The Neighbour. Dean Koontz

that made the Pomerantz place so like Poe’s House of Usher just before it sank into the swamp. At the same time, I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like when, at the end of that summer, she went far away to school, leaving me as the only member of the family who didn’t want to eat dinner off a TV tray.

      In early June, nearly a month before I heard Jonah Kirk rocking that Fats Domino tune at his grandfather’s house, across the street from our place, a weird thing happened next door. The residence in question was not to the east, not the Janowski place, where my mother and Mrs. Janowski regularly shared gossip, most of it delusional fantasy, about the marital relations of other people who lived on our block. It was instead one door west of us, at the former Rupert Clockenwall place, which had been unoccupied ever since old Mr. Clockenwall died of a massive heart attack a month earlier.

      The strangeness started at 3:00 one morning, when an unusual sound awakened me. As I sat up in bed, I didn’t think the noise had been in my room. I was pretty sure it came from beyond the window, although it might have been the last sound in a dream that, by its very threatening nature, compelled the sleeper to wake. In this case, it called to mind a long sword being drawn from a metal scabbard, the stropping of steel on steel.

      Even in an older residential neighborhood like ours, far from the high-rises and the Midtown bustle, the city is never silent, and long before you’re twelve years old, you learn to tune out its most familiar rattles, clashes, and percussions to get a good night’s rest. What woke me now was alien to the ear. I threw back the top sheet and got out of bed.

      Earlier I had raised the lower sash of the window in hope of a draft, but the night air remained warm and still. As I bent to the window, the sound came again and seemed to vibrate in the screen as if the blade of a stiletto had been whisked across that metal mesh, so that I startled backward.

      When the stropping came a third time, softer than before, I realized that it originated not inches from my face but from the house next door, and I leaned close to the window screen once more. Between the houses stood an ancient sycamore in full leaf. Perhaps because in its early years it had received too little sunlight or had suffered a bout with disease, the tree had attained a tormented architecture and did not entirely screen my view of the Clockenwall place. Through the twisted branches, I saw lamplight bloom beyond a downstairs window.

      The late Rupert Clockenwall’s only surviving relative was a brother who lived half a continent away. Until the small estate was settled, the house could not be put on the market for sale, and there had been no activity at the place since the day that Mr. Clockenwall died. Naturally, having the usual fantasy life of a twelve-year-old, I sometimes imagined dramas where none existed, and now I wondered if a burglar might have forced entry.

      Lamplight brightened another window on the ground floor and, soon thereafter, also one on the second floor. Through the sheers that hung over that upstairs window, a sinuous dark form whidded past the curtained glass. Although any moving shadow is bent by light and by every surface over which it travels, this one seemed particularly strange, bringing to mind the supple wings of a manta ray swimming the sea with all the grace of a bird in flight.

      Overcome by a sense that someone sinister must be prowling the Clockenwall house, I waited at the open window for a while, breathing the warm night air, hoping to glimpse that lithe and eerie shadow again or something more. Eventually, when I was not rewarded by any phantasmic shape or further peculiar sounds, even my boyish desire for mystery and adventure couldn’t sustain my attention. I had to admit that neither a burglar nor a vandal was likely to announce his invasion of the property by switching on nearly every light.

      After returning to bed, I soon fell back to sleep. I know that I had a bad dream in which my circumstances were desperate, but when I suddenly sat up in bed at 4:00 A.M., I could recall nothing of that nightmare. Little more than half awake, I went to the window, not to observe the house next door, where lights still glowed, but to close the lower sash. I also locked it, though the night was hot and a draft was much needed. I don’t remember why I believed that I should engage the lock, only that I felt the urgent need to do so.

      In bed once more, I half slept through the last sweltering hour of the summer night, muttering like a victim of malaria in a fever dream.

2

      Most mornings, our old man preferred a sandwich for breakfast, usually bacon and eggs on heavily buttered toast. In bad weather, he stood at the sink to eat, staring out at the small backyard, silent and remote, as though he must be pondering important philosophical issues—or planning a murder. On the nearby cutting board stood a mug of coffee. He held the sandwich in his right hand, a cigarette in his left, alternating between the two. When witness to this, I always hoped that in error he would take a bite of the cigarette or attempt to smoke the sandwich, but he never became confused.

      The morning following the activity at the Clockenwall house, he ate instead on the back porch. When he descended the steps and went to work, I retrieved the empty coffee mug and ashtray that were balanced on the flat cap of the porch railing. While I washed them at the kitchen sink, Amalia served breakfast to our mother in the living room, where on the TV some movie star was being interviewed by a morning-show host, the two of them competing to see who had the phoniest laugh. Our mother had ordered fried potatoes, a cheese omelet, and a cup of canned fruit cocktail. She and the old man rarely ate at the same time and never wanted the same thing.

      When Amalia returned to the kitchen, she said, “I think someone moved in next door during the night. My window was open, and a voice woke me, and then there were lights in all the rooms over there.”

      Her bedroom was on the same side of our house as mine. I said, “I didn’t hear anybody. Saw the lights, someone moving around over there, just a shadow. But no Realtor has put up a sign yet.”

      “Maybe they decided to rent the place instead of selling.”

      “Moving in at three in the morning is kinda weird. Was it just one person or a family, or what?”

      “I didn’t see anybody.”

      “What about the voice?”

      “Oh, that must have been a dream. There wasn’t anyone standing under my window. I thought someone called out from under my window, a man, but I must have been dreaming and woke up, because when I got out of bed and went to the window, no one was down there.”

      I put place mats and flatware on the dinette table. While I made toast, burning the first two slices, Amalia scrambled eggs and fried slices of ham for our breakfast.