The Face of Midnight
Author: Dan Padavona
Date: 2016-11-04 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Horror
Description: Becca is homeless, but she sleeps in the finest homes. She might even be sleeping in your bed right now. But danger is closing in on Becca. New York's most-feared serial killer, The Midnight Killer, is butchering victims on his way across the state. After Becca flees from a deranged stalker, she takes shelter inside an abandoned farmhouse. Something evil lurks within the house, and a freak October storm has trapped Becca inside. And it's Halloween Night.
Rights: Copyright 2016 Dan Padavona

Contents

CHAPTER ONE The Dead Girl

CHAPTER TWO The Chase

CHAPTER THREE Night in the Basement

CHAPTER FOUR In Over My Head

CHAPTER FIVE House on the Hill

CHAPTER SIX Last Goodbyes

CHAPTER SEVEN Movie Night

CHAPTER EIGHT The Midnight Killer

CHAPTER NINE The Face of Midnight

CHAPTER TEN Epilogue

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Author's Note

Copyright Information

About the Author

CHAPTER ONE

The Dead Girl

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A guy walks into a car, with a dead girl stuffed behind the back seat.

And I’m the punchline.

In the ten minutes it took to get from my apartment to the highway, I kept wondering where the perfume smell was coming from.

Not from the vents. Not from the pine-tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the mirror.

I doubt I’d have noticed the body had the Corvette hugging my bumper not flashed its brights at me for driving too slow. I twisted my head around to yell something crude and saw her curled on the floor between the seats.

A woman, not moving.

Her hands wedged under the driver’s seat, cold, dead fingers inches from my ankle.

You might criticize me for panicking and not thinking straight. Until you speed down a highway in heavy traffic with a dead person lounging in the back seat, you have no idea how you’ll react.

A horn blared. I jerked the wheel and pulled my Honda Civic off the shoulder, narrowly missing a rusty pickup trying to cut me off. Rumble strips thundered. The car shook until my teeth rattled. The Corvette shot around us, the driver’s middle finger extended.

My foot left the accelerator.

I had to tell the police.

Hell, no. That was a terrible idea.

I’d only lived in Barton Falls for a few months. How would the police react if an unknown twenty-four-year-old showed up at the station with a corpse in his car?

I dropped down to forty-five mph. Then thirty.

A chorus of horns assailed me. I was a slab of driftwood bobbing down a raging river.

Fingers nervously drumming the steering wheel, I avoided eye contact as cars whipped past. What if someone saw the dead woman?

Impossible. She was too low to the ground to see from another car.

Unless a tractor trailer passed.

I risked a quick glance behind me.

Her face was hidden, but I could see she was young, maybe a teenager.

Faded jean jacket, cropped blonde hair, body lean and strong beneath painted-on denim.

I got the impression she was attractive, except that she was dead.

Another beep brought my head around as I drifted onto the shoulder again. Something large and thick thwacked the undercarriage and dragged under the car until the tires jounced over it.

I hadn’t been watching the road. I had a terrible vision of driving over someone walking along the highway.

Vehicular homicide while traveling with a corpse—that’ll get you hard time.

I squinted my eyes and looked.

A muffler which appeared to have broken off from a semi flipped and cartwheeled over the guardrail. At least, I hadn’t killed anyone.

But there was still a dead girl in the backseat.

I considered pulling over but thought better of it; the last thing I wanted was to draw attention.

I needed to stop and think.

The mall exit appeared, and I picked up speed and followed a glut of vehicles exiting the highway. The ramp divided into three lanes and ended at a red light, me in the middle lane. I felt drivers staring over at me as we lined up. I looked straight ahead, sweating like a fat man on the Fourth of July, praying a bus or raised vehicle wouldn’t pull up beside me before the light changed.

As the red light glared back at me, I wondered about the girl.

Maybe she was an addict who’d crawled into my car after an overdose.

Maybe someone had strangled the girl and dumped her body in my backseat.

Who was she, and why was she in my car?

The light turned green.

I accelerated through the median, racing ahead of the other vehicles.

Just my luck, the mall parking lot was busy, but I managed to find a less congested area at the back of the lot.

I pulled into the empty parking space, wondering what the hell I was going to do. I didn’t dare touch the girl. Any contact with the body would make the police even more suspicious I’d killed her.

The motor rumbled. The afternoon sun shone through the windshield, too hot for mid-October.

Greasy, sweaty scents drifted out from a busy McDonald’s. I watched a minivan lurch past the drive-thru window and head in my direction. I knew a minivan was tall enough for the driver to see the body.

I had to get out of there.

My hands touched the wheel, foot poised above the accelerator.

Nothing to see here. Just a guy in his car with no dead girls in the backseat.

The van passed and drove off. Close call.

Throwing the car into drive, I turned down a two-lane road which cut into wilderness. Evergreens grouped close together and towered along both sides of the road. Even with the windows closed I could smell pine and standing water. The swamp glistened back through the trees, smelling of rot and dead things. I wondered how long it would take before the girl started to stink.

A truck came up on my bumper. I pulled to the shoulder to let it pass, and the truck vanished around a bend, leaving me alone on the road.

Alone with the dead girl.

Wiping my hands on my shirt, I looked over my shoulder, afraid of what I might see.

The girl’s high tops were dusty, beaten. Otherwise, her clothes appeared clean if a little ragged. She hardly looked like a derelict, but that didn’t rule out my murder theory.

Why me?

Starting to feel sick, I lowered the windows and let the scents of pine and swamp water roll into the car.

I didn’t intend to dump her body in the woods, did I?

No. I just needed to think this through, figure out who she was and why she was in my car.

I still couldn’t see her face. For that, I’d need to lean over my seat.

I unlatched the seatbelt, taking one more peek out the window to ensure nobody watched.

I shifted my body around and bent over the seat.

She moved.

A subtle shifting of the legs.

I stopped breathing.

I could tell by the taut rigidity of her body that she’d been conscious the whole time, a mouse frozen by a snake’s gaze. The quiet tension inside the car reminded me of the moment before lightning strikes. She was about to make a run for it. I started to say something and found my throat too parched for speaking.

Maybe if I grabbed her before she got away…

I reached down.

Her hand shot toward the door handle. Before I could react the back door flew open. I swung my head over my shoulder and watched her race into the trees, legs pumping like a sprinter.

I stumbled out of the car, a trembling mess. While I shouted at her to stop, the mystery girl weaved between pines and vanished into darkness. I followed her halfway into the forest and stopped. She was too fast, too strong.

The woods swallowed her whole.

The girl was gone.

Riley wheeled himself out from under the car and grinned, wiping oil on stained and threadbare blue jeans. That muffler I’d whacked on the highway cracked my oil pan, broke two springs and damaged the control arms.

Having a friend and neighbor who knew how to repair cars was a sweet perk. Too bad he wasn’t a miracle worker. What I needed was one of those televangelists to lay his hands upon the hood and infuse my Civic with the high-octane, restorative power of Jesus. Anything less meant a one-way trip to the junkyard.

“Shocks are wasted, too.”

“Can you resuscitate her?”

“I could,” he said, shaking out a mop of red hair that made him look frozen in adolescence. “But then you’re looking at a few thousand dollars. For what? Maybe another twenty or thirty thousand miles before a head gasket blows. You’re living on borrowed time. Might just as well put a bullet in her head and start over with something used.”

“Oh, you gonna let me borrow a couple grand?”

“I’ve known you forever, Steve. But hell, no.”

Noticing the landlord glaring across the lot, Riley’s smile faded. He cleared his throat and nervously rubbed the grit off his hands.

“Jenkins looks pissed,” Riley said.

“Guess he doesn’t like the tenants turning his parking lot into a junkyard.”

Riley waved and gave Jenkins a thumbs up. Jenkins shook his head and went back to painting a mailbox.

“Or maybe he wants his rent money,” he said.

“I’m only a month behind.”

“With no job, you’ll be two months behind next week.”

“I’m doing the best I can. You know Jenkins had it in for me the day I moved in. He’d throw me out tomorrow if he thought he could rent the place for what I’m paying, which is a helluva lot more than you or anyone else seems to be paying at King’s Road Apartments.”

I did my best to contain my resentment. I’m sure it flashed in my eyes because Riley sheepishly looked away. We’d grown up together in Smith Glen, another failed upstate New York industrial town, about an hour down the highway from Barton Falls. Back home, I’d been mulling over the possibility of community college six months ago when Riley called. He’d heard the new computer manufacturing plant in town was hiring and suggested I apply.

To know the weather is to know Barton Falls: Five months of frozen, barren winter. Four months of rain out of a slate sky that descends like a veil and suffocates you. We live for three months of summer, those sunny days when optimism brims and you start to believe that maybe next winter won’t be so bad, and someday these old industrial towns will rise from the ashes.

Six months after the plant hired me, the company shut its doors and fled to Florida, where taxes are lower and summer is eternal. Maybe I should have escaped with them.

It wasn’t Riley’s fault. I shouldn’t have left home on a whim. I was stupid enough to believe Barton Falls was different than Smith Glen.

I was seven years out of high school. The successful friends I’d grown up with had graduated from college three years ago and started families. I’d see them in three years at our ten-year high school reunion, a prospect that made me feel sick and small. I was almost out of time, and I didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do with my life.

“Anyway, I know a dude who will give you a few hundred for parts.”

“A few hundred?”

He raised his hands defensively.

“Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m not the one who drove over Godzilla. And a few hundred bucks should buy you time with Jenkins.”

”I swear the weirdest crap happens to me.”

“There’s an understatement. Tell me again about the dead girl.”

“Stowaway.”

“Okay, the stowaway. You seriously don’t know who she is or why she was in your car?”

“I didn’t have the doors locked. Maybe she was in the act of hot-wiring my car, saw me coming, and ducked into the backseat.”

Riley cocked an eyebrow and swept his arm at my ruined vehicle.

“Screw you, too, buddy,” I said. “That car was worth more than a few hundred bucks before yesterday, maybe even worth stealing.”

“A sexy car thief.” He glanced wistfully at the gray October sky. “What’s it like to be you, Steve Morgan?”

The Midnight Killer.

Hearing those words was enough to make most of us shiver and look over our shoulder when the sun dropped below the land. The first person to put a name to New York state’s serial killer was a reporter for the ROCHESTER SENTINEL named Mulligan. The Midnight Killer moniker took on its own life when the national news picked up the story.

The Midnight Killer murdered nine people, two men and seven women, between spring and autumn of that year. He struck in seemingly faraway places like New York City and Buffalo, too distant to worry a sleepy little town in the middle of nowhere.

Then September came. The killer abducted a female student walking home late at night on the Syracuse University campus. The state police recovered her head outside of Albany, stuffed inside a sluice pipe, bloated and pig-like, covered by twigs and leaves and clogging the water flow. The rest of her body remained missing. Just an hour east of Barton Falls, Syracuse was too close for comfort.

I didn’t make it a point to think about the Midnight Killer that October, but you have to understand what it was like that autumn. You couldn’t open the paper or watch the news without some mention of the murderer who always eluded the police and FBI. A real-life serial killer stalked our backyard. After six months of killings, we all walked a razor’s edge between paranoia and unbridled terror.

Our local news came from the KANE GROVE PRESS, a small town rag which originated a few towns south of Barton Falls and tended toward the sensational. The Midnight Killer headlined today’s paper because of his recent inactivity. I scanned the article in the grocery store checkout line with a loaf of bread cradled under one arm, while an elderly lady wearing thick, dark lensed glasses reminiscent of a nuclear physicist’s protective eyewear tried to read the article around my shoulder.

“Mark my words, he’s dead,” she said, sniffing. “And good riddance.”

“Maybe he’s just laying low for a while,” I said.

I grabbed a pack of gum off the rack and set the bread and paper on the conveyor belt. The cashier flashed the I need a manager to help me light, and I groaned. I always got stuck behind the shopper who paid by check.

“No. It’s in his blood. He wouldn’t stop unless he was dead.”

“Maybe it’s not a he,” I said, praying the manager would hurry so I could get out of there.

“The paper says he’s a he.”

“Then I guess it must be true.”

It didn’t make me proud to be sarcastic, but she’d started to grate on me. I just wanted to beat the rain showers back to my apartment. She leaned over the belt, trying to read more of the article and annoyed that I’d made it difficult.

At last, the manager arrived to get the line moving. I paid for the newspaper, bread, and gum. As I turned to leave, I handed the newspaper to the woman.

“What’s this for?”

“So you can finish the article.”

By the time I’d walked home, Riley’s guy had come through for me. He showed up an hour later to tow away the corpse of my car. I pocketed $450 for the Civic, grabbed a beaten mountain bike for $50 at a garage sale, and used the remaining money to buy groceries and get Jenkins off my back about the rent.

The supermarket on the east end of town hadn’t called yet, and honestly, I hoped they wouldn’t. I’d applied for the assistant store manager position. Another dead-end job would snap the trap shut, and I’d be stuck in Barton Falls forever.

The sun was down. Although it wasn’t cold enough to see my breath, I felt winter creeping up on Barton Falls. Throwing on an extra sweatshirt, I took the bike out for a ride, hoping to reach the Blue Lake Cafe on the west side of town before I caught hypothermia.

I pedaled up Cayuga Street, the cold and dark flying at me. Dead leaves scratched and crawled along the sidewalks. With Halloween a week away, macabre decorations adorned houses up and down the block.

Skeletons glowed in the night; cornstalks framed entrances. Gravestones, glowering pumpkins, and cackling witches peeked out from the shadows. Fortunately, no one had the bad taste to erect a serial killer dummy.

Feeling the chill of the wind bite at my ears, I pulled the hood over my head. Few cars traveled along Cayuga Street, the majority of town already locked inside their homes for the night. At one point I noticed a car following a few blocks back. Then it turned down a side street.

A shifting wind pulled the scent of a wood stove out from the neighborhoods to mix with the leaf mold. I reveled in my freedom, just me on the silent streets with no need to wake up early tomorrow.

I cut down Church Street, the lights of downtown sparkling to the west. Gothic churches soared to either side of me, some dark, others with fiery light at the windows. A crone pushed a shopping cart of cans and bottles down the sidewalk, muttering to herself. She stopped and watched me. The cold stare of her eyes made the hair stand on the back of my neck.

I pumped the pedals, leaving the crone in the distance.

The blast of a car horn nearly made me lose my balance. An old Chevy Impala had crept up on my back tire without me hearing. As the driver gunned the engine and passed, someone yelled asshole and tossed a beer can out of the window. Teenagers, probably. Maybe I wasn’t so alone on the roads tonight. I began to feel vulnerable on my new bike.

I took a left on Elm, cutting across State Street, which housed the public library. The lights were still on, the silhouettes of people moving between the stacks. I passed Main Street, its sidewalks empty, the shops closed.

The streetlights were fewer here, the way ahead cloaked in shadow. At seven o’clock in summer, the sun would be shining and the temperature warm enough for shorts. But in the waning days of October, all was black and cold.

I whipped past side streets where nary a light shone inside houses. It seemed entire communities had gone to the grave, yet I could see the outlines of vehicles in driveways.

My imagination conjured a disturbing image of a murderer lurking in those houses, the dark interiors hiding a trail of blood and bodies. What if the killer watched me from a window?

The Blue Lake Cafe was still two or three miles away, and I was alone.

I hopped a curb and felt something crunch and rattle on the bike. The pedals weren’t getting me anywhere.

“Shit.”

I bent down to fix the chain.

It was almost too dark to see what I was doing. A streetlight from a block away threw a light shaft across the road. Otherwise, it was as black as midnight.

I wasn’t alone out there. I can’t say how I knew this. It was just a feeling.

The chain was almost on. Another half-inch tug and I’d be able to pull it on by turning the pedals. But I couldn’t yank it past that last bit of real estate. Something was jammed, or maybe the chain was kinked. I wished for a flashlight.

The sensation I wasn’t alone grew.

While I yanked on the chain, footsteps approached in the darkness.

They came down the sidewalk, moving fast.

The stranger’s feet dragged along, scraping the concrete. I looked around for a place to hide, but the footsteps were almost on top of me.

A decrepit monster of a man came gliding out of the black. A very tall monster.

A grotesque hump rose off his back. He walked hunched over, accelerating as he closed in on me.

What frightened me most was his mad, toothless grin.

His shadow swooped down on me. I was too scared to scream.

I felt the sweaty breeze of his passing run across my face.

Then he was gone, vanished into the darkness. For a while, I heard his shoes scraping and dragging.

My body trembled as the sounds faded away.

Wanting to get the hell out of there before he came back, I tugged harder on the chain. I winced when it pinched my finger.

Finally, the chain caught. I turned the pedals and felt the pulley drag the chain back into place.

The night felt colder when I resumed my ride. I threw glances back into the darkness, afraid the tall man would be right behind me.

I was almost to the West Road intersection when I caught movement on the sidewalk about a half-mile ahead. A girl. Cropped, punky blonde hair bouncing along as she strode hurriedly through the night.

It couldn’t be. Yet I knew it was.

The stowaway.

She made a hard turn down West Road, cutting across a lawn and disappearing behind a wall of shrubbery. I pedaled faster, racing to catch up. It occurred to me I hadn’t ridden a bike since I was a teenager. Once I’d learned to drive a car, I didn’t think about bikes anymore. I paid for the long layoff with a screaming tightness clenching my leg muscles. Riding harder, I ignored the cold freezing my earlobes.

I slammed the brakes at the intersection and waited for a slow-moving sedan to roll past. The headlights caught the girl as she rushed down the sidewalk. Cursing, I drummed my fingers on the handlebars and waited for the car.

The sedan approached painfully slow with its lights blinding me.

The driver paused at the intersection of Elm and West as though lost, then turned around and headed back where he’d come from.

It took a long time before the red imprints from the headlights left my eyes, and by then she was gone.

She couldn’t have gotten far.

I crossed the intersection and raced along West Road, the lights of the cafe shining over the hill crest. The empty sidewalk stretched into the distance and vanished with the night.

Did the girl live inside one of the houses along West Road?

I studied the windows as I passed, expecting to see her cross through a living room.

Though I felt an oddly desperate need to find her, the cold worked deep into my bones. My fingers went numb on the handlebars, the bike becoming dangerously difficult to steer. I should have worn gloves.

Holding on to the slim hope she’d stopped for coffee, I angled across the shoulder toward the cafe.

A scattering of cars dotted the parking lot, just enough to convince me life still existed after so much darkness.

A bell rang when I pulled the door open. The smell of pastries and coffee enveloped me at the entrance. Two rows of tables led to a clear glass counter which held assorted tarts, cakes, and croissants. Though I’d known the girl wouldn’t be here, seeing the mostly empty cafe still hit me like a punch to the gut.

My stomach growled. I remembered how hungry I was. I made a quick stop in the restroom to wash off the bicycle grease. The warm water thawed my fingers.

Blue Lake Cafe made their own gourmet ice cream, and I’d craved a double scoop of strawberry all evening.

Maybe I’d find the girl on my way home when I had a full stomach and wasn’t so cold.

A teen girl with a blonde ponytail thrown over one shoulder worked behind the counter, petulantly watching the clock tick toward closing time. She took my order and sulked to the freezer, where she struggled to wrestle the scoops free from the frozen container.

I took my ice cream to a table near the back. A college-age couple sat two tables away from me, holding hands and sipping on lattes.

I’d finished my first scoop when the bell rang behind me and a cool rush of wind brushed the back of my neck.

“I thought that was you,” a female’s voice said.

I flinched, wishing I’d chosen a different eatery for an evening snack.

Excitedly smacking away on a wad of gum, Donna Berwick slid into the seat across from me. She smelled of cheap perfume, as though she’d wallowed in a pigpen of taffy.

“Hey, Donna.”

“Why don’t you call me?”

Heavyset and a full head taller than me, Donna pulled auburn curls over her shoulder and leered across the table. We’d met at a bar a few months ago, and somehow I’d ended going home with her after several beers. At least, I’d sobered up enough to escape before we ended up in bed together. Ever since, Donna had been my shadow—a hulking, Amazonian-like shadow. She seemed to show up wherever I went. Like tonight. God, I needed to get away from Barton Falls.

“Been busy.”

“You aren’t hurt, are you?” An overabundance of concern etched her brow.

“Why would I be hurt?”

“Riley told me you wrecked your car.”

My anger flared. Obviously, she’d sought out Riley to weasel information about me. Why would Riley tell Donna about my accident? I hoped he hadn’t mentioned my stowaway.

Donna touched my arm. Her fingers groped through my sweatshirt.

“Not at all,” I said, pulling my arm away and working on my second scoop. The sooner I finished, the sooner I could get out of there.

“Glad to hear it. I’d hate for anything to happen to that pretty body of yours.”

I thought about my bike chained to the light pole outside. If Donna saw, she’d never let me ride home in the dark. She’d insist on putting the bike in her trunk and giving me a ride home. I’d be trapped. Once she had me in the car, inevitably, Donna would need to stop at her apartment to pick up a few things.

Make yourself at home while I change into something more comfortable.

How would I search for my stowaway with Donna at the wheel, studying me, watching my every move?

The way she beamed while I ate my ice cream made me think of Hansel’s witch.

“Aren’t you going to order something?” I asked.

“I really shouldn’t. I’m trying to watch my figure.”

That makes one of us.

“Get a tea. Zero calories, and it’s supposed to be good for you.”

She thought for a moment and nodded.

“You have the best ideas. I could just hug you.”

Thankfully, she didn’t. Instead, she grabbed my hands and gave them a squeeze that nearly crushed my knuckles into sand. I pulled them back and concentrated on finishing my ice cream.

“I can’t imagine how much it set you back to buy a new car,” she said.

She winked shrewdly. There it was. She already knew about the bike. Damn Riley. How much torture had he endured before telling her about my situation? Not enough.

“Your tea, Donna?”

“Right. Don’t miss me.” She scooted back in her chair, the legs groaning in anguish. “Be right back, hon.”

As she placed her order I eyed the exit. I could be out the door and have my bike unchained before she realized I was gone.

I couldn’t.

As creepy as Donna’s obsessiveness was, I’d feel like a complete heel for abandoning her.

I stayed. My mistake.

After gulping down her tea, she refused to let me go home in the dark. She’d known all along I’d ridden my bike to the cafe.

“You’ll get yourself killed. People drive like idiots around Barton Falls. Do you even have a light?”

“Reflectors.”

“Reflectors?” She tutted. “What am I going to do with you?”

While I loaded my bike into the trunk of her Subaru, I stared into the night. Where was the stowaway girl? I’d never learn her name or find out why she’d hidden in my car until I caught up to her. And I couldn’t search for her until I got away from Donna.

Donna slammed the trunk shut, the sound of a cell door locking.

“All set?”

“Yeah, thanks.”

She kissed me on the cheek and left a wet spot that froze in the wind.

“My pleasure.”

Her fingers ran from my chest down to my thigh. She giggled and heaved herself into the front seat. The entire car shook.

Donna drove me around the south end of Barton Falls and turned onto Old State Road. Corporate commerce blossomed here, choking out what little remained of local businesses: Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Target, a smattering of awful chain restaurants. Though Old State Road was better lighted than Elm Street, narrow shoulders riddled with broken glass and assorted debris made biking dangerous.

Donna kept smiling at me, a devil’s grin tinged red and green by the dashboard lights. Her hand inched across the seat. I leaned against the door, just beyond her reach.

She leered.

“You always play hard to get. I just haven’t figured out what turns you on,” she said, certain she’d unlock my hidden kinks and desires.

Whatever those desires were, they didn’t include Donna and her lumbering, linebacker figure. It disturbed me that she was strong enough to snap my neck with one easy twist of hand. I tried hard not to look at her.

Halfway to Cayuga Street, I glanced out the window and jumped.

My stowaway.

She glided down the sidewalk, lithe legs making long strides as she drifted in and out of lamplight. I touched the door handle. If Donna’s car had slowed I would have jumped from the vehicle. To hell with the bike. She could keep it.

I could say my growing obsession with the mystery girl was fully rooted in my need to know what her story was and what she’d been doing inside my car.

That would be a lie.

Everything about her fascinated me. Her purposeful, carefree strides spoke of freedom, rebellion. Somehow I knew this girl didn’t play by our rules, wasn’t boxed in like the rest of us. And she sure as hell wasn’t from around here.

I can’t say exactly how I knew this. Maybe it was the way she glided through cold that would make a polar bear whimper, wearing only a faded jean jacket. Tiny puffs of cloud billowed off her lips and evaporated. Those long legs kept pulling her with purpose down the sidewalk toward something infinitely more interesting than anything Barton Falls had to offer.

Donna glanced at me. I yanked my eyes from the girl.

It killed me to focus on the road and let the girl drift off the periphery of my vision.

I couldn’t let Donna know.

Screw it, I thought. Let her know. Maybe Donna will finally give up on me if she thinks I’m interested in someone else.

“Something wrong?”

Donna’s voice was loud inside the car.

“Nothing, nothing. I was just thinking about…”

I trailed off.

“Replaying your accident?” Her eyes filled with sympathy. “I bet you’re suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome. It’s common, nothing to be ashamed of. Why don’t we stop at my place? It would do you good to talk about the accident. I’ll make a pot of coffee.”

Here we go. I had to hand it to Donna: she was a model of consistency.

The sidewalk lay deserted when I looked back. I’d lost the girl again. Thanks a million, Donna.

“I’d hardly call hitting a muffler on the side of the road a major accident.”

We were almost to Park Place when I saw the girl’s shadowed form slip across a front yard and turn off Old State Road onto Park Place.

My heart pounded. Park Place was a cul-de-sac of upscale homes, the last place I’d expect to find a girl who sneaked into unlocked cars. Spruce, pine, and bramble wove a treacherous web behind the cul-de-sac, and beyond the trees stretched miles of open land.

“You look peaked,” Donna said, pulling me out of my trance.

“I don’t feel so good,” I lied.

“I’m not surprised. It’s freezing outside, and you rode your bike clear across town. It’s a wonder you don’t have pneumonia.” She touched my hand, her thumb stroking snake-like patterns across my skin. “I’ll make you a nice, hot cup of soup.”

I considering feigning a sudden rush of nausea, but I didn’t want to overplay my act. She’d never let me out of her sight if she thought I was seriously ill.

“I’m carsick. I get motion sickness, especially at night.”

She glanced skeptically at me, looked at the road, then back at me again.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought only kids got carsick.”

“No. Adults get motion sickness, too.”

“Do you need medicine to drive?”

“It only happens when I’m a passenger. Something about the car motion throwing off my equilibrium.”

She laughed a little. Her hand moved down to my thigh.

“My God, that’s so cute.”

“Listen,” I said. “It’s only two miles or so back to King’s Road Apartments, and I’m warm now. Just pull over. I’ll ride the rest of the way home.”

“Steve,” she said, chewing her lip. “I don’t feel right leaving you on the street. And you don’t even have a bike light.”

“I’ll get one tomorrow. I promise.”

“Well…”

“Listen, Donna. If I ride with you another block, I’m gonna throw up in your Subaru. I know you don’t want that. You know how long it takes the scent of vomit to dissipate?”

She took us on a short jog down Main, then headed east on Cayuga.

“Donna.”

“Okay, okay. I just wanted to find a well-lit spot to drop you off. Don’t lose your lunch.”

After pulling to the curb, she popped the back trunk open. I could feel her studying and assessing as I hauled my bike from the car. Had I convinced her? Probably not. I didn’t care as long as I was out of the car.

“Will you call me to let me know you made it home safely?”

“Donna…I…”

“Fine. You don’t have to call. You’ve got better things to do, right?”

I’m not sure what gave her the impression we’d ever been a couple or that I owed her a call, but the hurt in her eyes convinced me now wasn’t the best time to point this out.

“Don’t be that way. I appreciate the ride. It was stupid of me to ride in the cold. Hey, I can feel my fingers again.”

I wiggled my fingers, and she grinned.

“Okay. Anytime, Steve. But call me sometime. Please?”

“You do know that Riley is single, right?”

“Oh, please. He’s a child.”

She extended her thumb and pinkie, placing her hand beside her cheek to signal call me.

Donna turned the car around and headed back to Main Street. I waited another minute after the taillights disappeared around the curve. When I was convinced she wasn’t coming back, I reversed direction and rode toward Old State Road.

The road seemed a lot darker than it had been earlier. Most of the Halloween display lights were powered off. The black outlines of decorations looked more frightening as they watched me from the darkness.

Ten minutes later I turned down Park Place. I coasted through the cul-de-sac, riding past sprawling, modern homes with big backyards. Expensive vehicles sat parked in the driveways—BMW’s, Hummers, Range Rovers, a yellow Corvette. Now and then, I glimpsed someone through a window. I never saw my stowaway.

I concealed my bike behind an old oak tree at the back of the neighborhood. Walking down the deserted sidewalk, I studied any house with its lights on. A mother carried her daughter up a flight of stairs in a big, gray Colonial, the girl’s head drooped over the woman’s shoulder and her arms flopping with each step up the staircase. In the upstairs of a rustic mansion, a muscular man peeled off his shirt. Getting ready for bed? I didn’t think so. A woman in a sleek nightie lay watching him on the bed, sipping red wine. Her eyes caught mine, and I looked away, hurrying up the sidewalk.

Halfway back to Old State Road, a shadow appeared out of a driveway. I leaped behind the hedgerow of a dark ranch and watched the figure approach.

Footsteps meshed with the clink of a chain. Carefully parting branches, I saw a large man in a black pea coat walk a mongrel dog down the sidewalk.

I should have just walked past as though I belonged in his upscale neighborhood. The worst he could have done was tell me to leave. Now I looked like a prowler. If the man caught me crouched in the bushes, he’d call the police.

I held my breath. I could see the reflected light in the dog’s eyes.

The leash went tight as the dog pulled toward the hedgerow.

“Easy, Buster,” the man said.

The dog sniffed and pawed at the bushes. He was almost face-to-face with me.

I slunk back into the shadows. Buster growled.

Given the size of his snout, he could have snapped my arm off at the elbow if his owner let go of the leash.

“Buster!”

The man struggled to yank him away. Buster’s claws scraped concrete as his owner pulled him past.

As they merged into the shadows, the dog kept looking over its shoulder at the hedgerow.

Then they were gone.

I hid a little longer behind the hedgerow, just to be safe. I didn’t like crouching in the bushes much.

When we were ten, Riley and I camped in his backyard. We used his father’s tent, but somehow we’d fallen asleep in the grass while gazing up at the stars. I awoke to the first lightening of the eastern sky and felt something crawl across my face. Normally, I’d have brushed the thing away, but I was frozen, stiff as a board, scared out of my mind. I let my eyes travel over to Riley and saw hundreds of spiders crawling over his arms, legs, torso, through his hair. For all I knew he was dead, and they were cocooning him.

I didn’t dare look down. Something skittered across my bare legs.

Riley’s sudden scream broke my paralysis. I leaped up, doing a weird, panicked two-step as I brushed dozens of spiders off my shirt and pants. Riley had it worse than me. His face and eyes looked as though a boxer had worked him over all night. We’d slept on a nest of ugly, brown spiders, and they’d feasted on Riley.

It could have been worse, I suppose. The spiders weren’t black widows or brown recluses. Those breeds don’t exist in upstate New York. But I’ve seen a wolf spider the size of a field mouse in Smith Glen. Some things in the night bite hard.

I got the hell away from the bushes.

A cool dampness settled over my skin. It was late and getting colder. I didn’t relish the thought of riding home.

I walked the cul-de-sac, studying every property on one side of the street. Then I crossed to the opposite side.

The girl had vanished on me again. She might have been in any of the lighted houses with signs of activity. Maybe she wasn’t near a window. Maybe she was already in bed.

I didn’t think so.

Something about the dark, sleepy houses drew my attention.

Was she in one of those houses, watching me through a slit in the curtains?

I’d find her. I had to.

It was nearly midnight when I gave up and rode home.

I slept in the next morning. On my way out for lunch, I noticed a yellow slip of paper taped to my door. Jenkins taped notices to doors when someone was late on their rent.

That was odd. I’d paid him next month’s rent with the car proceeds. Perhaps he’d made a mistake.

I headed downtown to meet Riley for a beer at The Rainbow Pub, a dingy, dark bar with smoke-stained walls which belied its name. Except for the few tables along the back where Riley and I ate, it was standing room only inside the pub, the late lunch crowd shouting over each other as the jukebox thumped out an old Pat Benatar tune. Deep fried food and beer permanently colored the scent of the wood grain.

I brought the conundrum of the late rent notice up to Riley during our second round.

“I don’t want to freak you out, but did you pay Jenkins in cash?”

Riley narrowed his eyes whenever he was skeptical or critical of something I’d done.

“Sure. It saved me a trip to the bank. I doubt the bastard would’ve accepted a check from me, anyhow.”

“But he gave you a receipt, right?”

I sipped harder on my beer, feeling a little worried now.

“He had his hands full with a window repair at the end of the lot. I didn’t want to bother him anymore than I already had. The guy hates me enough as it is. He told me he’d write me a receipt and slip it under my door.”

“Did he?”

I didn’t need to answer. It was written on my face.

“Jesus, Steve.”

“Come on. He wouldn’t rip me off that brazenly.”

“Maybe not.” Chewing on a pretzel, Riley stopped to watch a leggy waitress walk past. “But I bet you never got that receipt.”

“No.” Something danced a jig across my spine. “Great. Now you’ve got me paranoid.”

“It’s like you said. Jenkins probably made a mistake. Just be careful from now on. We aren’t locals. Guys like Jenkins know the mayor and half the police force. If they want to take advantage of out-of-towners like us, they damn well can.”

Good ole’ boy country-and-western thumped out of the jukebox. A harried waitress raced to keep up with the lunch hour crowd.

“You ever figure out who the girl was?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

It didn’t sit right with me to hold back on tracking the stowaway to Park Place. I guess I didn’t want him to picture me as a stalker.

“Maybe you should tell someone about her.”

“The police?”

“Why not?”

I groaned. “She didn’t steal anything.”

“She’s the reason you totaled your car.”

“My car was on its last legs. You said it yourself.”

The sky turned dark out the windows. Raindrops pattered the glass. In a few weeks, those raindrops would fall as snow.

“I still think you should tell the police. A local woman went missing last week, so you can’t be too careful.”

I’d forgotten about the woman. A photocopied picture of the woman’s smiling face hung behind the bar.

Erin Tuttle. Long black hair, age twenty-six, mother of two. I couldn’t imagine a mother abandoning two infant children. Foul play was suspected. The news had run a story, strongly insinuating her ex-husband might be involved. She’d filed a restraining order against him after a messy custody battle.

I grinned over the rim of my mug. “I seriously doubt the girl in my car had anything to do with the Tuttle woman’s disappearance.”

“No, but she’s probably a vagrant, part of the reason Barton Falls is getting so dangerous.”

“Since when are you so high and mighty?”

I reminded Riley of the time we’d accidentally set fire to Old Man Richardson’s back lawn when we were ten. As was typical of early spring in Smith Glen, a burn ban was in effect due to dry vegetation. But kids don’t know about burn bans. We built a campfire out of sticks and crumpled newspaper in Riley’s backyard, when a gust tore apart the fire and rained sparks over Richardson’s brown lawn. The firetrucks arrived just before the flames caught the siding of Richardson’s ranch. Mom and Dad grounded me for a month for that stunt.

Choking on bits of pretzel with his face turning red, Riley lowered his head to the table and laughed into the crook of his elbow.

“You gonna live, Riley?”

After he composed himself, he went somber.

“You know, it might have been the Midnight Killer.”

“In Barton Falls? He only hits the big cities. I doubt he could find this place on a map.”

“He’s coming closer. Syracuse last month. Who knows where next?”

“You’re pretty morbid today.”

“Just considering the possibilities. Hey, if he strikes in Barton Falls, maybe he’ll take care of Big Red for you.”

Now it was my turn to choke. Big Red was Riley’s nickname for Donna.

“Don’t even say it, man. I want her off my back, but you know I wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to her.”

“Just joking, just joking.”

“Well, don’t joke about stuff like that. I mean it.”

Seeing I was serious, he apologized.

“You owe me one, anyhow,” he said, as he brushed expelled pretzel bits off the table.

“How so?”

“She stopped by the apartment to look for you this morning.”

I shivered.

“Donna?”

“Yep. I was outside working under my car when she drove up. Bee-yatch nearly drove over my legs. I told her you were at a job interview. Highly unlikely, but she bought it.”

“God. She doesn’t give up, does she?”

Back at the apartment, I eyed suspiciously the yellow warning taped to the door. I stuffed the paper into my pocket, unlocking the door just in time to answer the ringing phone.

The supermarket had finally gotten around to calling me. The store manager assured me I was high on his list of prospective hires and wanted me to come in for an interview.

I’m pretty good at reading people. Even over the phone, I could tell from the desperate shade of his tone that I was his only applicant.

“Next Friday at noon,” I agreed.

The trapdoor slammed shut.

Do you want paper or plastic, Ma’am?

The way I figured it, I had a little more than a week of freedom left.

I was about to walk over to Riley’s apartment but found myself staring at the phone instead. I didn’t want to call home. Doing so usually left me feeling upset and drained.

I dialed.

Mom answered on the third ring.

“Stevie, is that you?”

“It’s me, Mom.”

“I can’t hear you too well. It sounds scratchy.”

“Bad line, I guess. How’s everything in Smith Glen?”

She fed me the extra helping of bad news I’d come to expect. Mrs. Harrington (she’d been my teacher in the first and fourth grades) had died of a stroke. Mr. Jackson from next door broke his hip last week, and now he had pneumonia. Cousin Jillian’s Penn State Masters Degree wasn’t helping her find a job, and she was back to living with Uncle Ben and Aunt Marylin, driving them insane with her constant critique of the lack of diversity in Smith Glen. Apparently, she was vegan, too, something Uncle Ben and Aunt Marylin never knew existed.

“She only eats plants,” Mom said.

I snickered, imagining Jillian stuffing her face with a rhododendron.

“And Dad got laid off at the mill.”

My father was sixty-one and should have retired by now. But nobody gets ahead in towns like Smith Glen, and nobody gets out. It’s a universal law, I think. The law says if you’re born into a hole, you aren’t allowed to crawl out. No matter what detritus life dumps down that hole, you live, work, and eat down there, accepting your fate the same as one accepts the sun setting in the west.

