Copyright © 2024 by Ben Farthing

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No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Cover art by Luciano Fleitas. Typography by Ruth Anna Evans.

ALSO BY BEN FARTHING

Series: I Found Horror

I Found a Circus Tent In the Woods Behind My House

I Found Puppets Living In My Apartment Walls

I Found Christmas Lights Slithering Up My Street

I Found a Lost Hallway in a Dying Mall

I Found the Boogeyman Under My Brother’s Crib

Trilogy: Horror Lurks Beneath

It Waits On the Top Floor

They Cling To the Hull

We Hide Our Faces

Standalone Books

The Piper’s Graveyard

Those Who Dwell Below the Sidewalk

Crowded Chasms: Tales In Terrifying Places

THE TWITCHING HOUSE

BEN FARTHING

1

Rain hastened the dusk.

Nettle tapped at the window with her muddy claws.

Her fur was a scant shield against the jolting impacts of raindrops.

She checked over her shoulder. The trimmed meadow in front of the Red House was a dangerous place for a mouse on a normal evening. But in recent days, something darker was going on.

It was time to flee.

Nettle tapped harder on the window, feeling even more exposed than while crossing the meadow. She’d spent her youth and adult life avoiding the Red House, and here she was seeking shelter.

She felt foolish, yet she felt even more foolish for her lingering desire to run back across the meadow to her burrow, back to her cousins.

Another mouse appeared on the opposite side of the window, already inside the house.

“Sorrel,” Nettle called her brother’s name. “Does your invitation still stand? I want to come live inside.”

Although she’d spotted his form in this window several times, she hadn’t seen Sorrel up close since he left the colony three seasons past. A human family moved into the Red House and Sorrel had said that was proof their fear of the place was unfounded.

Sorrel was fat now—a good sign for the accessibility of food and ease of avoiding predators.

He squinted to peer through the window, taking a second to focus on Nettle. He answered her then, his squeaks audible over the lower register of raindrops crashing into the windowsill. “Why now?”

Nettle had declined Sorrel’s invitation so long ago because she couldn’t leave her community. The familiar was comfortable. Who would she be if she weren’t among her cousins? So her brother’s question about timing was a valid one.

“It’s a lot to explain.” She checked behind her again. She felt blind with the rain muting the world’s scents. But in the charcoal evening, she thought she saw something slip through the trimmed meadow. Grass shuddered in a path toward Nettle here at the window.

She didn’t know what moved through the grass, only that it wasn’t a snake or a weasel or any other predator she’d learned to fear and survive.

“Please, Sorrel. Something’s wrong out here.”

“Even more than usual?” came his sardonic reply, but Nettle saw him recognize the fear in her eyes, in how her whiskers twitched. “Okay. Of course, yes. Let’s get you inside. Directly below you, there’s a wood patch among the bricks of the house. You can squeeze beneath the right side… no wait, from where you’re standing it’s the left side. I’ll meet you there.”

He disappeared.

Nettle navigated her way down the wet brick wall.

Grass shook, ever closer.

Somewhere in the meadow, a mouse shrieked and was cut off. Nettle mournfully wondered who it was, why they’d even left their burrow after the nightly chaos of the last week.

“Over here.” Sorrel stuck his head out from beneath a patch of white wood in the brick wall.

Nettle froze. She had one more favor to ask and despite Sorrel’s propensity for compassion, this was a big one.

“Are you coming?” Sorrel looked her up and down, nostrils flared, ears perked. “You’ve aged. I see bits of gray in your auburn fur. You used to blend in with acorns on the branch, but now you could hide in a pile of dusty pinecones. I like it.”

Sorrel had always mentally drifted at the aesthetics of his surroundings.

“Why do you smell like a pup?” he asked.

The concussive rain hadn’t washed the scent away during Nettle’s trip across the meadow. She looked back through the grass toward her burrow, plotting a path to her pups that would avoid where the grass had shuddered and her cousin had died. “My pups are still in my nest. Two of them. Their eyes will be open soon. The girl—Hush—she looks like Mom. The boy kind of looks like you.”

Even with the pounding rainstorm and unknown terror behind her, Nettle could smell the pride from her brother. “Why didn’t you bring them?”

“I can only lift one at a time. I didn’t dare leave the other alone.”

“I’ve been an uncle for how many weeks and this is the first I’m hearing about it?”

“Will you help me collect them?”

Sorrel’s ears pulled back. “I don’t leave this house. Certainly not with whatever you say is happening now.”

Despite his refusal, Nettle didn’t smell fear on him. Only stubbornness. She knew how to work with her family’s hard heads. “Please. They’re the reason I’m accepting your invitation. I don’t know what’s going on out here and I can’t keep my pups in it any longer.”

The muscles in Sorrel’s mouth relaxed, an expression of compassion that stirred in Nettle memories of their mother.

“You really want to live inside with me?” Sorrel squeezed out through the hole, pulling one hip through at a time. His gut jiggled as he popped free. “Okay little sister. Show me these pups who have changed you so completely.”

The journey back through the trimmed meadow was quick and perilous.

When they returned, Sorrel was without his tail. The pup Wisp had a cut down his side. Blood stuck his thin fur together in clumps. Both he and his sister, Hush, mewled from fear and from the cold rain.

Sorrel squeezed past the white wood before reaching back out to bring Hush through and then—carefully to avoid worsening his cut—Wisp.

Nettle scanned the meadow once more, which now had surrendered to the rainy black of the night.

She’d smelled another of her cousins killed, but there’d been no scent or sound from any predator.

It would be a relief to be enclosed beneath the Red House.

Even still, the old building churned its own flavor of fear inside Nettle. A lifetime of warnings not to even let its shadow touch you. Nettle didn’t want the colony to think she was rebellious. Rebellious mice didn’t survive long.

A column of raindrops suddenly turned sideways. Whatever was killing her cousins was near.

Nettle slipped through the hole into the Red House, away from the death that she refused to accept for her pups.

2

Inside, atop the black plastic that covered the dirt floor, Nettle held her pups against herself, worrying at how cold they both felt. She licked at Wisp’s wound. It wasn’t deep. He should be fine, although she doubted he’d sleep well for the next few days.

The crawlspace beneath the house had a naturally irregular floor, but the ceiling was unnervingly straight. And it stretched on forever, the vast emptiness interrupted by brick pillars.

Sorrel lay so that he sandwiched Wisp and Hush between himself and Nettle.

Long after Nettle had caught her breath, she listened to her brother wheeze.

Finally, he asked, “What happened out there?” He licked at the stub that remained of his tail.

Nettle didn’t know how to explain. Even having lived it the past week, she grasped at the words to explain it. “Mice dying. Several every night. But no one will take it seriously enough.”

Sorrel spoke with understanding, but far too jovially. “They could give a pile of snakeshit about individual lives. As long as births outpace deaths, they’re happy. I’m surprised they don’t start banishing a grandpa when a new pup pops out.”

He was right, but this past week had been worse than a hungry fox in wintertime. Nettle wanted desperately to convince her cousins of that, but when she’d suggested as much, they’d gone cold. To speak aloud of problems was to show that you didn’t belong.

But Sorrel instantly understood. He’d witnessed the horror himself on their short journey. Now he’d shifted into laughing about the colony’s long-standing attitude toward survival, rather than stewing in fear about what they’d just survived:

Wounds opening up in mice without a predator to be seen, heard, or smelled.

Nettle said, “The colony can’t survive this. Too many are dying. Pups can’t arrive quickly enough.” She certainly wasn’t ready to go through pregnancy again.

Sorrel looked up from tending to his tail stub. “That’s how you see it?”

Nettle sensed the tentative judgment in the way his nose stopped twitching, the way his ears lowered, the way his breathing slowed and affected the smell of the air, with less Sorrel in it.

It took Nettle a moment to process why Sorrel was suddenly holding himself back like she had to do with the colony—why he wanted to know if what was chief on Nettle’s mind was the colony’s ratio of births to deaths.

“Of course that’s not how I see it.” And it was an honest assertion, although it was difficult to say aloud. She’d trained herself so thoroughly to never vocally suggest a core tenet of the colony might deserve curiosity, let alone critique. “That’s not why I fled.”

“Then why?” Sorrel asked.

Nettle nuzzled Wisp and Hush. “I want my pups.”

After she didn’t continue, Sorrel asked, “Want them to what?”

“To stay with me. To be safe and warm and have their bellies full. To be happy regardless of…” she wasn’t sure how to finish that.

“Regardless of what?”

“I want them to be happy, okay? And there’s no happiness out there.” She quickly added, “Not these past nights. Now there’s only death and survival.”

Sorrel silently went back to licking the stub of his tail.

It’d been a long time since Nettle had spoken with her brother, but she could still tell that he had more to say. “Why did you leave the colony?”

Sorrel adopted his playful tone again. “So I wouldn’t get eaten by an owl.”

A year of living alone had ruined his ability to keep his emotions out of his smell. He was lying.

But what a strange thing to lie about. If he hadn’t moved inside out of fear of death, then why had he? What had he received when he’d bartered away every relationship in his life?

When Nettle’s thoughts spiraled like this, she always got hit with a sense of self-pity. Why couldn’t her thoughts be calmer and rarer like her cousins’?

She made herself focus on the moment. Her legs ached. Hush and Wisp suckled and her nipples were sore. Her head felt light with exhaustion. She was in a dark space at the bottom of the Red House, with vast distances and a low ceiling. It should feel safe—she would easily smell and hear a predator’s approach—but instead it was unfamiliar.

Nettle chose to think of good things, in the way her mother had taught her.

Whatever danger was outside hadn’t followed them in.

Now that she was out of the rain, her fur was drying.

She felt her milk providing both nourishment and comfort to her pups. Even Wisp, who preferred to nurse lightly and frequently, was now drinking deeply, absorbing reassurance through warmth.

“When you’re rested,” Sorrel said, “We’ll carry the pups to my nest.”

Nettle awoke to the sound of claws skittering across the black plastic floor.

She sniffed, taking in the strong scents of her sleeping pups and brother. They were all nearby.

Another mouse was in the crawlspace.

Nettle sat up.

The rolling bumps of the floor extended beyond the distance she could see. Brick pillars supported the long boards that held up the Red House.

Nettle perked her ears.

The sound of a mouse’s claws scraping and catching on the black plastic floor.

Somewhere deeper in the crawlspace than she could see.

“Hello?” she said loud enough for a mouse to hear, but hopefully too quiet for any predators.

Nettle listened for a response, hearing only the breathing and the heartbeats of Sorrel and the pups.

Then the skittering came again, drawing closer.

Nettle flared her nostrils, inhaled deeply, but didn’t smell anyone.

A tiny silhouette of gray against the black of the crawlspace. It came closer until Nettle saw the mouse. It was small, probably female. Even in heavy shadow, the thinness of her fur was visible. She was far older than most mice survived.

“Do you live in here, too?” Nettle asked. Sorrel hadn’t mentioned anyone else, but he hadn’t really had a chance.

The old mouse came another few steps closer, eyes wide, inspecting Nettle.

Nettle nudged her brother. “Wake up. Who’s in here with us?”

By the time Sorrel sat up, the old mouse was gone.

“What?” Sorrel asked. “Are the humans in the crawlspace?”

“There was another mouse.”

Sorrel wrinkled his nose. “You must be exhausted. If there was another mouse in the Red House, I’d have smelled her long ago.”

“She didn’t have a smell.” Nettle realized how absurd that must sound. “She looked older than anyone’s grandmother.”

Sorrel twitched, almost imperceptibly. “Nobody here but us. And I think we all need some more sleep.”

He’d spent so much time alone that he’d forgotten how to mask the scent of dishonesty. He was lying about recognizing the old mouse. But why would he do that?

Sorrel motioned to Wisp and Hush. “Are you ready to carry these little squirmers up to my nest?”

Nettle listened hard into the vastness of the crawlspace once more. Nothing.

“Ready,” she said, wondering how else Sorrel had changed since she’d seen him last.

3

Sorrel carried Hush and Nettle carried Wisp. It strained her back to carry him off the floor, but with the fresh cut down his side, she didn’t want to drag his open flesh through dirt.

Both pups mewled in protest at having been taken from the warmth between their mother and uncle.

Rain sounded strange from inside. Instead of an assault of heavy raindrops and a cacophony of roaring splashes, it was a dull mumble that seeped through the walls.

Nettle wanted to ask where they were going—what exactly made for a good nest inside the Red House—but it was near impossible to speak with the scruff of Wisp’s neck in her mouth.

She saw soon enough.

They climbed out of the dark wide distances of the crawlspace, up inside the house’s walls.

Nettle instantly understood how Sorrel had stayed here for so long.

Inside was like a cozy burrow, already dug out and waiting to be occupied. Two long walls of crumbly white faced each other. Two narrower walls were like chewed-down tree branches, but perfectly flat and straight.

Few predators could fit inside here. And those that might would still get tangled in the pipes and wires that criss-crossed the higher-up space of this square burrow.

Nettle expected she would sleep soundly in here, for the first time since her pups were born.

“This way,” Sorrel said, or at least that’s what Nettle understood through his mouthful of Hush’s scruff.

He led her through a hole in one narrow, wooden wall, into a near-identical burrow.

And then they did it again.

The entire Red House was made of safe, comfortable burrows.

Nettle wanted to collapse in relief.

And from exhaustion.

Her jaw grew tired from holding Wisp. She squeaked to get Sorrel’s attention, but he was focused on the journey.

Finally, after climbing up the sides of the wood and squeezing through a gap in the white, dusty barrier, they came upon a smaller partition, not as tall as the others.

In one corner was a pile of shredded paper, fabric, and soft, fluffy stuff that reminded Nettle of dandelion tufts. Together, it appeared far softer than anything Nettle had ever slept on.

Water beaded on one wood wall, dripping from somewhere above and sliding down to be absorbed by the wood floor. The easy access to water was nothing short of miraculous.

Nettle smelled something she identified as food, which mixed the earthiness of seeds or roots with the sweetness of berries.

Sorrel saw her nostrils twitching and motioned to a nugget of glazed seeds, which was on the floor next to the bedding. He set Hush down in his bedding, then picked up the nugget to give to Nettle. “Cereal,” he said. “It’s delicious.”

Nettle set Wisp down next to his sister. She nibbled on the cereal, and Sorrel was right, but there was one part of this burrow that concerned her.

It wasn’t that there were only two exits.

It was that there was a crack along the entire bottom corner of the burrow. It went all the way through the white, crumbly wall, allowing a view down into a massive room. The crack was wide enough that Nettle thought she could squeeze through it, but she doubted Sorrel could. The room smelled of a hundred different foods. And of humans.

“What’s down there?” Nettle asked.

“The kitchen.” Sorrel lay down next to the crack, chin on the floor, one eye aimed into this kitchen.

Nettle’s first thought was that he’d chosen the most exposed spot in his nest to lie down, which put him at risk.

But mice who made mistakes didn’t get as old as Sorrel.

“Why’d you build your nest here?” Nettle asked.

Sorrel exhaled, clearly ready for sleep. ““Imagine if you gathered every flavor you’d ever tasted into a single room. There’s more sweetness tickling your nostrils than there are crickets singing on a clear summer night. And any time you want, you can slip over there to fill your belly.”

Nettle came near to look down through the crack. “It’s too high to climb down.”

“Oh no. I’ll you show you the way down through the wall after we nap.”

“This place is exposed to the humans.”

“They haven’t noticed me yet. And with this opening, there’s no barriers to the plethora of scents. They often heat their food before eating, which releases strangely alluring scents.”

Sorrel told her more about the kitchen, explaining that food was stored in both the fridge, which was inaccessible, and the cabinets, which were easy to get into. If you relieved yourself on the countertop, the humans would put out traps, but under the fridge was fine.

Suddenly, Sorrel hissed, “Time to stay quiet.”

Before Nettle could asked why, she smelled and then heard a human approaching. There was a click and the light through the crack grew brighter.

A large, male human walked about the kitchen, opening doors to gather food and equipment until he sat down at the table and ate. The whole process was a melody of new sounds for Nettle. Small doors closing, metal utensils clinking together, pellets of sweet-smelling food cascading into a white glass bowl, a brief rushing of liquid as the father poured so much odd-scented milk at once that it sounded to Nettle like a short-lived creek rushing by.

“I see why you like it here,” she said to her brother.

Sorrel shushed her, then whispered, “Their hearing isn’t great, but once in a while they surprise you. Not so much Rumble, but the younger human sometimes hears me if I talk out loud to myself. Best to be quiet when any of them are near.”

“You call this one ‘Rumble?’” Nettle asked.

“Oh, right. It’s been ages since I’ve had a mouse to talk to. I forget that everything in my mind isn’t already in your mind. I call him Rumble because when he talks it’s like rumbling thunder, so low there are barely individual sounds in what he says. Just a rumble. There’s also a mother and a pup human, already in bed. Rumble often comes to the kitchen for a snack before he sleeps.”

They went back to watching and listening to Rumble eat.

Sorrel drifted off to sleep.

He deserved the rest, after the effort and injury he’d spent to help get Wisp and Hush to safety. Nettle was grateful that he still held compassion for her. Not many mice in the colony would ever do much to help an individual, unless it also contributed to the continuation of the colony’s future posterity. Sorrel was unique. So was she, Nettle supposed, but Sorrel had never tried to hide it.

Nettle laid down in the bedding, which felt like floating on a cloud. She nursed her pups again, and then Wisp crawled away to fall asleep with his nose twitching in the air. Hush passed out with Nettle’s nipple still in her mouth. Nettle pulled away until she popped out. Then she got up, nudged Hush close to Wisp, licked Wisp’s scratch again, and lay back down beside them both.

She didn’t feel safe, and it didn’t feel fair.

This burrow was safer than any she could build outside.

But it was unfamiliar, and so her unruly thoughts insisted on arguing that there could be new dangers she hadn’t prepared for.

Outside, Nettle had built her nest between several of her cousins’ nests. If predators came, she always heard commotion and smelled fear, giving her plenty of time to flee.

That was before Hush and Wisp came along. And before this new threat appeared. Still, until these last weeks, Nettle had felt safe knowing her nest was in the midst of many nests.

Inside the Red House now, there was only her and Sorrel. If a predator were to come hunting, there was only one nest to find.

Nettle reminded herself that few predators could fit inside this maze of burrows in between the rooms of the Red House. And that she was exhausted. It was easy to dwell on fear when exhausted.

Despite that exhaustion, Nettle stayed awake. She listened to the human father—to Rumble—finish his meal. He performed another song of new, pleasant sounds, before another click darkened the kitchen and his footsteps gently thundered to elsewhere.

Sorrel snored.

Hush and Wisp slept still as stone, exhausted from their wild night.

Their breathing began to ease Nettle to sleep.

And then the entire Red House twitched.

4

The sudden twitch wasn’t just in the comfortable bedding, but the entire burrow.

It yanked Nettle’s legs to one side. Her body followed. Dust from the bedding poofed upward.

Nettle jumped to her feet, ears perked, nostrils wide, searching for the predator.

Hush and Wisp cried out for her, or out of fear at the sudden jolt they’d just received.

With a snore, Sorrel rolled over. His eyes cracked open and he spoke through grogginess. “What happened? Did you wake me?”

Nettle looked all around the burrow. Flat walls and sharp-cornered edges that would never occur in nature. How had she ever felt this place was cozy? She checked both entrances. Through one, she could see another section of wall like this one, although empty of bedding. She couldn’t see far through the other.

“Something shook us,” Nettle said, peering down the crack into the dark kitchen. It was empty of people, but something was off.

Hush pushed herself against Nettle’s side. Wisp perked his ears as if he were ready to flee from a predator, despite his closed eyes and feeble ability to crawl.

Sorrel wiggled an impressively wide divot into the bedding. “You probably just felt Rumble hurrying about. When he runs, feels like the thunderclouds themselves are hunting you.”

“The whole house is quiet,” Nettle nudged the pups together, which comforted Hush well enough, and then crept over for a better view of the kitchen.

She’d only been here a few hours. It didn’t make sense that something felt off, and yet it did.

The countertops were the same height as before. The cabinets the same color and pattern as the insides of a broken tree.

A miasma of scents still drifted up from the kitchen, chaotic and full of unfamiliar details. Her suspicion that something had changed couldn’t have anything to do with smell.

The fridge still thrummed.

That was it.

Nettle stared at the fridge, trying to figure out what seemed different about it. Still the same color—white as fresh snow. The same height. The same sharp angles and straight lines.

There was extra space between the fridge and the counter.

A dark gap.

Only a few minutes earlier, when Sorrel had told her about the kitchen, she’d instinctively marked the space beneath the fridge as a potential hiding place, but not the space between the fridge and the counter. It was narrow enough to squeeze through but not squeeze into.

But now, it wasn’t a question of squeezing at all. She and Sorrel could easily walk shoulder-to-shoulder, right into the gap.

With how dark it was, she couldn’t tell how far back that gap went. The counter and fridge were against the wall, but somehow this new dark space between them seemed to go on even further. If she could get closer, she could listen to sound bounce around inside that gap, hear how far it went.

“Look at this,” she said to her brother.

Sorrel sleepily got to his feet and stepped to her side. “What?”

Nettle pointed out the space between the fridge and the counter. “It’s bigger now.”

Sorrel rolled his eyes. “I could see the fridge from where I was resting.”

“No. The gap next to it.”

“Oh. Hmm. Rumble probably moved the fridge a bit. You’d be surprised the size of the things he can move.”

He wasn’t taking her seriously.

“If that were the case,” Nettle said, “there’d be more space by the wall. But the fridge hasn’t been moved.”

Sorrel scratched his cheek with his back leg. He winced at the pain in his missing tail. “You’re right.”

“Then what are we looking at? Can you see the wall back through the gap? It looks like that space goes right on past where the wall should be.”

His ears perked up but of course they were too far away to hear how sound bounced around down there. “That’s strange.”

“You agree it’s different, then? It changed.”

“I’ve been down there a thousand times. I’ve hopped over that gap every time. It’s no wider than my tail.” He reached back with his front paw and closed his claws on empty air.

Nettle glanced behind them to make sure Hush and Wisp were still okay. They’d fallen back asleep. “What do we do?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it safe to be here?”

Sorrel inspected the scab on the stub of his tail. “Safer than outside.”

“Should we check it out?”

“Should we go straight into potential danger, during the night when predators hunt? No. No, we shouldn’t.”

“I can’t keep my pups here if we don’t know we’re safe.”

“I’m going back to sleep. Any predators hiding in that weird space don’t know we exist. Far too many scents in the kitchen to notice ours.”

“It’s weirder than predators.”

“I’ll give you that. We can sniff around later while we’re gathering food.”

Nettle wanted to berate him for his attitude, but she agreed with what he’d said. Now wasn’t the time to investigate. She told herself that her fear of the new, dark gap was being amplified by her exhaustion, by the unfamiliarity of this place.

But her gut told her she was right. Something was deeply wrong. She feared it might be related to the terrors outside.

Sorrel snored.

Nettle lay down next to Hush and Wisp. They were growing so quickly. She could barely curl herself around them anymore.

She considered moving the three of them closer to the crack in the wall, so she could keep a watchful eye on the dark gap, but ultimately she stayed where she was to let the pups sleep.

Most of life could be put on hold when it was time for babies to sleep.

5

Nettle awoke.

Moonlight still glowed through the kitchen window, wound its way up through the crack in the wall, and into Sorrel’s burrow.

Morning was close, but not yet arrived.

The strange square burrow filled Nettle with confusion, until she remembered where she was and calmed down.

She jerked up in panic—where were the pups? But she could feel, smell, and hear both of them breathing.

Everything was okay.

Despite the way the house had twitched earlier in the night and the dark gap had appeared beside the fridge, everything was okay. Wisp and Hush were safe and happy. Sorrel’s nest was warm and comfortable.

Once fully awake, Nettle’s mind and stomach narrowed in on a new problem:

She had no larder.

Sorrel’s nest went back to feeling like an unnatural square.

When Hush and Wisp were in her belly, she’d followed instinct and community direction to gather a lasting supply of seeds, roots, and berries. She’d hidden them near her nest so she could eat without leaving her blind and helpless pups.

When she’d fled the terror outside, she’d left behind her larder.

And although she could smell food from the kitchen, it wasn’t nearly close enough.

Nursing pups while having no gathered larder felt wrong on a deep level.

“Wake up,” she hissed at her brother.

Sorrel had been up several times throughout the night, but each time had gone back to sleep with his nose pointed to the view of the kitchen. Nettle saw his eyes pop open and heard his heartbeat quicken.

“It’s just me,” Nettle said.

“Right. Why are you awake?”

“I need to stock a larder.”

Sorrel wiggled his snout, wetting his cheeks which must have gone dry from all his snoring. He closed his eyes again. “You don’t need a larder.”

Nettle’s mind tripped over itself trying to list all the reasons Sorrel was wrong. Foremost among them was that instinct declared it. Nursing mothers needed food ready and waiting. This wasn’t something anyone should bother debating.

Nettle was here because she wanted her pups to survive, and since they were still drinking her milk, that required a stocked larder.

“Sorrel,” Nettle said, “all I need from you is to show me a path to the food that’s safer than squeezing through that crack and dropping to the floor. Once you show me the way, I can gather the food myself.”

Sorrel didn’t even bother opening his eyes. “You don’t need to. The kitchen is right here. Get food when you’re hungry.”

His dismissive tone irked Nettle. “Every mouse is born knowing we need to gather food. Every female at least.”

“Maybe,” Sorrel said. “Or maybe you’ve spent your whole life seeing your cousins do it and so you only think it’s an instinct.”

Nettle was not in the mood to debate. She pushed herself up to her feet. Her legs ached from yesterday’s climbing and running. She brushed bedding overtop Hush and Wisp. Hush whined in her sleep.

Was it safe to leave them?

Nettle couldn’t stay with her pups constantly.

Even inside, every day was a risk.

“I’m going to gather food,” Nettle told her brother.

“Okay, but there’s no need to bring back more than enough to fill your belly.”

Nettle huffed. “This is what I’m doing. You can stay and keep an eye on the pups.”

“You don’t know where to go.”

“You keep saying it’s so close. I’ll follow the scent.”

“The scent will lead you straight across the open kitchen floor. A human will see you and then I’ll be dodging traps for weeks. Won’t the pups open their eyes soon? You don’t want traps around when Wisp and Hush are first exploring.”

He had a point, but Nettle needed her larder stocked, even if she couldn’t win an argument about why. “I won’t let anyone see me. While you’ve been inside all comfortable, I’ve been outside actually avoiding predators.”

“Avoiding the humans is a different skill. They’re not looking for us, but they can still notice you, and they don’t like sharing their house with mice. Except for maybe the human pup. I’ve taken to calling her Birdsong. You’ll understand why when you hear her talk.”

As weird and unfamiliar as the Red House felt, she at least got to listen to Sorrel’s habit of wandering off on tangents. “You’ll keep an eye on the pups?”

“Of course. Are you going to sniff around that new gap between the fridge and counter?”

Fear bubbled up inside Nettle. “Will I need to get close to it to find food?”

“No. Let’s avoid it for now.”

“Agreed.” Nettle went through the exit in the corner, down passageways inside walls toward the kitchen.

Sorrel was compassionate to a fault—why was he being so stubborn about this?

Because she’d said the reason for a larder was instinct?

