Act I

“Uncle Ushu!” Jasmit ran down the stairs to the southern entrance hall. Her feet almost slipped on the hardwood steps, and she clutched the railing. “Uncle Ushu!”

The mansion at the edge of the jungle trembled. Bone china clinked in the cupboards, cockroaches scurried across the bathroom tiles. A lorry rolled over the dirt road from Anathakandu, and its trail of dust rose along the treeline.

“They found me.” Uncle Ushu closed the door and secured the bolt. “Someone told them.”

Jasmit raised herself on tiptoes to look out the window. It was evening, and the tropical night fell quickly into darkness. Twilight flooded through the trees and around the house, but no shadow foraged in its lighted halls.

Narun and the twins huddled around Jasmit, their eyes wide and bright with concern.

“Jasmit, akka, who are they? Who is coming?”

Uncle Ushu rushed to the other side of the room to rummage through the drawers of a cabinet, his balding head glistening with sweat. Above them, a fan turned slowly, and its hum merged with the engine noises roaring outside.

“They’re thugs,” Narun said, seemingly proud that he knew the word. “That’s what uncle Ushu said. Thugs. They’re here for his money.”

The twins shook their heads as one, nervously shifting from one foot to another. They were almost the same age as Jasmit and Narun’s twelve years,  but the twins—both the girl and the boy—were smaller, more delicate, with spindly arms and legs. “Uncle Ushu doesn’t have money,” one of the twins said. “And why should he give to them?”

“He owes them. He told me he had a farm in his village, he took a lot of loans. That means he owes them money, doesn’t it?”

“But why? I don’t get it. If he had a farm, why did he need money?”

“He lost the harvest. He—” Narun fell silent as uncle Ushu walked past them with heavy steps, his frame almost as tall as the doorway.

“What do we do? What if they just want to ask questions?” The twins stared at Jasmit and Narun, but Jasmit had no answer. She was only one year older than them but they looked to her like an elder sister or even an adult. She frowned at them until they cast their eyes to the floor.

“The forest,” Narun said, taking Jasmit’s hand and dragging her toward the hallway. The mansion was big enough to have entrances on its southern and eastern side, and the hallways connected them across both floors. “The Sap Mother will protect us.”

“I told you—” Jasmit broke away, and they all stood panting at the edge of the hall. In twenty minutes, the forest would be pitch black and it was already hard to see through the thick foliage. “The Sap Mother doesn’t exist. If you go into the forest, they will find you. Or a leopard will kill you, or a snake, I don’t know. But you won’t survive.”

“She exists.” Narun curled his lips. “I’ve seen her many times. If you won’t come with me, I'll go alone.”

“Don’t be a fool,” Jasmit said, turning away from him. She liked Narun, she really did, but he was the most stubborn boy she had ever met.

The steady shine of the mansion’s lamps brimmed the long corridors. Outside the windows, darkness washed over the grounds and through the high grass, fleeing the lorry’s headlights. Car doors slammed shut, and bootsteps clattered over the verandah.

“Children, listen to me.” The glinting chandelier animated uncle Ushu’s cheeks as he paced toward them. “You have to hide upstairs, you understand? Go to the master bathroom and don’t make a noise. Whatever happens, stay until I get you. I will be there soon. Go!”

Jasmit exchanged looks with Narun and the twins. “What about you, uncle?”

“What about me? Are you deaf? Hurry up, get out of here!”

Someone knocked on the door, the sound of knuckles dulled by a covering of leather. Jasmit felt the house shiver, its walls leaning against each other in search of protection. But there was something else too, a feeling of familiarity. The house had known heavy boots and hard knuckles.

“Open up!”

The kids froze in the entrance hall, and uncle Ushu chased them off before he faced the door. “One minute! I’m coming.”

Jasmit gripped the banister and jumped onto the first step, turning to reassure herself that the others were behind her. The twins hurried past, but Narun stood at the landing and didn’t move. Jasmit held her hand out for him and waited. “Will you please come? I don’t want to see a leopard eat your sorry face.”

