“What are you?” she sobbed. “A man? A devil? What in God’sname are you?”

The wind gusted.

The door banged.

Before her, the figure’s face seemed to change… seemed to wrinkle upward in a grin. There was something horribly familiar about that grin, and Jessie felt the core of her sanity, which had borne this assault with remarkable strength until now, at last begin to waver.

“Daddy?” she whispered. “Daddy, is that you?”

Don’t be silly! the Goodwife cried, but Jessie could now feel even that sustaining voice wavering toward hysteria. Don’t be agoose, Jessie! Your father has been dead since 1980!”

Instead of helping, it made things worse. Much worse. Tom Mahout had been interred in the family crypt in Falmouth, and that was less than a hundred miles from here. jessie’s burning, terrified mind insisted upon showing her a hunched figure, its clothes and rotted shoes caked with blue-green mold, slinking across moon-drenched fields and hurrying through tracts of scruffy woods between suburban housing developments; she saw gravity working on the decayed muscles of its arms as it came, gradually stretching them until the hands were swinging beside the knees. It was her father. It was the man who had delighted her with rides on his shoulders at three, who had comforted her at the age of six when a capering circus clown frightened her into tears, who had told her bedtime stories until she was eight-old enough, he said, to read them on her own. Her father, who had cobbled together homemade filters on the afternoon of the eclipse and held her on his lap as the moment of totality approached, her father who had said, Don’t worryabout anything…don’t worry, and don’t look around. But she had thought maybe he was worried, because his voice had been all thick and shaky, hardly like his usual voice at all.

In the corner, the thing’s grin seemed to widen and suddenly the room was filled with that smell, that flat smell that was half-metallic and half-organic; a smell that reminded her of oysters in cream, and how your hand smelled after you’d been clutching a fistful of pennies, and the way the air smelled just before a thunderstorm.

“Daddy, is it you?” she asked the shadowy thing in the corner, and from somewhere came the distant cry of the loon. Jessie could feel the tears trickling slowly down her cheeks. And now something exceedingly odd was happening, something she never would have expected in a thousand years. As she became increasingly sure that it was her father, that it was Tom Mahout standing in the corner, twelve years gone in death or not, her terror began to leave her. She had drawn her legs up, but now she let them slip back down and fall open. As she did, a fragment of her dream recurred-DADDY’s LITTLE GIRL printed across her breasts in Peppermint Yum-Yum lipstick.

“All right, go ahead,” she told the shape. Her voice was a little hoarse but otherwise steady. “It’s why you came back, isn’t it? So go ahead. How could I stop you, anyway? Just promise you’ll unlockme afterward. That you’ll unlock me and let me go.'.

The figure made no response of any kind. It only stood within its surreal jackstraws of moonlight and shadow, grinning at her. And as the seconds passed (twelve-twelve-twelve, the clock on the bureau said, seeming to suggest that the whole idea of time passing was an illusion, that time had in fact frozen solid), Jessie thought that perhaps she had been right in the first place, that there was really no one in here with her at all. She had begun to feel like a weathervane in the grip of those prankish, contradictory gusts of wind that sometimes blow just before a severe thunderstorm or a tornado.

Your father cannot come back from the dead, Goodwife Burlingame said in a voice that strove to be firm and failed miserably. Still, Jessie saluted her effort. Come hell or high water, the Goodwife stayed right in there and kept pitching. This isn’t a horror movie oran episode of The Twilight Zone, Jess; this is real life.

But another part of her-a part which was perhaps the home of those few voices inside which were the real UFOS, not just the wiretaps her subconscious had patched into her conscious mind at some point-insisted that there was a darker truth here, something that trailed from the heels of logic like an irrational (and perhaps supernatural) shadow. This voice insisted that things changed in the dark. Things especially changed in the dark, it said, when a person was alone. When that happened, the locks fell off the cage which held the imagination, and anything-any things-might be set free.

It can be your Daddy, this essentially alien part of her whispered, and with a chill of fear Jessie recognized it as the voice of madness and reason mingled together. It can be, never doubt it. People arealmost always safe from ghosts and ghouls and the living dead in daylight, and they’re usually safe from them at night if they’re with others,hut when a person is alone in the dark, all bets are off.Men and women alone in the dark are like open doors, Jessie, and if they call out or screamfor help, who knows what dread things may answer? Who knows whatsome men and women have seen in the hour of their solitary deaths? Is itso hard to believe that some of them may have died of fear, no matterwhat the words on the death certificates say?

“I don’t believe that,” she said in a blurry, wavering voice. She spoke louder, striving for a firmness she didn’t feel. “You’re not my father! I don’t think you’re anyone! I think you’re only made of moonlight!”

As if in answer, the figure bent forward in a kind of mocking bow, and for one moment its face-a face which seemed too real to doubt-slipped out of the shadows. Jessie uttered a rusty shriek as the pallid rays falling through the skylight painted its features with tawdry carnival gilt. It wasn’t her father; compared with the evil and the lunacy she saw in the face of her visitor, she would have welcomed her father, even after twelve years in a cold coffin. Red-rimmed, hideously sparkling eyes regarded her from deep eye-sockets wrapped in wrinkles. Thin lips twitched upward in a dry grin, revealing discolored molars and jagged canines which seemed almost as long as the stray dog’s fangs.

One of its white hands lifted the object she had half-seen and half-intuited sitting by its feet in the darkness. At first she thought it had taken Gerald’s briefcase from the little room he used as a study down here, but when the creature lifted the box-shaped thing into the light, she saw it was a lot bigger than Gerald’s briefcase and much older. It looked like the sort of old-fashioned sample case travelling salesmen had once carried.

“Please,” she whispered in a strengthless, wheezing little voice. “Whatever you are, please don’t hurt me. You don’t have to let me go if you don’t want to, that’s all right, but please don’t hurt me.

Its grin grew, and she saw tiny twinkles far back in its mouth-her visitor apparently had gold teeth or gold fillings in there, just like Gerald. It seemed to laugh soundlessly, as if gratified by her terror. Then its long fingers were unsnapping the catches of its bag

(I am dreaming, I think, now it does feel like a dream, oh thankGod it does)

and holding it open to her. The case was full of bones and jewelry. She saw finger-bones and rings and teeth and bracelets and ulnae and pendants; she saw a diamond big enough to choke a rhino, glittering milky trapezoids of moonlight from within the stiff, delicate curves of an infant’s ribcage. She saw these things and wanted them to be a dream, yes, wanted them to be, but if it was, it was like no dream she’d ever had before. It was the situation-handcuffed to the bed while a half-seen maniac silently showed off his treasures-that was dreamlike. The feeling, however…