She shrugged it off. Sorrel didn’t get to order her around. This was her home now, too.

At least until it was safe to go outside again.

Nettle felt an uncomfortable pit in her gut. If the colony did become safe again, is that where she intended to raise her pups?

Nettle shook herself off. Her purpose right now was gathering food. Pointless hypotheticals could wait.

6

Nettle sniffed the air.

Dry and dusty. But also a hint of something sweet and nutty.

More cereal.

The path below led down yet another rectangular space inside the walls.

Her claws dug into the white crumbly sides well enough that she could run straight down, as long as she was quick.

Dull yellow light shone through a hole at the bottom, coming from the kitchen.

A cereal smell came through that hole, along with a myriad of smells that Nettle didn’t recognize, though most of them were quite pleasant.

Sorrel had warned her that the direct path was too much in the open. She looked for another way to go.

Within the wall itself, if she wanted to circle the kitchen further she’d have to go back up to the top.

Nettle didn’t want to stay away from her pups for long.

If Sorrel had wanted her to follow some precise path to the cabinets, then he should have woken up and shown her.

Nettle crept to the hole that led to the kitchen. Human smell lingered all over, but not strong enough to mean anyone was in the kitchen right now.

She listened. A rhythmic tap of water dripping. The buzz of yellow light—the same that glowed above the Red House’s outer door. Human footsteps somewhere in the Red House, but not nearby. Nothing to worry about.

Still, she was nervous to push her nose through the hole into the kitchen. It was an open, exposed area, just like Sorrel had warned.

Exposure killed mice.

The passageways within the walls felt much safer.

But while her nose and ears could detect danger, they couldn’t plot a path. Only her eyes could do that.

Nettle wiggled into the hole. Her head popped through the other side.

The kitchen was gigantic.

Seeing it from above hadn’t prepared Nettle for how huge and open an enclosed space could be.

Like the passageways inside the walls, the kitchen had the same right angles and straight lines that were foreign to nature, but the size was overwhelming. Nearly as big as the meadow itself. Almost as bright, too, which was welcome.

Moonlight pouring through the window mixed with the yellow light above the sink.

Nettle blinked, steeling herself to flee if necessary.

Her eyes confirmed what she already knew—no one was in the kitchen.

She sniffed the air.

The sweet cereal smell was coming from brightly colored cardboard boxes on top of the fridge--Nettle had already seen those patterns, nibbled apart into bedding in Sorrel’s nest.

There’d be food inside those boxes.

Nettle ran along the edge of the kitchen floor, heading for the safety of the dark space beneath the fridge.

She slipped beneath, into dust as deep as her paws. Unpleasant, but it made her footsteps even quieter.

She hadn’t looked at the dark gap on the far side of the fridge. She didn’t need to get close to it. But if it were a threat, Nettle wanted to know what it was.

She lowered her chin to the floor, giving herself a view along the bottom of the fridge, below metal pipes and wires.

She could see the side of the cabinet just fine. There was nothing strange about it, except it was several tail-lengths farther away than it would have been earlier in the night.

But something about it gave off a strange energy, not unlike how the black wires in the walls hummed with unspeakable threats.

She’d leave that space alone for now.

Nettle crept to the back of the fridge. Between it and the wall, more pipes and wires were exposed. Nettle easily climbed them.

On top, she took a second to survey the strangeness of the kitchen. Other than beneath the fridge, the kitchen was devoid of dust. Everything in the world should be at least partially covered in dust, but here in the human’s kitchen every speck of it had been pushed under the fridge.

A table sat in the middle of the floor, as perfectly round as the full moon, or an owl’s eye. Nettle had never seen anything that large that was so perfectly round.

A pang of homesickness hit her, but she reminded herself of the nightly danger from which she was protecting her pups.

Lost in the discomfort of the Red House’s straight lines and perfect circles, Nettle didn’t notice the sound of footsteps growing louder until she felt the fridge vibrating beneath her feet.

A young human pup skipped into the kitchen.

Nettle froze. Atop the fridge, between two cardboard boxes of sweet grain, Nettle knew she was perfectly visible to the young pup. All the pup had to do was look up.

She smelled female. The hair on her head was yellow like grass in autumn. She smelled like she hadn’t been sleeping well, although Nettle didn’t know if that smell would be the same for humans.

Sorrel had called her “Birdsong.”

A lovely name for such a large potential predator.

Nettle didn’t know what to do.

With hawks or owls, you froze and prayed that they didn’t spot you. With foxes, you fled. With cats, you charged the cat and then fled. These weren’t the habits of the colony or even instinct, but rather the ways of survival that Nettle discovered through watching hundreds of scenarios and imagining thousands more.

Nettle had always avoided the humans on those rare occasions when they ventured across the meadow to the edge of the forest where the colony had dug its many burrows. Humans made so much noise that Nettle had no trouble being gone before they came close.

But now, in this high corner of the kitchen, Nettle saw the human pup spring around happily and she had no idea what to do.

The clink of glass as Birdsong got an empty bowl from one cabinet and then turned for the fridge.

She froze, eyes wide.

She’d spotted Nettle.

Nettle sank on her haunches, preparing to flee.

But then the pup did something Nettle didn’t expect: she laughed.

Nettle understood why Sorrel called the human pup “Birdsong.”

Birdsong spoke in words Nettle didn’t understand, but in a tone that Nettle might have used when meeting a cousin’s pups for the first time.

Birdsong’s emotions smelled of happy surprise.

An adult human quickly strode into the kitchen. Nettle jumped behind a cardboard box in alarm.

Birdsong spoke disappointment.

Nettle’s heart raced. How had she not heard this newcomer? He was so tall that the gray hair atop his head nearly brushed the ceiling.

Nettle wanted to peek back out from her hiding place, but she stayed hidden. Sorrel had said that Birdsong might not put out traps, but the adults definitely would.

Birdsong called out again. She was asking for Nettle to come back into view.

Nettle stayed still. She smelled Birdsong’s disappointment.

She heard wood scrape on the floor and then creak. Birdsong whispered something as one of the cereal boxes slid away. Nettle ducked behind another.

More movement below.

The same sounds and smells of pouring cereal and milk that Rumble had made earlier.

Nettle peeked around the cereal box.

Birdsong sat at the table, spooning cereal into her mouth.

The tall, gray-haired human sat across from her, hands folded on the tabletop. His back was to Nettle.

Birdsong laughed again—she’d spotted Nettle.

When looking for predators, the line of sight went both ways. Nettle dashed back into hiding before the tall man could turn around.

The gray of dawn came through the window before it was safe to leave.

7

Sweet, hard cereal filled Nettle’s cheeks.

There was hardly a more satisfying, content feeling than having cheeks full of food, heading back to your nest through tight, safe passageways.

Outside might feel more natural, but outside was exposed to predators from above and all sides. Instead of darting from grass tuft to bush to leaf clump, here Nettle could scurry confidently under a pipe, up a length of wood, and through a hole into the burrow.

The Red House was good for now.

Even if she was heading back to an argument with her brother about whether she needed a larder.

Sorrel should know that she needed a larder to stay fed while she was still nursing. It wasn’t a matter of instinct or colony tradition—it was common sense. Making her own life easier and more pleasant.

In fact, the thought of having a full larder made this place feel more like a real home. Not that she fully knew her way around yet.

But the way ahead was simple enough.

After she climbed this section of wall, the nest would be past two boards.

The Red House twitched.

Nettle froze. Less than a dozen heartbeats—less than a second—and her feet were suddenly sprawled apart forward to back, her spine drooping between her shoulders and hips. Muscles in her back, tired from caring for her babies, threatened to rip.

Simultaneously, the passageway in front of her jolted to the right in a blur, the movement like a massive falcon diving past her. In its place, crashing into view just as violently, was a different passageway, this one lined with bricks on one side.

Nettle inhaled. She perked her ears. She let out a low squeak to feel this changed passageway with its echo.

Where was she? Where had the familiar passage gone?

Her ears and nose told her this was the same environment she been in only a moment ago. But they also told her she’d become instantly lost.

“No, no, no, no, no,” she murmured to herself, the sounds of her words painting a clearer picture of her new surroundings. She had somehow ended up in the corner of the house. The brick wall on her left butted up against a perpendicular brick wall a hundred paces in front of her.

She turned around. Maybe she could slip back into the kitchen and find a way to climb the wall up to the tiny crack that led to Sorrel's burrow. But the passageway she’d just came through had vanished. Instead, there was a white pipe running floor to ceiling and blocking her way entirely.

Nettle thought maybe she could chew through the white crumbling material on her right, but she didn’t know where she was. That would be as much of a gamble as going forward around the bend.

She dropped the sweet, hard cereal from her cheeks onto the dusty floor. She didn't want the taste of it interfering with how quickly she would smell a predator.

She crept forward toward the bend.

A warm, humid breeze blew against her. She wasn't sure of the smell. It was dusty, woodsy, but there also something wet to it. Beyond the humidity itself, she associated the smell with moisture. She wasn’t sure why.

She perked her ears, listening more intently.

A hole to the outside would explain the humidity. But if there were a hole with wind blowing through, then she should hear it rushing and whistling.

She heard only her own heartbeat.

Maybe now was the time to gnaw through the wall and see if she recognized where she was. The breeze stopped, and at the end of it, she smelled a strong odor of half-digested grass.

She’d had her share of illnesses, so she knew what it smelled like to vomit a bellyful of grass seed. The smell was thicker than she expected, as if it wasn't just the seeds mixed into the bile, but also the inedible stalks themselves.

There must be something else living in here.

The old mouse that Nettle had seen in the crawlspace.

But a mouse that small couldn’t be producing this much wet, acrid air.

Something else. Something bigger.

But even if that were the case, why would they be eating grass inside? There was plentiful food in the kitchen. If they wanted grass, why come inside at all?

Nettle glanced behind her again, wishing for another way to go, anywhere but ahead, around the corner, into this rotten breeze.

But if there was a predator in the Red House, she needed to know.

Nettle reached the corner. She stopped before poking her nose around, not yet ready to expose her presence to whatever was down the next passageway.

She listened intently and widened her nostrils.

The same steady breeze, the same smell of bile and grass stalks.

Nettle needed a louder noise to get a sense of what waited around the corner.

If she was going to make noise, she might as well offer a salutation. “Hello?”

The air thickened with the stenches of chewed up grass. Even as the smell enveloped her, she focused on her hearing, listened intently to feel if there were some creature lurking around the bend.

But the sound echoed crisp and clear. The passageway around the corner was empty. But there was a small interruption in the way the sound bounced, as if there were a hole in the wall.

So maybe the answer was as simple as that: a hole to the outside letting in wind.

She leaned so one eye went past the edge.

The passageway stretched far into the distance, at least twice as far as the meadow was wide.

On the left was brick—interrupted by the hole she’d sensed, a dark spot leading outside. On the right was wood and the crumbly white material.

So very far ahead, pathways branched to the right and light spilled out. Somewhere down one of those pathways, Nettle would find familiar ground again.

Senses open, Nettle advanced. She was ready to flee, but forward, not back. If she fled backward, it would be a dead end.

Humid air blew out from the dark hole in the brick.

Nettle would have to slip past.

As she drew near, it occurred to her that she’d seen sunrise approaching when she’d left the kitchen.

A hole to the outside should be aglow with morning light.

Nettle looked above her at the dark spot in the brick.

Something in that darkness exhaled.

Its mouth was large enough that its breath covered every surface of Nettle’s body.

Acting on instinct, Nettle leapt directly away. She collided with the wall. She tried to flee—gaining enough of her mind that she remembered to aim herself forward rather than back—but nothing attacked her.

Curious, Nettle peered up again at the dark spot on the brick.

It was a hole, only it couldn’t go through the brick to the outside, because it was so dark in there.

Flat teeth lined the maw, each bigger than Nettle’s head.

It was a mouth, with lips that were long bulges of crumbling brick.

And between its teeth, blackness.

Nettle squeaked to send sound into that darkness.

The spaces inside the Red House had so far been unnatural straight. But beyond these massive flat teeth, the world swung to the opposite end of that spectrum.

Nature was wild, but nature was not maliciously confounding, like the tunnel she heard before her.

The tunnel that couldn’t exist in such a narrow wall of bricks.

The tunnel that loomed over her, ringed by teeth designed to crush.

The tunnel which echoed with the sounds of wet flesh rubbing against wet flesh.

Deep inside this mouth before her, some large appendage dragged itself toward Nettle.

She fled.

Toward the branching passages ahead, where brightness blinded her.

Nettle raced on, regardless, desperate to get away from those teeth. And away from the thing that was slithering and shuddering its way up that throat.

Her eyes adjusted to the light and she found herself in familiar territory, near where they’d entered the house from the crawlspace.

Nettle caught her breath, and then scurried back to Sorrel to ask what sort of nightmare house she’d moved into.

8

Nettle climbed back into the nest.

She found Sorrel playing with Wisp, sneaking close to the blind pup, blowing on his face, then hopping away when Wisp lunged for him.

Wisp was giggling.

Hush sat in the bedding. Her nose perked up when Nettle entered the nest.

Nettle caught her breath, unsure how to process what she’d just experienced.

Sorrel noticed her. “I thought you were bringing back food.”

Wisp pounced into his uncle’s side.

“This house isn’t safe,” Nettle said.

“What do you mean? Did the humans see you?”

“Did you feel the house twitch?”

Sorrel nodded. “I didn’t see any changes, though.”

“I did.” Nettle told him how she’d suddenly found herself in the back corner of the house, and how she’d found a hole in the outer brick wall. Not a hole that led to outside, but a hole lined with flat, crushing teeth, and that twisted in unnatural ways down into an impossible tunnel.

Sorrel’s nostrils flared.

He was sniffing for any smell of madness.

Nettle scratched at the floor so the smell of the wood would mask her own smell of frustration. He didn’t believe her about the old mouse—of course he wouldn’t believe her about this. “I didn’t imagine it.”

“Could you show me where you saw this mouth?”

Nettle tried to visualize the way back. “I think so.”

“Should we go see it?”

It was either go back to that horror or let Sorrel think she’d imagined the whole thing. Nettle didn’t care for either option.

“Yes. I’ll take you as soon as the pups nap again.”

Sorrel looked concerned. “How about we gather your larder, first?”

“Now you find that important?”

“I want you feel at home in here.”

“Because if not I might keep hallucinating?”

“That’s not what I said.”

Nettle let it go. She was on edge after the bizarre predator she’d just seen. Or was it a predator? Animals with flat teeth didn’t normally eat mice. And its breath—if you could call it breath—smelled of grass.

She didn’t want to damage her renewed relationship with her brother. Better to take a bit and clear her head.

“Okay. Let’s fill a larder. Once the pups are asleep.” Nettle sat by the crack in the wall to rest.

Sorrel played with Wisp, who eagerly chased his uncle around the nest. Hush stayed comfortably in the bedding, but she tracked the play with her closed eyes. Light was getting through. Both she and Wisp would open their eyes soon.

Nettle felt pride that both were progressing so quickly. Part of her wanted her cousins to see so they’d know that she was one of them. But for now, the Red House was the safer home for Hush and Wisp.

It turned out the pups didn’t nap very well in a new nest, despite the soft bedding.

Each trip Nettle and Sorrel took through the walls to the cabinets, they returned to find either Hush or Wisp mewing from fear or loneliness.

They’d set down the food from their cheeks into Nettle’s newly-claimed larder. She’d chosen the section of wall just beyond Sorrel’s nest, another rectangular burrow, this one without a crack in the corner.

Then, each time they’d play with the pups, Nettle would nurse them, and then when Hush and Wisp drifted back to sleep, Nettle and Sorrel would head out again to fill their cheeks with cereal and raisins and rice.

Filling the larder took most of the day.

Sorrel took advantage of their trips together to tell her about his life for the past three seasons that he’d been inside. Of course, the back half of each trip their mouths were full which made talking difficult, but still, Nettle learned how it took Sorrel three days to discover the passageways inside the walls. Before that he’d been cowering under furniture.

“That’s the first time Birdsong noticed me,” Sorrel said, as they dropped off the final load of food. “There’s something special about that big pup.”

“I saw her, too,” Nettle said. “She laughed when she saw me. I understand your name for her.”

“You were spotted?” Sorrel’s tone changed to worry.

Nettle bit back her annoyance. “Only by Birdsong. If anything, she was delighted to see me.”

Sorrel smiled but then got serious. “She’s young. She likes us, but she might like us so much that she tells her mother about us. And then there’ll be traps everywhere. You should have listened to me. There might not be as many tricks to survival as there are outside, but the tricks we do have are just as important, and you don’t know them yet.”

Nettle hadn’t been scolded since she was a pup herself. “If Birdsong puts out traps—or tells her mother to put out traps—we can stay put and eat from the larder. Nice that we have it, isn’t it?”

Sorrel used his nose to nudge together the pile of food. “You’ve got a point, but I don’t want to be restricted to the nest. You know what makes living inside the Red House so much nicer than out in the colony? Freedom of movement, of exploration. The only threat is the humans seeing you, and they don’t come after you like a predator. And inside the walls, we’re entirely safe from predators.”

Nettle felt herself shrink inward. After so many hours of carrying food, caring for the pups, then carrying food again, she’d nearly forgot about the mouth in the brick wall. “I need to show you what I saw.”

“Ah. Right.” Sorrel was still full of doubt.

It stung a little, that her brother didn’t believe her. But Nettle tried to be sympathetic. Brick walls didn’t have mouths. If Sorrel had spun the same tale, would she believe him?

Of course, the answer was no.

But Nettle longed for a family where the answer was yes.

She checked on her pups, in the square burrow next to her new larder. They slept hard. Hush twitched and Nettle wondered what she was dreaming.

“Ready?” Sorrel asked behind her.

They headed back out into the Red House to find something impossible.

9

Nettle led her brother back through his home.

Muffled human voices pierced the walls, gathered somewhere, talking and laughing.

“I don’t come back here often.” Sorrel clambered through a tangle of wires and pipes. “The bricks are hot in the summer and cold in the winter.”

Nettle’s heart hummed as they approached the dark corner where she’d seen the mouth.

But when they arrived, the wall was bare. Only bricks and rough, gray mortar between them.

“It was here.”

Sorrel began to speak but then held his tongue.

“I’m sure this is the right place,” Nettle said.

“Let’s head back.” Sorrel rubbed his cheek against hers. “It’s been a long day. Sometimes dreams are funny here in the Red House. You think you’re awake but you see the strangest things.”

“What do you mean? Did you see something?”

“Nothing too weird,” Sorrel said, smelling of dishonesty.

“Have you seen a mouth in the wall?”

“No.” Sorrel headed back the way they’d come. “Let’s peek in on the humans. I don’t believe you’ve seen Birdsong’s mother, yet. You’ll like her. I think.”

Nettle followed after, checking behind her that no mouths had opened up in the walls.

They came upon a section in the passageway where the ceiling became gray metal instead of yellow wood. There was a hole big enough to fit through.

Sorrel climbed inside. Nettle followed after.

They were inside a rectangular passageway. The floor, walls, and ceiling were all that same gray metal. It went on and on in both directions. Warm wind forced Nettle’s fur against her skin.

“Lots of nice views from in here,” Sorrel said. “I often watch the family and feel a part of this house.”

Although it surprised her, Nettle thought she might also enjoy being part of this place. But not as much as being a part of her colony. A real member of her colony, not a semi-outsider like she’d always felt before.

They scrabbled through the metal corridor.

“Quiet as you can,” Sorrel said. “Sound travels so smoothly in here that even the humans can hear us if we’re too loud.”

Soon, Nettle heard the humans again—three distinct voices. She smelled them each, plus a strong scent of paper. Then she followed Sorrel around a corner and the metal corridor was much brighter.

Strips of light shone through a grate.

Sorrel shushed her and then very exaggeratedly walked on the pads of his feet, keeping his claws from touching the floor.

Nettle mimicked her brother’s way of walking as they approached the grate.

Down below was another room, larger than the kitchen. It was more full of color, like the forest in spring. Three walls were green. Squares of other colors were mounted to the walls. The fourth wall was lined with horizontal boards upon which sat rows and rows of books.

A recess in one wall held a fire.

The flickering and popping reds and oranges mesmerized Nettle. She had seen fire only once, after lightning had struck a dead pine tree whose dry needles hadn’t yet fallen. It was terrifying, a monstrous display of danger worse than any predator.

And yet here inside the Red House, the humans had made friends with fire and sat comfortably beside it.

A plump bearded man sat on a soft-looking chair, engrossed by a rectangular light he held. That was Rumble.

Birdsong snuggled with her mother on top of a soft-looking chair. The mother spoke rhythmically while flipping through a bundle of paper. The colors on each sheet mesmerized both humans.

“What do you call the mother human?” Nettle asked?

“Careful.”

Nettle whipped her head around, nostrils flared and ears high. “What is it?”

“No, that’s what I call Birdsong’s mother: Careful.”

“Oh. Why?”

“Birdsong climbs as much as a squirrel. Her mother is always saying one specific word to her. I assume she’s telling her to be careful. I can always tell when Birdsong is in a happy mood because I hear her mother saying, ‘Careful.’ It happened so often that I came to think of her by that name.”

Nettle wondered how soon she’d be repeating warnings of “careful” to her own pups. Likely within the week, Wisp and Hush would open their eyes and start exploring. Not that Wisp had waited to drag himself around, sniffing in as much of the world as he could.

She looked down at the human family. “Rumble, Careful, and Birdsong. What do you think they call themselves?”

“Who could say?” Sorrel shrugged.

“And who’s that?” Nettle asked, pointing with her nose at a tall man standing at the bookshelves, the same who had sat across the kitchen table from Birdsong early this morning.

Sorrel tilted his head. “Careful’s father, I think. Maybe Rumble’s father. Sometimes the family has visitors who stay for days or weeks.”

“Birdsong has a playmate in her grandfather.” Nettle liked that idea. “I wish Mom were around to visit Hush and Wisp.”

“She would, if she were alive. She was always as strange as us. Just as incapable of fitting in with our cousins.”

“Hey,” Nettle weakly protested. “I fit in.”

Sorrel stared blankly before his eyes danced with laughter. He contained himself. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t laugh. I’m not mocking, I promise. But be serious, Nettle.”

Nettle bristled. “I’m not as weird as you.”

Sorrel guffawed. “I’d thank you, but I don’t want to encourage you insulting yourself. In all seriousness, why did you leave the colony?”

“To keep my pups safe from the new danger out there.”

“That’s why you left when you did. But why did you leave? I don’t see any of our cousins lugging their pups to safety. They’re hiding in the burrows. And if that unseen predator slinks inside, they’ll flee, mouths empty.”

It was a horrible thought—abandoning your own pups—but Nettle knew she was strange for taking Hush and Wisp with her when she’d fled. Her cousins would scoff. Nettle could birth more pups. Saving herself was the better choice for the colony’s survival.

But Wisp squeaked with joy when he was blindly exploring the burrow and bumped into a root he hadn’t found before. And Hush purred with contentment when Nettle hugged her warm, fuzzy little belly against Nettle’s own.

They were their own mice, and Nettle’s instinct told her there was value in that. Which, by the way, was evidence for Sorrel that instinct was not just what she’d learned from the colony.

“Quiet,” Sorrel whispered.

“I’m not talking.”

Sorrel hushed her again. He peered down through the grate.

Nettle looked to see both Birdsong and her grandfather returning her gaze.

Her and Sorrel’s discussion had been too loud.

The tall man now stood behind the couch where Careful had a book open with Birdsong.

Careful spoke rhythmically, eyes on the book. Rumble sat next to her on the opposite side from Birdsong, face pointed at his own book.

“Can they see us?” Nettle whispered.

Birdsong smiled up at them.

Her grandfather squinted. He leaned forward.

“Looks like it,” Sorrel said. “We should go.”

Nettle froze. Behind her brother, the metal wall split into a vicious smile.

They’d been loud enough that it wasn’t only the humans who’d heard them. The Red House had also been listening.

10

Nettle lunged for her brother.

Within the metal wall behind Sorrel, the grinning split opened to reveal teeth, yellowed and sharp as a coyote’s.

Nettle grabbed Sorrel’s shoulder between her teeth to yank him away. He spun with her effort, the fanged maw coming into view. Sorrel’s skin suddenly tasted like fear.

Teeth snapped together.

If Sorrel still had a tail, he might have lost it.

He threw himself away, colliding with Nettle, his chubby bulk knocking them both backwards.

The metal floor juddered with their impact, lessening the blow. Nettle scrambled back to her feet, keeping the mouth where she could see it.

Gums blended with the gray metal wall, moving with the metal like her own gums moved with her flesh.

Nettle helped Sorrel up, both of them backing away from the mouth, away from the grate, back to safety.

“What is that?” Sorrel asked, as if it didn’t fit exactly the description she’d given him before.

Except those teeth had been thick and flat, while these came to points easily sharp enough to pierce Nettle’s skin.

And where before it was only darkness behind the teeth, this throat glowed a sickly red to reveal bumpy, mottled flesh.

The mouth opened wider.

The wall bulged toward them. Coyote fangs angled outward.

But the metal would only bend so far.

“It can’t reach us,” Sorrel said.

Nettle heard in his tone that he already sensed how wrong he was, because as he spoke, his voice echoed down that maw into the red, fleshy throat that curved upward out of sight.

Both of their ears picked up. Those words echoed so much longer than they should have.

Nettle sensed this thing in front of her as a predator, yes, but also the entrance to a twisted burrow. Where the wet, red tunnel led, Nettle didn’t want to imagine.

“The teeth don’t need to reach us,” Nettle backed away.

She felt a familiar vibration as something from deep within that throat slithered its way closer.

“We should run,” Nettle said.

Sorrel expressed his agreement by running back up the ductwork the way they'd come. They made it a few dozen steps before a thick, raw, meaty smell filled the air around them. Something dull and sticky thumped against the floor. It echoed.

Nettle looked behind her as they fled. The canine mouth turned in their direction as far as it could stretch the wall. And now, a tongue lulled from between its teeth, out onto the floor.

“It’s hideous,” Sorrel said through heaving breaths.

The tongue twisted as it moved along the duct toward them. It slithered like a snake but to move it had to twirl like a falling maple seed.

Fangs were embedded in the meat of the tongue. Not sticking out threateningly, but sideways as if they'd been pressed into the tongue like pebbles into clay.

The sight, the sound, the scent—they all screamed at Nettle that this wasn’t only a predator to mice, or even to humans. It was hungry for the Red House, for the calm of the meadow, for the essence of all the lives it could touch.

Nettle ran. She quickly outpaced her brother.

Ahead, the duct angled hard to the left.

Nettle cried encouragement. “We’ll get around the bend and we’ll be safe.”

Maybe this twisting tongue couldn't turn sharply enough to grab them.

“On ahead there’s a hole downward,” Sorrel wheezed. “Practically straight into the nest.”

They rounded the corner much slower than Nettle wished.

Would they be safe in the nest? Although she wanted to dart ahead of her brother to reach the pups more quickly, she had to wait for him. If the tongue could reach the burrow, both she and Sorrel would need to pick up a pup and keep running.

The empty duct ahead was suddenly filled with chaotic movement.

A mouth opened on either side. Then another, then four, five, each different from the others. One with canine fangs, one with feline. Another with flat teeth like the first she'd seen. And yet another with no teeth but the razor edge of an owl’s beak.

