It was fun at first. Being alone.

That was after I stopped being scared and confused. After I'd begun to accept that I was alone. I walked through the shops and department stores of town, sampled from kitchens at resteraunts, learnt how coffee shop coffee machines worked, took what I wanted from hardware stores, bookshops, toyshops. I read the magazines at W H Smiths at my leisure- even the ones on the top shelf I wasn't allowed to see. I bored of them pretty quickly though. They were mostly pictures.

For affew weeks, while the electricity remained, I watched DVD after endless DVD. I watched two 18's. The first I didn't understand- just a lot of grown ups hugging and kissing and smoking cigarettes, and an odd scene where they are sniffing at flour. The second, though, was full of blood and people dying. I only watched it halfway through and I nightmared vicously that night. After that I stuck to the children's films.

I also looked at the books. The book shop was next to the film shop in the shopping centre. I sat on the squishy pouffes in the children's section, and sometimes the grown up chairs further into the shop and poured over book after book, reading little, just looking at the words, the pictures, hearing the sound of pages turning and breathing in the scent of new paper. Sometimes I cracked the spines for no reason at all. Other than I could.

Like eating the expensive chocolate from the expensive chocolate shop on the upper mall. I pigged out, on my first night on the town. I tried some of everything, leaving boxes strewn over the floor. I liked the caramel slab best, the rum and raisin least.

At first it was fun.

Then the electricity went.

I stopped watching the DVD's, and the world suddenly became a lot colder. I shut the windows when I was at home and when I was in town, but the cold still leeched in somehow. I thought about lighting a fire, but the resources were in daddy's shed, and I was never allowed in there. Sometimes, when I slept in town, I made a bed out of many, many clothes from Debenhams, like a nest under the stationary escalators, and I would curl up in it and shiver myself to sleep. In the mornings I was always warmer. I read the books. I built a fort for myself out of useless DVD's in their cases, and chocolate boxes, around the nest. I felt like I was on an adventure, like Frodo, delivering the ring to mordor.

It was still fun.

Then the food started to go bad.

Starting with the ice cream. There was a shop for it near the chocolate place- and I had been saving it for last. I loved ice cream even more than chocolate. Even more than sweets. But when I finally gave in to temptation I found that it was reduced to warm gloopy liquid. Not fair! I ate(or drank) it anyway- so much my stomach started to ache.

Every morning I started with runny icecream, then chocolate, then drinks and Oreos from Costa. Sometimes I went to Pizza Express too. I didn't know how the ovens got hot but I ate the cheese and the ingrediants they had lined up. Sometimes I went to McDonalds, but the chips were nasty when they were cold. I went to Krispy Kreme too. Donuts. I loved them. I loved eating what I wanted, when I wanted. But then I started realizing, slowly, that the stomach ache wouldn't go away. Once, I had to dash out of my fort in the middle of the night, and sprint and feel my way to the toilets, far far away on the other side of the shopping centre. I vomited into a toilet, and flushed, but it wouldn't flush. The shopping centre was so scary in the pitch black. I sprinted back to my fort as quickly as I could. For a moment, there, I thought I heard whispers, murmurings without voices. I snuggled deep into my designer clothes bundle and wished, for once, that I was sleeping at home, in mummy and daddy's bed, where I could imagine I was nuzzled imbetween them as I slept. I couldn't imagine them here, because they would never sleep in the shopping centre. I vowed this adventure was over. Tommorrow night, I would sleep in the safety of my own house, that never whispered. Where all my before-things were.

So for a long time I walked the town by day, and slept in mummy and daddy's room by night, in the house that never whispered.

And it was still fun.

But then I started to hear the monsters.

And that was not fun at all.

I first heard them when it was getting dark, as I walked back from town to my house. They were voices, alright, whispering, invisible, scary voices. Monsters.

'Doctor', they said,' doctor…'

I looked around but there was no-one, because of course there was no-one, I was the only one left, but there were still the voices. They sounded like air. Like wind and how fear felt like. I ran all the way home and bolted the door and ran upstairs and got into mummy and daddy's bed and pulled the cover over my head and cried for my mum. Why wouldn't she come? Where was she? Where was daddy? Where were all my friends from school and my good teachers and my yucky teachers and all the lots and lots of people I didn't know?

Where had they gone?