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They let Nim go at 3:30 a.m., waving her briskly past the same ambulance they loaded Veruca’s bag-clad body into. And there, beyond the yellow tape, she finds Tom Darbersmere waiting for her.

“Your friend…” he begins. “…The girl with the glasses, same one who came up to me, ‘round midnight?”

“Her name’s Veruca,” Nim finds herself telling him, mouth suddenly too numb to quite form every syllable. A fact he doesn’t really seem to notice, observing only:

“Veruca: Was it really. How absolutely marvellous.”

A statement, not a question, odd to the point of insult. It stings enough to make her look up, into his eyes—

—where she does see sympathy, of a kind. But only like a shallow sheen: all surface, china-cerulean, pale and dry and faded. And not young, when you come to look at them this closely—in no fucking way young, not at all. Not even a little, tiny bit.

“My dear,” Tom Darbersmere says, pressing her hot hand between his two smooth, cool, dry ones, “I am so very sorry for your loss.”

Sorrowful and civil, utterly archaic. And so much like Veruca’s treasured imitation of his late uncle, it brings sick to Nim’s mouth. Something burning in her nose, behind her teeth, choking her. Something deep down in her gut and lower still, sinking to where it makes her groin ache and her muscles flex, burning, burning, burning to cut and run.

(“He’s exactly the damn same...”

Who, Veruca?

“...im...”)

Him: Tom. Or, rather—

—Tim.

(The not-so-Late.)

With Alicia—Ellis, Iseland—standing right behind him, at a middle distance, puffing away. Her smoke-coloured eyes boring into Nim, slow-motion bullets. As though she thinks if she just does it long enough, she’ll be able to read Nim’s address off her DNA.

And: “Thanks,” Nim husks, at last, dropping his hand like it’s radioactive. Before running off into the night, away from the Speed of Pain, never (hopefully) to return.

Later, she’s over half the way home, sitting on the Vomit Comet with tears running down both cheeks—unsought, unstemmed—before she feels the edge of it touch her thigh as she shifts, and realizes she still has the only known copy of that nonexistent fucking book of his right there in her purse.

Thinking: Something needs to come of this. This needs to come to something. Bite your ass. Bite both your asses, you lying, dream-killing, kid-eating, unspeakable fucking, fucking…

Thinking: Because Veruca’s dead, and that thing, it’s dead too. But you’re alive, still.

You always will be.

Thinking, thinking, thinking: Nothing relevant, not really, aside from the dreadful half-sob that racks her now from head to toe, epileptic. Because it’s late, and she’s tired, more tired than she’s ever been in her life. Because her only friend in the world is gone, and—stupid fixations, obsessive eccentricities, annoying vocal inflections aside—the world she has to live in now, alone, is oh so much the poorer for it.

Nim hugs “The Emperor’s old Bones” to her chest with both arms, tight like she gave birth to it, and shuts her eyes once more, knowing she’ll have to keep moving now, but not knowing for exactly how long. Certain she won’t sleep ‘til dawn, at least. Or, maybe—

—ever again.

Formerly a film critic, journalist, screenwriter and teacher, Gemma Files has been an award-winning horror author since 1999. She has published two collections of short work (Kissing Carrion and The Worm in Every Heart), two chap-books of speculative poetry, a Weird Western trilogy (the Hexslinger series—A Book of Tongues, A Rope of Thorns and A Tree of Bones), a story-cycle (We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven) and a stand-alone novel (Experimental Film, which won the 2016 Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel and the 2016 Sunburst award for Best Adult Novel). All her works are available through ChiZine Productions. Her novella, Coffle, was just published by Dim Shores, with art by Stephen Wilson. She has two upcoming story collections from Trepidatio Publishing (Spectral Evidence and Drawn Up From Deep Places), and one from Cemetery Dance.