Sorrel skidded to a stop. “There’s too many. We have to go back.”

But even as he spoke, they both smelled the approaching raw meat of the slithering, rotating tongue. In that scent was the threat—the promise—that being caught by that fanged tongue would be worse than being crushed, or ripped open, or swallowed and digested.

Nettle spotted a crack in the metal ceiling. “Where does that lead?”

“The attic,” Sorrel said through heavy breaths. “We can’t go that way.”

The metal walls were too smooth to climb, but they should be able to jump straight to the crack above them.

Mouths in the walls opened wider. The tongue behind them slithered closer.

“Jump for it,” Nettle said. “We can make it.”

“Not the attic,” Sorrel snapped. He added, “I can’t jump that high,” but Nettle smelled dishonesty.

There wasn’t time to argue.

“Forward, then,” Nettle said. “Now, before the mouths reach for us.”

They raced down the gauntlet of predators’ jaws. Nettle sprinted and then waited, did the same again, as Sorrel desperately tried to keep up. His belly bounced and he ran awkwardly, his missing tail throwing off his balance.

They passed the first mouth, the second.

Beneath Nettle’s feet, the floor rumbled as tongues approached from deep within the mouths.

Nettle hugged the left side of the duct as she passed a sharp beak that protruded from the opposite side. She slowed to allow Sorrel to catch up.

A tongue emerged from within the beak. It was thinner than the first one they’d fled, it came to a sharper point, and where that coyote’s tongue had been pocked with curved fangs, this one had bones pressed into it. Femurs and ribs and jaws and toes. They could have been from her cousins’ corpses.

The thin tongue flicked out surprisingly quick, whirling along the metal floor. It swung wide, smacking Sorrel's back leg, but too thick and ungainly to twist around and snatch him up.

Sorrel cried out, not in pain, but as if he'd witnessed a tragedy.

He used his other rear leg to leap forward. Totally imbalanced, he launched into a slide along the slick floor.

The owl tongue rolled toward him. Nettle grabbed him by his scruff to yank him back to his feet.

Each mouth behind them now extended a twisting tongue, each reaching closer to Nettle and her brother.

The duct became a tangle of slithering tongues.

Nettle fled, the sound from her footsteps painting a chaotic picture of what pursued her.

Acrid, humid air stung Nettle’s nostrils and warmed her skin. She smelled grass and bile.

A final mouth opened wide, surprising Nettle. She veered away even as wide, flat teeth parted to unveil a red glow and a tongue that dwarfed her in its thickness. It was as thick as an oak root at the base of the tree.

The unnaturally massive tongue flopped across their path.

Embedded in the flesh were grasses, clover, dandelions.

Nettle urged her brother forward. “We have to jump.”

She couldn’t wait for him, she could only encourage him by showing the way. She launched herself up over the tongue, flying through the mouth’s damp breath. As she landed, her claws scraped for purchase on the slick floor, but she righted herself.

“Now you,” she called back to Sorrel. She couldn't see him, but the jump was less than she'd seen him do navigating the walls. “Come on.”

There was a high pitched grunt, and then Sorrel leapt into view. He soared above the meaty barrier.

His momentum ran out.

Nettle’s gut instantly grew heavy with fear. Sorrel wasn't going to make it. His imbalance, or exhaustion, or fear, brought him up short.

Sorrel landed atop the tongue.

The greenery within the flesh sprung out. A thick blade of grass wrapped around Sorrel's hips. Wide leaves of clover grabbed at his ankles. He yelled soundlessly.

Again, his panic didn’t smell or sound of fear, but of grief. It sparked empathy in Nettle that she wished anyone in the colony would have felt for her.

Sorrel launched himself toward her. He tumbled over the edge of the tongue, but the grass and clover kept him dangling there.

Nettle jumped to him, biting through the plants that held him. They tasted like death in autumn. She bit through. Sorrel's hips fell free. His weight ripped through the clover leaves. He hit the floor and scrambled back to his feet.

Nettle felt herself hesitating, unable to comprehend why. The taste of that slimy grass stayed in her mouth. She hated it. She wanted to curl into a ball around her pups until they could all three escape this terrible life.

Nettle shook her entire body like she would when wet.

The sound echoed off the massive tongue behind her, now rotating into another pursuing twist.

Nettle tried to run, but her steps were slow, forced.

What was the point? She and her pups would never survive outside or inside.

Ahead, she saw Sorrel fleeing in a slow, nightmare pace.

“No,” she said aloud.

Her word painted a square image of the ductwork around her. It bounced down the throat behind the flat teeth, finding a burrow where the tube of the throat expanded. Before the sound faded, Nettle heard something inside there. It wasn't empty. Something occupied those fleshy tunnels. Something massive.

The thought disgusted her, offended her.

She picked up the pace, reaching Sorrel. She grabbed Sorrel by the scruff again, this time nipping hard enough to draw blood.

He yelped, looked at her, offended.

“Come on,” Nettle said.

They fled together.

A horrific plethora of tongues spun and slithered behind them.

They reached the hole that Sorrel had promised. Nettle dropped through first, eager to be sure that Wisp and Hush were safe.

She didn’t wait for Sorrel. She ran through the dark, dusty wall until she reached another hole to drop down directly into the burrow.

Both pups were still in their nest. Wisp had his nose in the air, ears perked, eyes still shut. Hush was burying her face in Wisp’s side, whining in fear.

“I’m here,” Nettle cooed.

Sorrel dropped in behind Nettle.

“They're still coming,” he said. “Pick them up, run. Down through the walls.”

Nettle picked up Hush, made sure that Sorrel had picked up Wisp, and she ran for the exit which led to the kitchen.

A tongue packed with grasses crashed down, blocking her way. It forced its way further into the burrow.

Another tongue burst in beside it. Fangs glistened in its meat.

Nettle jerked Hush away. She ran for the other exit, which led to the newly-gathered larder.

Sorrel was already ahead of her. He pushed Wisp through the hole and then squeezed through himself.

Nettle did the same with Hush. Inside the larder, Nettle realized she had arranged the cereal, raisins, and rice as if they were a wide, low nest.

Sorrel crashed over one wall of this nest, and Nettle followed. Close behind, the two tongues now twisted around each other, pushing their way in.

Sorrel stumbled, fell, managed not to land on top of Wisp.

Nettle tried to help him up without setting down Hush. There was another exit on the far side of the larder, but the twisted mash of flesh was nearly on top of them. They'd never make it.

Nettle stopped next to Wisp. She put Hush down and covered them both with her body.

The hopelessness from before had been replaced with a sharp grief. She’d wanted her pups to grow up happy and confident. Now she only wanted what came next to be painless.

Behind them came a squelching thud. Nettle didn't dare look up.

The same sound repeated. She felt Sorrel get back on his feet. He muttered a curious curse to himself, and then said, “Look.”

Nettle turned to once again see the two tongues rush for her. She flinched. The tongues stopped dead, smashing and spreading wide as if they’d hit a solid stone Nettle couldn't see. They’d been stopped in the air directly above the edge of the food that Nettle had collected.

Wood cracked loud enough to hurt Nettle’s ears. Both pups whimpered.

Nettle looked up to see the ceiling splitting. Yet another monstrous tongue plunged toward them. Nettle drew her pups beneath her, but now curiosity accompanied her fear.

This third tongue also hit an unseen barrier. It kept pushing itself down from the ceiling until it coiled like a snake on an invisible shelf above them.

“What’s happening?” Nettle’s eyes twitched back and forth from tongue to tongue, determined not to let anything get closer without her seeing it.

Sorrel crept over to the two tongues reaching in from his burrow. He glanced above at the spiraled tongue. “They can’t get into your larder.”

He reached out with one paw until his claws brushed the red flesh. “We can move through it just fine.” He turned back to Nettle. “What did you create?”

Before Nettle could ponder his question, she noticed something that made her heart drop:

Hush’s eyes were open.

Her baby’s first sight in the world was three horrific tongues lashing toward them, each hungry to claim new flesh.

11

They spent the night in the larder.

The tongues withdrew after their assault was repelled by the larder’s invisible barriers.

They all four took shelter between the piles of food, which were smaller now that Nettle had lined the wall with the cereal, rice, and dried fruit.

Nettle lay on her side, Hush cuddled against her while craning her neck to nurse. Wisp lay between Hush and Sorrel, nibbling on a raisin.

Between bouts of anxious sleep, the events of the evening overwhelmed Nettle.

Predators’ mouths opening up in the walls, tongues like snakes reaching for them. And then how did you explain the larder stopping them, solid as an invisible tree trunk?

These thoughts circled Nettle’s mind, leaving little scratches of anxiety. But what cut the deepest was the terror she’d seen in her daughter’s eyes, the very first time Nettle had seen those eyes at all.

If inside the Red House was just as dangerous as outside, then what was she even doing? She should be back with her cousins where things were familiar. She may not have agreed with or understood everything they expected of her, but she at least knew what those expectations were.

But what was more dangerous? Mouths in the walls or the madness that had descended on the meadow and the forest and the colony of mice burrows in between. Her cousins lifted into the air, the life snapped away from them before they fell limp to the mud.

She almost wished her pups had waited another season to grow in her belly. Maybe then it would be safer outside. Maybe when the snow came, these strange, violent deaths would be over.

But Hush and Wisp were here now.

Nettle had a decision to make.

Inside, the walls themselves were carnivorous. The larder was safe for now, but she didn’t understand why, which meant she didn’t know when that safety might vanish. If they ate too much of the stored food, would the fanged canine tongue dart down from the ceiling above to crush their bones and drag their corpses back to its waiting mouth?

Outside, the burrows themselves seemed to be mostly safe. Very few mice had been killed when inside their homes. If Nettle kept her pups in her burrow, and only gathered food when it was safe, then maybe they’d be fine.

Except, soon Hush and Wisp would be exploring further and further from the nest. If this outside threat hadn’t moved on by then…

Actually, Nettle realized, out there they’d have a whole burrow to explore. Nettle could dig to expand it even further. Inside the Red House, the only safety was this dark square inside the wall. As soon as the pups reached a paw beyond the barrier of food, they’d be in danger.

That decided it. Moving inside the Red House and been a mistake.

Nettle would find a safe time to slip outside, check that her burrow was still safe and unoccupied, and then come back for her pups.

Sorrel spoke, startling her. “Do you think the tongues hate raisins and cereal? Or would any food do?”

She’d been so deep in her own head she hadn’t bothered to talk through any of her thoughts with her brother. Ever since he’d left, she’d been alone with her cousins whose thoughts didn’t extend far beyond eating, hiding, and ensuring the survival of the colony as a whole. She’d been alone until she joined Sorrel, and now she was leaving already. She felt sad, but a deep burrow outside was the safest place for two curious pups.

She told Sorrel she was leaving.

“You’re kidding.”

“This is my pups’ safety we’re talking about. I’m serious.”

“I went out there with you. It’s worse than in here.”

“Is it?”

“My tail thinks so, yeah.”

“It’s too much in here. Giant tongues? Mouths in the walls? At least outside I know places to flee. In here we’re stuck in the larder.”

“We don’t know that yet. Maybe the mouths won’t open up again.”

“You don’t believe that.”

“But at least we’re safe in the larder. How many mice died this week hiding in their own burrows?”

“Most who died were outside.”

“But how many were underground where it should have been safe? At least one?”

“Yes,” Nettle admitted.

Sorrel closed his eyes and breathed deep. “Why did you leave the colony?”

“Stop asking me that!”

“I will when you answer the question.”

“I left to keep my pups safe. The same reason I’m going back.”

“You left because you don’t want your pups to hide who they are like you’ve had to, or like I had to before I left.”

“I don’t hide,” Nettle snapped.

“And if you told any of our cousins that you risked your own life to save your pups, what would they say?”

Nettle bit her tongue. “They wouldn’t say anything.”

“Yeah, because they’d be shocked that you weren’t valuing the survival of the colony over the lives of Hush and Wisp.”

Sorrel’s raised voice disturbed both pups, who whined in their sleep. Still he kept on.

“You don’t know what our cousins might say, because you’ve hid every part of yourself that doesn’t align with the colony.”

“You don’t know that. You haven’t been around.”

“I do know, because if you hadn’t hid, then you’d have left the colony long ago. Either on your own or they would have ostracized you.”

“That’s enough,” Nettle snapped. Sorrel was right that she hid herself, but that didn’t change where was safest for her pups. “I’m going back.”

“I’m not helping you carry either of them.”

“I’ll take two trips.”

“Fine,” Sorrel said. “You want to know why I left the colony?”

“Sure. Tell me.”

“The same reason you can’t bring Hush and Wisp back there.”

“Did you hit your head? Whatever’s killing our cousins wasn’t there when you abandoned me. How can that be the same reason you left?”

“It’s not.”

Nettle was looking forward to communicating with mice who had actually carried conversations in the last year. “Then what are you saying? Why are you so opposed to me taking Hush and Wisp back home?”

“For the same reason I’m not leaving either. There’s a few predators inside now? Well, there’s a hundred outside, even before this new threat took my tail. We learn to avoid predators. It’s in our blood.”

“I’m more than my lineage.”

“I know. I don’t mean your blood as a mouse. I mean your blood. Nettle’s.” Sorrel reach out to pat her shoulder, but awkwardly withdrew it. “Mom died of old age. How often does that happen? But Grandma did, too. You and me—and your pups—if there’s a way to survive a predator, we’ll survive.”

“Then why are you inside? Everyone thought you were afraid of dying.”

“Why are you inside?”

“Because I’m afraid of Hush and Wisp dying. Out there, no one cares about death as long as there’s plenty of births.”

“You could have kept them alive. Deep down, you know that, too.”

“I do not.”

Sorrel talked over her. “I think you left for the same reason I did, or your own version of it.”

“And what’s that?”

Sorrel shook his head. “I’m not telling you what you already know. And I’m not helping you go back.”

Nettle wanted to strangle her brother. “I’ll carry them one at a time.”

“And if more mouths open up in the walls?”

“I’ll avoid them. Or maybe if I carry food with me, they’ll leave me alone.”

Sorrel’s eyes and nostrils widened with curiosity. “You think so? I suppose there must be rules to how this works. I’d been focused on how silly the tongues looked when they smashed up against nothing, and there we were on the other side, enjoying the view.” He cleared his throat. “But you’re right. There must be some logic behind it all that we can puzzle out.”

Nettle ignored his sarcasm. “I’ll figure out why the tongues couldn’t get past the larder if I need to. But first I’ll see if there’s a clear passageway back outside, and if my burrow is still unoccupied. Then I’ll come back for the pups.”

“Wait. The way we came in could take you too close to mouths. There’s a hole in the living room that goes directly down into the crawlspace. You’ll decide this is a bad idea, and I don’t want you getting hurt along the way.”

Nettle nodded an awkward thanks, and then took off out of the larder.

12

Nettle climbed down the section of wall past Sorrel’s nest.

She was furious at Sorrel’s insistence that she had some secret reason for leaving the colony, and that choosing what to share with her cousins was somehow hiding who she was.

She peeked out into the kitchen as she reached the Red House’s floor. She took in the smells and sounds and soft vibrations of the human family walking around. She felt a surprising twinge of sadness that she wouldn’t be around to become familiar with them like Sorrel had, to learn to appreciate the aesthetic of their interactions like Sorrel probably had naturally and immediately.

But the safety of her pups came first.

She slipped out of the wall, into the kitchen.

She could have taken the exact path that Sorrel had shown her on the way up, but that would take her past where the house had twitched and she’d ended up next to the first mouth.

It felt safer to sneak through the inside of the house, then back into the walls before heading down into the crawlspace.

At least, that was her thinking before she was halfway across the kitchen and heard footsteps from the hallway.

Nettle dashed behind a table leg.

The footsteps faded somewhere else in the house.

Nettle relaxed.

Movement caught her eye, in the hallway, down at her level.

A mouse.

It wasn’t Sorrel. With her thin and gray fur, Nettle recognized her as the same elderly mouse she’d seen in the crawlspace.

So Nettle hadn’t been imagining things. But what was another mouse doing in the Red House? And why did it seem that Sorrel didn’t know about her?

Nettle lifted her nose to see if she recognized the old mouse, but only smelled the dust in the carpet and the food in the kitchen.

The old mouse ran along the edge of the carpet, getting closer.

Nettle perked her ears to listen for any of the humans. This mouse was being too risky running out in the open like this.

Finally, the mouse stopped. She spoke. Her voice was rough with age. She pleaded with Nettle using strange words.

Out of everything she said, Nettle only understood the word, “Why?”

Nettle responded with her own questions. “Who are you? Do you live here? Do you know my brother?”

The old mouse repeated herself. Again, from her flurry of words, Nettle only understood, “Why?”

Maybe she should go back up to the burrow and make Sorrel admit he knew about this other mouse. But at this point, Nettle didn’t intend to have her pups inside more than another hour. As soon as she knew the journey was safe, she would carry them back, one by one.

“I’m sorry,” Nettle said to the old mouse, “I’m not staying here. If you need something, talk to Sorrel. I’m sure you’ve smelled him around.”

This old mouse didn’t have a smell.

That was strange.

Everything had a smell.

Nettle inspected the old mouse, how her fur was thin enough to show wrinkled skin beneath, how her incisors were chipped, how one back toe curled crookedly. Despite her strange lack of scent, she wasn’t dangerous.

Nothing about her changed Nettle’s plans. “I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

Nettle left the old mouse in the hallway, ran through the living room to find the hole that Sorrel had mentioned. It was behind the couch, close to the bookshelves, and stayed in shadow so the humans hadn’t noticed it. Nettle squeezed through, into the wall. She found her way down the brick post beneath the house, back across the black plastic that covered the dirt of the crawlspace, and out the gap beneath the wood door in the dirt foundation.

Morning sunlight blinded her. After the night spent inside the kitchen wall, and now her journey down through the crawlspace, the morning sunlight felt both painful and dangerous. It hurt her eyes and made her an easy target for morning predators like foxes and hawks.

She plotted her path under tall tufts of grass and started out.

The sun warmed her back, a feeling she hadn’t realized until now that she’d missed.

Nettle darted over a loose clump of dirt, sending tiny clods rolling and releasing an earthy scent.

A cardinal sang from the treetops at the edge of the meadow. A squirrel crunched through dead leaves on the forest floor.

This was familiar. This felt right. Not the dusty passageways inside the walls of the Red House.

Even while she ran, Sorrel’s curious voice came into her mind, “Is it instinct or is it what the colony has insisted is the norm?”

Now wasn’t the time for these sorts of thoughts. Nettle needed to check on her burrow and go back for her pups.

As she neared the far edge of the meadow, something felt off.

She ducked inside a tuft of grass. Stalks gently pushed into her on all sides. It was a familiar, comfortable sensation.

Nettle perked her ears.

The squirrel scratched its way up a tree trunk. The cardinal still sang, but quieter now. It had flown deeper into the forest.

Where there should have been the soft thumps and scratches of other mice scurrying about, there was nothing. She was close enough to the colony’s burrows. She should hear something.

But here at the edge of the meadow between the Red House and the forest, nothing moved except grass in the breeze.

Had everyone fled?

Mice didn’t survive deeper in the forest. Coyotes and foxes hunted too freely.

Nettle’s eyes darted to the sky, but the blue expanse was free of any bird silhouettes.

She sniffed for the mild skunk-like stench of a fox, or the chaotic and messy smell of a dog, or the musky and decaying smell of a snake.

Nothing.

A predator could be downwind, but the breeze wasn’t strong enough to completely whisk away their scent. Still, she climbed a thick weed to look in the direction the wind blew.

Grass rose to a uniform height, about three times as tall as Nettle. From Nettle’s viewpoint, it spread out like an open green ocean, until ending past the Red House, where the forest circled around.

No fox or dog could hide in the grass. A snake would be parting the stalks in a clear path.

Nettle was as confident as she could be that there were no predators about.

Why had everyone gone quiet?

Nettle spotted movement on the Red House’s front porch.

A dark spot appeared on the front door, as big as the doorknob.

Nettle squinted, trying to see it better.

Next to the door, a dark spot appeared.

Nettle looked up to see if something in the trees was casting small shadows.

When she looked back to the Red House, dark spots pocked the entire wall.

Within each spot, sunlight reflected on glistening teeth.

Mouths.

Nettle froze.

They’d followed her outside.

Fear rolled over the meadow. It crashed over Nettle like a wave. She fled.

Through the grass, away from the house, to the safety of her burrow.

She passed the nests and burrows of her cousins. They each smelled of death.

Nettle spotted the entrance to her nest, a hole beneath a gnarled tree root. The ground itself exuded terror. Nettle felt those mouths honing in on her like black eyes.

She dashed under the root, down the dirt tunnel and into the burrow she’d called home for the past year. It still smelled of her pups.

Nettle hesitated. She’d been ready to bury her nose in the dirt until she’d smelled Wisp and Hush.

As safe as she felt, enclosed by her burrow, to hide now would be to value her own life above her pups. Regardless of the fear that had overtaken her for a few seconds, she refused to act like her cousins who abandoned their pups to predators.

She felt the gaze of the mouths, even through the earth.

Where were her cousins? Cowering in their own burrows? Had they all fled deeper into the forest, into the waiting jaws of coyotes and foxes? Or was the death she’d smelled from neighboring burrows widespread throughout the colony?

Nettle climbed back up the tunnel.

A stabbing pain punctured her foot.

She jumped to the side to see a white, boney protrusion emerging from the dirt.

Another jabbed through to her side, pricking her shoulder.

A snake’s tooth, piercing outward from dirt walls that her instincts said meant safety.

A sickening feeling knotted in Nettle’s gut. The horrors of the Red House, the outside terror of the past nights, now infected what should be the safest place in the world.

Nettle fled up the tunnel.

More curved fangs broke free from the dirt, turning the passage to her burrow into a barbed trap.

Nettle darted and jumped between the wicked points. One caught the flesh of her back leg. With more teeth emerging every second, Nettle didn’t dare slow down. She launched herself forward. The hooked tooth ripped free from her skin.

Pain spiked up her leg. Blood drenched her fur.

Another careful leap and Nettle was back in the sunlight.

She breathed in the fresh air and exhaled relief. Leafy scents of the forest and grassy scents of the meadow declared that Nettle had escaped.

Something jabbed at her back. Nettle twisted around and jumped away. Nothing was there. No scent, no sound.

Another prick against the side of her face. She felt the skin break and a drop of blood well.

Despite the pain and the very real damage to her skin, Nettle saw only the forest and meadow. She smelled only her own blood. She heard only her own heartbeat.

Something stabbed her front leg, poking a conical hole below her elbow.

The teeth that assaulted her inside her burrow hadn’t let up their attack. They’d only become invisible to every sense except pain.

Nettle fled now, back toward her pups. She ran faster than her feet had carried her before.

A strong bite lifted her by her back leg, above the grass. Her stomach flipped as the ground slipped away.

Nettle’s instinct said to squirm around and bite in defense, but she knew her teeth would do nothing. Instead, she flailed with her free back leg until it caught on what felt like warm flesh. She pushed like she was leaping and ripped herself free from the invisible grip.

She flipped through the air toward the house. A scratchy tuft of grass slowed her fall before her shoulder impacted with the dirt.

Again, she ignored her instinct. She wanted to burrow below the grass tuft into dirt made soft by roots. Instead, she ran back into the open.

The only real safety was inside the Red House, inside her larder.

Ahead, dozens of predators’ mouths opened in the brick front of the Red House. Each longed for her with a predator’s hunger and a rival’s hate.

More cuts down her side from unseen teeth.

Nettle averted her eyes, used her nostrils only to breathe, and tucked her ears.

Her only focus was on the little hole beneath the crawlspace door.

She reached it, scrabbled underneath and away from the exposing sunlight.

She’d climbed up the stone post and into the walls before she realized the assault had stopped.

Nettle caught her breath. She had wounds to clean before she limped back to the larder. Back to her home.

13

Nettle looked up from the edge of the carpet where she hid. Rumble’s namesake voice shook through her. He sounded agitated.

Careful’s pleasant song replied, although it wasn’t so pleasant now.

Both parents smelled of stress and worry.

Nettle peeked up above the carpet fibers.

Rumble and Careful stood by the living room doorway. Nettle could see past them, into the hallway.

But now, there was a second doorway, right next to the first.

It was half as wide as the first, and only stood half as tall as Rumble’s chest. Tall enough for Birdsong to walk through, but not Rumble or Careful.

It opened into the hallway with a straight view to the kitchen.

Decoratively grooved wood lined this additional opening just like the first.

Nettle sniffed, searching for evidence that this was as strange as it seemed.

How could the humans have built such a uniform doorway in the time that Nettle was outside? Why would they do it?

Nettle knew the answer to both questions: they didn’t.

Despite not understanding their specific words, Nettle could tell that Rumble and Careful were arguing about how this squat doorway came to be here.

The air felt heavy.

Nettle had just learned that she couldn’t return outside.

And now the Red House was growing stranger. How long until the larder was no longer safe?

Nettle’s wounds ached. She wanted to get back to her pups.

She glanced up at Rumble and Careful to see where their eyes pointed. They were still distracted enough by their argument that Nettle braved starting her trip home.

She crept between tall fabric of the carpet, toward the kitchen.

She noticed more changes.

There was a dip in the floor like a shallow bowl. The carpet clung to the concave surface as if the house had been built that way.

As Nettle reached the hallway she saw a rectangular nook in the wall, between the two bedroom doors. The robin’s-egg-blue of the hallway extended into this nook, uninterrupted.

If she were Birdsong’s size, Nettle might find this rectangular offshoot from the wall a cozy place to relax.

But as it was, the pointlessness of the space discomforted her.

Nettle was vaguely aware that the humans constructed rather than dug their homes. But adding a change like this with no evidence left behind seemed unlikely.

Nettle thought of how the house had twitched, opening a small gap between the fridge and cabinets. The house had twitched when she was in the kitchen wall, and she'd suddenly found herself within a different wall in another part of the house.

Perhaps there’d been a twitch when she was outside.

If so, the changes that accompanied each twitch were quickly becoming more extreme.

Fear found a comfortable home in Nettle. She feared for herself, for her brother, for her pups. She wanted to bring them all to a safe place. But the only one she knew of was her larder.

Nettle feared for Rumble and for Careful. They were among the largest creatures she’d encountered, but their own fear filled the air with their argument.

Nettle feared for Birdsong.

That little human was a pup, like Hush or Wisp.

But was she as safe as them? Did she have somewhere to hide that was impenetrable by the horrors of this house?

Nettle also feared for Birdsong on Sorrel’s behalf. If her brother had fathered any pups, she didn't know about it. Most mouse fathers had no interaction with their offspring.

But the emotions she smelled on him when he spoke of Birdsong smelled like motherly love.

Her concern for him wasn’t entirely altruistic. She needed his help keeping her pups safe. If something happened to Birdsong, how much would grief damage Sorrel?

Nettle darted into the kitchen, leaving the arguing human parents behind her. Their tones had turned from angry to confused.

Nettle ran for the hole in the wall past the table. She kept a careful watch on the dark gap between the cabinets and fridge.

She made it inside the walls and started the climb up to the larder.

Each jump sent pain spiking through her wounds.

