He slipped across the kitchen and, making sure no one was coming, peeked in. The next moment he heard the tread of what was almost certainly his mother coming up behind him and he impulsively slipped into the closet, pulling the door back to where it was.

“I’ll just get the bowls,” his mother was saying.

The bowls were kept in cupboards on the far side of the kitchen. If she were only retrieving them and bringing them out to the table in the parlor – not the dining room – then he could duck out of the closet unnoticed when she left again in a few moments. He couldn’t be sure he was doing anything his parents wouldn’t permit him to do.

The odd smell was much stronger in the closet, which was, he now saw, actually a small room, completely bare except for a plain wooden table situated directly beneath a skylight. And the room smelt. He’d never smelled anything like it; it was a gamey smell, not meat, not like a butcher’s shop, not quite, but a little like that, and maybe just a little like the smell of sweat, freshly sweated? There was a trace of pungency, too, a little like stagnant sea water. He couldn’t connect this disgusting smell with anything he’d encountered before in the house, but at the same time it wasn’t really unfamiliar, was it? Where did it come from? It was everywhere in the room, equally strong; it was just the smell of the room itself.

He heard the clatter of bowls as his mother gathered them. Moving quietly, he went over to the table. There were no drawers, nothing. Did they reserve this room only to store this one table? He looked beneath the table and found nothing there except what might have been some scuff marks in the thin dust on the floor; as he looked, he kept his balance by pressing his hand and forearm against the top of the table, and he noticed then that the wood was warm. He drew his palm over the top and found it was nearly all uniformly warm, as if a big basin of hot water had been left there for a while. Near the far corner to him, he spotted a splash of milk. Was this where they kept the milk they gave him each morning? Were they all out? Was that why there was nothing in this room but this table? Did they pour out a bowl of warm milk in here? Was it milk he was smelling?

Maybe—he thought with a little rush of pleasure at figuring out a plausible explanation for this enigma—they were making cheese in here, and he would find it waiting for him on the table.