And you don’t get out. Not ever.

That’s the law of small town, rural New York.

“Is there anything I can do to help?”

“You stop that, Stevie. Your Dad and I will be just fine.”

The quaver in her voice told me she wasn’t so sure.

“I feel like I should come back. Maybe help out a little.”

“Help with what? You want to come do the laundry or take out the garbage on Tuesday nights?” She laughed. “The house is paid for, you know that. And the unemployment checks help.”

“That’s not enough to live on. Not comfortably.”

“Your Dad and I have always managed to get by. If I think how many times the mill laid off workers, and we still raised a beautiful boy.”

“Beautiful?”

“You are to us, Stevie.”

She cleared her throat. I heard her nervously shuffling papers. I wondered how many of them were overdue bills.

“Your Dad says it just isn’t right the way that computer company went to Florida and left all of you without jobs. Pretty soon they’ll move to Mexico or some Asian country where they can pay their workers peanuts. You know there was a time in this country when we took care of—”

“It’s all right. I still have a little money saved up, and I have an interview next week.”

“A good job?”

“Well…”

“You could do so much more, Stevie. I just wish we had the money to put you through college.”

She choked on that last bit. Now I really felt bad. Maybe I shouldn’t have called.

“It’ll all work out, Mom.”

“I know.” She sniffled and blew her nose. “I know it will. Can we send you a little money to help you out?”

“God, no. Come on, Mom. I’m fine.”

“You aren’t lying to me?”

“If I need anything, I promise I’ll call.”

The next morning dawned frosty and cold. Summer hadn’t quite surrendered to winter. By noon it was warm enough for blue jeans and a t-shirt, but before I could ride my bike up Cayuga Street, the telephone rang.

“Hello.”

“Hey there.”

Donna.

She was a tick burrowing into my skin. A big red tick with hair the 1980s wanted back.

“Wake up, Steve.”

“I’m here.”

She smacked on her gum. I could smell it through the receiver. It smelled purple and sticky.

“You never called me back. I started to worry.”

Yeah, right. She’d gotten the full scoop from Riley and knew my every move. If I pulled back the curtain, would I see Donna in her Subaru watching me from the parking lot? My hand moved to the curtain.

“Steve!”

“Dammit, Donna. I’m right here.”

“Then talk.”

“Uh, you called me.”

“Right. Well. There’s a Dakota Johnson movie playing at the Falls Theater tonight.”

“I’m not really into the 50 Shades movies.”

“It’s not, Silly Pants. It’s a comedy called, “How To Be Single.” It’s supposed to be great.”

I pulled back the curtain. Harry Jenkins was in the parking lot, looking at me. I waved, and he moved on without acknowledging me. Weird.

“So I’ll pick you up around seven?”

I saw my chance to find my stowaway girl slipping away.

No. Not this time.

“I’m not going to any movie, Donna.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to be that movie. We can see something else if you’d rather—”

“Donna, I really have to go.”

“Steve—”

“I don’t think you should be calling me like this.”

“Isn’t that what couples do?”

“For Christ’s sake, we aren’t a couple.”

“Steve? How can you say something like that to me? I thought you loved—”

I slammed the phone down. What made Donna think I was in love with her? Her sense of reality was slipping, and that felt dangerous to me.

I pictured Donna rushing to her Subaru and driving to King’s Road. If I was right, she’d be here in a few minutes.

My bike was chained outside my door. I undid the chain and quickly wound it around the base of the bike seat. I raced up Cayuga Street, focusing my thoughts on the stowaway girl.

A school bus was parked across the road, a stream of costumed youngsters pouring out through the doors: Batman, Superman, Dracula, zombies, witches, and a princess. The elementary school must have had a costume party.

Enjoy life while you can, kids. It all goes downhill after school.

My pessimism didn’t last. The sky was blue and endless, the leaves colored in fiery oranges and reds. The smell of raked leaves was thick on the air as I turned onto Main Street and made a quick right on Old State Road.

It was the sort of day that made hope spring eternal, yet I couldn’t have foreseen my stroke of luck.

No sooner did I swing down Park Place than I saw the stowaway girl round the corner of an expansive, gray Cape Cod near the dead end. Heart pounding and sweat pouring off my brow, I pulled the bike behind a shady elm before she noticed me. She paused at the corner of the house, eyes sweeping the street. Had she seen me?

Dead leaves scraped across the road.

After a long time, she cut across the lawn and started up the sidewalk, striding confidently between pools of shade cast down from the trees.

I suddenly realized she was headed right at me.

The second I rode out from behind the tree, she’d see me. Then what?

Maybe she wouldn’t recognize me in a bike helmet.

No chance.

My stowaway was savvy, careful, observant.

And beautiful.

Beneath the boyish, punky hair and the almost predatory gait was an easy, casual beauty that required no effort on her part. Studying her through the branches and dappled sunlight, I still couldn’t place an age on her. Teenager? She seemed too strong, too mature to be a teenager.

I got the distinct impression she didn’t belong here anymore than I did. I’m not sure why. Just a feeling.

I didn’t know what she was up to, just that she was clever. In order to catch her, I’d have to be smarter.

She was close now. Ten or fifteen seconds away.

Should I confront her?

I didn’t know enough about her to decide. I sensed I was in no position to challenge her, that she’d make a fool of me and leave me in the dust as she’d done before.

Here she comes.

Time to move.

I knew I’d spook her by darting out of concealment.

Carefully angling the bike toward the Old State Road intersection, I edged away from the tree. Her footsteps halted. She’d seen me in the shadows.

When I didn’t hear her advance, I walked my bike out from behind the tree, keeping my back to her as I feigned checking the chain.

Muttering a curse, I walked the bike up the Old State Road shoulder. I twisted my head toward traffic so she couldn’t see my face, all the while complaining about the bike.

I’d put on a convincing act. Was it enough to alleviate her fear that I was anyone other than a bicyclist with a broken chain?

Halfway to Main Street, I finally dared to look behind.

The girl was gone.

But I knew where she lived.

CHAPTER TWO

The Chase

I waited until dark.

As blue dusk spread across the sky, I slipped out of my apartment. A black pair of sweatpants covered my jeans, and a matching set of gloves, hat, and sweatshirt turned me nearly invisible. Figuring it wouldn’t be easy for cars to see me if I rode in the street, I biked up the sidewalk. A small flashlight stuffed into my sweatshirt pocket dug into my stomach when I pedaled. It was cold enough to see my breath. The night air burned my out-of-shape lungs.

A sparsity of cars drove past. Nobody was out tonight.

Except for me.

Trees threw black shadows across the sidewalk, where whole sections of pavement appeared to vanish. As fast as I traveled, I worried about smashing into an unseen toy or kid’s tricycle.

I was almost to the lights of Main Street when the shadows moved.

Something alongside a rundown home with a sagging porch, maybe branches swaying in the wind.

A shape darted out of the yard.

A jolt ran through me, as though I’d touched a live wire.

I swung the bike off the sidewalk and bounced over the curb. Looking over my shoulder, I saw a dark shape accelerating at me across the sidewalk. I pedaled faster with no idea what I fled from, only that the black ferocity of its pursuit scared the hell out me. I wished I wasn’t alone on the streets in the dark.

The lamplight caught the face of a man with an insane grin on his face. He emerged from under a canopy of leaves, riding a bicycle that looked at least two sizes too small for him. His knees nearly touched his chest when he pedaled. Racing emblems covered the frame. The man’s face was young but haggard, pockmarked by acne scars.

I tried not to look at him and crossed the road toward Main Street. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him slash across the street, cackling psychotically as he angled toward me. As small as it was, his bike was built for racing, and he had little trouble catching up to me.

“Where ya headed, boy?”

He rode side-by-side with me, his pedals nearly clipping mine. I envisioned the bikes wrapping together, both of us flying over the handlebars and landing on the unforgiving macadam.

“You deaf and dumb?”

“Store,” I said.

I looked straight ahead, doing a lousy job of not appearing scared.

“Store, eh? There’s only one thing worth lookin’ for this time of night. I bet you’re out hunting for pussy, aren’t ya?”

“I don’t want any trouble. Just want to get to the store before it closes.”

“Ah, hell. You ain’t going to the store. You’re dressed for the dark. You a rapist, boy? Maybe a cold-blooded killer? Ha! That’s it—I’ve caught me The Midnight Killer.”

“No.”

I pedaled faster, my heart pounding as the cold October night tore into me. The stranger tirelessly paced me.

“You can’t lie to me, boy. This is my world and you’re trespassing in it. The mayor knows everything that goes on in this town, and if you want to get to where you’re going without trouble, you’ll start telling the mayor the truth.”

We cut down Main Street. I saw two people enter a mini market a block away. Otherwise, the street was deserted. I prayed for a police cruiser to drive past.

“I’m telling you the truth. I just want to get to the store.”

“Oh yeah? Which store?”

My mind fumbled through the store names on this side of town.

“That’s what I thought,” the stranger said.

I changed strategy, opting to ride without acknowledging him.

“You can’t ignore me. I’m not going away.”

He swung the bike in a wide arc away from me, then angled back as though he meant to run me off the road. I swerved, my pedals nearly scraping the curb. The stranger shrieked laughter.

When he swerved away and made another run at me, I called his bluff and held my ground. I gritted my teeth as our knees touched.

“Hee-hee! This is fun, ain’t it?”

As we cut onto Old State Road, I realized I was leading him to my stowaway girl. Through slashes of lamplight and darkness, Park Place emerged a half-mile away.

Where could I lead him so he was faraway from her?

He reached into his jacket.

Christ, did he carry a gun?

“How much money you got, boy?”

So that was it. He was going to rob me. Then kill me.

“I asked you a question. How much money you got?”

“None.”

“None? I thought you said you were going to the store? You can’t buy nothin’ without money.”

“I don’t give a shit what I said. Where I’m going isn’t any of your damn business.”

The stranger howled at the moonless sky.

“Balls the size of cantaloupes. Too bad you’re wound tighter than a ten-day clock. I’ll fix that.”

He reached back into his jacket.

He’s going to shoot me.

I searched for escape routes.

Houses lined the street. If I suddenly swung into a driveway, I might lose him.

Or he’d follow and shoot me on some stranger’s property.

His hand surfaced from the jacket holding a plastic bag full of a powdery substance. Narcotics.

“Behold,” he said, grinning. “You want to meet God?”

“Not interested. Get that shit away from me.”

Chuckling, he pushed the bag into his pocket and brought out a glass case of needles. His eyes were watery, gray nothingness.

“Oh, so you want the really good stuff?”

I rushed ahead. He caught up.

The Lance Armstrong of junkies. I would have laughed had I not been so frightened.

Park Place whipped past. The lights of storefronts shone far up the road, offering potential salvation if I could get there. Something told me he’d never allow me to get that far. He’d kill me, probably jam a rusty blade into my ribs and leave me to bleed out on the shoulder.

I pushed the bike faster. The lamp lights were a blur now, the bumpy road threatening to upend me.

A glint of light caught my eye. The stranger flashed something at me.

A knife?

We careened over train tracks. My heart surged into my throat as I nearly lost balance.

The stranger vanished in a pool of darkness. He reappeared like a wraith under the next light.

Something sharp pricked my arm.

I jerked the bike away as the leering psycho tried to inject me with a needle.

How many diseases dripped off the tip? Aids? Hepatitis? What had he tried to inject me with?

When he came at me with the needle again, I grabbed his wrist and twisted.

Our eyes locked.

“Don’t fight it,” he screamed.

I felt his arm wriggling free and slammed a fist into his jaw.

The front wheel of his bike wobbled, and the stranger flipped sideways and slammed shoulder-first against the pavement.

Thighs and lungs screaming, I pumped faster.

“You can’t hide from the mayor! I’ll track you down and kill you, boy!”

I flew past restaurants and storefronts, the psychotic stranger’s screams fading into the night. When I felt reasonably sure he wasn’t back on his bike and following me, I swung behind the department store.

Breaking down cardboard boxes for the recycling container, a gruff-looking man watched me as I whirred past.

Out of breath, I stopped behind the strip mall. Fans blew greasy scents out of a restaurant’s window vent. Lights flickered off inside chain stores, throwing the back lot into darkness. I listened for the crazy junkie and his bicycle. He was somewhere in the night hunting for me. He’d kill me if he caught me again.

A car door slammed, making my heart skip. The lights of a sports car swept over my face as one of the last store employees to leave drove home for the night.

Now it was just me and the crow-feather darkness. It felt as though Park Place and the girl existed on the other side of the world.

I had to track her down, but the junkie might have been anywhere between the strip mall and Park Place, waiting for me to ride by.

I started to feel the night’s cold. It had been there before, but I’d been too frightened to notice.

When I cautiously rode out from behind the strip mall, the only vehicles left in the lot were parked in front of the restaurant.

Bass thumped as a car drove toward the center of town. Otherwise, the road was deserted.

The junkie was out there. I could feel him.

I biked along the edge of the parking lot, keeping to where the lamp light failed to thwart the shadows. Dead leaves crunched under the bike tires.

Although I could have ridden back to Park Place in five minutes, I jumped off my bike and walked it down the sidewalk. Where the lights were bright, I avoided the walkway and cut across shadowed lawns. The grass was wet with dew. It felt as though I was the only person alive in town.

Still, someone might have been hiding in the bushes or behind the trees. I doubted the junkie could go undetected in this area of the city where property values were high and neighborhood watch signs warned away criminals.

Now and then, a car would pass.

It seemed I’d walked for hours when I crept around a hedgerow and nearly bumped into the sign for Park Place. Seeing the upscale homes and mansions lit up like Christmas trees melted away my fears. No psycho would dare come into this neighborhood, not with Buster the dog patrolling.

I saw the stowaway girl’s house on the far end of the cul-de-sac.

Why would a beautiful girl from a rich family sneak into my car? What did she want with me?

On the front porch of the corner mansion, letters hung from a string and spelled HAPPY HALLOWEEN, the greeting fluttering with the wind. Next door, people laughed inside a two-story home with a raised balcony. Through translucent curtains I saw them gathered around an ornate table, dealing cards. I smelled pizza. My stomach growled.

I watched for Buster and his owner, for anyone who might recognize the strange guy who’d slipped through their neighborhood last night. I was the lone adventurer exploring this nighttime kingdom.

Some of the homes were dark, including the girl’s house. Was she asleep for the night? I doubted it; it wasn’t yet nine. She might be out for another night stroll.

Maybe she was right behind me.

Feeling the hairs on the back of my neck prickle, I swung around. Empty sidewalk extended back to the thoroughfare.

More houses passed, and then I stood before the girl’s gray Cape Cod.

It wasn’t the biggest, richest-looking house in the neighborhood, but it had one of the largest yards. It stood well back from the cul-de-sac, a long, winding driveway passing between towering oak trees which lent an added layer of privacy. Front lawn maples, oaks, and elms formed a natural barrier between the home and its neighborhood. Autumn leaves covered the lawn, choking the grass.

Strange.

I figured a family with enough money to afford such a nice home would pay someone to rake and manicure the lawn if they were too lazy to handle the job themselves.

Hiding my bicycle between the trees, I crossed the lawn and knelt beside a line of shrubbery following the meandering driveway.

No signs of movement inside the house, no lights.

My curiosity piqued, I crept down the driveway, staying close to the bushes.

I knew I’d entered dangerous territory: I was trespassing. To anyone watching, I’d appear as a cat burglar.

The hot glare of headlights swept over my head. I stupidly froze when I should have dropped to the ground.

Shit.

The lights whipped across the Cape Cod as the car turned into a driveway a few houses away. The car door slammed, followed by the beep of a security system’s activation. Blood thrummed through my temples as I waited for the driver to shout that a prowler was loose in the neighborhood.

The man from the car shuffled up his porch steps and disappeared inside.

I exhaled. He hadn’t seen me.

Following the driveway to a detached three-car garage, I peeked through the windows.

Something huge and bulky loomed in the corner.

I jumped back. What if the junkie was inside the garage?

Ridiculous.

My heart was a pickaxe chipping ice off my throat as I crept back to the window.

Two car spaces were unoccupied. The bulky shape in the corner was a car under a blanket. Probably a vintage sports car or something valuable enough to protect from the elements.

No other vehicles in the garage, and the girl walks everywhere she goes.

None of it made sense to me. Maybe her parents were out of town and she wasn’t allowed to drive the expensive car under the blanket.

Edging along the garage, I noticed the backyard was enclosed by a tall wooden fence, providing additional privacy to the isolated home. A dark mass of trees swayed behind the fence, marking where wilderness began.

The back windows, including a sliding glass door to a concrete patio, were dark. I didn’t like it. I couldn’t be sure someone wasn’t watching me from inside the house.

The breeze carried a car motor from down the street. I lay in the cool, wet grass until I was sure the car was headed toward the Old State Road intersection. Brushing grass off my shirt, I rushed to the house and flattened myself against the siding between a window and the deck door. I feared a face would be in the window when I looked.

Yanking the hood over my head, I pulled the strings so only my eyes were visible. If someone saw me at the window, they wouldn’t get a good enough look before I ran.

I took a deep breath and slid out of hiding.

I couldn’t see anything at first. Though my eyes were acclimated to the night, the inside of the house was darker. It took me a few seconds before I made out shapes through the deck door: a table with four chairs neatly arranged around the perimeter, a large cabinet with what appeared to be picture frames on top. This had to be the dining room.

Hoping the girl was in one of the photographs, I slipped the flashlight from my pocket and flicked it on. I only kept the beam on for a few seconds, afraid I’d draw a neighbor’s attention.

I’d seen enough.

I bit down on my tongue to keep from laughing.

I hadn’t recognized my stowaway in either of the two pictures. What I’d seen was a family of four: two middle-aged parents, two children—one boy and one girl, each of high school age. All four were very Chinese.

The truth slammed me with a closed fist. She didn’t live here. Not legally, anyway. The girl had sneaked into my car, and now she’d discovered a beautiful temporary home vacated by a traveling family.

How brazen.

How daring.

How incredibly exciting.

Now I understood the free and easy stride, the confident manner in which she carried herself. She didn’t play by anyone’s rules.

As I stood panting and sweating, trying to grasp the scope of her risk-taking, it occurred to me that she might come home at any second.

Home. I stifled another fit of giggles.

I had to catch her this time.

I couldn’t let her escape. Not again.

Trees swayed with a cutting wind as I resurveyed the backyard. I was certain she’d enter through the back door, where the fence shielded her from prying eyes. Testing the deck door, I found it locked, as were the windows and the back entrance off the driveway. Did she have a key?

Moving along the siding, I discovered a narrow pathway between the fence and house which led to the front yard. This was her escape route. If she saw me hiding in the backyard, she’d flee down this path. At her speed, I’d lose her in the trees.

Two lawn chairs sat on the patio. I grabbed one and walked it around the side of the house, where I wedged the chair between the fence and siding. She wouldn’t see the obstruction until it was too late.

Smirking, I crouched along the back of the garage and waited.

The wait wasn’t long.

After fifteen minutes of listening to the wind whistling through the trees and feeling the panels of the garage wall chill my spine, I saw a dark shape slip across the back of the house. She’d come down the driveway without me hearing. I was impressed. I’d been watching the driveway and still missed her.

As she stooped near the back entryway and slipped something from her pocket, I crept off the wall, moving silently through the grass. I hadn’t even considered what I’d do once I caught her.

What if she screamed?

No, she wouldn’t. She was the trespasser, the criminal in the night. I held the advantage.

The girl must have sensed me as she fiddled with the lock. She bolted for the driveway.

I had the angle on her. I cut her off, but she reversed course so quickly that my knees buckled. Catching her was as impossible as snatching a dragonfly barehanded.

With only one direction to go, she ran for the fence. A split second after she turned the corner, I heard her smack into the chair and yelp. Panicking, she turned around and sprinted for the backyard. I shot out of the shadows and dived at her ankles, barely able to grasp a pant leg before she leaped past.

I threw myself atop her squirming body. As I turned her over and pressed the girl to her back, her eyes caught a sliver of moonlight through the clouds and stunned me. They weren’t so much green or blue as they were aqua. Aqua like sparkling Caribbean waters at sunset, aqua like a gem Indiana Jones might scavenge from a forgotten cavern. Looking into those eyes made me feel as if she could drain my mind of its innermost secrets and drink of them like aged wine.

Conflicted hysteria covered her face, the desire to scream and the knowledge that drawing attention to herself wasn’t a great idea. The last person she wanted to explain herself to was a police officer.

“Stop it,” I whispered. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

Such an unconvincing plea. How many rapists use the same line?

She head-butted me between the temples. I saw stars.

She started to squirm out from under before I shook off the blow and pinned her wrists into the grass.

We lay panting in the bitter wind, her breath warm against my face.

“Stop fighting. I swear I won’t hurt you. But you aren’t going anywhere until you answer my questions.”

“Get the hell off of me.”

“Not a chance,” I said, confident.

I thought I’d finally captured her. I was wrong.

In one blinding motion, she twisted her wrists and threw me off. Before I knew what happened, she reversed our position and sat astride my hips. I tried to tumble her off. The sound of a switchblade snapping open stopped me.

The point touched under my chin.

“Don’t kill me.”

“Why the hell not?”

Those aqua eyes turned dangerous.

“I’m not a rapist, for Christ’s sake. You don’t recognize me, do you?”

The hood was still tight around my face. She studied my eyes and shook her head.

“You broke into my car,” I said. Keeping the blade fixed near my throat, she reached down and pulled back my hood. Recognition flashed in her eyes. “Does that ring a bell?”

“I didn’t break into your car. The doors were unlocked.”

“I feel as though you don’t have a good grasp on how our legal system operates. You can’t just crawl into a stranger’s car because the door is unlocked, and you sure as hell can’t live in other people’s houses.”

The latter point jarred her. For the first time, her confidence faltered.

“Look,” I said. “I only want to know why you were inside my car.”

“You went through a lot of trouble to catch me. How long were you waiting out here?”

“I don’t know. An hour. Maybe a little more. Just don’t kill me, okay?”

“Anybody see you come back here?”

“No, nobody. Look, it doesn’t matter to me. It’s not my house. What do I care? I wouldn’t tell anybody.”

With a snap, the blade disappeared into its casing. She crawled off me and sat back in the grass, studying me with caution and mounting curiosity.

“Fine,” she said, looking warily across the yard. “So you found me. What do you want to know?”

Sighing, I rubbed the memory of the switchblade off my chin and sat back in the grass. She drew her knees into her chest.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“All this effort and you don’t have a single question for me? I’ll be leaving now.”

“Wait. Ever since you jumped out of my car and ran into the woods, I’ve been trying to figure out who you are. I thought you were dead.”

She grinned.

“Obviously not. I didn’t mean to scare you. If you’re worried I wanted to steal your car, I didn’t. I only hid inside because someone was following me. I wanted to rest for a bit until I was sure I was safe. I guess I fell asleep.”

Up close, I noted holes in the knees of her jeans and fraying along the cuffs. Her jean jacket lacked a few buttons.

“It was a mistake, and I promise I won’t step foot in your car again unless you personally give me permission. Deal?”

“Yeah, well, that won’t be a problem. The car finally broke down on me. But if you steal my bike, I’ll kick your ass.”

Her eyes leaped up to mine, then her lips curled into a smile.

“I’d like to see you try.”

A wet leaf stuck in her bangs. I wanted to pluck it out if only to touch the silk of her hair. A dog barked a few yards away.

“I can’t believe you break into people’s houses. Why?”

“Because it’s better than living on the street. Whoever said being homeless meant you couldn’t sleep with a roof over your head?”

Homeless.

My stomach lurched. I hadn’t considered the possibility. She smelled clean, fresh, hardly like someone who lived on the streets. I supposed she owned only a few changes of clothing and did her best to keep them washed. Had she used the Chinese family’s washer?

Aside from the beaten clothing, she was well-groomed, beautiful, able to blend into a crowd without anyone wondering about her. But something about her looked ill and tired. Upon closer inspection, her eyes held the fatigue of someone who’d run for too long. I wondered what she was running from.

She looked off to where the driveway meandered back to the sidewalk. Park Place was lined with the homes of happy, wealthy families, and somehow she’d managed to live among the rich without anyone noticing.

“You’ll get caught. It’s inevitable.”

Shrugging her shoulders, she glared at me.

“There are scarier things out there than police sirens.”

I thought about the junkie and knew she was right.

She pushed herself up and strode to the back door, leaving me alone in the dewy grass. Her lifestyle frightened the hell out of me. And yet it fascinated.

Though it seemed our conversation had ended, more questions perched on the tip of my tongue. I figured it was time I left. I doubted she wanted me around, bothering her with more questions.

As I brushed dirt off my pants and started for the driveway, she said, “Aren’t you gonna come inside?”

My skin felt too tight. A happy warmth spread down my body.

“You sure?”

“You forgave me for killing your car, so I kinda have to trust you.”

“You’re asking me to break the law.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything. What you do next is up to you. Come inside, or don’t. Your call.”

She dug into her pocket. In the faint light, I watched her remove a lock pick. She jimmied with the lock for several seconds, and the locking mechanism clicked open.

Then she disappeared into the home, and I was alone in the darkness with the cold wind.

To hell with it. You only live once.

I took a deep breath and followed her inside.

CHAPTER THREE

Night in the Basement

Electricity tingled along my spine. Being inside a stranger’s house, exploring the rooms, sifting through belongings, was no longer just an idea. I was doing it.

“You didn’t even ask me my name,” the stowaway said, flicking on her flashlight and aiming the beam at the floor so nobody passing by could notice.

“There are probably a million things I’d like to ask you. Since you mentioned it, I’ll settle for a name.”

“Becca.”

“That’s a pretty name. I’m Steve.”

“Steve’s a pretty name, too.”

She smiled over her shoulder.

“Very funny.”

Becca kicked off her sneakers and left them neatly by the door, so I did the same. She padded silently across the kitchen in a pair of white socks turned threadbare by repeated washings. I wondered if some of the stains were from the wetlands she’d disappeared into.

A wooden island stood in the kitchen’s center, a block of expensive knives on one end. A green glow from the microwave LED reflected off a spotless floor. Whoever these people were, they had money. The stainless steel refrigerator was bigger than my apartment closet.

A troubling thought crawled inside my head.

“Are you sure the house isn’t protected by an alarm system?”

“Not this house. No sign out front, and I checked it out thoroughly. Which included picking the lock and waiting in the bushes for fifteen minutes before I entered.”

“Fifteen minutes?”

“Yeah. If the police don’t show up by then, they aren’t coming.”

As we wound through the kitchen and dining room, my only view was of the linoleum and hardwood reflected inside her flashlight beam. She turned up a plush carpeted staircase and flicked off the light. The house went dark for a moment, then my eyes adjusted to the ambient light flowing through the ceiling-to-floor windows at the top of the landing.

“Where are we going?”

“Shh.”

Becca turned down a hallway and opened the second door on the left. A bathroom.

“You brought me up here so you could use the bathroom?”

“No. I came upstairs to use the bathroom, and you followed me. Remember, I never told you to do anything. You make your own decisions.”

Large white tiles glowed along the bathroom floor. A clear glass door led into a stand-up shower.

“Whatever. Just make it quick, okay? I’m not interested in going to jail.”

She grinned at me and shut the door in my face. I waited to hear the lock turn, but I guess she trusted me. Though I tried not to listen to her peeing, it sounded ridiculously loud in the silent upstairs. After a while, I heard the toilet flush, then running water. The door opened.

“Feel better now?”

“Very.”

“Then let’s get the hell out of here.”

“You can go anytime you like. This is home, and I’m staying the night.”

She slipped past me and started down the stairs. I slapped myself out of my stupor and followed her.

“Staying the night? What if the owner comes home?”

“He won’t.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

At the bottom of the stairs Becca cut left, and I followed her down the main floor’s central hallway. The living room was off to the right, where I glimpsed a huge LCD television on the wall. She stopped short and opened an inconspicuous door.

“Believe me. I’m sure.”

We descended another carpeted staircase into a deeper darkness. The air tasted stale on my tongue. I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face until she turned on the flashlight. We were inside a finished basement. A long couch lay across the front of the room with another HD television on the wall. A computer hummed in the far corner.

“You didn’t kill the family, did you?”

“Do I look like a murderer?”

She didn’t, but what did I really know about her?

“Then how do you know they aren’t coming home?”

She turned on the overhead lights.

“That doesn’t seem like a good idea. Everyone in the neighborhood will know we are in the basement.”

“Relax,” Becca said, pointing at the windows. The basement only had two small windows, and she’d stuffed blankets in front of the glass. “The basement is the safest place to be, provided you block light from reaching the windows. Plus, it’s underground. I can watch television or listen to music as long as I don’t blast the sound.”

Pulling the cushions off the couch, she reached inside and dragged out a pullout bed with a white sheet affixed. From the corner closet, she removed two pillows and a comforter.

Was she inviting me to sleep with her?

As she made up the bed I stood watching, frozen to the floor. I kept waiting to hear the owner return, throwing keys down on the table, stomping across our ceiling before he ventured down to the basement and caught us.

I looked around. No escape.

The basement windows were small casement types. You couldn’t have squeezed a toddler through. The only option was to hide inside the closet and pray nobody checked.

After she made the bed, she fished another pillow and an old blanket from the closet.

“Here,” she said, handing them to me.

“What do you want me to do with these?”

“If you want to stay the night, you might as well get comfortable. The carpet is nice and soft.”

That answered my question about sleeping arrangements.

I couldn’t contain the tremors rippling down my spine as I looked around the basement. Trespassing was bad enough. Sleeping in another family’s house was insane.

Out of a worn backpack, she removed a small bath towel which had seen better days.

“What’s the towel for?”

“I’m gonna take a warm shower, dummy.” I looked incredulously at her. “Why are you looking at me like that? It wouldn’t be cool if I used the owners’ towels. I keep to a strict set of principles.”

I was too stunned to talk as she strode past without a worry or care. I don’t think I moved a muscle until I heard the water gurgling through the pipes and the hollow thud of the shower door closing.

Then a moment of clarity, as though ice water splashed my face.

I had to get out of there. I’d done some pretty stupid and careless things in my life, but nothing approached this. This was utter lunacy.

I spun around, searching for any incriminating evidence to tie me to the scene.

My fingerprints were probably everywhere.

I heard a motor approaching. Probably just a neighbor passing by.

The motor stopped, and a car door banged shut right outside.

“Becca.”

I called up the staircase, not wanting to yell too loudly. Water cascaded into the tub upstairs.

“Becca, someone is outside.”

Hell.

Another car door slammed. I heard a man and a woman laughing.

“Becca!”

The shower kept running. Her humming reverberated emptily through the corridors. She’d never hear me while the water poured over her ears.

I rushed up one flight of stairs and stood in the dark hallway between the living room and kitchen. I knew where the back door to the house was. The front entry door had to be somewhere left of the living room. Whichever door the Chinese family opened, I’d race for the opposite door.

Leaving Becca to be captured, naked and humiliated, made me feel like a worm. I couldn’t abandon her.

Figuring I was sealing my fate, I rushed up the second flight of stairs. I passed the ceiling-to-floor windows, seeing only pinpricks of light from neighboring houses amid the black of night. Running water filled the hallway with clamor.

I reached for the doorknob and thought about her naked inside and how I’d frighten the hell out of her by bursting in.

Better that than going to jail.

“We gotta go,” I said, throwing open the door.

Steam rolled out to meet me. I couldn’t see through the fog.

The faucet turned off. For a few awful seconds, all I heard was the drip…drip…drip of water in the tub. It made me wonder if Becca was behind that roiling mist, or if someone else was back there, waiting for me.

I was torn between screaming at Becca and leaving her there to be captured when she finally said, “Calm down. You’re making yourself crazy.”

“I heard someone outside. The owners are home.”

Drip…drip…drip.

“Becca?”

“Nobody’s home, Steve. Just you and me.”

“But I heard—”

“You heard a car door. The neighborhood is full of them. Get used to it.”

“I can’t get used to this.”

“When your nerves are wound tight, every little sound will make you think something terrible is about to happen. But it’s not.”

Easy for her to say. We were just as trapped upstairs as we’d been in the basement.

“I’ve been doing this since I was seventeen. Three years. Never been caught, never even came close.”

“You only have to get caught once, Becca.”

“Take a deep breath. When I come downstairs, I’ll prove to you nobody’s coming home tonight. In the meantime, if you don’t mind I’d like to dry off without an audience.”

Biting back a curse, I slunk back into the hallway and gently closed the bathroom door. For a long time, I leaned against the door, listening as the couple’s voices trailed away. I felt stupid. Their voices came from at least three or four houses away, not nearly as close as I’d convinced myself. Fear blooms strong in the dark.

I was sitting on a lounge chair, rolling the remote around in my hand and deciding whether or not to turn on the television, when she came downstairs. Fully clothed, towel wrapped around her head, she angled straight for the computer. When she moved the mouse the screen turned on.

“I wanna show you something,” Becca said.

She scooted to the edge of the chair and made room for me. I slid in beside her. Sitting this close, I caught the fragrance of flowery bath soap and shampoo. I tried really hard not to think about how beautiful she looked or how the faded denim of her jeans clung tight and damp like a second skin.

Our knees touched.

When I looked up, the Facebook profile of Ji Lin smiled back at me. I recognized the middle-aged Chinese man from the picture in the dining room. In his profile picture, he wore a dark blue business suit and tie, his hair slicked back. Just below was a picture of Lin sandwiched between his wife and two kids, all wearing summer clothes and shorts. The wife, a frail and pretty little thing with jet black hair, wore a lei around her neck.

“Say hello to the Lin family, Steve. The Hawaiian islands are beautiful this time of year, or so I hear.”

I scanned down the screen and noted the family picture had been uploaded two hours ago.

Before I could ask my followup question, she said, “They’ll be home in eight days, and their immediate family is divided between China and southern California. No family in Barton Falls. Staying here couldn’t be any safer.”

I shook my head. I still couldn’t fathom secretly living in a stranger’s house for weeks at a time.

And yet the excitement I felt was that of uncovering a priceless diamond in the backyard. It was so simple, why hadn’t I thought of it before?

Because it’s wrong.

Isn’t it?

She tossed the towel aside and shook out her hair.

“It’s amazing what people put on the Internet,” she said. “Travel plans, where they’re staying and how long they’ll be away. I guess they do it to show off for their friends. Imagine if I were a thief. I could rob the Lin family blind for another eight days if I wanted.”

“But you wouldn’t do that, right?”

She gave me a level stare, a that-can’t-be-a-serious-question look.

“Right. And look at this.” She pointed at the biographical information under Ji Lin’s picture. “His profile is open to the public. That’s crazy. But I’ve seen plenty of people with closed profiles post status updates which are open to the public, and that’s just as bad. And don’t get me started on Twitter. People say anything and everything to complete strangers on that site. I’ve found more upscale homes to stay in on Twitter than anywhere else.”

“I’m impressed. I still don’t understand how you find these…opportunities. Seems like finding a needle in a haystack.”

“Watch and learn.”

She unzipped a small compartment on her backpack and withdrew a black and red thumb drive. After inserting the drive into a USB port on the monitor, the file manager opened. She double-clicked on a file nebulously named Scrape, and a black window opened. Random characters filled the window, and then the program closed.

“Did you just give them a virus?”

“Don’t be silly. It’s a data extraction tool. No harm was done to the computer.”

“Data extraction? You mean an application that grabs information off the Internet and writes it to a file?”

Her eyebrows raised.

“Wow. Look at the big brain on Steve. Did you study computer science in college?”

“Me?” I looked off at something in the corner of the room “No. I’m not smart enough for college.”

“If you know what data extraction is, you are smart enough for college.”

“Yeah? Maybe.”

“Definitely.”

“Where did you get a program like that?”

“I wrote it.”

“You what?” I asked.

“It’s not hard.”

“I thought you said you were…you know…”

“Homeless?”

“That.”

“Not forever. I spent better than a decade in foster homes, all of them bad news. Except for one. He was a professor at Cornell University, really into computer programming. He taught me how to write my own applications, and the rest I figured out through trial and error. Good guy. The world needs more people like him.”

“It sounds like you really liked him.”

“I did,” she said. Her eyes glazed over, and she feigned blowing her nose to cover a sob.

“Why aren’t you still living with him?”

“He died.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. He was old and led a full life. And I still have him here and here.”

Becca touched her heart and head. It was quiet except for the hum of the computer fan as she clicked around Lin’s profile, filling the uncomfortable void of conversation.

“Anyway,” she said, dragging the tissue across her nose as though irritated with herself for showing signs of frailty. “My application grabs data from four different social media websites based on what I program it to search for. So now I’m searching for keywords like vacation and Disney and cruise, and cross-referencing with small towns between Philadelphia and Fredericksburg.”

“Heading south?”

She shrugged.

“I guess so. Sometimes I go a few days between finding places to stay, and it’s getting too cold up north. If I got stuck outside in January, I’d rather sleep under a Florida beach pier than on a park bench in New York.”

My throat constricted. I’d only just met Becca, easily the most fascinating person I’d ever encountered, and already she prepared to disappear.

We made small talk for a while before she yawned and stretched. I eyed the blanket and pillow on the floor. The carpet was plush and soft, but not enough to prevent me from putting a crimp in my back overnight.

“Goodnight, Steve. Remember we’re safe here. See you in the morning.”

I sat on the floor and watched the rises and falls of her chest turn gentle. A few minutes later I realized she was already deep asleep.

I dozed for an hour and awoke with a gasp.

Noticing my full bladder, I left for the bathroom.

Halfway up the staircase, I knew something was wrong.

A light was on in the living room.

I froze at the top of the stairs.

A cold and scaly snake curled around my heart.

I backed down the stairs until my shadow receded from the hallway wall and listened.

Something scraped along the wall. It sounded as if it came from the living room.

Heart thundering into my throat, I edged down the staircase.

Then Becca’s voice spoke inside my head.

We’re safe here, Steve.

Take a deep breath.

I did.

My pulse stopped racing. With relaxation came clarity.

The light was on a timer to keep away thieves and trespassers. To deter people like us.

I climbed the stairs and jolted at the sight of my own shadow growing monstrous against the white wall. Next, I crept toward the living room, eyes fixed on the huge LCD screen reflecting an image of the room. From this vantage point, I could see if anyone hid inside the room. Could an intruder see me?