“There are no leopards. The Sap Mother is everywhere under the forest. It belongs to her. She will protect me, she promised. I can’t come with you.”

The door shook under the force of repeated knocking. “Open now!”

“Fine.” Jasmit withdrew her hand and took several steps. Narun suddenly seemed small with his thin arms and big ears. His dimples showed when he smiled. His hair stood up in all directions. “Please. Come with me, don’t go into the forest.”

“I’m sorry,” Narun said as he turned and ran, soon sprinting along the hallway toward the eastern entrance.

Jasmit wanted to grab him, but he was gone and she would not follow him. She cast one last glance at uncle Ushu, then followed the twins to the upper floor.

Loud voices rose behind her as soon as she stepped onto the landing. One of them belonged to uncle Ushu, but the others surrounded him like a pride of lions. What were they saying? Something about money, about repayment, about a debt that uncle Ushu owed to them.

“Jasmit. Hurry.” The twins peeked out from the master bedroom and gestured frantically. “Hurry, please.”

They closed the door and locked out the voices. Goosebumps bloomed on Jasmit’s skin, and she pressed herself against a wall. It was warm and soft and seemed to react to her touch as if it were alive.

Outside, the night had risen to the canopies of the kata-kela trees. At the window, Jasmit squinted into the forest, trying to find Narun amidst the broad-leafed ferns of the undergrowth. Questions churned in her belly: what would happen to Narun, now unprotected in the dark wood? What would happen to uncle Ushu? Swallowing hard, Jasmit rubbed her arms as she turned back to the twins.

“Uncle said to go to the washroom, Jasmit. Will you come?”

The master bathroom was huge, its tiles decorated with mosaics of tea leaves and water lilies. Small moss-colored lizards retreated before the children, vanishing below the sink and under a dresser. The two mirrors surrounded Jasmit with her own reflection, and she saw herself standing next to the shivering twins wherever she turned.

“Akka, where can we hide? When the men come upstairs, they will spot us, no? Why did uncle send us here? Has he lost his mind?”

Jasmit searched for a hiding place. The bathtub loomed like a porcelain grave, the under-sink cabinet was filled with pipes. There was no space behind the toilet or the shelves, no exit besides the small window.

The sound of heavy boots on the floor outside the master suite made Jasmit’s heart skip a beat. The staircase moaned under the weight of several men, and the tremor from the impact of their footfalls traveled through the mansion’s upper level. Whatever uncle Ushu had said to stall them, it had failed.

“Close the door.” The twins pulled the bathroom door shut and listened for sound in the adjacent room. Jasmit knew why uncle Ushu had sent them here. She remembered that time she had woken up in the night, soon after they’d arrived at the house. She knew it hadn’t been a dream.

She opened all the taps in the room as far as they went, watching water gush into the sink and the bathtub. The Dry House was real, and it would hide them from these men. But what would it want in return?

 

Jasmit climbed out of the van behind Narun and the twins. “This is the place? Uncle Ushu, are you kidding?” Uncle Ushu had stopped the dirt-sprayed van in the middle of the paddies and now crossed his arms with a smile, towering over them.

A building rose from the lush paddy fields and the irrigation canals, the biggest building Jasmit had ever seen. It weighed on the landscape and pressed its shadow onto the ground with the sharp edge of its overhanging roof. It was no ordinary house: it wasn’t a temple or Kovil—it was a palace.

“You’re playing a trick on us,” Jasmit called as she looked over the paddies. She couldn’t take her eyes off the palace, but she knew there had to be a catch. Uncle Ushu would laugh at them, chase them back into the van and drive to some hovel at the edge of the fields instead. He’d brought them here from the bus station, but surely this couldn’t be his home? “What is this place really?”

The house stretched over two stories and had more windows than Jasmit could count, surrounded by a garden that grew to the boundary of the woods. Faint chanting drifted over the treetops, the voices of monks or priests performing an afternoon ritual at the monastery somewhere in the forest.

