No idea where this is going, but...
Jesse tried not to get caught outside the Fence after dark. The monsters didn’t bother him, but the audience sometimes got on his nerves.
Any time he returned from an outing that had kept him out past dusk you could bet that the younger children would be peering out from their dormitories, talking in hushed voices, until one gathered the nerve to come up to him and ask him how he did it.
“I just don’t get eaten,” he told them. “Simple, really.”
But they kept on asking.
Other children who stayed out when the mists and the rimblyshivers crept over the city and up to the Fence were never heard from again. Some were gobbled up by the monsters of the night, and some just got pulled in by the rimblyshivers and never came up topside after that, and some left bits of what they’d been carrying behind but none of the creatures or people who walked in the daylight could say what happened to the rest of them.
Jesse didn’t think it was that scary. He told the children, when they asked, that yes, the rimblyshivers really seemed to cover all the ground at once, and that they tickled his ankles. He told them that the things that go bump in the night could be very large indeed, some as high as buildings, but they snuffled at him and let him pass if their paths happened to cross with his. He told them the mists were mostly just sticky-clingy, like a soaked shirt on a summer day.
And then, some Tuesday or other when his errands ran late - for the older boys always had errands to run in the city - Jesse would get caught out late again, and would use his big key in the Fence’s gate, and would shake the last clinging rimblyshiver off his sneakers, and then he would close up and go inside and pass all the whispering children down the hall on the way to bed.
It was simple, really.
Any time he returned from an outing that had kept him out past dusk you could bet that the younger children would be peering out from their dormitories, talking in hushed voices, until one gathered the nerve to come up to him and ask him how he did it.
“I just don’t get eaten,” he told them. “Simple, really.”
But they kept on asking.
Other children who stayed out when the mists and the rimblyshivers crept over the city and up to the Fence were never heard from again. Some were gobbled up by the monsters of the night, and some just got pulled in by the rimblyshivers and never came up topside after that, and some left bits of what they’d been carrying behind but none of the creatures or people who walked in the daylight could say what happened to the rest of them.
Jesse didn’t think it was that scary. He told the children, when they asked, that yes, the rimblyshivers really seemed to cover all the ground at once, and that they tickled his ankles. He told them that the things that go bump in the night could be very large indeed, some as high as buildings, but they snuffled at him and let him pass if their paths happened to cross with his. He told them the mists were mostly just sticky-clingy, like a soaked shirt on a summer day.
And then, some Tuesday or other when his errands ran late - for the older boys always had errands to run in the city - Jesse would get caught out late again, and would use his big key in the Fence’s gate, and would shake the last clinging rimblyshiver off his sneakers, and then he would close up and go inside and pass all the whispering children down the hall on the way to bed.
It was simple, really.