When he turned back to us his eyes were black with crawling things and wriggling legs. He opened his mouth but it was filled with the same. His hands fell to his sides as he dropped to his knees; he swayed back and forth once or twice, then he toppled face-first onto the sidewalk where he lay still. Not a twitch, not a groan. He looked shrunken inside his clothes. His right eye socket—empty now—was visible.

I stared in open-mouthed shock. No doubt he was dead.

“Ellie?” I said when I found my voice, a voice that sounded like someone else’s. “What happened?”

“The kiddlies defended us. It just so happened they were hungry as well. They have no taste for skin and bone, but they like everything else.”

I closed my eyes and swallowed a surge of bile. She was telling me that he was—quite literally—little more than a bag of bones now.

A couple of commuters hurried by, barely looking at him. Ellie removed Blanky from his corpse—I couldn’t help but notice the black, writhing mass clinging to its underside—and retied it around her neck. I shuddered at the thought of those things against my own back.

“Come,” she said. “The sunrise awaits.”

3

I barely remember the trek up Stillwell Avenue to the boardwalk. Vague images of Nathan’s signs and that grinning Steeplechase Face everywhere, a rollercoaster to my left, the bright orange height of the defunct Parachute Jump looming to my right, and finally a locked-up pavilion overlooking the beach and the sparkling water.

“Excellent!” she said, spreading her arms toward the limitless expanse of pristine sky. “A beautiful morning for the show.”

I was too numb with shock and, I confess, sick fear to appreciate the weather. A man had died back there. A scum-of-the-earth man, a former pimp from what he’d said, but a human being nonetheless, and he’d been devoured from the inside by Ellie’s kiddlies.

And Ellie herself…in the pre-dawn light I could see how her face had filled out and her cheeks now showed a rosy glow.

I realized to my horror that the kiddlies had shared their bounty. Ellie had fed too.

She pointed west, past the Parachute Jump. “See that purplish sky just above the horizon? That’s called ‘Earth shadow,’ which is exactly what it is—a shadow cast by the curve of the eastern horizon before the sun rises above it. And see that pink band above that? That’s the sun lighting up the higher levels of the atmosphere. It’s called the Belt of Venus.”

“Did you learn this in your coma too?”

“No, Mother,” she said, her tone arid. “In Mister Benson’s astronomy class. What time on your phone?”

I checked. “Five twenty.”

She pointed east. “The sun is supposed to appear in one minute.”

We waited. A minute passed, then two, then three…and no sun.

“Well, Ellie, either my phone’s wrong or your information is wrong.”

“Before I woke you, I checked with the U.S. Naval Observatory. Using Eastern Standard Time, it lists today’s sunrise at this latitude and longitude at four twenty-one. Since we’re in Daylight Saving, I had to add an hour.”