A Hunger Most Dark novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: The Stairs

The sickness took me on the cellar stairs, at three in the morning, in the fourth week.

I had not meant to be there.

I had told myself I was walking the house, and my feet had carried me down the kitchen passage to the eleventh step and sat me down on it.

Her door was propped open with the boot.

Through the gap I could smell her.

My hands were shaking so hard that I pressed them between my knees.

Sweat ran down my back, and the stone was cold against my spine, and the hunger had stopped being a feeling and become a voice.

Go in.

It said nothing else.

I heard her bare feet on the floor, and then I heard her stop.

"Dav?"

"Go back to bed."

She came up three steps.

She wore a nightdress and the grey coat over it, buttoned to the chin, and she carried a candle in a dish.

I had never seen her with her hair down.

It fell past her shoulders in a dark red-brown mass, and I looked away from it, because looking was a mistake.

"You look dreadful," Lenore said.

"I said go back."

She did not go back.

She came up three more steps and sat down two stairs above me, with the candle between us on the stone.

She was close enough that I could hear her pulse.

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