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For Curtis, the best living human

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Jane woke up and whispered, “Julie?”

The room yawned around her. After two years of sleeping alone in her own bedroom in the new house, Jane no longer dreamed of the ceiling fan dropping onto the bed and chopping her up. The spiders, too, had vanished from the shadows; ten-year-olds don’t need to have the corners checked before bedtime. Only occasionally, when something woke her in the middle of the night, the silence around her ached for Julie’s soft breathing. In the old house, she used to hoist one foot over the top bunk railing and giggle until Julie said, Shhh, Janie, go back to sleep. Now, she shut her eyes tightly before they could drift toward the dark seams where the walls and ceiling met.

The next noise definitely came from Julie’s room.

Jane pulled back the covers and slid her bare feet down to the carpet. In the old house, a braided rug slipped over the smooth wooden floor when she got out of bed. Now her feet barely made a sound on thick carpet as she padded to the door and peered down the dark hallway. A faint rectangle of lighter darkness hovered at the end — a closed door.

They rarely slept with doors closed; Janie’s room got too hot, Julie’s too cold. Mom grumbled about the air circulation in two-story houses, but Mom and Dad’s room downstairs on the first floor was always shut at night, because they were adults. Now Julie was too, or wanted to be. Ever since her thirteenth birthday, she seemed to be practicing for adulthood all the time, brushing her hair slowly in front of the bathroom mirror as if rehearsing for some secret play, sitting at her desk to write in her diary instead of flopping on the bed stomach-first, like Jane. And closing her bedroom door.

At the end of the hall, the pale rectangle shuddered, a crack of darkness opening up around one side. Julie’s bedroom door receded inward, four large fingers hooked around its edge.

Before she had time to think, Jane ducked into her closet, crouched down, and pulled the door shut behind her. The fingers — they were too high up on the door to belong to Julie, too large to belong to her mother. They didn’t belong to her father either, but she didn’t know how she knew they didn’t, and that was the most unsettling thing of all.