Dad, Walter thought. What if it’s Dad who’s coming?

He blinked and realized he’d reached the middle of his rooms. The shadows of the many raindrops danced upon his Goblin Marauders tank top, and Walter looked down to see he’d dropped his blanket at his feet.

“Dad?” he said. “Are you the ghost I’m fearing?”

He barely made contact when he was alive!

It would surprise Kamp to know that, somewhere on that other side, his father might be looking for him.

And would he recognize him if he came? Both Harrison and Judy were buried standing up in the Goblin Cemetery and had been for a long time. It didn’t take an artist’s imagination to endure a vision of Dad in the kitchen, half rotten to the skull, bones making sharp angles out of his brown death suit.

Maybe it’d be his father’s one big chance to play father-educator by returning from the grave to tell Walter not to waste so much of his life on obsession.

Wanna end up like me, son? Carrying all your concerns into the ground?

Kamp paced between the refrigerator with the see-through door and the secured windows against the wall. He nearly stepped on the bear trap on the way.

“Dad,” he said, “Mom. Please don’t come to see me. Not yet! I’m not ungrateful. I love you both. I’m just not ready. I can’t handle it. My heart…my—”

He looked down the length of his rooms and saw that his blanket was balled up on his bed.

Kamp brought a hand to his chest.

He looked to the ground, to where he was sure he had left it last. And yet he had been pacing. To and fro. From one end of the apartment to the other. Was it possible he’d picked it up and set it down on the way?

A long, gurgled moan rolled out of his throat and Walter felt a sudden need to piss.

“There’s something hiding under my blanket on my bed,” he said.

The words were too real, too immediate, and he had to cover his eyes with both hands. When he pulled his big fingers away, he saw that the blanket was still there, bundled upon his bed.

Go on…push it aside.

But the thought was a bad one. A mean one. Walter couldn’t walk across his rooms any more than he could find the nerve to pull the blanket aside.

He stared at it for a long time. As the rain pounded against the glass. As his heart pounded against his ribs.

How long had he been thinking about his mother and father? How long had he been off his guard? Traveling through nostalgic woods, stepping under nostalgic archways…

Go on. Pull that blanket aside.

He was walking toward his bed at last, without the conscious knowledge of having decided to do it. When his big toes touched the Plexiglas base, he bent at the waist and reached for the line-switch that would ignite the bulb aimed at his bed.