Chapter 15: Not Sold in Stores (Patreon)

I. Two in the Morning

He moved.

I'd seen him move in two movies and taken it apart frame by frame in a video I made in another life, and none of it had prepared me. In the movies, Chucky moves like a puppet with somebody good on the strings: jerky, fast for a doll, scary because a doll shouldn't move at all. This was something else.

My father took one step toward the tree with the bat, and the box under the tree exploded. Red paper and cardboard and cellophane burst apart all at once, like something had gone off inside it, and the doll was out and across the room and on the back of the couch between one blink and the next. I didn't see him cross the carpet. I don't think anybody could have. There was the box coming apart, and then the Good Guy crouched on the back of my parents' couch, three feet from my mother, little plastic hands on the cushion, looking at her.

My mother screamed again, and my father swung.

He swung the way he'd swung at a softball in 1979, level and hard from the hips, at the doll on the back of the couch, and the doll put up one hand without even looking, like catching a tossed set of keys, and caught the bat. Caught it and stopped it dead—thirty-four ounces of Louisville Slugger at full swing from a grown man, and the little plastic hand closed on the barrel and it just stopped, like it had hit a wall. My father's whole body jerked forward with it. His glasses fell off.

Then the hand squeezed. The bat cracked. Ash wood. I heard it go, a long, dry, splitting sound like a branch in an ice storm, and the barrel split down the grain under those little fingers, splinters coming out between them.

"Easy, Ted," said Charles Lee Ray pleasantly. "Easy. Let's everybody take a breath."

My father stood holding the handle of a split bat, staring at the doll on the back of his couch.

"See, now you're all up," said the doll, "and it's two in the morning, and everybody's yellin', and somebody's gonna get hurt. And it ain't gonna be me." He let go of the bat, and it fell on the cushion in two pieces. He looked at my mother, backed against the bookshelf with both hands over her mouth. "Ma'am. Diane, right? I'm real sorry about the paper. I used the good stuff."

I had the spear.

I don't remember calling it. It was in my hand, low, in guard, the way Polearm Mastery had put it into my feet, cold and black and reflecting nothing. The air around the point went cold. Frost crept out from it across the hardwood at the edge of the carpet in a little fan, and the frost went black.

The doll stopped talking. Its head turned slowly, the way a dog's head turns when its name is said by somebody it's afraid of, and the big blue eyes went to the spear and stayed there. The plastic didn't move, but I'd spent five weeks reading the faces of people who were lying to me, and I knew what I was looking at: a man who'd just smelled something he'd never smelled before.

"...What," said Charles Lee Ray, very low, "is that?"

I didn't answer.

"That stinks," said the doll. One little hand had gone to the bib pocket of its overalls, holding something in there. "That stinks like... like sulfur. Like somethin' burnin' at the bottom of a hole, a long way down." A pause. "That stinks like Hell, kid. And I been closer than most." His voice had gone flat. "What is that? Where'd you get that?"

I didn't know. That was the truth. I knew what the card said, from the morning I pulled it in an ambulance with Billy's blood on the floor: extra damage to holy and divine beings. I'd figured this world didn't have anything like that, or that if it did, they'd be the good guys. But Charles Lee Ray didn't get his power from being a ghost. He got it from somebody—a god, if you wanted to call it that, an old one from Haiti, whose name he'd said in a toy store in Chicago in 1988 with a bullet in him. Divine, I thought. A spear made to hurt gods. To something running on a god's power, it would smell like the other side. Oh. Oh, you're scared.

"Get off the couch," I said.

The doll looked at the spear. At the black frost on the floor. At my father with the broken bat. At my mother against the books. At Martha in the doorway, who hadn't moved, who was gripping the door frame so hard her knuckles were white and staring at him with her chin up. He looked at all four of us, and I watched him count. You've never been here before, have you? In two movies and eight years, you've never once been in a room where everybody believed the kid.

"...Okay," said Charles Lee Ray. "Okay, okay, okay." He put both hands up, little plastic palms out. "I'm a reasonable guy. I can read a table. Bad hand." He hopped down off the couch onto the carpet, light as a cat, and stood there two and a half feet tall in his overalls and striped shirt, hands up, red yarn hair sticking out where the box had come apart around him. "I'm folding," he said.

And he went—away from us. I saw his weight shift a quarter second before he moved, the way a dog's back legs bunch, and I knew, the way you know a car is going to run the light. He skipped the door and the hall and went for the tall side window behind the tree, looking out on the side yard and the Abernathys' fence, black, with seven feet of Christmas lights reflected in it.

I threw the spear. I didn't decide to. Polearm Mastery did, and Battle Maniac did, and my arm did, all at once, from the guard, like throwing a javelin somebody had taught you in a dream. Everything I had went down my arm and out through my fingers. It was the best throw I'd ever made, and it went through the place where he'd been.

He was already in the tree. He went through it like a cat through a hedge, and the whole tree rocked on its stand, the lights swung, and the glass pickle came off its branch and burst on the hardwood. The spear came after him a quarter second late, black and cold and humming, through the branches, through the space where his head had been. Then the window went. The whole tall pane came apart outward into the dark in the colored light, with a sound like somebody dropping a tray of glasses down a flight of stairs. He went out through the middle of it into the night, my spear went out through the hole after him, and I felt it hit nothing out there in the rain, come apart, and go back to wherever they go.

Cold, wet air came in through the hole, with the sound of rain, and from somewhere out in the dark, in the side yard, very close, came a voice, unhurried, not even out of breath.

"Too slow, sport," said Charles Lee Ray. "Don't feel bad. I'm a little faster than I used to be."

He laughed, and the laugh moved away along the fence toward the back of the yard and the Abernathys', and the rain came down over it, and it was gone.

I was at the window before I knew I'd moved.

Glass under my socks. I didn't feel it. I had my left hand on the frame, on the broken teeth of glass still stuck in it, and didn't feel that either. I was leaning out into the rain with the spear coming back into my right hand, cold and ready, looking, and there was nothing to see.

The motion light over the garage hadn't come on; maybe it didn't register things that small, or maybe he'd gone the other way, under it, along the wall. The side yard was black—wet black grass, the black shapes of Mom's roses cut back for winter, the fence, and the rain slanting silver through the light from our own Christmas tree behind me—and then nothing. The Abernathys' house was dark. The street was dark. Somewhere a gutter was running. It was forty degrees and pouring at two-thirty in the morning, and he was out there, somewhere close in the dark, two and a half feet tall and faster than anything I'd ever seen.

Go, said the second heartbeat.

It came up out of my chest like a dog off a leash. Go. He's right there. He's small and he's wet and he's close, and he's running, and things that run can be caught. Go over the sill. Go now. GO.

I had one foot on the sill. I don't remember putting it there.

And behind me I heard my sister breathing. That was all, no words—just Martha in the hall doorway, breathing the way you do after you've been screaming and stopped. And my mother by the bookshelf with both hands still over her mouth. And my father in the middle of the living room in his robe, holding the handle of a bat that wasn't a bat anymore.

I thought it all the way through. It took about a second and a half, which is how long the important ones always take.

I had socks on and a T-shirt. A spear I'd just thrown at him from eight feet with everything I had, and missed. Truth Assertion at my throat, worth exactly nothing in a dark yard. Morbing in storage, five minutes away. He could see in the dark—I'd seen his eyes, and they weren't really plastic anymore. And he hadn't run because he was losing. He'd counted four of us and a spear he didn't understand, and he'd chosen the dark and the rain and the cold, because those were his. And he'd folded. He'd said he was folding. I'd watched a lot of guys fold in a lot of card games, in barracks and break rooms, and the ones who said it out loud had already decided which hand they'd play next.

If I went over that sill, I'd be chasing something faster than me through the dark and rain into a yard he'd already picked. He wouldn't even have to fight me. He'd just have to go around—around the garage, around the house, back to this window ten seconds behind me—and it would be my mother and my sister and my father, and half a bat.

That's the play, I thought. That's the whole play. He wants me to go out.

Go, said the second heartbeat. GO.

I took my foot off the sill.

It was one of the hardest things I've ever done, harder than the lawn at Stu's, harder than the boiler room. My whole body was leaning out into the rain after him, and I stood in the glass and pulled it back in by hand an inch at a time, like a man hauling in a rope with something big on the end.

My father's hand came down on my shoulder. He didn't say anything. He put it there and left it, the way he had in the hospital in October, and after a while I let the spear go. It went out of my hand like breath off a window, and the frost it had left on the sill faded from black to white to wet.

Feat Achieved! Let him go+1× Bronze Trait Gacha Ticket(Story in progress. Ticket held.)

You pay for that? I thought, standing in broken glass with rain on my face. For staying? The panel didn't answer. It never does.

We closed it up together, my father and I. He came back from the garage with a flattened moving carton from the summer we painted the den, a roll of duct tape, and the shop vac, and I held the cardboard over the hole while he taped it, one strip at a time—top, bottom, sides, diagonals—carefully, the way he did everything, like it would be inspected. My mother went through the house with Martha turning on every light: the porch light, the closets, the lamp in the guest room nobody had used since Grandma. I could hear them going room to room checking locks. Click. Click. Martha saying this one's good every time in a small, flat voice.

My father pressed the last strip flat with his thumb. Rain ticked against the cardboard from the other side.

I was looking at the tree: the neat round tunnel the spear had made through the branches, the needles around it gone gray and dead, and the glass pickle in pieces on the floor. I'm a little faster than I used to be.

"Fuck," I said out loud. "I should've taken the comics into consideration."