“This is your house, uncle?” Narun sounded as awestruck as Jasmit felt. There had to be a hundred rooms, a hundred staircases and corridors to hide in! Jasmit allowed herself a smile: no one would ever find them here.

“It’s not my house, no,” uncle Ushu said, the smile fading from his face. “It belonged to a foreigner, a British merchant who came here with his family. He owned tea plantations, and he built himself a mansion. That was a long time ago, when our country was still a colony.” Uncle Ushu pulled himself upright, his chalk-colored eyes brimming with pride. “Now I am the caretaker of this house.”

“Caretaker.” The twins, in the back seat behind Jasmit, repeated the word in unison, as if they had never heard it before.

“Yea. The people who inherited this mansion have entrusted its care to me, just like your parents did with you. I am to keep its corridors clean and its lamps shining, to look after its every wish and whim.”

“A house doesn’t have whims,” Jasmit said, frowning. She didn’t know what to think of uncle Ushu. Why would the owners of this place entrust it to such a strange man?

“If our parents cared for us, they wouldn’t have sent us away,” Narun said as he pushed his way to the window beside Jasmit. “Why did they send us to you?” Narun crossed his arms and tried to look older than he was.

Jasmit focused on him, then turned back toward the house-palace. “When can we go home?”

“When your parents tell me.” Uncle Ushu shrugged.

“And when is that, uncle?” Narun pushed the creaking van door open and jumped from the vehicle. He sprinted away from the group, straight toward the house. “When is that?”

“Hey!” Ushu tried to grab Narun as he ran past. “Stop!”

“I’ll get him, uncle.” Jasmit bounded after Narun. Out of the van, out in the air! It was too hot to be refreshing, but it had been a long drive from the bus station to the house, and Jasmit had had enough of the cramped, vibrating van. She raced along the road with its two deep runnels, catapulting herself forward with every step. Jungle roiled over a ditch on one side, paddies stretched languidly on the other. Though she wouldn’t stop running, Jasmit wanted to rub her eyes. How green everything was!

“Narun! Wait for me!”

“Catch me,” Narun called as he bolted for the main entrance of the house, a door with two wings. Ornamental carvings decorated the wooden frame, images of bo leaves that climbed toward the lintel. Some of the carvings depicted blossoms that reminded Jasmit of starfish, but she had no time to examine them.

As the van pulled up, Jasmit rushed inside and nearly crashed into Narun, who had stopped just inside the main hall, staring up in awe.

“This isn’t a real place,” he breathed.

It was the biggest hall Jasmit had ever seen, the biggest hall she could imagine. Its ceiling arched like the heavens, its staircase was wider than Jasmit’s whole room at home. A crystal chandelier the size of a man dangled above them, and white columns rose two stories high, bracing the towering walls.

“It isn’t real,” Narun said again, his brow suddenly furrowed. “Jasmit, I don’t want to stay here.” Narun’s words were brittle, crumbling in the light-flooded hall. “I don’t want to live here.”

“What do you mean?” Jasmit’s eyes slipped off the walls, followed soft edges and almost organic angles. “This is a palace! I dreamt of something like this when I was little. It’s wonderful.”

“No.” Narun shook his head. “Can’t you feel it?”

Jasmit pulled her gaze from the architecture to Narun, who seemed tiny in comparison. He shivered as if the house was cold, and his hands dug deep into his pockets.

“Can’t you hear it, Jasmit? This place is quiet. It shouldn’t be here, and neither should we. I want to go home. Please.”

Uncle Ushu appeared in the doorframe, his voice already booming across the hall. “Give it a chance, little one. I know this is difficult for you, for all of you. But this is only to keep you safe. These are difficult times, especially where you come from. The war is still going on everywhere in the North and your parents are worried. You are old enough to understand, no? Nowhere is ever really safe, but there is no fighting down here.”

