smell it?”
“No.”
He looks pale. Working too hard to get us out.
This is the day I begin hunting.
18
jesus, god
Wakey, wakey, rise and shine
mind your toe upon that vine
slinking in across your floor
oops! The woods are at your door!
BROKEN BOOK ENTRY