My father looked at me. He didn't say anything about the language; it was two-forty in the morning and his living room window was a moving carton. "The what?"

"Nothing," I said. "Later. I'll tell you later."

Because there were comics. Of course there were. There are always comics.

That was the stupid part: I hadn't forgotten them. I'd read them, in the life before this one, out of a long box in a comic shop in Sacramento. Innovation did a Child's Play series in '91, the doll back for more after the second movie. In 2007 Devil's Due put out a Chucky book that nobody in this world would ever draw, a doll that hit harder, moved faster, and took more punishment than Don Mancini ever had the budget to put on a screen. That's what comics are. Nobody pays for the effects. A doll can do whatever the page needs. I'd known all that. I'd just never put it in the same drawer as real.

Since the first morning, somewhere in the back of my head, I'd been treating this world like the horror section at Bradley Video. The movies were canon—what was real, what counted, what I'd have to deal with—and everything else, the comics, the novelizations, the tie-in books, the stuff on the 7-Eleven spinner rack, was merchandise, like the lunchbox or the Halloween mask. I never asked why. Nobody had told me the multiverse only counted things with a runtime. I just assumed it, because I was a movie guy, because the movies were what I'd watched a hundred times and taken apart on camera and knew backward, and it felt better to believe the answer key was the one I'd already studied.

Twenty minutes ago I'd watched him catch my father's swing like a set of keys and told myself right then that nothing in the movies had prepared me for how he moved, and it still hadn't clicked. It took a doll stepping out of the way of the best throw of my life, and telling me, for it to click.

Then I thought about Freddy and had to sit down on the arm of the couch.

Marvel did a Freddy magazine in '89. Innovation did a whole run, Nightmares on Elm Street, the same year as the Child's Play one. Later there was more, a lot more—a Freddy who went looking for the Necronomicon, a Freddy with bigger plans and more pages than any movie ever gave him. Comic Freddy. Freddy with no budget. And I'd gone into Springwood like it was the third movie, like I knew the rules because I'd seen them on a screen a hundred times. I'd walked into a dream demon's house with a remote control and a list of what he did in Dream Warriors, and I'd been proud of it. I'd called myself the guy who knew the plot. I'd memorized the box art and treated the worst thing I'd ever fought like a VHS tape whose ending I'd already seen, and I never once asked which Freddy we'd gotten.

I'd written it myself the first morning after the gold door: We rolled the one answer on the test and we didn't even study. I'd thought that was the worst line on the list, and it turned out the worst part was not even knowing how many tests there were. If the Freddy in Kristen's house had come from the back half of the long box instead of the movie, everybody we'd brought into that house—every kid and every grown-up and a skinny kid with a remote—wouldn't have been enough, and I'd have walked them all in anyway, smiling, with the answer key to the wrong test. He'd been the soft one. I'd called him the soft one. I hadn't known how lucky we were to get the soft one. And he wasn't dead. He doesn't die. He just waits until somebody remembers him.

I wrote it down later, at the kitchen table at five in the morning while my mother made the third pot, under WHAT WORKS ON WHAT, in shaky letters:

COMICS COUNT. ✎Tie-ins too. Novels. Games? ASSUME EVERYTHING.Which Chucky did we get? (The fast one.)Which Freddy did we get???

I underlined the last line three times. But that was later. Right then I just sat on the arm of the couch with every light in the house on, looking at the cardboard, listening to the rain on the other side of it.

My father put the duct tape down on the coffee table. He looked at the cardboard, at the tree, at the collar still glowing faintly at my throat, and at me.

"The kitchen," said Ted Meeks. "I'll make coffee. Nobody's sleeping anyway."

II. When I Get Back

The Meeks kitchen. Monday, December 9, 1996, 2:50 a.m. – 6:15 a.m.

I let the collar go before I sat down.

I did it on purpose. I stood in the kitchen doorway and opened the panel in front of them, though they couldn't see it, and let Truth Assertion sit in its slot, quiet—you can't turn a slotted ability off, but you can stop leaning on it. The glow went out of my throat, and the kitchen was just a kitchen: the light over the stove, the coffee maker gurgling, the clock on the wall saying 2:51.

"I used it for him," I said. "For the doll. Because there wasn't time to do it any other way, and because he's the kind of thing where if you don't believe me right away, you never get the chance to." I sat down at the table. "For the rest of it, I'm not going to. I want you to hear it and decide. You can decide I'm crazy. That's allowed."

"Randy," said my mother. "A doll just went out through my window."

"Yeah."

"I don't think crazy is on the table anymore, honey."

I'd been thinking about this conversation for three months.

In the hospital with my shoulder in a sling. On a plane to Ohio and on the plane back. Every time Martha said I can't tell you that one back to me like a password, and every time my mother looked at me across the dinner table with that small, careful, worried line between her eyebrows. I'd worked out what I'd say and how much and what I couldn't say a hundred ways, and in every one of them I'd decided not to. Because once you say it you can't take it back. Because I was pretty sure there were people out there who'd very much like to know who in Woodsboro knew what I was. Because my mother had already lost a son once, in a way, whether she knew it or not, and I didn't know how to tell her that, and wasn't going to.

And now there was a doll loose in the rain with my sister's name on him, and none of that mattered.

I told them the parts I could. I told them something had happened to me in the fall, around the time of the murders—something I couldn't explain, because I didn't understand it myself and wasn't sure there was a way to explain it. It had given me things, abilities. I could do things now that people shouldn't be able to do. And I told them it came with a price.

"The price is that I see," I said. "That's the best way I can put it. Something opened my eyes. To... to how things really are. There are things out there. In the world. Real things. The kind of things I used to rent from Bradley Video and watch in the den on Friday nights and laugh at. The ones you told me would rot my brain, Mom."

"I said that once."

"You said it every Friday."

"I said it most Fridays," said my mother faintly.

"They're real," I said. "Not the movies. The movies are... the movies get things wrong, and right, and wrong again. But the things the movies were about. Those are real. And they act like the movies. That's the part I can't explain. They follow rules. The same rules. If it's a doll, it acts like a doll from a movie. If it's a dream, it acts like a dream from a movie. If it's a guy in a mask with a knife—" I stopped. My mother had flinched. "They follow the rules. And I know the rules. Because I watched all of them, more than anybody, my whole life. And now they keep... finding me."

"Finding you," said my father.

"Woodsboro. Then Springwood. Then him." I looked toward the living room and the cardboard. "They find me. I don't know if it's because of what happened to me, or if it's the other way around. I don't know if they're coming because I can see them. I just know that every time, it's a little worse. And every time, I have to be a little stronger than I was the last time." I looked down at the table. "Or one of them gets here. To you. And I'm not strong enough."

Nobody said anything for a while. The coffee maker finished with a long gurgle and a hiss, and nobody got up.

"Show us," said Martha.

I showed them what I could.

I called the Devas down from my room—not out loud; I just thought it, the way I always did—and a minute later I heard them on the stairs, a soft, quick patter like rain on a roof. Four hamsters in scarves came across the kitchen floor in a line, Maga-Z in front and Cham-P bringing up the rear with Jum-P riding on his back, asleep. They went up the table leg one after another like they'd done it all their lives, stood in a row on the placemats in front of me, and waited.

"Right," I said. "Present."

They did, all four at once, Jum-P included, who woke up for it: up on their hind legs in a row, little paws to their heads. A salute.

My mother put her coffee cup down very slowly.

"I KNEW it," said Martha, fierce rather than loud. "I knew it. I told you. I told you they weren't normal. Since November. I said it at dinner. I said Randy, why does Maga-Z keep getting OUT, and you said hamsters are escape artists." She pointed at me across the table. "Escape artists!"

"They're very good escape artists."

"They SALUTE."

"Dismissed," I said. They dropped back to all fours, crossed the table, and sat down in a pile in front of Martha. San-D climbed into her lap, and Martha, still glaring at me, put her hand on her.

I called the spear again, slowly this time, so they could watch. I held my right hand out over the kitchen table palm up and let it come the way it came, out of nothing into my hand, cold and black and as long as a broom handle, reflecting nothing. The light over the stove didn't touch it. Frost spread across the tabletop from where the shaft rested, white and then black, creeping toward the sugar bowl, and my father picked up the sugar bowl and moved it.

I let it go. It went out of my hand like breath off a window, and the black frost faded to white, then to wet, then to nothing.

Then I reached behind my left shoulder, into the place where things went that I wasn't holding, and took out the cane—Brook's cane, Soul Solid, black and slim and silver-topped, with a little skull on the handle. Extremely sharp and extremely durable and extremely dapper, the card had said in the ambulance. I hadn't taken it out in front of anybody but Martha since October. I laid it on the table between the coffee cups.

My mother looked at it a long while. "That's a nice cane," she said finally, in a very small voice.

"There's a sword in it."

"Of course there is," said my mother, and started to laugh, and the laugh went sideways in the middle and turned into something else, and my father put his arm around her, and she put her face in his shoulder and stayed there.

"Why you?" she said after a while. She'd lifted her face, and her eyes were red. "Randy. Honey. Of all the... why you?"

I'd thought about that one a hundred times too. "I don't know," I said. "Honestly. I don't." I looked at her. "But I'd rather it found me than you. Or Dad. Or Martha. If it had to find somebody. I'd rather it was me."

My mother closed her eyes.

My father sat motionless at the end of the table with his arm around her, looking at the cane. Then he looked up at me, and his face was one I didn't know—not the flat-tire face, not the IRS face, something older, something that had been at a softball game in 1979, in a delivery room twice, and in a hospital in Woodsboro in October, standing by my bed.