The mirror image of a long leather couch and two matching chairs filled the screen. A glass table fronted the couch, while a bookcase consumed most of the back wall.

No sign of someone hiding.

When I reached the end of the wall, the scraping sound came again. Like nails on a chalkboard.

Why did I listen to you, Becca?

I imagined my childhood terrors waiting for me around the corner: Hannibal Lecter, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, or some black, slithering entity out of a repressed nightmare.

Just as quickly I heard Becca’s reassurance. How had she come to have such a profound effect on me when I barely knew her?

I crept around the corner and saw the misshapen claw of a tree limb scrape the window.

You’re a paranoid idiot, I told myself.

I stood giggling at the threshold, then resumed my climb to the bathroom.

After I finished, I explored the bedrooms. The teenage boy’s room looked extraordinarily neat. The computer was off, and on the desk lay two pens and a pencil perfectly arranged around a notebook, almost like a classic table setting of dinner plate and silverware. The clothes drawers were drawn shut, with no hint of sock or underwear hanging out. The bedspread and blankets were drawn tight, making the bed appear made of stone. I got the impression Ji Lin ran a tight ship, that the son was a young clone of his father.

The girl’s room wasn’t so neat. Whereas the previous room’s walls were bare, this room held a poster of a grinning boy band I didn’t recognize. I bet that poster caused a fair amount of consternation with Ji Lin. One of the drawers was overstuffed. I pulled it open. Inside were t-shirts, most of which would cling tightly when worn. The shorts were small enough to be considered swimming trunks. I pushed the overstuffed clothing down so the drawer closed properly.

The exploration exhilarated me, searching through personal belongings and vicariously living their lives. I knew it was wrong, knew I’d broken more laws in one evening than I had in a lifetime. But a part of me wanted more, wanted to push the limits. I never realized privacy invasion could be so enticing.

When I returned downstairs, I sat and watched Becca a little longer.

Still the voyeur.

She’d cocooned herself in the blanket with only her head visible. Worry creased her brow, making me wonder if she was in the middle of a bad dream. Her eyes flicked open momentarily. She appeared stunned to see someone in the room with her. Then she closed her eyes contentedly and snuggled into the pillow.

Fluffing my pillow, I pulled the blanket over me and lay staring at the ceiling of a stranger’s basement. I never believed for a moment that I’d get a wink of sleep.

But the next thing I knew it was morning.

Riley came within an eyelash of a mental breakdown when I told him about Becca.

“That might be the craziest story I’ve ever heard. You’ll both end up in jail.”

The late afternoon lull between the lunch rush and after-work crowd meant we had the back of the Rainbow Pub to ourselves. I was nervous the two overweight truckers sitting at the bar would overhear.

“I know,” I said, running a hand through my hair and silently willing the bartender not to look our way. “But it’s like I said. She’s real careful about where she stays and knows to get out before the owners return.”

“Listen to yourself, man. You’re actually justifying it. What would your reaction be if you discovered someone slept in your bed while you were on vacation?”

“Probably that it was the most action my bed had seen since I was seventeen. You remember Mary Beth Pierson?”

“Har-har.”

I knew I shouldn’t have opened my big mouth. It was inevitable Riley would flip out. Who wouldn’t? At least, I’d kept secret the neighborhood Becca had targeted.

“And in the middle of town. I wouldn’t hazard to guess where you did this.” He stopped and shook his head vehemently. “No, no. Don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know.”

A waiter with a dripping sweat stain at the armpit pushed through the kitchen’s double doors. He held a box of condiments under one arm. I waited until he was beyond earshot.

“Good, because I’m not telling you where.”

“All it takes is one nosy neighbor and both of you are toast.”

The front door opened, drawing in car motors rumbling down Main Street. A young couple sat down at the end of the bar.

I thought about the Lin residence, set off from its neighbors and shielded from the street by trees. The house was well-hidden, but what if the mailman tried to deliver a package or Buster got off his leash and ran into the yard?

“It’s not like I’m going to do it again.”

Of that, I wasn’t so sure. Already, I began to ache, wondering what Becca was doing at that very moment. My insides tingled. I’d acquired a taste for our voyeuristic adventure and wanted more.

“That’s a relief,” Riley said in between cheeseburger bites. A blob of ketchup hung from the corner of his lip. “I’ll give her credit. Talk about resourcefulness! Though I can’t imagine she’s the first person to ever do something like that.”

“You think other people break into vacated houses?”

“Sure. And I’m not just talking about people who have a need. What about deviants? I’ll bet there’s a secret underbelly of people who get their kicks by sneaking into other people’s houses, thumbing through personal stuff, opening up the underwear drawer. Sick shit like that.”

I pictured myself sifting through the Lin daughter’s dresser and felt a little sick.

“Why would someone take that much risk for kicks?”

“Probably because it’s easier to get away with than most people would believe. Was it difficult for you?”

“Well, no. I mean I really didn’t do much of anything. She did all of the work, though it didn’t require much effort.”

“Exactly. So if you two think you’re the only ones pulling these stunts, think again.”

I tried to imagine someone breaking into my apartment and looking through my belongings, reading credit card statements, checking to see what was in my refrigerator and who my acquaintances were.

Sleeping in my bed.

Hadn’t I come home on occasion and felt a creeping sensation that a personal item was in a different place than I’d left it? Missing items—a favorite CD mysteriously vanished, a few dollars taken from my wallet, the level of milk in the jug lower than I’d remembered.

Donna.

I pushed the thought away.

One of the truckers looked over at Riley as he chewed on a greasy hamburger. Riley averted his eyes and cupped a hand beside his mouth so only I would hear.

“Anyhow, if I were to try…and don’t get any bright ideas…I’d pick a place out of town where I didn’t have to worry about neighbors.”

“Such as?”

“A foreclosure,” Riley said, leaning in conspiratorially. “Think about it. I’d want a place where I didn’t have to worry about the owner cutting vacation short and showing up while I’m dancing around in my underwear.”

“Thanks for the visual, Tom Cruise.”

“Better my underwear than yours.”

“I think I’m gonna be sick. I don’t know of any foreclosed properties in town. Think they’re easy to find on the Internet?”

“Who needs the Internet?” Riley raised the beer to his lips and watched me over the rim. “There’s an old two-story out on Myers Road just west of town that foreclosed last year. The notice is still taped to the door.”

I knew the location. The house stood on a hill in the middle of nowhere. I passed it sometimes when I traveled to the lakes, but I’d never noticed the foreclosure notice. It always made me feel a little creepy, with its dark windows and chipping paint. Had that house been in the middle of Smith Glen when we were kids, we’d have christened it the town’s haunted house.

And yet it seemed perfect. Who would know if I broke inside? Maybe one or two cars drove past on a busy day.

The foreclosure was my ticket to financial solvency. Even a menial job would turn my bank account around when I didn’t have to pay rent or utilities.

I can do this.

My sudden interest in the home scared me a little. What was I thinking?

“You’re not considering taking a ride out to Myers Road, are you?”

I sipped my beer.

“Of course not. Kinda far for a bike trip.”

I filed the foreclosure in the back of my mind as I rode home under a dark and lowering sky. The dead fingers of a cold wind, a reminder of how close winter was, touched my neck and followed as Main Street fell farther behind.

The houses became more derelict. At the last possible moment I realized the house with the sagging porch—the crazy junkie’s house—was just ahead. I wheeled sharply down a side road and circled around the block until I came back out onto Cayuga Street. I kept glancing over my shoulder, but there was no sign of his bike.

Halfway to King’s Road, I spotted the Subaru behind me. A 4x4 truck and an old station wagon rode between me and the recognizable Subaru. Apparently, Donna thought I couldn’t see her.

This confirmed my worst fears—I had a stalker.

Our meeting at the cafe had been more than happenstance. For how long had this been going on?

Becca was in my life now, a person whose experiences made me question everything I thought I knew. I’d searched too long for Becca to let Donna screw this up for me.

I shot a quick look over my shoulder and saw the Subaru inching closer as the 4x4 and station wagon passed. Not wanting to let her know I’d seen, I watched our reflections in house windows from the corner of my eye. A black, sporty compact fast approached in the oncoming lane. A train of slower vehicles moved behind it.

This was my chance.

I edged the bike into the middle of the lane. I felt Donna’s car pull back to give me room, then slide in behind me.

I guaged the space between the sports car and the trailing traffic. It was going to be close.

I had a sudden vision of the classic video game, “Frogger.”

As the sports car shot past, I swung the bike across the road.

My heart jumped into my throat. I’d misjudged the speed of the hatchback leading the slower train. It was going to hit me.

Horns blared. The hatchback flashed its high beams.

Tires squealed and somebody swore out their window as I hopped the opposite curb and cut down a side street. Looking behind, I saw the Subaru brake with no chance to cut across. Donna would have to wait for the line of cars to pass and do a u-turn.

Expecting she wouldn’t give up the pursuit, I swung another left into a quiet neighborhood, cut through two yards, and worked my way back to Cayuga Street. By then the glut of traffic had cleared. No sign of Donna.

I’d lost her. My day was about to get worse.

The first raindrops wet the blacktop when I crossed the parking lot of King’s Road Apartments. I didn’t think much about the police cruiser parked in front of my apartment until I saw the eviction notice taped to my door. A hard-chinned officer stood with Jenkins, eyeing me from the lot. The cop’s eyebrows appeared as one long caterpillar-like growth, his hands huge and gnarled, the hands of someone who’d used his fists too many times to solve problems.

“What the hell is this?” I yelled, ripping the notice off the door.

“You don’t pay your rent,” Jenkins said. “And so now you are out of an apartment.”

“I paid you last week.”

He walked toward me with the wind pulling greasy strands of hair across his eyes. The officer lumbered beside him. Emboldened, Jenkins glanced at the policeman, whose badge strangely shared my landlord’s last name.

“Oh? Perhaps I am mistaken. If you could provide me with a copy of the check—”

“You know I paid cash. This is bullshit.”

“You see why I asked you to come?” Jenkins asked the officer.

The cop stood a full head taller than me. His hand rested on a night stick, the grin not meeting the hardness in his eyes.

“Sir,” the officer said, glaring down at me. “You need to lower your voice and get yourself under control.”

“I’m perfectly under control,” I said. “He knows I paid him cash. He told me he’d give me a receipt.”

“Is this true?” the officer asked my landlord.

“The boy is full of stories. Since Mr. Morgan moved into King’s Road, he’s been chronically late with payments. I’ve given him every chance to catch up, but what more can I do? What do you expect from a young man who can’t be bothered to work like the rest of us? Everyone knows I would never cheat a tenant.”

“You can’t get away with ripping me off. I’ll report you to—”

“Who? Who are you going to report me to?”

A covert smile passed between them. Jenkins had a family member on the police force, and I had no leverage. I bit my tongue, cursing myself for not demanding a receipt before I placed cash in his cold hands.

The wind howled. Sleet pinged against the police car’s windshield.

“This has gone far enough,” I said.

I tried to insert my key into the door and found the lock had been changed.

“This isn’t your property anymore.”

“This is just an eviction notice,” I said, waving the paper in his face. “You can’t change the locks without giving me time to respond.”

“I can, and I did. I am a fair man,” Jenkins grinned. “And I will show you how fair I am by allowing you to retrieve your personal items from the apartment. All I require is one hundred dollars as a good faith payment.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. What Jenkins was doing was illegal.

“You mean you want a bribe. You can’t do this. I have rights.”

“Sir,” the officer said, moving to stand beside the door. “I told you once to lower your voice. If you can’t control yourself—”

Frustrated, I twisted the locked knob and threw my shoulder into the door.

“He’s vandalizing my property,” Jenkins said.

I shot Jenkins a look that would have made water boil. As I shoved against the door, the nightstick struck my ribs. The breath rushed from my lungs. I crumpled to the pavement, clutching my side. Tears blurred my eyes; I buried my face in my arms so as not to give them the pleasure of seeing the pain they’d caused me.

As I lay catching my breath, the officer grabbed me by the back of my shirt and yanked me to my feet.

“That’s police brutality.”

I slumped against the wall for support.

“You were out of control and attempting to break into private property. You’re lucky I don’t haul you to jail.”

I almost tried to break the door down again, figuring I’d have a better chance fighting Jenkins and his crooked family cop in court, but I thought better of it. Barton Falls was a cold, lonely area, a place where someone could disappear. I might end up at the bottom of a deep hole on the outskirts of town. The officer glared at me with hard, black eyes that made me wonder if he’d read my thoughts.

“So what’s it going to be?” my landlord asked. “Do you want your belongings?”

I nodded. My stuff didn’t add up to much, but it was worth more than a hundred dollars. I opened my wallet.

Riley let me throw two bags into his trunk for safe keeping. The remainder of my possessions—a few changes of clothes, a toothbrush, and an empty wallet—were stuffed into a knapsack.

“I can’t believe he’d go this far,” Riley said, pulling his coat together to fend off the cold whipping across in the parking lot. “You have to take him to court.”

“Why bother? He has a police officer in his back pocket, and you know what the officer will say when he’s called to testify. It’s my word against theirs.”

“The other tenants have to know what he did to you.”

Riley cut off, seeing Jenkins storm across the lot with a bag of rock salt.

“You’d better go inside before he sees us talking,” I said.

The sleet abated, leaving behind a treacherous glaze of ice.

“Where will you go, man? You’re welcome to stay with me for as long as you need. You know I have room.”

“Not a good idea, Riley. Not unless you want to be in his crosshairs next. Don’t worry about me. I’ll land on my feet.”

As I threw the knapsack onto my shoulders and climbed onto my bike, realization dawned on Riley’s face.

“No way, Steve. No freaking way. I know what you’re up to. If you think you have trouble with the Barton Falls Police Department now, wait until they catch you breaking into houses. This Becca girl is nothing but trouble.”

A switch flipped inside of me. What did Steve know about Becca? All the frustration I’d stored away—Riley convincing me to move to Barton Falls, the computer manufacturer abandoning us, wrecking my car, settling for a dead-end supermarket job, Jenkins ripping me off—came rushing forth in a dam break of released fury.

“I don’t have a fucking choice, Riley. Look at me. This bag represents all I have to my name. And don’t tell me what you would do in my position, because from where I stand, you’re in a better fucking position than I am. Why in the hell did I listen to you? Come to Barton Falls, they’re on the verge of something big here. Thanks a helluva lot for the advice.”

“Steve…I…”

I saw the hurt in his eyes, the look of a scolded dog. All I wanted to do was kick that dog in the ribs.

“And another thing: don’t talk about Becca. You don’t know her, don’t know what she’s been through. You don’t have the right to speak her name.”

I kicked down on the pedals and rolled out of the parking lot. I felt him watching me, fighting to swallow the lump in his throat as his best friend of the last two decades left him alone in the cold. I knew I was a complete heel, that I’d taken my frustrations out on my friend.

I never swallowed my pride and accepted Riley’s help.

And that’s how the trouble started.

Becca looked surprised and a little concerned when I arrived at the Lin family doorstep. Her eyes flicked over my shoulder, a quick and subtle movement borne of years of suspicion, as though worried I’d brought the authorities back with me. Then she saw my raw, red fingers and ears and pulled me in from the cold.

As the light faded from the stormy October sky we sat a few feet apart on the basement couch, a blanket thrown over our legs and an old James Cagney gangster movie on the television. We sipped from mugs of hot cocoa while the wind tried petulantly to pry into the house.

She barely watched the movie, dividing her attention between television gunfights and a slip of paper in her lap. From the corner of my eye, I could see she held a list of potential residences. None of them were within a hundred miles of Barton Falls, and one was as far away as northern Florida. With a pang of regret, I already knew how much I’d miss her after she left.

Though I didn’t know her story, it was obvious she’d been dealt a tough hand.

Yet here she was, a survivor, possessing a freedom most of us couldn’t comprehend.

I’d begun to feel as though she was my doorway, my egress to something better. Hers was somehow a roadmap to a better life, evidence that the walls we perceive around us are figments of imagination.

Why play by the rules when the game is rigged?

That got me wondering if she’d let me travel with her.

I wanted to put Barton Falls behind me forever, get as far away as possible. At wages barely above the legal minimum, the supermarket position wasn’t worth me sticking around. Moving back home with Mom and Dad wasn’t palatable, not for a twenty-four-year-old who’d disappointed his parents enough already. I had to leave. Still, I would have loved to get my hands on Jenkins just once.

Becca caught me reading her list. She folded the paper and tucked it away in the pocket of her jeans. On the television, a soaking rain fell as James Cagney stumbled down the street, his body riddled with bullets.

Even tough guys met their makers.

The computer screen was locked on an ominous news story. Another body had been discovered, sans head, in a town called Vestal about two hours south of Barton Falls. A group of Binghamton University students found the body, a freshman male on the lacrosse team, butchered inside a thicket on campus. The Midnight Killer was back, and he was getting closer.

I glanced at the blanket-covered windows and pictured the frigid dark outside. If the downward trend in the weather continued, snow would arrive by Halloween. My bike, secluded amid the backyard trees, would be rendered useless once snow and ice covered the roads.

Becca sighed and flicked off the television. I could feel her studying me as I fidgeted on the couch.

“You want to leave with me,” she said.

Her knack for reading my mind was uncanny.

“First you tell me I’m crazy to take these risks.” She rolled her eyes. “And now you want to join me.”

I didn’t know what I wanted. I knew I wasn’t ready to lose Becca. If being together meant giving up the perceived safety of a mundane life for the danger of the road, I would.

“Okay,” she said.

Just one word, two syllables.

Suddenly it felt as if all those imaginary walls disintegrated. A sense of freedom I hadn’t felt since I was a kid fell over me.

“But only if you follow my lead and my rules.”

Since I had no experience scoping out houses, I agreed.

“For instance?”

“Remember I told you I have principles, and I always leave a house better than I found it,” she said. “I’m eating their food, using their energy, sleeping under their roof. The least I can do is clean up after myself. I’ve been known to remove mildew that was there before I arrived. I’ve repaired jammed windowpanes and tightened my share of loose screws. I guess it’s my way of saying, thanks for letting me stay here.”

“The locations on your list are a long way from Barton Falls. How do you move from town-to-town?”

“During spring and summer, walking or biking is the best option. A small tent and a backpack are all I need to camp my way across a state.”

But it wasn’t summer, and spring was half-a-year away.

“And now?”

“Hitchhiking, unless the idea of train hopping appeals to you.”

I didn’t like the idea of hitchhiking, especially with The Midnight Killer somewhere in New York. That’s when I remembered the foreclosed property outside of town. If the cold spell broke in the next few days, we could bike to Myers Road.

The prospect of the country house came up between us, then it hung in the background like a pale fog at the window while she schooled me on locating vacated residences. I could tell she wanted to get south before winter caught up and trapped her until spring, yet the Myers Road house seemed a perfect fit. Neither of us saw a need to rush a decision. The Lin house was warm and safe, as ideal a temporary residence as I could imagine.

I was wrong.

I awoke with a start sometime after midnight. I’d dreamed someone was in the house. Darkness swallowed the basement except for a tiny pool of red and green on the carpet below the computer lights. I heard the gentle rise and fall of Becca’s breathing, like low tide rinsing over sandy shells.

I threw off the blanket and quietly climbed the stairs. A clock ticked inside the living room. The refrigerator was a low rumble of white noise. All else was silent and shadowed as I slipped from room to room, looking for an intruder I knew wasn’t inside.

The carpet was soft under my feet as I climbed the stairs to the upper level. I opened the door to the master bedroom and found an empty water bed flanked by his and hers nightstands. An antique wooden dresser topped by picture frames and a jewelry box ran along the near wall. I didn’t like the way the darkness poured down from the ceiling and waited in the corners. It was easy to envision someone hiding back there, waiting for me to step close enough to grab. I guess that’s why I decided not to check the closets or open the doors to the kids’ rooms.

I relieved a full bladder in the bathroom and flushed, feeling stupid for overreacting to a nightmare. I was a trespasser in a strange house. A bad dream or two seemed inevitable. But as I washed my hands, a cold dread that I was being watched worked up my legs.

The cloudy night lent dingy, gray light through the hallway windows, just enough to make the floorboards visible. I waited for a board to groan and something to rush out of the shadows.

There was nothing.

Just the October wind keening outside the window.

It took me a long time to convince myself nobody was in the hallway. Still, the sensation of being watched persisted.

I walked the long and narrow corridor back from the bathroom. At the top of the stairs, I peered out through the wall-length window and stood back from the glass, hoping the darkness would hide me. The window looked over the front yard; dead leaves rained down from a grove of trees separating the house from its Park Place neighbors. A greater chunk of sidewalk and street became visible between increasingly barren limbs. The Lin house wasn’t as concealed as it had been before the cold struck and the trees were fully leaved.

The clear expanse of glass made me feel like I was standing in the crow’s nest of a tall ship, the shifting shadows of the trees on the ground ocean waves. It was enough to evoke vertigo. I imagined Ji Lin spent considerable time staring out this window. It was a crime if he didn’t.

“Look at that,” I whispered. Something about the dark inside the vast house made me want to whisper, as though raising my voice might make the imagined ghosts real. The heavy quiet of the house smothered me, an unceasing warning that I tread on dangerous ground.

I started to turn away from the window and felt as though a live wire touched my heart. A figure stood watching the house from behind the trees. I stepped back into the darkness. What if I’d already been seen?

The watcher stood tall, wrapped in an overcoat and somehow vaguely familiar. Long hair whipped in the breeze.

Donna?

A sick feeling that she’d found me again worked through my stomach. But it couldn’t have been Donna. Nobody knew I was here.

Unless she’d followed me.

When I looked again the sidewalk was empty.

CHAPTER FOUR

In Over My Head

I jumped out of my skin when Becca shook me awake in the wee hours of the morning.

“Easy. It’s just me.”

In a moment of panic, I worried the Lin family had unexpectedly returned. They hadn’t.

“We’re almost out of food,” she said. “Let’s go.”

I didn’t know what to expect as Becca quickly dressed. She threw dark sweatpants and a hooded sweatshirt over her clothes and recommended I do the same. My knapsack held my black sweat pants, but we needed to rummage through Ji Lin’s dresser to find a darker sweatshirt.

She pulled me out into the cold a little after four in the morning. It was still dark. I couldn’t stop shivering.

The storm had moved on, and the clouds parted for the moon. Except for one shining light from an upstairs window as some poor soul readied for an early workday, all of Park Place was dark and sleeping.

I had to quicken my pace to keep up as we turned onto Old State Road. Her long legs glided silently up the sidewalk. She breathed easily without a hint of strain. Our breaths puffed little clouds into the cold, still morning.

I kept throwing quick glances over my shoulder to make sure nobody was back there.

“Problem?” she asked.

I shook my head, not wanting to alarm her over the crazy junkie and figuring it was way too early for him to be out.

Sunrise was still two hours away when we turned into the same shopping plaza I’d hidden behind. The storefronts were dark except for a 24-hour Walmart anchoring the far end of the strip mall.

Until now I hadn’t asked her where she was taking me or what she meant by gathering food.

“I have about twenty dollars left,” I said, touching my near-empty wallet through two layers of pants.

“Save it for a real emergency.”

“Okay,” I said apprehensively. “I thought you said you wanted food.”

The dichotomy between her energy and a morning that couldn’t have felt more harshly silent wasn’t lost on me. She was a torch moving with purpose through the darkest of dungeons as we circled around the backs of the buildings. I half-expected to turn the corner into Isengard and see goblins scaling the walls. A month ago we would have heard peepers singing out of the marshes. Now it was still and dead, as though everything fled the coming winter.

For several minutes we knelt behind a recycling dumpster reeking of wet cardboard.

“What now?”

She placed a finger to her lips and shushed me.

As though on cue, the rumble of a large truck approached from the front of the plaza. Its headlights grew against the rusty fence separating the lot from the dark countryside.

“Here we go,” she said.

Before I could ask Becca what she intended, she pulled me out of hiding. We ran hunched over to a line of detached truck trailers and knelt down. The truck was closer now, the headlight beams blasting a sheet of white across the blacktop. The motor’s rumble ascended from the ground and rode through my legs.

As the truck taxied alongside the unlighted back wall of the store, Becca reached into her coat and removed two sacks. Now I understood. She intended to steal supplies as the truck was unloaded. Anger burned through me. She could have told me her plan. I felt as though she’d thrown me into the fire.

There was no time to protest. She darted out of hiding and rushed to the next set of trailers with me struggling to keep pace.

A door opened and slammed shut, then I heard the driver circling behind the truck. The trailer door opened with a screech as a light flicked on behind the building. I felt ice move through my veins when the light pooled around my sneakers. Our shadows were sharp against the blacktop, easy to recognize.

A metallic overhead door rolled noisily up along the back wall of the store. I heard voices and hoped nobody would notice our shadows. I peeked around the corner and watched one of the store’s night crew hand the truck driver a clipboard. Then the driver returned to his trailer and emerged with a dolly of cardboard boxes.

The instant the driver disappeared into the store, Becca said, “Go,” and ran for the open trailer. I almost lost her in the dark before I saw her silhouette leap through the open door. By the time I climbed in behind her she’d already loaded her sack half full of food boxes, bread, sports bars, anything she could grab. The trailer’s inside was frigid and claustrophobic, the walls of boxes pressing in on me as clouds of refrigerated air rolled down from the ceiling. My hands trembled. I reached for a box of pudding and thought better of it, opting instead for yogurt.

I’d only filled half of my sack when she tugged my shirtsleeve.

“You’re too slow,” she said, throwing a full sack over her shoulder. “He’ll be back at any second. Move it.”

She leaped off the back of the trailer and disappeared around the corner. When I jumped out after her, I tripped upon landing and felt the macadam scrape anguish across my knees.

I looked up and saw only darkness. Becca was somewhere amid the rows of trailers. I was too panicked and turned the wrong way. Someone shouted for me to stop as I wheeled around.

“He’s stealing from the truck!”

The trucker’s voice awakened a clamor of activity inside the storeroom.

I limped through blinding slashes of light, angling toward the trailers as footsteps raced from behind. Too injured to run, I knew I’d never outrun the truck driver.

As I fled across the parking lot, I saw Becca’s shadow between two long trailers, motioning me to run toward her.

Trust her.

I cut hard to my left and felt the driver’s fingers brush the back of my shirt. He cursed and stumbled as I ran for the trailers.

Becca was gone.

Good, I thought. Please, just let her escape.

The driver was on his feet and closing on me. He yelled for me to stop, close enough for me to feel his breath on my neck.

As I started down the tunnel between the trailers, I knew I wouldn’t make it to the end.

He grabbed the food sack.

I spun around and heard him grunt as the breath rushed out of him. He lay clutching his stomach. It was too dark to see what happened as Becca jumped out of the shadows and pulled me after her.

I thought of her switchblade.

No, she wouldn’t kill someone over a bag of food. Would she?

The blacktop behind us was empty. Surely someone had phoned the police.

We ran along the fence bordering the parking lot. While my lungs screamed, she seemed tireless. A siren rose up from inside the township and headed in our direction as we emerged onto Old State Road.

“This way.”

She turned off the sidewalk and led me behind a row of residences. The first tinge of dawn lay behind the eastern hills as we sprinted through frosty backyards. A growing number of lights shone from the houses as people went about their morning business. I worried we’d run into someone with a dog. My sack of food kept snagging on bushes, slowing us down.

The sun was almost up when we broke out of the backyards and into the meadow. I hadn’t heard sirens in a long while, though I doubted the police would give up the chase. Had we gotten away with a few bags of food, they might have dropped the pursuit. The assault on the trucker upped the ante. Had he seen my face?

We trudged through bramble and cut along the edge of a forest rich with pine scents. A long wooden fence appeared. Until Becca threw her bag over the fence, I didn’t realize we’d reached the Lin house.

Becca shut and locked the door behind us. The last place the police would canvas was Park Place, and since nobody knew we were here, I felt safe. All we needed to do was lie low until Ji Lin and his family returned from Hawaii. By then the police would assume the trailer thieves were a pair of vagabonds long gone from Barton Falls.

I know we all play catch-as-catch-can against life’s harsh realities, none of us winning the war. Becca did what she needed to do to survive, and I won’t blame her for the decisions she made.

She curled up on the sofa bed and slept through early afternoon. I was too wired to sleep. I paced the room and made several trips to the upper floor to ensure nobody was standing in the yard, staring up at the window. Though remote, the possibility of someone knowing we were inside the house troubled me.

The television downstairs was tuned to a local news channel with the sound muted. Fortunately, I didn’t see a news story about a Barton Falls shopping plaza robbery.

When I checked the Internet for stories, something rancid turned over in my stomach. Harry Jenkins, landlord of King’s Road Apartments, lay in critical condition at Barton Falls hospital. He’d been attacked by an unknown assailant while walking to his apartment. The attacker had nearly beaten Jenkins to death with some sort of pummeling object, possibly a baseball bat or crowbar. Jenkins lost three teeth and suffered a skull fracture.

The police requested anyone with information about the crime contact them immediately.

If anyone had the motivation to brutalize Jenkins, it was me. The crooked family cop would raise my name to the top of the suspect list.

I glanced over at Becca, still sleeping, and read the story again.

Riley popped into my mind, and I immediately pushed him out. No, Riley wouldn’t hurt a fly let alone attack his landlord. After my verbal assault, I doubted Riley felt compelled to avenge me.

Besides, given Jenkins’ unscrupulous business practices, surely I wasn’t the only person he’d crossed. Who knew how dirty Jenkins was or what shady dealings he made?

Anyone could have attacked Jenkins.

So why was dread scuttling up my neck on scorpion’s legs?

After ensuring Becca was asleep, I crept up the staircases and checked Ji Lin’s bedroom for a phone. The hallway was quiet. I listened for Becca, knowing she’d kill me for risking a phone call. A moment of apprehension stopped me cold. If the Lin family figured out we’d broken in, would they think to check outgoing calls?

The odds were low, and as Becca told me, I worried too much. But I had more than traced phone calls to concern myself with now that someone had brutally assaulted Harry Jenkins.

Screw it. I needed to talk to Riley.

I sat on the edge of the water bed and dialed.

The telephone rang inside Riley’s tiny, sparsely furnished King’s Road apartment. It rang twice. Three times.

Riley, who’d endured the torture of an abusive parent. Riley, whose body had swelled up like the Michelin Man after the spider colony supped on his lifeblood one night. Riley, my best friend of two decades, who’d only wanted to see me succeed at the computer plant and couldn’t be blamed for the company bolting for Florida. Riley, the friend I attacked for questioning my lunatic decision to follow Becca.

“Pick up the phone, Riley,” I whispered. “I know you’re there.”

I hadn’t a clue what I’d say if he answered.

Did you pummel Jenkins with a crowbar, Riley?

The phone kept ringing. After a long while, I put the receiver down. Something was wrong.

I didn’t sleep much that night, and when I did a nightmare I hadn’t experienced since childhood returned.

We were nine when Riley’s father took us camping in the Adirondacks. We were lost—he’d been drinking from a metal canteen that smelled too strong to be water—stumbling along an unknown trail overrun with vegetation. I remember his hateful, bloodshot eyes, the cord-like arms draping down to hands that curled into fists. I’d seen the purple bruises on Riley’s back and neck before, knew how dangerous his father was when he was drunk. Watching his frustration mount, I prayed he wouldn’t hurt Riley. He’d turn on me next.

Before darkness caught us we took cover inside a narrow canyon. Pines blotted out the sky. Riley’s father walked a tenuous line between rage and alcohol-induced exhaustion. I hoped he’d fall asleep before he hurt Riley or me. Soon he lay back in his sleeping bag and began snoring. Riley rolled over and put his head down, too ashamed to face me.

That night, while Riley and his father slept a few feet away, a ghostly wind shrieked off the ridge tops and slammed through the canyon.

Being lost with Riley’s drunken father was bad, but the wind was worse. The pines trembled in a death rattle; needles rained down and stung skin. It seemed a devil screamed that night, enraged that we trespassed through his domain. The terror that something black and monstrous would crash out of the wilderness and tear me to pieces paralyzed me until the sun finally rose.

Riley’s father was hungover when he finally crawled out of the sleeping bag. He looked confusedly at the litter of branches and leaves strewn across the canyon floor. We’d eaten the last of the food yesterday, so we grabbed our bags and started walking.

Despite not sleeping I was able to keep up with his clumsy pace. Sometime during the afternoon we came across the main trail. I just wanted to get out of the forest before the thing from the canyon found me.

The memory of the wind haunted my dreams for a long time. Now it was back, and it felt larger and more ominous than before.

Becca awoke around sunrise. It put my mind at ease to listen to her move through the house, the scent of toasting bread drifting down from the kitchen. Finally, I fell into a deep sleep.

It didn’t last long.

“Oh, shit.”

My eyes fluttered open to a blurry glaze of sleep deprivation.

“We’re in trouble.”

Becca’s voice shocked me awake. I ripped the covers off and leaped up as she hustled back-and-forth across the finished basement, stuffing our belongings into the sacks. Ji Lin’s Facebook page displayed on the computer monitor.

“His mother died in China,” she said, hurriedly folding the bed into the couch.

I grabbed the blankets and pillows and stuffed them into the closet.

“I take it he’s not on his way to China.”

“Not yet. They caught a red eye into Syracuse and are on their way home.”

I caught a glimpse of Lin’s status: a photo of his bleary-eyed family slumped into uncomfortable-looking plastic chairs outside an American Airlines terminal gate. Below the picture, a train of condolences and well wishes rolled in from friends and family.

“When did they land?”

“About seventy minutes ago. God, this isn’t supposed to happen. Nothing like this has ever happened to me before. They shouldn’t be home yet.”

I did the math in my head—ten minutes to retrieve their belongings at the baggage claim, another five or ten minutes to walk to their car, an hour’s drive from Syracuse to Barton Falls. They’d arrive any minute.

Becca shut down the computer, gave one last look around the basement and said, “Oh, hell. The windows.”

I saw what she meant. The blankets were still stuffed over the casement windows. I dragged a chair from window-to-window and ripped down the blankets. I was still folding them as she rushed up the stairs. I heard her bagging our food items as I shoved the blankets into the top of the closet.

I took the stairs two-at-a-time with my backpack hanging off my shoulder.

“Forget the food. We need to get out of here.”

“I have to be thorough,” she said. “If the family suspects a break-in, it will be easy for the police to connect the food items back to our botched robbery.”

Becca meant my botched robbery, of course.

She’d almost cleared the stolen items out of the refrigerator when a truck door slammed outside. The Lin family was in the driveway.

“Becca!”

“I’m done, I’m done.”

Peeking through a curtain, I could see them stumbling out of a black Range Rover, the boy and girl slumped at the shoulders with hair hanging in their eyes. The woman rounded the back bumper and opened the trunk, waiting impatiently for Ji Lin to help with her bags.

“I can’t tell which door they plan to come through,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter. If we go out the front now, they won’t see us around the corner of the house.”

I didn’t like the idea of exiting through the front door. How many neighbors were headed up the sidewalk to welcome the Lin family home?

The trunk slammed shut. They were close enough for me to hear their muffled bickering.

I all but shoved Becca into the hallway as a shadow passed over the window.

“Are you sure you have everything?”

“Shit!” She stopped and stared wide-eyed. “My bath towel.”

Ji Lin stomped up the back steps.

“Leave it.”

“I can’t. They’ll know it’s not theirs.”

Before I could grab her, Becca stormed up the staircase. She wasn’t going to make it in time.

Keys jangled, a harried and frustrated sound. The father cursed as he fumbled with the lock.

“Becca, now.”

More footsteps climbed up the back stairs. Bags thumped down around the door.

“Becca, they’re coming in.”

The next moment burned permanently into my memory: Becca halfway down the stairs with two sacks thrown over her shoulder. Ji Lin’s face looking right at me through the back door curtain. The locking mechanism clicking open.

The trap door slamming shut.

The door burst open as Becca reached the hallway.

I expected Lin to yell for us to stop. Instead, he argued in Chinese with his wife while their sullen teenagers pushed into the kitchen behind him.

Had it been too dark inside for him to see me?

The hallway was a straight shot from the kitchen before turning left into the front entranceway. A slim chance for escape still existed.

The wall shielded us from view as we reached the door. I heard them shuffling in our direction down the hallway.

Becca pulled open the door as someone’s shadow grew across the floor.

Thank God for well-oiled hinges. The door didn’t make a peep as it slid open.

My feet were icicles, my brain too panicked to think straight as I slipped onto the porch.

As we shut the door, someone yelled. I thought we’d been caught, but it was just Ji Lin and his kids yelling at each other. While the arguing resumed inside, we leaped from the steps onto the walkway and scrambled into the tree grove, dead leaves crunching underfoot.

“Get down,” she said.

The way my breath flew in-and-out of my chest made me feel as though I’d run a marathon. I looked back at the house, where the door stood closed and nobody peered through the window curtains.

The mid-morning sun cut sharp delineations of light and shadow through the trees as I turned my attention to the road.

A sedan moved slowly up Park Place. We crouched beside an elm and waited for the car to pass.

I knew if Lin looked out the front window, he’d see us.

“Walk out from the trees as though nothing happened,” Becca said. “Can you do that?”

I nodded, thinking I could.

“Just like you did when you hid from me at the intersection.”

I stammered, thinking I’d fooled her that day. “You saw me?”

“Of course I did. Like I told you: I’ve done this for three years without getting caught. I’m cautious, and I see everything. Including guys feigning bicycle troubles.”

We strode out from the trees and started up the sidewalk, Becca walking with a casual grace I couldn’t fathom. My junior high basketball coach once taught me to keep my head on a swivel. His voice incongruously came to me as I took in all the dark shadows. Nobody seemed to pay us attention.

Our sacks looked out of place. I worried about our descriptions on the news and people recognizing us through their windows. How could I look nonchalant with my bags bulging as if I was some vagrant Santa Claus?

A quick glance over my shoulder confirmed Ji Lin wasn’t chasing after us. It didn’t stop my heart from hammering over the belief we’d left something behind to tie us to the scene.

We were a third of the way down Park Place when my hands went cold.

“My bike. It’s in the backyard.”

I’d come to believe Becca was impervious to alarm. At that moment I saw dread in her eyes.

At the far end of the street, someone started walking down the sidewalk.

