CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Freya returned many times to the study in the Vicarage. How could she not, knowing what was written within? The honesty that she found in those pages, however horrid, was nourishing. Mostly, it seemed to satisfy her hunger, or distract her from it, where it might otherwise have consumed her.
Some diaries, as Ms. Andrews’s, were confessional. She read tear-stained accounts of feeding frenzies beneath the trees; residents racing through the Forest, converging like a pack of hounds on their human quarry. She read of panicked breaths, of lingering tastes in the mouth and the winter of ’42, when the hunger claimed an entire train as it pulled into the village station. After that year the line fell into disuse. The carriages themselves were dissembled. Melted down. The metal,