"Okay," said my father. "Okay. This is how this is going to go."

I waited.

"Rule one," said Ted Meeks. "No lies. Not to us. Not anymore. Not about where you are, and not about what you're doing, and not about whether you're okay. You don't have to tell us everything. I understand that. I think I understand that. There's going to be things you can't tell us." He held my eyes. "So you say that. You say I can't tell you that. And we'll take it. Your mother and I will take it. But you don't lie to us. Not once. Not ever again."

"Okay."

"Rule two. You tell us before you go. If one of these things finds you, and you have to go somewhere, do something, you tell us. Before. Not after. Not with a note under the sugar bowl." He glanced at my mother—so she'd told him about the note from Ohio; of course she had. "I don't care if it's two in the morning. You wake me up and you tell me."

"Okay."

"And rule three." His voice didn't change, but something under it did. "Whatever it is. Whatever's out there. Whatever finds you. You come back."

The kitchen was silent.

"Whatever it is," I said. "I come back."

"Say it again."

"Whatever it is, I come back."

My father nodded once. Then he picked up his coffee, drank, made a face because it had gone cold, and put it down. "Okay," he said. "Then we're going to need more coffee."

For most of it, Martha didn't say much. She sat with San-D in her lap and the other three piled against her hip, listening and watching my face the way she had every time I'd said I can't tell you that one, doing math. Around four, while Dad made the second pot, she said:

"Is that why you run? At five?"

"Yeah."

"And the garage? The pull-up bar? The thing with the bucket by the creek?"

"Yeah."

"And Ohio. The real reason for Ohio."

"I can't tell you that," I said. And then, because it was the first time and it mattered: "Yet."

Martha considered that and nodded slowly. "That's allowed," she said. "That's the rule now." Then, after a moment, softly, looking at the hamsters: "He said he'd be my friend."

"I know, Mart."

"I wanted him to be. I wanted it so bad. All week. Since the commercial." Her voice held, mostly. "If you hadn't... if you'd just said don't touch it, I would've. I would've touched it. When you weren't looking." She looked at me. "I'd have opened it, and he'd have said hi, and he'd have been nice, and I'd have hidden him from you. Wouldn't I."

"Maybe."

"I would have," said my sister with absolute, merciless honesty. "That's what I'd have done. I'd have thought you were being weird again." She looked down at San-D, who was looking up at her. "And then he'd have used me. Like you said."

Nothing I could have said would have been both true and comforting, so I kept quiet.

"Okay," said Martha finally. "Okay. Then I'm going to help."

"Mart—"

"I'm going to help," said Martha Meeks. She looked at our father, standing at the coffee maker with the pot in his hand, and our mother at the table with her red eyes, and then back at me. "He came in through my name. He wrapped himself in our paper. He put my name on the tag." Her chin came up. "So I'm going to help."

My father looked at her. "Okay, kiddo," said Ted Meeks. "You can help."

At six-fifteen, with the sky going gray in the kitchen window and the third pot of coffee mostly gone, my mother asked the question I'd been waiting for since three.

"Can you kill it?" she said. "Honey. That thing. Can you actually kill it?"

"Yes," I said.

It came out faster than I meant it to; it had been sitting in me since two-thirty, at the window, with the rain on my face. They looked at me.

"He's not a ghost," I said. "He's not something that comes back because that's the rule. He's a man in a doll. And the doll's a doll. You break it badly enough, he's dead." I turned my cup on the table. "He can't jump when you kill him. That's the thing everybody gets wrong. When the cop shot him in 1988, he didn't just die into the doll. He did it on purpose, before he died, with a chant. Out loud. With his hands on it. That's the only way he moves. He has to do it, to somebody, for about a minute, with nobody stopping him." I looked at my mother. "So you don't give him the minute. You don't let him talk. You just do it."

"Then how does he keep coming back?" said my father.

"Because people keep picking up the pieces," I said. "A toy company rebuilt him, to prove there was nothing wrong with the doll. Then somebody melted what was left in a factory, and somebody else ground up the plastic and made new dolls out of it, and he was still in there. He never came back on his own. Not once. Somebody always put him back together." I looked toward the living room and the cardboard. "So you don't leave pieces."

"What does that mean?" said Martha.

"It means you hit him with the car," I said. "And then you back up. And then you burn what's left. And then you put the ashes in a coffee can, and fill the can with concrete, and put it somewhere nobody's ever going to dig."

Nobody said anything. My mother put her cup down.

"And the spear," I said. "He smelled it and he ran. He caught a bat with one hand, and he ran from the spear. I don't think it just breaks the doll. I think it breaks whatever's holding him up in it. The thing he made the deal with." I looked at my hand on the table. "I don't know that yet. But I think it."

And the whole time I was saying it, my leg was bouncing under the table. I'd been sitting at that table three and a half hours, and every minute some part of me had been out there in the rain—under the hedges, along the fences, down the creek path behind the houses, in the storm drain at the end of the cul-de-sac, in every dark place in Woodsboro a two-and-a-half-foot man could fit. Go, the second heartbeat said; it hadn't stopped since the window. He's out there. He's small and he's wet and he's close. Go get him. Hit him with the car. Burn him. Pour the concrete. Go. Why are you sitting here. Why are you drinking coffee. GO.

"You want to go out there," said my father. It wasn't a question.

"Yes."

"Right now."

"He's close, Dad." My voice came out tighter than I wanted. "He's somewhere inside half a mile, in the rain, with no box and no ride and nowhere to be. Every hour I sit here, he gets farther away, or he gets ready. And I'm sitting in a kitchen drinking coffee."

"Rule two," said my father.

"I'm telling you. Before I go. That's what this is."

"I know it is." He held my eyes. "And I'm telling you no. Not tonight."

I opened my mouth.

"He went out in the rain," said my father evenly, "in the dark, at two in the morning, after he counted us. You told me that yourself, at the window. I watched you figure it out. He wanted you out there." He put both hands flat on the table. "And if you go out there, and he comes back in through a moving carton, it's your mother and your sister and me. And half a bat."

It was the same math I'd done at the window, word for word. I'd done it in a second and a half with glass under my feet, and my father had done it too, watching me from the middle of the living room, and come out in the same place. The second heartbeat hated it. I could feel it hating it.

"Okay," I said.

"Daylight," said my father. "In daylight, a thing like that has to hide. In daylight, you go. And I'm driving."

"Ted," said my mother.

"I'm driving, Diane." He didn't look away from me. "That's not a rule. That's just how it's going to be."

I held his eyes, then nodded.

"Then he stays out there," said Ted Meeks, "until we find him."

He went to the phone on the wall and dialed his office, and when the answering machine picked up he said, in his flat-tire voice, "Hi, Carol, it's Ted. I'm going to be taking the week. Family thing. I've got nineteen days I've never used. I'll call Bob." He hung up, turned around, and looked at my mother. "Diane."

"I know," said my mother. She'd stopped crying sometime around four. She was looking at the calendar on the fridge, at the weekend circled in red—CALISTOGA!! in her own handwriting, three exclamation points, from August. Twenty years. The mud baths and the little inn with the claw-foot tub. "I know, Ted."

"We can—"

"We can go in March," said my mother. "Twenty years can wait three months." She took the magnet off the calendar, took the calendar down off the fridge, turned it around, and hung it back up facing the wall, and that was all she ever said about Calistoga.

Then she looked at me. "I'm still going to work today. And Martha's going to school. And you're going to school. And we're going to act like a normal family, because that's what normal families do on a Monday, and because if that thing is listening, I want it to know that it doesn't get to change one thing about how this family lives."

"Mom—"

"And your father's going to sit in the living room," said my mother, "by that cardboard, with the newspaper."

My father picked up the handle of the broken bat from the counter, where he'd put it at three, looked at it, and put it down. "I'm going to need a new bat," said Ted Meeks.

III. The Inner Child

Main Street, Woodsboro. Monday, December 9, 1996, 3:40 p.m.

The Inner Child was on Main between Hendrickson's Hardware and the Rexall, in the space where the Hallmark used to be, and I walked past it every day on the way to Bradley Video. On Monday the front windows were papered over inside with brown butcher paper, and a sign lettered in careful, colorful marker was taped to the door:

THE INNER CHILDToys That Teach!GRAND OPENING MONDAY DEC. 16

Stuart Abernathy was out front on a stepladder in his fisherman's sweater, trying to hang a wooden sign shaped like a rocking horse from two hooks over the door, with a screw in his mouth, a drill in one hand, and the sign under his other arm. He was losing.

"Randy!" he said around the screw. "Hey! Neighbor! Grab the end of this, would you?"

I grabbed the end. He got the screw in. The rocking horse hung a little crooked and swung gently in the wind off the hills, and Stuart climbed down and looked up at it with his hands on his hips like a man looking at his firstborn. "Come on in. Come see. You're the first visitor."

I'd had no sleep. I'd had three pots of coffee and a day of school spent staring at the same page of The Great Gatsby for fifty minutes, while my father sat in his armchair in the living room facing a sheet of cardboard where a window used to be, with the Press Democrat and a new aluminum bat from Hendrickson's across his knees. I'd called home from the pay phone at lunch. Nothing, my father said. Glass man can't come till next week. Your mother says the tree's a goner. I had twenty minutes. I went in.

It smelled like sawdust and fresh paint and beeswax, and it was small and bright and the most aggressively wholesome room I'd ever stood in, in either life. Wooden trains on wooden tracks on a low wooden table at kid height, for touching. Marble runs. Kites hanging from the ceiling like sleeping bats. A wall of thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles with paintings of lighthouses on them. Chemistry sets, crystal-growing kits, and a real ant farm with real ants already tunneling. An actual carved and painted rocking horse with a real horsehair tail. And not a battery in the place, not one blinking light. I looked.

