Chương 64: “Six Days”

He prepared. He walked every floor. Checked every passage, every room, every angle. The guardian on the ninth, the memory on the second that he had finally, in the last month, made some kind of peace with. Gerald's floor with its soft angles and its alcove. The hearth at the bottom of the thirty-first. He reinforced what could be reinforced. He left what should be left as it was. On the fourth floor he found Speck.

He had not seen Speck in weeks, which he had attributed to Speck's general indifference to anything beyond the washing machine gap. But Speck was in the fourth floor, in a corner, and he was not alone. There were twelve of them. Small things, all the same kind as Speck, all dormant until very recently, all now awake and watching him. He had not woken them. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. Speck had. He looked at Speck.

Speck regarded him with the expression, if it could be called an expression, of something that has been underestimated for some time and is mildly satisfied about it. He had, he realized, seriously underestimated Speck. He gave them all instructions. They received them and dispersed back into the walls and the floors and the in-between places of the house and dungeon. He went back upstairs. Six days. He sat on the windowsill. June came home from school, dropped her bag, sat on her bed, and looked at him.

"Are you okay?" she asked. He thought about this seriously, the way she always asked it seriously. One glow.

"Scared?" He thought about that too. Two glows. She nodded.

"Me too," she said.

"But I think that's okay. I think being scared means you know what you have to lose." He looked at her. She was ten years old. She had been ten years old for three weeks. She would, if everything went the way he intended it to go, be eleven and twelve and thirty and seventy and old enough for her hands to shake when she reached into dark places, and he intended to be on the windowsill for all of it. He wrote: you are very wise for someone who draws anatomically incorrect dragons. She laughed.

The real laugh, the one that was a good sound. Six days.