Night-time always felt slippery to Randy. Not the ‘it’s eleven o’clock, so I’d better go to bed’ night-time, but the ‘it’s three a.m. and something’s just startled me out of sleep’ night-time. That was when reality seemed a little harder to hold on to, and the things a person had long since written off to childhood imaginings—the ghouls and the goblins, the monsters and the malevolent—began to slither back into thought. It had been a long time since Randy had woken up and felt the urge to pull all his limbs back under the covers (they can’t get you if you’re under the safety of the comforter) or held his breath to listen for oddities (they can’t find you if they can’t hear you breathing).
He’d almost managed to tell himself it was nothing. The brilliant red numbers that read 02:54 had bee
