“They’re real!” Gigi whispered. “Squatchicorns!”
Hugo started to shut the door, and he would have locked it, too, but the bigger Squatchicorn rushed toward him, calling, “Wait! Are you Hugo?”
“Yes,” said Hugo cautiously.
“And you must be Winnie?” the Squatchicorn said to Gigi.
Gigi was too shocked to speak.
“That’s Gigi,” Hugo said. “Winnie’s hiding.”
From the other room, Winnie yelled out, “You get the award for biggest mouth, Hugo!”
“My name is Nogg,” the Squatchicorn said. He held out his hand, and Hugo shook it. “This is my sister, Yama. Our parents are at your family’s bakery right now. Your mom said we could wait for them here, in your apartment.”
“Um . . . come in, I guess,” Hugo said uncertainly.
As the two Squatchicorns walked into the apartment, Hugo spied another group of Squatchicorns walking by in the passageway outside. So it was an invasion! Only, they didn’t seem like very scary invaders.
Nogg and Yama were both squidges, which is what you call a young Sasquatch.
Nogg was very tall and looked to be a few years older than Hugo, while his sister, Yama, was a few years younger than Hugo. Their hair was the usual Sasquatch sort of hair, and their bodies were Sasquatchy, too, but their horns were gray and stuck straight out of their foreheads.
They must be some sort of cryptid that Boone’s book didn’t know about, thought Hugo. Just like a Snallygaster was part bird, part reptile, Nogg and Yama were part Sasquatch, part unicorn.
“Would you like something to eat?” Gigi asked, nudging Hugo, because that was really what he should have asked.
He and his sister sat down while Hugo and Gigi went into the kitchen. Hugo opened up the cabinets and looked at the shelves. There were jars of acorn butter and pickled mushrooms and blackberry preserves. There was a wild sorrel-and-onion tart and a gooseberry pie and a bowl of hazelnuts.
“What do you think Squatchicorns eat?” he asked Gigi.
“Well, unicorns are sort of like horses,” Gigi said, “and horses eat grass.”
“I don’t think we have grass,” Hugo said, looking up at the cabinets.
Gigi thought for a moment.
“What about pillows? They’re stuffed with straw.”
“Good thinking!”
First they went to Hugo’s room to get his pillow. But then he remembered that Winnie’s pillow was fatter than his, so they went to Winnie’s room and took her pillow to the kitchen. Carefully, Hugo pulled apart the stitches. Then he reached inside the pillow, took out handfuls of straw, and divided it up between two plates.
Hugo and Gigi looked at the plates of straw doubtfully.
“I wish it looked more delicious,” he said.
“It may not look delicious to us, but it will probably look delicious to a Squatchicorn,” Gigi said.
Hugo guessed so. But just in case, he put a few hazelnuts on top of each pile of straw for decoration.
It would be nice to have a horn on your head, Hugo thought, but he couldn’t imagine life without an acorn butter–and–raspberry cream sandwich every now and then.