The twins wandered away into the ground floor hallway as Ushu put his calloused hand on Narun’s shoulder. “For better or worse, this is your home now. I won’t let anyone harm you, Narun. Don’t worry. I knew your parents, a long time ago, and when they reached out to me, I made a promise to them. I’ll look after you like my own children.”

“Do you have children, Uncle Ushu?” Jasmit stopped to look the tall man in the eyes, but he avoided her gaze. “Where are they?”

“A daughter,” he said, mouth tight. “Come on now, let me show you the house.” Without a further word, he turned and walked into the shadowed hall.

 

“Amazing.” Jasmit’s whisper floated into the chamber. Musty sheets covered a piano and a vitrine, as if uncle Ushu had been in the midst of renovations when he’d left to pick them up at the bus station.

Jasmit lifted a corner of the sheet and stared at the painted figurines behind the vitrine’s glass door. A tom-tom drummer, dancing village girls, an ayah with a baby in her arms, a Kandyan king with puffed-up shoulders.

With quiet footsteps, Jasmit went to the door and peeked out into the hall. “Narun? Are you there?” The eastern wing of the mansion seemed abandoned. Back in the piano room, Jasmit ran a finger though the dust collected on low windowsills. Far below the second story windows, a garden clustered around a pond, the center of a spiral of blossoming flowers.

The twins were in the garden, having one of their tea parties beneath the Nelli tree and its pale yellow fruits. They sat with their thin legs crossed on a blanket, a tea set plundered from the kitchen between them. Fish floated languidly against each other in the pond, scaly shapes as long as Jasmit’s arm. Their backs disappeared in the murky water, surfacing now and then between duckweed and fallen leaves.

“Narun?” she called again, turning back to the expanse of the room. He wasn’t in the house, or maybe he was napping downstairs. Either way, Jasmit would explore the room by herself—and what a room it was! It was huge, with a walk-in wardrobe stretching across one wall, a metal rod with clothes hangers lining the opposite one.

The floor was smooth, the wooden boards creaking slightly as she moved about the chamber. This must have been a dressing room, maybe for the owner’s wife. Jasmit turned around and imagined wearing a deep green saree, the jacket glittering with sequins. Sleeveless, flowing, made of the finest silk. She would have makeup layered on her face to conceal every impurity, and her hair would be pinned into high, smooth waves. A forest of safety pins would hold the saree together, snug against her skin as she turned. How fantastically rich the owners of this place must have been!

Jasmit whirled through the room in tune with the music in her head, music like at a big movie wedding. Guitar, drums, and a keyboard creating an energetic, infectious rhythm. She imagined the musicians’ fingers flying over the keys while she moved in circles. Such weddings must have happened here, in this house. The hallways crowded with guests, the bride and groom out in the warm night air of the garden.

Jasmit gave her body to the gentle pull of the music. It was easy to forget that she was so far away from her home and her parents, that this was a place she knew nothing about. It was easy to get lost in the dance. A clockwise turn, the swinging hips of Baila. Jasmit’s mother wouldn’t like this—she never did. Whenever Jasmit dreamt of her wedding, amma had boxed her on the ear and put her to work: scrubbing the floor, washing the dishes, stitching her brother’s pants. She was too young for a proposal, and amma didn’t encourage daydreaming. Well, marriage was a long way off, almost as far away in time as home was in distance.

Still swaying to the music, Jasmit suddenly missed the sea, the salty air and the rushing waves. In her hometown, the waters were never far away, the tides of Palk Strait lapping against the coast. Jasmit’s momentum wound down, leaving her panting in the heart of the chamber. She missed more than just the sea, of course. She missed the hidden paths through the sand and the wind that moistened her hair. She missed her friends at school. Most of all, she missed her family.

When Jasmit had entered the chamber, she’d felt welcome. Now, she wasn’t so sure. Something observed her from deep inside the walls, something like the fish sliding through the muddy pond, their scaly backs cutting the surface.