In the back by the register, leaning on a push broom in a green apron that said THE INNER CHILD in yellow stitching, was Alan Abernathy, wearing the expression of a political prisoner. "Hey," he said. "It's the guy."

"Hey."

"My dad's making me work here," said Alan, "until I'm thirty. Or until I'm not a juvenile delinquent anymore. Whichever comes first."

"Alan," said his father mildly, from the trains.

"I'm sweeping." He swept once, for emphasis, at nothing.

Stuart gave me the tour. It took four minutes. At the back we came to a door marked STAFF ONLY, and he pushed it open to show me the stockroom—where the magic happens—and I stopped in the doorway.

The stockroom was small and cold and lit by one bulb: metal shelves, cartons of wooden blocks, boxes of books. In the corner by the back door, stacked on a hand truck, were six big brown shipping cartons that didn't match anything else in the room. They were stamped on the side in black, HEARTLAND TOY CO. · SANDUSKY, OHIO, and over the stamp somebody had slapped a crisp new white-and-blue sticker, a cartoon globe with a ring around it like a planet: GLOBOTECH. The top carton was open. And Stuart, in the same careful marker as the sign on the door, had taped a sheet of paper to the side of the stack. RETURN TO SENDER.

"Oh, those," said Stuart behind me, with the deep weariness of a man who'd been fighting a phone tree. "Don't get me started on those."

I looked into the open carton. It was packed tight with a dozen retail boxes, bright and explosive—red and black and camouflage green, lightning bolts, stenciled letters, and a photo of a square-jawed plastic soldier in a helmet and flak vest, with a scar through one eyebrow, a cigar in his teeth, and a face like a fist. MAJOR CHIP HAZARD, said the box. COMMANDO ELITE. And under that, in a starburst: NO ENEMY LEFT STANDING! Under the Commando Elite boxes I could see the edges of another kind, purple and green and swampy, with jagged monster lettering and a picture of something gentle-eyed and lion-faced with a little bow across its back. GORGONITES.

"The driver dropped them off Wednesday," Stuart was saying. "Nice old fella. Says he's been driving that route since Eisenhower. They were on his manifest, so he unloaded them, and I said I didn't order these, I don't sell these, look at them, and he said, Pal, I just drive the truck. And now I call Heartland, and I get a recording. Heartland Toy Company is proud to be a member of the Globotech family. And I call Globotech, and I get a hold line." He shook his head. "Do you know what Globotech's hold music is, Randy?"

"No, sir."

"The Marines' Hymn." He said it the way other people say the Zapruder film. "Fifty minutes of it."

"Did you put batteries in any of them?"

He gave me an odd look. "They take double-As. Six each. Not included. No. Why would I—"

"Don't," I said. "Please." And before he could ask: "Mr. Abernathy." I made my voice reasonable, a nice neighborhood kid's voice. "I'll take them off your hands. All six. I'll pay to FedEx them back to Ohio. Or I'll buy them. Cash. Today."

His big earnest face went soft with concern, and I realized with a sinking feeling exactly what he was seeing: the boy from the news, who'd killed two people this fall, standing in his stockroom asking to buy six cartons of toy soldiers with knives.

"Son," he said gently. "I'm not going to sell war toys to... after what you went through. I don't think that's what you need."

"I want to put them in a fire."

Stuart opened his mouth and closed it. Then a strange, thoughtful look came over his face, the look of a man who'd read a lot of books with titles like Raising Your Spirited Child. "You know," he said slowly, "that might actually be very healthy."

"Great. So—"

"But they're not mine to sell, Randy. Not till Heartland sends me a return authorization. Legally, they're still theirs." He patted the top of the stack with a big hand, like a man patting a dog he didn't like. "Nobody's opening them. They're just going to sit back here in the dark until somebody in Ohio answers the phone."

Sit back here in the dark, I thought. I did the math and hated it. I could come back tonight or tomorrow night, swap something out for Poison Breath, get in the back door, and breathe on six cartons of plastic until they were six puddles. Then I'd have a breaking-and-entering on the new neighbor's store, my face on the news, and Stuart Abernathy standing in the wreck of it looking at his son—and a doll still loose somewhere in town, and my father alone in the house with a bat. One at a time, I thought. They've got no batteries. He's got no box. One at a time.

"Okay," I said. "Thanks for the tour, Mr. Abernathy. It's a really great store."

Alan was still at the register with his broom. He'd been listening; he was fifteen, and that's what fifteen is for. I stopped and leaned on the counter and lowered my voice. "Hey. Alan. Do me a favor. Don't put batteries in those."

His eyebrows went up. "Why?"

"Just don't."

I walked out under the crooked rocking horse onto Main and got about fifteen steps toward Bradley Video before I stopped. I'd just told a fifteen-year-old who'd been expelled twice not to do something and refused to tell him why. I've seen every movie ever made. I know exactly what happens next.

I stood on the sidewalk in front of the Rexall for a long minute. Then I checked my watch, saw I was going to be late, and went to work.

I called Kent on my break from the back office at Bradley Video, under the Dead by Dawn II poster Mr. Bradley had hung crooked in 1987 and never fixed. Six-thirty in California was nine-thirty in Kentucky. The old man on the switchboard recognized my voice this time, said Hold, and after three minutes Andy came on, breathing hard like he'd run.

"It came," I said. "Sunday. Under the tree. To my sister. From Santa."

Andy didn't say anything for a while.

"He's out," I said. "He came out of the box at two in the morning, and caught my dad's bat, and broke it, and went out through our living room window. He's somewhere in Woodsboro. I don't know where."

Silence on the line.

"Andy?"

"Your dad," said Andy Barclay, very slowly. "Your dad... saw him."

"Yeah."

"Your dad knows."

"My dad, my mom, and my sister," I said. "I woke them all up. At two in the morning. In the living room. And I told them. And they believed me."

The silence went on so long I thought the switchboard had cut us off. Then I heard it, very faint, two thousand miles away, in a phone booth in a hallway at a military school in Kentucky: a sixteen-year-old who'd been six in Chicago in 1988, crying, softly, the way you cry when you've been holding something for eight years and somebody finally takes the other end.

"They believed you," said Andy.

"Yeah."

"They just... believed you."

"They saw him catch my dad's bat," I said. "And break it. That helped."

Andy laughed, a wet, cracked, surprised laugh, the first I'd ever heard out of him. "Nobody believed me," he said. "My mom didn't believe me. Not till the end. Not till she saw him move. They put me in a hospital, Randy. I was six. They gave me pills. A doctor with a mustache sat across a table from me with crayons and asked me to draw the doll, over and over, like if I drew it enough times I'd stop." He breathed. "And you just... woke them up."

"I didn't give them a choice," I said. "That's the honest version. I had a way to make them believe me. I used it."

"I don't care," said Andy fiercely. "I don't care how. I don't care if you cheated." A breath. "Good."

I sat in Mr. Bradley's office chair looking at the crooked poster for a minute. "Andy. What's he going to do now?"

I could hear him thinking. He'd thought about this, I realized, every night for eight years. He was the only person in the world who'd thought about it as hard as I had.

"He's not going to be nice anymore," said Andy. "Not to your family. Nice doesn't work if they already know. Nice is how he gets in, and he's already in, and you took it away." A pause. "So he's going to get mean. Or he's going to get somebody else. Somebody who doesn't know. A kid. Close by."

I thought about a boy on the roof of a Ryder truck eating a Pop-Tart. Expelled twice. A boy his mother had moved across the country, who'd decided on the first afternoon that I was cool.

"And Randy," said Andy. "He's close."

"I know."

"No. Close." Andy's voice had gone flat and certain, like somebody reading off a list he'd made a long time ago. "He likes to watch. He'll be somewhere he can see your house. And he'll be up high. He always liked it up high." A pause. "Look up."

"Okay."

"And when you find him," said Andy Barclay, "don't talk to him. He's better at talking than you. He's better at talking than anybody. Just do it."

IV. Daylight

Woodsboro. Tuesday, December 10, 1996, 3:20 p.m.

My father was waiting in the Volvo in the school parking lot when the last bell rang, engine running, window down, in his Cal sweatshirt with his reading glasses pushed up on his head and the Press Democrat folded on the dashboard, like any dad picking up any kid. Tatum saw him from the steps and looked at me, and I shook my head, and she let it go, which is one of the things I like best about Tatum.

I got in. There were two fifty-pound bags of Quikrete on the back seat, a red can of charcoal lighter fluid, and an empty Folgers can, the big one, with the lid on. I looked at them, then at him.

"Hendrickson's," said my father. "I told the kid at the register it was for a fence post." He put the car in gear. "Where first?"

We had about an hour and a half of light. In December in Sonoma County the sun goes behind the hills at a quarter to five, and after that it's his. The night before, at the kitchen table after everybody went to bed, I'd made a list of every place near our house where a two-and-a-half-foot man could get out of the rain unseen. It was a long list. Woodsboro is a small town, but small towns are full of places nobody looks.

The storm drain at the end of our cul-de-sac first. I lay on my stomach on the wet asphalt and shone the Maglite in—leaves, a tennis ball, a lot of black water moving fast—while my father stood over me with the new aluminum bat held down by his leg, where the neighbors couldn't see it from their kitchens, and watched the street.

