FLOOD

A Sudden Darkness

After the sarcastic guy (that’s what I decided to call him) left, nobody else came. I yelled and screamed until I was hoarse, but nobody answered. My fists were sore and red from beating them on the sides of the Plexiglas, but it didn’t so much as make a scratch in the smooth surface. Eventually I settled on sitting at the edge of the box, pressing my nose to the plastic, trying to see through the murky surface to the boxes on the shelf opposite me.

There was something in the other boxes, I could see the dark outlines, and I knew that at least one of them held something alive, since I could see the shape shift from time to time. So why had no one answered me? Couldn’t they hear me through their cages?

Minutes passed, or maybe it was hours. It was impossible to tell. Time seemed to stretch out into something impossibly long. Was it day outside still?

I half wished I’d been carrying something on me to tell the time. Jotun didn’t usually carry watches, we could simply look up at the sky and see the time, or glance over at one of the sundials in the garden. Technology never did very well in Jotunheim, it tended to fail. But now I would give anything for a clock. Just to watch the minutes tick by, just to see that I wasn’t frozen here, stuck in time while the world passed by outside.

There was a loud clicking sound, and I jumped as my cage was plunged into darkness.

“Hey! Hello?”

Nothing. No answer. No sound.

Maybe the lights were on an automatic timer. Maybe there was no one here at all, and the sarcastic guy had gone home for the night. I think even he would have been good company right about then, I was feeling desperate.

Finally I curled up in the corner, hugging my knees to my chest. Was I supposed to sleep without a mattress? Without a blanket or a pillow?

The darkness pressed in around me, and I shut my eyes, trying to pretend I was back home, in my room in the servant’s quarters. Picturing it helped. My small bed with the hand sewn sheets, made by my mother. The little rock salt lantern that burned orange on my bedside table, making the tiny room look warm and inviting. My books were always there, stacked on the set of shelves above my bed, waiting for me to crawl between the sheets and read until I fell asleep.

What was my mother thinking now? Would she sound the alarm? Would she send the warriors out to look for me? I was just a servant, so it was unlikely the king’s guards would be out there scanning the woods, but maybe a few of the common guards would arrange a manhunt. It had been hundreds of years since the forest had taken one of the Jotun, we were good at avoiding deadly wildlife, and we knew where to step to avoid landslides and swamps. So what would they think had got to me? Certainly not the wolves, we had a treaty.

Thinking about the wolves made me wonder about Fiske and Kalda. Where were they now? I’d yelled for Kalda repeatedly, until my throat was sore. I was sure that if she’d been able to answer she would of. I tried to push the thought aside. She was probably just in another oom. Who knew how many rooms of these crates there were. The idea was chilling. Were the crates all full of people? Maybe there were Jotun in all of them?

No, that was impossible. We would have noticed if that many of us had disappeared. There weren’t enough of us that we wouldn’t notice “misplacing” a few hundred. The idea was ridiculous.