Frankenstein

talked. Eventually, the question became not
when
Grace Ahern would come home but
if
she would show up at all.
    “She wouldn’t go straight to the hospital,” the boy insisted. “She feels stale after working all day at school. That’s what she says—
stale
. She takes a quick shower. She gets to the hospital about six.”
    She was already far behind the schedule that the boy attributed to her, but when Travis wanted to wait another ten minutes, Bryce said, “We can wait as long as you like. All night if you want.”
    After that, they maintained their watch in silence, as if Travis feared that speaking of his mother would jinx her and him, that only by a stoic silence could he earn the sight of her again.
    The boy’s anxiety became as manifest as the chill that coiled ever tighter as the night wore on.
    Minute by minute, Bryce was overcome by a growing sympathy of such tenderness that it risked becoming pity, and he didn’t want to pity Travis Ahern because pity supposed that the mother must be already lost, like the screaming victims in the hospital basement.

    
chapter
61

    In the silence, Nummy waited for the ceiling to creak but he also listened hard for any sound of Mr. Lyss searching downstairs for something he could use to burn the cocoons. Mr. Lyss wasn’t usually a quiet person, but now he was as quiet as a sneaky cat. No footsteps, no doors opening and closing, no bad words being said because he was having trouble finding what he wanted …
    Maybe the problem wasn’t that Mr. Lyss couldn’t find what he wanted. Maybe instead the problem could be that something that wanted Mr. Lyss had found
him
. Maybe downstairs hung a cocoon that smelled a little bit like Mr. Lyss’s bad teeth.
    Maybe three outer-space things spun these giant cocoons around themselves, the way caterpillars spun themselves up inside their own silk to become butterflies. But maybe instead the thing that spun the cocoons wasn’t in any of them, and it was creeping around the house and spinning more cocoons with its
babies
inside, and none of them pretty like a butterfly.
    This was for sure what Grandmama meant when she said too much thinking led to too much worrying.
    Although he seemed to have been gone a long time, Mr. Lyss still wasn’t making any noise downstairs, but suddenly some noise came from one of the cocoons or maybe from all of them. At first Nummy thought the things in the cocoons were whispering to one another, but then he realized this was a slithery sound, like a lot of snakes might be sliding around inside the sacks.
    You would think that so much slithering would make the sacks bulge and ripple, but they didn’t. They just hung there, looking wet though Mr. Lyss said they weren’t.
    Nummy stood very near the bedroom door, and he wanted to back across the threshold into the hallway, putting a little more space between himself and the cocoons. But he knew that once he went as far as the hallway, he would run for the stairs. If he ran for the stairs,
that
was when Mr. Lyss would finally return with his long gun, and Nummy didn’t want his head blown off and used like a basketball.
    Finally, he couldn’t bear listening to the slithery sounds any longer, and he said to the cocoons, “Stop scaring me. I don’t want to be here, I have to be here, so just stop.”
    To his surprise, they stopped.
    For a moment, Nummy felt good that they stopped slithering when he told them to, because maybe they didn’t really mean to scare him in the first place and were sorry. But then he realized that if they stopped slithering when he told them to, they were
listening
to him, which meant they knew he was here in the room with them. Most of the time he was watching them, he told himself they were just cocoons, they weren’t aware of him. But they
were
.
    Footsteps on the stairs turned out to be Mr. Lyss, which by now was the last thing Nummy was expecting.
    “Are your pants still dry?” Mr. Lyss asked.
    “Yes, sir. But they was slithering.”
    “Your pants were slithering?”
    “The things in the cocoons. Lots of slithery sounds, but the sacks they didn’t bulge or nothing.”
    Mr. Lyss carried a two-gallon red can like people used to keep gasoline for their lawn mowers. He also carried a little basket with some smaller cans in it.
    “Where’s your long gun?” Nummy asked.
    “By the front door. I don’t think it’s smart to use a shotgun for this. Split the sack, and who knows how many things might come