Becca stopped and looked at the Lin house, partially concealed by leafless trees. The sun had come around to the front of the house, setting the bed of leaves ablaze in autumn reds. The fates might as well have shone a spotlight on us. There was no way to pass through the front yard without being seen.

“You wheeled it back near the fence, right?”

I had to think for a moment.

“Yeah, between a clump of trees and the fence.”

The oncoming neighbor was closer now. It was Buster’s master, I realized, but the dog wasn’t with him. He wore his black peacoat with the collar up, his head lowered against the crisp air as he strolled in our direction.

“Leave it,” Becca said and continued walking.

“It’s evidence against us,” I protested.

“I know it is. But right now…” She stopped talking at the approach of Buster’s master.

Becca smiled and said good morning as he passed. He nodded and glanced curiously at our sacks before turning up the walkway of a tall, Gothic mansion with wrought iron gates. I heard Buster barking inside.

“Just play it cool for now,” Becca said, covertly leaning her head toward me and lowering her voice. “We can get your bike after dark.”

I didn’t like the idea of coming back to the Lin house tonight. We were pushing our luck.

The bags would soon grow heavy, and I knew how conspicuous we’d appear walking along a busy roadway. The morning traffic thickened at the intersection of Old State Road. I had to fight myself from running when a police car raced down the thoroughfare.

After a half-mile walk back toward the scene of last night’s crime, we cut across an open lot, between two small houses with empty driveways, to where the meadow began. The ground was damp with melted frost, the meadow grass brown and wilted. A few hundred yards away the forest grew up against a blue sky.

It felt warm until we crossed inside the pines. Once we lost the sun the temperature plummeted as if we’d entered winter’s realm. My two layers of sweatshirts weren’t going to prevent the chill from cutting into my bones.

In a leafy clearing, Becca threw down her sacks and sat cross-legged in the leaves. Here the sun shone warmly again. Two large, flat rocks lay at the center. Crumpled cigarette packs and beer bottles were scattered around the rocks, telling me this was where kids came to party after dark.

“You feel confident enough to get your bike tonight, or do you want me to go?”

“I’ll get it,” I said, feeling a shade less than worthless.

“I can move more quietly than you.”

“This is my problem. Let me fix it.”

She raised an eyebrow, not exactly a vote of confidence.

We shared a sports bar in silence. After she finished her half, she leaned back against the rock and folded her arms.

“Wake me up before it gets dark.”

I thought she was kidding. Then her eyes closed. She plunged into sleep, seemingly impossible in the bright sun.

She’ll get caught because of me, I realized, watching her rest as the wind slung dead pine needles around us.

I saw no reason for her to believe in me. Truthfully, I sensed what little trust she had in me was fleeting. I was in over my head, and all I’d done was fail her.

Birds fluttered in-and-out of the trees, singing to autumn’s last stand.

I thought of closing my own eyes but didn’t. I’d watch over Becca, make sure no harm came to her. She’d see I could be useful if she gave me a second chance.

Afternoon slogged along. The rumble of distant motors moving down Old State Road into Barton Falls was a twin accompaniment with the wind. Now and then I heard kids calling to each other from the neighborhood yards, too far away to worry over. Becca’s instincts were right as usual: we were safe here.

Catching the scent of burgers grilling upwind, I felt my stomach growl.

Shadows grew longer, spilling across the clearing in dark, bloody streaks. The eastern sky was almost in twilight.

I was about to shake Becca awake when her eyes popped open. Surprise caught her face. Her hand plunged into her front pocket before she realized who I was. Buttoning her jacket against the plummeting temperature, she snatched up her belongings.

“I thought I told you not to let me sleep too long,” she said.

I was tired and hungry and sick of the criticism.

“No, you told me to wake you up before dark.”

She looked over the treetops. The first stars sparkled in the eastern sky. With a huff, she threw the sacks over her shoulder and started walking toward the trees. I could see she was frustrated with me again. Somehow, I’d even managed to screw up her wakeup call.

“Well? Are you coming or not?”

The snap in her voice awakened an angry boy inside me. Indignation is a bitter pill.

She glared straight ahead, doing her best to ignore me as she glided through the trees. I was losing her.

I grabbed Becca’s arm and spun her around.

“What?”

She nearly spat the word at me.

“I’m sorry about the damn bike.”

“I’ve never come so close to getting caught before. And I’ve never had a roommate. Coincidence?”

“It wasn’t my fault. Remember what you told me the night we met? When I followed you into the house, you told me I made my own decisions. Well, so do you. You chose to break into Ji Lin’s house. That was your call. I realize you couldn’t have predicted his mother would die, forcing him to take an emergency flight home, but you also can’t blame me. Be reasonable.”

“Be reasonable? Your bike is still in the yard. What if he sees your bike and realizes someone was inside his house? What if the police release a photo and a friend of yours recognizes the bike?”

“Now you’re the one who’s acting paranoid.”

Was she? Riley would recognize my bike, as would Donna. Anyone who’d passed me on the street might remember. Even the psycho junkie knew my bike.

“And if I hadn’t stopped the truck driver, he’d have caught you. We’d both be sitting in a jail cell tonight.”

She must have seen the stark terror on my face. I tried to forget the image of the driver crumpling to the pavement, clutching his stomach. She laughed derisively and looked up at the gathering stars, as though they shared her exasperation.

“No, Steve. I didn’t stick a switchblade through his belly. That’s what you thought, isn’t it?”

My face flushed. I didn’t have a good answer.

“Yeah, I kicked him pretty hard. I did what I had to do to save your ass. He’ll be sore for a few days, but he’ll still be able to have kids when he finds that special someone.”

“Dammit, Becca. You brought me to a robbery and didn’t even tell me about it until the delivery truck was right in front of us.”

“If I had told you, you wouldn’t have stayed.”

“You’re wrong.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“Am I? Tonight needs to go smoothly, Steve.”

“It will, I promise,” I said. “Which is why we should get moving while we can still see. I’ll get the bike, and before the clock strikes midnight, I’ll get you into another house.”

She glared doubtfully at me. The wheels in her head spun.

“The foreclosure in the country you were talking about,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I suppose we don’t have much of a choice. Do you know how to get there?”

“I do.”

She stared off to where the woods thickened. Somewhere beyond the dense overgrowth lay Ji Lin’s house and one last piece of evidence linking us to the crime.

“Okay. Let’s get your bike. And this time, no loose ends left behind.”

Behind us, the ground swallowed the sun. It became increasingly difficult to see where I was walking. I kept butting up against branches, worrying one would poke through an eye. Underneath me, the leaves whispered conspiratorially of all things dark and dead in October’s night.

Light through the trees marked Ji Lin’s house. I wondered if he was inside making emergency flight plans to China or calling the police over some piece of evidence discovered in his backyard.

We stood before the tall wooden fence.

When I grabbed hold of the fence top, Becca pulled me back.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going,” she said.

“No. This is my problem. You said you’d let me fix it.”

“I changed my mind. I’m quieter than you.”

A night bird called from the forest.

“You’ll never lift the bike over the fence without my help. Why don’t you let me do this?”

“I don’t need to lift the bike. Once I’m sure it’s safe, I’ll walk it between the fence and the house and ride down Park Place. You can meet me there.”

I started to protest, but she was up and over the wall before I realized she’d started climbing.

“Becca, no.”

She landed with a soft thump. I didn’t like that I couldn’t see her anymore. I had the impression of a ground-to-sky wall between us, Becca impossible to reach. What if Ji Lin waited on the other side?

Or the junkie.

(Or Donna).

That last thought sent a chill through me.

Ridiculous.

It was, wasn’t it? When does obsession cross the line into insanity?

“Becca.”

I pressed against the cold fence wall, listening.

The night was cold and hushed as though the quiet came from six feet under.

“Becca.”

Still nothing.

Knowing she’d be furious with me, I grabbed hold of the fence and pulled myself up, dropping both our bags into the grass. I felt ligaments strain between my armpit and ribs as I balanced on top and scanned the dark backyard. My bike was behind the clump of trees in the back corner, but I could see neither the bike nor Becca.

The downstairs was awash with light. Someone passed by the sliding glass doors and disappeared into the kitchen.

When I looked back toward the trees, I couldn’t see a thing. My eyes had already adjusted to the lights.

Swinging my legs over, I dropped into the grass. I landed louder than Becca had. She was a lot better at this than I was.

That she wasn’t there to berate me made me uneasy. She was nowhere to be found, as though the yard swallowed her whole.

I edged along the fence, glimpsing the outlines of the fence and trees now, but still no Becca.

“Where are you?”

My whisper died in the darkness.

Then I saw her shadow emerge from the trees.

She walked my bike across the yard, wheeling it through the shadows. She hadn’t seen or heard me yet, or I think she would have scorned me for not following directions again.

She moved too slow, too cautious, seeming to slog through quicksand. The night closed in around her.

I kept glancing between her and the house, a nervous parent watching his child totter across a highway.

Go! I screamed inside my head.

What happened next remains a blur. A shape shot out from behind the garage.

A man.

“Look out!” I yelled.

It was too late.

Becca turned as the man tackled her. Their shadows and that of the bike collapsed against the dark ground. I lost sight of them. Somewhere in the yard, Becca grunted as she tried to throw him off.

He swore at her. Though I didn’t speak Chinese, the spiteful tone of his curse was easily recognized.

His hands were around her neck, her legs flailing and bridging as I threw my shoulder into his.

Ji Lin was strong; it felt as if I’d slammed into a brick wall.

I felt the breath rush from my lungs. He landed awkwardly on his arm, winced, and grabbed at his elbow. I leaped atop and slammed a fist against his jaw. Becca was on her feet and racing the bike toward the driveway.

“Leave him,” she said.

As I turned to flee he grasped my ankle and tripped me up. I smelled hard liquor and body odor as he fought his way on top. Apparently, he’d done his share of drinking on the plane and continued at home.

It was too dark to get a good view of his face. I hoped he couldn’t see mine.

His fingers shook as they wrapped around my neck. I realized he was drunk and out of his mind. How long had he waited for us? What scrap of evidence had he found that we’d lived in his house?

That police sirens weren’t wailing down Park Place terrified me. Ji Lin didn’t want the authorities to handle this. He meant to murder us.

I swung an elbow and caught him over his eye. He gasped and fell off.

I pressed my advantage and battered him with punches. Becca pleaded with me to run.

Something snapped inside me. My anger at Jenkins and the frustration of my failures were a fireball of hate. He covered his head as I rained more punches down on him.

I don’t want to think what I would have done to Ji Lin if his daughter hadn’t screamed. No longer a teenager with a messy room and rock-n-roll posters taped to the wall, she was a little girl terrified for her daddy.

The girl kept pleading for the monster to leave her daddy alone. I knew the police were on the way, yet I kept hammering fists against his face. It was the girl’s frightened cries that made me stop.

I started running and turned back.

Our belongings.

More shouting came from inside the house as I rushed back to the fence. I had to feel through the dark until my hands clasped our bags. Ji Lin lay moaning in the grass as I sprinted out of the yard.

“Take your bike,” Becca said as I ran into the driveway. “I’ll meet you at—”

“Jump on and grab hold of me.” She looked confusedly at me. “Do it.”

I climbed onto the bike. She straddled the seat and wrapped her arms around my stomach. I could hear the mother and son running down the steps to help Ji Lin.

Becca’s face was pressed hard against my back as I kicked the pedals. I had to ride standing up, something I hadn’t done since I was a kid riding double with Riley. I couldn’t balance. We nearly crashed on the lip of driveway and road as a siren screamed from the center of town. Then my muscle memory kicked in, and we flew down Park Place as if the devil himself was chasing us.

“He couldn’t see me,” I kept saying.

I wasn’t sure if I was trying to convince myself or Becca.

By the time the police car thundered into Park Place we were on the west end of Old State Road, past the shopping plaza. Thankfully, the road was devoid of cars, the plaza having closed an hour earlier. Otherwise, someone would have noticed the unknown couple fleeing on a mountain bike made for one.

Ahead, the county road bore off to the left. A mix of Eastern White Pines and skeletal deciduous trees bordered the county road to either side. We’d have ample cover if vehicle lights appeared on the horizon.

Were it not for her tight grip around my chest I might have thought Becca was sleeping. I felt her breath on my neck, the softness of her breasts squeezed against my back.

The foreclosed residence lay no more than a half-hour away. Soon we’d be safe.

No headlights swept down West Road. No sirens or flashing lights screamed up behind us. We were nearly home free.

Then I glanced over my shoulder and saw the low-slung racing bike closing in on us.

CHAPTER FIVE

House on the Hill

“Who the hell is that, Steve?”

I could tell by the quaver in Becca’s voice that she was scared. I’d never heard her frightened.

I didn’t answer. I pedaled until my legs screamed for me to stop. The wind was an ice bath against my flesh.

We were on the county road, the black strip of blacktop devoid of street lighting. The moon hid behind a blanket of clouds; I couldn’t see a damn thing.

The lunatic junkie was closer each time I glanced over my shoulder. I couldn’t so much see him as catch dull glints off the reflectors and a shadow moving very fast through the darkness.

I knew I couldn’t get away from him riding double. I’d learned I couldn’t outrace him at all on a second-hand mountain bike. My tires were built to grip, not fly.

That’s when I got the idea to put my new bike to the test.

“Hold on tight.”

Becca hooked her arms under my shoulders and clasped her hands tightly against my chest. I looked behind and saw he was only fifty yards behind and closing on us. Ahead, headlights climbed out of a dip in the terrain. The oncoming car was at least a mile away and coming fast.

I yanked hard on the handlebars and angled for the ditch.

How far across was the ditch? Three feet from bank to bank? I was working off an uncertain memory and a fistful of prayers.

I heard water gushing through a drainage creek. I pushed faster, knowing it would take considerable speed to safely clear the far bank. Wavering would cause the back tire to clip the edge.

We’d break our necks if we were lucky.

Branches whipped at our faces. I felt Becca squeeze harder—she sensed what I intended.

We both yelled when the mountain bike took to the air. Becca lifted several inches off the seat. Had my sneakers not been wedged inside the pedal straps, I would have flown backward with her.

Time stopped. I heard the water rushing underneath, felt its chill against my ankles. We were weightless, a split second away from escape or obliteration.

The landing knocked the breath out of me. The frame groaned and sprang back. I concentrated on keeping my grip of the handlebars as the tires jounced and the bike wobbled.

Our momentum nearly threw Becca off again. She gripped her knees against my sides to regain balance.

Now we were one entity, Becca, the bike, and me, tearing into the forest.

I heard the junkie gaining on us, screaming he’d kill me and the whore.

“Throw down your pack.”

“What?” she asked.

“The packs. They’re weighing us down.”

We tossed my backpack and our sacks of food into the trees. I made a mental note of where we’d dropped them, never believing I’d see those bags again.

Without the added weight encumbering us, I was better able to dodge trees and handle bumps.

Maybe I couldn’t beat the junkie’s bike in a race, but he was in my territory now. The mountain bike’s tire treads were wide and jutted, designed to go off-road. The tires chewed into the undulating slope of dead leaves, rock, and dirt, and carried us through the forest.

I slowed down. Sure, I worried we’d slam into a tree, but I was more concerned over the deep gorges that cut into the landscape. They were impossible to see without moonlight.

Several minutes later, when I could no longer hear him behind us, I pulled the bike into a clump of pines. My legs were numb as we crawled under needled boughs and settled against the sticky trunk. The cold was a knife blade against my sweaty skin. It was too dark to see anything but the suggestion of shapes.

An owl hooted nearby. I listened for tires digging through leaves and snapping twigs. The forest was dead quiet.

The pine scent erupted. It reminded me of Christmas trees in the living room during the holiday season, made me long for home. Then I thought of Becca: Becca, who’d never had a real family Christmas, Becca, who was homeless. Becca, who needed to rob produce trucks today so she could eat tomorrow. I doubted I’d ever again feel sorry for myself.

My lungs burned when Becca pulled me around. I couldn’t see her, only felt the heat of her anger.

“You want to tell me what the hell that was about?”

“I don’t know who he is,” I said.

I told her about the chase through town and how the junkie had tried to inject me with a needle.

“Jesus.”

“He’s out of his mind. He’ll kill me if he gets the chance.”

We sat in silence, listening to the night as the cold desolation of the forest crept around us.

It seemed fate kept throwing roadblocks between us and the old house on Myers Road.

“The sooner we get away from this town, the better.”

We.

Hearing her include me in her plans made something warm flutter in my chest.

“You sure? It seems all I’ve done is mess things up for you.”

She sighed.

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault Ji Lin found your bicycle. If I’d paid closer attention to his social media accounts, we could have been in another state by the time he made it home.”

“You can’t monitor all day and night. When will you sleep?”

She didn’t answer.

“Sometimes it’s just bad luck,” I said. “Like this crazy guy following us. If I hadn’t passed his house at precisely the wrong moment, he wouldn’t even know I exist let alone want to kill—”

A branch snapped.

It sounded like a shotgun blast amid the quiet.

We slunk back against the trunk. I suddenly felt as if we’d backed into a corner and given ourselves no route for escape.

Minutes passed without another sound.

Trees shed branches all the time. Maybe that’s all I’d heard.

Holding Becca’s arm, I started to crawl under the boughs.

I froze at the rustling of leaves.

Someone was coming.

The footfalls brazenly swept across the forest floor. Whoever it was made no attempt to mask his approach.

“Where you at, boy? Can’t hide all night.”

The junkie.

A gorge lay nearby. His echo bounced off its walls and came back to me as a wraith’s cry.

I couldn’t judge how far away he was. His voice seemed to come from everywhere.

“I’m gonna kill you and the girl. Then I’ll lay her corpse over a rock and have me a dead whore. How’s that taste?”

Closer. Forty or fifty yards.

Dried leaves rattled as he pulled on a branch and snapped it off. I heard the tree swaying back and forth in his wake.

“My town, my forest. Nobody comes or goes without the mayor’s say-so.”

He stood no more than ten yards away, close enough for me to smell his sweat stench.

“And nobody gets out alive.”

He knew where we were. Somehow he homed in on us despite the absolute darkness. Could he see the bike between the trees?

I felt Becca slide her hand into her pocket. The switchblade.

Twigs and leaves crackled in front of us. He was only a few feet away.

I sensed her thumb on the release.

Becca’s body shifted. I imagined her on one knee ready to plunge the blade into our pursuer’s throat. If the junkie stuck his head through the branches, he’d get a helluva surprise.

The last thing we needed was a murder on our hands.

A break-in, a robbery, and now a dead body. The police wouldn’t sleep until they hunted us down.

The air had a tension to it. It was as if a bomb was about to explode.

Then the footsteps trailed off to our left and went deeper into the forest. After a while, I couldn’t hear him anymore.

I could finally breathe again.

“We should get out of here while we can,” she said.

I wondered where we were and if I could find my way out. We’d ridden blindly through the forest to get to this spot.

“Okay. I’ll do my best.”

Pine needles scraped down my neck as I crawled out from under the branches. Although the forest was dark, it seemed positively bright compared to the black that was our hiding place. Tree shapes were discernible for a greater distance now. I turned in a circle, trying to find the exit.

“How do you want to do this?”

Becca was referring to finding our way back to the road. She looked past our hiding place and slightly off to the left. That’s where I believed the road to be, and I took comfort knowing she’d come to the same conclusion. Of course, maybe both of us were wrong.

“Maybe we’re better off staying put until first light.”

No. The junkie had almost found us once. It was only a matter of time before he retraced his steps and came back.

I parted the boughs and pulled my bike from the clump of pines. Weed overgrowth stuck through the spokes, and I had to yank hard to free the bike. I was making too much noise.

While Becca climbed onto the seat, I checked the forest one last time.

I felt eyes watching.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

The junkie?

No. Something else.

Something worse than the junkie.

I walked a few steps toward where our stalker had disappeared. Shriveled ferns leaned out of a bed of needles and dry leaves. Pines towered to the moonless sky, everywhere their scent.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

I climbed onto the bike and grabbed hold of the handlebars.

A scream tore out of the trees.

My stomach dropped out from under me. Becca’s hands wrapped around my chest and dug in with her nails. I could feel her twisting her head around, peering back into the dark.

I thought about those deep gorges and how easy they were to fall into at night.

I wanted to believe the junkie had fallen to his death.

Yet there was something in his cry which warned something far worse than a plunge into the gorge had befallen him. It was the sort of scream I imagined a swimmer made when the Great White bit into his belly and split him in half.

I couldn’t move. With trembling legs, I held the bike steady until the night swallowed the echoing scream.

It was quiet again.

And to my eyes, quite a bit darker.

“Get us out of here, Steve.”

I stomped down on the pedals and raced back through the trees. At that moment I didn’t care if the road was ahead. All I wanted was to put as much distance between us and that scream as I could.

Our intuitions were correct. It didn’t take long to find the road. Our path into the forest was fresh enough to recognize, and I was surprised to find our supplies splayed between two leafless bushes. I threw my backpack on, each of us grabbing a food sack.

When we made it back to the ditch, we skipped the heroics this time and walked the bike through the stream.

Once we were up and out of the weedy overgrowth, I checked my phone. It was fifteen minutes past midnight, and a missed call from Riley topped my log of messages. No voice mail, but he’d left a text message.

Riley: Where are you? Please tell me you didn’t have anything to do with it.

I knew what he meant. Jenkins.

I felt a momentary flare of guilt over thinking Riley had put Jenkins in the hospital. Guilt quickly switched to anger. Who was he to accuse me? As innocuous as his message was, it pissed me off that he’d sent it. The police wouldn’t have much difficulty figuring out what “it” was.

I deleted the message.

I shut down the phone and stuffed it into my pocket as Becca jumped onto the bike seat.

“What do you think happened back there?” she asked.

I wanted to tell her about gorges and the dangers of hiking in the dark. I knew she’d hear the lie in my voice, so I just shook my head and started to pedal.

The cold chewed holes into me while we rode. I kept thinking how much warmer it was from the Carolinas down to Florida. I didn’t think I’d miss lake effect snow storms and wind chill warnings.

After riding for a half hour, I took a right onto an unmarked dirt road as the paved county road continued into darkness. All around us towered wild grass, brown and dead until next spring. The growth blotted out the meadow beyond.

Potholes riddled the road. More than once my heart leaped into my throat when a hole clawed at the bike tires. Somehow I kept the bike upright.

Nobody lived here. A dilapidated and abandoned barn, barely noticeable in the gloom, leaned in the meadow, a fossil which proved someone had once called this lonely strip of nothingness home. It was nearly one in the morning, and we were the only living people for miles.

A few minutes later, I spotted the signpost for Myers Road growing out of a clump of weeds. Tendrils wrapped around the post, choking the pole and pulling it back to the dirt.

The gravel road undulated with the terrain and ascended. The foreclosure house, still invisible from the intersection, sat on the other side of the hill crest. I knew my way around the back roads, knew Myers Road could take me into the Finger Lakes. A scattering of residences existed on Myers Road, growing more numerous closer to the lakes. Until then, the foreclosure house was the only residence.

The clouds parted to let through a sliver of moonlight. Halfway up the incline I pulled a large tree limb out of the road and threw it into the brush. It made a sound like snakes hissing as it rolled down the hill. The road was too rutted for the bike, so we walked the rest of the way.

“You’re sure the house is up here?” she asked, hands cupping elbows to hold off the cold.

“Positive. Once we clear the hill we’ll see it.”

Something rustled the bushes. I looked into the night and saw glowing eyes staring back at me. Probably just a fox. In the dead of night, it was hard not to believe in werewolves and mummies and all of the made-up monsters we used to frighten ourselves over when we were kids.

“I hope that’s not a coyote,” she said.

“Just as long as he doesn’t have friends.”

“Might be a raccoon.”

“Or a crocodile.”

She punched me in the shoulder.

The eyes blinked off-and-on. Then the animal scurried down the hill and out of sight. If it was a werewolf, it was more scared of us than we were of it.

We didn’t need to clear the hill before seeing the house. The black outline of its steeply-pitched roof grew up from the horizon as we neared the crest.

Then we reached the peak, and the downgrade steepened down the other side. We half-walked, half-stumbled through the loose stone. The house seemed to have its own gravitational pull, and we were caught in it. Along the sides of the road lay mud strips of scoured earth where rains had washed the gravel and weeds away.

I told you I’d seen the foreclosed property from the road before. But never at night, and never from the brush. That season I’d seen dozens of houses outfitted for Halloween. None looked half as haunted as the decrepit two-story jutting bone-like out of the earth. I swore it leaned toward us as we approached, as though it might grow claws and snatch us up when we got close. A part of me wanted to grab Becca and ride the hell out of there. I might have done so had I not been so damn cold.

Once the house had been painted white. Now it was blotchy gray, peeling and warped. It was too dark to see the terrain below the hill. I had the impression of standing atop a mountain growing out of a black and rising sea. We couldn’t have been more isolated. I wasn’t sure if this was a good or a bad thing.

“Who would live way out here?” Becca asked.

I wondered that, myself. The hill was too steep for farmland, and there were no decent roads to take us into town.

The vista appeared stilted and weeping, scoured by generations of wind and storm.

Whoever once lived here had abandoned the house, just as the barren land around it had been abandoned by civilization. A dirt driveway ran around the other side of the house. There was no sidewalk, only a beaten path of brown leading from the driveway to the porch steps. Nor was there a garage or carport.

“What do you think?”

“Even with a car, it’s fifteen minutes to Barton Falls,” she said.

“It’s even more isolated than I thought.”

“Let’s give it a closer look.”

A roofed porch stretched along the front of the house, the sort you’d expect to find attached to a bungalow. A weathered rocking chair groaned and moved whenever the wind gusted. I could see the tattered strip of foreclosure notice affixed to the front door. Little pieces of the notice blew back and forth across the porch.

Grass grew high enough to cover the basement windows. A monstrous spiderweb stretched from the porch roof to a dead shrub at the corner of the house. Something lay cocooned in the web, twitching and wiggling with no hope for escape.

The windows were shuttered on the first and second floors. Somebody had boarded one of the upstairs windows.

As I climbed the steps I expected them to squeal like they did in haunted house stories. They didn’t. The stairs were sturdy, solid. The porch planks were dirty yet strong, making me think this addition was only a few years old.

“Welcome home,” I said.

I kept looking over my shoulder. I was about to break into a house, my second in less than a week. The cops had to be looking for us by now. We couldn’t steal our way into another residence without someone noticing, even if we were in the middle of nowhere.

I opened the storm door. What remained of the foreclosure notice ripped off and flew into the night like a fleeing bat. I knew the main door would be locked, but I tested the knob anyway. It was an older door and lock set, nothing that would trouble Becca and her tools of the trade.

She must have known what I was thinking because she said, “Let’s check around back first.”

Becca led as I wheeled the bike around the back of the house. A brick barbecue pit stood several feet back in the yard. The residual scents of burned chicken and hamburger had long since departed, but I could smell the charcoal. I leaned the bike against the bricks and walked back to where she stood in the dark of the yard.

Another scent colored the night air, a sharp, sweet smell like Benzene.

Next to a flimsy-looking door stood a dark, rectangular bulk.

“You think it’s okay to use the flashlight back here?”

She glanced around and nodded. The beam painted a large gasoline generator. That explained the scent.

“Turn it off.”

“What?”

“Something isn’t right.”

I turned off the flashlight. The yard looked darker than before.

The wind blew Becca’s hair around. She stood back from the house and watched, studying intently. Leaning close to me, she whispered.

“Normally, I like to spend a day watching a house just to be sure. Between the notice on the front door and your friend’s testimony, I guess it’s safe to say this house is uninhabited, but I want to check things out first. Just to be sure.”

I followed her back into the overgrown grass. It was up to our knees and dew-laden, clinging to my jeans and soaking through.

If anyone was inside, it was too dark to see into the house. I couldn’t fathom how Becca could see anything inside, but who was I to question her? She’d stayed alive doing this for three years and knew what to look for. For long moments she was an invisible statue in the gloom, patient and observant. Her eyes moved from window-to-window, then back to where the shadow of the generator butted up against the house. I could almost see Becca piecing the puzzle together in her head.

Next, we circled to the makeshift driveway and studied one side of the house. The windows caught a sliver of moonlight and turned a silvery cobalt. We spent several minutes here, then a similar length of time watching the front and opposite side of the house. All the while the cold poured through my clothing and sent my teeth to chattering.

I began to worry she didn’t trust the house, that we’d freeze to death in the long October night. Finally, we looped back behind the house and she reluctantly nodded.

“There’s no one in there,” she said.

“You think it’s safe?”

“I never said that.” Before I could ask what she meant, she started walking toward the door. “Turn on the flashlight. Let’s see what we’re up against.”

I aimed the light at two windows and saw a rustic kitchen behind the glass. Not thinking I’d have any better luck opening the windows than I’d had with the door, I tested them nonetheless and came away with a splinter and gray-colored fingers.

“No dice,” I said.

“Time for the ole failsafe.”

She jimmied the lock set with her pick. The locking mechanism snapped. It happened so fast I thought she’d broken the pick. She gave the door a shove, and it emitted a bullfrog’s groan as it swung open.

Placing a finger to her lips to shush me, she took the flashlight.

The macho, chivalrous side of me wanted to go in first and keep her safe.

Better to let her lead the way. I was the amateur, she the professional.

My anxiety kicked up inside the kitchen, the same as when I’d first entered Ji Lin’s house. I’d broken the law again. It was easy to imagine myself in a small room with Officer Jenkins staring bullets into me, grilling me over why I was inside a foreclosed property with a runaway vagrant.

What did you do to Harry Jenkins?

While she swept the beam across the tiled floor, a voice whispered warnings into my ear. According to Riley, the foreclosure notice had been affixed to the door for about a year. I expected the floor to be dusty, yet it looked clean. Did the bank periodically send a crew to tidy things up for prospective buyers? I had no idea how the process worked.

The light pulled cherry wood cabinets out of the dark, their reds dulled by age. Laminate counters bordered a long antique farmhouse sink with double basins.

The counters ended at a gas stove with four burners. Bloody leaks trekked out from under a hulking refrigerator in the opposite corner.

“This is the house you think we should stay in?” she asked.

Fear weighted her words.

A black rotary phone hung over the counter. I put the receiver to my ear and jiggled the hang-up. It had a dial tone, but when I tried to dial the number to my cell phone, all I got was an annoying beeping.

“Tone, but no service,” I said.

“Is that normal?”

“It is. The phone company allows limited service to inactive lines. I could call 9-1-1 in an emergency, but I couldn’t call a friend.”

“I never knew that.”

Across the room stood an unpainted, weathered door with gouges cut into the wood, as though something with claws had gone at it.

The cellar.

If the door was any indication of the cellar’s condition, I hoped to hell Becca wouldn’t insist on sleeping in the basement again. I thought about the huge spiderweb off the porch and what was crawling around in the cellar.

I started to worry when Becca pulled on the door.

Locked.

“Who locks a basement?” I asked.

“Someone who doesn’t expect a prowler with a lock pick.” She patted her pocket. “We’ll check it out later.”

“I’m not sleeping down there.”

She shot me an ironic smile.

“I may be careful, but I don’t sleep in filth. I’d sooner freeze in the forest than sleep in that basement.”

A small den with 1970s-style wood paneling stood off the kitchen. A corner door gave entry to a dirty half bath. I found a brown couch with stuffing worming out through cushion holes. Scratching came from inside the wall, probably the same rats that chewed those holes.

A small television sat on a desk across from the sofa. A DVD player was attached to the television, and disks were stacked on the desk. I figured the previous owner had left in haste. What else had he left behind?

I thumbed my way through the DVDs, counting them as I went. I write this because it’s important, though I didn’t know it at the time. I counted twelve DVDs in the stack. Twelve, not an unlucky thirteen. I’m a fallible human who makes mistakes, and maybe I miscounted. But I don’t think I did. I’m superstitious and would have noticed if the stack contained exactly thirteen unlabeled DVDs.

I hoped I’d recognize a movie and give myself an escape from the reality of always being on the run. It’s amazing how binding total freedom can be.

“Cool. Maybe we can watch a movie tomorrow night.”

When I turned around, Becca was gone.

I saw the light sweeping down the hall. I rushed to catch up to her.

A long living room fronted the home. The room was unfurnished, and much like the kitchen, it wasn’t as dirty as I’d anticipated. The floor was bare, slatted hardwood.

A drafty picture frame window did little to hold back the chill. The wind rattled the glass, a sound like bones tumbling into a grave.

There was a fireplace across the room with two unburned logs on the grates. I would have searched for matches had I thought we could burn a fire without attracting attention. From this high up, the smoke plume would be visible for miles.

“I’ll check upstairs,” she said.

“Not without me, you won’t.”

I might have said it because I wanted to keep her safe. The truth was the old house unsettled me. I didn’t wish to be alone any more than I wanted her venturing into the dark by herself.

Becca led the way up the staircase. Her flashlight beam swept twin arcs from banister to wall and from the top landing down. The planks felt solid, but I didn’t like the way the banister wiggled.

The hallway at the top of the stairs was adorned by striped wallpaper that peeled and hung like snakes’ tongues. A full bathroom sat straight ahead with what appeared to be a closed bedroom next to it. At the end of the hall were two more closed bedroom doors. A dusty set of stairs led up to the attic, its door closed and the dry stink of insulation slipping under the threshold.

I walked into the bathroom and pulled back the shower door. A rusty blotch spread out from the drain. The porcelain was yellowed and streaked by age, making it difficult to tell if the tub was clean or dirty. I had a sickening vision of someone committing suicide in that tub, opening a vein and turning the water crimson. Maybe that’s where the stain had come from.

“Three more rooms to check,” she said. “Then we can get some sleep.”

I’d forgotten how tired I was and yawned automatically.

I put my hand out.

“What’s that for?” she asked. “You offering to hold my hand in the dark, Steve?”

“Give me the flashlight. I’ll go first this time.”

She shrugged.

“Fine with me. But it’s your ass if the monster behind the door bites your head off.”

“Thanks a million.”

The door down the hall from the bathroom opened to a bedroom.

This was the room with the boarded window. Without the flashlight, I couldn’t have seen a thing. Most of the glass was missing from the pane with a few jagged points stabbing out at the room. I checked the floor for broken glass and found it clean of debris.

A table lamp, useless without working electricity, sat against the wall. The shade was ripped and dented with a cobweb draped over the top.

A metal bed frame on rollers rested in the middle of the room. A mattress and box spring leaned against the opposite wall. The corner was a jumbled mess of metal clothes hangers, some bent or broken, and various cleaning supplies—a plastic bucket, a dry sponge, some rags, a bottle of Lysol with the cap lying a few feet away, a half-melted candle, and a box of matches.

In the wall bordering the bathroom was a walk-in closet. A slatted door guarded the entrance. I heard more scratching sounds and wondered if the rats were here, too.

“Ugly,” she said. “But it’s better than sleeping out in the cold.”

If it was warmer inside than out, I barely noticed.

“Let’s check the next room.”

A queen-size bed fronted the room across the hall. The mattress and box spring were in place, with a brown discoloration in the center of the mattress. I looked up and saw a brown spot mirrored on the ceiling.

“The attic is leaking,” she said.

I bent down and looked under the bed. A large ball of dust was wedged between dirty floorboards and the frame. Apparently, the cleaning crew hadn’t touched this room. Motes dancing on air tickled my nose.

A bedside table lay smashed against the wall, the legs splayed out in a star-burst shape as though an angry ogre had squashed it under boot.

“I don’t think I can sleep in here,” I said.

The closet doorknob was missing. I cringed as Becca reached into the hole and pulled the door open.

Inside the closet lay a pile of dirty clothes thick with must. Black granules covered the floor inside.

Vermin droppings.

The last room we checked was the master bedroom across the hall from the bathroom. This was the largest of the rooms and appeared surprisingly clean. It made sense for the bank to keep the master bedroom clean for showings.

I looked out the window into the backyard. It was the dead of night now; the faint moonlight couldn’t repel all that black. If someone was in the yard, I’d never see him.

The generator was against the house, the gasoline scent noticeable from the second floor. In the daytime, I imagined you could see half the county from up here.

An antique dresser held a smudged mirror, while one corner held a red-stained armoire with the doors thrown closed. The bed stood across from the windows, offering a spectacular view of the sky. The mattress looked clean, and I didn’t see any dust bunnies hiding under the frame.

So it surprised me when Becca crossed her arms, as though warding off a shiver, and edged to the doorway.

“Something wrong?”

“I can’t stay in this room.”

“Why? What’s the problem?”

She shook her head. I could see her struggling to identify her own fear.

“I don’t know. Just a feeling. It’s probably nothing, but I don’t think either of us should sleep here.”

I started to do the math in my head. That left the two unkempt bedrooms down the hall. If she chose the bedroom with the cleaning supplies, I’d have to stay in the dusty room with the roof leak. I didn’t think my allergies would survive ten minutes in that room. The only other option was to drag a mattress down the stairs and sleep on the living room floor. Alone. I didn’t like that idea, either.

“Let’s take the room with the boarded window,” Becca said.

It took me a few seconds to register what she meant.

“Both of us?”

“You don’t want to be alone in here, do you?”

No, I didn’t.

“If you’re sure.”

In the bedroom, we plopped our belongings down inside the door. The unrefrigerated yogurt’s shelf life was almost up, so I ate that first, tearing the cover off and inhaling the strawberry and cream mix. Becca ate a blueberry yogurt. The other yogurts we’d need to throw away.

We pulled the box spring onto the frame and laid the mattress on top. Leaning against the wall, the mattress hadn’t collected much dust. Except for the corner clutter, the floor was fairly clean. Nevertheless, I wasn’t in any rush to pull open the closet door.

Becca sat on the edge of the mattress, bouncing to test the firmness.

“I guess this is home for a few days,” she said.

I set the flashlight on its end to light the ceiling. The light fell softly onto Becca’s shoulders. An angelic halo effect surrounded her; I realized how beautiful she looked.

Though the board was flush against the window frame, the cold found a way to seep inside.

“We’d better conserve battery life,” she said, nodding at the flashlight.

I knew how dark it would be without the flashlight on. A part of me wanted to leave the light on and kill the batteries. We could always scavenge or steal new batteries tomorrow. But I knew it was foolhardy to venture back into Barton Falls.

