Routinely and without apparent effort, P.J. became the center of every social circle that 
he entered. Highly intelligent yet self-effacing, handsome yet free of vanity, 
acerbically witty but never mean, P.J. had been a terrific big brother when they had been 
growing up. More than that, he'd been-and after all these years, still was-the standard 
by which Joey Shannon measured himself, the one person into whom he would have remade 
himself if that had been possible.
    In the decades since, he had fallen far short of that standard. Although P.J. moved 
from success to success, Joey had an unerring knack for failure.
    Now he took a few ice cubes from the bowl on the floor beside his straight-backed 
chair and dropped them into his glass. He added two inches of Jack Daniel's.
    One thing that Joey hadn't failed at was drinking. Although his bank account had 
seldom been above two thousand dollars in his entire adult life, he always managed to 
afford the best blended whiskey. No one could say that Joey Shannon was a cheap drunk.
    On the most recent night that he'd spent at home-Saturday, October twenty-fifth, 
1975-he had sat at this window with a bottle of RC Cola in his hand. He hadn't been a 
boozer back then. Diamond-bright stars had adorned the sky, and there had seemed to be an 
infinite number of possible lives waiting for him beyond the mountains.
    Now he had the whiskey. He was grateful for it.
    It was October twenty-first, 1995-another Saturday. Saturday was always the worst 
night of the week for him, although he didn't know why. Maybe he disliked Saturday 
because most people dressed up to go out to dinner or dancing or to a show to celebrate 
the passage of another workweek-while Joey found nothing to celebrate about having 
endured another seven days in the prison that was his life.
    Shortly before eleven o'clock the storm broke. Brilliant chains of molten-silver 
lightning flashed and rattled across the wedge of sky, providing him with flickering, 
unwanted reflections of himself in the window. Rolling thunder shook the first fat 
raindrops from the clouds; they snapped and spattered against the glass, and the ghostly 
image of Joey's face dissolved before him.
    At half past midnight he rose from the chair and went to the bed. The room was as 
black as a coal mine, but even after twenty years he could find his way around without 
light. In his mind's eye, he held a detailed image of the worn and cracked linoleum 
floor, the oval rag rug that his mother had made, the narrow bed with simple painted-iron 
headboard, the single nightstand with warped drawers. In one corner was the heavily 
scarred desk at which he had done his homework through twelve years of school and, when 
he was eight or nine, had written his first stories about magical kingdoms and monsters 
and trips to the moon.
    As a boy, he had loved books and had wanted to grow up to be a writer. That was one 
of the few things at which he hadn't failed in the past twenty years-though only because 
he had never tried. After that October weekend in 1975, he'd broken his long habit of 
writing stories and abandoned his dream.
    The bed was no longer covered by a chenille spread, as it had been in those days, and 
in fact it wasn't even fitted with sheets. Joey was too tired and fuzzy-headed to bother 
searching for linens.
    He stretched out on his back on the bare mattress, still wearing his shirt and jeans, 
not bothering to kick off his shoes. The soft twang of the weak springs was a familiar 
sound in the darkness.
    In spite of his weariness, Joey didn't want to sleep. Half a bottle of Jack Daniel's 
had failed to quiet his nerves or to diminish his apprehension. He felt vulnerable. 
Asleep, he'd be defenseless.
    Nevertheless, he had to try to get some rest. In little more than twelve hours, he 
would bury his dad, and he needed to build up strength for the funeral, which wasn't 
going to be easy on him.
    He carried the straight-backed chair to the hall door, tilted and wedged it under the 
knob: a simple but effective barricade.
    His room was on the second floor. No intruder could easily reach the window from 
outside. Besides, it was locked.
    Now, even if he was sound asleep, no one could get into the room without making 
enough noise to alert him. No one. Nothing.
    In bed again, he listened for a while to the relentless roar of the rain on the roof. 
If someone was prowling the house at that very moment, Joey couldn't have heard him, for 
the gray noise of the storm provided perfect cover.
    "Shannon," he mumbled, "you're getting weird in middle age."
    Like the solemn drums of a funeral cortege, the rain marked Joey's procession into 
deeper darkness.
    In his dream, he shared his bed with a dead woman who wore a strange transparent 
garment smeared with blood. Though lifeless, she suddenly became animated by demonic 
energy, and she pressed one pale hand to his face. Do you want to make love to me? she 
asked. No one will ever know. Even I couldn't be a witness against you. I'm not just dead 
but blind. Then she turned her face toward him, and he saw that her eyes were gone. In 
her empty sockets was the deepest darkness he had ever known. I'm yours, Joey. I'm all 
yours.
    He woke not with a scream but with a cry of sheer misery. He sat on the edge of the 
bed, his face in his hands, sobbing softly.
    Even dizzy and half nauseated from too much booze, he knew that his reaction to the 
nightmare was peculiar. Although his heart raced with fear, his grief was greater than 
his terror. Yet the dead woman was no one he had ever known, merely a hobgoblin born of 
too little sleep and too much Jack Daniel's. The previous night, still shaken by the news 
of his dad's death and dreading the trip to Asherville, he had dozed only fitfully. Now, 
because of weariness and whiskey, his dreams were bound to be populated with monsters. 
She was nothing more than the grotesque denizen of a nightmare. Nevertheless, the memory 
of that eyeless woman left him half crushed by an inexplicable sense of loss as heavy as 
the world itself.
    According to the radiant dial of his watch, it was three-thirty in the morning. He 
had been asleep less than three hours.
    Darkness still pressed against the window, and endless skeins of rain unraveled 
through the night.
    He got up from the bed and went to the corner desk where he had left the 
half-finished bottle of Jack Daniel's. One more nip wouldn't hurt. He needed something to 
make it through to the dawn.
    As Joey uncapped the whiskey, he was gripped by a peculiar urge to go to the window. 
He felt drawn as if by a magnetic force, but he resisted. Crazily, he was afraid that he 
might see the dead woman on the far side of the rain-washed glass, levitating one story 
above the ground: blond hair tangled and wet, empty eye sockets darker than the night, in 
a transparent gown, arms extended, wordlessly imploring him to fling up the window and 
plunge into the storm with her.
    He became convinced that she was floating out there like a ghost. He dared not even 
glance toward the window or risk catching sight of it from the corner of his eye. If he 
saw her peripherally, even that minimal eye contact would be an invitation for her to 
come into his room. Like a vampire, she could tap at the window and plead to be let in, 
but she could not cross his threshold unless invited.