She’d failed. Her plan to flee to her burrow, make it big and interesting for her pups until the terrors went away, had fallen apart when the Red House reached out after her.

But it had been the Red House all week, hadn’t it?

Nettle had brought Hush and Wisp right into the belly of what threatened them. And now they only had the larder as a home.

Was it a home, though? Somewhere safe to raise her pups?

Nettle had no choice.

She would have to figure out how to make the Red House a safe home.

Nettle limped into the larder.

The straight lines and right angles should have been comforting, now that she knew her burrow outside was no longer safe.

But the unnatural shapes inside the walls of the Red House felt as strange as ever.

Sorrel’s nostrils and eyes widened at her. “What happened?”

Nettle collapsed onto the shredded paper bedding, sinking into the depth of it. It cushioned her entire body, and there was the bit of comfort she’d been longing for.

Wisp crawled over to latch onto her and start nursing. Hush must have been just as hungry, but she first crawled to Nettle’s face to look her mother in the eye.

“Hello there,” Nettle cooed. “You’re safe. We’re all safe. Go ahead and drink.”

Hush nuzzled against Nettle’s cheek, pressing on her whiskers in a way that made a chill run down her back. Then the newly-seeing pup waddled down to Nettle’s belly to join her brother.

“Death and swallows,” cursed Sorrel, “you’re bleeding.”

“It’s not deep,” Nettle said, although she didn’t know if that was true. The blood had congealed, which meant she wasn’t dying yet. She wanted to sleep.

Sorrel licked the dried blood. “Don’t want any dirt in there.”

“Why?” Nettle asked, already drifting off.

“Something Mom used to say.”

Nettle fell asleep. She dreamed that Hush and Wisp were sucking on her congealed blood until it flood freely again. She worried she would bleed out and leave her pups alone, but then Sorrel came and gave them cereal to distract them from their mother’s blood. Then he plugged her bleeding with raisins.

14

Hours passed. Even when she woke, Nettle stayed still to allow her wounds to scab over.

Sorrel nudged the pups over to her so they could nurse. He disappeared and returned with more food.

“Another mouth opened up inside the walls. I’ll show you a different path to the cabinets.”

Nettle grunted acknowledgement.

By the time she felt like she could move again, daylight was fading.

As she gathered her thoughts, a fresh desire bloomed:

She needed a plan.

For what, she wasn’t exactly sure. But she hated how she felt right now, like she’d built a nest high up a tree that was swaying and cracking, except she hadn’t chosen to build there at all, it was simply what life had handed to her, the same life that now sent wind and rot to topple what precious value she’d managed to gather from her circumstances.

She could hide in this larder, sneaking out only to gather more food, never understanding why it was safe or for how long it might remain safe.

Or she could devise a plan.

She looked at her brother, whose mouth was now stained by the blood he’d cleaned off of Nettle. He’d lost his tail helping bring Hush and Wisp to safety. She could trust that he wanted Nettle and the pups safe.

But he’d also lied to her. He claimed not to recognize the old mouse Nettle had seen, and in the duct last night he’d lied to avoid going into the attic. The first truth he’d hidden from her was why he left the colony in the first place.

She said his name. “Sorrel.”

He raised his head up from the bedding where he rested. “What is it? Can I bring you more food?”

“I need answers.”

“I wouldn’t mind answers, either. What happened outside?”

“The same thing as before. I was attacked by something I couldn’t smell or see or hear. But this time, there were predators’ mouths in the outside wall of the Red House. They were doing it somehow. That’s what’s been killing our cousins. I brought my pups inside to escape, and the danger was coming from in here all along.”

“There was no threat in here until you came inside.”

In the silence that followed, Nettle drew her pups close.

Sorrel shook his head like he was shaking off raindrops. “I’m sorry, that sounded much worse than it did in my head. I was thinking aloud. I’m scared, but I want you three here where it’s safe.”

Nettle hadn’t seen her brother for nearly a year. Before, he’d been caring to a fault, which was largely why the colony hadn’t ever accepted him. But what did so much loneliness do to one’s sense of compassion?

Sorrel apologized again. “You’ll have to give me more time to not say aloud every little thought that comes through my head.”

If she was going to come up with a plan, then she needed Sorrel on her side. She needed to know her brother as well as she once did. “Why did you leave and start living in here?”

“I told you. Too much death outside.”

“No, I asked if that was why you gave a half-answer.” Nettle avoided an outright accusation of lying. “I get the sense there’s more to it than survival.”

Sorrel sat in silence for a moment. “I suppose there is.”

“Why then? Why’d you leave me alone out there?”

“When you get angry your whiskers twitch in little bursts, as if you’re leaning in and out of the wind. But the paper bedding around you is still, so it’s like your anger has conjured a tiny, localized windstorm on either side of your nose.”

“Would you answer me?”

“Mom’s whiskers twitched when she was sad. For you, it’s when you’re angry. I haven’t considered when my whiskers twitch the most. When I’m excited, I think. The other night, were my whiskers twitching when I first saw you through the window?”

“Sorrel. Please. I have to figure out how to survive this, I’m scared, and confused, and I want to feel like I actually know my brother again. Could you please be honest about why you live here.”

“I like the green on Birdsong’s bedroom walls. It’s like if a sunset rubbed up against the green of the meadow. None of our cousins could imagine such a color.”

Nettle shouted loud enough to startle both pups. “Tell me why you left!”

Sorrel’s daydreaming gaze zeroed in on Nettle. A new insistence entered his tone. “Would you please listen? I’m telling you. I can’t explain it in a single breath. It’s not logical. It’s a feeling that I’m trying to share with you.”

She wasn’t sure yet whether to apologize for her harshness or to roll her eyes at Sorrel’s refusal to answer her questions directly.

Sorrel took her hesitation as understanding. “See? These idle thoughts about the aesthetics of life—you haven’t heard anyone casually talk about this since I left. I sound weird to you. But I want to keep seeing the world like this. Mom used to say I have a creator’s eye. Have you ever heard one of our cousins say the word creator?”

“What are you saying? You left the colony because no one wanted to talk about what’s pretty?”

“No! Well, yes. That’s the simplest way of saying it. They wanted me to stop talking like that. No one had any curiosity. Not for how to survive, and certainly not for beauty. But that’s a part of me. I want to notice what I like and be curious about how else things might be. Our cousins would have treated me strangely until I stopped or until I learned to hide it. And it would have killed me.”

“To not talk about what’s pretty? Isn’t that kind of dramatic?”

“Nettle, the world is full of predators. If I’m slow and distracted from not allowing myself the flavor of joy that I love most, then I’m a slow, distracted target for an owl or a snake.”

“So it is about not wanting to die.”

“I don’t want this part of me to die. Whether I squash it down or whether I get chewed up and swallowed, this unique part of me would stop existing. And I hate the thought of that. I ran away from the colony because the thought of that part of me snapping out of existence—nothing scares me more.”

Nettle said, “Oh.”

He’d answered her question in a way she hadn’t expected. But the strange part was, she got it. If she loved noticing pleasant bits of the world as much as he did, she might have fled the colony long ago.

Sorrel turned the question back on Nettle. “Why’d you want to leave?”

Nettle gave him the same answer he’d already rejected. “Mice were dying and I didn’t know why. I had to get Wisp and Hush to safety.”

“That’s why you worked up the courage to leave that night. But the desire had been there far longer. My question is why?”

“To keep my pups safe,” Nettle repeated.

“Two nights ago you still thought your burrow was safe. Why didn’t you hole up and stay hidden underground? Why did you leave the colony?”

Before Nettle could start puzzling through an answer, a scream echoed through the walls.

Birdsong.

She sounded like a cornered prey animal. And a terrified pup.

Without thinking, Nettle took off toward the scream.

15

“Stay with the pups,” Nettle yelled behind her to Sorrel as she darted out of the larder and into the walls.

But Sorrel ran close behind her. “They’re safe in the larder. I have to help Birdsong.”

Nettle wasn’t sure that was her same intention. Now that she knew she was staying inside the Red House, she needed to know how to stay safe. So if one of the humans had cried like a prey animal, Nettle needed to know why.

Although, her gut did twinge at the idea of a pup being in danger, even a human pup.

She ran through the walls down a path Sorrel hadn’t shown her yet, in the direction of Birdsong’s scream.

“I don’t go this way,” Sorrel said, panting to keep up.

“This is where I heard her,” Nettle said.

Ahead in the straight passageways of the walls, a sliver of light peeked through next to an electrical box. Nettle raced to it. She looked through the hole.

On the other side, the room smelled vaguely of fruit, but in an artificial sort of way. Like how plastic felt as hard as rock but at the same time you knew it didn’t fit in nature.

Visually, the room was as colorfully varied as clover flowers.

The carpet was a deep violet, faded in the direction of death. The bed as yellow as a daisy. The walls were the shade of green that Sorrel liked so much.

Bunches of fabric and loose toys were scattered over the carpet.

Nettle’s narrow view of the room pointed straight at the human pup.

Birdsong’s sunshine-colored hair hung over her face which was wet and red. The girl worked her mouth refilling her lungs. She stared at something above Nettle, squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them again to increased terror.

Birdsong managed a gasping shriek, and although Nettle couldn’t understand her exact words, she recognized a pup’s cry for its mother.

“What’s going on?” Sorrel asked behind Nettle.

There wasn’t enough room for him to squeeze in next to her.

Nettle didn’t answer, instead pressing her head through the tiny hole in the wall, already knowing what she’d see above.

Green bulged outward, forming into a bottom lip. Nettle saw crooked fangs jutting out from above that lip, although she couldn’t see the mouth itself.

Based on the width of it, it was so much bigger than those predators’ maws she’d already encountered.

What sort of predator hunted humans?

Nettle didn’t know, but its saliva smelled of sex and rot.

The stench mixed with Birdsong’s sweat and fear. The human pup crawled backward on her bed, wedging herself into the corner of the wall.

Part of Nettle wanted to retreat. She’d seen the threat now. She could return to her pups, better prepared to keep them safe. But she couldn’t leave this human pup alone.

That didn’t mean she had any idea how to help.

Sorrel wedged his head in next to Nettle’s, pushing her forward. “What’s happening?”

“A mouth opened in her wall,” Nettle said. “Big.”

Sorrel exhaled weakly. He tried to squeeze all the way through into the room.

Nettle grabbed his scruff. “You can’t go in there,” she said through a mouthful of his fur.

“I won’t let it hurt Birdsong.”

If it had been Hush or Wisp, Nettle would have already been at their side.

She backed away to let Sorrel see. “What can we do?”

Inside the room, the doorknob rattled. A human voice called through the door, too deep to belong to Careful, not quite deep enough to belong to Rumble.

Birdsong cried out to her grandfather.

The wall creaked and cracked above Nettle. The mouth stretched forward, over the foot of the bed.

Birdsong tried to press herself deeper into the far corner.

The grandfather called out again and Nettle heard calm in his voice. He didn’t know what was going on inside.

“I’ll unlock the door,” Sorrel said. “Her grandfather can help. He’ll carry her to safety like you would with your pups.” He pushed his head and shoulders through the hole. His hips got stuck. He strained and grunted but there was too much bulk to fit through.

Sorrel pulled himself back inside the wall. He touched Nettle’s paws, desperation flooding his scent. “You have to do it.”

Nettle’s gut twisted. It was one thing to allow her brother to risk his life for Birdsong. It was another thing altogether for Nettle to risk orphaning her own pups.

Sorrel whimpered, eyes locked on the human pup.

Nettle squished herself through the wall and into Birdsong’s room.

Green, purple, and yellow were all around her now. She’d stepped inside one of Sorrel’s aesthetic daydreams, except this one had been corrupted by a gaping maw in the wall above, half as big as the window, and full of thick, sharp teeth that would crush as they stabbed.

Nettle sensed an impending arrival. Something from deep and far away worked its way up the mouth’s throat.

Nettle dashed across the carpet.

A wet thump on the floor behind her. She turned to see a rope of flesh thicker than a human’s leg. Owl talons stuck out from the red, moist tongue. They twitched.

The tongue inched toward Birdsong.

Across the room, Birdsong slipped down between the bed and the wall. She rolled onto her side, brought her knees to her chest, and screamed.

Birdsong’s eyes fell on Nettle.

Nettle froze.

Being spotted meant you froze.

But Nettle’s next step—unique from her cousins—was to evaluate.

Birdsong wasn’t a predator. She was fellow prey, and she was a pup. So Nettle did the same thing she would do for her own pups: draw away the predator’s attention.

She filled her lungs with air and then squeaked with all her strength.

The bulging mouth tilted downward, trying to aim at her. Its dangling tongue slowly twisted toward Nettle, propelling itself along the floor like a dying snake.

As the tongue and its talons drew closer, Nettle feared her last thought would be how stupid she was.

“What are you doing?” Sorrel yelled. “Go unlock the door. Don’t let it spot you!”

From inside the wall, he couldn’t see that the mouth had already directed its attention to Nettle, that its tongue was already spiraling its embedded talons closer to her neck.

Nettle dashed along the wall, toward a dresser which stood next to the bedroom door.

The floor thrummed arrhythmically as the tongue gave chase.

Nettle pumped her legs faster than she’d known possible. Behind her, Sorrel squeaked nonsense, trying to distract the horrors like Nettle had done for Birdsong. It didn’t work.

The tongue crashed down a hair’s width behind her.

Nettle dove beneath the dresser. The green, purple, and yellow openness of the room was replaced by tight, dusty shadows.

The tongue was too thick to follow her. It circled the dresser, wrapping around its wood legs. It started another loop around, which would block off any possible escape.

Nettle jumped through the narrow opening left between the tongue and the bottom of the dresser. She dug her claws into the crumbly material of the green wall. It was enough. She dashed up the wall, slipping along the way and twisting around to climb the dresser instead.

The grandfather again spoke through the door. Birdsong cried out for help.

Predatory hate filled the room, the same she’d felt from the first predator’s mouth she’d encountered in the walls, the same she and Sorrel had felt when fleeing through the duct and its gauntlet of fangs and tongues.

Nettle leapt from the top of the dresser to the doorknob.

She collided with the slippery metal but managed to wedge herself between the doorknob’s edge and a decorative groove in the door.

Nettle prepared for the next step. Her gut sank.

She hadn’t asked Sorrel how to unlock a door.

She’d seen the humans turn the knob to open the door. And when they walked from the car to the front door, they jingled metal and fumbled with the doorknob before opening it.

Nettle didn’t see any loose metal to jingle. Just a plump disc at the edge of the doorknob.

Nettle climbed toward it, claws spread wide so she wouldn’t slip.

The tongue unwound itself from around the dresser.

Birdsong gasped. She’d spotted Nettle again.

Nettle peered down between her feet, at the doorknob’s vertical edge. A loose ridge of metal jutted out from the doorknob itself. It looked like it could rotate.

That ridge had to be the lock.

Nettle reached for it with her nose, trying to test if it jingled.

The grandfather rattled the doorknob.

Nettle’s front feet slipped to the right and her body to the left. As she fell, she lunged for the ridge. She caught it with her upper incisors and it rotated.

Then Nettle was falling, trying to right herself, scraping her claws against the door.

She hit the floor. The carpet absorbed much of the impact, but she still hit hard enough that the cut in her side opened up again. Pain overwhelmed her.

The tongue rose up, its tip hovering in the very center of the room.

The door swung open.

The tongue withdrew lightning quick. Jaws snapped shut. The wall returned to its solid form.

Nettle darted under the dresser as the grandfather stepped inside.

Birdsong cried tears of relief.

As Nettle ran back to the hole into the wall, she heard Rumble and Careful hurrying down the hallway to Birdsong’s room.

Shouting ensued, but Birdsong was okay.

Sorrel helped Nettle back into the wall. As he checked her wounds and wept his thanks for helping Birdsong, Nettle felt a small bit of pride. This wasn’t something the colony had forced upon her. She’d decided this for herself, and now a family was safe for another night.

She and Sorrel crept back through the walls, hoping that staying quiet would avoid attracting the predators’ mouths.

When they made it back to the larder, Wisp was gone.

16

Nettle ran past the nest.

“Stay with Hush,” she said to Sorrel.

“Where would he have gone?” Sorrel asked.

“Exploring,” Nettle yelled behind her, and then whispered to herself, “Wisp is my little explorer.”

She squeezed out of the larder and into the old burrow. The bedding they’d left behind still littered the floor. A crack of light came up from the far wall, from the kitchen.

Wisp’s newly opened eyes would see that light as something blurry and fascinating to be investigated.

Nettle approached the crack with more dread than she’d felt in her life. She told herself that such a long fall shouldn’t be fatal for such a little mouse. He was so insubstantial—just a wisp—he might not even break a bone.

But her self-reassurance felt insubstantial. This house had much more terrible threats than falling.

Nettle reached the crack. She looked down into the kitchen.

The only light came from above the stove, dim, but enough for Nettle to see.

Wisp was down on the floor crawling toward the fridge.

He didn’t look hurt.

Relief filled Nettle but then drained away.

Something moved in the gap between the fridge and the cabinets. A flash of light at the edge of the darkness, a reflection of the yellow stove light.

Wisp crawled right for it.

The thing jerked forward, into the light.

Canine fangs glistened with drool. They jutted out from fleshy, veiny gums that were speckled with brick dust.

Nettle screamed for her baby.

How was there a mouth at the edge of the darkness? The others she’d seen were a part of the walls. There was only open space behind those fangs, wasn’t there? The darkness didn’t reveal its secrets.

Wisp wasn’t listening to her. From this far away, her screamed warnings must have sounded jumbled to his developing ears.

She had to get down there before Wisp reached the mouth, or before the mouth let loose its tongue. The smell of bile and blood was already thick in the kitchen.

She couldn’t hope to leap and land unscathed, but she didn’t dare take her eyes off Wisp to descend through the walls.

Nettle made her choice.

She pushed her head, shoulders, belly, and then hips through the crack, and fell.

She jabbed her claws at the wall, trying to slow herself, but only succeeded in adding a chaotic spin to her fall.

The dark kitchen whirled around her. Air whooshed past her ears.

Again, Nettle hooked her claws and reached for the wall. They caught, and pain lanced up her front leg. She swung around her hold to slam into the wall. The collision knocked loose her grip and Nettle plummeted down.

She got her feet beneath her but the fall was still too far. The force of the impact exploded up her legs, her spine, her skull.

Her ears rang in a whining high pitched scream.

Nettle jumped to her feet, but dizziness sent her back down to her side. She pushed up again, looking for Wisp, looking for those sharp teeth and brick-pocked gums. She searched for the fridge, disoriented. She found the oven light, used that to get her bearings, and both looked and started walking toward where she knew her son to be. Her eyes fought to focus. Wisp was too close to the mouth, to the blackness behind it, which she now saw was not blackness at all.

The space between the fridge and the cabinet was now crisscrossed with fleshy tubes, a net of a maze that ended with the mouth that now opened wide, inviting her pup. Wisp crawled toward it. Whether he was still too blind to understand what he was seeing, or the thing called to him somehow, she didn't know. She leapt forward again, meaning to transfer that momentum into a dash, but her head still spun and she fell on her front shoulder.

Behind Wisp, she saw herself racing toward her pup. Her own gray-brown fur rippled in the wind from her speed. But she was more gray than she realized, and she saw a distinct limp when her left rear paw touched the floor. Nettle's head cleared a bit more, and she realized that she was not watching herself from across the kitchen, but rather a different mouse who looked similar to Nettle, but older.

This other mouse had no smell.

It was the old mouse she'd seen below the house when they arrived, and who’d asked, “Why?” when Nettle had tried to leave.

The old mouse caught up to Wisp and grabbed hold of his scruff.

Nettle threw herself to her feet and forward again, and this time made it most of the way across the kitchen before she fell. The strange familiar mouse tugged Wisp away from the fanged maw. Nettle watched in horror as the mouth widened big enough to swallow a mouse, a squirrel, a cat, and then it stretched out from the dark space between the fridge and cabinet. The massive tube condensed and constricted as it stretched forward, looking like a tangle of roots but crawling like an earthworm.

The strange mouse picked up her pace, Wisp dangling from her jaws, but the mouth closed the distance.

Nettle ran to meet them. Her mind cleared enough to stay balanced. She took Wisp from the old mouse, gently gripping his scruff between her own teeth. Then she ran.

“Who are you?” she asked in a muffled voice through Wisp's soft fur. But as Nettle ran toward the hole into the walls on the far side of the fridge, she realized that the strange mouse wasn't keeping pace with her.

She looked back to see the mouse leap from one side of the mouth to the other. It’s fangs snapped together in an attempt to catch the mouse. She hopped again, playing its part in a fight for dominance between two mice, which was the only sort of a fight a mouse ever took part in. It certainly didn’t fight off predators. But there she was, protecting Nettle and Wisp.

Nettle pushed Wisp through the hole inside the wall. She set him down and looked behind her. The strange mouse hopped in to nip at the thing's gums above a rear tooth. It whipped to the side, failing to catch the mouse.

The mouse flew opposite Nettle's direction, skidded on the ground.

If Sorrel were here to take Wisp back to the safety of the larder, then maybe Nettle could go and help. But Sorrel had listened to his sister and stayed in the nest with Hush.

The old mouse squeaked at Nettle, a string of words that she couldn’t quite understand. Except for two: “Attic,” and “sunset.”

Then the old mouse leapt at the distended throat once again. Flesh stretched and teeth snapped, and then Nettle lifted her pup and raced upward toward safety.

17

Nettle reached the larder, muscles burning.

Sorrel sat curled around Hush, cooing promises that everything would be alright.

Wisp twitched in Nettle’s grasp. He was alive.

Nettle told herself again that he was okay. Her panic and adrenaline had cooled, and now she wanted to collapse into the bedding with her pups to weep until they were forever safe.

Sorrel looked up. “You brought him back.”

Nettle nodded. She set Wisp down next to Hush, who whined and waddled toward her. Sorrel hurried out of the way for Nettle to take his place.

“He was in the kitchen?”

Nettle told him what had happened—that in the extra space beside the fridge, a distended throat had filled in the space. A mouth—free of the wall—had nearly swallowed Wisp, until the old mouse saved him.

“Before I fled, she told me to go into the attic at sundown.” Despite the flood of emotion, Nettle needed answers from her brother. “Who is this other mouse? And why didn’t you want to go into the attic? What are you hiding from me?”

“Nothing! I’m hiding nothing. I swear on the color blue.”

“Who is this mouse? I saw her when we first brought the pups inside. When I tried to leave this morning, she asked me ‘why?’”

“You understood her?”

Nettle sniffed hard, trying to get a sense of her brother’s honesty. “Only a few words. But she wanted to know why I was leaving. Like she wanted me to stay, or like she had something she wanted me to do. Something in the attic.”

“I won’t go up there with you.”

“Why not?”

Sorrel looked away.

“Answer me! Who is this mouse? You know who she is.”

“I don’t.”

Nettle was done ignoring his lies. “You’re out of practice hiding your nervous scent. Why are you lying? You know something about her.”

“I don’t know her. That’s a hundred percent an honest answer.” Sorrel tilted his head to look up at the ceiling. “I’ve never laid eyes on her.”

“But you’ve heard her?”

“No.”

“Smelled her?”

“You said she doesn’t have a scent. And no, I haven’t.”

“You’re being too precise with your answers. Have you noticed this scentless mouse in any way?”

“No. Not while awake.”

“You dreamed about her.”

“Yes.”

“Why lie about that?”

“It was an ugly dream.”

“Tell me about it.”

“No.”

“In your dream, did she tell you to go to the attic?”

“Yes.”

“Did you?”

“In my dream, yes.”

“What did you see?”

Sorrel’s voice lost its music. “Corpses. Dead animals. Big ones. They’d been sliced up and their innards were hung from the rafters. It was beautiful.”

“You liked it?”

“I hated it. But the patterns made from the intestines and arteries were like spiderwebs spun by a rabid predator. I wanted to stay and admire the artistry even while I wanted to flee from the rot. I’ve never dreamed such a pungent stench.”

Nettle tended to her pups, digesting what Sorrel had said. She didn’t see the world like he did, but his reaction still disturbed her. When a mouse died in the colony, someone quietly dragged their remains away. They didn’t stay to admire them.

But at least he’d still found it revolting.

“Did you go to the attic after your dream?”

“No. I’m afraid those corpses will be there.”

“We would smell them from here.”

“Since you’ve arrived, things don’t seem to work like they should.”

Nettle couldn’t argue with that. “I’ll check the attic at sundown.”

“I’m not going with you. I don’t want to see what I saw in my dream.”

What he left unsaid was that he was afraid he would appreciate the experience.

“I’m not asking you to. I need you to stay with the pups.”

Sorrel nodded.

18

Sunlight came through the kitchen window and into the walls. When it took on the pink hue of an approaching sunset, Nettle left the larder.

The attic awaited.

If there was a way to make this house safe, the old mouse might know it. If she was still alive.

Nettle followed Sorrel’s directions, skipping the ducts to climb upwards inside the walls. The vertical space between brick and plaster opened up to a horizontal gap under the attic floor. Nettle found an opening upward through a knotted board.

The attic was vast and dark.

Sunset’s last rays came in through a window, but shadows permeated every nook and cranny of the great room.

Iron spikes poked down through the sloped ceiling.

There were no animal corpses or stretched out intestines. Instead, cardboard boxes were piled across the floor.

Nettle saw only their shapes and shadows.

Although the last sliver of sunlight reflected off floating dust near the window, it couldn’t penetrate far into the attic.

Nettle didn't know exactly what she was looking for, but she trusted this mouse who looked like her. If there were a way to turn the Red House into a safe home, then that solution would be up here, where the old mouse told her.

Nettle sniffed, relieved to find no trace of giant corpses.

Movement across the attic, between the boxes, getting closer. Something small.

Nettle raised herself on her toes, ready to flee.

She flared her nostrils, smelled only the attic’s dust and mildew.

The old mouse came into view, and Nettle relaxed. Here was a friend who could help.

Then she saw the mouse's stiff gait, her wide eyes. Nettle couldn't smell her fear, but she could see it.

A stringy sliver of red ran from the old mouse's rear ankle back into the shadows. Nettle recognized that meaty smell.

The old mouse didn't slow down. She wasn’t coming to see Nettle—she was fleeing.

But her eyes did lock onto Nettle's for a moment. She spoke in that frustratingly familiar language, and this time Nettle picked out a few words.

“Hide. Don't leave. Watch.”

Nettle resisted the impulse to flee back to the larder.

As the old mouse ran past her, Nettle got a better smell of the stringy mass that attached to her ankle. It was the same gummy flesh that made up the throats of the mouths and the distended throat that had tried to swallow Wisp.

The last she’d seen the old mouse, that distended throat was getting the better of her.

So who was Nettle looking at now?

Did the presence deep within the throaty burrow now move the old mouse about like a mother carrying a pup? Did it flood syrupy ideas up that sticky thread to implant them in the old mouse's mind? Or was it a shackle? Was the old mouse tethered to those wicked tunnels?

The attic twitched.

Nettle looked around frantically for what had changed. Fear welled up inside her.

The old mouse had warned her to hide and yet here she stood.

From somewhere deeper in the attic came a sound like a dry heave and a rip in fabric.

A red, warbling glow bathed what had before been in shadow.