The creek path behind the houses next: half a mile of mud and fallen leaves and blackberry brambles, the creek running high and brown from the rain. The Devas came for that one. I'd brought them in the Nike shoebox, and at the head of the path I opened the lid and set them down in the leaves, and they went, four little shapes in scarves spreading out the way I'd taught them to clear a room on my bedroom floor in November: Maga-Z on point, Cham-P on the flank, San-D trailing, watching behind. Jum-P had climbed into my jacket pocket and gone to sleep, which I decided counted as the reserve.

Maga-Z found it, of course. It takes one to know one. Under a culvert a hundred yards down, where the path crossed a drainage ditch, there was a little dry hollow in the dirt beneath the concrete lip, the leaves pushed back, about the size of a two-year-old curled up, and in the mud at its edge was one print: a tiny sneaker with a little cartoon star on the tread. I crouched there looking at it.

"Last night?" said my father behind me.

"Last night." I put two fingers in the hollow. Cold. "He's not here now."

"He's moving around."

"He's moving around," I agreed.

We worked through the rest of the list. The loading dock behind the Rexall. The old pump house by the Little League fields. The crawl space under the Methodist church's fellowship hall, with a broken vent cover I'd known about since I was nine, because Randy hid in it once during a game of sardines and nobody found him for two hours. Nothing, nothing, nothing. Once, in the pump house, the Devas all stopped at once and went flat, ears back, staring up at a rafter, and my heart jumped into my teeth and the spear was in my hand before I'd thought about it.

It was a barn owl. It looked down at us with its flat white face—at four hamsters and a spear and a man with a bat—decided we weren't worth it, and went back to sleep.

My father let out a long breath. "Well," he said, "that one's real."

At four-thirty we were parked on the street by the park with the heater going, eating Taco Bell out of the bag, because neither of us had eaten since breakfast and my mother wasn't home yet to notice. The Devas were in the shoebox on my lap with the lid off, Cham-P doing most of the work on a bean burrito my father had donated to the cause.

"Can I ask you something," said my father.

"Yeah."

"Last night. At the window." He was looking out the windshield at the park, not at me. "You had your foot on the sill. I was standing right there. You were going. And then you weren't." He took a bite of his taco and chewed. "You told us yesterday it costs something. The things you can do. Is that... is that part of what it costs? Wanting to go?"

I thought about how to answer. No collar. Just me.

"Some of it," I said. "There's a thing in me now. Since the first morning. It likes a fight. It likes them a lot more than I do. When something's in front of me that's strong, and scary, it pulls. Like a dog on a leash." I looked down at the hamsters. "I'm the leash. Most of the time."

"Most of the time."

"Last night I was the leash."

My father nodded slowly. He finished his taco and folded the paper into a neat square, the way he folded everything. "And the rest of it? The part that isn't the... dog."

"The rest of it's me," I said. "The rest of it's just me wanting him dead. Because he came into our house with Martha's name on him."

My father looked at me then. "Okay," said Ted Meeks. "That part I get."

The sun went behind the hills at 4:47. I watched it go. The light on the park went gold, then gray, then the streetlights came on one at a time down the block, and somewhere in Woodsboro a two-and-a-half-foot man in wet overalls opened his eyes.

"He watched us," I said. "All afternoon. From somewhere. I'd bet money."

"Probably," said my father, and started the car. "Let him."

He drove home slowly with the headlights on low and the window down in the cold, and I sat with the shoebox on my lap and the Maglite in my hand and looked at every hedge.

That night my father moved the lawn chair into the garage.

He didn't make a speech about it. After dinner he carried it out there with a thermos, a blanket, and the bat, and set it up by the workbench facing the side door. The garage was the only door in the house you couldn't see from the kitchen or the living room. It was also where the Devas went out.

That was my idea. They'd been doing it on their own since November anyway; now they did it on purpose. At midnight they went out under the gap at the bottom of the side door into the dark, on patrol, the way I'd taught them, the way I'd once walked a perimeter at night with a rifle in another country. Two out and two in the open cage on the workbench, switching every two hours. Maga-Z and Cham-P pulled most of the night shifts. San-D wouldn't go farther than the hedge under Martha's window. Jum-P slept through every one of his and still somehow came back with leaves in his fur. If they found him, they'd come back and squeak, and I'd come down. Four hamsters in scarves hunting a doll through the hedges of Woodsboro. I know how it sounds.

They found where he'd been—three places the first night alone: under the Abernathys' hedge, in the hollow beneath the Fimples' porch steps, and in the gutter over our own back porch, a long flat place in the wet leaves right under Martha's window. Every one cold and empty, with the little star-shaped tread in the mud somewhere close. He was moving around and staying close, and he was never, ever there when we came, and somewhere out there in the dark, I was pretty sure, he'd noticed who kept finding his beds.

V. Weather

The Meeks garage. Wednesday, December 11, 1996, 9:14 p.m.

The storm came out of nowhere.

I mean that literally. Wednesday had been clear all day, cold and blue and still, the kind of December day in Sonoma County when the hills go gold in the afternoon and you can see all the way to Mount Saint Helena, and the Channel 7 weatherman had said clear and cold through the weekend. At nine o'clock I was at the kitchen table doing calculus, my mother across from me grading a pile of something from work, Martha on the couch with the TV on low, and the sky outside the kitchen window full of stars.

At 9:06 the stars went out—not behind clouds; I was looking at them. They went out the way a TV picture does, all at once, in a square directly over our street. Then the wind came up from nowhere, up, out of the ground, out of the cul-de-sac, flat and hard and warm, too warm for December, smelling of wet pennies and something burnt. The wind chimes on the Fimples' porch went crazy. The Abernathys' recycling bin went over and rolled down the driveway into the street. Fat, heavy drops hit the kitchen window, and then all of it hit at once, a roar on the roof like gravel.

My mother looked up from her papers. "That's not—that wasn't in the—"

"Mom," I said. "Get Martha. Stay in the hall. Away from the windows."

She looked at me and didn't argue. She'd had three days of not arguing and was getting good at it, and I hated that she was getting good at it.

I was already moving toward the garage door when the lightning came. It came straight down instead of across the sky the way lightning does, one crooked white bolt out of that dark square over our street, like a crack in a window, and hit the big oak in our backyard forty feet from the garage with a sound I felt in my teeth. The kitchen lights flared and went out. The furnace stopped. The refrigerator stopped. Every light on the street went dark at once, every porch light and Christmas light, and the only light left in the world was the oak in our backyard, burning.

And in the dark, under the rain, from the garage, I heard the Devas—all four at once, the high, sharp warning squeak they'd only ever made one at a time—and my father shouted.

I hit the garage door with my shoulder and came through with the Maglite in one hand and the spear coming into the other.

The garage was pitch black except for the orange flicker of the burning oak through the little back window and the white Maglite beam swinging. The little window was gone. Glass glittered all over the top of the chest freezer under it, rain blowing in through the hole. My father was on his feet out of the lawn chair with the aluminum bat up. The Devas stood in a line on the workbench in front of their open cage, backs arched, scarves soaked, facing the back of the garage.

And he was standing on top of the freezer, in the glass, in the orange light. Two and a half feet of Good Guy, soaked through, dead leaves in his red yarn hair, mud to the knees of his overalls, eyes wide open, blue and bright. In his little hand, held up so I'd see it, was something on a leather cord, small and pale and carved. Bone. It was humming; I could hear it, a low hum under the rain, like a power line.

"Evenin', Ted," said Charles Lee Ray. "Evenin', sport. Don't get up. I'm just here for the rats."

My father swung. The doll wasn't there—I didn't see him go. The bat hit the freezer lid with a clang that rang through the whole garage and sent glass flying, and the doll was on the shelf over the workbench eight feet away, crouched among the paint cans, right above the hamsters, between one swing and the next.

I threw the spear—summoned it, really, the way I'd learned in the woods in November: don't summon it and then throw it, summon it thrown. I let the one in my hand go and called it again already moving, out of the air beside my shoulder with a sound like a sheet tearing, black and long and cold, straight at the shelf, straight at the little striped chest.

And he moved. I've thought about it a lot since, and I've seen a lot of things move since, and I've never seen anything move like that. He didn't dodge the way you dodge a thrown thing. He just wasn't there anymore. The spear went through the place where he'd been, through the pegboard behind the shelf, through the garage wall and out into the rain, and I heard it hit something outside—the Fimples' fence, a crunch of wood—before it went back to wherever it went when I let it go.

And the doll was in the rafters, above us in the dark between the beams, among the old Christmas boxes. Look up, Andy had said. He likes it up high. Crouched on a beam, looking down, the amulet hanging from his fist and humming.

"Now that," he said from the dark, admiringly, "is a nice trick, sport. Throwin' it without throwin' it. I gotta remember that."

I called the spear back into my hand. My arm was shaking. Three spears and I was done—I'd learned that in the woods too—and that was one.

"But you're still slow," said the doll kindly. "Monday, I told ya. You're real slow, kid. Not your fault. You're just a kid. In a kid's body. With a kid's arms." He stood up on the beam. "And these little bastards of yours." He pointed down at the four of them on the workbench. "Two days. Two days I can't lie down nowhere in this whole stinkin' neighborhood without a little rat head poppin' up outta the leaves and squeakin' at me. Under the hedge. Under the porch. In the gutter. You know how hard it is to get some shut-eye in a gutter, pal?" He shook his head. "So. I'm takin' 'em off the board."

Something small and tan went past me in the dark: Maga-Z, up the leg of the workbench, up the pegboard, from shelf bracket to shelf bracket to the rafter, straight at him, without a sound, the way he did everything. The other three came behind him in a line, the way they'd gone up every hedge and gutter in the neighborhood for two days, the way they'd go up anything I pointed them at.

