Алма Катсу - The Hunger

But every hour he got worse. More agitated, more aggressive, more manic. Tamsen saw Halloran in everything Solomon did and said, the hostility and impatience. She was tense in his presence, waiting for him to snap. The moment came when he lunged toward little Georgia, one of Tamsen’s daughters. Quick as a hawk, she darted between them and shoved Solomon away. Jacob’s eyebrows shot up while Betsy rushed to her son’s side.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded. “You could’ve hurt him. He’s injured, or have you forgotten?” But Tamsen had seen the look of horror flash on Solomon’s face. He knew what he had almost done. It was his last cogent human thought. He dashed out of the tent before anyone could stop him and disappeared into the night.

It took two men to keep Betsy from running into the darkness after him.

That was the beginning of the end for Betsy. She was mad at everyone at first for keeping her from trying to save her son. “He was beyond saving,” Tamsen tried to tell her, but Betsy refused to believe her.

“We got to find him. He can’t survive out there on his own,” Betsy pleaded with her husband. She was clearheaded enough to know she couldn’t go after him alone, at least. “Whatever’s out there, they’ll kill him. They’ll rip him to pieces.”

He was seen two nights later. One of the sentries—the luckless Walter Herron again—was attacked when he strayed too far from the bonfires. The creatures scattered into the darkness when John Denton, the second watchman, arrived but not before Denton saw wild-eyed Solomon Hook with them, a clumsy wolf pup at his first hunt. There could be no mistaking it, Denton swore on his life.

Betsy wailed and threw herself at Denton, calling him a liar, but Denton stood firm. “Your boy’s… changed.”

Tamsen swallowed. “He’s become one of them.”

No one argued with her.

They understood how it worked now.

Christmas: Dawn, low on the horizon, was just visible on either side of the smoke blackening the sky from the fire.

Mary wouldn’t have known which day it was if her sister Sarah hadn’t told her. Mary had lost the knotted thread three days ago; she had left Stanton behind, she had heard a gunshot, and she had simply let the thread fall, and let her thoughts fall with it, her memories and hopes.

She was an animal now. She rose when they told her, followed the person in front of her like a mule on a pack train, sat when they were done for the day. When she was thirsty, she would melt snow in her mouth. The ache of hunger had transformed into a different pain: She couldn’t eat, she would never be hungry again. There was something bestial in her stomach, a terrible pain ripping her apart. She couldn’t feed it.

Sarah wouldn’t stop talking about the Christmases on the farm in Springfield. “Do you remember the year Mama made matching dresses for us out of that red calico? Didn’t we think we were something special in those dresses? I wore mine until it fell apart and she used the skirt panels in a quilt.”

Stop , Mary wanted to say. But she didn’t want to speak, either. She couldn’t stand to hear her own voice, unchanged, carried on the stillness of a world that no longer held Charles Stanton.

Since she’d abandoned Stanton, her sister had taken care of her as though she were an invalid: Sit here, not too close to the fire, try to sleep. Keep hold of the end of my blanket and follow me. Sleep was elusive. It was the only thing she looked forward to—oblivion, a silence so complete she didn’t have to think about what had happened.

Sometimes during the day she would startle into sudden awareness—When had it started snowing? When had they passed into the peaks?—and she’d realize she’d been dozing as she’d walked.

On and on. They had inched their way over the summit, where winds were so strong the snow blew sideways, and were now working their way down. It was difficult to know how many days had gone by because they were all the same, just mile after mile of snow. Luis had fainted several times in the past three or four days. Most mornings, her father was too weak to make it to his feet and had to be lifted or carried and set upright, staggering on like a corpse compelled by witchcraft to walk.

Now, on Christmas, he could go no farther. He fell to his knees several hours before nightfall, and could not be brought again to his feet.

Through the haze of the campfire smoke, Mary saw her sister and brother-in-law bent over her father. Their voices, too low to hear distinctly, tickled the edges of her consciousness. Luis and Salvador, the Miwoks, huddled miserably together under the same blanket, like skeletal birds interlinked by a single ruche of feathers. They seemed to be living off of leather scraps they trimmed from their clothing, chewing and chewing to soften it in their mouths and make it last.

Sarah broke away from her husband and came to sit beside Mary. For a long time she was silent.

“Papa’s dead,” she said at last.

Mary tried to reach down, to pull up some thread of sadness or regret. It was as if the mountain cold had reached into her center and frozen her through the core. “We have to bury him,” she said.

Sarah shook her head. “We must keep moving.”

But it was as if something had snapped in Mary. She held her ground. “I’m done,” she said. “I want to go back to the rest. There are too few of us now. They’ll pick us off, all of us. We have no chance.”

Sarah gripped her sister’s shoulders between icy fingers. “There’s no way back now, Mary. We’ve come too far.”

“We put the others at risk,” she said, realizing now that it was true. “We wanted to march ahead to seek help, but we’ve cut the party down in size. The shadows will come for them as they’ve come for us. Don’t you see? We separated ourselves into smaller groups, made ourselves easier targets. We doomed ourselves, and by doing so, we’ve doomed the others, too.”

“Mary,” her sister was saying, and she was shaking her, hard.

Or was it the cold causing her to shake?

She could easily picture lying down, letting the snow swallow her up. Surrendering to the cold. Numbness spreading to her fingers and toes, ears and nose, throat, and finally her chest.

But she hadn’t imagined it. She was lying down.

Sarah had gone somewhere. Maybe she had never been there—maybe none of them had.

Snow fell on Mary’s eyelashes, stiffening them, tiny icicles fracturing the firelight. Or was it sunlight? Somehow morning had come. There was no hunger left in her—no feeling at all.

The snow was dazzling, endless.

Sarah appeared before her, lifted her, forced her to her feet, and took her hand.

They trudged on, into the blinding light.

It was sudden and overpowering: the smell of burning hair. Acrid, unearthly.

Tamsen screamed… and dropped her curler on the floor.

Quickly, she doused it in water and breathed a sigh of relief as steam rose and the iron tong cooled.

She was nervous, distracted. Luckily, she hadn’t lost much hair, only singed a few strands.

She had risen early to get ready for the ceremony, but in truth, she hadn’t been sleeping anyway. It was as though she could feel the weight of the rest of the house sleeping around her. She’d grown up here, and now it was her brother’s home. Every night, he lay in the big four-poster bed just through the far wall. If she listened hard enough, she imagined she could hear him breathing, hear him thinking. Was he having the same thoughts that she was?