“Is… is anyone here? Narun?” Jasmit whispered, approaching the west wall with fear tightening her throat. “Uncle Ushu? Anyone? Who’s there? Who are you?” No one answered. No one appeared in the doorway. “I’m Jasmit. I’m not from here. I am from the North-East, from the coast.”

She didn’t know who she was speaking to, but she kept talking. “It’s not far from our home to the beach, fifteen minutes on foot. The fishermen start early in the morning, and they let me watch.”

Jasmit flinched. Had she heard an echo? Did the walls crackle and pop like soil constricting in the heat of the sun? She straightened herself and walked backward to the door until she tumbled out into the hallway.

 

Jasmit opened her eyes to the twilight of the bedroom. The house lingered in the night and breathed quietly around her, waiting to make its move. The walls moaned in their sleep, shuddering with ill-remembered dreams. Jasmit floated through the shallow end of sleep, just below the surface, her eyes open to the waking world. Her throat was dry, her legs itched, and she needed to pee. She sat up in bed.

Across the room, Narun slept in his own bed while the twins huddled together on a mattress. How could they sleep so peacefully in this place? Jasmit pushed the blankets from her legs as if she could also push away the tension she felt inside her. Carefully sliding off the bed, the floor met her feet with a strange roughness, like pressed grains of sand. She tip-toed across the room and swallowed the urge to cough. Just a quick visit to the bathroom, no need to wake anyone.

Dizzy as she walked along the hallway, Jasmit felt the floorboards sway beneath her, the bare walls lean in. Everything seemed different at night, didn’t it? It felt different. This was natural, Jasmit reassured herself.

In the bathroom, she finished her business, then flushed. The toilet produced only a dry clicking noise, no water. The bare walls of the room seemed to spin, and the ugly plastic doll that Ushu had put on the shelf—his attempt to help her feel at home—stared at her. She pulled the handle again without result. The faucet didn’t work, and neither did the tap at the sink. Nothing.

What was happening? She twisted the tap as far as it would go, but the pipes remained empty. The same was true for the bathtub and the shower head, for every source of water in the room. Jasmit sat on the edge of the bathtub until the dizziness subsided.

The water had worked in the evening, hadn’t it? Jasmit had brushed her teeth and had a wash, just like everyone else. The plumbing wasn’t at fault, so what could it be? Maybe someone had turned off the water.

Jasmit peered out the bathroom window toward the outdoor valve where the water pipes entered the house, trying to make sense of the dark nighttime shapes. No lights shone in the paddies. No lights in the forest. Only the house cast a square of brightness on the ground below, the bathroom light filtering around Jasmit’s body.

People could be hiding in the tall grass or between the palm leaves. They could be crouching in the garden or pressed against the walls, climbing the verandah or the roof.

Closing her eyes, Jasmit listened for any hint of movement. The house creaked around her, from the wood to the stones. The wind swarmed through the forest outside, bringing with it the sound of bats and night herons. Insects buzzed against the window, grass rasped against grass.

When Jasmit opened her eyes again, she saw two things. Outside the window, a pale shimmer crept between the trees and licked over the soil, a tongue of sickly light. It ran together in rivulets and pooled in the potholes of the forest road, funneled around the pond and discolored its contents.

And in the mirror behind her, the room’s reflection stood on its head, inverted horizontally. Jasmit touched the glass and then her face in a nauseating motion, trying to process the impossible.

Water rushed from the taps in the mirror. The sink had flooded, the bathtub filled to the halfway point. Spray water glistened on the wall tiles and the floor, the shower head splashed against the window in a high arc. The cabinet was soaking wet, and little waterfalls rushed between the soap bottles and toothbrushes.

Narun and the twins stood at the entrance of the room, but that wasn’t why Jasmit screamed. Her own reflection was missing—the mirror was empty except for the rushing water and the three children watching with eyes hollow of understanding.

 

“So, Narun,” Jasmit called, dangling her legs from the low wall as she watched over the back garden. “Tell me.”

