More Than This by Patrick Ness Read Free Book Online Page A

plant life in this place, all these weeds and ridiculous grasses, all growing completely out of control and unchecked, like down here in this really quite huge hole.
    So you’d think there’d be –
    And before he can even think the word
animals,
he sees the fox.
    It’s frozen there, down at the bottom, tucked in amongst the weeds, its eyes bright and surprised in the morning sun.
    A fox.
    A real, live,
living
fox.
    It blinks at him, alert, but not quite afraid, not yet.
    “What the hell?” Seth whispers.
    There’s a small bark, and three baby foxes – pups? No,
kits,
he remembers – climb playfully over their mother, before freezing, too, when they see Seth standing there above them.
    They wait and watch, looking ready to run, ready to respond to whatever Seth does next. Seth wonders what he’ll do next, too. Wonders also at the reddish brown faces and the bright staring eyes of the creatures. Wonders what they mean.
    It’s a long time before he moves away from the sinkhole, but the fox and her kits never stop staring at him, even as he heads back up the street.
    Foxes,
he thinks.
Actual foxes.
    At the very moment he thought about them.
    Almost as if he’d called them into being himself.
    He hurries up toward the High Street now, his head still down, eyes glancing around even more suspiciously. Every moment, he expects something to come jumping out of the bushes, out of the unkempt lawns or weedy cracks in the pavement.
    But nothing does.
    He feels himself tiring again, quickly, too quickly, and when he reaches the High Street, he almost collapses on a nearby bench, panting from the effort of walking up a short hill.
    It makes him angry. He spent three years on the cross-country team at Boswell High, the hobby and habit of running having been picked up from his mother, something that should have brought them closer together but had somehow not. Granted, he wasn’t a particularly serious competitor, Boswell regularly got beaten quite badly, but still. There’s no way he should be out of breath walking up one stupid road.
    He looks around. The High Street is really just a long, skinny town square, blocked off at each end by metal posts. His mother would shop here with him and Owen when every square inch was covered in stalls selling sugared almonds and popcorn; homemade candles and bracelets that were meant to cure arthritis; ethnic clocks and paintings even toddler Owen thought were ugly.
    There’s nothing here now. It’s a vast, empty space, with the now-familiar proliferation of weeds and abandoned-looking buildings lining either side, just like any other street.
    Seth waits a moment before getting up from the bench.
    He didn’t create the fox. He
didn’t.
It was just hidden there in the weeds, and he saw it, that was all. He’s thought of plenty of things since he’s been here, his parents and Owen, Gudmund and H and Monica, even his uncle when he saw the painting over the hearth, and none of
them
had suddenly appeared.
    There were wild plants, and this seemed for all intents and purposes to be England, so why wouldn’t there be foxes? Foxes were English. He remembers seeing them when he lived here, sloping across the street with their oddly adult air of detachment. So of course, there’d be foxes. Why not?
    But foxes had to eat. Seth’s eyes pore over the trees that grow from brick boxes up the High Street, looking for birds, maybe, or squirrels or rats. They must be there. If one fox was here, there had to be more animals, more
something.
    Didn’t there? If he just didn’t actually
create
–
    “Hey,” he says, stopping this line of thought but feeling unsatisfied.
    “Hey,” he says again, not sure why he’s saying it, wanting to say it once more.
    And louder this time.
    “Hey!” he says, standing up.
    “HEY!”
    He shouts it again and again, his fists clenched, his throat raking from the effort. He keeps screaming until he’s hoarse, until his voice actually breaks.
    It’s only then that