He reached the three steps that led up to the front door. This close, he could see how old the wood was. He could see the broken doorbell with the wires hanging out. This part of town was all dark. No streetlights. Behind the house were the woods, and the trees there never seemed to grow any leaves. They stood against the dark sky and didn’t move, like they were waiting for something bad to happen.

All these thoughts, my brother said, flickered through his mind. Them and more. The biggest and darkest thought, and the heaviest, the one that pressed down on all the others, was the feeling that he was being watched by someone with no goodness in them. He felt eyes on him that were mean and greedy and so full of hate, and he felt like the house would swallow him up if he got too close.

So he stood on the first step, leaned in as far as he could get, and knocked three times on the door.

Three loud knocks, so loud they could have woken the dead and, even though he was one who made it, the noise broke something within him and he turned tail and bolted, back to the hooting and hollering of his friends, and they grabbed their bikes and cycled away from there like the devil himself was on their tails.

All this he told me one Saturday night years later, right before he went out with his college buddies. This was his version of a pep talk, because tonight it was my turn to knock on that door and my brother knew it, and he went away laughing at how white my face had gotten.

I told my parents I was going to bed early, and my dad grunted like he’d barely heard me and didn’t lift his head from the book he was reading. My mom didn’t drag her gaze away from the TV. She was watching some game show. Her favourite was Wheel of Fortune. Dad said he hated game shows, but I caught him enough times glued to Jeopardy! that we ended up watching it in secret, just us. That’s one of my fondest memories of my dad, even now.

I went to my room and turned out the light and got into bed fully dressed. I don’t know why I did that. My parents never checked on me, anyway.