The murutha trees bloomed in mauve and rose-pink and their pollen floated in the air, irritating Jasmit’s nose with every breath. She tightened her grip on the smooth stone at the edge of the wall. The forest loomed beyond the garden, a dark barrier of trees and undergrowth. Even at this hour, the sunlight faltered beneath its canopy and filled the underbrush with constant motion. The forest was waiting. Observing. Pondering.

“Tell you what?” Narun asked as he sat next to Jasmit and tried to peel the label from a mackerel tin.

“You know.” She watched his slender fingers picking at the paper. “What you do. When you go in there.”

The wind carried chanting from the temple across the forest, and the monks’ voices blended into a deep hum.

“Nothing much.”

“You’re in the forest for hours and hours, Narun. You can’t be doing nothing, no?”

“I don’t know! I just walk around. It’s relaxed there, with all the trees and wildlife and stuff. The house is boring. The house is too quiet.”

Jasmit studied him as he removed the last remainders of the label from the tin can. The house was a palace, and a palace wasn’t boring. And besides, with all its cockroaches, ants, lizards, and mosquitoes, it was almost as alive as the jungle. “Don’t lie, Narun. You are meeting someone, aren’t you?”

“Maybe,” Narun said slowly, cheeks flushed. “What does it matter?”

“What does it matter?” Jasmit looked at him with wide, incredulous eyes. “Are you stupid? Who is it, someone from the village? They are not our people. They will tell everyone about us.”

Narun shook his head. “No, they won’t. They are not from the village, trust me.” He put the tin can on the wall, next to the other three he had already cleaned of their labels. “I don’t want to talk about this.” He jumped down from the wall and headed toward the house without looking back. “Mind your own business, and don’t call me stupid.”

The forest rustled like a peacock opening its feathers. For a moment, Jasmit thought she saw something there, a faint shape darting through the branches. A bird?

“Wait, wait,” Jasmit called after Narun. “I just want you to be careful, yea, not to get hurt. We don’t have friends here. We are stuck in the house, I know. But it’s for a good reason. Uncle Ushu is protecting us. We will go back home someday, everyone says so.”

“Yea?” Narun stopped. “You believe that? Who is stupid now, me or you?”

“It’s still you.” Jasmit caught up to him. “Things don’t last forever and ever. We just have to wait for a bit, is that so terrible? Uncle Ushu takes care of us.”

“Uncle Ushu is a coward. Why is he here, Jasmit? He’s hiding, and he doesn’t even admit it. He knows about the forest, he knows about the house. He doesn’t say anything because he’s afraid.”

Jasmit frowned. “What do you mean, he knows about the forest and the house? What is there to know?”

“Listen to yourself.” Narun raised a finger but pulled it back when he met Jasmit’s eyes. “What about your brother? What about our parents? What about the village? So much has happened. Like here, where the forest never forgave those who built the house.”

“You talk about the forest as if it’s a person. Who are you meeting there?” Jasmit put a hand on Narun’s shoulder, but he brushed it away. “Tell me, Narun.”

Narun took a deep breath, rubbing his chin. “I’m meeting the Sap Mother.”

Jasmit paused. “Who is that?”

“She lives in the forest.” Narun smiled. “She has taken me in, you know. She said I can live with her. She is like an ayah, like the one that took care of the kids that lived here. She nibbles on my fingers, and it doesn’t even hurt.”

“Where is this forest ayah now?”

“She likes to come into the house. You can't see her, but she is here. She climbs the drains and squeezes through the pipes. I saw her in the garbage can yesterday and under the staircase the day before. One day, the Sap Mother took me down through one of her tunnels. She showed me the basement.”

“The house has no basement, stupid. You’ve been daydreaming again.”

“I have to go,” Narun said as he pulled away from her. “Time doesn’t reverse, and neither will the world. It only goes in one direction, Jasmit. It only dries up and turns to dust.”