In the spiked wood of the sloped ceiling, a thin red line appeared. With another squelching rip, the line parted to reveal a human-sized hallway of undulating flesh. Mouths of all sizes spotted those walls.

That ripping echoed around the attic. The bouncing sound filled in holes in Nettle’s vision, revealing her surroundings even where it was too dark to see.

It echoed back down the cyclopean throat, but not far before it collided with something coming.

This approaching thing was not as wide and long and simple as a tongue. It was tall as a human but many-limbed like a spider. In the center of his head, a gaping hole instead of a mouth.

Nettle wanted to flee, but she couldn't overcome her instinct to freeze. The terror gripped her too tightly. Whatever abomination was about to come into view would devour her body, her mind, her hopes. It would snap its jaws down upon her and her children, who would die from the wound.

The thing came into view, lit from behind by the glowing walls of flesh. Though her ears had told her this was a many-limbed thing , what she saw instead was a human man.

He was tall and slender. Gray hair ringed a head that was bald on top. He wore fabric of dark reds and blacks.

Nettle knew this man already: Birdsong’s grandfather.

The same gray-haired human man who had sat across the table from Birdsong, who had stood beside Rumble inspecting the books on the shelf, who had—oh no—who Nettle had let into the bedroom to help Birdsong when the horrors had been after her.

The tall man reached down into the shadows and then rose again, now with that fleshy string between his thumb and forefinger. He gave it a sharp jerk. The old mouse flew out from the shadows, across the open space above the boxes, and disappeared down that huge maw.

Nettle didn't dare move, didn't dare breathe. She feared the tall man would look down and see her.

She stared and listened intently, waiting for the moment when he turned away so she could flee.

The tall man walked soundlessly toward the stairs downward.

Nettle didn’t have to guess where he was heading. She knew exactly who he was going to visit.

19

Nettle hurried down through the walls.

She arrived at the narrow entrance to Birdsong’s room.

The meaty scent of the attic’s maw hovered thick.

Nettle heard two sounds: Birdsong’s rhythmic breathing as the human pup slept, and cold whispered words from the tall man, who was not anyone’s grandfather.

Nettle tried to remember if she’d seen the family interact with him at all, or even acknowledge his presence.

When he’d sat at the kitchen table across from Birdsong, the little pup had been watching Nettle. When he perused the shelves in the living room, neither Rumble nor Careful had even looked his way.

No, there was one time, even if Nettle had only witnessed the aftermath.

Last night, Birdsong had screamed. She locked her door. And then only after Nettle and Sorrel arrived did the mouth on the wall open up.

The poor human pup had already been scared.

Had she seen the tall man, fled to her room and locked him out, only for Nettle to unlock the door and let him in?

If Rumble and Careful hadn’t rushed in right after him, what might have happened?

Nettle paused. What did happen when Birdsong’s parents rushed in? She’d heard shouting as she dashed back inside the wall, but was that shouting joyful? Fearful?

Had Rumble and Careful entered the room to find a stranger approaching their daughter? Had they seen him at all?

Was Birdsong okay?

The sound of the human pup’s breathing said she was still alive, but the cold, whispered words of the tall man made Nettle question how long she would stay that way.

His whispers were too soft to bounce sharply off walls to tell Nettle’s ears his position inside the room. She gently squeezed through the hole in the plaster until she could see into the room.

The tall man stood on the wall, parallel to the floor, straight as the unnatural boards that made up the Red House. His face was inches from Birdsong. He whispered quick and hatefully, directly into her ear while she breathed the deep breaths of sleep.

Nettle found herself walking determinedly toward the tall man. She couldn’t allow him to…

What was he doing?

What was she doing? She was a mouse, smaller than the tall man’s hand.

Nettle felt suddenly very exposed. She hesitated on the open carpet between the foot of the bed and the wall.

The tall man turned his head. His eyes locked onto Nettle.

His cheeks and jaws loosened and his eyes widened. He fell, landing across Birdsong and then scrambling to his hands and feet at the side of the bed, much more limber than he looked.

Birdsong rolled over in her sleep.

Nettle ran back for the wall.

The floor shook with the tall man’s heavy steps. Nettle’s legs rattled as she squeezed through the opening into the wall.

Staticky fingertips brushed against her back.

She pressed herself against the far interior side of the wall, turning around to see if she had the time and space to leap up and begin her climb to safety.

The tall man pressed his eye against the hole.

His pupil was a darker black than even a moonless, cloudy night. His iris was the brown of mud. In his eye’s white, specks of red swam like tadpoles.

He hissed words at her. Their meaning, Nettle had no idea.

She jumped and climbed up the wall, back to the safety of the larder.

20

When she arrived back in the larder, Nettle told Sorrel everything she’d seen.

“He’s in Birdsong’s room right now? Why didn’t you say that first?” Sorrel raced away.

“It’s not safe!” Nettle called after him. “He came after me!”

But Sorrel had already climbed the wall and squeezed himself through into the passageway above.

Nettle climbed after him, sticking her head through the hole. She saw her brother scamper away down the dusty, rectangular passageway.

She wanted to go after him, bring him back, but Hush and Wisp were stirring. The larder was safe from the horrors of the Red House but it wasn’t safe enough to keep curious pups from wandering.

Nettle hopped back to the floor to whisper her pups back to sleep.

She tried to keep her thoughts away from Sorrel and what would happen when the tall man caught him. Would he tether him to the fleshy hallway like he had the old mouse? Nettle didn’t dare hope that Sorrel might see the danger in Birdsong’s room and decide to stay hidden. His affection for the human pup would propel him straight at the tall man.

Nettle had achingly planned an entire system for surviving without her brother by the time he returned.

Nettle jumped to her feet, hurrying to his side to nuzzle him and check for injuries.

“I’m fine,” Sorrel said. “Birdsong’s room was empty.”

Relief loosened every muscle in Nettle’s body. “Thank goodness.”

“No.” Sorrel smelled of worry. “I found her outside her room, sitting crosslegged and facing the end of the hallway.”

“Awake?”

“Her breathing sounded like she was asleep, but she was singing and working her fingers like she was making pictures with liquid stains. Her grandfather’s smell still lingered.”

“Not her grandfather,” Nettle said.

“I believe she’s safe for now. But her grandfather… that man will be back tomorrow night.” He shuddered. “I hated seeing her work those stains in her sleep. That’s a special thing about her. Did I tell you she stains paper in different colors? It’s lovely. But seeing her do those motions in her sleep, it felt wrong. I’ve got to protect her. I’ll build a larder under her bed to keep her safe.”

Nettle tried to absorb everything he’d said. “Will that work?”

“It worked here.”

Nettle realized her brother hadn’t mentally gone through every possible way the safety of their larder could fail. “But we don’t know why. And so far it’s only worked for the mouths, not for the tall man.”

“They’re the same. Or at least together. Can’t you smell it?”

He was right about that. The tall man had entered the attic through an opening with a throat like the mouths that had attacked them. “But we don’t know why the larder kept them out. If you pile food around her bed, is that really a larder? You’re not gathering it for a larder’s purpose.”

Sorrel grumbled. He waved his nose in a little circle. “These piles of food stopped those fanged tongues. I’ll do that under Birdsong’s bed, and it’ll form a barrier just like it did in here.”

Despite Nettle’s doubt, she didn’t have another suggestion for protecting Birdsong. “It’s worth a try.”

“I’m glad you agree. This will take a while. Let me know if you need a break from watching the pups.” And with that, Sorrel darted out of the larder, in the direction of the kitchen.

Exhaustion caught up to Nettle and she slept fitfully, waking every few minutes when Sorrel would run through the larder. His cheeks bulged as he traveled from the kitchen to Birdsong’s bedroom. They were empty on each return trip.

As the night passed, Nettle grew nervous for her brother. She stopped him as he was passing through with empty cheeks. “You need to sleep. Is it safe out there?”

“I’m fine.” His back heaved with deep breaths. “One new mouth opened up—I had to hop over a long cat’s tongue. So I’ve been taking different routes each trip. That seems to throw them off.”

She couldn’t believe how casually he spoke. “Will you finish before the family wakes up?”

“There’s gaps, but this barrier here isn’t perfect and it still works.” Sorrel motioned to the low wall of food around them.

Nettle didn’t share his confidence, but she wouldn’t try to persuade him.

She drifted back to sleep, and when she woke again, sunlight wound its way into the larder and Sorrel was asleep on the other side of the pups.

21

It was no use trying to convince Sorrel that he didn’t need to be under Birdsong’s bed.

“The barrier might need one of us inside,” Sorrel said. “We haven’t seen if the tall man and his horrors can enter our larder when we’re not here.”

And he was right. Nettle couldn’t say for sure that Sorrel could leave Birdsong alone and she’d be safe.

The day passed without Nettle thinking of another way to keep him from challenging the tall man again.

As evening fell, Nettle lay close to both pups, feeling them breathing. Wisp’s little chest rose and fell slowly. Hush gasped in her sleep. Nettle nuzzled her daughter, whispering in her ear that everything’s okay, mama’s here, bad dreams can’t hurt you.

Hush leaned into Nettle. Her breathing calmed.

Nettle pulled her tight. She wished that physical affection could magically make her nervous pup grow into confidence, could guarantee that Hush would one day feel safe in her home.

But right now, Nettle didn’t have a safe home to offer her pups.

And how could she ever?

The tall man’s horrors had taken over her old burrow. They already stalked the Red House.

Nettle snapped her head up. She’d been drifting off, her mind wandering anxiously to the melody of her pups’ breathing.

How long had Sorrel been gone?

Nettle didn’t know if he intended to stay down there all night, or only for a while after sunset.

If the larder worked in keeping away the tall man, would the tall man lurk around for the rest of the night? Or would he leave?

There was too much Nettle didn’t know.

Terrible fates for her brother played through her mind.

Swallowed by a mouth in the wall, stomped by the tall man. Even something as plain as getting his neck snapped by a spring trap.

For all the grief she’d given Sorrel about going down there, now she was discovering that she couldn’t sit and wait.

Sorrel might need her help.

Nettle arranged her stores of food into steep walls, completely blocking the exits. She couldn’t risk Wisp wandering away again.

She made sure the food still formed an unbroken barrier.

Then she nudged the bedding into a tall pile above both pups to keep them warm and comfortable.

“Please stay asleep,” she whispered, and then scurried through the wall in search of her brother.

The journey to Birdsong’s room was quiet and dark. Nettle was used to the night being loud with crickets, frogs, the wind rustling the meadow, dew dripping off leaves—but inside, the Red House muffled those sounds so completely that the slight scratching of Nettle’s claws on the wood floor drowned them out.

As she approached the hole into Birdsong’s room, Sorrel’s scent grew stronger, and two quiet sounds drifted to Nettle’s ears: the tall man’s harsh and unceasing whispers, and Birdsong’s muffled sobbing.

Nettle’s nostrils twitched at the increasingly familiar sensation of the tall man being near.

Nettle put her head into the room. A single light perched low on the wall made the whole room visible. That was new.

She glanced upward, making sure that mouth hadn’t opened back up in the wall.

Atop Birdsong’s bed, a lump of blankets, so similar to the piles of bedding Nettle had just made over her own pups.

Helpless crying came from within, too scared to cry loud enough for her parents to hear.

The tall man hunched over her bed, the forward curve of his spine breaching the barrier that Sorrel had built at the edges of the bed.

The tall man’s face pointed straight down, his lips only inches from the lump of blankets.

As he expelled his constant whisper, spittle flew off his tongue.

Protective instincts demanded that Nettle act. Reality left her paralyzed. What could she possibly do?

A shape ran across the open floor.

Sorrel.

He dashed from the dresser by the closed door, straight toward the tall man’s boot.

Nettle called out, “What are you doing?”

He wheezed a reply. “Making noise isn’t distracting him. I’m going for blood.”

In an off-balance, jiggling charge, Sorrel latched onto a boot, propelled himself up to the tall man’s pant leg, and sank his teeth into flesh.

The tall man’s constant stream of whispers stopped. He stood straight, lifting himself away from Birdsong, so tall that he tilted his head to avoid it hitting the ceiling.

He looked down at Sorrel, who clung tightly.

The tickling in Nettle’s nostrils flared.

The tall man flicked his ankle. Sorrel flew through the air, slid across the floor, and came to a stop at the door.

Nettle leapt into the room, ready to be a distraction so Sorrel could get to safety.

But the tall man leaned back down over Birdsong to continue his whispering.

Nettle and her brother were so diminutive they weren’t even worth his notice.

When he’d seen her in this room last night, he’d chased her to the wall. It was almost like he’d been furious to notice a mouse, but then a closer inspection had told him he didn’t need to worry about her.

“Nettle!” Sorrel hissed. “I’ll get the door unlocked. You go wake Rumble and Careful.”

“But you know the house better than me.”

“He hurt my leg. I can’t run.” Sorrel cradled one front paw in the other.

“You can climb?”

“I can jump.” Sorrel leaned back and then jumped onto a dresser drawer handle. “You go wake her parents! Under the door, left, pass the bathroom and then to the right is the door to where they sleep.”

As Sorrel jumped up to the next drawer handle, Nettle squashed down her instincts that told her to stay hidden. She dashed across the open floor. The tall man ignored her.

She hoped she was quick enough to bring Birdsong’s parents before the tall man finished with his whispers.

Nettle squeezed under the bedroom door.

She found herself in a space that was both exposed and comfortingly familiar. She’d crossed the hallway before, but on the far edge. Now she was in the middle of the space.

The scale was large, but this hallway was the same as a tunnel through a burrow. It had the human family’s scent embedded deep from constant passage, just like a tunnel through a burrow did for Nettle.

The hallway was a good place. No purpose except to connect the safe place where you sleep with the safe place where you eat.

Nettle hoped for luck that no further mouths would open in the walls to slow her down.

She raced through the hallway to the door to Rumble and Careful’s bedroom. She slipped beneath it.

Rumble snored, a sound even lower in register than his normal voice. Nettle felt it more than heard it.

Behind Nettle, Birdsong’s sobs came up the hallway, so quiet Nettle barely heard them. Metallic scraping sounded within those cries, the sound of Sorrel working the door’s lock.

Rumble and Careful’s bed was twice as big as Birdsong’s, and twice as tall. Nettle leapt high to dig her claws into the blanket. She climbed atop the bed.

She saw giant lumps beneath the blanket ending in Rumble and Careful’s heads uncovered at the far end of the bed. Nettle navigated between the two bodies.

Rumble was the larger of the two, so she picked him to wake up.

She crawled from the blanket to Rumble’s neck. He twitched as her grip tickled him. She climbed onto his cheek and poked her tail inside his nostril.

His hand descended out of the darkness above. Nettle jumped away, landing on the soft mattress between the humans. Rumble scratched his nose, still sleeping.

From down the hall, Birdsong’s sobs softened as the tall man’s angry lecture grew louder.

Nettle hooked her claws into Rumble’s cheek, piercing the skin. She scratched.

The human man sat up, shockingly fast for someone so large. He spoke, an earthquake of a sound this close to him.

He raised a glass rectangle which suddenly emitted a blinding white light.

Nettle dove for a hiding spot beneath the blanket.

She breathed deep. Had he spotted her?

They were awake now. They should hear their daughter crying and the intruder’s hateful words.

Rumble barked short words.

Careful awoke. The mattress sank and rose, tossing Nettle about.

Suddenly, she was soaring through the air, tangled in the blanket, which cushioned her impact with the floor.

Rumble’s light pinned her.

She needed to run, to escape, to lead Birdsong’s parents to her aid, but her leg was caught. The light blinded her to the point she couldn’t tell which way to flee.

Both Rumble and Careful spoke with excitement and disgust.

Couldn’t they hear their daughter crying? Couldn’t they hear that wicked voice speaking to her?

Nettle jumped, trying to free her leg. She flopped about.

Rumble’s voice grew too close.

Nettle wasn’t going to let herself be crushed by a scared human while her pups were unprotected back in the nest.

Still, the light brightened with Rumble’s approach.

Careful spoke, quick and short. Rumble and his light stopped moving.

A thunderous flurry of heavy steps punched shockwaves through Nettle. Both parents rushed out their door and down the hall.

Nettle heard Birdsong’s door swing open—Sorrel had unlocked it.

And then a sound sent chills down Nettle’s spine: Careful screamed.

A flood of pheromones so thick, Nettle smelled them from afar. Fear, disbelief, grief. And then rage.

Rumble roared with anger and then shock.

Nettle managed to free herself from the blanket. She dashed back up the hallway. It was no longer a safe tunnel but a pathway of dread.

What would she see when she came around the corner? What had Rumble and Careful seen?

Before she reached the doorway, Sorrel fled from inside Birdsong’s room, eyes wide, chest heaving, air around him thick with adrenaline. “Back to the nest!” he yelled

The quickest way back that Nettle knew was into Birdsong’s room and into the wall. “How?”

“Bathroom.” Sorrel ran down the hall in the direction opposite Rumble and Careful’s room. Nettle raced behind him. They cut into the bathroom he’d led her through when they first arrived.

“What happened?” Nettle asked between breaths as they climbed through a hole in the wall behind the toilet. “Why did the parents scream?”

She didn’t ask, Is Birdsong okay?

Sorrel hopped up through the wall. “The tall man didn’t care about me until I unlocked the door. He heard it click and then he noticed me. Gave me a terrible stare, but didn’t stop those mean words coming from his mouth. But when Careful got over her shock and came inside like a hawk diving, talons out, the tall man realized I’d been doing more than just trying to distract him. He jumped at me. I ran.”

“Why did they scream? What did they see?” Nettle danced around the question she wanted to ask, afraid of the answer.

“They saw the tall man! They’ve got the same protective instincts you have for Wisp and Hush. None of this running from predators and trying again with the next littler like too many of our cousins.”

Finally, Nettle let the question out. “Careful sounded and smelled like a type of fear I’ve only felt in myself. Is Birdsong okay?”

When Sorrel didn’t answer, Nettle thought he was ignoring her, until she heard him open his mouth to speak, get choked up, and then try again with the same results.

As they approached the larder, Nettle’s concern for Birdsong shifted into anxiety for her own pups. She’d left them again. It was an act of desperation, but she’d left them just the same. Would they still be there when she crawled back into the larder’s entrance?

She could already smell them, but smells lingered.

Nettle’s heart hummed by the time she entered the larder.

She heard the softer hums of her pups’ heartbeats. They were here, asleep, whole.

Sorrel squeezed into the larder behind her.

Nettle lay down with Hush and Wisp, relieved they were okay. Careful’s fear smell still played through Nettle’s mind.

She closed her eyes and waited for Sorrel to gather himself to tell her what had happened with Birdsong.

22

Nettle awoke to heavy footsteps throughout the house.

As impactful as Rumble’s, but more of them. Probably more human men.

Hush nursed and Wisp blindly scavenged for a peanut to nibble.

Sorrel came back into the larder. He’d left without waking her.

“Where did you go?” Nettle asked. “Who else is here? Is Birdsong okay?”

Sorrel collapsed into a pile of bedding, the bunches of paper and cardboard easily absorbing the impact of his bulk. “Birdsong… I’m hopeful. I believe she’ll be okay.”

“What did you see?” Nettle asked. “She’s hurt? Are the newcomers here to help her recover?”

“Before the tall man chased me from her room, Birdsong peeked out from beneath the comfort of her blankets.”

“Before or after the tall man hurt her?” Nettle asked.

Sorrel closed his eyes, not to remember but to hide from a mental vision. “Both. After. I don’t know. She wasn’t herself. She didn’t have her curiosity or her delight or even her fear. She saw me and I felt the tall man’s perversion of her aesthetic intention.”

Nettle parsed what he’d said. “You thought she wanted to pull you apart and decorate with your insides?”

“Yes,” Sorrel whispered.

“You could tell that from a single look?”

“You would too if you saw her. Go ahead. I’ll stay with the pups. Look in her room. The two visitors are in there—they look like larger, male versions of Careful.”

Nettle felt some kinship with the human mother, that she would bring in her own family to help protect her pup. She imagined Hush or Wisp’s personality distorted by the terrible tall man. “I don’t need to see Birdsong,” Nettle told her brother. “I believe you.”

Sorrel spoke in a more helpless tone than she’d ever heard from him. “What can we do?”

“Gathering a larder around her bed was a good idea. You did the best you could.”

“It didn’t work. We have to do better. This larder here is safe. How do we extend this safety to the whole house?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s not any safer outside. Your pups won’t be safer anywhere else.”

“I’m not leaving you, Sorrel. If it were safer outside, I’d ask you to come with us.”

“I couldn’t leave Birdsong.”

“Why?”

“She needs help.”

“She has her parents. All we did last night was alert them. They helped her.”

“Could we come up with a more pointless debate? It’s not safer outside, you’re not leaving, and so there’s no reason for me to leave Birdsong.”

Nettle stayed quiet. Sorrel was right. And Nettle understood wanting to protect someone else’s pup. Young animals needed protection. But Sorrel also had an affection for Birdsong that went beyond protective.

“Even once she’s safe,” Nettle said carefully, “you’ll still want to stay with her.”

“True, I suppose.”

“Why?”

Sorrel sighed. “Let me show you something. Come with me.”

“How far? We should build up the barriers again so Wisp doesn’t wander off.”

“Oh, that’s right. Stay here. I’ll go get it.”

Sorrel left, leaving Nettle in the larder with the pups.

Hush finished nursing. Instead of rolling over with her bulging little belly like she often did, she instead sat in front of Nettle’s face, peering up at her expectantly.

“What can I do for you?” Nettle asked, amused.

Hush squeaked back at her, little songs of gibberish.

Nettle hummed. “You’ve got a full tummy. You’re not tired. So what is it?”

Hush looked about for her brother. She found him blindly exploring their tiny home, nostrils twitching as he crawled closer to a pile of raisins. Hush rushed at him, stumbling once on the way. Right before they collided, Hush jumped back.

Wisp whipped around, having heard her approach. Hush ran at him again. This time he jumped toward her, overshooting to sail over his sister.

Nettle quietly watched, not wanting to interrupt their play.

Sorrel returned, bumping into the walls as he came back into the larder. At the noise, both pups hurried back to Nettle.

They smelled their uncle and relaxed.

“Here it is,” Sorrel said. He carried balled-up paper in his mouth. It was nearly as big as he was.

He dropped it and then used his feet and mouth to flatten it out.

“Come look,” he said.

It was the same as any other old paper: wrinkled, soft, a few tears in the edges, lines and splotches of color on one side. The sort of thing that was a single session of shredding away from being a cozy pile of bedding.

Sorrel held down one corner that kept curling. He motioned to the paper reverently. He smelled like affection.

“It’s paper,” Nettle prompted him to explain.

“Look at the picture,” Sorrel said.

Nettle wasn’t sure what he meant. The picture before her was her brother standing on the edge of a wrinkled piece of paper, in front of the yellow wood wall and surrounded by a low barrier of raisins, rice, and cereal.

Sorrel saw her confusion. “There’s a picture on the paper. Birdsong put color on the paper until I could see a picture.”

Nettle stood on her back legs to stretch tall and see the whole paper at once.

Waxy blue lines formed two overlapping circles. The larger circle had four little lines sticking out the bottom and one long squiggly line out the back—legs and a tail. The smaller circle had two dots—eyes—and two even smaller circles on top—ears. A triangle stuck out the side with a waxy pink dot at its tip—a nose. Sorrel’s nose.

It was strange to suddenly realize that these patterns of color represented something. Stranger still that it represented her brother.

And somehow, strangest of all was the thought that a living creature had arranged these colored lines with this intention.

Sorrel said, “I have to stay with Birdsong⁠—”

Nettle finished for him. “Because you want to learn to do this yourself.”

“What? No. Because I want to see what else Birdsong can create.”

Nettle waited for him to say he was joking, or to admit that Nettle was right and he wanted to create the sort of aesthetic beauty he was so good at noticing.

Sorrel explained himself in whispered tones. “There’s so many lovely things to be surrounded by. Like when Careful is preparing food in the kitchen so the air smells like warm butter, and reflections of the morning sun come soft through the window, and I think how the color of Careful’s hair in that light is so much like the smell of butter.”

Sorrel looked down at the paper and its waxy representation of himself. “Can you imagine if I were as blue as the sky and my nose were as pink as a milkweed flower? I never would have if Birdsong hadn’t created this. I want to stay here so I don’t miss what else she conjures up. How lucky am I to have found a rare creature who not only imagines such lovely pictures but is able to create them.”

Nettle thought that Sorrel would even better appreciate this sort of colorful representation of a picture if he created one himself. But she wasn’t sure how to convince him of it, and in this moment there were more pressing matters to figure out. Like how to make this place safe, regardless of their individual reasons for it.

“Well, I’ve got nowhere safer to bring my pups, and you’ve found… a human who makes paper pretty.” Nettle didn’t mean to diminish Sorrel, but the words came out too quick.

Sorrel laughed, understanding her awkward phrasing didn’t mean she thought his affection for Birdsong was stupid.

Nettle relaxed. Despite the horrors they faced, she felt gratitude for her current situation. She’d spent so much time in the colony explaining herself when she misspoke, worried her cousins would think she didn’t value the colony’s survival as much as them. Which she didn’t. Her pups were so much more important than the group as a whole. And though it was selfish to even think it, so was she. Not that her life was worth more than anyone else’s, but that she wasn’t willing to sacrifice herself—the unique mouse she was—on behalf of the colony. Her unique desires for her self weren’t as grandiose and lovely as Sorrel’s, but they were just as valid.

Here, now, in the Red House, with Sorrel chuckling that Nettle had stumbled over herself to avoid offending him, she felt more at home than ever before.

Inside the larder, that was.

The second she stepped past the barrier of food, she wouldn’t be safe anymore.

They had to do something about the tall man and the horrors he controlled.

“That’s why you’re not running,” Nettle said, pointing to the paper. “But what do we do next?”

“What if you try building another larder?” Sorrel suggested. “Yours blocked those tongues but mine didn’t. The difference is who made it.”

Nettle didn’t want to shoot him down too quickly, but she was certain the difference was bigger than that.

Before she could pick a place to start, a sudden thump shook the ceiling.

Nettle and Sorrel both jumped to cover the pups with their bodies as dust rained down.

When the dust stilled, Nettle asked, “When I was in the attic and saw the tall man arrive, did it shake like this?”

Sorrel shook his head. “No. And it’s hours from sunset. It’s not him.”

“More mouths?” Nettle asked.

“Could be,” Sorrel said. “But it sounds big. Big enough to go after Birdsong.”

“In the middle of the day? I guess we don’t know when they hunt.”

“If you can call it hunting,” Sorrel said.

Nettle thought of how urgently the old mouse had told Nettle to go to the attic. She’d assumed it was so she could witness the tall man’s nightly arrival. But what if there was something else in the attic that could help them make the Red House safe?

“I’m going up there,” Nettle said. “Wisp will be hungry soon. He can have rice.”

Without waiting for Sorrel’s response, Nettle darted up the wall and through the exit into the ceiling.

23

Nettle hopped up, wedged three feet in the hole, and then pulled herself up and through.

Darkness extended around her in all directions, as massive a space as the meadow only instead of open sky above, there was a low entrapping presence.

The air smelled less of dust and mildew than before, but a new smell crept into the air, starting vague and then thickening to pungency, as if its source were rapidly drawing closer.