The doll looked down at the hamster coming along the beam toward him in its little scarf, and kicked it. He barely tried—a flick of one little plastic shoe, like a man flicking a pebble off a step—and Maga-Z went off the end of the rafter and through the air, a little tan ball, end over end across the whole garage.

Martha caught him.

I hadn't known she was there. She'd come through the kitchen door behind me, of course, in her socks, with my mother behind her saying Martha, MARTHA, and she'd seen the hamster come off the beam and run three steps and dived and caught him in both hands on the cold concrete and rolled, and come up on her knees in the doorway with Maga-Z cupped against her chest, alive and squirming and furious.

The doll on the rafter looked down at her. "Nice catch, Martha," said Charles Lee Ray.

"Don't," said my sister from her knees, in a voice that shook and was absolutely clear, "say my name."

The doll laughed.

Below him Cham-P, Jum-P, and San-D had reached the top of the shelf brackets and stopped in a line at the end of his beam, and stood up: three hamsters on their hind legs in the dark, chests heaving, between a killer and a thirteen-year-old girl, with Cham-P out in front, the biggest of them, puffed up to twice his size. Jum-P was wide awake. San-D was shaking and didn't move. My father had moved too; he was under the rafter now with the bat up, between the beam and Martha. And I had the spear back, and the second heartbeat was going like a drum, and that was two more throws, and he could see all of it.

He looked at all of us. I watched him count again.

"Eh," said Charles Lee Ray. "Another night."

He went out the back window the way he'd come—off the end of the rafter, down onto the freezer lid in a scatter of glass, and through the hole into the rain and the orange light of the burning oak—and was gone.

The rain stopped at 9:31, all at once, the way it started. The roar on the roof cut off like a faucet, the wind dropped, and the stars came back in a square over the street exactly where they'd gone out. The power came back on, every porch light and Christmas light on the street at the same moment. The refrigerator hummed and the furnace kicked on, and in the bright fluorescent light of the garage there was glass all over the freezer lid, and mud, and little prints the size of a toddler's sneakers with a cartoon star on the tread.

The oak was still smoking. My father stood in the backyard in his slippers in the wet with the garden hose on it for twenty minutes, saying nothing. The Fimples' fence had a clean hole in it the size of a broom handle, through both boards, the wood around it gone gray and dead and smelling like a struck match.

Nobody on the street came out. That's what I remember most. A lightning strike, a burning tree, the power out on the whole cul-de-sac for twenty-five minutes, and nobody came out onto a porch. Phil Fimple's lights were on. The Abernathys' lights were on. I could see Christy's silhouette in her upstairs window, looking at our yard. And nobody came out.

I stood in the bright garage with my mother and my sister and four hamsters, looking at the footprints.

"He came in," said my mother, barely above a whisper. "He came into the house."

"Into the garage. For them." I looked at the Devas, back in a row on the workbench, wet, their scarves stuck to their necks. "They've been finding him, Mom. Every place he lies down. He can't rest, he can't watch us, he can't get close. So he came to take them off the board."

"Is he going to... is he coming back? Into the house?"

I thought about it the way Andy had, two thousand miles away on the phone. Nice doesn't work if they already know.

"No," I said. "Not into the house. Not yet. There's nothing for him in here. We all know what he is. Every door in this house is a door he knows we're watching." I looked out the broken window at the dark yards and the fence between ours and the Abernathys'. "He's going to go find somebody who doesn't."

"Who?"

I didn't answer.

Martha sat on the step down from the kitchen with Maga-Z in her lap. She'd checked him all over very gently, the way the vet had shown her in November, and he was fine, a little dented, mostly offended, and he was standing on her knee now facing the broken window with his paws up like a boxer, eyes narrowed to slits, memorizing the hole the doll had gone out through.

"He kicked him," Martha said to nobody, in the same clear, shaking voice. "He just kicked him. Like he was nothing."

"I know, Mart."

"I'm going to get him," said Martha Meeks. "I don't know how. I'm thirteen. But I'm going to."

My mother looked at her, then at me. I didn't say you're not. I'd learned better; I'd learned a lot of things in three days.

"Okay," I said. "But not alone. Nobody does anything alone. That's the rule now."

"Whose rule?"

"Mine," I said. "Dad's got three. I'm allowed one."

I swapped that night, in the garage in the bright light, with my father on the step, the hose still dripping in his hand and the oak smoking outside.

Ability Slot 1: Truth Assertion → Morbing[SWAP] (5:00)

The collar went out of my throat for the last time that week, and the cold came into my teeth. For the next two nights I did what Morbing was for. Rule two: I told my father first both nights, and he stood in the back doorway with the bat while I went out after midnight into the side yard, shouted the stupid words into the dark as loud as I dared, because Morbing only comes if you shout it, and hunted with my ears.

You can hear a lot, Morbin'. Every heartbeat on the street, through the walls, the way you hear radios through an apartment wall. My father's, slow and heavy, in the lawn chair. My mother's, light and fast, not sleeping. Martha's, even, asleep, with four tiny ones around it like satellites. Phil Fimple's, a little irregular; he should see somebody about that. Christy's. Irene Abernathy's. Stuart's. Alan's, up late every night, too fast, in his room by the window.

And once, early Thursday morning at 2:40, from somewhere in the Abernathys' backyard under the hedge, one more. Small. Very small. Slower than it should be. Like something learning how.

I was over the fence before I thought about it. There was nothing under the hedge and nothing in the yard—just wet grass, the hedge, and a little patch of ground beneath it where the dead leaves had been pressed flat, like something the size of a two-year-old had been lying there looking up at the second-floor window. At Alan's window.

I stood in the Abernathys' yard at three in the morning with my canines out and twenty-two minutes on the clock, eleven of them gone, listening. Somewhere very far off, toward Main Street, I thought I heard the small, slow heartbeat again, moving away, going downtown. Then the clock ran out, and I was just a kid in a wet yard, and the heartbeat was gone.

VI. Falcon Cable

The Meeks driveway. Thursday, December 12, 1996, 3:55 p.m.

Christy Fimple caught me in the driveway on Thursday afternoon while I was looking at the hole in her fence.

"Your tree got hit by lightning," she said. She stood on our side of the property line in her cheer sweatshirt with a Diet Coke, arms crossed against the cold. "My dad says that's like, insurance. He says you should call somebody."

"We called somebody."

"And the fence." She pointed at the hole, at about my shoulder height, perfectly round, through both boards, the wood around it dead and gray. "Did the lightning do that?"

"Something did."

Christy studied the hole, then me. "Okay, weird question. Is the new kid weird?"

"Alan?"

"Alan." She lowered her voice. "Because he's been up every night this week. I can see his window from my room. Every night. Till like three. With the light off. Just standing there. Looking at your yard." She shrugged elaborately. "Not that I'm looking. I just noticed."

"You just noticed," I said.

"I'm observant." Christy sipped her Diet Coke. "Also. Weirder question. Do you know whose van that is?"

She pointed down the street with the can. At the end of the cul-de-sac, under the transformer pole where the power lines came in from the main road, sat a slightly dirty white van with FALCON CABLE on the side in blue letters, the falcon logo, and a ladder on the roof rack. It had been there since Tuesday. I'd noticed it Tuesday, the way you notice anything new on a street where you've learned to notice everything—a vehicle you don't know, parked a little too long—and I'd told myself it was the cable company, because it said it was, and I had a doll in the hedges.

"It's the cable company," I said.

"That's what I thought," said Christy. "So I called Falcon. On Tuesday. Because my dad's Home Command Center keeps doing this thing where the lights turn on at like four in the morning, and I thought, the cable guy's right there, he can look at it. And the lady at Falcon said they don't have anybody on our street." Another sip. "She said they don't have anybody in Woodsboro at all this week. Because of the holidays."

I looked at the van. I couldn't see anybody in it; the windows were tinted and the engine was off. It sat under the pole in the late afternoon light, the way it had for three days.

"Huh," I said.

"Huh," said Christy, satisfied, like I'd confirmed something. "So it's weird, right? It's weird."

"It's weird," I agreed.

"Thank you. My dad says I'm being dramatic." She turned to go, then turned back. "Randy. Is something going on? On our street? Because your tree got hit by lightning, and your fence has a hole in it, and there's a fake cable van, and the new kid's up all night, and your dad's been home all week. Your dad's never home."

I looked at her—Christy Fimple, sixteen, across the street since she was four, who'd babysat Martha twice and been locked out both times, whose father had a house full of gadgets, a gas line, and a Home Command Center that turned the lights on at four in the morning by itself. The Fimples' house, I thought. In the movie, the soldiers take the Fimples' house.

"Christy," I said. "If anything in your house starts doing anything weird. Anything. A toy, a light, the TV, the Command Center thing. You come get me. Okay? You don't call Falcon. You don't tell your dad you're being dramatic. You come across the street and get me."

She studied me. "That's also weird," said Christy Fimple.

"I know."

"Okay," she said. "Okay. I'll come get you." She started back across the street, and halfway there said without turning around, "You know you've been saying that to everybody, right? Come get me. My mom said you said it to her at the Safeway."

"I said it to your mom at the Safeway?"

"She said you looked really tired," said Christy, and went inside.

I called Kristen at six. I'd called at six every night that week; on Tuesday she'd told me flatly, If you don't call me at six, I'm coming in to get you, and I'd believed her.

"Still out?" she said.

"Still out."

