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across his white shirt!
    Keep your eyes on those gifts
, Truman heard his grandmother’s voice repeat in his head.
Keep your eyes on them!

CHAPTER SEVEN
Into the Cold, Dark Night
    Truman couldn’t sleep that night. The room shifted with strange shadows, and the narrow bed squeaked every time he moved. He lay on his side and stared at his snow globe sitting on the bedside table. Even now, just sitting there, it shimmered. Had the woman in the hooded cloak stabbed the man on the ground? What kind of grandmother gives a snow globe like that as a gift?
My grandmother
, Truman thought.
    Camille was having no trouble at all sleeping. She was even snoring a little, cradling her snow globe like a football.
    Truman always had trouble falling asleep. When he closed his eyes, his mind would be flooded with strange creatures—roaring, clawing, creeping, pouncing. His father called his imagination his blessing and his curse. But it seemed like just a curse to Truman.
    In addition to the strange room with its strange noises and shadows and the eerie image in the snow globe, Truman was being kept up by his stomach. It was gurgling. He wasn’tsure how it was possible, but he was hungry. And he’d just eaten more than he ever had in his entire life!
    As he tossed and turned, he only felt hungrier and hungrier. Eventually, at some point after midnight, it dawned on him that he hadn’t really
eaten
dinner. He’d
tasted
it! It had been a
tasting
tale! There were tons of food left over too, in all those containers. He put on his glasses, kicked off his blanket, and decided to go downstairs for a late-night snack.
    He took the snow globe with him. He could stare at it while he ate—maybe he’d see something that made sense. He wanted desperately to connect the snow globe to the story Swelda had told.
    He tiptoed out into the hallway and passed Swelda’s shut door. He could hear her snoring too, loudly. He was glad she was asleep. He was embarrassed by his pajamas—blue flannel with red buttons. Who had buttons on their pajamas anymore?
    He ran his hand along the water-stained wallpaper—the dragonlike Chinese fighting dog—as he went down the stairs. The living room was dark, but he could see the dim shapes of the furniture, as well as the hall tree standing quietly by the door. It looked a bit drier than it had the day before.
    When he stepped into the kitchen, he felt the wall for a light switch. He patted the spot where the light switch was at home, but there was nothing. He patted a bit more. Still nothing. And then, as if by magic, the overhead lights shone bright.
    And there, claws gripped to the back of a chair, was Grossbeak. His perch was mounted on the wall right next to a light switch. The wall had a long, wide crack running allthe way to the ceiling. Truman didn’t remember seeing it when he’d been in the kitchen the day before. Was it possible he hadn’t noticed a crack that big? Did it just appear, like a crack shooting through the ice on a frozen lake?
    Truman looked at the crack and then the light switch and then the parrot. “Did you turn the lights on?” Truman asked, imagining him pecking it with his fat, curved beak.
    Grossbeak bobbed his head.
    “Did you just nod at me?” Truman asked.
    Grossbeak bobbed his head again.
    “You’re a smart bird, aren’t you?”
    “Parrot, knucklehead!” Grossbeak squawked, correcting him.
    “You know it’s not nice to call people knucklehead, right?”
    Grossbeak bobbed his head. He knew all right. And then he added, “Knucklehead!”
    Truman gave him a dirty look and walked to the fridge. He opened the door. The containers were stacked everywhere. Truman was delighted. He recalled, immediately, the tastes of the different foods, and with each remembered taste, a bit of the story swirled within him too. He remembered the strange dizziness of the tale, the way it felt inside him. He wanted that feeling back again.
    And he realized that he wasn’t hungry for the