Page 1 of Nightwatching

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There was someone in the house.

She stood in her son’s dark bedroom. Through its open door and down the long hallway, the landing at the top of the steep kitchen stairs was lit by the dim glow of a plug-in night-light.

The light was there so the children would be able to see the stairs in their nighttime wanderings. To prevent them silently, helplessly falling as they padded from their rooms to their parents’ bedroom overnight seeking water, or comfort, or after a wet bed.

The old house let the wind hiss through and crack its ribs. The sounds of it bracing against the storm, its staggered breathing, were familiar. But through it all came noises that rooted her to the spot. Also familiar, but not at this time of night. Not when she had been sure she was the only one awake.

In the brief hush between the frozen gusts came the wheeze of weight on the stairs.

You’re imagining things.

Her daughter lay asleep in the next room. Her son was already sleeping again a few steps away from her.

For a moment the hope that it might be her husband lifted her.

Stop it. That’s impossible.

But it could be her daughter sleepwalking again. They’d bolted the door of the girl’s room that led to the old front stairs—a placetoo dangerous to let her sightlessly wander. But it was possible her daughter had gone out the other door to her bedroom. The one they left unlocked despite the girl’s sleepwalking and the danger of the kitchen stairs. The door they left open so she could use the bathroom at night, so that she understood she was still a big girl, they trusted her and she should trust herself.

Yes, that could explain it! And you wouldn’t have heard the baby monitor go on.

Her husband had mounted a motion-activated baby monitor outside their daughter’s unlocked bedroom door after three nights of finding the little girl standing at their bedside, still and unwakeable in the darkness.

“What can I say?” Her husband had shrugged. “Cameras are what I know.”

Click, fizz, beep!The monitor would spring to life in their bedroom, and their daughter would pass on the screen, looking blurry and bleached on the night vision, retinas giving an animallike mirror flash. One of them (her, always her) would get up and intercept their daughter before the girl had a chance to accidentally hurt herself. She would guide her little girl back to bed, stroke the dark hair away from the empty open eyes, away from the slack mouth, sit with her daughter until she lay back on her pillow.

That must be it. Sleepwalking.

And yet, she couldn’t make herself move. Couldn’t unfasten her eyes from the distant night-light. A part of her remembered that the sound of her daughter on those stairs was simply different. A part of her acknowledged that in all her daughter’s nighttime drifting, the little girl had never actually gone down the stairs. And the sounds were coming from the stairs.

A twisted bit of nursery rhyme echoed through her head, one ofthe endlessly reread child things that now permeated her consciousness.

If wishes were fishes we’d have some to fry. If wishes were fishes we’d eat and not die.

A low thump, a pause. A complete and instant switch in her thinking.

He’s hit his head.

It sometimes happened to people who were unfamiliar with the eccentricities of the old house. Anyone taller than six feet had to tilt their head or duck to avoid the low cut of the ceiling at the turn of the kitchen stairs.

There were thin, scraping sounds as this person readjusted. Recalculated. Moved again.

She saw fingers wrap the banister like white spider legs.

The intruder pulled himself up slowly until he stood at the top of the stairs, features washed to invisibility by the darkness and the way the night-light shone low behind him. For the briefest of moments looking at that silhouette, she saw her husband. Opened her mouth to call to him, ask how he’d gotten home.

But your husband wouldn’t hit his head. Not tall enough.

With this thought came clarity. The figure went wrong around the edges and unfurled into a stranger.

It’s a man.

He was tall. His arms hung loose and long. His presence had the distantly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she’d tasted before but couldn’t quite place.

Do you recognize him? Who is he?

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