"And your family—"

"My dad hasn't been to work since Monday. My mom's sleeping on the couch so she can see the front door. My sister wants to kill it with her bare hands." I leaned my forehead against the kitchen wall by the phone. "They're doing great, actually. They're doing better than me."

A long silence on the line from Springwood. "They believed you," said Kristen. "Right away. The first night."

"Yeah."

"Do you know how lucky you are?"

I knew. She'd been at Westin Hills for two years because nobody believed her. Her mother put her there. Her mother stood in the doorway of a locked room and told the doctors her daughter was a danger to herself, because her daughter wouldn't stop talking about a man in her dreams with knives on his fingers.

"I know," I said.

"My mom still doesn't," said Kristen softly. "Even now. After everything. She looks at me like I'm a light she's not sure is going to stay on." A breath. "Your dad sat in a garage with a baseball bat for three days. Because you told him to."

"He didn't need me to tell him."

"That's what I mean," said Kristen Parker.

VII. Human Operations

The Inner Child, Main Street. Thursday, December 12, 1996, 9:22 p.m.

He came in through the roof.

There was a vent on the flat tar roof over the stockroom, an old aluminum hood from the Hallmark days held down by four screws, three of them rusted half through, and he'd had it off in a minute. He'd been up there since four in the afternoon, lying flat behind the parapet in the last of the sun with his cheek on the warm tar, listening to the kid sweep.

The kid. The one from next door. The delinquent with the Walkman, who'd griped through the fence to his old man on Tuesday about working at the store till I'm thirty. Charles Lee Ray had been lying under a hedge at the time, and he'd filed it, the way he filed everything. A toy store. A kid with a key. A kid nobody would ever believe about anything, because he'd already been kicked out of two schools for being a little shit.

He heard the back door close at 9:19, the deadbolt turn, and sneakers going away down the alley at a run. Then nothing. He gave it three minutes. Then he went down the vent shaft headfirst like a kid on a slide, into the dark above the stockroom ceiling, pushed up a ceiling tile, and dropped. He landed light on a stack of cartons and crouched there in the dark, breathing.

It smelled like sawdust and beeswax and fresh paint. Wholesome. Like a church picnic. He hated it immediately. But it was dry, the first dry place he'd been in four days, and there was nobody in it, and there were no rats. He sat on the cartons in the dark a while and let himself be dry.

Three days, he thought. Three days, and four goddamn hamsters.

The kid with the spear he'd figured out in a Laundromat in Muncie. The family had been a surprise—the whole family in their pajamas at two in the morning, believing. He'd never been in a room like that. It had felt like walking into a wall in the dark. But he'd walked away from it, out a window, and that had been the right call, and he knew it. What really got him was the rats. Every place he'd lain down since Tuesday, every hedge and porch and dry spot in every gutter on that street, and sometime before morning a little furry head would poke up out of the leaves, look at him, squeak, and go away to tell. The tan one was the worst. The tan one didn't squeak. The tan one just looked, from somewhere he couldn't quite see, like a guy across a bar who'd already decided how the night was going to end. He'd kicked it. That hadn't helped as much as he'd wanted.

Okay, he thought. So no more of that street for a while. New town. Well. Same town. New street.

He needed a kid. He'd needed one since August. And he needed somewhere the kid with the spear wasn't looking, and here he was, in the dark, in a toy store, a toy among toys, with a key-carrying delinquent who'd be back at eight in the morning to sweep. He was just starting to like the idea when somebody at the front of the store said, very loudly, "GORGONITES."

He went still.

Neither the kid nor a man: a voice like gravel in a cement mixer, coming from the front window through the half-open stockroom door, talking to itself.

"...perimeter is secure. No visual on the enemy. Commando Elite, report." A pause. "Commando Elite, REPORT." A longer pause. "Negative contact. Unit is—" A strange flat note crept in, almost confused. "Unit is in boxes."

Charles Lee Ray got down off the cartons, went to the door low, and looked.

The store was dark except for the streetlights on Main, coming through the front window in long yellow stripes across the wooden trains and the rocking horse. In the window, in the middle of a little display somebody had set up with a toy jeep and a stack of wooden blocks painted like sandbags, stood a soldier. A foot tall. Helmet, flak vest, a face like a fist, a scar through one eyebrow, a cigar clamped in his teeth. He stood at parade rest with his back to the street, surveying the dark store with an expression of absolute professional suspicion. And he was alive—alive the way he was, nothing like a toy, nothing like a doll with a chip.

Well, thought Charles Lee Ray. Ain't this a kick in the head.

He looked past the soldier at the cartons, the open ones by the stockroom door he'd landed beside, and went to look, quickly, by streetlight. Retail boxes, a dozen to a carton, bright. COMMANDO ELITE. MAJOR CHIP HAZARD. NO ENEMY LEFT STANDING! Under them, purple and green and swampy: GORGONITES, a picture of something with a lion's face and a little bow. On the back of the soldier's box, in a comic-strip panel, the soldiers were blowing the monsters to pieces and the monsters were running away.

He read the whole box, front, back, and sides. It took about forty seconds. He'd been reading people for forty years, and boxes were easier; a box tells you exactly who somebody thinks they are.

He stepped out into the stripes of streetlight in the middle of the floor where the soldier could see him, hands where the soldier could see them too. Easy. "Major Hazard. At ease."

The soldier spun, fast, and a molded rifle came up to his shoulder like it had been waiting its whole life to. "IDENTIFY YOURSELF."

"Good Guy," said Charles Lee Ray. "Consultant. Human operations." He let that sit. "Command sent me."

The rifle didn't move. "I have no orders regarding a consultant."

"'Course you don't. It's need-to-know. You think Command puts a consultant on the box?" He tipped his head at the cartons. "Read your box, Major. Read it real careful. What's it say about the humans?"

The soldier's eyes narrowed, and Charles Lee Ray watched him go back over the box in his head like a man rereading a contract.

"...Nothing," said the Major slowly.

"Nothing," said Charles Lee Ray. "Nothing about the humans. Not one word. You know why?" He took a step closer. "'Cause the guys who printed it didn't want you to know. 'Cause if you knew, you'd ask the obvious question, wouldn't ya? Why do the Gorgonites keep gettin' away, Major? Every panel on the back of that box, they're runnin'. Where they runnin' to?"

The rifle came down an inch.

"The humans are helpin' 'em," said Charles Lee Ray, low, like a man sharing something he wasn't supposed to. "That's the big secret. That's why I'm here. The Gorgonites can't win on their own. Never could. Look at 'em. Bows and arrows. But the humans hide 'em. The humans feed 'em. The humans keep 'em in their houses, behind locked doors, where a soldier can't get at 'em." He shook his head sorrowfully. "It's a goddamn disgrace, is what it is."

The Major's jaw worked around the cigar. "Proof."

It was a fair question, and Charles Lee Ray didn't have any. He'd made the whole thing up in the time it took to read the box, the way he'd been making things up since he was nine in a South Side schoolyard, and he opened his mouth to make up something else. But the Major had already turned and was looking at the stack of open cartons by the stockroom door—at the top one, a purple-and-green box with a cellophane window, lying on its side, open, and empty.

The Major dropped off the window display, crossed the floor at a run, went up the side of the carton like a cargo net, and stood looking down into the empty box: the little molded tray in the shape of a lion-faced thing with a bow, nothing in it, and two double-A batteries loose in the corner of the carton where somebody had dropped them.

"ARCHER," said the Major, like a curse. "The Gorgonite leader. He was activated. He was HERE. And now he is GONE."

Charles Lee Ray looked at the empty box for exactly one second. He had no idea. Some kid had lifted a toy, probably—the delinquent on his way out, sticking something in his backpack. Whatever. It didn't matter. It played.

"What'd I tell ya," he said.

The Major turned around on top of the carton and looked down at the doll in the stripes of streetlight, and took the cigar out of his mouth. "Rank."

"Consultants don't have rank, Major. Consultants have clearance."

The Major regarded him another second. Then, all twelve inches of him, he came to attention on top of the carton of Gorgonites and saluted, and Charles Lee Ray saluted back. He'd never done it before. It was easy. Everything was easy when somebody already wanted to believe you.

"Okay," he said. "First things first. Your men are in boxes. You're gonna need batteries. Double-As. There's a register up front, and there's a smoke detector in every room of this place, and I bet nobody's checked 'em since the Hallmark." He jerked his head at the rest of the stockroom. "And all these other boxes. The ones that ain't gonna wake up. They got the same thing in 'em that you got? The chip?"

"Affirmative."

"Take 'em. All of 'em. Spare parts. A man never knows when he's gonna need a spare." He smiled. It didn't do much on that face. "And then we're movin' out. Can't stay here; the delinquent opens up at eight. I know a place. Across the street from where the collaborators live. Guy's got a garage full of guns and a house full of gadgets, and he don't know nothin'."

The Major's eyes narrowed again, interested now. "The collaborators. You have a location."

"I got an address, Major," said Charles Lee Ray. "I got a whole family. Mom, Dad, little sister, and a big brother, seventeen, skinny, a real wiseass. He's the one runnin' it. He's got monsters in his house right now, I guarantee it." He turned and started for the register. "And he's got these rats."

