squishy noises, as if something black and green and wet was moving around in there just a little.
‘Rita asked me if I was working too hard, and I started to snap at her, just like the old days. I got sick to
rny stomach leaving them alone to go to work, but I was glad to get out. God help me, I was glad to get
out. I started to think, see, that it lost us for a while when we moved. It had to hunt around, slinking
through the streets at night and maybe creeping in the sewers. Smelling for us. It took a year, but it
found us. It’s back. It wants Andy and it wants me. I started to think, maybe if you think of a thing long
enough, and believe in it, it gets real. Maybe all the monsters we were scared of when we were kids,
Frankenstein and Wolfman and Mummy, maybe they were real. Real enough to kill the kids that were
supposed to have fallen into gravel pits or drowned in lakes or were just never found. Maybe . .
‘Are you backing away from something, Mr Billings?’
Billings was silent for a long time – two minutes clicked off the digital clock. Then he said abruptly:
‘Andy died in February. Rita wasn’t there. She got a call from her father. Her mother had been in a car
crash the day after New Year’s and wasn’t expected to live. She took a bus back that night.
‘Her mother didn’t die, but she was on the critical list for a long time – two months. I had a very good
woman who stayed with Andy days. We kept house nights. And closet doors kept coming open.’
Billings licked his lips. ‘The kid was sleeping in the room with me. It’s funny, too. Rita asked me once
when he was two if I wanted to move him into another room. Spock or one of those other quacks
claims it’s bad for kids to sleep with their parents, see? Supposed to give them traumas about sex and
all that. But we never did it unless the kid was asleep. And I didn’t want to move him. I was afraid to,
after Denny and Shirl.’
‘But you did move him, didn’t you?’ Dr Harper asked.
‘Yeah,’ Billings said. He smiled a sick, yellow smile. ‘I did.’
Silence again. Billings wrestled with it.
‘I had to!’ he barked finally. ‘I had to! It was all right when Rita was there, but when she was gone, it
started to get bolder. It started . . .’ He rolled his eyes at Harper and bared his teeth in a savage grin. ‘Oh,
you won’t believe it. I know what you think, just another goofy for your casebook, I know that, but you
weren’t there, you lousy smug head-peeper.
‘One night every door in the house blew wide open. One morning I got up and found a trail of mud and
filth across the hall between the coat closet and the front door. Was it going out? Coming in? I don’t
know! Before Jesus, I just don’t know! Records all scratched up and covered with slime, mirrors
broken . . . and the sounds . . . the sounds…
He ran a hand through his hair. ‘You’d wake up at three in the morning and look into the dark and at
first you’d say, “It’s only the clock.” But underneath it you could hear something moving in a stealthy
way. But not too stealthy, because it wanted you to hear it. A slimy sliding sound like something from
the kitchen drain. Or a clicking sound, like claws being dragged lightly over the staircase banister. And
you’d close your eyes, knowing that hearing it was bad, but if you saw it. .
‘And always you’d be afraid that the noises might stop for a little while, and then there would be a
laugh right over your face and breath of air like stale cabbage on your face, and then hands on your
throat.’
Billings was pallid and trembling.
‘So I moved him. I knew it would go for him, see. Because he was weaker. And it did. That very first