As cold as I was, I pulled off my top layer sweatshirt and balled it into an improvised pillow. I started to lie back and ball my knees into my chest when she spoke.

“It’s okay. You don’t have to sleep on the floor. Let’s share the bed, Steve.”

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“We have to be practical. You’re cold, I’m cold. The last thing we need is for one of us to fall sick.” Outside, the wind threw itself against the walls of the old house. “Come to bed. I trust you.”

Until that moment I hadn’t realized how intense my feelings were for her. It transcended sexual attraction. I felt an inordinate urge to be close to her, to know and understand her, to prove I was better than those who’d failed her throughout her life. It was on shaking knees that I approached the bed, stopping only to grab the flashlight and hand it to her.

Not wanting to seem forward, I lay in the center of the mattress and turned onto my side, facing away from her. My knees were drawn up with my hands stuffed between them. Our shadows reflected on the ceiling, vast and exaggerated.

The light flicked off. The room went as black as a dungeon crypt. Somehow that made the wind seem louder.

A spring pressed into my calf. The mattress swelled and fell back as she shifted her weight.

Then her arm draped over my shoulder, and she spooned her body against mine. Her breath was warm on my neck. Together, our combined heat formed a blanket which shielded us from the cold.

“Steve?”

The board rattled against the pane.

“Yeah?”

“Sorry about Ji Lin. I’ll be more careful from now on.”

“It wasn’t your fault. And I’m sorry about the food truck. I really botched that one up.”

“You’d never done anything like that before. I was wrong to put you in that position and blame you when things didn’t go right.”

Her words were conciliatory and pained. I swallowed the lump in my throat.

“I want to thank you for something else,” she said.

“Thank me?”

“Yes.”

She was quiet for a while. I could almost hear her trying to put her thoughts into words.

“The last three years…I never realized how lonely I was, never realized how much I needed someone to talk to. Loneliness. It was always just under the surface, you know, waiting to punch me in the gut when I least expected. All I’ve done these three years is survive.”

I pulled her arm over my chest and clasped my hand with hers.

“All you’ve done is survive? You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.”

“I don’t want to survive anymore, Steve. I want to live.”

I want to live.

Those four words pulled me up from clouded waters. What was I thinking, living on the run, rebelling against those who’d done me wrong? I should have been pulling her into my world, getting her off the streets. No matter how fast you run, your legs give out, eventually.

“But I can’t stay here. Not in this house,” she said. “I don’t feel safe here.”

A vehicle passed outside, a reminder of how dangerous a game we played.

Then I didn’t hear her anymore.

I kept drifting asleep and shocking myself awake with the vague recollection of a nightmare my waking brain refused to let me remember. Once I sat up in bed and heard myself whisper, “Monster.” The room was pitch black and my skin clammy with sweat.

Becca stirred and turned over, and my body finally surrendered to exhaustion.

CHAPTER SIX

Last Goodbyes

The strength of the light pouring under the door told me I’d slept through most of the morning, and I wondered how late it was. A dingy residue had settled on my skin and clothes. I rubbed a dark grit out of my eyes and blinked the blur away. My phone read eleven o’clock on the thirtieth of October. The battery strength was down to thirty percent. With no electricity, it was only a matter of time before my last tie to the outside world was severed.

Monster.

Remembering my whisper in that darkened room turned my legs to rubber. I didn’t recall dreaming, but it was easy to imagine how the creepy house could lead to nightmares.

Damn Riley. Why hadn’t his foreclosure been a Skaneateles Lake boathouse belonging to some tycoon whose stock portfolio had imploded?

Becca was gone. That gave me a spell of anxiety before I heard her moving around downstairs.

“I thought I’d lost you for good,” she said as I limped down the stairs. The tightness in my legs made me worry I’d tear a muscle if I moved any faster. “I was about to call Prince Charming to kiss you awake.”

“That’s Snow White. I think you mean Phillip.”

The insensitivity of my correction struck me. I doubted Becca grew up with Disney fairy tales, and I suppose it was just as well. In the real world, Maleficent always won.

Becca didn’t seem to notice. She wore a knowing smile as she waited for me to hobble into the living room.

“I want to show you something,” she said. “I think you’re going to like it.”

“I can say with absolute certainty that no woman has ever used that line on me.”

“Very funny. Drag yourself out to the backyard.”

The light through the windows pained my eyes. I squinted from the living room to the kitchen until my eyes adjusted.

Becca stood beside the big generator, hands on hips, toe tapping with sarcastic impatience. The sun shone strong, but the day was cold enough to see my breath.

“Thinking of putting in a garden?”

“Just watch.”

She pulled lightly on the rope, then yanked hard. I was stunned when the motor rumbled to life. Inside the kitchen, a light flickered on over the sink.

“Impossible. I thought the gasoline was stale.”

“Obviously not.”

I recalled my theory about the bank cleaning crew. Maybe someone had filled the tank so the workers could power their vacuum cleaners and shine lights into dark corners. But why had they cleaned the downstairs and the master bedroom while leaving the other two bedrooms filthy?

“Does this mean you don’t hate the house as much as you did last night?”

Her look of distaste told me nothing had changed.

“I guess that’s a no.”

The generator hummed softer than most I’d encountered. It still made me edgy.

“You can’t hear it from the road,” Becca said, reading my mind again. “I checked.”

“But you can see the lights on in the house.”

“Which is why we need to have ground rules. No lights on in the living room or bathroom ever, and we need to be especially careful after dark.”

“Running the television in the den shouldn’t be an issue. It might be a good idea to tune in the local news with the rabbit ears. See if anything is going on in town that we should know about.”

“Be truthful. You just want to watch movies.”

“That, too.”

She rolled her eyes.

“Come on,” I said. “It might be fun.”

“What we really need to do is plan where we’re heading to next. If you can find the local news, figure out when this cold will break.”

“Tomorrow is Halloween. This late in the year, the cold might not break until May.”

“Well, find out. I don’t want to be here more than a few days. It’s so filthy in there that I swear something is growing on me.”

I followed her inside and turned on the television. It took some antenna twisting to bring in the local station. A game show was on—Drew Carey was in Bob Barker-mode while a fat lady bid one dollar on a Jamaican cruise to undercut her competitors—and the news was scheduled next. I turned the volume high enough to listen from the kitchen. Game show bells, buzzers, and cheering echoed off barren walls like screams in a cavern.

During my brunch of granola bars and packaged nuts, the news never mentioned food truck thieves, residential break-ins, backyard beatings, or a manhunt for two suspicious young people carrying sacks. Nor was there mention of a dead junkie at the bottom of a gorge. Either the police hadn’t connected our crimes or weren’t concerned. After all, it was Ji Lin who attacked us, not the other way around. What proof did he have that the shadowed characters in his backyard were the same people who’d broken into his house?

Between bad jokes which would make an FM drive-time deejay seem like Rodney Dangerfield in comparison, the weatherman predicted a major warming trend starting three days from now. Sixties, if he was to be believed, plenty warm enough for travel. His short-term forecast called for a continuation of the polar express and featured a cartoon graphic of a pumpkin covered with icicles.

Outside, a blanket of dark clouds snuffed out the sunshine. The chill in the air deepened, making me hope the previous homeowner had left behind a space heater.

Becca lay napping on the bed when I climbed the steps to the attic. Voices from afternoon soap operas followed me through the house, strangely comforting.

The kitchen phone rang.

The sharp jangle made me stumble up two steps and knock my head against the door.

“Steve? What happened?”

Becca squinted her eyes from the doorway. I’d hit my head, but it was my knee that had taken the brunt of the fall. I rubbed the pain away and pulled myself up.

“You okay?”

“Yeah. The phone rang.”

Becca gave me a muddled look.

“The phone line isn’t active,” she said. “You checked it yourself last night.”

“Maybe it has something to do with the power turning on.”

I didn’t think the generator had anything to do with the phone working. I’d grown up with a rotary phone in the house and knew old phones still worked when the power went out.

She followed me down the stairs. The television seemed louder with my nerves frayed, so I stopped in the den to turn the volume down before investigating the phone.

I waited for the dial tone, then dialed the first number that popped into my head—my parents’ house. The call never went through.

“See?” I asked, holding the phone in front of me. The line beeped in error. “No service.”

Becca pressed the receiver to her ear and confirmed the obvious.

“So why did it ring?”

“How the hell do I know? Bad wiring, phone company running a test, ghosts.”

She didn’t find amusement in my joke. Leaning against the door frame, she stared out from the kitchen into the backyard. The wind grew stronger, pulling leaves through the overgrown grass.

I felt an undefinable threat when she opened the door and swept her gaze along the back of the house.

“Becca?”

A tree branch clawed against the walls.

She shut the door, the cold air having already invaded the kitchen.

“Huh.” She leaned against the door with her arms crossed and brow furrowed. “Ever get the sensation that someone is watching you?”

Sure I did. Most of the time I was right when it came to Donna.

The panes rattled with menace—the wind was trying to get inside.

“I don’t think they’re watching us through the phone.”

Again my attempts at sarcasm fell flat.

It was awfully dark for early afternoon. I stared out at the yard, past the brown tufts of grass and barbecue pit to where forest swallowed meadow a hundred yards down the hill.

“It’s just me making myself paranoid,” she said. “I shouldn’t have woken up so early this morning. Hearing you fall scared the heck out of me.”

She massaged the stiffness from her neck and glanced back toward the staircase.

“I’m gonna lie down again. Do you mind?”

I told her I didn’t.

From the kitchen, I followed her footsteps creaking up the staircase, down the hall, and into the bedroom. The springs groaned as she plopped down on the bed.

When it grew quiet I opened the back door and stepped into the yard. Cold as it was, it felt good to step out of the stuffy, dusty house.

I started to see why someone would want to live here. The hilltop isolation yielded an incredible view of lakes shimmering to the west. Far to the east cars drove busily between the shopping plaza and downtown Barton Falls. Though I couldn’t see King’s Road Apartments, I saw where the road bisected Cayuga Street. Woodlands west of town grew green and gray where pines mixed with deciduous trees.

Somewhere deep in that wilderness lay the body of a dead junkie.

A splotch of wetness struck my forehead and dribbled down my nose. I caught the next drop in my hand. It was half-frozen, the first snowflake of the cold season. It was too wet to stick, but it got me worrying again about how cold the house was after sunset. The weatherman’s promise of sixties by Wednesday seemed a million years away.

The old house was quiet through the afternoon. Once I heard Becca cross overhead and use the bathroom. The bedsprings squealed, and she settled back into the mattress.

Good. She needs to sleep.

Our first stroke of luck came when I found a fan-driven space heater, still boxed, under the tattered den sofa. It was too small to heat an entire floor, but it worked wonders for the den. Later I’d set it up in the bedroom, maybe tidy things up and make the room livable before we turned in for the night.

I passed time flicking back and forth between the only two television channels the rabbit ears could pull in. Both cycled through predictable soap operas. Brief news reports were given every thirty minutes with never a mention of our crimes. The heater hummed and blew invisible sunshine across my legs. I found myself struggling to keep my eyes open.

I might have dozed for ten minutes before the wind whipped sleet against the glass and shocked me awake. On the news was a woman with haunted eyes, eyes that had seen the face of death. Text at the bottom of the screen read, Geneseo Woman Escapes Midnight Killer.

I stumbled off the sofa and hurried to turn up the volume. Lorna Bedford, a pretty, middle-aged single woman with short black hair, claimed she’d been home alone last night and fallen asleep on the couch. When she awoke a little after midnight, she had a sudden sensation she wasn’t alone.

She thought she heard whispers, but that might have been the television, which she’d left on. Then Lorna turned down the volume and heard the whispers coming from the dining room.

Two black shoes stuck out from beneath a drawn curtain covering the sunroom entrance.

The curtain moved. The black shape of a man wielding an axe lunged across the room.

Dumb luck saved her when a police cruiser with wailing sirens and flashing lights shot past the front window. The killer froze. Lorna reached the front door and ran out into the yard before he caught her.

The policeman, who’d been in pursuit of a speeding vehicle, glanced over just in time to see the woman running frantic out the door.

By the time the policeman calmed her down and called for backup, the lunatic was gone.

My mouth felt like cotton. Geneseo wasn’t that far away, maybe a ninety-minute drive.

Had my head been clear, I might have visualized a map of The Midnight Killer’s past slayings and seen the spiderweb pattern which closed around Barton Falls.

Lorna Bedford’s story kindled the memory of an urban legend we used to tell as kids. Unlike the Hook for a Hand and Bloody Mary campfire tales, our story was supposedly true.

According to the legend, a six-year-old girl in Kane Grove began talking to an imaginary friend named Norman. The development didn’t surprise her parents, for their daughter possessed an overactive imagination. They were new to the area, having moved to Kane Grove that summer from Pontiac, Michigan. The girl was shy and hadn’t made any friends in her new neighborhood.

The daughter spent her days in the backyard playhouse her father purchased for her, holding tea parties and pretending the cottony summer clouds were hearts and angels and all manner of wildlife. It was during the tea parties that the mother heard her talking loudly from inside the playhouse. When the mother asked her daughter who she’d been talking with, the daughter smiled and said it was Norman.

Norman, the daughter said, was a real-life prince who loved to drink tea and try on her princess outfits. He promised he’d take the girl to his magic castle and teach her to fly.

This part of the story troubled the mother. Child predators were real monsters, and many of them promised children wondrous things to lure them away from the safety of their homes.

Everyday for the next two weeks, the girl held her imaginary tea parties and talked to Norman. After putting her daughter to sleep, the mother would hear the girl giggle and say, “Tell me another story, Norman.”

Though the mother believed the imaginary friend was nothing more than the manifestation of her daughter’s creativity, she couldn’t shake the creeping sensation that something wasn’t right. Just to be sure, she asked her husband to have a look around the playhouse after the girl went to sleep.

It was dark when the father wandered out to the yard with a flashlight. Looking back at the house, he saw the orange glow of the night light in his daughter’s bedroom.

The playhouse sat near the back of the yard behind the swing set. In the dappled starlight, the playhouse looked misshapen and strangely macabre, like something out of a Grimm Brothers fairytale.

Inside the playhouse, he swept the flashlight beam from wall-to-wall. The daughter’s costumes lay in scattered heaps. On the child-sized table, two sets of saucers and tea cups were set across from one another. In the center sat a teapot.

The father removed the lid, smelled inside, and turned it upside down for good measure. It was empty.

There was nothing here but the playthings of a little girl. He thought his wife’s imagination was nearly as overactive as his daughter’s.

He swung the light behind him and saw it.

Dolls, stripped of their clothing, lay piled in the corner.

A mangled cigarette pack peeked out from under the mound.

For one frozen moment of confusion, he wondered how his daughter had come into possession of cigarettes.

Yet he knew they weren’t hers. He knew…

The father started running for the house and saw a man’s shadow through the girl’s bedroom window, hunched over the bed.

I call the story an urban legend because it existed in several incarnations. In one story, the father saw the shadow of Norman holding hands with the daughter as he led her out of the house.

In another, the parents heard the daughter talking after midnight, telling Norman he could sleep in her bed that night. The father threw open the girl’s closet door and shot the grinning lunatic.

In yet another version, the father returned from the yard and found his wife butchered inside the house. The front door was open. His daughter was gone.

Maybe none of the stories were true. Maybe they were no more real than the escaped psychopath with a hook for a hand or the woman who spoke, “Candyman,” into a mirror.

Yet I knew people who swore the stories were true. My uncle claimed to know one of the police officers who searched for the mysterious Norman. I had a friend whose cousin worked as an orderly at the Kane Grove hospital when the ambulance arrived with the family. According to his story, the father required ten staples for the bloody knife wound on his arm.

Years from now, maybe Lorna Bedford’s close call with The Midnight Killer will become urban legend. On this day, it was a warning of how close the danger was. I should have heeded the warning.

The television dramas were back from commercial, and my phone’s screen was lit, indicating full charge. I considered messaging Riley, then pushed the idea away. I was still sore with him for thinking I’d had something to do with the assault on Harry Jenkins. Not to mention how stupid it was for him to text me about it.

I’d started to sift through the DVDs—twelve of them, I counted again—when I heard Becca coming down the stairs. She sagged into the couch and drew her feet under her knees, eagerly consuming the space heater’s warmth.

“You sleep okay?”

“Yeah,” she said, smiling and stretching. “Thanks for letting me rest. I hope I didn’t overdo it and can still sleep tonight.”

“You’ll be fine.” I nodded at the heater. “This little baby puts your lights out. I love it.”

Becca handed me another granola bar. My stomach groaned in protest; I was sick of eating the same stuff day-after-day. But I needed energy. I also knew how much worse off homeless people were. For some, a sports bar or a bag of salted peanuts was a king’s feast. Sleep took place in dark alleyways, not in a house overlooking the countryside.

Another problem had been gnawing at me while I waited for Becca to finish her nap.

“Becca?”

“Yeah?”

“We don’t have a computer anymore, and I doubt your scraping program will work with my phone.”

“No, it won’t.”

“So how are we going to find another house?”

“You need to work on your resourcefulness.”

She grinned and patted me on the shoulder, an act that seemed both reassuring and patronizing.

“I found this house.”

She shivered.

“I appreciate the effort. Just don’t expect me to stay a minute longer than needed. But hey, you outdid yourself by finding the heater. I could kiss you for that.” My cheeks turned strawberry-red. “Regarding my program, in every decent-sized town there is a library, and libraries have computers with Internet access.”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea to go back to Barton Falls, library or not.”

“That’s for sure. You said it’s supposed to get warm soon, right?”

“Three days, yeah.”

She chewed her lip. “When I steal, I only do so to survive. And I doubt a national supermarket chain will miss a few cups of yogurt or a bag of apples. Now and then, though, I have no other choice but to bend my own rules. How far do you think we could get on your bicycle in one day?”

“With you riding behind me? Not far. Maybe thirty or forty miles. We’d draw too much attention biking illegally, anyway.”

“And if we obtained a second bike?”

“A lot farther. At ten miles per hour, with over ten hours of daylight, it would depend on how tired we got and how much we rested. Theoretically, sixty or seventy miles if we really pushed it.”

“Then it’s settled. Tonight, we steal ourselves a bicycle.”

From her bag, she pulled a dog-eared roadmap with a small tear running down one of the folds.

“We’re here,” she said, pointing just west of Barton Falls. “Avoiding the highways, the back roads could get us to Pennsylvania on day one. If we can get to the Maryland border by Friday—”

“That’s a lot of biking in three days. You’ll be sore as hell on Thursday and won’t want to ride so hard.”

“You’d be shocked what you can will your body to do when you have no other choice.”

The determination in her eyes made me think maybe she could handle the ride. But there was something else there: a lifetime’s worth of nightmares trying to catch up to her again. I wouldn’t let them catch her.

We debated the issue as the storm abated. Maryland was just the first leg of a long journey which Becca expected would conclude somewhere between the Georgia border and Miami. She’d stayed in the north for too long and needed to get away before winter set in. New York was no place to be in December if circumstance required you to camp in the woods.

I hadn’t realized how late it was until the clouds parted and the sun appeared above the western horizon. The color of the sky was burnt yellow. Soon it would be deep orange, the color of Halloween pumpkins burning in unison on the other side of the world. Then the light would be gone, and we’d be alone in the darkness of the old house. I flicked off the television, not wanting its bluish glow to travel into the living room on the off chance someone drove past.

She started to rise, and I touched her hand. Imagination filled in the details of what little I knew about her past, and it anguished me. I wanted to empathize, though I was sure nothing in my disappointment of a life could compare to her hardships.

“What’s wrong, Steve?”

I stammered. The words were in my head, but none of them sounded right. I looked away, concentrating on the accelerated descent of the sun.

She started to walk away, and I said, “You told me you want to live.”

“Yes.”

“This is no way to live, Becca. I don’t know what you’re running from—”

“No, you don’t.”

“Maybe if you told me, I’d understand.”

She stood rigid in the failing light. For a second, her defenses faltered. She nearly opened up to me.

“Would you, Steve?”

“I’d try to.”

She shook her head.

“Get ready,” she said. “It’s almost dark. I don’t want to be anywhere near Barton Falls once the weather changes.”

We thought we had a plan. We had nothing.

We never made it out the door.

The sun went down. The sky turned indigo, then black.

Becca and I were in the bedroom, sweeping dust and vermin droppings onto a piece of cardboard, when the sun dropped out of sight. I’d salvaged a dirt-smeared bulb from the living room ceiling, knowing we could never turn that light on. It felt safe to install the bulb in the bedroom. The boarded window hid us from prying eyes.

I was about to dump the mess out the bathroom window when something thumped below. It was loud enough to make me fumble the cardboard and dump the sweepings onto the floor.

“Did you hear that?”

I jumped again. I hadn’t heard Becca sneak up behind me.

“I can’t tell where it came from.”

“I think it was the basement.”

My stomach went sour.

We descended to the living room and stopped.

What little light congealed here was dingy and grim and deceitful.

I couldn’t see the back wall. The room seemed to stretch on forever.

Thump.

Again.

I couldn’t tell if it came from the basement or from outside, as though someone was prodding along the foundation, looking for a way in.

“Could be an animal,” I said.

“I don’t think so.”

I worried about the police. Maybe they’d tracked us here. Had someone seen a light or heard the generator?

I realized how exposed we were in the living room. The window offered no sanctuary.

We slipped behind the lip of wall separating the living room from the kitchen. I eyed the basement door.

She mouthed, Check the lock.

As I started across the kitchen, the floor groaned. Becca flinched.

She moved behind me, somehow able to slide across the floor with barely a whisper.

Maybe she should be doing this.

I don’t know what I expected to happen, but I didn’t want to touch the basement doorknob. I kept waiting for the unidentified thud to come from outside so I wouldn’t have to check the basement. Quiet suffocated the house.

I looked back at Becca, who was staring questioningly at me, obviously wondering why I hadn’t yet checked the lock.

I swallowed my fear and grabbed hold of the doorknob.

It was cold.

It should have been cold, I told myself. The whole freaking house was frigid, and brass always captured cold preternaturally well. Still, the cold unsettled me, as if something dark and ghostly waited on the other side of the door.

I clenched my teeth and twisted the knob.

The door was locked.

Breathing deeply, I slumped down against the door. Nobody was in the basement. The noises could have been caused by the wind, a raccoon, anything.

Another sound came from outside.

It was unmistakable this time: the crunch of someone stepping on dead leaves.

Becca’s eyes locked on mine as a shadow passed across the kitchen window.

I crawled across the kitchen. We were on the other side of the lip separating kitchen from living room.

The person in the yard couldn’t see us from here. Unless they circled back to the front yard. Then we’d be sitting ducks.

“The generator,” she whispered.

I heard it running. Whoever was outside knew we were here.

The front door was a short dash away. With a head start, we might outrun whoever was following us. I thought about my backpack upstairs. My wallet was inside the pouch along with my phone.

The shadow passed over the back door and slid across the den window. I pulled Becca back from the lip and threw myself against the wall.

We were trapped.

“Christ, it’s a cop,” I said. “It’s gotta be a cop.”

“Then why no flashlight?” she asked. “Why hasn’t he announced his presence? If the police were on to us, I doubt they’d send one cop by himself.”

The shadow was gone from the window.

“Where is he?”

I hadn’t heard a vehicle approach the house, but the driver could have parked down the hill and walked up.

The night was silent.

Part of me wanted to leave my belongings behind and make a run for it. Without knowing where the intruder was, I didn’t know whether to try the front or back door.

Then I heard a voice.

“Steve.”

The stranger called my name in a loud whisper. Becca’s eyes were fierce.

“Steve. Is that you?”

The shadow was back at the kitchen window. I could see it rise and fall as someone leaped up to glance through the pane.

“What the hell is going on?” Becca asked.

The moonlight caught a tuft of disheveled, red hair when he jumped again.

“Oh, my God. It’s Riley.”

Becca shook her head disapprovingly. I was already moving for the back door.

He rounded the house with the fearful apprehension of someone expecting an attack.

“Riley, get your ass in here before someone sees you.”

He made a worried glance over his shoulder. As he started toward me, I could see him limping.

Grabbing him by the shirt collar, I yanked him into the kitchen and shut the door.

“What happened to your leg?”

“Don’t worry about my leg,” he said, wincing and clutching at his thigh. “Are you crazy? Are you so far gone that you actually went through with it?” His eyes traveled over the shabby interior. “It hardly seems worth the risk.”

“What is he doing here?”

Becca’s angered looks moved between us as if she were watching a tennis match played by her worst enemies.

“It’s okay,” I said. “He’s the one who told me about the foreclosure.”

“You told him about me,” she said. “Jesus, how could you do this?”

I didn’t open my mouth quickly enough to stop her bolting from the room. She ran up the staircase. I heard her stomp across the floor, then the door slammed shut.

“I didn’t mean to upset anyone—”

“Then why did you come, Riley? What the hell did you think her reaction would be?”

He’d moved into the moonlight. One eye was blackened. I could see four bloody grooves torn into his cheek from ear-to-nose, spaced apart in an exact fit of nailed fingers.

“Who did this to you?”

“Nobody.”

Unwelcome memories of a young Riley showing up at my doorstep with black-and-blue marks on his neck and back revisited me. His current state made him look as if he’d tripped into a thresher.

“Bullshit. Was it that cop? Harry Jenkins’s relative?”

“No…no problems with the police. Why would I have issues with them?”

“Then who?” I screamed.

My outburst made him flinch, and I immediately felt bad for yelling.

“Donna.” His eyes fixed on the floor. My spine turned to jelly. “Donna did this to me. Are you happy?”

“What?”

I fell back against the wall and slid into a sitting position. I rubbed my temples, trying to make sense of what he’d told me.

Donna?

“She’s crazy, Steve. You need to know.”

“I know she’s crazy.”

“No. You think you do, but you don’t.”

He was on one knee, eyes even with mine. It was an effort for him to stay in that position without teetering.

“Whatever fixation she had on you is the tip of the iceberg,” he said. “She’s completely out of her mind. If she finds you with that girl, she’ll kill her. She’ll kill you, too.”

It felt as if a sledgehammer pounded my belly. I expected Riley to suddenly grin and say what a sucker I was for falling for his ridiculous story. But those wounds were real, and so was his grimace whenever he moved too quickly.

“I’ll tell you something else,” he said, propping one hand against the wall to keep from falling. “I think she’s the one who put Harry Jenkins in the hospital.”

“Harry? Why?”

My voice sounded very faraway, as though someone else’s.

“Why?” He laughed without hint of hilarity. “For you, of course. She found out what they’d done to you.”

“Please say you didn’t tell her about Jenkins.”

He looked away.

“How was I to know she’d almost kill a complete stranger for crossing you? Anyhow, the police are looking for her. She’ll have to lie low if she doesn’t want to go to jail.”

I pictured Harry Jenkins in a hospital bed, blackened and bruised, wires running from his body to a life support machine.

“I’m sorry for suspecting you,” he said.

The reminder of his accusation flared new anger. Seeing tears in his eyes doused it.

“I had motive.”

“You sure as hell did, and I wouldn’t have blamed you for knocking that bastard’s teeth down his throat. But I shouldn’t have thought you’d…”

His voice trailed off. He looked away from me, out the window toward the dark rectangle of the barbecue pit and the craggy silhouette of forest entrance. His shoulders shook.

I let him work the sobs out of his chest and pretended not to notice. Another thing I’d done too many times when we were kids.

After a while, the crying stopped, but he was too shamed to turn around.

“You know,” he said with the suggestion of a laugh under a sniffle. “There’s scuttlebutt about town of two people…kids, they think…stealing yogurt and sports bars off delivery trucks behind the supermarket. Imagine that.”

“I’m positively sure I couldn’t.”

“Certainly not.”

“Any rumors of a break-in on the west side of town? Or a death-defying escape from an irate homeowner?”

“No. Can’t say I’ve heard of such a dastardly act. Should I have?”

“Absolutely not. Things like that don’t happen in Barton Falls.”

This time his laugh came from deep inside. It was my gift, perhaps my higher purpose for being a part of Riley’s life, that I could always make him laugh when he most needed it.

His eyes were red, cheeks wet, and I don’t think he cared anymore. We sat on the kitchen floor with our backs to the wall.

“How did you get here? Don’t tell me you walked all the way from town.”

“Nah. The car is at the bottom of the hill behind a row of bushes. I can be discreet when I need to be.”

“And you’re absolutely sure nobody followed you?”

“Nobody.” He looked at me pointedly. I’m sure he knew I was thinking of Donna. “You know, when I told you about this place, I never really believed you’d actually go through with it.”

“I wish we hadn’t, but we didn’t have a choice. Circumstance forced us.”

“Well, circumstance or not, this is crazy, Steve. It might be the middle of nowhere, and thank God you’re keeping the lights off. But somebody is going to notice.”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe? Getting caught is a certainty. Might not happen tonight or tomorrow, but it’s going to happen. You’ll both go to jail.”

He concentrated on his hands, then nervously chewed his thumbnail.

“What do you see in that girl?” he asked.

“She’s a good person. I don’t know the whole story, just that she’s been dealt a bad hand in life.”

“And you’re the knight in shining armor who will save her? Get real, Steve.”

I could hear Becca moving around upstairs. I wondered if she was trying to listen in on our conversation.

“You know the way my father is,” Riley said. “And you know my mother turned her eye and avoided the…situation. My parents wouldn’t give a shit if I got caught trespassing. They’d probably expect me to disappoint them. But your folks…they’re good people, Steve. You’ll break their hearts if you keep going down this road.”

“Is that what you came all the way out here to tell me?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m not here because I want to be. And neither is Becca.”

“You have a choice. Let her go. You can’t save everyone.”

It went silent upstairs, as though Becca heard and waited on my reply.

“How would you have felt if I’d turned my back on you?”

Riley looked down. I’d hit a sore spot.

“You don’t know anything about that girl. For all you know she might be dangerous.”

“She’s a lot of things. Intelligent—brilliant, really—resourceful. Braver than anyone I’ve ever known. But she’s not dangerous.”

“You figured all of this out in less than a week?”

He laughed, and I grew angry again.

“Go home, Riley.”

He sat forward and glared incredulously at me.

“I came here to help you.”

“I appreciate you trying to help, I really do. But my mind is made up.”

“You’re making a big mistake.”

Riley rarely got angry, but when he grew frustrated, his face colored to match the red of his hair. I could see he was very frustrated now.

“Have a little faith in my decision. I’ve thought this through.”

“At least, tell me where you’re headed so I’ll know where to send the hearse.”

“Pennsylvania first, then Maryland. Hopefully, we’ll reach the deep south before winter catches up to us. By then, I’ll have a plan to turn this mess around. Maybe get a job down there, get the both of us off the street, start over.”

“Like I said: ‘knight in shining armor.’ You’ll play the hero and get the both of you killed.”

“Thanks for the support, Riley. It’s all going to work out.”

Riley pulled himself up too fast, forgetting about his injuries. He flinched and grabbed hold of his leg.

Looking back at me, he shook his head. His eyes were conciliatory, his shoulders slumped in defeat.

When he started for the door, I jumped up and pushed it shut. I believed I was about to lose my best friend. If he walked out that door, I’d never see him again.

“You’re too hurt to walk down the hill, especially at night.”

“Don’t worry about me. I can handle myself just fine.”

“You can stay here. With us.”

He glanced derisively around the downstairs.

“No thanks. I don’t want any part of this.”

Riley shoved my hand off the frame and pulled back on the knob. I watched him limp along the back of the house, one arm extended to the wall to keep him upright. How he’d made it up the hill I’ll never know.

I fought myself from going after him. Once Riley made up his mind, there was no changing it.

“Come on, man. Come back inside.”

He stopped at the corner with his back to me, breathing hard, leaning against the wall.

“Don’t go, Steve.”

Those three words were a kick in the groin. I didn’t know what to say.

Before I found my voice, he slipped around the corner and disappeared.

I’m not sure how long I stood in the doorway. For a while, I could hear him trudging through leaves, the sounds of his descent getting softer as he drifted down the hill. Then I couldn’t hear anything at all.

I stared toward the dark corner of the house. I kept hoping he’d come around the corner again.

I knew better. He’d stubbornly limp down that rutted hill and drive himself home in the dark.

There was a moment when I was out in the frigid moonlight, smelling the pine and overgrown grass scents roll across the yard, when I had a moment of clarity: I needed to go after him. I needed to risk leaving Becca alone and run after Riley while I still had the chance to catch him.

But I didn’t.

I’ll always regret my decision.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Movie Night

“How could you allow him to come here?”

My heart leaped. I started to believe Becca was part-cat, she moved so silently.

“I didn’t know he was coming,” I said, catching my breath as I leaned against the kitchen wall. “Don’t worry. Riley isn’t going to turn us in.”

“How do you—”

“Because I know him,” I said, louder than I intended.

Her mouth hung open. I knew I’d frightened her.

I composed myself and tried to speak more gently.

“Nobody else knows we’re here. You’ll have to trust me on this one.”

She studied me. It was hard to make out her features in the dark.

“Trust.” She spat the word. “I barely know you.”

The moonlight caught her. She wore her jean jacket, and a sack was thrown over one shoulder.

“What are you doing?”

“Getting away from this place. Getting away from you. I should never have agreed to let you follow me.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Goodbye, Steve.”

I reached out as she blew past me. She threw my hand off her shoulder. I tried to grab her again, but she was already out the door and following Riley’s path.

“Becca, stop.”

Outside, the cold sliced through me.

Her shadow disappeared around the side of the house as I ran to catch up.

“You’ll freeze to death.”

My voice echoed down the hill. In the moonlight, the gravel road and the weedy overgrowth framing it appeared silver, frozen, dead.

She cut across the front lawn. In a moment, she’d reach the road. I figured she’d only last a few miles before the cold overcame her.

“Where do you think you’re going? We’re several miles from the nearest town, and you can’t go back to Barton Falls.”

“I’ll manage.”

I grasped her shoulder. Becca spun away, all muscle and fury.

I reached out and mistakenly grabbed hold of her hair. She rotated her body and drove her palm into my chin.

Stars flared across my vision.

“Why?” She screamed. “Why won’t you let me go?”

She struck my face and beat fists against my arms. I fell back into the grass and covered up. “I hate you! Do you hear me? I hate you!”

My eyes closed. It felt as though a hurricane pelted me with debris.

I tasted blood. Punches hammered my chest and battered my arms. A prizefighter would have tired faster.

We nearly tore the lawn to shreds before she tired. The top two buttons of her jean jacket were ripped off, and there was a tear in her shirt collar. Though my t-shirt was in one piece, it was stretched to the point of no longer fitting.

My shirt was soaked with her tears, and the salt of them mingled on my lips. She sobbed, violent hitching noises like a woman drowning. I pulled her into my arms and held her under the stars on that lonely hill, wondering how a storm could have spun up so fast.

“Everything I touch I break.”

I stroked the bangs from her eyes.

“I don’t think that’s true,” I said. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

Her hand found the chilled flesh of my chest where my shirt hung loose.

“I don’t want to talk.”

“I think you should.”

She was quiet now. Quiet like the night.

“It’s this house,” she said, drying a tear with the cuff of her jacket. “It’s this fucking house. I hate it here, Steve.”

“I don’t like it either, but it’s too cold to travel. At least, it’s safe.”

“Is it? It doesn’t feel safe.”

A coyote barked and howled from a long way off, a lonely sound.

“You’re upset because of Riley. I understand. I get it. But nobody else knows we’re here.”

My teeth began to chatter. My fingertips were numb.

“Let’s get inside before we freeze to death,” I said.

“I don’t want to go back in there.”

“We don’t have a choice.”

I carried her bag for her. She walked unsteadily, one arm hooked with mine as we stumbled through the overgrowth.

Shutting the door behind us, I gave the backyard another glance. The shadows were sharp off the barbecue pit and the generator. The forest seemed unsettlingly close, the tree shadows stretching toward the back door. It gave the impression of darkness closing in on us. I pulled down the window shade.

I walked Becca into the den, where she curled up on the sofa with her feet tucked under her knees, shivering and hitching.

“I’ll grab the heater.”

She didn’t seem to hear me.

Leaving her alone made me uncomfortable, even if it was a quick run to-and-from the bedroom. The old house unnerved me in the dark. It felt like someone was watching me.

I yanked the cord from the wall and hustled back down to the den. I had a moment of panic when I didn’t see her on the couch where I’d left her—I didn’t think she’d try to leave again; she’d released her fury—then I saw her in the corner of the sofa, her hands tucked between her knees.

I turned the fan to high and pointed the heater at us. It probably wasn’t healthy to sit directly in front of the heat, but I wanted the chill out of my bones.

She stared into the torn remains of a tissue. I could see she’d been crying while I was away.

“I don’t remember my mother,” she said. “I should. I was two-years-old when I last saw her, and I know kids are supposed to remember a parent’s face when they are that age.”

She leaned her head against my shoulder and stared out the den window. The light from the television turned everything black beyond the glass.

“She was a heroin addict. That’s how I first ended up in foster care—her own family had sworn her off and wanted nothing to do with me. How bad a person am I that I don’t remember my mother’s face?”

“You’re not,” I said. I dropped my arm around her shoulder.

She stuffed the tissue into her jeans pocket and glanced off to where the kitchen descended to the cellar. I realized with some unease she was staring at the locked cellar door. The door we’d never opened.

“I know what foster care is supposed to be: a second chance at having a real family. But it was never that way for me, except for the Cornell professor. In my first home, I was one of six kids, all of us foster children.”

“Six?”

“It’s insanity. Some states allow you to have eight.”

“Who would want that many kids?”

“Most foster parents have their hearts in the right place. But some do it for the money—the government kickbacks are pretty enticing—and that’s why my family had six. The county stepped in and broke us up after a few years. I spent the next several years bouncing from home-to-home, wondering if my next family would be the one I’d hoped for.”

She shook her head. The colors of the television screen yellowed her skin and made her appear jaundiced.

“I became a little angrier with each move, you know? It got to the point where the good foster families didn’t want to deal with an older child with behavior issues. It wasn’t until the professor took me in that I felt like I had a real parent. I really miss him.”

She started to cry again. My throat constricted. I was close to joining her.

“Where did you go after he passed?”

