The first one I saw was Hush.
It stood between two trunks, maybe thirty feet away. Tall — much taller than a man — and narrow, made of coats. Dark wool coats and rain jackets and a little yellow anorak near the bottom, all hanging from nothing, layered over each other like feathers. They didn't move in the wind. The wind went around them.
Where a face should have been, there was a hand.
A big, pale, adult hand, fingers spread, pressed flat over a mouth that wasn't there.
I knew it. Of course I knew it. I had made it when I was five, hiding in the closet at the top of the stairs while two voices shouted in the kitchen below. I had sat in the dark among the coats and I had thought, very hard, something in here is keeping me quiet. Something is holding its hand over my mouth so they won't hear me. So they won't find me.
It had been a comfort. That was the point. That was always the point.
I had never seen it before. Not like this. Not with snow settling on its shoulders.
"Hush," I whispered.
It didn't answer. It never does. But the cold around me deepened, and the forest went very, very quiet, and I knew it had heard.
Then I saw the others.
They had been there all along, I think. I just hadn't been looking.
Mother Stitch was closest. She knelt beside me in the snow — or the shape of her did, a woman in a long grey dress, her hands moving, moving, never still. Her fingers were needles. Long and thin and silver, ten of them, clicking against each other. A thread ran from them to me. I could see it now. A single strand of something pale, running into my chest through the dead man's coat.
Her face was wrong. It was a good face, a kind face, but it didn't fit together. A forehead from one woman, a chin from another, eyes that didn't quite match. The seams were neat. Very neat. She had sewn herself together from every woman who'd ever been kind to me — a dinner lady, a teacher, a nurse at the clinic — and she'd done a beautiful job.
One of the eyes was brown. I knew it. I didn't know how. And then I did: I'd seen it the day before, in a photograph on a fridge, under a magnet shaped like a fish.
She'd taken it. From the woman who left. She'd taken the best part and thrown the rest away.
"Hello, my boy," she said, and smiled with somebody else's mouth.
Behind her, half-hidden by a trunk, a thin figure in a clerk's grey coat, hunched over something in its hands. An abacus. The beads were small and pale and jointed, and I didn't want to think about what they were made of. Its skin was covered in marks — little vertical lines in groups of four, crossed by a fifth. Tally marks, hundreds of them, up its arms and neck and over its bald head. Its lips moved without stopping.
Ten thousand and one. Ten thousand and two.
Thirteen.
Off to the left, leaning against a tree with its arms folded, was me.
Exactly me. My face, my hair, my hoodie under a dead man's coat. Only the smile was different. Wider than mine. Just a little too wide, as if someone had pulled it up at both corners with fishhooks. It waved.
"Surprise," said Smiler.
I couldn't see Lord Should.
But I could feel where it was. Above me. Above the trees, maybe. Somewhere in the dark between the branches and the two moons, something very tall was standing with its head bowed, looking down. I didn't look up. I had spent my entire childhood not looking up. I wasn't going to start now.
It didn't say anything. It almost never does. It just stood up there and watched, the way it always had, waiting for me to need something it could take away.
Gnash, I couldn't see either. Not fully.
But at the edge of the trees, where the forest opened back out onto the white field, the snow was moving. Bulging. As if something enormous was breathing underneath it. And every so often, the bulge would split along a line and I would see teeth. Rows of them. Yellow, uneven, far too many.
Then the snow would close again.
Coming, Gnash rumbled, from under the field. Coming. Coming. I smell them.
And the seventh.
I didn't look for the seventh. I never look for it. But I knew — the way you know there's someone standing behind you in an empty room — that there was a place, somewhere at the edge of the trees, where the cold was different. Where it wasn't cold at all. Where it wasn't anything at all.
I kept my eyes on the others.
"Why," I said. "Why can I see you?"
"Does it matter?" said Smiler, flopping down in the snow beside me, my face, my grin, my too-wide grin. "Honestly? You've been talking to us for twenty years like we're the radio. Now you can see the radio. I'd call that an upgrade."
"Of course it matters!"