It was the rot of recently deceased flesh. Not the meaty death of the Red House’s throats and tunnels, but a repulsive stench of mouse remains after a coyote nibbles off your muscles but before the ants carry off the rest of your organs and the rain washes away the remnants of your torn open bowels.

The scent became so thick Nettle thought she could hide inside it.

Massive corpses appeared in the darkness of the attic, at least five of them.

The nearest was also the largest, short brown hair over a round belly, a strong neck, and a dark mane matted with blood. Its hooves sprawled overtop the neighboring animal corpse, similarly shaped but smaller and with curved horns on its head.

A horse and a goat, if the stories passed down from her older cousins were accurate.

The third corpse was a coyote—Nettle recognized coyotes. The fourth and fifth were dogs.

For each corpse she looked at, the darkness revealed more: a vulture, a pile of crows, snakes, a cat.

Each dead animal was covered in precise slices. Wings were missing, teeth sawed in half, tongues ripped out. The dogs and coyotes were disemboweled. The horse had her throat slit.

Nettle had never seen such a large animal dead. What sort of predator could kill something so powerful?

But it hadn’t been a normal predator.

And these couldn’t be normal corpses. They weren’t here in the attic two nights ago. If the tall man had slaughtered this eccentric colony of animals since then, their screams and squeals would have shaken the Red House.

Nettle didn’t know what that meant. They were the corpses of ghosts, maybe.

But they were exactly as Sorrel had dreamed.

The old mouse had spoke to him in a dream, told him to come up to the attic. She’d given Nettle the same instructions. Nettle thought it was so she would witness the tall man’s nightly arrival, but apparently there was more the old mouse wanted her to see.

But what was she supposed to learn from an attic full of rotting ghost corpses?

Nettle wondered if they were solid.

She crept forward to touch the horse’s sagging stomach. She nudged it with her nose.

At the touch, the world around Nettle suddenly changed.

Morning sun glared through a fog bank.

Nettle was in the meadow but high above it.

No, she stood on the ground, her hooves slightly sinking into the soft dirt.

She saw the Red House through the mare’s eyes—and the horse was a mare, she felt that now.

She smelled the crispness of the air. It lacked the smokey, oily scent that grew stronger when the humans arrived and left in their cars. The hard black road that normally cut through the meadow to the Red House was now only dirt.

She approached the Red House, not sure why. Something called to her. At her side, her goat friend approached as well. They communicated as well as they could to share their confusion about what was drawing them in.

Through the mare’s eyes, Nettle looked in through a window.

The mare’s height was dizzying.

Flickering candleflame in the living room.

A human woman sat at a wooden table. Nettle felt the mare’s trust in her. She was kind.

The kind woman had piles of books in front of her. A strange amount of candles stood on the table. The kind woman moved rocks around in a pattern of circles. Her lips moved like she was speaking, but there was no one in the room she could be talking to.

No, there was someone else in the house. Nettle found that recent memory in the mare’s mind. The tall man had arrived and took the kind woman’s child into a back room.

Nettle felt the horse whinny in agitation.

The kind woman looked to see the horse outside the window. Nettle wanted to flee but the mare’s emotions were calm and concerned.

The woman grew excited. Her mouth moved more quickly. She dragged rocks in circles around each other more haphazardly.

Knowledge pierced the mare’s mind: the tall man was a predator.

The mare backed away from the window. Any threat that stood shorter than her legs, she could easily stomp. But to protect herself from a predator as large as the tall man, she had to rear back first, and that was more dangerous to the mare. She could lose her balance. The predator could strike while her chest was exposed.

The mare readied herself for the tall man to attack.

Around her, Nettle heard the mare’s goat friend run away.

From the treetops, crows took to the sky, warning each other with quick cries.

Two familiar dogs slunk toward the house, hackles raised and growling. Cautious.

Through the window, Nettle saw the kind woman grow frustrated. She moved her stones around and spoke again.

New knowledge entered the horse’s mind.

The tall man was a rival.

The horse didn’t understand. What did she care about rivals? Stallions came to her—she didn’t have to compete for attention.

The goat came clomping back over. He raised up on his back legs and lunged at the air, showing this confusing rival what his horns were capable of.

The dogs stood taller. They barked confidently.

Crows circled in flight, now over the Red House. Their cries grew angry.

Movement in the forest. The mare and Nettle smelled coyotes.

Again, the kind woman grew frustrated.

The animals accepted the knowledge she gave them but weren’t reacting how she wanted. She looked over her shoulder, deeper into the house where the tall man had taken her child.

She went to her shelf to return with different books. She read through them.

Time passed and the mare wandered over to a clover patch, curious about the human who was a predator and a rival, concerned about the kind woman who brought her food and water and who—in the winter—even covered her with a thick blanket.

The kind woman came outside. She called to the mare with words Nettle didn’t understand, didn’t think the mare understood, but as they approached each other, Nettle felt the mare’s love for this human woman.

The kind woman held her stones in her fists. She raised them to the mare, rubbed them in the mare’s mouth, along her gums, gathering saliva.

The horse backed away.

The goat approached, to also add his saliva to the stones. Then came the dogs.

The kind woman started back inside, but then stopped. She cocked her head, listening, and then walked across the meadow and into the woods.

Crows descended beneath the trees. Coyotes barked.

The kind woman returned, patting the mare as she passed by and went back inside.

The mare returned to the window, the love she felt for the woman making her want to help.

The kind woman spit on the stones and then arranged them into a circle. She put a finger on one and dragged it. All the stones rotated, although she only touched one.

The mare’s mind flooded with knowledge.

She was a beast of labor, her ancestors ran free, the woman loved her but nothing like a mother’s love, the woman served the tall man like her mother had served the tall man’s mother, the world was so terribly more complicated than the horse’s life in the barn and in the meadow.

Understanding. More than ever before.

Some of it was familiar to Nettle, but there was so much more than she could absorb, and so she turned away from it. It was too much, too strange.

The kind woman looked out through the window to see the mare breathing rapidly. She looked satisfied, triumphant.

One final time, she moved the stones around and spoke.

Knowledge entered Nettle’s and the mare’s mind.

The tall man had murdered people in town. That was a new concept, to kill not for food or even for play, but for reasons unclear to the kind woman. This sort of killing offended the mare in a way she’d never experienced.

But that wasn’t all the woman taught the mare about the tall man.

The tall man had set his eye on a child—her child—not as a victim but as a protege. And deeper inside the Red House, right now he was teaching his wickedness.

Fury erupted in the mare’s mind.

Coyotes barked as they broke from the treeline, running for the house. The dogs snarled. Not even the goat was spooked. He leapt at the window, shattering the glass with his horns.

The woman jumped from her chair, scared.

The mare wouldn’t leave the kind woman alone in her fear. She wouldn’t leave the tall man to continue existing in his offense.

Nettle felt the massive body charge the front door of the Red House.

She was flooded with an emotion which Nettle knew, but which this mare was only just discovering: indignation.

Two farm dogs ran at her side. A small pack of three coyotes broke the tree line to join as well. Flapping wings overhead told her that birds had also felt this new emotion, and the target was inside the Red House.

Nettle felt herself rear back, raising her muscled legs and hoofed feet into the air, and then crashing them forward against the door.

It slammed open, banged into the inside wall.

The mare stumbled inside.

Smells washed over her: fear, scratched metal, and the blood-and-shit smell of released innards.

It was similar to the scent that had leaked out from the Tall Man’s opening in the attic, but where that smelled like a fresh wound, this had the scent of rot and death.

She recognized the layout of this house, the kitchen to the left, hallway straight ahead, living room to the right.

At the end of the hallway, directly ahead, was a door that Nettle didn’t recognize. There couldn’t be much space behind it—that was an outside wall.

Blood seeped under that door.

Indignation carried the mare straight down the hallway. Nettle went along for the ride as this massive creature reared back again to smash open this much weaker door.

The scent of rotting death was nearly as powerful as this new emotion, almost making the animal flee in disgust.

But the kind woman had told this beast what great wrongness was happening, and now it witnessed with its own senses.

There were no windows in this strange room.

Intestines of all sizes were pinned to the walls, making a pattern like a spider's web. In the gaps between were pinned hearts and livers and sections of brain. Nettle could see no purpose for this, other than a twisted version of what Sorrel would call the aesthetic value.

In the back corner, a tight spiral of tubed flesh began on the floor, winding its way upward, growing in width as it turned and rose. This twisting pile of throat ended with an opening as large as one of the growling dogs that prowled up the hall behind her.

But even that wasn’t the target of this newly learned indignation.

The tall man stood by a table in the middle of the room, next to a human pup the same age as Birdsong.

The man’s spindly fingers were on the pup, one hand on his shoulder, the other guiding the pup’s own hand.

A cat’s corpse was fixed to the table top with rope.

The cat twitched.

Nettle realized in horror that the cat was alive.

The scent of death was so strong that Nettle couldn't determine what was alive and what wasn't. The human pup held a glistening sliver of metal. The tall man guided the pup’s hand to cut through the cat's belly. Together, they unspooled its insides.

Every mouse was familiar with predators. Their every habit was meant to keep them unseen by animals who wanted to kill them.

Humans were often predators. The mare also knew this.

But the indignation which the kind woman had shared with the animals, that went beyond the killing. That was aimed at the tall man’s hand guiding the child’s. The willful perversion of youthful innocence.

Nettle witnessed all this in a few heartbeats.

The farm dogs acted first. Maybe they had more of a natural sense of indignation or maybe they felt affection toward the human child.

Nettle understood compassion for a human better than she did a few days ago.

The dogs raced passed Nettle, barking and snarling.

They attacked the tall man as a pack of two. One snapped its jaws in front of him. The other circled around, lunging for his legs. The tall man swung down the glistening metal. The dog yelped as his snout split and blood poured over his fangs.

The human pup suddenly let out a confused sob, as if he were waking from slumber.

The tall man yelled curses.

Nettle was surprised to sense that the mare in which she resided understood a scant few of those words: No, and the name of the crying pup. This massive animal wanted to strike, but was scared to attack directly.

As the dogs circled the tall man, Nettle heard a human wail from outside. The tall man grabbed the child and pressed the metal to its neck.

The kind woman, now in the hallway behind Nettle, put another idea into the animal's heads:

Stop.

But she hadn’t started this with commands and force.

She’d let the animals think more like her. Made them understand the wrongness of what the tall man was doing.

And so her command to stop wasn’t strong enough.

Dogs and coyotes circled. The mare danced about, searching for a safe moment to strike with her front hooves.

Still, they didn’t approach.

The animals’ newly perceived world didn’t tolerate the tall man’s continued existence, yet his paralyzing gaze darted from dog to coyote to horse. They couldn’t push past their instinct to only strike when it was safe.

A familiar mouse climbed up the aesthetic viscera pinned to the walls, and then leapt atop the little hut of opened fleshy tubes. She launched herself at the tall man’s neck.

The old mouse—who in this memory was still young—gave the tall man no chance to bat her away. She collided with the soft skin of his neck, incisors leading like a diving falcon’s talons.

She bit down hard.

A string of blood ran down the tall man’s neck. He swatted the mouse away and reared back. The human pup collapsed out of his grasp.

Nettle felt the mare sense its opportunity. It jumped forward to strike down with more strength than Nettle ever imagined she’d feel. Hoof’s edge cracked through human skull.

The tall man went limp. Hooves and fangs found his body before it even struck the floor. The dogs and coyotes moved in. More animals attacked, animals Nettle hadn’t even realized were following. The tall man was stomped and slashed and bit until he became a messier version of of the walls.

A human continued to yell. Nettle willed the horse to look around so she could see who it was, but she had no control. She was only a witness.

The kind woman carried her pup out of the house. She cooed to him and he was silent, but a human voice kept wailing.

Fear gripped Nettle as she realized the wailing was the tall man’s, although no fragment of his body remained that was larger than a mouse.

The sound chased the animals from the room.

The horse slunk back to the hallway, but not before Nettle saw the hut of stretched intestines glow a bloody red.

The mouse squeaked frantically at her fellow animals, running from the corner where she'd been flung to the center of the tall man's remains. It was hard to decipher her words through this other animal's ears, and she still spoke in that dialect which was different from Nettle's own. But Nettle understood enough to know that the mouse was warning that the tall man was not dead.

As the horse slunk back down the hallway, the kind woman returned and fury came with her. She'd left her pup outside. She squeezed past the horse’s side.

Nettle felt the horse’s concern for the kind woman. She was a mother herself, and that sense of indignity flared hot. She wanted to see the tall man punished even more.

Nettle watched through the mare’s eyes as she looked back into the room.

They couldn't see past the kind woman who stood in the doorway, but they heard her yell a staccato burst of words, one at a time. Nettle didn’t know the words, but the mare thought one of the words was nest or maybe home. It conjured images of where the horse slept inside the barn.

Another word was the same the kind woman would use to warn the horse away from the garden: stay away.

The woman repeated herself. Past her, the room’s red glow brightened.

The woman howled those words.

The tall man’s wailing stopped.

The red glow faded.

Nettle’s connection to the mare’s mind snapped.

24

Nettle found herself once again in the attic. The corpses were gone, but she remembered what they looked like.

They’d been the animals who had ended the tall man's life.

Nettle now understood why she’d felt such personal hate from the tall man.

The tall man saw Nettle and remembered the old mouse, who’d delivered the first blow, allowing the other animals to end his life.

Except, his life hadn’t ended. Nettle didn’t understand what had happened, but despite his body being ripped apart, she’d still heard his screams.

Here in the attic, Nettle perked her ears. She felt vibrations through the floor, adult humans walking around below. She kept a close watch above at the spiked ceiling, ready to flee if a red slit opened up again.

She wanted to talk to the old mouse now, but Nettle hadn’t seen her since the tall man had yanked that bloody tendril to pull her back into his lair.

Nettle didn't understand what that lair was. Or for that matter, why there’d been a back room in the memory she’d just witnessed.

Maybe the missing room was the tall man’s lair. Whatever rituals he’d been teaching to the kind woman’s pup, he had a secret place to do them. And in death, he’d fled deeper into that place.

But now he’d emerged again.

Why now?

Nettle didn't know. But the answer to that question would help her find a way to make the Red House a safe home.

As she crept from the attic back to the larder, she thought of the kind woman yelling commands to the living remains of the tall man. Home and stay out were what the horse had understood. It was simple to puzzle out the command that sealed away the tall man for so long:

Stay out of my home.

Nettle relayed everything she'd seen to Sorrel.

“You realize what this means.” Sorrel grew excited.

Nettle was ready to plan with him how to use the kind woman’s command to banish the tall man back through his strange doorway.

“The old mouse must be our grandmother,” Sorrel said. “Or her grandmother. Or her grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother.

Nettle blinked. Why did that matter?

Sorrel rambled on. “You said the Red House looked different. Like it was recently built and the hard black path wasn’t there yet. So you saw that horse’s memory from ages ago. How many generations back?”

“I saw the tall man die,” Nettle said, trying to get her brother back on track. “Maybe we can lock him away like the kind woman did.”

Sorrel wouldn’t be distracted. “Come on, picture it. One mouse, giving birth to another, who gives birth to another, to another. All passing on the color of their coat, the undertones of their personality. It’s a line of mothers and daughters.”

“Now you sound like the colony preaching tradition.”

Sorrel waved his paw dismissively. “Those boring mice say tradition but only keep around the stuff they personally like. They don’t care about the actual tapestry of our bloodline. They listen to their gut but don’t take a moment to digest all the voices talking to their gut. What we’re talking about explains why you and I are so different from the rest of the colony. And why Mom was, too.”

He’d succeeded in grabbing her attention. “You mean because of the knowledge she put into the other animals.”

“Precisely. She let them think and feel like humans. Well, not quite like humans. I can only appreciate the pictures that Birdsong creates. I can’t make them myself.”

“You could try,” Nettle nudged.

Sorrel ignored her. “Point is, some of us are different. It must have been passed down from that old mouse. You have to know what I mean. You value the individual lives of your pups more than the colony as a whole. Maybe more valuable than your own life.”

“Not maybe,” Nettle said.

“Well, there you go. How many other mice have you met like that?”

“At least a few,” Nettle said. “But they hide it.”

“Maybe those are closer cousins than we realized.”

“You’re probably right. Now can we discuss why the old mouse wanted me to see that memory? There must be something we can use to keep Wisp and Hush safe.”

Sorrel nodded. “And Birdsong.”

“Of course.” But as much as Nettle felt the need to protect the human pup, she knew her brother felt it a thousand times stronger. “We have to assume the tall man will come back tonight.”

Sorrel bristled at the reminder. “True.”

“Now we know why he’s so focused on Birdsong. He was trying to corrupt the kind woman’s pup. Now he’s doing it again.”

Sorrel shuddered. “She’d never let herself be persuaded by him.”

“I don’t think he’s trying to convince her. It feels darker than that.”

“We can protect her, right?” Sorrel asked.

Nettle wasn’t sure when their roles had reversed, but she reassured him, “Yes. We know of two different ways to keep the tall man at bay.”

“What?”

“The first is this larder,” Nettle said. “The tall man can’t pass through.”

“She won’t fit in here, and building a larder under her bed didn’t work.”

“Which must be why the old mouse showed me that memory. We can do what the kind woman did: Order the tall man to stay out of our home.”

“Yes. We’ll do that. That’ll keep Birdsong safe.”

Nettle could hear the doubt in Sorrel’s voice, but also his attempt to convince himself. “My concern is that it was a human who gave him the order. What if he had to understand the words for it to work?”

“You’re right. There’s a million factors we’ll have to consider.”

Before Sorrel could panic, Nettle said, “I want to find the old mouse again. She may be able to tell us exactly how the kind woman kept him away.”

“Do you think it has to be our actual home?” Sorrel asked.

“What do you mean? Isn't the Red House your home?”

Sorrel shrugged. “My burrow inside the wall was my home. The larder is my home now. I could tell him to stay out of the larder.”

“Maybe the old mouse can answer that question, too.”

“How are you going to ask her?”

“I’ve got an idea of how to find her.”

25

If the old mouse could repeatedly escape from the tall man's lair, then Nettle could find a way in.

With the larder’s exits blocked by piles of food, and Sorrel keeping an eye on the pups, Nettle returned to the attic. This time, the animal corpses were gone, replaced by the cardboard boxes she'd seen the first time. Sunlight came in through the attic's one window. The attic smelled of dust and mildew.

But if Nettle breathed deep and concentrated, she could smell the memory of the tall man's breath. It was still day, and so Nettle didn’t expect to find that great maw. But there still might be a way through.

The other night, the old mouse had fled past Nettle before the tall man arrived. She had remained tethered, but the tall man's entrance hadn't yet opened. She had found her own way.

She climbed to the top of a cardboard box and then hopped onto a taller one.

She perked up her ears.

Nettle spent the next hour sniffing and gnawing at every irregularity in the wall beneath where the ceiling had opened up.

She had one other idea to find her way inside, but it felt far too foolish to try.

A bump on the floor caught her eye. She sniffed it, detecting a stronger presence of blood.

She tilted her head and lowered her ear to the floor. Wind whooshed by the window across the attic. Her heart thrummed. If she closed her eyes, held her breath, and concentrated, she could just barely hear the low thump-thump of a large animal's heartbeat. She felt the sound vibrate her more than she heard it with her ears, deeper even than Rumble's voice. This had to be where the old mouse had broken through.

Nettle scratched at the floor, at the wood. It was as tough as any oak. She gnawed at it. It splintered sharply.

She suspected the barrier might be thin. Pain darted into Nettle’s gums.

Add splinters to the injuries that had struck her these last few days.

Still she gnawed. Finally, cold air touched her teeth and gums. She'd broken through. She leaned back, letting the smells come in.

Dust and mildew.

She peeked down into the hole.

It led inside the attic’s floor, only the same rectangular passageways.

So much gnawing for nothing.

Nettle again held her breath and listened. She still heard and felt that deep, gargantuan heartbeat.

She was sure that the old mouse had crossed over here, but was incapable of getting through herself.

That meant she had two ways of trying to get into the tall man’s lair. The first was to wait for the tall man to open the ceiling at sundown.

That wasn’t an option at all, since when the doorway opened and the tall man stepped through, they’d be out of time to protect Birdsong.

That left only Nettle’s second idea for sneaking into the tall man’s den.

This idea was foolish. It relied on the similarity between the tall man’s passageway and the mouths in the walls.

That same smell and texture should mean that the smaller throats were also passageways.

The idea filled her with terror so strong that instinct told her to flee, to hide.

But time was running out. This was the only safe place she knew for her pups, and for the sake of Birdsong—for the sake of Sorrel's love for Birdsong—she needed to know how to make this home safe.

And she only knew of one mouse who had done that before.

She would go into one of the Red House's many throats.

Of the mouths to choose from, her decision was easy enough. There was one mouth whose teeth wouldn't snag on her, whose maw was wide enough that she could run instead of wriggle her way down.

Nettle climbed back down from the attic into the space between the floor until she was running below the metal ductwork. She considered diverting to tell Sorrel what she planned, but the sun would set soon, and Sorrel might insist that he go instead.

He wasn’t quick enough to survive whatever terrible lair awaited Nettle.

Inside the duct, Nettle’s claws tapped on the metal floor. The sound echoed, giving away her presence and position. But it also bounced off the straight walls and unnatural angles—giving her a clear auditory view of the gauntlet ahead.

Predators' mouths lined the walls.

Nettle knew which one she was aiming for.

A mouth with snake’s fangs began to stir. Its oversized forked tongue flicked between its teeth.

But Nettle was quick and determined. She dashed by the opening reptile mouth and past the curved, yellowed fangs of a coyote.

A long feline tongue snapped out at her. It was embedded with shedded cat claws. She leapt out of the way, sprinting forward to reach her goal: the mouth with flat teeth, its breath with smells of bile and partially digested grass.

The thick tongue flopped out, aiming for her. She jumped over it, between lips formed from the duct's metal walls, and into the humid warmth of the mouth.

She dug her claws into what would be its inner cheek, remembering how touching the tongue had trapped Sorrel before. This surface was spongy flesh, easy enough to grip.

The tongue continued to reach outside the mouth, flowing past her like a solid river.

Nettle held her breath.

The tongue could crush her against the side of the mouth just by twitching to the side.

But with the frequency that the old mouse seemed to escape, Nettle suspected that these mouths—or whatever animal controlled them—couldn’t sense her precise location.

Nettle blinked slow, steeling herself for what came next.

She spared one last glance between the thick, flat teeth, back into the relative safety of the duct. Then she climbed to the back of the mouth, to the dark fleshy pit that was the throat.

Nettle started down.

26

Nettles claws pierced the lining of the throat.

She held on like she might grip the outer edge of a leaf, claws tucked on one side, the butt of her paw squeezing against them.

She tried not to think about what was beyond this throat’s lining, beyond where her toes now poked through. Skin and blood? Or wood and brick?

Either answer aggravated Nettle’s urge to panic and flee.

Nettle breathed deep. Wet heat coated her mouth and throat. She had to quicken her breaths to get enough oxygen.

She climbed further down.

She found the base of the tongue. And here, she had more space to traverse.

Nettle continued down.

Until she could no longer sense the exit behind her.

Deeper.

Until she felt she must be below the crawlspace where she first came inside the red house.

Deeper still.

Until she must have tunneled into the earth which held up the Red House.

Still, the tunnel descended.

Nettle's legs grew tired. She hooked her paws into a soft spot and hung there to catch her breath. She couldn’t tell where her sweat ended and the moist air began.

Again, she descended.

This was too much. She’d have to turn back.

This throat wasn’t a doorway. It was just a throat, and soon the slippery saliva would become digestive fluids and it would burn off her fur and then through her skin.

A noise echoed up from beneath Nettle.

It sounded like metal on skin.

Nettle descended slowly, quietly.

A voice joined the scraping sound: the tall man.

He spoke but it was either muffled or he murmured.

No one responded, nor did he give time for a response. He conversed only with himself.

Nettle crept downward. The softest of breezes blew past her, carrying with it a cacophony of scents.

Blood.

Dogs, cats, coyotes.

The tall man.

And a mouse.

Nettle spotted the bottom of the throat, an opening into a brighter space.

She descended ever so softly. She hesitated before approaching the hole.

The tall man's voice was clearer now, not that she understood his words. But his tone suggested idle musings to himself while focused on something else.

Nettle flared her nostrils, but smelled no new warnings.

Finally, moving only a hair's width with each breath, Nettle put her eye in front of the opening to look in on the tall man's lair.

It was cavernous, bigger than the entire Red House.

Instead of straight walls and floors and unnatural right angles, it had the irregular roundness of a burrow.

Or a stomach.

Although, that was only true for three of the walls. Across from Nettle, instead of a fourth wall, the den continued out of sight, into darkness.

Before the darkness, the tall man stood over a rectangular table, stained brown from dry blood.

A cleaver and small knife lay on the table.

The tall man's long fingers worked an off-white needle and pale white string through a square of raw, pink skin. He stitched it into a quilt, making patterns of squares alternating between gray fur—which likely belonged to a coyote—and the inner wet flesh of skin, which could have belonged to any animal large enough, including humans.

How fresh was that?

Nettle felt a flash of concern for Rumble, Careful, and Birdsong, but she’d seen them since the tall man had been inside the house.

There were the other visitors who had tried to help against the tall man, but Nettle thought them safe as well.

Thanks to witnessing the mare’s memory of the kind woman, Nettle knew that humans valued individual lives as much she herself did.

If one of the visitors had died, Nettle would have heard a commotion.

That meant the skin and fur the tall man was turning into a quilt was likely as old as the mare’s memory.

The tall man’s den didn’t attach to the Red House in a natural way. It didn’t attach to the rest of reality in a natural way. Down this deep, the sun didn’t rise and set. Maybe that interfered with time passing.

Nettle gathered her thoughts.

She needed to find the old mouse, ask her how she and the kind woman had banished the tall man.

Nettle looked around the tall man’s den, at this alcove jutting off an infinite darkness.

A web of intestines and arteries hung from a rounded wall, the same pattern as in the extra room in the mare’s memory.

That room had somehow become this hidden den.

The tall man had been busy since then. Another web drooped from the ceiling, this one with patterns of diamonds. A mosaic of bones was pressed into another wall, parades of femurs and ribs arranged in swirls that reminded Nettle of a babbling brook. A hammock dangled in an alcove, woven from hair and fur, and matted with red bits of skin.

Nettle again felt glad that Sorrel wasn’t with her. She worried how much he would appreciate the tall man’s artistry.

Nettle had intended to slip out from this throat and into the den in order to search for the old mouse, but she could see the entirety of it from here--the only living thing was the tall man, and something told her nothing could live in the darkness beyond the den.

She sniffed. She smelled a menagerie of animals. The old mouse had to be among them.

Where was she?

From the corner of Nettle’s eye, movement behind the intestine web.

Nettle stared intently.

She waited for the movement to return, somewhere in the net of shadows.

There.

The flesh wall bulged, stretched out until the shape of a hoof became clear. The wall tightened, forcing the leg back down deep.

An animal trapped within the walls of the tall man’s den—had that been the mare? Her goat friend?

Nettle leaned back, unfocused her eyes, took in the entire den.

Another bulge to the side of the bone mosaic, this time something pushing out and along the inside of the wall.

The longer she stayed still, the more movement she saw.

All across the tall man’s den, animals pushed against the fleshy walls.

