hovering just out of sight, for as long as Kelly could remember. Even when she’d been a tiny baby, long before she could walk or talk, she’d caught glimpses of him.
In her dreams, his face would come to her out of the darkness of sleep, leering at her, horrible features twisted into a malicious smile, his fingers—the clawed talons of a carnivorous bird—stretching toward her. She would awaken screaming, and her mother would hurry to her, lifting her from her crib, cradling her, soothing her, whispering to her that she was safe.
Those words were the first she learned.
You’re safe.
Safe.
Even now, at sixteen, she could remember speaking the word.
Safe.
But she hadn’t been safe. Not then, when her mother had whispered to her that everything was all right, that she’d only had a terrible dream, and not now, when even wide awake she could feel him creeping closer to her, reaching out, reaching.…
For what?
What was it he wanted from her?
She knew nothing about the monstrous figure of her nightmares; had no idea who he was, nor where he’d come from.
All she knew was that he was there, never far from her. Waiting. And he wanted something.
Tonight, as Kelly moved restlessly around the small house she shared with her parents, she knew he was closer than ever.
It was an oppressive night, unseasonably hot for early June, the kind of thick, muggy night that hung heavily, threatening to suffocate her. She’d opened the windows an hour before in the vain hope that even the faintest of breezes might stir the air, might cool her skin, might even drive away the madness that threatened to destroy her tonight.
She knew that’s what it was.
There was no man; there were no hands reaching out to her.
It was in her mind, all of it.
That’s what she’d been told, first by her mother, and then by the doctors her mother had taken her to.
The man who pursued her, who skulked eternally on the fringes of her life, existed only in her own mind. She’d made him up sometime long ago, and should have forgotten him, too, sometime almost as long ago.
She’d talked to the doctor for an hour a week, and tried to do what he’d told her, tried to figure out why she might have invented the man. For a long time the doctor had insisted that it was because she was adopted, telling her that she was imagining a father to replace the real father she’d never known. Kelly hadn’t believed him—after all, if she was going to create a father, he wouldn’t be anything like the terrible image she saw in her dreams. And why wouldn’t she have imagined a mother, too? Besides, she’d seen the man long before she’d ever known she was adopted, long before she’d begun to understand how different she was from everyone else.
Finally, when the nightmare man refused to go away, and she’d known he never would, she stopped talking about him, stopped trying to think of reasons why he might be there. Instead, she’d simply reported to the psychiatrist that he was gone, and at last she’d been allowed to stop going to the doctor.
For almost five years, she hadn’t mentioned him at all. But the frightening image that haunted Kelly’s nights had not gone away.
She’d stopped crying out in the night when he suddenly appeared out of the darkness of her slumber; stopped telling her mother when she caught glimpses of him at the veiled edges of her sight.
She stopped talking about much of anything, terrified that somehow she would slip, and her parents, or her teachers, or the other kids she knew, might find out that she was crazy.
For that’s what she was.
Crazy.
Her terrible secret was that only she knew it.
But tonight it would end.
She stopped her aimless prowling of the house and went to the small bedroom that had been hers for as long as she could remember. The hot, humid night seemed even more cloying in the confines of the room, as Kelly glanced over the few objects that stood against its faded walls.
It was, she thought, a tired-looking place, filled with worn-out furniture that had never been any good, even when it was new.
Just like herself: tired, worn-out, never any good even to start with.
A few months ago Kelly had covered the walls with posters-strange, dark images advertising the bands whose records she collected but rarely bothered to play.
Another of her secrets: she didn’t care about the bands, didn’t really like the music, didn’t even