And, thanks to his fastidious preparation, his industrious traps and triggers, and his keen sense of sound and sight, he’d avoided being scared to death once more, and could dream to face another day tomorrow.

2

Mrs. Doris, Kamp’s eighty-eight-year-old landlady and next-door neighbor, watched with concern as Walter, a year after moving in, trucked up and down the five flights of stairs, carrying up tools and carrying out doors, sweating so hard he looked like he might pop. She wondered deeply at those doors he was removing, one of which she recognized as belonging to the bathroom. She wondered, too, at the blueprint he’d accidentally dropped in the hall, where it unrolled for her to see his vision of an apartment with no surprises.

She’d stopped him numerous times but gotten little information out of him. He’d simply smiled behind his big blue glasses and run a plump hand through his reddish-blond hair, before limping back up the stairs, carrying his saw or hatchet or ax.

She worried.

Though she had known Walter for a good long year, this behavior was certainly alarming. She believed he was good for the rent money, his numerous municipal jobs seemed to pay well enough, and yet…it was possible he’d overextended himself somehow. Or as her sister Maude once called it, it was likely Walter Kamp had gone ape.

And to see his ape-ish size trundling up and down the steps didn’t help squash this blooming concern. But when Walter paid her for the next year in advance, a gesture Mrs. Doris had not been anticipating, she was pleased, despite fearing she’d been handed an envelope of, as Maude would say, hush money.

The truth was, until recently, Walter Kamp had been one of her best tenants. If only for his stature among the Goblin intelligentsia (a circle Mrs. Doris didn’t run in but, by virtue of gossip and flyer, was aware of). Walter was bright. Funny. And nobody could argue his being the wisest Goblin historian the city boasted. The man could talk George Carroll like no other. And the Original 60 were like family to him. Yet wasn’t it the best and the brightest that usually fell for what Maude would call life’s painful pitfalls?

Lately Walter had been talking about fear. And being frightened. And how he was (as he put it one night, high on wine) afraid of being scared to death.

A strange concern, Mrs. Doris thought, but she’d heard stranger. And yet, watching Walter carry things in and out of the building, Mrs. Doris naturally opined that he’d be best served with exercise, if it was his heart he was so worried about. Walter, having just carried a stack of mirrors of many sizes outside, simply smiled and said something she’d long remember.

Did you know that some mothers scare their kids to death, Mrs. Doris? With a simple game of peekaboo?