Crow talons poked through.

Nettle waited for them to escape, but they only stretched out the wall like her pups had done with her belly shortly before they were born.

The crow talon’s withdrew and Nettle heard an avian complaint before the movement from that area ceased.

The tiny holes remained. Nettle spotted countless others, signs that the trapped crow had pressed outward.

Now that she looked for it, all around the den Nettle saw punctures and rips in the walls, stitched and patched.

The old mouse wasn’t the only one of the tall man’s prisoner’s with a penchant for escaping.

Nettle looked for signs of where the old mouse had escaped before.

On the floor at the edge of the light, beneath a hanging arrangement of bird skulls, was an area of fleshy material that was more patches than floor. Each of those patches was about the size of a mouse.

Nettle felt pride for this mouse—at least thirty patches dotted this area of the floor.

Nettle plotted a route from the throat where she hid, down the wall, to circle the den in the dips and crevices until she reached the edge of this half-circle of walls, where the darkness began. She’d have to get to the far side of the tall man and his work.

His back was to her now, and she suspected he positioned himself that way intentionally, facing the patch of floor that was the old mouse’s prison. With the number of mouse-sized repairs Nettle saw, that positioning must not have fully solved the problem.

Nettle would gamble on that.

She darted down the curved wall, her claws sticking through skin and between sinew for purchase. Her toe snagged and she pendulumed to the side, but she caught herself without a sound.

The curve of the wall became too steep—Nettle gripped its surface and hung precariously over the bottom edge of the wall.

She climbed practically upside-down, until the wall was once again more easily navigable.

When she finally reached the floor, her heart hummed so loudly that she was surprised the tall man didn’t hear.

Nettle found a groove in the outer edge of the fleshy floor. She followed it around to the wall’s end, where the endless darkness began. When she reached the end of the groove, she perked her ears, made sure that she still heard the scraping of the bone needle on skin, the little snap as its point broke through that skin, and the rubbing sound of the gut-thread being pulled through. The tall man was still distracted.

Nettle rose up on her back legs until her eyes peeked over the edge of the groove. From down here, the tall man towered over her like an elderly pine tree—straight and narrow, so tall that it appeared thicker at the bottom and delicately thin at the top. If he spotted her, he could reach down with his lanky arms and his strangely long fingers to pluck her up and jam her into her own prison alongside the other animals he’d captured.

But he stitched away, adding to his quilt of flesh.

Nettle crept out from the groove, feeling eyes on her. If the tall man glanced up, he’d spot her, but that wasn’t why she felt watched.

She’d reached the edge of the walls that surrounded half the tall man’s den. The other half was surrounded by darkness. His strange works of art dangled from the ceiling, the farther away they were the more they blended into shadow.

Nettle couldn’t tell how far this space went out into the dark, but instinct whispered that if she started exploring, she’d never find the end.

She could slip into the shadows, circle around to the old mouse’s prison from behind.

But something inside Nettle insisted that the safer path was in the light, risking the tall man spotting her.

If the tall man didn’t make this art for himself, then Nettle didn’t want to know who—or what—would come around to admire it.

Nettle avoided the dark. She stayed low, belly brushing the floor, hiding in low spots and behind high spots.

She got a reprieve as she ran behind a work of art that hung close to the tall man’s table: a clear-but-murky globe the size of a deer. It was made of individual patches—a material that Nettle first assumed must be glass like in the Red House’s windows, until she saw the faded irises and pupils dotting the surface, one set for each patch of the globe.

Nettle didn’t worry that Sorrel would be intrigued by this horror. No one could feel anything but disgust and indignation at seeing it, at the creeping feeling that it was seeing you back. No one except for this dead man who was robbing her family and Birdsong’s family of a safe home.

And whatever wandered the darkness beyond this lair.

Nettle reluctantly stayed behind the murky-clear globe of eyeball membranes, where the tall man couldn’t see her, to decide how to approach the place where the mouse was imprisoned.

The section of floor covered in mouse-sized patches was in direct view of the tall man. No more macabre works of art to hide behind—not without leaving the light—and no more grooves to dip into or bumps to hide behind.

Nettle put her ear to the floor. The rushing of blood through veins, the pumping of hearts. Maybe the hum of a mouse’s heart, but if so, it was far away.

Nettle made her voice as high pitched as she could, like Sorrel had shown her couldn’t be heard by humans.

She hoped that applied to dead humans, too.

“Hello?”

Through the globe, Nettle watched the tall man’s blurred figure. He kept on with his work.

More confidently now, Nettle spoke again. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

A muffled squeak of surprise.

It gave Nettle a feeling she’d been missing: hope.

27

Nettle sniffed at the ground. The old mouse was somewhere underneath, but Nettle didn’t know exactly where to start digging.

“How do I get you out?” Nettle asked.

The old mouse answered, but her voice was too muffled for Nettle to pinpoint her location.

Nettle glanced through the globe made of eyeball membranes. The tall man still worked at his table. The globe gave Nettle enough cover that she felt safe, although the darkness to her left felt more threatening than any predator.

In between two patches of skin stitched onto the floor, something shuddered.

There.

The old mouse was within the fleshy floor.

To move over to that spot would take Nettle out from behind her hiding place, but she needed answers and she was running out of time.

Staying low, Nettle crawled out from behind the globe to one of the stitched on patches, which matched the color of her own fur better than the rest of the floor.

The darkness beyond the den twitched.

Nettle perked her ears and flared her nostrils. She readied herself to flee, but the dark remained empty.

The tall man's mumbling echoed behind her. The sound of it created an auditory picture of an intestine web, outside the light of the den.

Nettle didn’t want to wonder about how many more of the tall man’s creations decorated the darkness.

She looked back at him again. She was totally exposed now. If he checked on the old mouse, he would see her.

Nettle worked fast.

Still on her belly, she leaned over the edge of the patch to where she'd seen the floor shudder. She bit into the flesh of the floor. The smell and taste filled her mouth and nostrils. It was both rotten and disgustingly fresh. Her teeth pierced it easily, so she bit and ripped, bit and ripped. Beneath the upper layer of tough skin, she found wide globules of fat, all squished in together. Among them, she saw the pink of a mouse tail. She shoved her face down into the fat to reach the tail.

The fat adhered to her snout. She bit gently onto the tail and pulled.

The old mouse emerged in a splash of liquid, like a sped up version of her pups being born. But unlike her pups, which had been pink, blind, hairless versions of herself, the old mouse came out eyes wide, ears perked, and immediately jumped to her feet. She shook quickly, unsuccessful in ridding her fur of the wet, clinging fat.

The old mouse looked around the den with little twitches of her head. She hopped behind the globe where Nettle had been hiding. Nettle quickly followed.

“Where is he?” The old mouse asked with enough familiar words that Nettle understood.

Nettle peered through the ball of stretched eyeball membranes, but the tall man's figure was no longer at the table. Nettle perked her ears, hearing massive but gentle footsteps.

There he was, walking with great, loping steps around the den, along the same path that Nettle had taken.

His shoulder brushed a pot made of human teeth. The teeth clinked together.

His hateful eyes bore down on Nettle. The old mouse frantically asked something.

“What?” Nettle didn't understand.

The mouse nipped Nettle's scruff and tugged her around the other side of the globe.

Again the old mouse asked a question, and this time Nettle recognized enough words to understand. “Where did you get in?”

Nettle motioned up to the base of the throat in the wall, high above the table.

The old mouse nodded. She started for a path straight across the den, which would take them beneath the table. But Nettle judged the tall man's speed and knew he would easily reach them before they could climb the wall.

“Shouldn't we go this way?” Nettle motioned with her head around the edge of den, opposite the way she'd already come.

But the old mouse responded with a harsh, “No.” She pointed into the darkness they would pass on Nettle's suggested path.

An extra shadow sat between two of the tall man's creations.

Nettle was positive it hadn't been there before.

What meager light reached it sloughed off the sides. Its form and shape were shifting.

First, the irregular mass of a blueberry bush covered in snow. Then, the angles and corners of a pile of bricks. Then, something fluid, twisting in on itself, spiraling like the movement of the tongues that had pursued her and Sorrel.

The mass felt Nettle watching it.

Nettle knew this deeper than instinct.

A sharp pain on Nettle's scruff. The old mouse yanked her hard.

She scolded Nettle. “Don’t look at it. Follow me.”

Nettle followed her from the edge of the darkness toward the tall man's work table.

To their right, the tall man charged past the clear globe with surprising speed. He was on top of them before Nettle could react. He reached down with a scooping motion.

Nettle and the old mouse dashed beneath the table. The tabletop blocked the tall man. His fingers came for Nettle, squibbling like spider legs. They snatched empty air beside her.

The old mouse spoke again. Nettle didn’t understand a single word, but the tone was clear: When I say run, we run.

The tall man's head appeared beneath the tabletop. He crawled towards them, slamming his hands onto the floor with fingers cupped.

The old mouse barked her order, and they dashed out from under the table toward the wall. By the time they reached the base of the wall, the tall man was scrambling out from under the table.

Nettle climbed in quick jumps. Risky, but the bigger risk was being too slow.

She reached the hole in the upper wall where she'd come in. She squeezed her head through and turned around to help her companion.

The old mouse couldn’t jump like Nettle, but she dashed up the wall one step at a time. At the wall's most concave point, Nettle feared the old mouse would fall, but she had obviously escaped this room many times already.

As Nettle watched her climb, she saw a strange mass on the old mouse's back leg. It was the same mottled flesh as the floor and walls. As the old mouse drew closer, Nettle saw that this bit of flesh wrapped around her leg and stuck into the floor. It followed where the old mouse climbed, sliding through the floor like a grass seed floating along a stream.

The old mouse was tethered to the tall man’s den.

Nettle could help the old mouse escape, but not permanently.

The tall man ran for the mice. Nettle pulled the old mouse up into the throat.

“Go!” yelled the mouse.

Nettle scrambled up the mushy, wet walls, the old mouse behind her.

Suddenly, cool air blew upward along Nettle’s skin. She looked back to see the tall man's hand forcing itself into the tunnel.

They scrambled higher, far enough away that the tall man couldn’t reach.

A string of flesh was attached to the old mouse’s back leg. It stretched back down the tunnel into the tall man’s den.

Nettle remembered the tall man jerking the old mouse by that tether, back into his lair. That could happen again at any moment. Now was Nettle’s chance to ask questions.

As they both caught their breath, clinging to the near-vertical wall of the throat, Nettle asked, “How did you trap him?”

The more she spoke to the old mouse, the more Nettle realized that many of the strange words she used were familiar, but her pronunciation made her difficult to understand. If Nettle listened closely and digested the sound, she could understand a little more of what the old mouse said.

“Wrong question,” the old mouse replied. “Why is he back?”

“Okay,” Nettle said. “Why?”

“The house has new residents.”

“It’s my fault?”

“No.”

“My brother’s fault?”

“No. The human family.”

“But they’ve always lived in the Red House.”

“They arrived less than ten seasons ago.”

The old mouse had to be confused. Even the oldest mice in the colony had no memories of the Red House being unoccupied. Not even any stories from their parents.

On the other hand, the human pup had always been a pup, and that simply wasn’t possible. The seasons passed differently for the slow-living humans. Perhaps from their perspective, they were new residents like the old mouse said.

Nettle tried to understand why that mattered. “The kind woman banished him. But he returned when Birdsong’s family arrived?”

“The kind woman banished it from her home, and the banishment lasted until it stopped being her home.”

Nettle thought of the mare’s memory, of the kind woman roaring an order into the back room after the animals had killed the tall man but he refused to be dead. The mare had felt power she hadn’t known the kind woman possessed.

“How was she able to do that? With what power?”

“Not power. Weakness. The weakness of the things in the shadows.” The old mouse motioned down the throat, to the den they’d just escaped.

Nettle thought of the shifting mound she’d seen in the darkness, how she’d sensed that it felt her watching it. “They can’t enter someone’s home?”

“They must be ordered away.”

Such a simple solution and yet so far out of reach. “How do we tell Birdsong’s family?”

It was difficult enough communicating with this mouse from generations ago. How could Nettle possibly hope to convey to Birdsong, Rumble, or Careful that they needed to order the tall man—or whatever he’d become after death—out of their home?

The old mouse shook her head. She pointed at Nettle, square between the shoulders. “If this house is your home, you can banish him.”

“How do I know if it’s my home?”

The tether on the old mouse’s leg went taut, and she was yanked back down to her prison.

28

Back in the larder, Sorrel was following Hush around as the pup explored her surroundings.

Wisp smelled Nettle’s return. He scrambled over to her, holding chewed-up grains of rice in his cheeks.

She nuzzled her pup.

“What do you smell like?” Sorrel asked, nostrils wide.

Nettle explained what she’d seen in the tall man’s lair and what the old mouse had told her.

“You went into a mouth?”

“Yes. And I learned that we can order the tall man out of our home, just the same as the kind woman did.”

“How did you know you wouldn’t be crushed between its teeth? Or digested in its belly?”

“Focus,” Nettle said.

Sorrel’s fear was replaced with curiosity. “What colors did you see down there?”

“Reds and blacks. Now help me think. The old mouse said we can only banish the tall man if this place is really our home.”

“There’s an interesting idea,” Sorrel said. “Is the Red House my home? Is it yours? Was the colony ever really our home?”

“The Red House is my home now.” Nettle tried to speak it into being. “When he arrives in the attic tonight, I’ll order him to leave.”

“He won’t understand you,” Sorrel said.

“I don't think that matters.”

“He understood the woman in that horse’s memory,” Sorrel said. “Didn’t she already know him?”

“Yes, but he died. The tall man we’re seeing is something else now.” Nettle thought of the mound in the darkness that shifted from blueberry bush to brick pile to ice. “The thing inside will understand me well enough.”

“But is this your home?” Sorrel asked. “You’ve only been here a few days. And you tried to move back outside.”

“But it wasn’t safe. The Red House is the only safe place. Making it my home.”

“Maybe the larder. Not the rest of the house. Certainly not the attic. I should do it.”

“You consider the attic your home?”

“More than you do. I’ve been here three seasons. I love Birdsong.”

“As much as I love Wisp and Hush?”

Sorrel scoffed. “I don’t know. Is it a competition?”

“It might be. My love for my pups makes this my home. I need to protect them and so I need this to be my home.”

“Doesn’t feel like that’s how it works.”

“You didn’t speak to the old mouse.”

“Still.”

Nettle needed this to be her home. There was no safety in the colony anymore. Even if there were, she wouldn’t want Hush and Wisp to grow up like that, always hiding themselves.

The Red House was her home. It had to be.

“I’m doing it,” Nettle said with finality. “When the sun sets tonight, I’ll banish the tall man.”

29

Before sunset, Nettle returned to the attic.

The maze of cardboard boxes felt welcoming, with a thousand places to hide. As much a home as any forest floor.

At least, that’s what Nettle told herself.

She looked up at the spiked, sloped ceiling.

Once sunlight faded from the attic window, that ceiling would split open with a red, glowing smile.

Instinct told her to stay back where she was, near the hole into the floor. She could banish the tall man while remaining at a safe distance.

But the Red House was her home, so she had to be confident enough to stand directly in the tall man’s way.

She climbed to the top of the nearest cardboard box, then hopped from one to the next until she stood below the spot in the ceiling where the tall man would come through.

While she waited, the old mouse's words ran through her head again. “If this house is your home, you can banish him.”

Why had she made it conditional? She knew that Nettle lived here now. She'd seen her try and fail to move back outside.

Doubt crept in.

Was this her home?

The old mouse had said what she said with intention. Of course the attic wasn't Nettle’s home. It scared her.

All the reasons she’d given Sorrel for why she should be the one to banish the tall man, they now felt weak.

The larder was her home.

Those horrific tongues had chased her throughout the walls but couldn’t enter her larder. Following the old mouse’s logic, that meant the rest of the Red House was not her home.

As she stood here, amid the smells of dust and the deepening darkness, Nettle felt like an intruder in a predator’s burrow.

A scent of blood and bile entered the dusty attic.

Nettle felt deep, heavy movement beneath her feet.

She heard the spikes in the ceiling scrape against the wood they pierced.

She refused to turn tail.

Her doubts were only temporary fear.

The Red House was her home. This was where she lived. This was where she would raise her pups. Where they could be safe. Where her fur would turn as gray as the old mouse’s. Where she would one day rely on her pups to bring her food, reversing their roles.

A red, glowing grin appeared in the ceiling.

Nettle told herself that this was her home.

And she believed it.

Almost.

The ceiling split along that glowing smile.

Inside was a giant’s throat.

A tunnel of crimson flesh wide enough for the entire human family to walk down, shoulder-to-shoulder.

Smaller mouths pocked the walls.

Nettle imagined a tangle of narrower throats, each circling around this larger passageway to make its way down to the tall man’s den.

The tall man walked up out of the maw. The throat’s sourceless light glistened against his hateful eyes.

Nettle steeled herself, assaulted by her inconsequentiality against this being who was so big, who had lived for so long, and whose life had been sustained by something even older and bigger.

He didn't notice her at all. Nettle reared back, mimicking the mare ready to strike with hooves. Standing tall, she inhaled, filling her lungs until her chest puffed out.

“Stay out of my home,” she ordered as loudly as she could.

Her voice squeaked. It failed to fill the room even half as much as a one of the tall man’s footsteps.

The tall man stopped.

High above Nettle, he tilted his head. His chin tilted downward, his hateful eyes bored into her, and his thin lips turned up into a smile of bemusement.

Nettle’s heart hummed with fear. Instinct roared at her to run and hide. But she stood her ground and raised her voice. “This is my home.”

The tall man took another step toward her.

It hadn't worked.

Now wasn't the time to question why, now was the time to flee.

Nettle dashed across the top of one box, leapt against the side of another, and slid down to the floor.

The tall man’s laugh reminded Nettle of how she’d chuckled when her pups had tried to walk before they could crawl. Only then, she’d felt delight and compassion, while the tall man’s laugh carried malice.

He said something, too deep and shaking for her to even hear the emotion.

She ran between boxes, toward safety. Before she ducked into the hole, she peered around a box to see if he pursued her, but he was gone.

Nettle had no doubt where he’d gone.

30

Nettle raced through the attic floor toward Birdsong’s room.

She wanted to get back to Hush and Wisp, but they weren’t the tall man’s target.

It wasn’t mouse pups he’d been educating in the mare’s memories. It was a human pup.

Humans yelled beneath Nettle’s feet. She tilted her head to point her ear downward through the floor.

Rumble and Careful spoke over each other. One of Careful’s brothers responded with compassion. The other barked angry words. At who, Nettle couldn’t tell.

An unfamiliar voice rose above the others, loudly and determinedly. Its words were rhythmic like the tall man’s had been when whispering to Birdsong, except this new voice had nothing to hide—there was nothing surreptitious about it.

Nettle ran and jumped down through the walls, anxious to see what was happening. If there was anything she could do to help Birdsong, she would do it.

The voices grew louder as she approached the hole into Birdsong’s room, both because she was closer and because the humans were shouting more loudly.

Nettle reached the hole into Birdsong’s room.

Nettle had never smelled so many humans in one place, but overpowering it all was the scent of blood and bile that lingered on the tall man.

With the newcomer’s steady voice bouncing around Birdsong’s room, Nettle could tell everyone’s position before even poking her eyes through the hole.

Careful and Rumble sat on the bed, clutching Birdsong between them.

Careful’s two brothers stood by the door, both leaning forward like they were ready to pounce.

Standing on the bed, in the corner behind the Red House’s family, was the tall man. He bent forward, shoulders against the ceiling, head tilted down.

He mumbled silent words, lips inches from the top of Birdsong’s head and her golden hair.

There was one new visitor. This man wore clothes of all black except for a stiff ring of white around his neck. He held up a carved tree branch as if he were demanding that Birdsong take it.

His words poured out like the predetermined course of a river, without the self-doubt and unsurety that normally flavored the conversations of any animal.

His aggression toward Birdsong confused Nettle. Why did this newcomer keep yelling at the pup, while the tall man loomed crookedly over them all?

None of the humans even looked at him.

They couldn’t see him.

Nettle jumped forward at this realization, shouting warnings to Careful.

Nobody heard her.

And if they did, little good it would do.

Nettle breathed deep, desperate to find a way to help.

Why could she see the tall man, when the humans couldn’t?

Birdsong hadn’t seen him sitting across from her at the kitchen table. None of the family had seen him in the living room.

But there was one time.

When Nettle had awoken Rumble and Careful, they’d heard Birdsong scream and ran to her room, where they’d seen the tall man.

What was different about that night?

Sorrel had bit the tall man.

Either he’d broken the tall man’s concentration, allowing the humans to see him, or something about a simple mouse’s teeth piercing the outer shell of this man had broken whatever dark magic kept him invisible.

Nettle crept into the room, instantly feeling vulnerable. She glanced above her to see a smile crack open in the green wall.

Nettle abandoned her plan for stealth. She raced for the bed.

Careful’s brothers yelled in surprise.

Nettle didn’t slow to check whether they’d seen her or the mouth opening in the wall. She scrambled up the bedpost, up the blanket that draped over the mattress, and atop the bed.

The tall man’s face swooped down at her, his open hands extended to either side, malice swimming inside his eyes alongside those red specks.

Nettle gambled that the tall man couldn’t tell the difference between her and her brother, that he expected her to be slow and ungainly.

She jumped with all her strength directly at his nose.

His eyes widened and their red specks swam about more wildly. He swiped for her but she was too fast. Nettle bit down. Her incisors easily pierced deep.

She didn’t hold on, instead immediately opening her mouth wide to drop onto the bed. She dashed beneath the blanket.

His nose hadn’t felt right. Nettle had bit only a handful of animals in her lifetime, but she knew that beneath skin there should be the squishy grease of fat, or the rubbery snap of blood vessels, or the resistance of dense muscle, or—if you bit deep enough—the hard shock of your teeth colliding with bone.

Biting into the tall man had felt like biting into an overripe berry—weak skin filled tight with rotting juice.

Nettle pushed herself deep under the blanket, focusing on its weight against her fur, trying to get the memory of that bite out of her mind.

She hurried forward, searching for the end of the bed.

Careful’s brothers now yelled in alarm.

The new visitor wheezed and then continued his steady river of speech, even louder now.

The mattress sank beneath Nettle as Careful and Rumble moved about. Both made a noise and released a scent that combined fear, fury, and protective instinct. The bed rocked and Nettle heard the human parents pull their pup away from danger.

Nettle reached the end of the bed. She slipped down between the blanket and the edge of the mattress, landing hard on the floor.

All the noise bounced around, still providing Nettle with a clear image of her surroundings.

The visitor now offered his carved branch to the tall man, who bent down to spit on it.

One brother was wrapped up in a long horse’s tongue. The other brother pried at it with his fingers.

Rumble had fled the room with Birdsong. Careful turned back in the doorway. The human mother pointed with a single finger at the tall man, weeping and screaming in rage.

Hope flared in Nettle that Careful would banish the tall man from her home.

But whatever threats or orders she flung at him, they weren’t the proper ones, because the tall man only diverted his attention from the black-clad visitor to laugh at Careful.

Sympathetic anger filled Nettle, but she’d done all she could now, at least until she made the entire Red House her home and could banish the tall man herself.

Nettle fled into the walls and back to her own family.

31

In the morning, Nettle awoke to Wisp peering into her face.

His rose-colored eyes were a welcome sight after the terrible things she’d witnessed last night.

“Well, look at you,” she said to her pup. “You’ve opened your eyes. Now nothing can stop you.”

Sorrel was up already, breaking a raisin into smaller pieces to hand them to Hush, one-by-one.

He noticed that Nettle was awake. “Here’s what I think,” he told her. “You couldn’t banish the tall man because you don’t feel safe in the Red House yet.”

“No argument here,” Nettle said.

“But let me ask: how many predators did you survive outside in the colony? Before the last week, I mean.”

“Countless,” she answered. “The world is full of predators.”

“And yet you did feel safe outside.”

Nettle wasn’t sure if that was right, but she let him continue.

“What I’m getting at, is that the Red House doesn’t have to be free from danger for you to feel like it’s your home.” Sorrel handed Hush another piece of raisin. “You only need to be confident in surviving that danger. In the meadow, you knew how to keep in the shadows of the dandelions or hide inside grass tufts. At the forest’s edge, you knew which roots to hide under, and how to hide your scent when a fox came prowling.”

Nettle listened to her brother while she made faces at Wisp. “What are you saying?”

“I’ll show you everything I know about each room of your new home—where to hide, how to flee, where to step and remain absolutely silent.”

Nettle nodded. “Okay. Yes.”

“It’ll work, right? Tell me you think this’ll let you banish the tall man. Because I’ve got a bad feeling that tonight is our last chance. It’s getting worse for Birdsong so quickly. The tall man knows the humans are trying to stop him. Whatever his plans for Birdsong, he’ll act tonight.”

“It could work. I mean, yes. Once I know how to survive anywhere in the house, then that should make it my home.” Nettle wasn’t as optimistic as she let on. At least, not about Sorrel’s plan. “Today, you can show me everything you know about survival here. But also, maybe you can banish the tall man.”

Sorrel tilted his head. “Yesterday you said you’d have a better shot than me.”

“And yesterday I failed. I was purposely being stubborn and insisting to myself that this is my home. I thought that would make it so. It didn’t work. When the tall man comes back tonight, you should be the one to order him away.”

“I’m willing to try. I don’t know that it’ll work.”

“Why not? You said it yourself, you’ve been here three seasons already. It’s more your home than mine.”

“I don’t know if I see it that way. I’m living in Birdsong’s home.”

“Doesn’t that make it your home?”

“Maybe. I left the colony because I had to hide my curiosity about how pretty the world is. But sometimes I feel like I’m still hiding it.”

“From who? Me?”

“A little, yeah. But even when I was alone. I try to embrace it. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job, though.”

Nettle thought it through. “We’ll both go up to the attic tonight. Between the two of us, maybe we can save Birdsong.”

Sorrel perked up. “Before then, I’m giving you a detailed tour of our home.”

Nettle and Sorrel built up the barriers of food to keep the pups safe while they were gone.

But as they left, Nettle heard a squeak. She turned around to see Wisp with his head over the top of a pile of rice, his eyes peeking open.

He and Hush had been jumping so much in their play together, of course a little barrier wouldn't stop them anymore.

Hush joined her brother atop the useless barrier.

“You two stay there,” Sorrel said.

“Even if they understood us yet,” Nettle said. “Wisp is too stubborn and curious to listen, and Hush doesn't like being alone. He'll leave and she'll follow.”

“What do we do?” Sorrel asked. “We can't stay in here all day. You've got to get out there. Make this place yours.”

“We bring them with us.” Nettle motioned for the pups to make their way down this side of the barrier. They scrambled down, sending rice sliding about.

Nettle picked up Wisp by his scruff and set him onto Sorrel's back. “You hold on tight.”

Sorrel did the same for Hush. Nettle felt tiny claws grip her skin.

They hurried through the walls, Sorrel eager to help Nettle make the Red House her home, Nettle thinking of how to convince Sorrel that this place was already his home.

Human footsteps and conversation sounded through the drywall.

“Why don't they leave, do you think?” Nettle asked.

“Why don't you?” Sorrel said.

“I don't have anywhere to go,” Nettle answered.