My voice cracked in the cold air. The forest swallowed it — Hush's doing, I think. The sound just stopped a few feet from my mouth.
"I made you up," I said. "I made you up. I was a kid. You're not — you can't be here. You can't be in the snow."
"We're always where you are," said Mother Stitch, reasonably.
"Not like this!"
"No," Smiler agreed. "Not like this. Isn't it wonderful?"
I pressed my hands over my eyes.
The dark behind my palms was not dark.
It was a hallway.
I was standing in it. Not sitting against a tree — standing, in my socks, on a strip of old brown carpet. The hallway of the house I grew up in. The upstairs hall, at night, with the hall light off.
Doors on both sides. More doors than there should have been. I knew them. Each one had been a real door in the real house, once, but they'd been stretched apart, the hallway lengthened between them, like a memory pulled long.
And on every door, a drawing.
Crayon, on cheap sugar paper, gone soft and yellow at the edges. Stuck on with tape that had dried brittle. I knew them too. I'd drawn every one of them, kneeling on the kitchen floor with my tongue between my teeth, the year each of them was made. Every time I made a new one, I drew it, so I'd know what it looked like. So I'd know where it lived.
The closet door, slightly ajar. On it, a tall black scribble of coats, and in the middle, where a face should go, a big pink hand. I'd pressed so hard with the black crayon that it had torn the paper. Coats inside. Something tall behind them.
The kitchen door — which made no sense, the kitchen was downstairs — with warm light leaking under it and the faint smell of soup. On it, a lady in a long grey dress with ten silver lines for fingers, done in the one silver crayon in the box. I'd given her a big red smile. Someone, since, had carefully coloured over the face with other faces.
The living room door, shaking in its frame — and on it, a huge brown shape that ran off every edge of the paper, all teeth, so many teeth I'd run out of white and done the rest in yellow. Underneath, in a seven-year-old's capitals: GNASH. The paper jumped every time the door did. Thudding. Something on the other side throwing itself against it, slowly, patiently, over and over.
The staircase, going down into the dark. On the newel post at the top, a small square of paper: a thin grey stick-man, covered from head to foot in little lines, four up and one across, four up and one across. Thirteen steps. I didn't count them. I just knew.
The front door, with a face-shaped mirror beside it. On the door, a drawing of a boy. Me, at ten. Smiling. The smile had been gone over again and again, darker each time, until it was wider than the face. My reflection grinned at me when I didn't.
The study door. Heavy. Dark wood. On it, a drawing of a very tall man — so tall I'd had to tape a second sheet on top for the rest of him, and a third for the crown, and even then his head went off the top of the paper. I'd never drawn the face. Above the door, the ceiling went up and up, far higher than any ceiling should, into a darkness where something stood with its head bent.
At the very end of the hall, the bathroom. The door shut. A thin line of white light underneath it. Always on. There was a sheet of paper taped to that door too. But it was taped face-in, picture to the wood. I'd done that. I remembered doing that. I didn't remember why.
Between the bathroom and the study, the old floral wallpaper, peeling. Somebody had mended a tear in it once, a long neat seam, top to bottom. I didn't remember a tear there. I didn't stop to look.
I took my hands off my eyes.
Snow. Trees. Two moons. Six monsters, all of them looking at me. And a seventh place, somewhere behind me, that I wouldn't turn around to see.
And something else.
Out on the field, past the place where Gnash's teeth churned under the snow, the line of the horizon had gone ragged. Shapes were moving there. Low and long and grey, loping in a loose line toward the trees.
I counted them before I could stop myself.
Nine.
"Nine," Thirteen said at the same moment. Then, without any change in its voice at all: "I told you. Something was still here. I said so at two thousand and six seconds."
Get up, said Mother Stitch.
Run, said Smiler, cheerfully. Or don't. I'm curious which.
Hush pressed its hand to the forest, and the forest went silent, and in the silence I heard them for the first time — a long, low howl, rising from nine throats together, so cold it seemed to come from the snow itself.
And underneath me, under the ground, under the white field, under everything, something began to laugh.
Coming, said Gnash. Told you.
MINE