“Plattsburgh, New York. The Thompson family—Karl and Jill. And that was the worst. I could tell it was a bad situation as soon as I put my bags down. They had another daughter, Sandy, also a foster kid. She was a year older than me, pretty, the sort of girl who’d have been on the high school cheerleading team under different circumstances. It didn’t take long to figure out something was wrong. She wouldn’t look you in the eye when she talked, you know? And she always walked quickly with her head down and her arms folded over her chest, like she was afraid someone would snatch her up.

“We shared a bedroom, a tiny room that was barely big enough for the beds. The Thompsons slept in separate rooms on opposite ends of the hallway, which was a red flag. I woke up one night and saw Sandy curled up on her bed with her arms wrapped around her knees, crying. I had the covers pulled over my head so she wouldn’t know I was awake, but I could see. The next day, Sandy wouldn’t talk to me about what happened. She all but turned and ran whenever I approached. Then the next night, it happened again. For a while, I thought she was sick to her stomach. Maybe she had the flu. But it kept going on night after night, and I started to have my suspicions.

“I wanted to figure out what was going on with Sandy. So I decided to stay awake and watch. I pretended to be asleep, hidden under the covers. I left a little fold in the blanket I could see through. A little after midnight, I heard someone coming down the hallway. Then I couldn’t see the hallway at all. A huge shadow stood in the doorway. I was terrified. I thought someone had broken in and wanted to hurt us. I realized it was Karl. He started walking toward me. I froze up. He stood right over me. I could hear him wheezing; his asthma acted up at night. I just lay there under the blanket, praying he would go away, frightened but not sure why.

“My eyes were closed when I heard him step away. When I opened them, he was standing at Sandy’s bed. He reached for her, and she slunk against the wall. She begged him to leave her alone. He snapped his fingers as if she were a dog, and she flinched. He did it three or four times, I think, before she submitted, took Karl’s hand, and disappeared down the hall with him.”

“That’s terrible. He didn’t touch you, did he?”

“I never gave him the chance. While he and Sandy were in his bedroom, I crawled out of bed and slipped on my clothes. I kept worrying he’d hear the floor squeak as I was grabbing my belongings. But he mustn’t have heard me, or maybe he was too busy with Sandy to care. I crawled out the window and vowed I’d never allow myself to be a victim again. How can I say this? I left Sandy alone. I ran because I could, and maybe because she couldn’t.”

I didn’t know what to say. No words in my vocabulary did justice to the anguish I felt for Becca.

“That was three years ago. I’ve been on my own ever since. A lot of times I’ve thought about going back…maybe I could convince Sandy to come with me. But most victims never flee. It’s like they can’t envision a life without oppression.”

Becca was quiet again. It was as though the old house was under a glass dome, the rest of the world unconnected and unreachable. Maybe it was.

“Luckily, it was summer, warm enough for travel. I hitched back to Ithaca. I guess I needed the familiarity of the last place I’d been happy. I got by stealing food off delivery trucks and sleeping in a tent outside of town. I’d had the idea of breaking into houses for a while. I just needed a system for determining which houses were most likely to be vacant. That’s when I decided to code my program using the knowledge the professor gave me. The rest, as they say, is history.”

I held her for awhile, worried I’d never be strong enough to pull her out of her situation.

“Help me get my mind off this,” she said.

“Anything you want. You wanna talk about something else?”

“I appreciate the offer, but I think I’m all talked out now.” She pulled her feet out from under her and pointed at the television stand. “So what’s on the DVDs?”

“Hopefully a bootlegged comedy or two. You up for a movie?”

She yawned, stretched, and settled contentedly against my shoulder.

“Sure. Let’s see what the owner left us.”

I started sifting through the identical-looking, untitled disks—except for a scratch here or a smudge there, there was no telling them apart—speculating over what they contained. I pulled a DVD from the middle of the stack and inserted it into the player.

The machine whined. Something inside rattled. I wondered how much dust and grime had accumulated inside the player. After a bit of whirling and searching, the player read the DVD.

As I settled next to Becca, the television screen filled with blue. One side of the screen wavered, obscured by a band of static, a surefire sign that a home movie was to follow. A second later, dashboard camera footage appeared.

So much for movie night.

I started to get off the couch, and she pulled me back.

“Let’s see what it is first.”

The movie took us up and down side streets in what appeared to be a small town. Now and then, a pedestrian would shoot past on the sidewalk. The car moved too fast to make out faces.

The recording cut to a new scene: a suburban Cape Cod home with a row of flowers fronting a deep porch, where two unoccupied rocking chairs flanked a wreathed door. A compact car, maybe a Kia, sat in the driveway. The shakiness of the video marked the footage as handheld. I could hear the dampened laughter of children down the street and the bark of a dog; whoever was recording the video obviously had the windows rolled up on his vehicle.

Underneath the neighborhood sound came the slow, controlled rasp of a large man breathing.

My skin crawled with worry. It appeared the camera operator was scoping out the house.

A burglar?

The recording continued for several minutes, the camera sometimes zooming in on a window and panning across the sides of the house.

I waited for someone to step out onto the porch, felt sympathetic stress with the unknown man behind the camera that he’d be caught.

“What do you think he’s doing?” Becca asked.

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it. Maybe we should watch something else—”

“No, wait. I want to know what he’s up to.”

My mind grasped at straws, searching for a reasonable explanation.

“Could be a real estate salesman,” I said. “They take pictures of properties to show to buyers.”

“I don’t see a for sale sign.”

A queer thought popped into my head and elicited a nervous laugh.

“Maybe he’s like you and me, and the homeowner is about to leave on vacation.”

“Pretty brazen of him to record the house in broad daylight.”

Brazen was the correct term. The car was parked directly across the street in plain view of the owner.

“I bet he’s a private investigator,” I said.

“Oh, I like that idea. Makes the video a little more enticing.”

“Right.”

“What do you think he’s investigating?”

“My theory?” I thought for a moment and grinned. “The woman inside is having an affair with one of her neighbors, and her husband paid the P.I. to spy on her.”

“Obviously, it has to be the woman who’s having the affair.” She rolled her eyes. “Maybe the husband is having sex with the maid and it’s the wife who hired the investigator.”

“Interesting theory. But what if the maid is a guy—”

Before I could finish my thought, the scene cut off. The screen was blue again, then black.

“That’s the end of the movie,” I said. “Two out of five stars.”

“So odd. I wonder if all of the DVDs are like that.”

“You want me to try another?”

“Sure, why not? We have plenty of time to kill.”

The player, clearly on its last legs, groaned and complained when I hit the eject button. I wasn’t sure it would spit the disk out until the DVD finally slid out the front. It came out with a gritty residue on top, which I brushed off.

I replaced the disk in its case and thumbed through the stack of twelve—yes, I counted them again—this time randomly removing a disk from near the bottom.

“This better be more exciting than the last one,” I said.

The player obstinately accepted the new DVD, sucking it out of my hands and swallowing it. I figured I’d never get the disk back.

“Too bad we don’t have popcorn.”

“If you’d asked, I would have grabbed some off the truck. They had whole boxes of microwavable popcorn.”

As I squeezed my way onto the sofa, Becca leaned her head on my shoulder. Our clothing, which we hadn’t been able to wash since our stay at Ji Lin’s house, had begun to smell dingy. I imagined dust clouds following me around like in the Peanuts cartoons. Yet she smelled fresh and clean, redolent of springtime. The spikes of her hair tickled at my nose.

At that moment, I could almost relax and feel comfortable. She made me forget our drab surroundings and the sleet and cold trapping us.

The video started and took away all feelings of comfort.

The unsteady footage told me the camera was amateur and handheld again, the shakiness making me dizzy.

I saw an old wooden table, scratched and gouged as though someone had gone at it with a pitchfork.

On the table was a mask.

A Halloween mask. Clown-like, but gray and peeling like flesh off a corpse.

The camera centered on the mask.

I could hear the man breathing behind the camera. As he zoomed in on the mask, the breathing intensified.

“What the hell is he doing?” Becca asked.

Her eyes locked on the television.

“I don’t…”

The hunger of his breathing choked off my reply.

An arm, made absurdly long by the perspective of the lens, reached out and grabbed hold of the mask.

He pulled it on, and now the lens recorded the world through two eye holes.

“It’s like a horror movie,” I said. “Maybe he’s a wannabe filmmaker.”

“I don’t think so.”

The screen went black.

I sighed audibly when the movie ended. My skin felt clammy and cold.

“What the hell was that?” I whispered.

“I think that’s enough for movie night.”

“I agree.”

I flipped on the local station. A banal comedy I’d never watch under different circumstances washed away the sick feeling gurgling in my stomach. Becca’s strained attentiveness to the comedy told me she actively worked to forget what we’d just watched, too.

It took several bad jokes and predictable scenes for my heart to slow. She’d snuggled close to me again, her body warm against mine.

Her eyelids grew too heavy to hold open.

“Why don’t you try to sleep?” I asked.

“That’s a good idea.”

She thanked me again.

“For what?”

“For listening.”

I offered to help her to the bedroom, but she waved me off. I watched her slowly climb the stairs through the darkness.

The bedroom door closed, and I was alone again.

Try as I may, I couldn’t exorcise the memory of what she’d told me of her past. It would haunt me for a long time. The sensation of being in over my head returned, and this time I was drowning.

I turned off the television and stepped out the back door, hoping the fresh air would clear my head.

The cold clung to me like a dead thing. It felt sharpest where Becca’s tears soaked my shirt. The generator rumbled. I wondered if it had enough fuel to get us to Wednesday.

Thinking of Becca upstairs alone, I felt I understood where I fit in her life. I was nothing more than a brief stretch of roadway, a detour riddled with potholes. My highway didn’t stretch far enough for her to reach her destination.

I wasn’t sure such a road existed.

The forest, too muddled to see clearly on cloudy nights, appeared razor-edged under the moon and stars. The hush of the night was palpable, as though the dark was listening.

I think that’s when I first sensed the danger we were in. It was a nebulous thing, barely enough to make my flesh crawl.

I felt it, nonetheless, watching me from the dark recesses of the barren terrain.

I wrote my unease off to nerves. Like Becca, I was tired, stressed by the creepiness of the strange house and the events in Barton Falls. I’d constructed my own demons, given them the power to exist.

I slipped into the house and bolted the door.

How was I to know the evil was already inside?

“Did you see my phone?”

Becca looked up from the sink before spitting toothpaste down the drain. Pale morning light out of a gunmetal sky seethed in through the bathroom window. It was Halloween.

“No.”

“It was on the charger in the den.”

“Obviously, you forgot where you put it. It didn’t just get up and walk away.”

I felt like I was twelve-years-old again and talking to my mother.

Smelling fresh from the shower, Becca padded barefoot from the bathroom to the bedroom wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt. Even after sweeping the upstairs, you wouldn’t have caught me walking around without shoes. It wasn’t just the rats and the dust. I’d found rusty nails rolling loose on the floor, and some of the boards were badly splintered. Stick a nail through a foot way out here and I’d be in a heap of trouble.

“Maybe your friend took it.”

I knew she didn’t believe Riley would steal my phone. I guess she needed to dig me a little more for telling him about her.

I checked the bathroom again, peering behind the toilet, sifting through the cabinet, even looking inside the bedrooms we rarely entered.

I retraced every step I remembered taking since last night. I looked under the bed. When I didn’t find it there, I pulled back the mattress and box spring and poured the contents of my food sack on the floor.

This was crazy. Maybe I’d misplaced the phone, but there were only a few places in the house it could have been: the bedroom, the den, the kitchen and bathroom. I didn’t spend time anyplace else.

It was gone. Vanished into thin air like a magician’s trick.

Becca offered me breakfast from our dwindling supply of sports bars, then plopped down on the bed and tore the wrapper away on hers. Though I needed to eat, I declined. I’d begun to worry.

“Relax. It’s around here somewhere.”

“Easy for you to say.”

Without my phone, I couldn’t confirm Riley had made it home and was safe.

Who was I kidding? Riley didn’t want to talk to me. Not yet. He’d come around and forgive me after a few weeks like he always did, but for now, I was persona non grata.

The problem was I didn’t have a few weeks to make things right with my friend. In two days, Becca and I would be in another state. I didn’t believe I’d see Barton Falls again.

I had to find the phone. Leaving it behind was as good as stapling my driver’s license to the wall.

Evidence.

So I kept looking.

Searching for the phone seemed almost funny at first. It was like playing a kid’s game. Was the phone in the bathroom? Not here. Hiding in the living room? No dice. How about inside the torn cushion of the couch in the den? Nope. I felt squeamish with my fingers fishing blindly through the stuffing, waiting for something to bite me.

The basement.

A chill crawled on spider’s legs down my back.

How could it be there? The door was locked.

It’s strange how the dead seem to speak in old houses. I felt generations of ghosts following me as I searched the house, trying to warn me that the missing phone held more significance than I understood.

I should have listened.

“It’s not here,” I said.

I heard Becca banging around upstairs, pouring the contents of her bag on the floor and shoving aside debris.

“I still can’t find it.” Her voice echoed down the staircase, sounding very distant. It gave me an edgy feeling as if we were cut off from each other. “Check outside. Maybe you lost it last night.”

Outside.

That was where my phone had to be.

Yet it wasn’t along the back wall of the house, nor was it in the front yard where she’d nearly beaten me unconscious.

The phone was simply gone.

Sighing, I picked up a rock and skipped it down the road. It hopped and kicked up dust until I couldn’t see it anymore. That reminded me of Riley disappearing down the hill, and I started to worry again.

I’d really stepped in it this time. Undoubtedly, my phone would show up once the police canvassed the house. I pictured my mug plastered on wanted posters across Barton Falls.

I needed to keep my wits.

When I came inside Becca was in the kitchen, towel-drying her hair.

“I don’t know how you can stomach cold showers.”

“I want to be clean,” she said, running a hand through her hair to pull out her natural spikes. “Cold water is better than no water at all.”

“It’s a little too painful.”

“Better than smelling like must and dirt, though there isn’t much I can do for my clothes until we find a place with a washer and dryer. Did you find your phone?”

“No. I—”

Thump.

The thud was heavy enough to rattle the floorboards.

My whole body flinched. It was as if I’d put my arm down on a hot plate.

“That sounded like it came from the basement,” she said.

“I think it came from outside.”

“Like something whacked against the foundation.”

“Yes, I think so.”

Sleet pattered against the window. Thunder rumbled out of the valley, the resultant lightning flash too distant to slice into the kitchen’s gloom.

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“Check the basement.”

“Christ.”

“It’s the only locked door in the house.”

I grabbed the doorknob and gave it a twist.

“That door has been locked the entire time. The noise couldn’t have come from down there.”

She pulled the switchblade from her pocket.

“So we’ll check outside.”

I went first through the door with Becca wielding our only weapon.

Ice pellets stung my skin. The ground had grown slushy and slick.

Indentations in the grass marked where I’d searched for the phone moments earlier. It was hard to tell if all those tracks were mine or if a stranger had come through the yard.

The wind threw me back. We shielded our faces as the storm hurled sleet at us. There was no sign of anything that could have caused the thumping sound.

By the time we finished circling the house, we were both too cold to continue searching.

Pushing into the kitchen, I locked the door and tried to knead the chill off my flesh. Her teeth chattered. Tiny lumps of ice freckled her hair.

“That was fruitful,” I said.

Her eyes held on the basement door.

“Let’s just get out of here. Another minute inside this house is a minute too long.”

“Becca, we’re not dressed for a winter storm. And it’s too risky to ride a bicycle on icy roads.”

“I don’t care.”

“I do. If I crashed and hurt you, I’d never forgive myself.”

“Fine. We’ll wait until the storm lets up and then leave. It’s Halloween, not Christmas. How much longer can this weather last?”

“What about my phone?”

“To hell with it. I’ve survived for twenty years without my own phone.”

“Dammit, Becca. All of my information is on that phone. My name, all of my contacts. I might as well hang a sign on the wall that says, Steve Morgan was here.”

“You should have thought of that before you lost it.”

I followed her into the den and watched the storm through the window. Rivulets of melting ice blurred the glass. I had to sit down, needed to mitigate the impending explosion I felt rumbling inside me.

Out by the brick barbecue pit, ice piled up on my bicycle seat. The weatherman’s forecast for Indian summer in two days seemed a pipe dream.

Becca’s eyes softened, and she sat beside me with her hand on mine.

“Let’s say they do find your phone and figure out your name,” she said, reassurance coloring her voice. “So what? Your name won’t matter anymore because no one will know where you are. Making a decision to follow me means turning your back on your previous life.”

This wasn’t at all what I wanted. Once we put Barton Falls behind us, once we were free of this house and this cold, I wanted to get Becca off the streets. I’d show her she could trust me.

The cold was our prison. She hadn’t experienced such confinement in three years of running.

Had I one wish it would have been for the predicted warm-up to arrive early: we’d step out the back door bracing for the hard clench of winter, and instead we’d feel the warm sun on our faces and hear ice melt running off the hill. If only to experience the chirping of birds and buzzing of insects again, to travel past wildflower meadows and see the deep green of hillsides framing the valley.

The storm was relentless on Halloween afternoon. We napped in the den, Becca nuzzled against my shoulder and sprawled so we barely fit on the couch.

The television was on, but I was too tired to pay attention except for news updates. The weatherman issued his dubious promise of warmer days, but it looked grim for tonight’s trick-or-treaters. There was still no mention of a body found in the woods west of town. If the junkie was at the bottom of a gorge, he might not be found until spring.

I don’t believe in second sight. But I believe the deepest recesses of our minds hold truths too frightening to share.

The house was gloomy as the day withered away. We retreated to the bedroom when the confines of the sofa caused us to cramp. I guess we slept past sunset, for the hallway was black when my eyes popped open.

“Do you ever worry the monster you’re running from is inside the room?”

I don’t remember saying it, don’t even recall what I’d dreamed.

When I awoke, Becca was sitting up in the bed with her hands clenched over her heart and staring at me. I sensed rather than saw how wide her eyes were.

“Why did you say that?”

The words came trembling out of her.

“Say what? I didn’t say anything.”

“You were talking in your sleep.”

She repeated the words back to me. It felt as though dead things clung to my flesh.

I was trying to remember what I’d dreamed when the phone blared downstairs.

I slipped off the bed and nearly snapped my wrists while breaking my fall.

It rang again, loud enough to be heard from the road.

Then a third ring.

By the fourth ring, Becca stood shivering in the doorway, glaring at me.

The ringing ceased.

“Did it ring that loud last time?” she asked. “It didn’t. It couldn’t have or I would remember.”

“No, you’re right. It sounded louder this time. A lot louder.”

“How could the volume change?”

A few logical explanations came to me. The phone was old for one thing. Maybe the ringer was bad or the phone company was testing the line.

Or someone had turned up the ringer.

I started to get off the floor. My legs went wobbly, scarcely able to support my weight.

I couldn’t see past her into the hallway. Everything had gone black.

We crept into the hall. My arms extended in front of me, feeling for the wall.

I heard Becca breathing beside me. All I saw of her was an ill-defined shadow amid a sea of darkness.

She hissed.

“Wait!”

I stepped down and the floor that had been under me was there no longer.

Becca grabbed me at the top of the staircase, or I might have tumbled over the rail and broken my neck.

I stood balancing with one foot on the landing and the other extended over the precipice.

Silence crawled up from below.

I started to speak, and she shushed me again.

“Go back to the room and grab the flashlight,” she whispered.

The gray light of a starless sky pooled into the living room. There wasn’t much of it. I didn’t want to walk back in the dark, didn’t want to leave Becca alone, even for a few seconds.

The darkness was sharper toward the bedroom. A terror I couldn’t put a finger on seemed to be right behind me the whole way.

Why was I scared? Because the phone rang? Because I’d had a nightmare I couldn’t recall?

Do you ever worry the monster you’re running from is inside the room?

What would make me say such a thing?

I tried to put it out of my mind. The memory hung there like a bat in the rafters.

Something glimmered as I edged my way to the staircase. Becca held the switchblade.

When I flicked the beam on, she shook her head. I turned it off.

“Then why did you make me go get it?”

She pointed at the business end of the flashlight, then at her head. I agreed: the flashlight would make a good bludgeoning weapon.

“You don’t think there’s someone downstairs, do you?” I asked.

“I’m not taking any chances.”

It didn’t matter how quiet we tried to be. The steps squealed all the way down as though the old house betrayed us.

The living room, the only room accepting the miserly shaft of gray light, was empty. The fireplace appeared as a gaping mouth.

I stepped on a clump of dirt and knelt to examine it. It’s conceivable the dirt was there all along or one of us had tracked it in. Conceivable, but unlikely.

Easy now, I told myself. You had a bad dream, and you’re sneaking through a strange house. Don’t start imagining ghosts and monsters.

I couldn’t see into the back of the house. Black ink swam there.

That I was too old to be afraid of the dark didn’t matter.

Because we fear not what we know, but the unknown.

Fear cannot be walled away or wrestled into submission. It does not show its true face nor scream so that we may hear its words clearly. Fear cryptically whispers on the backs of our necks, its power derived from what our subconscious minds cower from.

Fear is the unseen snake under the bedsheets, the madman in the shadowed corner, the closet bogeyman.

In the old house, it was what the darkness concealed.

The kitchen lay straight ahead. If someone was in there, the dividing wall wouldn’t let us see. My fingers squeezed around the flashlight.

Blood pounded through my head

The stench hit me at the threshold. A rotting smell like roadkill along the highway.

We stood to the side of the dividing wall.

Becca caught my eye. I nodded.

She shot into the kitchen with the knife thrust before her. I yelled and brought down the end of the flashlight, stopping myself when I realized the gray bulk at the corner was the refrigerator.

My eyes swept across the room.

It was empty and dark, a feeble glow rising off the faucet. The carrion smell lingered.

“What’s that smell?” I whispered.

She put her hand up and motioned at the den.

My adrenaline amped as we approached the room.

We weren’t alone. I was sure of it. The same dread I’d felt before the humpbacked man lurched out of the darkness was back. Even if we found the den clear, there were two unexplored bedrooms upstairs and an attic.

And the basement.

The locked basement.

The den was empty. Just the tattered couch with its stuffings crawling out, the television and stack of DVDs.

The DVDs.

Something was different about them. A slight alteration in their configuration.

Or maybe I was just tired and scared.

I peeked inside the tiny bathroom and found it empty.

Becca turned and went back into the kitchen. I wasn’t about to let her go alone.

I found her staring at the telephone. Had the phone rung at that moment, I would have collapsed.

The wind threw leaves against the windows. Around us, the old house creaked and groaned as though it was coming alive.

“It shouldn’t keep ringing,” she said. “Are you positive the line is inactive?”

“We’ve been over this. It’s dead. It doesn’t work.”

To prove my point, I pulled the receiver off the hook and dialed my mobile phone. If the call went through, I’d hear my phone ringing and finally figure out where I’d lost it.

The call didn’t go through. The phone squawked the same error tones. I held the receiver out so she could hear.

“Then nobody should be able to call us,” she said.

“I know.”

Becca stared into the surrounding rooms. The fear of someone else in the house clawed at my back.

“Steve, can you force a telephone to ring?”

I knew what she was getting at and didn’t like it.

There were ways to force a phone with an inactive line to ring. I was no expert at this, but my Uncle Jim used to work for the telephone company. With the right electrical equipment, he said, you could activate the ringer. But you had to know where to apply the voltage and exactly how much to use so you didn’t ruin the phone or electrocute yourself. Regardless, the rotary phone was in one piece. No one could have taken it apart and put it back together without us hearing from the top of the stairs.

Yet something was different.

Putting the receiver back in place, I ran my finger from the base to the dialer.

I saw it. The slider on the bottom of the phone was at its maximum position. That’s why the ringer was so loud.

“Are you positive you never touched the phone?” I asked.

“Of course not. Why would I?”

Had the slider always been set to maximum? Neither of us had touched it, so it must have been.

“There has to be another way to make a phone ring,” she said.

“Short of the phone company testing the line or—”

Suddenly it hit me.

When we were kids, back when we all had landlines and only the rich or technologically-savvy owned cell phones, we’d known a way to prank each other. If we wanted the phone to ring, we dialed a four digit number.

2-1-1-2?

I couldn’t recall.

“Steve?”

I knew I was scaring her.

I yanked the receiver off the hook and dialed 2-1-1-2.

As I held the receiver to my ear, the phone remained silent. Maybe I was wrong.

“I think it’s a problem with the wiring.”

In the faint light reflecting off the sink, I saw the color come back into her cheeks.

I was about to chalk our panic up to paranoia when I realized I’d forgotten part of the process. The steps to make the gag work were hazy after so many years.

Depressing the hook until the dial tone returned, I dialed 2-1-1-2. This time I put the phone back on the hook and stepped away.

It was deathly quiet.

Certain I’d gotten the gag right and the phone wasn’t responding, I exhaled.

“You see? Nobody forced the phone to ring—”

The phone blared.

My heart shot through my chest.

I snatched the receiver back to my ear and yelled, “Hello!”

Silence replied.

Silence and the scratchy sounds of an old, noisy line, like phantoms whispering.

My hands felt cold.

No, it wasn’t sensible for someone to sneak into an abandoned house and pull the old callback trick.

Not unless he wanted to psychologically torture us.

We’d checked the downstairs. Nobody was here.

“It’s the phone company testing the line,” I said. “Or the ancient wiring is so screwy it keeps causing the ringer to go off.”

“Then why did it work for you?”

Becca pushed past me and flipped the wall switch. The kitchen light flared.

“Where are you, you son-of-a-bitch?”

“Stop it, Becca. There’s nobody in the house.”

Cursing, she flicked the other switch, and a floodlight illuminated the backyard.

I was angry enough to forget how scared I felt.

“Turn off the damn light,” I said. “If someone drives past they’ll see.”

She stared out at the backyard. The light pulled frozen grass out of the darkness.

Nobody was outside. We were alone on Myers Road.

She petulantly flipped off the floodlight. Becca’s switchblade was out again.

“What’s wrong?”

She wasn’t listening to me. Another thought already possessed her.

“Come on, Becca. We’ve checked the entire downstairs.”

“Not everywhere.”

She stomped to the basement door and jiggled the knob. When she found the door locked, she pulled the picks from her back pocket and went to work on the locking mechanism.

I started to ask her what she was doing, and she shot me a glare that buckled my knees.

She was on one knee, lips pursed with her tongue protruding. For such an old door, it gave her quite a struggle.

Then I heard something snap, and Becca yelled, “Shit!”

Tossing the broken pick aside, she withdrew a second tool and fished it into the mechanism. I didn’t dare say anything, not with her face strangled in concentration and sweat matting her bangs.

She jimmied the lock, twisting, testing, blindly feeling her way through the mechanism’s defenses.

Snap.

She slammed the second broken pick down and ripped another from her pocket. She was down to her last two.

“Becca, nobody’s in the basement. You’re panicking.”

“I’m not panicking, Steve. I’m exhausting every possibility.”

“It sure looks like panic from where I’m standing. How are you going to break into the next house? Give up while you still have a few picks left.”

“It’s an old lock. A child could—”

Snap.

She didn’t drop the pick so much as it fell from her hand. It clanged around on the tile as though mocking her.

I snatched her back from the door as she reached for the last pick.

“Get control of yourself.”

Her body was taut, a live wire. I worried she’d lose control again and attack me. If she’d tried to fight her way free, I couldn’t have stopped her.

She stared down at the final lock pick.

How desperate our situation was seemed to flood over her. If she broke the pick, we’d be stuck here. Becca dropped her head into my chest and cried.

I didn’t know where to put my hands. For a long time, I was a statue in the kitchen while she leaned into me and sobbed. Finally, I slid my hands around her back. When she didn’t protest, I pulled her closer and kissed her forehead.

“I should turn off the light before someone comes driving up the hill and sees,” I said.

Becca sniffled. I felt her trembling in my arms.

“I hope someone sees,” she said. “I’d give anything for someone to come along and take us out of here. Even the police. Jail cells are heated.”

“You don’t want to go to jail.”

As much as I wanted to reassure her everything would be fine, I dreaded spending another moment inside the house.

“Steve, let’s just leave.”

Outside the window, the tree silhouettes rocked in the wind.

“We won’t get far in this weather.”

“I still have my tent. If we shelter ourselves from the wind—”

“We’ll freeze to death.”

The death scent grew stronger. It seemed to be trickling up from the basement. She kept staring warily at the door.

“Okay,” I said. “Anything is better than another night in this house.”

The tension slipped out of her.

“Thank you. Let’s grab our things and go.”

My charger was inside the den. Though I hardly had a use for it anymore, I didn’t want to leave evidence behind.

Becca held my hand, fingers clasped and digging into my palm, as we walked into the den. In the faded light at the window, I saw the charger beside the television.

I reached for the plug and felt paralysis knife through me.

The DVDs leaned in a malformed stack.

Thirteen of them.

“What’s wrong?”

Her voice sounded miles away.

“Dammit, Steve. You’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”

I ran my thumb along the cases, counting them again.

Then recounting.

I didn’t need to.

Another disk had been added to the stack.

Thirteen.

Surely, I’d miscounted the first time. There’d been thirteen, not twelve, all along.

The last disk we’d watched, the strange home movie of the clown mask, should have been on top.

I saw my hand reach for the DVD and slip it into the player.

“What the hell are you doing? We need to go.”

“Give me a second!” I said, snapping at her.

I flicked on the television. Gray, animated static lit the room like a funhouse.

“The hell with this,” she said. “I’m getting my things and leaving.”

She pulled away from me and stopped in the doorway.

The video started.

“My God, what is that?” she asked.

I stared at the screen.

A woman, naked except for her panties, pleaded into the camera. Black eyeliner rode the grooves of her face, smeared by tears.

I thought I recognized her. I’d watched every low budget horror movie I could get my hands on. Had I seen this movie?

Then I realized what was on the DVD.

The abhorrent underbelly of underground pornography.

“It’s a snuff film,” I whispered.

“A snuff film? What’s a snuff film doing here? It wasn’t here before.”

An axe raised before the camera.

The woman cried for her husband, for God, for anyone.

The blade ran tauntingly along her bare shoulder. She jerked, causing the blade to cut into her flesh.

Blood rained down from where blade touched skin.

“It’s not real, though. Right?”

I tried to answer. Something like dead leaves scratching together came out of my throat.

The woman was hysterical, wide-eyed and squealing. The sound reminded me of pigs led to slaughter.

“It can’t be real. You can’t kill somebody for real in a movie.”

But some snuff films were real, I knew. Though I’d never seen one before, I recognized clearly what was on the television.

I wanted to heave the contents out of my stomach. Something kept my feet frozen to the floor.

The unseen killer raised the blade over her head.

“Turn it off!”

I tried but couldn’t. My arms wouldn’t work for me.

That’s when my brain connected the dots.

I knew who the woman was.

Erin Tuttle. The missing woman on posters all over Barton Falls.

The camera spun around. A hideous mask, the same from the other movie, covered the murderer’s face.

Becca was already gone. I heard her pounding up the staircase and running across the landing.

As I ran from the den, crying Becca’s name, I heard a scream and a splattering noise come out of the television. The blue-gray light of the killer’s movie danced across the walls as I stumbled through the kitchen.

“Leave it, Becca! We need to go!”

But she didn’t recognize the woman on the television, didn’t realize the implications of The Midnight Killer’s victim starring in a snuff film left for us to watch.

In my panic, I slammed a shoulder against the banister. Pain rocketed down my arm as I half-stumbled, half-crawled up the stairs.

“Get out of the house!”

I could hear her throwing her belongings into her bag. The light was on in the bedroom. Shadows from the room stretched out through the hallway.

When I made it to the doorway, the bag was over her shoulder. She kicked my bag to me and started for the hallway.

“Drop your bag,” I said, nearly out of breath. “Just bring the knife.”

Her eyes searched mine.

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“Becca, I—”

“There’s someone in the house, isn’t there?”

The light went out. Someone had killed the power.

Footsteps thundered across the living room.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The Midnight Killer

I could no longer see where the bedroom ended and the hallway began. Feeling my way along the wall, my hand brushed through a cobweb before finding the door.

I edged it shut.

Now all three bedroom doors were closed. I prayed whoever was downstairs hadn’t seen the bedroom light before the power went out.

Rats skittered through the walls.

Footsteps moved toward the staircase.

“Who is it?” Becca whispered in my ear.

She was crouched next to me, both of us beside the door. I heard the switchblade pop out.

“Stay quiet,” I said.

I couldn’t hear over the vermin thrashing behind the plaster.

A stair buckled under a great weight.

Then another step groaned.

The stranger was halfway up the staircase.

As I felt my way along the door frame, something crawled down my arm. I nearly yelled and gave us away. I slapped down on my arm and felt something crunchy and wet under my hand.

I hate bugs. They always seem to find me when the lights go out.

I tried to remember the exact layout of the upstairs: the bathroom with the master bedroom across from it, the two unkempt bedrooms at the end of the hall.

Another riser led to the attic. I recalled how loudly those boards screamed when stepped upon. If the person on the staircase climbed toward the attic, I’d hear.

The images of the clown mask and the axe slicing into Erin Tuttle’s shoulder kept playing in my head.

Christ.

We’d crept right into the lair of The Midnight Killer.

It was too quiet in the hallway. I hadn’t heard the stairs groan in some time.

Maybe the killer had gone downstairs to look for us.

I blindly made a move for the door. Becca’s blade caught my elbow.

She realized what happened and pulled the knife back. Too late. A nasty gash ran from elbow to triceps. I was glad it was too dark to see the damage.

She whispered an apology I barely heard. I was too intent on the quiet outside the bedroom door to worry about my arm.

“I’m going out there,” I said.

“No.”

“Becca, if the hallway is empty we can make a run for it.”

“It’s a trap.”

“Then give me the knife.”

“Not a chance. We go together, or you go without the knife.”

“Fine.”

Pressing my ear to the door, I pictured the hallway, remembering every potential hiding place and where I’d be most vulnerable to an attack. The bathroom door had been open, so I’d have to be ready for someone hiding inside. Next came the staircase and a helluva lot of dark.

I grabbed hold of the knob and gave it a slow twist, careful the latch bolt didn’t pop.

When I couldn’t twist the doorknob any farther, I pulled the door open to a thin crack. Dusty air rolled in from the hallway.

The opening wasn’t wide enough to poke my head through. For all I knew, the person on the staircase was right outside the door.

Something black lay inside my chest and wanted to crawl out. The death scent had risen up the staircase.

Clenching my teeth, I edged the door open.

I’m not sure what grabbed my pant leg when I crawled through. A staple or a nail. It ripped a hole in the knee of my jeans and dug another gash into my flesh.

Some hero I was. I hadn’t encountered the killer yet and was already bleeding from my arm and leg.

God, it was dark. I could see the small pool of gray down the hall cast from the bathroom window, but that was it.

Becca was somewhere behind me, frozen and silent. I wished I could see her. I had no way to know if she was next to me or still inside the bedroom.

The floorboards groaned. Close.

I dived back against the wall, heart pounding. I knew I was fully exposed if the stranger’s eyes were better trained for the dark than mine.

At first, I saw nothing but black.

Then a shape took form.

A massive figure stood at the top of the stairs.

It swayed in the darkness, a monster out of a nightmare.

Swaying, breathing, listening for us to give ourselves away.

It can’t see me. If I’m quiet, it won’t know I’m here.

My head felt dizzy. I still held the flashlight, but it was slipping out of my sweaty hand. If I dropped it now…

The monster sniffed at the air. It took one lumbering step toward me.

It stopped as though considering, then took another step down the hall.

“Come out, come out, wherever you are, my precious Steve.”

I knew that voice. I couldn’t believe it was her.

“I know you’re up here. You and your little slut. Did you think you could cheat on me and get away with it?”

Donna.

Her body was a massive shadow against the darkness. I smelled the cheap perfume intermingling with the grime and body sweat of someone who’d been on the run for days.

Donna. The Midnight Killer?

I didn’t want to believe it. There had to be another explanation.

Yet Harry Jenkins lay in a hospital bed, and Riley looked as if he’d come out of a meat grinder after what she’d done to him.

I no longer doubted what she was capable of. She was out of her mind.

The death smell, the old house, my fear—Donna would revel in it. This was the perfect place for her to murder me.

Leaping off the wall, I threw my shoulder into her belly. It felt like slamming into a tree.

She staggered back against the wall, screeching my name. Her nails dug gorges into my cheeks.

“I hate you!” I yelled, striking her across the face.

What she shrieked back at me was utterly unintelligible and terrifying, the scream of an animal.

Donna swung wildly in the dark, the meat of her arm catching my skull and flashing stars across my eyes.

She lumbered at me.

I kicked her belly and sent her flailing backward. Wood crunched as the bedroom door crashed off its hinges.

A second shadow darted through the gloom.

It wasn’t clear Becca had leaped atop Donna until I heard them struggling on the floor. Becca cried out. I saw the outline of her body thrown through the air. She slammed down on the bed with Donna’s monstrous form atop her.

The bed collapsed. Becca’s choked gasps filled the room.

Flipping the flashlight on revealed Donna astride Becca, choking her with hands strong enough to snap bone.

I slammed the flashlight into the back of Donna’s head. She moaned and wobbled.

I struck again.

This time she released her grip on Becca’s neck and fell back on the mattress. Blood dribbled down her forehead. The life in her eyes flickered on and off.

Coughing and choking, Becca twisted out from under Donna and reached across the mattress.

“Stop!” I yelled, seeing her grab the fallen switchblade.

I couldn’t stop her in time.

Becca plunged the knife into Donna’s chest.

Donna squealed.

Becca ripped the blade free and jammed it down again. Blood geysered and splattered her face.

Donna’s mouth was open, trying in vain to speak. Red fluid ran down from the corners of her mouth. Her eyes fixed on mine.

Becca started hyperventilating. She kept looking between Donna and the switchblade, the horror of what she’d done dawning.

She threw the weapon aside and stared at it with revulsion. She sucked air in gasps.

“Easy,” I said. “Nice and easy. It was self-defense.”

She shook her head. Tears washed dirt down her cheeks.

“Becca, she would have killed us both.”

“You…told me…to stop,” she said, stammering. “I didn’t have to kill her.”

I didn’t want to look at Donna but couldn’t help it. She kept staring at me, lips moving without any sound coming out. What I saw in her eyes wasn’t love. It was shock. I’d allowed this to happen to her. I’m not proud of wanting her eyes to close for good, wishing she would die so the accusation would stop.

