He didn’t answer. She couldn’t see a thing. The store was completely black. She didn’t even know which way she was facing.

“Matt?” she whispered. “Please, tell me you’re here.”

No answer. Had he abandoned her in the dark? Was he crawling toward the front entrance right this second? And could she really blame him? Together they’d ditched Basil, and now Matt had ditched her. They were all on their own.

Then she heard it: shallow breathing in the darkness. She lunged toward the sound and brushed Matt’s shirt with her fingertips. “Are you all right?” She ran her fingers up his arm and felt cold wet fabric caked with sand and grit. His flesh was cold; his skin was stone. And as Amy realized this person wasn’t Matt at all, he was already pushing his rough fingers inside her mouth and toppling her to the floor.

10: Hügga

Amy tried scrambling away but the hands found her and they were all over her, hundreds of hands, dragging her from her hiding place, pulling her across the floor, smashing her into walls and furniture. Twisting, screaming so loudly and for so long that she forgot she was screaming, Amy clawed at the maple flooring but only succeeded in peeling off one of her fingernails like a wet postage stamp. Cold, dirt-encrusted hands grabbed at her ankles, her wrists, her throat, her face. Amy’s mind popped like a light bulb and only then did she finally go quiet.

After that it was all hands, dragging her, pushing and shoving and groping and pulling, and the whole time it was so dark she could have been asleep. Every breath she took was thick and filthy with the stench from the hallway.

People, or things that were shaped like people, thronged around her in a crushing mob, their muddy clothes suffocated her, the bodies underneath their rags as dead as marble; her head was filled with their stench, her bones were chilled by their cold. The hands lifted her up and slammed her down into a chair, knocking the wind out of her in one shocked gasp. Some distant part of her mind recognized it as a Poonang high-backed armchair with its cushion removed. A strap was cinched hard around her chest, and when she inhaled it tightened, collapsing her lungs, flattening her ribs, keeping her from drawing enough air to scream.

She tried to kick but the shapes in the darkness held her legs, and straps bit into her shins. The shapes forced her wrists down and fastened them to the arms of the chair, and then more bands encircled her flesh, more and more of them stretched over her thighs, around her knees, across her ankles, her waist, her shoulders, her neck. When she tried to move her head, she realized that it had been strapped to the back of the chair, leaving her no choice but to stare straight ahead.