It was no use. Cassie wasn’t there. Nobody was there.
Sorrow let out a choked sob, swallowed it back quickly. She wasn’t going to panic. Panicking was what Mom did, and Sorrow and Patience were the ones who soothed her. They calmed her down and they worked around whatever problem she had, even if it seemed to them more imaginary than real. That was what they did. Mom said they were good at it. They were her rock, she said, for when everything else was unsteady.
This wasn’t an imaginary problem. Maybe Sorrow was alone, without her older sister to help her, but she could still be the person who fixed things, who made something scary into something manageable. She could do that. She put her mittened hand over her mouth to keep the cries inside, pushed down deep until they didn’t matter anymore, and she made herself think.
The door was blocked from the outside. She had to find a way to unblock it. She had to do it in the dark. She had to do it without falling into the cellar, which she couldn’t even see, which could be right next to her, it could be that shadow right there, and she was all confused again, confused about which way to turn, terrified of taking the wrong step, making a wrong move, and the cold was so sharp it felt like a living thing clawing its way into her skin—
Cold with teeth. That was what Patience called it, and she would bare her teeth and raise her hands like claws and pretend to be a winter monster chasing Sorrow all over the house. She used to, anyway, but it felt like a long time since Patience had played with her. Now when Sorrow suggested a game Patience would roll her eyes and say she was busy. She didn’t want to play Pioneers anymore, or Explorers, or even Traitors and Spies, which used to be her favorite. Patience had always made Sorrow be the nasty old preacher Clement Abrams so she could be their ancestor Rejoice Lovegood, who had been locked up after the townspeople accused her of being a witch. But she had broken out of their makeshift jail, not using magic as the men later claimed, but only a whalebone stay she tore from her corset.
Sorrow didn’t have whalebone stays beneath her dress. She had to find something else. It was too dark. She couldn’t see anything. She needed to see.
She lowered herself to the floor. She took off her mittens and began to search the space around her. When her fingers curled over the end of a broken board, she snatched her hand back.
That was the hole in the floor. She could feel the cellar breathing. In her mind the broken floorboards took on the shape of a great mouth rimmed with jagged wooden fangs.
Sorrow squeezed her eyes shut. She had to stay calm. She was good at that. Mrs. Roche from down the road said she was eerily calm. Sorrow hadn’t known what that meant, so she’d asked Patience, and Patience had said Mrs. Roche was only admiring how Sorrow didn’t throw tantrums or make a fuss like other kids her age.
She wasn’t making a fuss. There were sobs trapped in her throat and her breath was rasping and fast, but she was okay. She was okay. She wasn’t afraid of the dark. She wasn’t. She wasn’t. She just needed to see. She searched the area around her, and when she didn’t find anything she crawled a few feet and kept searching. Her fingers brushed over a curve of metal—the iron ring on the bottom of a barrel. Sorrow tugged at it, but she couldn’t break it free. She moved on, still searching. The metal head of a shovel. A couple of bottles that rolled and clinked when she touched them. More barrels. A scattering of short metal nails. A crusty chunk of something that Sorrow hoped was mud but knew was probably the dried-up remains of some unfortunate mouse or bird.
She brushed her hand on her coat, and she reached out again, walking her fingers along a gap between the floorboards until they touched something hard and cold.
It felt like metal, but not the gritty iron of old farm tools and cider press parts. She tugged, rocking the object back and forth until it came free. She turned it over in her hands. It was a rectangle about the size of a matchbox, mostly smooth, with a small bump on one side—a hinge, she realized, and her heart jumped in excitement. She flipped it open and ran her fingers over the inside, feeling for the small, ridged wheel. She knew what it was.
It was a lighter, an old-fashioned one like Mr. Roche used for his pipe. One evening last summer he and Mrs. Roche had come over to drop off some mail that had gone to the wrong house, and Mom had been in a rare good mood, bright and bubbly and cheerful, so she had invited them to stay awhile and drink cider on the back porch. Sorrow had been fascinated by how Mr. Roche had packed the tobacco into his pipe, the careful way he held the flame to the bowl and puffed and puffed. He had caught her staring and handed her the lighter, showed her how to use it, and he had chuckled when Mrs. Roche scolded him for teaching a child to play with fire. Mom had laughed too and told Mrs. Roche not to worry.
Sorrow struck the lighter once, twice. Nothing happened. A third try, and nothing. The cold felt even deeper, the darkness more complete, than it had a moment ago. She shook the lighter near her ear, but she couldn’t tell if there was any fuel inside.
“Come on,” she whispered. “Come on, please, come on.”
Finally: a spark.
Sorrow was so surprised she nearly dropped the lighter. When she clicked it again, she got a small flame. It wasn’t very bright, but it was enough to push the darkness back, if only a bit. Finally she could see.
She scrambled to her feet and went to the door. She studied the small gap between the door and the frame. It wasn’t wide, barely big enough for her to stick her little finger in. She held the light out and looked around, searching through the junk and piles of discarded tools, until the flame burned her thumb and she had to let it go out. She stuck her thumb in her mouth to cool it before trying again. It took a few strikes to get the flame back.
The first thing she found, a long metal nail, was too fat. The second, a drill bit, was skinny enough to fit in the gap but not long enough to reach the two-by-six on the other side. She let the flame go out again, shook her hand and the lighter to cool them. The next time the flame caught on the first try.