She was strong. Even with two knife wounds bubbling crimson out of her chest, she wouldn’t die.

“What the hell am I going to do?”

Becca’s voice snapped me away from Donna. Panic filled Becca’s eyes. Donna convulsed, and Becca scooted back on the mattress, knees drawn protectively to her chest.

My mind spun. I couldn’t seem to put two thoughts together.

We had to dispose of the body, hide it somewhere. I knew that much. It felt wrong to admit such a thing while Donna was still alive to hear.

Please just die.

Donna’s arm reached for me. Whatever she’d become, in that moment, I only saw somebody’s daughter bleeding out on that dirty mattress. There would be a funeral and flowers and tears, and a mother and father putting their baby girl into the ground.

I jumped when Donna’s arm thumped dead against the mattress. Her eyes were still open.

Becca collapsed into a ball and cried. The finality seemed to hit us at the same time. I slumped down to my knees and buried my head in my hands.

I wanted to cry but couldn’t. Not for a stalker I hardly knew who’d murdered several people and brutalized my best friend.

We couldn’t leave her here.

“We’ll hide the body in the basement,” I said.

I started nodding as my mind sifted through the possibilities and formulated a plan.

“Yeah…that should work,” I said. “She’s too big to carry out to the woods, so it’s gotta be the basement. Gotta figure out how to open that door. Then we’ll drag her down there. By the time someone finds the body, we’ll be days, maybe weeks gone. And once they see the DVDs…once they realize who she is and what she did…they won’t give two craps who killed her.”

Becca watched me, too distraught to move. But I could see her coming around.

“Shit, Becca. You’ll be a hero without a name. The woman who murdered The Midnight Killer.”

Bewilderment twisted her features. The shock of what I said brought her out of her stupor.

“The Midnight Killer?”

“You better believe it,” I said. “Those creepy DVDs, the Barton Falls woman in the snuff film. It’s Donna, all right. Though I still can’t believe she killed all those people.”

“My God.”

She leaned back against the wall, dazed with disbelief, and gazed out at the night. It was going to be a long time before she fully appreciated what we’d done.

“But I can’t open the basement door,” she said. “I’ve tried. And I’m not wasting my last lock pick.”

I noticed the nickel-silver light flashing from the top of Donna’s pocket. The keys to her Subaru.

“That’s it,” I said. “Problem solved.”

“What are you talking about?”

I snatched the keys, jangled them in front of my face, and stuffed them into my pocket.

“She must have left the Subaru somewhere down the road. All I have to do is find it, grab the crowbar out of the trunk, and wedge the basement door open.”

Becca sat up, suddenly recognizing the full value of Donna’s car keys. I could tell we were thinking the same thing—Donna’s car was our sanctuary from the cold, our ticket out of Barton Falls. Forget Pennsylvania. We could be in Miami in twenty-four hours.

The wind threw black rain against the window.

“Gas will be an issue,” I said. “It’ll take a couple refills to get south, and I don’t have much money left.”

“Just get me away from this damn place, and I’ll figure the rest out later.”

Together we dragged Donna off the mattress. She was too heavy to carry, even with Becca and me lifting together.

I yanked her across the littered floor. Donna’s hair and clothes snagged dust mounds and dragged them along like tinsel on a Christmas tree. She left behind a few smears of blood, discernible on the water-stained floorboards.

I wasn’t through the doorway before she became too heavy. I caught my breath, then Becca took one leg and helped tug Donna into the hallway. Placing the flashlight on the floor, I aimed it down the hall so we didn’t blindly plunge headfirst down the stairway.

Dragging Donna down the stairs was the worst part of moving her. Her head thudded grotesquely on each step, leaving behind a trail of dust and hair. Her eyes were still open, cockeyed, bloody, and looking off in different directions.

Once, we nearly lost control. I imagined us pitching forward with Donna’s weight careening down to crush us at the bottom. I kept one hand on the banister until my feet touched the floor.

My arms were trembling by the time we pulled Donna through the living room and into the kitchen.

I ran back to grab the flashlight. In the kitchen, Becca leaned over with her hands on her knees, exhausted, nauseous from the putrid stench.

“The smell is definitely coming from the basement,” she said. “Maybe we should just leave her here.”

I pictured a throng of dead rats congealing in their own body fluids.

“No way. If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this right.”

“But that smell.”

“I know. Whatever died down there will mask her body. If we take the time to hide her in the basement, it might be a long time before someone realizes the smell is more than a few dead animals.”

“I think there are more than a few.”

I swallowed the bile crawling up my throat.

“Fine. Let’s find where she hid the car.”

Despite the cold and wind, it was an immense relief to be outside. The rain finally stopped, and a patch of clouds had shredded, allowing a slice of moonlight to shine through.

“The bike is gone,” she said, looking off to where the brick barbecue pit stood against a backdrop of craggy forest wall.

I thought maybe the wind had blown the bike over so I couldn’t see it in the tall grass, but closer inspection verified it was gone.

“Donna thought of everything. She really had us cut off out here.”

Cut off.

Maybe we were.

I could barely see the lights of Barton Falls off to the east. To the west spread empty land cut sharply by the moonlight. It was easy to feel cut off, isolated from civilization.

We trudged solemnly through wet grass. Dead tendril clumps seized my ankles and tried to drag me down. My pant legs were soaked through when we reached Myers Road.

I stood at the hill’s precipice, peering left and right.

“Which way do you think?” I asked.

“If she came from Barton Falls, then left.”

“That was my guess, too.”

We scuffed down the gravel hill, the soles of our shoes drawing gullies in the dirt. We sounded loud amid the nothingness. I looked around for the coyote or whatever animal had followed us on our trip up the hill. The meadow was lifeless, almost mournful.

Becca, already exhausted from moving Donna to the kitchen, was out of breath.

We reached the intersection. No car.

“Now what?” she asked.

“I guess it must be down the other side.”

As we reversed course, the moonlight glimmered off something behind a stand of trees. I leaped across the ditch and helped Becca over. Parting bramble and decaying overgrowth, I aimed the flashlight at the trees and saw the tire tracks. I followed matted grass and located the Subaru hidden behind a willow tree.

When I turned the key and the engine rolled over, I yelled a happy curse and started laughing.

Donna had wisely taken the car through a shallow section of ditch. I retraced her tire tracks and climbed onto Myers Road.

“A full tank,” I said, pointing at the fuel guage.

I was tempted to turn down the hill and just leave the old house behind—the Pennsylvania border was an hour away—but I knew Becca would never stand for it. So I drove up the hill, listening to rocks ping off the undercarriage and crunch under the tires like old bones. Something large and spindly crawled across the windshield. The wipers squished its insides across the glass.

I parked the car at the top of the dirt driveway. The forest was black through the windshield, the country house gray and glowing.

The crowbar was inside the trunk, hidden under a cover plate and a strip of carpet. I handed the keys to Becca when we climbed out of the car.

“What are these for?”

“Just in case anything goes wrong in there, I want you to take the car and get the hell away from this place as fast as you can.”

Though I had no logical reason to worry, it was impossible to shake the creeps after what we’d gone through. It made me think of horror movies where the killer was never really dead.

Donna’s body missing from the kitchen. A blood splotch left behind.

Donna’s shadow lumbering out of the den, the living room, rocking and swaying in the dark bedrooms.

Stabbing her with the switchblade and watching her rise again with lifeless eyes.

You can’t kill evil.

“Nothing is going to go wrong,” she said. “Take a deep breath. Don’t let your imagination get the best of you.”

The wiring between the house and generator was severed. Now I knew why the power had gone out. We’d have to make do with the flashlight.

We found Donna where we’d left her. She hadn’t risen from the dead after all.

Yet I gave the body a wide berth as I stepped around her, fearful she’d grasp my ankle with the cold hands of the dead.

I carried the bags down from the bedroom and stuffed them into the Subaru’s trunk. Then I stared down at Donna and scratched at my chin.

“Here goes nothing,” I said.

I wedged the crowbar between the door and frame and shoved my weight against the end. The lock held strong, but the ancient door was flimsy and dilapidated. The wood snapped as though a firecracker had gone off in the kitchen. Fissures ran toward the center of the door.

I moved the bar down a few inches and gave another shove. This time a chunk of wood broke off, taking the lock set with it. The lock was shiny, new, and modern; no wonder it had given Becca a struggle. I threw what remained of the door open as dust mites assailed us.

The basement smell rose up with vile intent. I plugged my nose to keep from vomiting.

“Jesus. Let’s make this quick.”

Becca nodded. She had one hand over her mouth and a green look to her complexion.

The cellar staircase was too narrow to accommodate the both of us, so I took the lead, tugging Donna by the ankles as Becca pushed against her shoulders. Once the dead weight was fully out of the kitchen, I was on my own supporting Donna. Becca aimed the flashlight against the wall so it wasn’t in my eyes.

Donna’s head clonked down the steps. Her neck was broken, malformed, lolled at a ninety-degree angle. Blood, along with something gray and chunky, dribbled out from the corners of her mouth. I tried not to look.

I kicked aside a cobweb-covered box of light bulbs and heard it fall a long way down before smashing. It was too dark to see where the stairs ended.

I stumbled down a step and lost hold of Donna’s feet. Becca was too late to grab the body, which tumbled down and smashed me against the wall. I cried out. Donna’s weight pinned me to the wall, her head thrust into my chest. The rancid substance dripped from Donna’s mouth down my shirt.

“You okay?”

I groaned.

“I can’t move. Dammit, she’s heavy.”

Becca tried to squeeze around Donna to help me, but there was no room on the staircase.

She pulled while I shoved. It took three heaves before Donna fell backward onto the steps. Relieved to breathe freely again, I relaxed for too long and felt Donna’s mass shift on the staircase. Before I could get her under control, the steps buckled and her feet kicked up. She tumbled over the side. Her body smacked the cellar floor, heavy and wet.

“Oh, my lord,” I said. “I’m gonna be sick.”

Becca breathed heavily beside me, shining the flashlight anywhere but down where Donna had splattered.

“Don’t look,” she said.

“Trust me. I won’t.”

“It’s getting late. We’d better get on with it.”

Becca flashed the light down the steps. A tunnel of cobwebs swayed with the newly-stirred air. I could see a rutted concrete floor at the bottom and not much else. It was a long, long way down.

The deeper we descended, the more a musty, earthy scent mixed with the decay.

Something scratched through the dark. More rats, probably.

Water stains blemished the concrete. I took the light from Becca and swung it where I expected the far wall to be and saw only black. I hadn’t realized how cavernous the cellar was until the flashlight beam perished in the darkness.

An old washer and dryer, pockmarked by rust and blanketed in spiderwebs, stood at the foot of the stairs. A black spider the size of my palm spun a beetle into a cocoon.

“Can’t imagine coming all the way down here just to wash clothes,” I said.

“I can’t imagine coming down here at all.”

A rotten egg odor hung under the awful decay scent, the result of water seeping up through the concrete and receding for decades. The crumbling texture of the floor was evidence the water was winning.

Sweeping the light into the cellar revealed a mound of junk—broken and splintered two-by-fours, a digital clock with a shattered display, a rotted stack of shelving crawling with bugs, about a hundred rusty wood screws of various lengths, a winter hat with a tear up the front, an antique dresser turned on its side and smashed. Enveloping all of it were more spiderwebs.

I realized I’d been wasting time. I didn’t want to see the results of Donna falling off the staircase.

I most wanted to get out of the basement. I kept worrying the stairs would collapse and we’d be stuck down there.

We walked along the stairs into the depths of the basement. The light found Donna face-down, thankfully. One of her arms was bent the wrong way. A leg appeared to fold between the knee and shin. Blood seeped out from under her.

“Drag her to the back of the basement,” Becca said.

“I can’t see the back wall. Why don’t we just drag her under the stairs?”

“It can’t be too far. How big can a basement be? Shine the light.”

I spread the beam straight ahead and found the concrete wall about twenty paces in the distance, covered with cobwebs. Tarnished rebar jutted out of the wall like iron maiden spikes. Most of the wall was hidden behind a big metal storage closet and the water heater.

“You see?” she asked. “Not far at all.”

I didn’t think I could drag Donna another foot, but I wanted the ordeal done with. Becca grabbed one ankle. I grabbed the other. We had to turn Donna, who was facing the other direction. As we spun her around she left a bloody, slimy trail of grue, the rutty concrete tearing clothing and clawing flesh. Some of that flesh stuck to the concrete.

“Almost there,” she said. “You okay?”

My face was wan, eyes blurry from trying not to breathe.

The death scent assaulted me at the storage locker, and my stomach buckled in on itself. I let Donna’s leg drop and leaned over to vomit. Becca plugged her nose and looked in the other direction as the flashlight rolled away.

I thought the sickness was over before another surge roiled out of me and splattered on the concrete. A lot of it ended up on Donna.

“Take a deep breath,” Becca said.

The irony almost made me laugh—she was still plugging her nose.

“The smell…it’s coming from the storage locker.”

She glanced up at cobwebs hanging down like stalactites from an impossibly tall ceiling.

“Let’s get the hell out of here before something grows on us,” she said.

The locker door hung open a crack. Though I didn’t want to know the source of the stink, my hand reached for the door.

“Oh, don’t look, Steve. It’s probably just…”

Her words floated away to another time and place.

The door creaked open.

My mind refused to process what lay inside.

I think I screamed. From somewhere far off, I heard Becca screaming, pleading with me to look away.

It was Riley. Only it wasn’t Riley, he was so difficult to recognize.

A split ran down the center of his face, the chasm open to bits of bone, cartilage, and bloody flesh. The red rivers Donna had raked across his face were black and crusty now. His eye sockets were white snow, chunks of brain matter crusting his hair and forehead. I jerked back at the sight of a cockroach crawling from his open mouth.

Another body lay stuffed into the back of the locker.

A woman’s body. The coagulated stump of a neck crawled with beetles where the head had been.

I didn’t need to examine the body to know it was Erin Tuttle’s.

A third body was slung over her lap. I recognized his clothes. The junkie.

I heard myself crying. I couldn’t feel my legs.

As I dropped down to my knees, Becca grabbed me from behind and dragged me from the locker.

“No. I can’t leave him here. Riley’s my friend.”

“He’s dead,” she said. “We need to get out of here. Now.”

Becca tugged me until my legs started to work again. I cried out. The hollow basement echoed back at me.

She thrust the flashlight into my hand. The weight of it grounded me, giving me something real to grasp hold of when all around me was nightmare.

Donna wouldn’t have gone this far. She’d been unstable, not a murderous monster.

Something shifted at the back of the basement. Too heavy to be a rat.

I swung the light toward the noise. My view was blocked by the storage locker and water heater.

Then a dragging sound.

I imagined Donna crawling after us.

“Go,” Becca said, whispering into my ear.

My will to survive drove the pins and needles from my legs.

We stumbled toward what we believed was the staircase. It wasn’t. The flashlight beam was too narrow and weak, and the dark played tricks on us, leading us to the pile of junk in the middle of the floor.

“Wrong way,” I said.

She issued a nervous laugh.

As I got my bearings the sound came again. Something big in the dark.

Near the stairs?

I pulled Becca back when she started toward the exit.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“You didn’t hear that?”

“I didn’t hear anything.”

“Donna isn’t The Midnight Killer.”

When I breathed it felt as if pieces of broken glass lay in my chest.

“Then who was on the DVD? Who killed all those people?”

Becca’s eyes were black stones in the dark.

The stairs groaned.

The sound might have been the decaying wood settling.

I knew better. We both did.

Her hand touched mine, a gesture no different on its face than when we’d sat together in the den, talking. It meant more now. Something was on the stairs. Something which meant to kill both of us.

We hid in the darkness without hearing the noise again.

Why had we wasted time dragging Donna into the basement?

“I think we’re alone,” I said.

“Let’s go.”

I pushed Becca in front of me and aimed the light up the stairs. Nobody was on the staircase.

We climbed the long tunnel of stairs, brushing cobwebs aside and keeping an eye out for an extra shadow. It appeared just as dark above as it did below. Not being able to see the kitchen made me feel buried alive.

We kept climbing and climbing as grit rained down from the stairs and bounced off the concrete.

Then we were out of the basement.

Becca shoved the splintered door aside before I realized we’d made it to the kitchen. Though dark, the kitchen seemed bright compared to the cellar.

I stood at the threshold and listened.

The upstairs was quiet.

“Probably just rats on the stairs,” I said, trying to assure myself.

Becca wasn’t convinced. The look of warning she gave me got me going again.

A phone rang upstairs.

My phone.

Impossible, as we’d checked the bedrooms.

I looked questioningly at Becca. The ringing stopped.

The quiet was heavier than the dark.

“Leave it,” she said, the mistrust over the sudden reappearance of my phone evident in her voice.

When we were halfway across the kitchen floor, something scraped against the back of the house, a chiseling noise running along the wood.

The rotary phone was gone, torn off the wall. A mess of wires hung out of the plaster.

As I stepped back toward the cellar stairs, a shadow moved across the back door.

The shadow grew monstrous.

Then the shadow receded into the night as though I’d imagined it.

I listened for footsteps circling the house but heard only wind.

“I don’t think that was a policeman,” she said.

“No.”

My throat was parched. I’d spent the last few days terrified a cop would find us. Now I prayed one would bang on the door and get us out of there.

I knew how vulnerable we were. The back door was unlocked, and the front door was fastened by a rusty deadbolt that wouldn’t stop a child.

I wanted equal space between us and each door. I led her to the living room, where we stood with our backs to the wall, hearts thundering.

The mind is an insidious thing. It fabricates shapes in the darkness where only shadows lie, turns swaying branches into the claws of monsters. I knew this time the monsters were real.

I moved my gaze to the windows. The glass swam with shadows.

Then the door imploded, and something tore Becca away.

CHAPTER NINE

The Face of Midnight

Becca screamed from somewhere in the house. I crawled back to my knees.

Splinters and dust and dirt stuck against my skin and stung my eyes. I climbed to my feet and staggered against the wall as deep pain wrenched the back of my neck. I’d been hit, knocked unconscious.

For how long?

Cold poured through the open door.

A thudding noise echoed through the walls, then silence. I was too disoriented to tell where the sound came from.

The house became quiet, troubling. Hearing Becca flee through the house provided evidence she was alive. Now I heard nothing. Just the dead weight of the house groaning and shifting with the wind.

I started to push off the wall and stopped. The shadows were somehow out of place. I looked over to where the big fireplace was, then behind me into the kitchen. It was too black to make anything out.

Someone was downstairs with me. Someone waiting where the shadows congealed with the dark.

I felt him out there, listening, maybe in the kitchen, maybe in the den or back near the fireplace. I didn’t breathe, didn’t move a muscle, a rabbit frozen by a wolf scent.

Minutes ticked away. I took comfort knowing the killer was after me instead of Becca.

If she was still alive.

I stuffed that thought down where I couldn’t see it anymore. She had to be alive.

Then the tension in the air lessened. He was gone.

Gone because he’d found Becca?

I remembered my phone ringing somewhere upstairs. A trap, I knew.

The phone was our best chance. Our attacker had toyed with me, planting the phone upstairs and dialing it, trying to lure me deeper into the house so he could slip inside unnoticed. I shivered at the possibility he’d been inside the house since we arrived.

Yet his plan had backfired. All I needed to do was find the phone and call for help.

I edged off the wall and crept toward the staircase. It was darker above than in the living room.

I bit my tongue each time my weight came down on a stair. My hand slid along the banister, shoveling away dust.

The fates were kind to me. The stairs remained quiet until I was safely upon the landing.

It was freezing upstairs without the space heater running.

One door stood open: the shattered door at the end of the hallway. We’d left our bedroom open when we pulled Donna down the stairs. Now it was closed.

I bypassed the master bedroom and bathroom and crept to our room. My hands trembled as I turned the knob.

I slipped inside and closed the door, drawing ragged breaths into my chest. Gambling the light wouldn’t be seen under the door, I turned on the flashlight and swept the beam across the room. The bed, the boarded window, the stash of cleaning supplies in the corner all looked untouched. The closet door was closed—had it been before?—and as darkness outside the beam seemed to sweep in on me, I flashed the light at the door and carefully approached.

A floorboard groaned. I stopped, panting and sweating as I listened for someone climbing the stairs.

When silence followed, I opened the closet and shined the light inside.

No phone. Just vermin droppings and a pile of insulation where something had made a nest.

I checked under the mattress and lifted the box spring.

Dammit.

It wasn’t in our bedroom.

The phone rang. It sounded loud in the dark.

Where? The master bedroom?

I hoped to hell it wasn’t in the attic.

The phone continued to ring as I cracked open the bedroom door. The jagged blade-feeling in my lungs warned me not to follow the siren song.

Another trap. I felt sure of it.

As I slipped down the hallway I pushed an ear against the wall. No, the phone wasn’t in the master bedroom. It was above me in the attic. Which meant the killer was probably there, too.

This was my best chance to find Becca.

Let the killer think I’ll walk into his trap. We’ll be gone before he realizes his mistake.

I turned back and checked the open bedroom at the end of the hall. The bloodstain on the mattress was larger than I’d feared. The floor was streaked in dark shadows where we’d dragged Donna from the bed.

Becca wasn’t inside.

I caught my breath when the phone went silent for a few seconds. Then it started ringing again.

More places to hide existed in the master bedroom. I whispered Becca’s name, got down on all fours and checked under the bed. She wasn’t in the closet or behind the dresser. Nor was she inside the bathroom. Which left only the downstairs to check.

Where are you, Becca?

I stood at the top of the landing as the phone continued to blare. The stairs to the attic led up to the left. Death waited up there.

The ringing stopped for good.

I remember the tight pull in my chest and the sweat dripping off my fingertips as I scuffled toward the banister.

It was too dark to see if the attic door was open or closed.

A black shape lurched across the floor. I nearly shouted before I realized it was my own shadow rendered in a thin shaft of moonlight through the bathroom window.

Something thumped inside the attic.

I hurried down the stairs to find Becca.

“Becca.”

Each time I whispered her name my eyes shot to the top of the landing. I hadn’t heard the attic sounds in a while.

I craned my neck inside the fireplace, plenty big enough for Becca to hide inside. It smelled of soot and ash. The wind made moaning sounds up the chimney.

After checking the den and kitchen, I knew there was only one choice left if she was still inside the house.

She was in the basement.

Why the basement, Becca?

I eyed the shattered cellar doorway, tilted askew on broken hinges and hanging like a broken jaw. The death scents were sharper. I prayed Becca wasn’t down there, hoped she’d fled the house.

I knew she hadn’t. The killer wouldn’t allow her to leave the house. If he was still inside, she was, too.

All I saw was black down the stairs. Knowing the risk I was taking if the killer was in the basement, I lost my nerve and turned on the flashlight.

The light ricocheted off cobwebs and painted deformed shadows across the stairs.

God, those stairs were steep. The warped sagging of the boards made me wonder how they’d held our weight.

“Becca.”

Still no answer.

I started down the steps to the pitter-patter of debris showering off the stairs. My feet were like thunder on the old boards.

Halfway down the stairs, I swept the light across the basement, amazed again by its vastness. I saw the webbed washer and dryer, the junk pile, the water heater and storage cabinet.

I whispered her name and again heard the dead silence of that subterranean hole.

A plank snapped underfoot. I pitched forward into the washer and dropped the flashlight.

Something crawled across the pocked metal surface toward my hand. I scrambled backward on all fours and snatched up the flashlight. My pulse raced. I felt thankful the only stair to snap had been at the bottom.

But there was still the climb out of the basement to worry over.

The ceiling groaned overhead. I couldn’t tell if the sound came from the living room or the kitchen.

I moved as fast as I could in the dark, stepping over debris as unseen hazards snagged my shoelaces and tried to trip me up.

I avoided the water heater and cabinet. No way Becca would hide beside a pile of dead bodies.

As the light swept across the back wall, it caught movement in the corner.

A person, curled into a ball and shivering.

Becca.

I rounded a broken worktable and hurried to her. When I touched her shoulder she jumped as though electrocuted. Her eyes were wide and vacant.

“Becca, it’s me.”

A cry shuddered from her throat. I didn’t see any sign of recognition in her eyes.

“It’s me—Steve. Concentrate on my voice. It’s going to be all right.”

I pulled her into my arms. She trembled like a frightened baby animal that had never encountered humans.

If she was in shock, I didn’t know what I could do for her in what little time I had.

Another thump came from above. Dirt sprinkled my face.

“I need you to listen to me. I can’t carry you. You’ll have to walk if you want to get out of here.”

“The car.”

I met her eyes, which gained focus as footsteps moved overhead.

“Yes, yes,” I said, whispering. “We need to get to the car. You had the keys. Do you remember?”

She glanced uncertainly around the dark as though waking in an unfamiliar room.

“Do you remember?”

Her hands jumped in panicked movements through her jacket down to the pockets of her blue jeans. A jingling sound came as she patted the pocket.

“I remember. I have them.”

Relief flooded over me.

“Good girl. Now I need you to stand up and help me get out of here. Can you do that?”

She shook her head violently.

“Yes, you can,” I said.

“No. He’s upstairs. The Midnight Killer. Jesus Christ, Steve, he’s been in the house the whole time.”

Someone walked through the kitchen.

“Listen to me. He’s trying to lure me upstairs with my phone. Did you hear it ringing?”

She nodded.

“He was in the attic before,” I said. “He might go up again if he doesn’t think we’re downstairs. I found the bedroom doors closed, so he must believe one of us is upstairs.”

She stared at me. I could see she wasn’t completely lucid yet, still working through the shock.

“We’re trapped down here. There’s only one way out, and he’s waiting for us.”

I glanced around the basement, realizing it would be pretty hard for the killer to find us in the dark if we kept quiet.

“I’m not going to die tonight, Becca. And neither are you.”

“We should have just driven away. If we hadn’t moved the body…”

“Stop. How could we have known someone was inside the house?”

She went quiet, lips still moving as though carrying a conversation with herself. A desiccated cockroach was stuck in her hair. I brushed it away.

“I better turn off the light,” I said.

Fright flashed in her eyes.

Red and orange stars flared over my eyes with the sudden absence of light. Then everything went black.

I painted a mental map of the basement—the locker off to the left, one junk pile in front of us and another near the middle of the basement, the bottom of the stairs somewhere back near the washer and dryer.

The old stairs gave us one advantage—we’d hear the killer coming.

Yet it remained oddly silent as we sat in the dark.

Minutes ticked past. I felt Becca shivering as we sat shoulder-to-shoulder.

“You think he’s still in the kitchen?” she whispered.

I hadn’t heard him in a long time, but something told me he was up there waiting for us. It made me think of alligators lying in the murky dark for hours, preternaturally patient, waiting for prey to wander by.

“Only one way to find out,” I said. “Still got your knife.”

The switchblade snapped up.

My knees popped as I rose. She hooked her elbow with mine, and we began to shamble back toward the stairs. I followed the memorized map, afraid I’d slam into one of the junk piles and give us away.

“I can’t see,” she said.

“Me neither. But we know the stairs are ahead. Keep moving.”

I fought the temptation to flick on the flashlight. If the killer was at the top of the stairs, he’d see.

My knees felt locked. Fear has a nasty way of freezing the joints, making it impossible to flee when the monster crashes out of the dark.

Quiet carried down the stairs. Maybe he’d gone upstairs.

It seemed we’d shuffled through the dark for hours when my leg brushed against the washer. The feel of cold metal through denim made me flinch.

I felt along the washer until I butted up against the wall.

“We made it,” I said.

I saw only black from the bottom of the stairs to the top. The killer might have been standing in the cellar doorway without me knowing.

“Careful. I busted the bottom step on the way down.”

We inched forward until my shin touched the broken plank.

“I feel it,” she said.

“Step over, nice and quiet.”

I imagined her leg lifting over the broken board in sync with mine. I swallowed when my foot reached the next step. There was a slight scuffling noise, hopefully not enough to draw attention. Glancing up, I still couldn’t see the kitchen or what waited at the top of the stairs.

A few steps up, my foot missed the stair. I felt a moment of vertigo, the dark spinning end over end as my hand reached out for a rail that wasn’t there. Becca grabbed me. How she sensed I’d lost my balance I’ll never know. I would have fallen to my death.

We kept climbing. Climbing and listening.

Then she nudged me in the ribs, and I glanced up to see the gray outline of the kitchen.

My heart was in my throat. Becca thrust the switchblade before her. I held the flashlight, butt end up, prehistoric man armed against dangers in the dark.

We stood at the threshold.

Something rhythmically banged inside the living room. The broken front door. The refrigerator stood to our left. I couldn’t see around it.

We walked backward into the kitchen’s center as moonlight glinted off the faucet. I kept waiting for the killer to lunge at us from behind the refrigerator.

Something hard clipped my hip, and I hauled myself around, ready to bring the flashlight down on the killer’s head. I’d backed into the door knob.

Through the window, the backyard was slashes of gray and black. The objects were sharp and exaggerated by the moon.

We were almost out of there. It felt wrong. It felt too easy.

As though someone dared us to walk through that door.

Becca must have felt it, too. She glared at the knob as if a cobra coiled around it.

The steady beating of the broken front door sounded like a time bomb ticking.

I’d rather die outside than in this hell.

I pulled open the door.

We stepped into the night and carefully shut the door behind us. Becca fished the keys from her pocket and held them in one hand, the other gripping the switchblade. Somehow this alarmed me. I was about to warn her to keep them in her pocket when she strode away, keeping to the shadows along the house.

The clouds had vanished, and the stars were as sharp as the cold. The chill dragged the breath out of me.

A moment of anxiety that the Subaru wouldn’t be there squeezed my heart, but when we turned the corner, the car sat where we’d left it, aglow in the moonlight. We were almost to the car when a clump of grass tripped Becca. She landed face down on the frozen ground.

“What’s wrong?”

She looked hysterical.

“The keys. And the switchblade. I dropped them.”

I swallowed a curse, jumped down to my knees, and felt through the grass. The lost items were probably right under our noses, but the dead grass grew up to our shins and swallowed everything it caught.

“Dammit, Steve. Why can’t I find them?”

I swept the light across the grass, felt around some more.

They were gone.

I glanced over my shoulder. The back door stood closed. Darkness pressed out from the windows.

“Stay calm,” I said, seeing her eyes well up. “They have to be close.”

Another minute of searching doused my hope. I was about to give up and suggest we flee down the hill when the light caught the glint of metal. I plunged my hand into the frosty overgrowth and came up with the switchblade.

“Got the knife,” I said.

We redoubled our efforts in a small perimeter around where I’d found the switchblade. A few seconds later Becca gasped and fished out the keys.

“I can’t believe I did that,” she said. “I almost stranded us.”

I gave the house one more look and ran for the car.

Throwing open the door, I slid into the passenger seat with Becca behind the wheel. Her hands shook as she sifted through the keys, then she found the right one. I worried something would go horribly wrong—the engine wouldn’t start or the car would flop along on slashed tires.

But when she turned the key, the engine hummed and the headlights lit the backyard.

I felt the clock ticking. The killer must have heard.

I looked over my shoulder at the desolate strip of road as Becca shifted into reverse.

A face crashed against the windshield. Glass imploded.

Becca jerked the wheel. The car bounced over a hummock and veered across the grass.

The rear bumper slammed into a tree. I pitched forward and whacked my head on the dashboard.

The car ricocheted off the tree, and a crunching sound came from the undercarriage.

Becca screamed.

I turned and saw Donna’s face against the windshield. Her lips were bulbous and fish-like, puckered against the impact point. She bled and silently screamed, staring with the whites of her eyes.

Her head lifted and slammed back down against the glass.

I was too scared to move, didn’t understand what I was seeing as glass pellets rained onto my lap.

Then I saw a shadow looming over her, a man gripping Donna’s bloody hair.

The Midnight Killer.

Becca shifted into drive and gunned the engine. The wheels spun helplessly. A tree stump was wedged under the car, suspending us.

The killer smashed Donna’s face into the windshield again. The glass burst inward. Donna’s head plunged through the opening, jagged spikes shredding her neck.

Blood poured onto my legs.

I looked up and saw the clown face of The Midnight Killer glaring down, head tilted in curiosity.

He towered over the hood, a monster out of a nightmare.

I moved one shaking hand to the door handle. He watched me, the axe thrown over one shoulder. Donna’s body lay splayed across the hood, a few bloody strands of tissue connecting her head to her torso.

Lunatic eyes gazed through the mask’s eye holes. I was paralyzed.

My hand trembled on the door handle. I knew the axe would rip my head off as soon as I stepped from the vehicle.

He caught Becca glancing at the driver-side door and circled to the front of the car.

Taunting us. A cat-and-mouse game.

He ran the hair-matted tip of the axe blade across the hood. It made a fingernails-on-chalkboard squeal.

Becca was sobbing, nearly delirious. I looked into the night. Miles of wilderness stood between us and sanctuary.

“He can’t chase both of us at the same time,” I said. “I’ll try to distract him—”

“No. I’m not leaving you.”

I thought I could rock the car off the stump if I was behind the wheel. I’d have to talk her through it.

“Gun the engine.”

She did.

“Harder,” I said.

The Midnight Killer grinned and rounded the car toward Becca. The motor roared, the wheels whirred.

“Reverse!” I yelled.

She threw me an uncertain look, then shifted the car into reverse and stomped the accelerator.

I felt the car lurch, but the wheels were still in the air.

The killer came at the driver-side door, axe raised.

“Forward!” I yelled.

She shifted. The car rocked. I thought I felt one of the tires catch the ground.

I told her to reverse again. The Subaru slammed down. Tires caught rock and dirt, peppering the killer with debris.

The bumper slammed against the tree. Becca bounced her chin off the steering wheel. Blood streamed out of her mouth.

The Midnight Killer screamed and swung the axe.

Becca shifted into drive as her window exploded. The tires dug into the ground.

The side-view mirror punched into the killer’s ribs. He smashed against the door and fell out of view as the car ramped over the tree stump. Metal parts screeched and tore from the bottom of the car.

We flew through the air for a breathless second before pounding the earth. The car jounced and bucked as I spun my head to look behind.

Out of control, we missed the driveway and barreled into the side of the house. The car ricocheted backward, the engine dead.

“Where is he?” she asked

She frantically checked the mirrors. All I saw were moonlit trees leading down to acres of wilderness.

Becca turned the key. The sputtering cough of an engine that refused to turn over laughed at us.

“Shit!”

She pounded the steering wheel.

I rolled from the car with a face masked in crimson. Every part of me screamed in pain.

I coughed and felt a stabbing in my ribs. I spit blood.

Crawling to her door, I watched Becca stumble out of the vehicle. She cried out and pulled something from her leg. The open switchblade had plunged into her thigh during the collision. The blood spot on her pant leg was dark and expanding.

I grabbed hold of the trunk and pulled myself up. Becca leaned against the car, gasping and clutching at her thigh.

“Just go,” she said. “I’ll bleed out before I make it to town.”

“Bullshit.”

I moved and winced. It felt as if someone jammed needles into my ribs.

“Make a run for it. Get to town and bring back help.”

“I’m not splitting up, so you can forget it.”

For a moment, I saw two Beccas before the ghost image merged with her real body. My head throbbed, making it hard to gather my thoughts.

I knew the flashlight was somewhere in the car. I didn’t have the energy to search for it.

She gingerly held the switchblade, her free hand clutched against her thigh. Red pooled between her fingers.

The rasp of my breathing and the engine ticking were the only sounds. I looked out across the empty yard and back toward the trees.

“We hurt him,” I said. “That mirror clipped him pretty hard.”

“Something like that wouldn’t kill him.”

“No. But if he’s too hurt to move…”

I looked back toward the stump. Donna’s body lay torn and mangled in the grass, chest down with her head twisted around and glaring at the stars. A part of me felt remorse, despite Donna hurting Riley and attacking us. I wondered how the newspaper obituary would explain her death.

“We need to go back inside,” she said.

Please, not the house.

“We don’t have a choice,” she said, scanning the shadows. “Neither of us will get far walking, especially in this cold.”

“But your leg—”

“It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Her eyes glistened. A dread certainty swam in them.

“While we stand around out here, he can come at us from any direction,” she said. “We need walls between us and him.”

“Not exactly.”

I could see she thought I was suffering from a concussion, and I probably was. But I suddenly knew how to trap and kill The Midnight Killer. If we lured him inside the house, we could burn him alive. The generator held plenty of fuel. I just needed a way to start a fire.

Casting nervous glances down the hill, she nodded as I explained my plan.

“Remember the cleaning supplies in the bedroom?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“I saw a box of matches.”

“Shit, that’s right. Can you walk?”

She put weight down on her injured leg and sobbed.

“Yes.”

“No, you can’t. Give me your arm.”

She shot me an angry look.

“You can’t do everything by yourself. Give me your arm.”

She sighed and leaned into me. Walking made my ribs feel torn to shreds, but somehow I supported Becca and walked her around the corner of the house. I stopped to catch my breath, one hand on the generator to prop myself up.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Not really, but we’re almost there.”

We hobbled together to the back door. Stepping back into the kitchen felt like returning to a spook house. And maybe that old farmhouse really was haunted, from the wind moaning through the eaves to the sprawling dark of the basement. How much death had its walls borne witness to?

I locked the back door. The window would never stop the killer, but I’d hear him coming when he broke it.

There wasn’t much I could do about the front door. As Becca slumped down to the floor and nervously rubbed the blood off her hands, I shifted the broken door so it leaned over the opening. Doing so slowed the cold but made the living room a lot darker than I felt comfortable with.

Blood dripped off Becca’s thigh and splattered against the floorboards. I knew the leg was in bad shape, knew she’d bleed to death if I didn’t find a way to slow the bleeding.

“I’ll grab the matches,” I said. “Be back in a second.”

She didn’t reply, just closed her eyes and leaned her head against the wall.

It occurred to me it might be impossible to find the matches without the flashlight. I pushed the bedroom door wide open, but the moonlight trickling from the bathroom into the hallway died long before reaching me.

I walked into the black with my hands held in front of me. I kicked something and fell forward. The bed.

From the bed, I edged around the mattress until I touched the wall. The cleaning supplies were in the corner, but I couldn’t see a thing.