 

“Akka?” The twins’ voices crumbled into the bathroom’s desiccated air. “Where are we?”

Jasmit’s stomach twisted and she doubled over. She fought against the urge to vomit as her mouth filled with acid. The room had turned upside down!

The lamps rose from the floor like mushrooms humming with electricity. The windows re-defined themselves as bricked-up holes, webs of dust collapsed at the corners. Jasmit looked up to the door, now near the ceiling. Too high for her to reach.

Inverted corridors stretched as featureless passages in all directions. Something like a fine milled flour hung in the air, a mist of particles that clung to every surface and bleached out its colors.

Jasmit’s skin had turned as fair as a Burgher’s, and the twins too could have been foreigners. But it was hard to breathe—she had to force the air down into her lungs.

“Where are we?”

“In the Dry House,” Jasmit whispered, her voice already hoarse. She didn’t know when she had invented the name, but it felt right. Like she’d somehow remembered it from stories she’d heard before memory.

“What is that? What is the Dry House?” the twins asked. Huddled together, they kept close to Jasmit. She smelled the sweat evaporating off their skin, saw their chests heave as they struggled to breathe.

“I don’t know.”

In the labyrinth of rooms, dry air crackled around them. Tight staircases slithered toward huge halls, groaning gullets connected to the vast stomach of the house. As Jasmit pushed through narrow passageways, her steps echoed downward and were lost, sucked into the bulging spaces beneath her feet. She wouldn't fit through the staircases, and they made no sense to her. Why did everything change size and shape here? Salt and flour had formed deposits around the holes in the floor, concentric circles that told of silenced currents.

“Hello?” Jasmit said, almost to herself. She entered a bedroom with a chandelier in the center of the floor and tried to orient herself. If this was the master bedroom, this wall should have windows, and these exits shouldn’t exist. The bathroom was there, and Jasmit examined the sink with its large mirror, now empty and bone-dry. The reflection stood on its head. In this upside-down bathroom, Jasmit was alone with the twins. But the mirror bathroom was occupied by four rough-looking men, their hands calloused, their faces covered in old scars. They searched the cabinet, their shoulders pushing against the walls whenever they turned.

“Jasmit!” The twins waved at her frantically. “Run!”

She shook her head. “They can’t see us.” Jasmit was rooted to the spot, her arms hanging. “No one can see us. Where is uncle Ushu? He isn’t there with them.”

The men finished their search and left behind a devastated bathroom, the tiles littered with broken glass bottles, leaking soap and lotions. A forsaken room in a forsaken house. A room that was smaller than before, with its walls closing in, ceiling sagging.

 

The children had walked for hours, and the corridors opened up again and again into yet more corridors. The stomach-halls remained inaccessible beneath them, but these vast chambers sucked all moisture from the air in a downdraft that never ceased.

“I don’t know if we can go back,” Jasmit whispered. Her bones felt brittle, as if the marrow had been drawn out, leaving hollow tubes. She could move, she could breathe, but there was a strange and painful friction at every twitch of her muscles.

The house lurched beneath them. Jasmit stumbled against a wall, stirring up a cloud of plaster. The twins tumbled to the floor with rasping cries. A bare light bulb flickered between drywall and wooden floorboards. She rubbed her eyes. The hallway stretched before her like it had always done, undisturbed.

“Akka, look.” In the bedroom, the twins pointed at something atop the blankets. What was this, an owl’s pellet?

Jasmit took the thing up between two fingers—a ball of insect carapaces, roots, and tangled hair, of skin flakes and tiny teeth. It stared back with crisp compound eyes, and she staggered back, dropping it on the bed.

No. It was an inanimate object, it didn’t have eyes. A shard of glass glittered there, a marble hidden inside the pellet. A dark, shining seed. Jasmit stood motionless, not willing to get any closer to the thing.

“Something left this,” Jasmit whispered. “Something lives here.”

Despite the oppressive heat, all three of them shivered.

“Something is here in the house with us.”