Sorrel shrugged as if to say, probably the same with them.

“And you?” Nettle asked.

“I’ve already told you,” Sorrel said. “I’m staying by Birdsong. Where else could I go and find somebody like that? Who can do what she can do?”

“Maybe you can,” Nettle said.

Sorrel brushed her off. “You already know the living room, the kitchen, Birdsong's room.”

“I’ve been through the hallway as well,” Nettle said. “And the bathroom and the parents’ room.”

“There’s more inside each that you need to see. Come this way.”

They crept into Rumble and Careful’s room.

Careful sat on the bed by herself, facing the wall. She spoke quietly, pausing like she was listening to someone, but no one else was there.

“What’s she doing?” Nettle whispered.

“She saw a dead man last night,” Sorrel said, “and her pup is in danger. Who knows how someone will react to stress?”

They snuck around the room. Sorrel showed her how clear plastic boxes under the bed provided enough cover should she ever need to hide while in here. And he showed her that under another door was a closet full of shoes to hide in.

From there, they went to Birdsong’s room, where Careful’s brothers sat with Birdsong on the floor, dolls between them. They played and sang.

Sorrel looked sadly at the human pup. “Do you smell how scared she is?”

Nettle nodded.

“We’ll keep her safe, right?”

Nettle rubbed her cheek against Sorrel’s. “Yes. Keep showing me the house.”

Nettle already knew the hiding places under Birdsong’s bed and under the dresser. Sorrel showed her the closet and a divot in the carpet.

In the hallway, they slowed as they passed the nook in the wall that had appeared with one of the house’s twitches.

“I wouldn’t hide in there,” Sorrel said.

They continued to the living room, where Rumble spoke with the visitor in black. They smelled of fear and confusion.

Sorrel showed Nettle places he’d escaped the view of the humans.

As they traveled back across the hallway, Sorrel asked, “What would you do with this space if it were your own?”

“Stick to the edges. Freeze if a predator came through.”

“No, I mean, if your nest were in here.”

Nettle said, “I don't understand, it's too wide and open.”

“But if it were your own?”

“It wouldn't be,” Nettle said. “I would want a more enclosed burrow like we have in the wall.”

“If you can't even imagine this space being yours, how are you going to make the whole house your home?”

“What about you?” Nettle asked. “What if the hallway was where you closed your eyes at night?”

“The walls are white and plain,” Sorrel said. “I would want pictures like Birdsong can do. Representations of all my favorite places. So whenever I woke, I could pick which picture to look at, wherever I wanted to imagine myself.”

Nettle thought this train of thought might lead him where she wanted. “What if Careful and Rumble's room were your burrow?”

“There's not too much I would change in there. Anywhere under their bed would be a nice place to sleep. But even when the sun is brightest, not enough of its light makes it through that window because of the trees. I think I would want the window to be bigger. But like I said, I also like it how it is.”

“And Birdsong's room?” She could smell the joy from her brother.

“Oh, there's nothing to change about that one.”

“Sorrel,” Nettle said, “I know you said that it's Birdsong's home and you just live here, but you can imagine every room in this house as yours. This is your home.”

Sorrel stood straighter. “You’re right. When the tall man comes through into the attic tonight, we’ll make him leave.”

32

Once again, Nettle stood atop a cardboard box in the middle of the attic, watching the sloped ceiling with all its spikes, waiting for that great maw to open up and reveal the tall man.

Only this time, Hush clung to her back, and Sorrel stood next to her with Wisp on his back.

With the pups increased confidence in moving about, it wasn’t safe to leave them alone.

“We’ll order him out of our home the moment we see him,” Nettle said. “We’ll do it together. No reason to do it one at a time.”

She didn’t say aloud that since they didn’t know if it would work for either of them, they should both try as quick as possible. That way they might have a chance to escape if their attempts failed.

The last glow of daylight faded.

“Stand up so Wisp can’t see in front of you,” Nettle said. She did the same with Hush, who had already seen too many horrors in the short time her eyes had been open.

Sorrel whispered to himself, “This is my home.”

A smell of exposed muscle overlaid with something sour. Wet sounds of slipping flesh pulling apart.

The ceiling cracked.

Red-tinged light shone through.

“This is what happened before?” Sorrel whispered.

Nettle nodded, not willing to look away from the widening mouth.

It stretched wide until it was big enough for a human to step through. Smaller mouths with protruding tongues spotted the walls of the massive throat, which sloped down out of sight.

“If it doesn’t work,” Nettle said, “then we run as quick as we can.”

The sound of footsteps over a wet floor. Movement from down the throat.

The tall man came into view, ascending his horrific tunnel, head tilted upward with awful eyes reflecting the sourceless red light.

Nettle felt him see her and Sorrel. He hesitated.

“Do we say it yet?” Sorrel whispered.

“Wait for him to reach the attic,” Nettle replied.

But the tall man sank back down out of sight.

Nettle’s hackles raised. Where was he going?

“Did you say it?” Sorrel asked. “I thought it—did that count? I think it worked.”

The air in the attic tasted thin.

“We should run.” Nettle backed to the edge of the box.

“Run from what? We did it. The Red House is our home and I thought the words, ‘get out of my home.’ I said them in my head clear as day and it worked.”

“The mouth is still open,” Nettle said.

“Maybe it takes a minute. What happened in the mare’s memory when the woman banished him?”

“I couldn’t actually see past her into the room where he was.”

“Then maybe this is how it happens. The mouth stays open for a bit.”

“Does it feel like that to you?”

Sorrel swallowed nervously. He stepped toward Nettle, keeping himself between the mouth and Wisp.

Nettle realized that he’d also placed himself between her and the mouth. She tried to think of the last time another mouse had put themself in danger to protect her. It had probably been her mother when Nettle was a pup, not that she remembered a specific moment. But it certainly hadn’t happened since then.

A new smell entered the attic, of bleach and rotten earth. Suddenly, it shifted to rain and old garbage, then just as quickly it changed to saliva and grass.

“Run,” Nettle said to Sorrel, who backed toward the edge of the box but kept his focus on the maw in the ceiling.

“Get away!” Nettle yelled.

This time, Sorrel heard the fear in her voice and smelled it in her sweat. He turned and fled toward Nettle, and now that he was carrying Wisp away from the threat, Nettle was willing to run as well.

As she turned, Hush clinging tight to her back, the mouth bulged downward. Its edges formed an oblong ring in the ceiling that grew like an inverse hill.

And then that hill drooped further.

The flesh wall inside the throat pushed itself past the mouth, out into the attic, distending itself.

It was a cyclopian worm of wet flesh. It twitched like it was about to disgorge something.

Nettle didn’t wait to see what.

She pushed Sorrel ahead of her, down the edge of the cardboard box and into the maze of canyons between the boxes.

“Is the tall man coming back?” Sorrel asked, sensing something, too.

“Something is. I don’t know what,” Nettle said, afraid that she did.

The house twitched around them as they scrambled for the exit.

The limp, heavy throat struck the floor. Wood cracked and splintered.

Sorrel shouted a warning.

The floor fell out from beneath Nettle.

33

Hush’s tiny claws lost their grip.

Nettle felt the absence of her pup, even as she fell with the collapsing attic floor, splinters of wood and crumbles of plaster tumbling through the brightness around her.

Where had the darkness of the attic gone?

Where was Nettle’s family?

She felt Hush’s light body bump against her. Nettle twisted around, grabbed her pup with all four feet, and then she struck a dangling length of wood, lost her breath, and rolled to the floor.

Humans were screaming. Dust filled the air—dust that smelled of bile and rotting mud.

Hush crawled beneath Nettle.

Nettle tried to sniff, see if Hush was okay, but her lungs burned. She couldn’t bring in enough air through her nostrils to inspect her pup.

She raised up to allow Hush to squeeze beneath her. She tried to look around but her head swam.

Finally, air came back to her.

She smelled Hush, found that she was okay, and then took in their surroundings.

They were in the hallway. The ceiling had collapsed. It had swung down in such a way that a big, red mass of it hung diagonally across the hall, breaking through Birdsong’s door into her room.

Nettle’s vision was still blurry. Her head swam.

Humans kept screaming. One of them tried to push past the broken red ceiling into Birdsong’s room, but it blocked their way inside.

Nettle perked her ears, listening through the humans’ shouting for any immediate threats. The wood bones of the Red House creaked and strained. Scrabbling scratches as a mouse navigated difficult terrain.

Was the old mouse coming to help?

Sorrel’s voice: “Nettle.”

Wisp babbled and squeaked.

Nettle’s head cleared.

Her brother hunched over her, sniffing for injury. Wisp’s little head peeked over Sorrel’s shoulder. Hush wiggled out from beneath Nettle to check on her brother.

Dust filled the hallway like a thick fog. A dark gap instead of a ceiling. Wires dangled. A broken pipe dribbled water. And down through it all, at an angle, was the great maw’s distended throat. It stretched from the attic, slumped through the dusty fog of the hallway, and reshaped itself to fit through the rectangular door to Birdsong’s bedroom.

Careful’s brothers and Rumble were at the edges of the blocked doorway, prying at the doorframe with their bare hands. Rumble shouted something, and then one of the brothers ran past the mice, toward the front door.

Nettle didn’t hear Careful, but even through the dust and bile, Nettle could smell that the human mother had been there only moments before.

No doubt she feared that the massive throat had crushed Birdsong when it fell, and she’d run to find a different way inside the bedroom.

Nettle hoped the human pup was still alive—there was no smell of fresh animal blood.

Sorrel yelled at the drooping column of throat, “Get out of my home!”

No reaction.

“I had to try,” Sorrel said. “But looks like we’ll have to banish the tall man to his face.”

Sorrel emanated confidence now. Nettle felt a surge of hope. If Sorrel believed this was his home, that meant it was, right?

“Her parents can’t get in there,” Sorrel said. “It’s up to us.”

They got the pups onto their backs, and then Sorrel led the way over fallen pieces of ceiling, toward the living room, the closest way back inside the walls.

There were still two doorways into the living room, the second having appeared during one of the Red House’s twitches. But now, the new opening was blocked by a blurry darkness.

Sorrel and Nettle ran past the dark rectangle, to the original doorway, and into the living room.

Whirling darkness covered a patch of carpet ahead.

Now Nettle got a better look at the dark, blurry fog. She realized that it didn’t look blurry because it was foggy, but rather it looked indefinable because it kept shifting.

Nettle had seen and smelled this before: the shifting mound of shadows, beyond the light inside the tall man’s den.

It shouldn’t be out here.

The Red House was hardly a haven, but the absolute wrongness of those shifting, dark blobs of… something didn’t belong anywhere.

This was worse than the offense the mare had felt at the tall man corrupting the kind woman’s pup. This was the evil behind that act. Whatever had prolonged the tall man’s life—whatever had driven him to start killing without hunger—it should remain in those endless shadows down in that terrible den.

But now it had traveled up the tall man’s passageway, turned that passageway inside-out, and infested the Red House.

Where else was this ever-shifting matter gathering in the Red House? Between the fridge and the counter, in the wall next to the kitchen, anywhere the house had twitched and changed?

How much was inside Birdsong’s room, where the massive throat now emptied out?

Nettle followed Sorrel into the wall, then down a hole into the crawlspace. They jumped from a brick pillar onto the top of a square duct. As she landed, Nettle’s claws slid over the smooth metal, but she caught herself and continued on. Nettle didn’t know this path, but as she followed Sorrel back up into the floor, she found herself in the wall of Birdsong’s room. They approached the hole into the human pup’s room from the opposite side that they’d previously come.

Sorrel squeezed into the hole, until he realized that Wisp wouldn’t fit through the hole with him. He backed out. “I have to get in there,” he said.

Nettle picked up Wisp by his scruff. She set him down between her front legs so she could talk. “We both have to try,” Nettle said. “I know the house better now. I might be able to banish him.”

“We can’t take the pups out there,” Sorrel said.

“We can’t leave them alone. There’s nowhere safe until we make somewhere safe,” Nettle said. “You go on through.”

Sorrel exhaled and then squeezed through the hole.

Nettle whispered to Wisp and Hush, “Keep your eyes shut. Hold tight to me.”

They didn’t understand her words yet. They wouldn’t shut their eyes—there was some trauma she’d never be able to protect her pups from. But they understood from her tone that danger was ahead and to cling tight to their mother.

Nettle pushed herself through the hole, Hush on her back and Wisp holding on to her hips.

Before she poked her head into Birdsong’s room, a cacophony of scents crashed into Nettle’s nose.

The exposed muscle and bile of the throat passageways, the constantly morphing smell of the shifting mound from beyond the tall man’s den, and the sweat of a dozen different animals.

Interlaced with it all, the emotions of a scared human pup.

Nettle heard the tall man’s angry lecture. Birdsong’s sniffs and sobs accompanied it. The human adults’ shouting made its way inside the room, but they remained outside the room.

Nettle stuck her head into the room.

The massive distended throat drooped into the room, squeezing through the door and then widening again into its open maw—an irregular circle with a top half that sagged.

A shifting mound of shadow crawled from the inside toward the edge of the mouth, ever so slowly. It looked like a pile of innards, and then a dense blueberry bush, and then a single, solid stone. It smelled of dandelions, and then an elderly mouse’s breath, and then an earthy root smell that Nettle recognized from the kitchen but didn’t have a name for yet.

The tall man was losing his structure. He stood on the floor but his legs and torso were so long that he stretched up to the ceiling where he bent at a sharp angle to point back down. His head and shoulders hovered right overtop Birdsong.

The scared pup made herself small in her bed, holding her pillow like a shield.

The tall man’s skin ripped.

A smell of lightning filled the room.

Beneath his skin was a dark mass that shifted in time and in appearance with the shambling mound that approached from the distended throat.

The tall man spoke unceasingly to Birdsong.

Nettle feared that he wasn’t trying to persuade her to be like him—that was how the kind woman had explained it to the mare, but it wasn’t quite accurate. He was saying the words that would prepare her to become like him—whether she wanted to or not.

The creeping mass came for Birdsong. When it reached her, the tall man’s lecture would be finished.

As Nettle came into the room, she found Sorrel standing between the bed and the giant mouth. He swiveled his head back and forth, unsure where to issue his order of banishment.

“Into the mouth!” Nettle yelled.

Sorrel wouldn’t look away from Birdsong. He yelled at the tall man, “Get out of my home!”

The tall man kept on with his speaking. The shifting mound slithered ever closer.

“It’s not him,” Nettle yelled at her brother.

Telling herself that this place was also her home, Nettle joined Sorrel in the middle of the rug.

With Hush and Wisp clinging to her fur, reeking of fear, Nettle faced the gaping maw that had burst into Birdsong’s room.

She raised up on her back legs and puffed out her fur, making herself as big as possible. She roared at the approaching horror, “Get out of my home!”

The tall man and his possessor paid her as little mind as they had Sorrel.

“What now?” Sorrel asked.

All at once, every surface of the walls and ceiling began to stretch and tear.

Nettle backed toward the hole out of Birdsong’s room, her balance thrown off by carrying both pups.

The walls and ceiling warbled like a puddle in a rainstorm.

Sorrel stood his ground, giving his order over and over—once to the tall man, then to the ever-changing mass and the distended throat through which it shambled.

In a section of wall above the exit, the green color that Sorrel loved stretched out farther than anywhere else. It reached toward Birdsong. An oblong shape formed, almost flat at its end.

A horizontal split opened at the end, revealing flat teeth.

The thing within the wall exhaled, adding the smell of partially-digested grass to the room.

The familiar mare whinnied. She pressed outward, the whole shape of her head becoming visible beneath the stretching green.

All throughout Birdsong’s room, animals pushed outward from the walls. The walls’ structure stretched. It should have crumbled.

Coyotes yipped from the ceiling. A farm dog lunged from below the window, only to be restrained by the wall.

Something hissed behind Nettle.

She whirled around. Under Birdsong’s bed, the shape of a blacksnake’s head slithered along the wall, a single fang sticking through and slicing a path.

Sorrel continued his back-and-forth dance, desperate to save the human pup he so admired. Nettle’s heart broke for her brother. They were powerless.

The window shattered inward. Glass added a blanket of glittering reflections to the carpet.

Human hands reached through, grabbed either side of the window frame.

Careful climbed inside.

She carried with her a mother’s fury.

The tall man raised his head, adding yet another impossible bend to his elongated torso. He snarled words at Careful.

For the first time, Careful saw inside the maw, into the throat. The view interrupted whatever plan she had.

“Does she see him?” Sorrel asked, and then ran toward the bedside to bite the tall man.

But of course Careful saw the tall man. There was no need for secrecy anymore. Whatever preparation he’d been doing to Birdsong was nearly done.

Nettle felt useless.

Except she wasn’t, not to her pups. She could get them out of the Red House, away from the colony, maybe somewhere deep in the woods. Surviving coyotes and foxes had to be safer than this.

She called to Sorrel, “We can’t help. It’s not our home.”

Sorrel looked back over his shoulder as he climbed the tall man’s leg. “Take the pups to safety. Find a home. This is mine.”

As he bit through the tall man’s pants, Nettle wanted to argue.

If this is your home, then why can’t you banish the tall man?

But Wisp fell off her hips, and so Nettle filled her mouth with his scruff.

The willful pup wiggled in her teeth. He babbled something that almost sounded like his uncle’s name.

Nettle turned and ran for the exit. She wanted to weep, to scream, to gnaw the tall man into a million bloody slivers. This wasn’t her home yet. She couldn’t help and Sorrel wouldn’t leave until he saved Birdsong. This was Sorrel’s home. His order should work, but it didn’t and Nettle didn’t understand why.

Nettle couldn’t leave her brother to die in a pointless attempt to save Birdsong.

She’d take her pups to the larder, then come back for Sorrel. She’d be back before Wisp had time to wander away.

Nettle carried her pups away from the chaos, into the wall.

This climb would be difficult with the extra weight of both pups.

Nettle looked up.

An owl’s beak snapped down at her.

She jumped away.

The inside of the walls stretched and moved with as much activity as inside Birdsong’s room.

A patch of wall reached out and down toward her. It formed the shape of a bird’s head with a razor sharp beak piercing through.

Nettle fled.

She ran through the dark passageways of the wall, down a path she hadn’t taken before.

Once she was sure that the owl’s beak wasn’t pursuing—and hadn’t extended a tongue to slither after her—Nettle stopped to catch her breath and her bearings.

She found herself surrounded by paper—not shredded for bedding but folded upon itself many times. There were at least a dozen of them, tucked into cracks and crevices.

Nettle took one out and unfolded it.

Waxy red lines depicted a square with a triangle above. It was the Red House.

Nettle unfolded another paper. This one was mostly covered in violet scribbles, but dotted with white. A white crescent took up one corner of the paper.

Nettle looked at it from different angles, focusing and unfocusing her eyes until she understood the scene depicted: the night sky.

The next paper that Nettle unfolded, she recognized as a simple depiction of Birdsong, Careful, and Rumble.

The last paper that Nettle unfolded was more heavily creased than the others. It smelled strongly of Sorrel. It was the paper that he had brought to show her. The waxy colors depicted Birdsong and Sorrel.

A heavy sadness struck Nettle. He so admired Birdsong’s ability to turn paper and colored wax into aesthetically pleasing representations of the world.

Sorrel deserved to create wax and paper creations like this himself. He’d done so much to be who he wanted, mustering the courage to leave the colony, learning by himself how to survive in the Red House.

He’d found so much beauty that he admired, but she’d failed to convince him to try creating that beauty himself. Nettle wanted to weep for her brother, that despite all his effort, his time in the colony had still forced parts of himself so deep that he wouldn’t let them out.

Suddenly, Nettle knew how to banish the tall man.

Nettle ran back through the wall.

The owl mouth slammed itself in between drywall and white plastic pipes.

Nettle slipped past it, back into the hole to Birdsong’s room.

The shifting mound crawled over the carpet.

The tall man’s legs disappeared into the shifting mass. His torso now resembled a snake’s more than a man’s. He stretched and twisted across the room, head and shoulders looming over Careful and Birdsong.

Careful now sat on the floor, back against the dresser. Blood smeared across her cheek. Her nose was crooked.

She held Birdsong, who buried her face in her chest.

The tall man had cornered them. He could easily grab them, but didn’t. The shifting mass crawled ever closer to the mother and daughter.

Rumble and Careful’s brothers fought to get inside the window, but the wall around it stretched inward. Captured animals snapped their jaws.

Sorrel stood in the tall man’s way, his back to Careful and Birdsong.

Nettle’s urgency rose to panic as she saw her brother rear back, facing down the impossibly tall man and his possessor.

Sorrel’s squeaking roar ordered the horrors back out of his home. They didn’t notice him.

Nettle dashed into the room. “It’s not your home because you’re still holding back. You’re still afraid you can’t, or you think you don’t deserve it, or—I don’t know. But you want to create like Birdsong does, so you have to, or else this place will never be your home!”

Somehow, Nettle’s cry got the tall man’s attention. He whipped around, swinging his long body behind him. His hateful face and spindly fingers descended toward Nettle like an owl with its talons extended.

Nettle fled, willing her pups to keep clinging tight to her, but the tall man was so fast now.

Sorrel yelled an order, and this time the tall man heard him.

The mound that swallowed his knees expanded in all directions, shifting to what looked like a loose pile of intestines.

Sorrel jumped backwards, away from the wriggling mess.

The tall man’s closed fist crashed down on Sorrel.

Nettle heard herself scream.

She saw her brother’s eye bulge, his nostrils fill with blood, as the tall man’s fist crushed the rear half of his spine, his hips, his back legs.

Nettle ran to him out of instinct.

As her thoughts grew clear again, she realized—where else would she go? The tall man’s horrors blocked any escape. And Sorrel was her brother. She wouldn’t let him die alone.

Another mourning voice pierced Nettle’s ears.

Birdsong screamed and sobbed. She reached for Sorrel but her mother held her back.

Nettle made it to her brother’s side. “I’m sorry,” she told him, not knowing for what.

Wisp whimpered from her back. Hush squeezed against her.

Sorrel wouldn’t look at Nettle.

His front claws twitched on the carpet.

“Get up,” Nettle begged, knowing it was pointless. But she would die dragging him toward safety, even if there was no path to get there. “Give me your paws.”

Still Sorrel looked down, his front paws convulsing.

He was dying.

Nettle touched her cheek to his. He pulled away.

Sorrel couldn’t stand anymore, but he pushed himself up on his front legs. He tilted his head upward at the tall man.

Nettle now saw beneath him, where his front paws had been twitching.

No, not twitching.

Drawing.

In red blood on the beige rug was a crude depiction of a mouse—oblong body, pointed head, long tail. Next to it was a human face—two dots of blood for eyes, a curved line for a smiling human mouth, and longer lines for Birdsong’s hair.

Nettle felt a burst of pride and admiration for her brother.

Sorrel inhaled, gathering what little energy he had left, and then breathed his final words:

“Get out of my home.”

34

Nettle caught her brother as he fell back.

He was limp and heavy.

The tall man trembled, then convulsed. At his ankles, the shifting mass made a slurping sound. Birdsong’s room filled with the smell of bile and rot.

The tall man’s long torso went limp and was sucked into the mound. The mound flattened out and was pulled back into the gaping maw, which in turn withdrew through the doorway, the hallway ceiling, and out of sight into the attic.

There was a sharp pop and the air pressure shifted.

The opening to the tall man’s den had closed.

Nettle’s pups clung to her as she held Sorrel. She didn’t think they could understand why she wept, but they smelled of sadness, so maybe they did.

Behind her, Nettle heard Careful weep loving words to Birdsong.

Rumble and Careful’s brothers climbed in through the window.

The walls, which had gone still at Sorrel’s command, now stretched again. This time, the structure of the walls cracked and crumbled.

From near the hole where Nettle entered the room, a blacksnake tumbled out of the wall, coated in white dust.

Rumble jumped away in surprise.

The snake fled under the bed.

As Rumble ran to his family, the wall beneath the window burst open and out rolled two dogs—the farm dogs from the mare’s memory.

They jumped to their feet and barked in circles until they saw there was no more threat.

A coyote fell from the ceiling, and then a goat butted through the wall. Birds clawed their way free. Finally, the entire wall facing the foot of Birdsong’s bed collapsed into a pile of crumbled white.

The mare stumbled into the now-crowded room.

The humans smelled and sounded of shock, but no longer of fear. The coyote and birds fled through the window. The other animals sniffed each other and stood about, unsure where to go.

Nettle felt gentle teeth on her scruff.

She turned to find the old mouse tugging at her. She motioned for Nettle to follow. The day had been won, the Red House was safe, and it was time for the mice to scurry back out of sight.

“I can’t leave Sorrel,” Nettle said, knowing it was foolish.

The old mouse spoke again, and this time Nettle understood the word, “Brave.”

She came close to Nettle. Wisp climbed over onto her back.

Together, they slipped over to the edge of the room where the passageways within the walls were now exposed.

Nettle heard the humans all bunching together, talking with confusion and relief.

She smelled another presence, one she had smelled only once before, and with someone else’s nose.

Nettle looked back to see Careful holding both Rumble and Birdsong in a tight embrace. The fellow mother looked over her family’s shoulders at a woman who stood in the ruined doorway. This woman was half-shadow, but Nettle recognized her—the kind woman who the mare loved so much.

Careful mouthed words that must have been thanks.

Nettle considered that Sorrel hadn’t banished the tall man on his own, hadn’t been the only one to turn the Red House into his home.

Nettle looked once more at Sorrel’s picture on the rug, and then she and the old mouse headed back to the nest. Back home.

35

“Mama, mama!” Wisp poked his nose into Nettle’s cheek.

Nettle groggily opened her eyes.

Sleep had been so much easier before the pups learned to talk.

Hush grabbed Nettle’s paw with her teeth. “Get up. Come see.”

“Ouch,” Nettle said with exaggeration. “Too hard, too hard!”

“Sorry, Mama.” Hush let go.

Nettle got to her feet. She sniffed the air for their new companion, the old mouse who’d finally been able to communicate that her name was Clover. She must have been off gathering food.

They’d moved back into Sorrel’s nest. It made Nettle miss her brother, but she enjoyed watching Birdsong, Careful, and Rumble in the kitchen. Sometimes she’d catch glimpses of the beauty that Sorrel used to see.

Nettle had dragged one of Birdsong’s colored wax sticks to the nest. It was green. She hoped that Hush or Wisp would one day become as curious about it as Sorrel was.

“There’s mice outside,” Wisp said.

“What? Show me.” Nettle followed along through the wall, then sneaking out into the bathroom, and up to the window.

A mouse sniffed at the outside glass, then tapped with its claws.

In the last few weeks Nettle had noticed this mouse watching the Red House from the meadow. It seemed the colony had survived the horrors that Nettle had fled.

Nettle hopped up to the window to tell this mouse how to make it inside.

ARE YOU A STRANGE READER?

Hello Strange Reader,

Stephen King has “Constant Readers.” But you just read a book about two mice taking on a Cronenbergian haunting, so I figure you’ll happily wear the title of “Strange Reader.”

I’d like to invite you to visit my website where you’ll find some exclusive bonus material for ‘The Twitching House.’

I’ll ask you for your email address so you can be part of my “Strange Reader Newsletter,” but you’re welcome to unsubscribe at any time.

Tap Here to Go To Bonus Content

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