I followed the wall until my shoe scraped over the pile. Bending down, I sifted through the junk—the dry, hardened sponge, the misshapen wax of the candle. Finally, my hand closed over the book of matches.

God only knew how old the matches were or if they’d still light.

I stuffed the book into my pocket and followed the faint blue of moonlight back to the hallway.

“Got ’em,” I said from the top of the landing.

It was silent and dark below.

“Becca?”

No reply.

I grasped the banister and stopped. What if the Midnight Killer was downstairs?

“Steve…”

Her voice was weak and gravely. It made me think of sandpaper against plaster. I still couldn’t see her.

I rushed too quickly down the stairs and nearly broke my neck falling down the last few steps. My ribs knifed hot agony through my body.

Kneeling beside her, I watched Becca’s eyes roll back in her head as the lids fluttered open and shut. Her mouth hung open. Moans wheezed out. The pant leg was completely soaked through with blood, the fold of denim under her thigh dripping like a squeezed sponge. I worried Becca was already in shock.

I looked toward the kitchen door. All I saw was dark beyond the window.

I was losing her.

“Sorry, Becca. I don’t have a choice.”

I pried off her sneakers and yanked on the cuffs of her jeans. She cried when the denim shifted across her wound.

“I’m sorry…I’m sorry.”

I gave another tug. The waistband slid down to her knees.

The gaping wound was exposed now, a black, festering hole. After tearing off my sweatshirts, I removed my t-shirt and tied it around her thigh. She cried out again, her eyes tormented as tears dropped down her cheeks.

Becca watched me as I knotted the shirt over the wound. I figured the improvised tourniquet might stop the bleeding for a while, but knew the wound would tear open if she moved too fast. She winced and helped me slide the jeans back over her thighs. I shivered as I pulled the sweatshirts over my head.

“Thank you,” she said.

“It’s the best I can do for now. Try not to move too fast. And keep your eyes open. I don’t want you falling asleep.”

She straightened her leg and grimaced.

“Did you find them?”

I’d forgotten about the matches. I touched my pocket and felt them inside.

“Yes.”

“Then get on with it.”

The yard was empty and the hillside a frozen quiet. I looked down to where we’d struck The Midnight Killer and saw jagged shadows spilling off a clump of trees. Whether or not he was down there, I couldn’t see.

Although the wiring was severed, the generator itself was untouched. I felt around until my fingers found the gas cap.

The volatile liquid sloshed inside as I shoved the generator. Without a siphon, I had no way to get at the fuel. My only option was to overturn the generator and dump the gasoline, but it would be easy to smell the trap.

“Wait until he comes inside and trap him.”

I jumped out of my skin at Becca’s voice. I hadn’t seen her leaning in the doorway, the moonlight turning her pallor an unearthly gray.

“What are you doing up? You’ll start bleeding again.”

“I’m already bleeding.”

The splotch of black on her pant leg glistened with fresh blood.

I dug into my pocket and felt panic rising.

“Becca, where are the car keys?”

“Still in the ignition.”

I looked toward the corner of the house. The moon had circled around to the other side. It was too dark to see where the car had struck the wall. The hairs rose on the back of my neck.

“I better get them.”

Becca’s eyes held a grim determination to trap The Midnight Killer, no matter how foolhardy the plan.

“Give me the matches,” she said.

“Why?”

“Don’t question me, Steve. Maybe I don’t want to sit in the pitch black wondering where he is.”

“Okay then,” I said, handing her the matches. “I’ll be back in a second. Keep them safe.”

“I’m not gonna be much help with this plan, Steve,” she said, her eyes sunken and defeated. It was clear she’d accepted her fate. The running was over. “You’ll have to use me as bait.”

Blood dripped, dripped, dripped on the kitchen floor.

“Like hell, I will.”

“I can barely stand. Do you expect me to overturn the generator? I can’t outrun him if the plan fails.”

“Screw the keys. The car probably won’t start, anyway. Stand back.”

Angry, I dumped the generator on its side. Gas turned the threshold dark and glittering. The fumes made me woozy, and I had to plug my nose as I hauled the generator back to a standing position.

“I’m not using you as bait, and I’m not giving up on you. Listen, I can still run. If I’m the bait, I have a chance of escaping the fire. You don’t.”

She glanced down at her leg.

“I don’t think it matters anymore.”

“It fucking matters to me.”

Spitting curses, I grabbed hold of the generator and dragged it to the corner of the house.

“Where are you going?”

“To douse the front entryway. I have to booby trap both exits.”

I knew Becca was right—she’d already lost too much blood—but I refused to give up on her.

My ribs protested as I hauled the generator into the darkness. I passed the Subaru and gave one more look down the hill.

Still no sign of the maniac.

Maybe we’d killed him.

No. Life and death were never so accommodating.

It almost killed me to drag the generator up the porch steps. Once in the front entryway, I pushed the machine on its side. Gas, sharp and pungent, sloshed over the floorboards. Considering the broken door, I wrestled it out of its frame and doused it. Then I shoved it back into position.

The house was dusty and dry, a torch waiting for ignition.

I was halfway to the back door when I knew something was wrong. I stopped along the side of the house, breaths billowing fog as my teeth chattered. I stared at the doorway, a dark maw open to the night.

“Becca?”

Silence.

I limped faster now, one arm on the wall for support, frantic to get back to her. It was muscle memory and desperation that pulled me to the kitchen doorway.

I wondered why I hadn’t heard her scream.

You knew all along what waited outside the door, didn’t you, Becca? You wanted this.

I saw her drooped against the living room wall.

And I saw him.

The axe dangled off his arm, the blade tip bloody and matted with hair. His back was to me, yet I think he knew I was there.

And didn’t care.

I was no threat to him.

He took his time, a cat toying with a mouse.

There was a moment when I wondered why the switchblade wasn’t in Becca’s hand. Didn’t she mean to defend herself?

I saw the match spark between Becca’s fingers before I could react.

“Becca, no!”

She threw it to the floor.

Orange flame erupted off the floorboards, caught the door, and roared up the wall.

Now the switchblade was in her hands. The knife gleamed as she leaped at the killer and plunged the blade into his arm.

He batted her aside as though she were a fly.

I smashed the back window as Becca crumpled to the floor. The Midnight Killer raised the axe over his head.

I jabbed a broken shard into the killer’s back.

He wheeled around, the axe handle clipping me in the head.

As I fell into the kitchen the fire caught the living room ceiling and started to spread up the staircase.

The wall of heat hit me at the threshold, the smoke already driving me backward.

The Midnight Killer extended his hands in front of his face, warding off the fire, as he disappeared around the corner. He was somewhere near the fireplace, trapped by the inferno in the doorway and the dragon’s breath of smoke streaking toward the kitchen.

I couldn’t see the living room anymore. It was too black, too choked with smoke.

“Becca! Where are you?”

Limping toward the living room, I buried my mouth in my shirtsleeve. Orange hellfire flickered and flashed inside the smoke as it swelled. I was almost to the threshold when a dark shape, coughing and gasping, shot out of the haze and struck me in the chest.

My ribs buckled. I yelled out, stumbling back through the kitchen and out into the yard.

I looked up and saw Becca’s shadow amid the smoke.

Becca’s shadow and The Midnight Killer lurching behind her with the axe raised over his head.

“Get out of there!” I screamed.

Another match flared.

Where the threshold had been became a wall of fire. She’d cut off all exits.

“What are you doing?”

I rushed into the flame, and the heat threw me back. Flame licked along the sleeves of my sweatshirt. I dropped into the grass, smothering the fire as something exploded inside the house.

A louder explosion echoed from the front. The generator.

I shrieked for Becca. The kitchen blazed and coughed out smoke.

Glass shattered as I stumbled along the house, desperate to find a way inside. Heat radiated off the walls. The fire spread with demonic momentum, as though the house itself fed its own demise.

With smoke snaking around the house, I didn’t see the car until my shoulder struck the trunk.

I fought my way through the haze, barely able to breathe.

From the front of the house, the interior appeared pumpkin-orange. Smoke poured down the porch and seeped out through the boarded second-story window. I couldn’t see the shattered picture frame window. Glass fragments in the lawn reflected the fire.

I limped up the steps, and the smoke and heat turned me back again. The fire had begun to catch the outer walls. The inferno would be visible from several miles away.

“Becca!”

I made one last attempt for the door when The Midnight Killer lurched through the opening. His clothes were ablaze. Blood bubbled out of three holes in his chest. Whatever had become of Becca, she’d badly hurt him with her switchblade.

The axe sliced blindly through the air. His mask was burned and melting. Pieces of rubber smoldered against his charred face.

He’d murdered my best friend, killed Becca, and destroyed the lives of so many families in the last year.

I forgot how afraid I was. As he lurched down the staircase, I screamed and sprang at him.

Sparks rained down around us as I grasped his stabbed arm and dug my thumb into the knife wound. Blood welled out of the hole and ran warmly down my fingers. He shrieked. I think that was the first time I knew he was human and not some devil who’d crawled up from hell.

I dug the thumb deeper. He bashed a fist on the back of my neck. I felt my grip failing and made a desperate move, purely instinct.

I bit down on his forearm, sinking my teeth in like an attack dog.

I was aware of the gore-matted axe inches from my face, but he couldn’t swing it. Not with my jaw latched onto his arm. I was an animal fighting for survival.

I felt muscle rippling between my teeth, knew he would grab my neck and snap it in two if I let go.

Flesh tore away in my teeth as he threw me off. Hot blood trickled down my chin.

The Midnight Killer staggered onto the lawn. I leaped at him, jamming my forefinger through one of the mask’s eye holes. My nail tore something wet and squishy. He screamed and dropped the axe, the blade clanging against the step.

Enraged, he lumbered toward me as I bent for the weapon.

I swung the axe and buried the blade into his chest. Blood splashed my face.

I ripped the weapon free and swung high. The axe dug into his neck.

The Midnight Killer collapsed in the grass and lay twitching, blood pouring from his mouth and ruined eye.

A blast of hot air hit me when part of the front wall broke off and set the porch ablaze.

Banshees screamed out of the Halloween night, rising and falling near Barton Falls. I was only vaguely aware the screams were sirens.

The axe raised up and fell again as though it moved on its own. The blade chopped a canyon into the killer’s shoulder.

The twitching stopped. I backed away, unsure if he was breathing.

Then a fireball burst from the second-story bedroom. A chunk of panel exploded off the window and clipped my forehead. The night spun around me. I lost balance, toppling onto all fours.

The next thing I knew I was staggering down Myers Road.

Dazed and surrounded by bramble, I slumped into the cold meadow and lay staring up at the heavens. Stars, more than I’d seen in a lifetime, sparkled down from a sea of black. A ghostly finger of smoke billowed and expanded through the sky as I coughed and choked on the singed air.

I hold a hazy recollection of hearing my mother’s voice calling for me in the night. I was too tired and parched to answer. She wasn’t there, of course. Couldn’t have been. Soon her voice faded below the wail of approaching sirens.

A car engine rumbled by. Slow-moving tires crunched over the gravel road. I raised my head to look and collapsed.

The world went black.

CHAPTER TEN

Epilogue

I awakened to two voices arguing, one male, one female. The hospital room was blurry, as though smoke from the house fire had spread to my new location.

The female voice belonged to a heavyset nurse with one thick slash of eyebrow that dove angrily down to the bridge of her nose. A unibrow, Riley once called it. Remembering put an ache into my heart. The male voice was of a young-looking police officer the nurse comically dwarfed.

He argued his need to speak to the patient as I awoke. He was losing the argument.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ll answer his questions.”

My voice didn’t sound like mine at all. It was gravely and dry, the way it might sound if I was lucky enough to live until ninety-five.

“Five minutes,” the nurse said. “And not a minute more, Officer Michaels.”

The look of warning she gave him made the officer bite his lip and nod. Then he was by my bedside with a pen and pad, furiously scribbling notes as I talked.

Sometimes his eyes studied me as though I were an entity unexplainable through science. This unassuming, shattered twenty-four-year-old in the hospital bed had ended The Midnight Killer’s reign of terror, and within a few hours, my name would be all over the news.

“What I need to know is what you were doing there in the first place,” he said. “How did you know Brian Kealan was inside the house?”

“Who?”

“Brian Kealan, The Midnight Killer. Yeah, I know,” he said, turning his head toward the window where a team of paramedics raced past, pushing a gurney. “His real name isn’t as news-friendly or exciting as The Midnight Killer.”

“Brian Kealan. Sounds damn scary to me.”

“I suppose it does once you link the crimes to the name. Like Ted Bundy or David Berkowitz. The squatter—the woman living inside the farm house on Myers Road. Was she a friend of yours?”

“The woman?”

He shot a look over his shoulder, probably searching for the nurse. Then he turned back with tired eyes, eyes which wanted answers before the sun rose.

“Help me out here. You’ve been through a real shit storm, but I need you to take a deep breath and remember. The woman, Donna Berwick. We found her murdered outside the residence. We also pulled three bodies out of the basement. Fortunately, the fire hadn’t gotten to them, and we were able to identify two of the victims. One is Erin Tuttle, the missing woman from Barton Falls. The second is a known drug dealer from the east side. The third…”

His voice trailed off as I pictured Riley, bloody and stacked like cord wood in the basement locker. I closed my eyes, and he was still there, hollow sockets for eyes, flesh crawling with spiders and roaches.

“Why did you let me die, Steve?” Riley seemed to say.

The large outline of the nurse waited outside my door.

In the hallway, a tattooed man showing ass cheek through the back slit in his hospital gown tried to push past a throng of doctors and orderlies.

“…and maybe you tried to talk some sense into Miss Berwick for trespassing. Which is why you were there?”

His voice brought me back. I could tell by the way he led me toward an optimal answer that he was more interested in Donna’s crimes than why I was there. He wasn’t going to arrest the man who’d murdered The Midnight Killer.

Officer Michaels sighed and rubbed at his eyes. It was after four in the morning.

“Look, I don’t much care if you trespassed. We’ve got three bodies on that hill, plus The Midnight Killer, so what I need to know is…”

Three bodies.

I couldn’t hear his voice anymore. Beside me, the heart rate monitor drew sharp, irregular waves as the beeping quickened.

“You okay, Mr. Morgan?”

Three.

Donna, Erin Tuttle, and Riley.

What happened to Becca’s body?

“Mr. Morgan?”

“Yeah. I’m okay.” My fingers searched beneath the blankets and found a spaghetti dish of probes connected to my body. Suddenly, I wanted to join Tattoo Man and escape the hospital. “It’s like you said. Donna shouldn’t have been staying up there. I tried to talk some sense into her, tried to get her to leave, but she wouldn’t listen.”

“And you had no idea The Midnight Killer was inside the house?”

“None.”

“Who started the fire?”

“I did.”

He raised his eyebrows. I felt relieved Officer Jenkins wasn’t doing the interrogation. He would have loved to pin an arson charge on me.

“Why?”

“The Midnight Killer was inside the house, and Donna was already dead. I thought if I trapped him—”

“So you just grabbed your handy lighter and—”

“A pack of matches and fuel from the generator.”

I could tell he already knew how I’d started the fire. I’d given him the answer he wanted.

“Just out of curiosity, do you have any idea why Miss Berwick attacked Harry Jenkins? We checked: Jenkins was your landlord, and you were evicted under questionable circumstances. Did you have anything to do with Berwick assaulting Jenkins?”

I shook my head.

“She knew about my eviction, yes. But I had no idea she’d try to avenge me like that.”

“None?”

“She hadn’t been right for a few months. Donna was under a lot of pressure. Guy issues, I think.”

“Guy issues. As in you?”

“No, sir. I was just a concerned friend.”

“Hmm.”

He glanced to where the blanket covered my taped midsection.

“How are the ribs?”

“Shitty.”

“Yeah.”

He started to get up and sat back down. The glint in his eye told me he knew I wasn’t telling him the whole story.

“Another question, if I may. How did you get all the way to Myers Road from Barton Falls?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, it’s too far to walk considering the way the weather has been. One side of the farmhouse was struck by a vehicle, but there’s no sign of a car.”

Jesus.

I remembered the keys dangling from the Subaru’s ignition, the voice calling to me as I drifted unconscious in the meadow.

Becca.

The heart monitor got active again.

He started to ask another question when the door flew open, and the nurse barreled into the room.

“Your five minutes are up, Officer Michaels.”

“Just a few more questions—”

“You can come back in the morning. The patient needs his sleep.”

My parents arrived after breakfast. They’d only just heard the news. Mom always unplugged the phone at bedtime, not wanting to be disturbed, and Dad always swore it would come back to haunt her some night when a real emergency occurred.

Mom wrung her hands and did a lot of apologizing. She was overly cautious about touching me as if I were shattered pieces of china glued together.

Dad rolled his eyes at her fretting and gave me ‘atta-boy slaps on the shoulder. Yet his eyes regarded me as Officer Michaels’ had. I might have suddenly revealed I was an international spy or the first astronaut to walk on the sun.

“It was so sweet of you to help that girl,” Mom said, wetting the corner of the bed sheet in a cup of water and dabbing dirt off my face. “You were always the first to help a friend in need. Breaking into an abandoned house in the middle of nowhere…who would do such a thing?”

I saw Officer Michaels three more times before the doctors released me two days later. He feigned concern for my healing ribs and joked about my sudden fame—I’d done three television interviews, all of which were picked up by the major networks, and spoken to seven newspapers, including THE NEW YORK TIMES—but mostly he threw me a scattershot of questions which revealed he knew his story was missing something important.

I half-considered asking him if a girl with a lacerated leg had arrived at the hospital the night they brought me in.

I kept my mouth shut. Becca, after all, was the something missing that Michaels couldn’t put a finger on.

Better she remained a ghost.

The day I walked out of the hospital was sunny and warm, exactly the late-autumn warmth Becca and I had hoped for.

A year has passed since that awful Halloween night.

You’ll be pleased to know I have my own apartment in the big city.

Well, Syracuse.

Compared to Barton Falls and Smith Glen, Syracuse might as well be New York City. I’m halfway to an associates degree at the local community college, where I major in computer science and ask my professor uncomfortable questions about scraping data off of web pages. He probably thinks I plan to hack Yahoo or Amazon upon graduation.

I’m seeing someone. A girl, yes, but not what you think. Though attractive, she’s thirty years older than me and doesn’t date patients. Her office is warm and dark and safe.

It took several months, but my nightmares aren’t as frequent or violent. The pretty doctor is the only living person who knows of my dark autumn with the homeless girl.

Since moving to Syracuse I’ve become active on Twitter and Facebook. Though I know it’s a bad idea, I list my current address on my profile pages, and I use my Twitter feed to update whenever I’m at class, out to dinner, or shopping at the mall. Sometimes I leave my first-story window open a crack.

Mom and Dad aren’t getting any younger. My strange fame and brush with death aged them several years.

Last week, I spent fall break with my folks in Smith Glen. I made it clear on social media that I’d be gone for seven days and wouldn’t be back in Syracuse until Sunday evening. We went apple picking, toured the Finger Lakes, and posed for pictures everywhere we went. You’d have to have been living under a rock to not know my apartment was vacant. The few friends I have online, mostly old high school classmates and a smattering of new friends from college, seemed mildly amused.

I wondered if someone else was watching.

I came home tonight. The door was locked, the window still open a crack and letting in a cold breeze off Lake Ontario. Indian summer is over. Halloween is coming again.

The extra food I’d left in the cupboards and refrigerator was untouched. The blanket hanging over my second-hand couch appeared exactly as I’d left it.

Yet something was different.

A scent.

The hint of bath soap mingling with the fresh water smell of the lake.

Goosebumps rippled down my arms, the adrenaline before ripping open the big mystery box on Christmas morning.

I ran to the bathroom and threw open the door.

A still-moist, tattered towel I hadn’t seen since last year hung from the rack. Three beads of water, barely perceptible against the white tub, clung to the porcelain bottom.

I know you’re close, Becca.

Come home.

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Read on for an excerpt

From

Crawlspace

“One of the most exciting writers to burst upon the scene in quite some time.” – Brian Keene, 2014 World Horror Grand Master

I flew over the crest of Court Hill without a bike helmet. My headphones were on, which is why I never heard the pickup truck creep up on my back wheel.

When the driver laid heavy on the horn, I nearly jumped out of my skin. You can’t appreciate how loud a big truck’s horn is until the grille is two feet from your ass. You don’t just hear the horn, you feel it blasting hot air against the back of your neck while the wail rattles through your bones. The horn made me lose control and nearly careen over the curb, but I straightened the front wheel and managed to stay upright. I twisted my head around and saw the hardened, beady eyes of a man laughing at me over the steering wheel.

Doing what any sane person outweighed by 6000 pounds would do, I edged toward the curb to give the driver room to pass.

He didn’t pass.

He swerved the grille directly behind me again and blared the horn. I inched closer to the curb, afraid the bike pedal would clip the concrete and I’d tumble over the handlebars. He flicked on his high beams.

The smartest choice would’ve been to hop the curb and get onto the sidewalk, but it was too dangerous to attempt at high speed. The sun was almost down, and downtown, at the bottom of the hill, was still a mile away. I realized we were the only two people barreling down the incline. If the driver was crazy enough to run me over, there would be no witnesses.

When I looked over my shoulder, the driver stuck his middle finger up at me and rode the horn for several seconds. I swerved into the oncoming lane, hoping he’d finally pass. As I angled across the road at over twenty mph, the headlight beams swept across the pavement and followed. I veered back, the driver right on my tail.

We zigzagged again; I couldn’t shake him.

The horn brayed in triumph, and I did another stupid thing: I flipped my middle finger back at him.

The pickup lurched angrily forward and grazed my back wheel. The touch was so subtle that I wouldn’t have noticed if every nerve in my body hadn’t been on high alert, red-hot and standing at attention. The bike trembled dangerously. I white-knuckle-gripped the handlebars, knowing that if I so much as touched the brakes, the bike would fly out from under me, and three tons of steel would drag me under.

The faster I pedaled, the more the driver pressed down on the accelerator. We were one entity, the truck and I, accelerating in lockstep toward downtown. A quarter-mile below, a train of vehicles crossed the intersection, growing closer by the second. I felt the trap closing around me. The motor growled down the back of my neck.

Then the truck whipped around me and passed. He shot downhill doing highway speeds in a residential zone, the red eyes of the taillights glaring back at me. Watching the truck instead of the road, I lost control. The bike tires flew out from under me, and for one awful, frozen moment, I saw the cruel macadam rush underneath and imagined the amount of skin it would tear off my body when I landed.

In that precious split second, I had enough presence of mind to clutch my arms protectively around my head. The bike careened over the curb. I smashed shoulder-first against blacktop.

The air rushed from my lungs, and the pavement peeled away skin from shoulder to hip. It seemed as though I slid forever across that cheese grater of roadway before I finally stopped. Ringing trailed through my eardrums, and when I tried to make a fist, my hands refused to respond.

Shaking, I rolled gingerly onto my stomach. I didn’t want to see how much skin I’d lost. Strips of shirt were torn away and in pieces up the incline. What I saw of my arm I didn’t recognize: the layer of skin the macadam had excavated was as white as January snow, dotted by pinpricks of blood. I think my body was too shocked to bleed.

As I lay at the base of the hill, a car pulled up beside me. A middle-aged man in glasses leaned out the window.

“Good Lord. Are you okay?”

His wife stared from the passenger seat, both hands over her mouth. A young girl in the backseat held a stuffed dog in front of the window, making it dance for me. She seemed quite amused.

Putting his phone to his ear, he waved reassuringly and said, “I’m calling 911.”

“No, don’t,” I said to his amazement. My school health insurance had lapsed because I took the spring semester off, and my family’s health plan wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.

“Look, you could have broken bones and a concussion—”

“I’m fine,” I said, cutting him off. He shook his head, muttering something about idiot college kids, and squealed off toward downtown.

Then she was there.

A thousand wasp stings stabbed my skin when I moved my shoulder, but when she knelt down and offered me her arm, I took it and crawled up to my knees, vaguely aware of her car, a pearl blue Mazda RX-8, purring curbside. The first thing I noticed was her legs—tan, fit, and sexy beneath a jean miniskirt that barely caressed her mid-thigh. I must have stared for too long, because she said, “My eyes are up here, Don Juan.”

I rushed my eyes to her face, thinking she wouldn’t take kindly to them lingering elsewhere. My legs were gelatin, and if she hadn’t grabbed hold of my arm, I would have collapsed.

“You okay now?”

“I don’t have a clue.”

I looked into her eyes and gasped. I know how corny this sounds, and believe me, I’m no romantic, but I wanted to melt in the endless depth of those blues. My knees buckled again, and this time she ducked under my arm and let me lean against her. I caught scent of her perfume, subtle yet alluring, redolent of distant wildflowers after a warm rain. The sun flooded orange and red into her blonde curls, which draped down to her shoulders and tickled my nose.

Her eyes considered the bike—twisted, bent carbon, the brand name nearly scraped away by blacktop.

“Hmm. No saving the bike, I fear. But if you want me to throw it in the trunk—”

“Just leave it,” I said.

I turned away. The scrapes across the bike’s body reminded me of what had become of my skin. I found no sign of my headphones or MP3 player. They were probably halfway up the hill, in worse shape than the bike.

“All right. Can you walk to the car if I help?”

I told her I could, though each step made my head swim and my stomach turn. She watched me closely as we took it one step at a time, concern etched into her face.

“We should really get you to the hospital.”

“No doctors.”

I expected her to protest, but she just shrugged her shoulders.

“Good. I don’t trust doctors.”

I pulled the passenger door open, and she eased me into the car. New car smell and pungent black leather met me as I slumped into the seat. I should have told her to drive me to the hospital, insurance or not. My head seemed to float off my shoulders, and the yellow stripe of dividing line snaked and slithered out the window as though alive. Maybe I had brain trauma. Maybe I was minutes away from an aneurysm.

Screw it.

I rolled the dice and put my life in her hands. There were worse fates than dying in the front seat of a sports car with the sexiest girl in Kane Grove beside me.

“What do they call you, Don Juan?” she asked, slipping into the driver’s seat. I would’ve stolen another glimpse of her legs, but I felt sure I would vomit if I didn’t keep my eyes fixed on the undulating road.

“Jerry.”

“Jerry like Seinfeld, or Jerry like Cantrell?”

I smiled to myself. An Alice in Chains fan. Could she be more perfect?

The last thing I remember was trying to form an answer.

“Jerry…Laymon.”

Everything went black.

My eyes squinted open to a blur of traffic lights whipping overhead, the windows rolled down, letting in a cold splash of upstate New York air. Where was she taking me? What if the short skirt and pretty face were meant to lure me into her car before she slashed a razor across my throat, stole my wallet, and left me in a countryside ditch?

I still hadn’t asked for her name. Or had I? My mind was a needle on a skipping record.

After losing consciousness for several minutes, I awakened to the grumble and jounce of tires along a gravel road. The high beams were on, painting field grass in monotonic whites and grays. A creek sluiced beyond a line of barren trees, reflecting the twilight, mirroring her eyes.

She swung the Mazda up a rocky incline of a driveway. Just up the hill, a long apartment complex seemed to grow out of the earth, like the dead rising.

“Where are we?”

She jumped, the dashboard lights cast back against her face.

“Jesus, you scared me. I thought you were asleep…or dead.”

“I feel like I am,” I said, trying to rub away the sensation that a layer of putty lay beneath my face.

The beams swept across an apartment on the lot’s right end and shut off. She killed the engine, and a chorus of cricket songs rang through the open windows.

“Home, sweet home.”

Home, sweet home?

The L-shaped complex, with its chipping paint and dingy windows, made me think of the Bates Motel. One of the apartment’s shutters hung askew like the broken wing of an injured bird, and there was a smell—a stale, musty odor that blotted out the scent of spring rising off the dewy grass. I wondered why she chose to live here, why she of all people scraped my carcass off the blacktop and drove me to her house without knowing the first thing about me. That got me thinking again about who she was and whether or not I should trust her.

As she helped me up the steps, I took in the string of connected apartments, a queer familiarity tickling recollection down the less-traveled corridors of my memory. I’d seen this place before. But where? A faded wooden sign welcomed all to Gardenia Apartments. At the base of a pitched roof, five dark letters spelled MOTEL, each letter flickering and dying like moths to a flame. I should have known this place, but the memory hid lost and unrecognized, like a ring in the dark, smutty murk of a catch pipe.

She unlocked the door, and I limped with her assistance from the entryway to the couch. The downstairs barely looked lived in—little in the way of furniture, a small television, an absurdly small dining room table. While I slouched against the cushions, she disappeared around the corner to the kitchen. I heard cabinets opening and closing and the sound of running water, and a few minutes later she returned with a first aid kit, a box of gauze bandages, and a glass of water.

“You look prepared for the worst,” I joked, as she dunked cotton into a bowl of iodine. She didn’t answer.

“This is gonna hurt,” she said, holding my gaze until I nodded that I was ready.

She dabbed the cotton, soaked with purple savagery, against the newly-exposed layers of my excavated skin. It felt as if she’d run a blowtorch across my arm. I bit down on my tongue to keep from screaming. Even after she took the cotton away, the burning went on incessantly.

“The hurt means it’s working,” she said, giving me a wink. “At least that’s what Mom always told me.”

“My mother said the same,” I said through gritted teeth. “I thought she was full of shit back then, and that iodine is payback for all the hell kids give their parents. Iodine and Bactine—the suburban parent’s favored choices for torture devices. Nothing since has changed my opinion.”

Now she held a pair of scissors. A needle and thread rested on the end table, and I hoped to hell she didn’t intend to stitch any wounds. She cut the gauze to size, and I looked away as she moved it toward my bleeding arm.

“You never told me your name.” I tried to change the subject, hoping she’d slow down and let me recover between torment sessions.

“Yes, I did. But you kept falling asleep during the ride.”

“Don’t take it personally.”

“I didn’t. You had a valid excuse. This time.” The bandage felt like sandpaper against my arm. She moved her attention toward lesser wounds, applying a dab of antibacterial cream here, a small bandage there. “And it’s Kelli Tyler, by the way. Kelli with an ‘I’, not a ‘Y’.”

“Nice to meet you, Kelli with an ‘I’. Do you always make it a point to pick up roadkill and take it home?”

“You needed help.”

“I didn’t ask for help.”

“In a fair world, you shouldn’t have to ask.”

Something flashed in her eyes when she said it. Anger? Hurt? It came and went before I could decide.

She pulled the bottom of my shirt up to my armpits and cursed. I glanced down at a trail of gravel buried into flesh which appeared as though someone had gone at it with an acetylene torch. Feeling such pain made me regret my decision not to see a doctor. If it were up to me, I would’ve given up and gone to the hospital no matter the cost, but she bit down on her lower lip and went to work.

Kelli nursed my wounds for what seemed like the entire night but was probably about thirty minutes, removing every last bit of gravel, applying ointments, washing and rewashing wounds. When she finished, I still looked like hell, but I was clean. No infection could have survived the nuclear assault of ointment applications she administered.

“Expect the skin around your wounds to feel tight for a few days. You should feel a lot better by next week. Do you still feel dizzy, nauseous?”

My stomach felt unsettled, but the room wasn’t spinning.

“Not as bad as before. Look, if you could just drive me back to my—”

“Not a chance. You’re staying here. On the couch. Someone has to keep an eye on you tonight.”

“How do you know I don’t have someone to look after me at my apartment?” She raised an eyebrow. “Okay, yeah. I’m a loser, and I live alone. That’s my story. But what’s yours? I still don’t know why you’d pick up a total stranger and let him sleep on your couch.”

“You’re not a total stranger. I’ve seen you around campus.”

“Kane Grove University?”

“Yes. I’m working on my psychology masters. We’ve crossed paths in the Jamison Science tower. I recognize you, though I don’t think I’ve seen you around lately. Did you graduate?”

“I took a leave of absence.”

Her eyebrow cocked higher.

“Any particular reason?”

There was a lot I chose not tell her. I was already $35,000 underwater in loans, and this year’s aid package had fallen much below last year’s. True, I was only 36 credits from a bachelor’s of science, and conventional wisdom stated that I should have bitten the bullet and paid the last forty grand of tuition and board. But conventional wisdom wasn’t paying my bills. I was. And to be totally honest, I’d started to hate university life—the sense of entitlement among the student body, star professors who were more interested in getting their research papers published than in teaching, the whole scam that is higher learning in the twenty-first century.

I mean, it’s just a shell game when you get right down to it. The university takes your money, draining your family’s life savings, then delivers a vague promise about job prospects for graduates, while forcing you to waste two-thirds of your credits on poetry and theater classes which don’t have jack to do with your major. They roll out bar charts comparing the lifetime earnings of college graduates versus the general population, all the while subtly painting the trade schools as the great unwashed masses. After four years, your savings are replaced by a mountain of debt, and no one in your career field is hiring. College is a confidence trick. Anything which takes so long and costs so much has to have an incredible payoff. Right? Yet when you leave campus for the final time, you look back over your shoulder and see the same bright-eyed prospective freshman sitting at the recruitment table, watching the shells slide back and forth.

“I needed some time away.”

“I don’t blame you. We could all use some time away from Kane Grove.” Intensity flared in her eyes, again so brief that I almost missed it. “Anyhow, you can tell me all about it later. We’re staying up late tonight.”

“We are?”

“Well, I am. I’ll wake you several times during the night to check on that head of yours. You’re probably fine, but I don’t want to take any chances.”

I slept uncomfortably on Kelli’s couch, which was really more of a loveseat. I’m a pretty short guy, but my head hung over one arm, and my feet draped over the other.

As promised, Kelli came to wake me once an hour, though the discomfort of the cramped couch and the searing pain every time my skin stretched kept me wide awake or in a state of semi-sleep. I was delusional through much of the night. I remember talking about old friends and lost loved ones, as though Kelli was family. I dreamed she cried at my grandmother’s funeral. Don’t ask me what that was about. Another time she kissed me fully on the mouth, her tongue searching for and finding mine. That couldn’t have happened, either—not to me, and definitely not with a girl so beautiful. Yet when I awoke the next morning, I wasn’t convinced I’d dreamed the kiss.

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“[Padavona's] descriptions paint vivid portraits in the mind and help with the visual 'Drive-In movie feel'."

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"Foreboding and moody. I love it!!!"

"[Padavona's] descriptive imagery is outstanding. I truly 'see' this town and the characters."

Ready to be scared? DOWNLOAD STORBERRY at http://www.amazon.com/Storberry-Dan-Padavona-ebook/dp/B00N0D2LUG and turn the lights to low.

Author’s Note

In “Crawlspace” and “The Face of Midnight,” I ushered you, Dear Reader, into very dark realms.

You might ask me where I get my ideas. Do they originate from Stephen King, Jack Ketchum, Richard Laymon, Brian Keene, or the horror movies of the 1970s and 1980s? These writers and movies greatly influence me as they would any horror writer or filmmaker. But I believe the true source of darkness comes from within, a product of life experiences, hopes, and fears.

Like “Crawlspace,” I chose to write “The Face of Midnight” in the first person. I felt the voice was a natural fit for this story, as it allowed us to feel the most anxiety for Becca. After all, as a rule, the narrator does not die in a first-person-perspective story. Or at least, when they do it is a rather cruel joke. The narrator might lose a body part or see his life spin out of control, but we accept he will survive the ordeal.

Since the “Dark Vanishings” series I’ve had a voyeuristic fascination with characters living where they previously didn’t belong. For instance, downtrodden characters moving into a luxury resort hotel vacated after the apocalypse. “The Face of Midnight” amps up the intrigue because Becca sneaks into posh residences while the owners are alive but on travel. Despite Becca’s assurances that she is safe, we are intelligent enough to understand not all possibilities can be accounted for, and eventually, she will get caught.

And these situations are the most entertaining to write. I can’t help but live vicariously through my characters, making decisions with them, seeing how far they will push their boundaries. Would you dare to live inside someone else’s home?

Sympathizing with Becca is easy—she is homeless, she simply wants to survive without living on the streets. Becca never abuses her opportunity; instead, she takes it upon herself to care for her temporary home. She is arguably the most resourceful character I’ve written to date.

A clear dichotomy exists between Becca’s treatment of the Lin residence and the foreclosure house. From the moment she sees the house, she is suspicious of the foreclosure, even antagonistic. This 180-degree attitude swing influences our own feelings toward the house, even though it is obvious from the beginning that the old house is dangerous.

Approximately half the novel takes place inside the creepy foreclosure house, and that percentage met a goal I had for the narrative. I wanted to be trapped with you inside the house for an uncomfortably long period of time, not just for the final chapter. Believe me, I felt grimy and dusty writing those scenes. I even felt a little claustrophobic.

I hope the payoff was to your liking. The climax had a “Black Christmas” or “When A Stranger Calls” feel to it, in my opinion.

Thank you again to Jack Musci for outstanding editing. Jack has been my editor since “Storberry,” and in the nearly three years I’ve written horror, he has refined my style and helped me discover my voice. I can’t thank him enough for his patience and persistence.

Most of all, thank you to my beautiful wife, Teresa Padavona. We’ve traveled our own dark passages over the last two years, but we did it together and came out stronger. I will love you forever. Thank you for three decades of magic.

As always, thank you, Dear Reader. Your support is greatly appreciated and is a source of inspiration in all my writing. I don’t know where I’ll take you next, but I know it will be an exciting journey.

Although some of the United States locations described in The Face of Midnight are actual places, Barton Falls itself, Smith Glen, and most of the featured locations are solely of the author's imagination. Any resemblance between the people in this book and people in the real world is purely coincidental and unintended.

Copyright Information

Published by Dan Padavona

Visit our website at www.danpadavona.com

Copyright © 2016 by Dan Padavona

Artwork copyright © 2016 by Dan Padavona

Cover Design by Elderlemon Design

Editor - Jack Musci

All Rights Reserved

About the Author

Dan Padavona is the author of The Face of Midnight, Crawlspace, The Dark Vanishings series, Storberry, Shadow Witch, and the horror anthology, The Island. He lives in upstate New York with his beautiful wife, Terri, and their children, Joe, and Julia. Dan is a meteorologist with NOAA’s National Weather Service. Besides writing, he enjoys visiting amusement parks, beach vacations, Renaissance fairs, gardening, playing with the family dogs, and eating ice cream.

Visit Dan at: www.danpadavona.com