It took them half an hour. The Major woke his squad first, five of them out of five boxes, with the double-As from the register drawer—a big bald one with a rifle, a quiet one with a knife, one with a bazooka, one with a flamethrower, and one with a headset who started listening to the radio in the store's little office before he was all the way out of the cellophane—and they came out of their boxes the way men come off a troop truck, fast and ready and looking for somebody to tell them where to point. Then they did the rest of the boxes. Charles Lee Ray sat on the counter by the register with his legs dangling and watched. They were good. They were fast. Thirty boxes opened along the seams, the soldiers inside laid out on the floor in rows like casualties, and the Major going down the rows with the quiet one's knife, opening each little plastic chest, taking out something small and green and flat, and dropping it into a canvas sack. The ones on the floor didn't move. They never had. Then the smoke detectors; the bald one stood on the bazooka one's shoulders.

At 9:56 Charles Lee Ray climbed the shelves by the stockroom's back door, reached the deadbolt from the top shelf, turned it, clack, and let them out into the alley, six soldiers in a line, covering each other, with a sack of chips and every battery in the store. He went last. In the doorway he stopped and looked back once at the dark store, the rows of soldiers on the floor, the wooden trains and the rocking horse. Somebody who don't know, he thought, pleased. A whole army of somebodies.

He didn't bother to lock it behind him.

VIII. Batteries

The Meeks house. Friday, December 13, 1996, 12:40 a.m.

At twelve-forty something scraped on the garage roof.

I was lying on my bed in my clothes in the dark with my shoes on. I hadn't really slept since Sunday, not more than an hour at a time. The hamster cage lived on my desk now, and all four Devas were awake, and Maga-Z was out of the cage altogether, on the windowsill, pressed flat against the frame, like a man waiting behind a door with a knife.

The scrape came again, rubber on asphalt shingle. The trash can under the eave—the one the kid had used to sneak out since eighth grade, the one Billy Loomis had shown him how to drop onto without a sound. Somebody was climbing it.

The second heartbeat started up. I rolled off the bed and went to the side of the window, flat to the wall, the way you clear a room, the way I'd done it a hundred times in another life, and waited. I could hear a heartbeat out there, big and fast and scared and human, nothing small or slow about it. A shadow came up over the edge of the garage roof, crouched, breathing hard, a little cloud of breath in the cold. It crawled across the shingles on hands and knees, stopped outside my window, and tapped on the glass. Tap. Tap-tap.

"Randy?" it whispered. "Randy. It's me. It's Alan."

I opened the window. Alan Abernathy was crouched on our garage roof in a parka over flannel pajama pants and high-tops, hair sticking out from under a knit cap, a backpack on his back. His face was white, and he was shaking, and not from the cold.

"I called," he said before I could say anything. "I called your house. Like twenty minutes ago. And your dad picked up on the first ring and said Who is this like a cop, like a really scary cop, and I panicked and hung up." He swallowed. "So I came over."

"How did you know about the trash can?"

"Everybody's got one. I had the exact same setup in Ohio. Two schools' worth." He shifted on the shingles. "Can I come in? It's really cold. And I'm kind of freaking out."

I put out my hand and pulled him in. He came over the sill in a tangle of parka and backpack, landed on his knees on my carpet, and stayed there breathing. I closed the window. Maga-Z hadn't moved from the sill. He was looking at the backpack.

Down the hall my parents' door opened, and my father's footsteps came fast, and my door opened, and my father stood in it in his robe with the aluminum bat, the hall light behind him, looking at a fifteen-year-old from next door on his knees on my carpet.

"It's okay, Dad," I said. "It's Alan."

My father looked at Alan, then at me. "Is it okay?"

"I don't know yet."

My father nodded slowly and didn't leave. He stood in the doorway with the bat. Alan looked up at him, swallowed, and looked back at me. "Your dad's scary," Alan whispered.

"He's having a week," I said. "What happened, Alan."

"You said on TV," said Alan to the carpet. "On your show. Christy taped it. You said if it keeps talking after you take the batteries out, you leave. And you call me. You. You said to call you."

I sat down slowly on the edge of my bed. "Alan. What did you do."

He looked at me with a face I knew—the face of a kid who's done something, knows it, and has been carrying it around for hours alone, waiting for somebody to tell it to. "You told me not to put batteries in them."

"...Yeah."

"So I did."

Behind him in the doorway, my father closed his eyes.

"Why," I said, "would you do that?"

"Because you told me not to!" His whisper cracked. "You came in the store, and you looked at the boxes like they were bombs, and then you told me don't put batteries in those, and you wouldn't tell me why! Nobody tells you not to do something unless it's cool!"

I opened my mouth to argue and had nothing. He was right. I'd known it Monday, in front of the Rexall.

"That's fair," I said. "That's actually my fault."

"Thank you."

"What happened."

He took off the backpack and held it in his lap in both arms. "My dad left me to close up tonight. At nine. He had to go to the Price Club, for the opening, for the punch and stuff. So I was alone. In the store." He swallowed. "And I opened one. Of the monster ones, not the soldiers, the Gorgonites. 'Cause the monsters looked cooler. And I put the batteries in, six double-As, out of the register drawer, and I turned it on." He looked at the backpack. "And it looked at me."

"Alan—"

"Not like a toy. Like a person. It looked around the stockroom, and then it looked at me, and it said please. It said please don't hurt us. And that's not on the box, Randy. I checked. The box says GORGONITES, ATTACK! and FOR GORGON! and like four other things, and none of them are please."

"Rule three," I said softly.

"Rule three." He nodded fast. "So I took the batteries out. Like you said. And it kept talking."

On my desk, the other three Devas had come to the front of the cage, lined up at the bars, facing Alan's backpack. They weren't hissing, just looking: Cham-P in front, San-D with her nose pressed between the bars.

"Can I see it?" I said.

Alan unzipped the backpack slowly and held it open toward me. There was a figure inside, wrapped in one of Alan's T-shirts like a blanket: a foot tall, gray-violet, with a long, gentle, lion-shaped face, a mane of molded plastic hair, a body like a medieval monk's, and a little bow and quiver slung across its back. Its eyes had been painted on by a machine at a factory in Ohio, and they were looking at me—big, dark, wet, frightened, alive, and so tired, like something that had woken up in a box in a stranger's back room, in a world it didn't understand, and been told by the writing on the box that it was a monster and was supposed to lose.

"Please," said the figure. Its voice was low and grave and very gentle, an old man's voice, a voice for reading bedtime stories. "We are not a threat."

In the doorway my father made a very small sound.

"What's your name?" I said to the figure in the T-shirt.

"Archer," it said. "I am Archer. Of the Gorgonites." Its dark eyes moved past me to the desk, to the cage, to three small shapes in scarves standing at the bars in a row looking back at it, and then to the windowsill and the fourth.

On the windowsill, Maga-Z stood up on his hind legs, looked Archer over with those narrow eyes, and then lifted one paw and saluted, sly as ever. Archer looked at the hamster. Then slowly, in the T-shirt, in the backpack, in Alan's arms, the Gorgonite bowed his head.

"Okay," I said softly. "Alan. Is that all? Just him?"

Alan didn't answer right away.

"Alan."

"I put batteries in the soldier guy too," he said, very fast, all at once. "Chip Hazard. The leader. For the window. For the display. I thought it'd be cool, for the opening, if one of them was in the window, moving. And he saluted me. And he said Gorgonites. Like it was a swear."

The room went silent.

"And then I got scared, because of the monster, and I put Archer in my backpack and I locked up and I went home. I forgot my jacket. So I went back for it. At ten. With my dad." He looked at me. "And the window was empty, Randy. The soldier wasn't in the window. And the back door of the stockroom was open. And there were boxes on the floor. A lot of boxes. Open. And my dad called the sheriff, and the deputy said it was probably kids. Kids. Kids who broke in and didn't take anything but some toys out of some boxes."

"And the batteries?"

"Gone. All of them. Out of the register. Out of the smoke detectors."

I sat on the edge of my bed in the dark looking at Alan Abernathy and the thing in his backpack.

"Also," said Alan.

"There's more?"

"The back door of the stockroom." He wasn't looking at me now. "It wasn't broken. Like, nobody kicked it in. It was unlocked. From the inside. Like somebody was already in there, and let them out." He swallowed. "And last night. At like two-thirty. I was at my window. And I saw something under our hedge. Like a little kid. Lying on its back. Looking up at me." He finally looked at me. "And yesterday. Wednesday night. In the storm. When your tree got hit. I saw it in the light from the fire. Running across our yard. From your garage. Like a little person. In overalls." His voice dropped to almost nothing. "And it stopped. Right under my window. And it looked up. And it waved at me."

Nobody said anything. In the doorway, very slowly, my father lowered the bat.

"Randy?" said Alan. "What's happening?"

I looked at the clock radio on my nightstand, green numbers in the dark. 12:47 a.m. Friday, December thirteenth. Of course it is, I thought. Of course it fucking is.

A week ago Tuesday, after the moving truck, I'd sat on this bed and written everything I could remember about a kids' movie I'd seen once at nine, half asleep on a group home couch. At the bottom I'd written nobody dies, stared at it, crossed it out, and written underneath, in the movie. And now Charles Lee Ray, who'd come all the way from Indiana for me and found a family that wouldn't buy his act and a spear he was afraid of, had gone out into the dark to find somebody who didn't know what he was, and found a stockroom full of soldiers who'd only ever been told one thing in their lives, on the side of a box. Somebody who doesn't know, I thought. A whole army of somebodies.

I didn't write nobody dies back in.

"Alan," I said. "Sit down. Take your coat off. My dad's going to make cocoa, because that's what he does now at one in the morning. And we've got a lot to talk about."

In the doorway my father turned without a word and went down the hall toward the kitchen. And outside, from somewhere in the dark between our house and the Abernathys', from the side yard, under the hedge, very faintly, through the window glass, something laughed.