Still chuckling, he turned and sat with his back to the door. Looking down the length of his rooms, he saw his great bed illuminated by the hanging holiday lights.

Did I scream? When I woke up?

He tried to remember. It mattered to him. Because if he hadn’t, what had Mrs. Doris heard?

“Goblin history,” Kamp said. “It got to us both.”

But while this felt good to say, Kamp couldn’t be sure it was true.

Kamp got to his feet quickly.

What exactly did she hear?

He was starting to sweat now. Imagining the screams of the Original 60 on the very land on which his rooms were built.

Goblin.

You’re a true Gobliner. Truer than any other. Most of us are passing through, but Goblin has gotten into your bones.

Mrs. Doris had said that. And what exactly did she mean?

An alarm went off in his room. He gasped and stumbled back against the door, his hand to his chest.

He barreled down the hall to his bed.

The clock read three forty-five a.m.

Had he set it for that? He couldn’t remember. But if he hadn’t, who did?

“Mrs. Doris?” he asked.

The thought chilled him. His landlady, like she was in his dream, carrying the folded rungs of flesh, changing his alarms, erasing his tapes, adding corners and small doors to his rooms.

“Stop it,” he said. “She would never.”

But if not her, then who?

To Blackwater, he’d told Mrs. Doris over wine, Goblin wasn’t a place anybody should settle. The land was sacred and the rain suggested great spiritual power. This land wasn’t for dwelling, Mrs. Doris. It was for…

“Spirits.”

Kamp looked to the kitchen. He surveyed his rooms.

Was something in there with him…right now?

He felt the first tingling rise of panic.

If something was there, if something had reset his alarms, now was the time it would show itself. He was as sure of this as he was the spelling of George Carroll’s name. He could feel the air pressure in his rooms change, making space for another, something squeezing itself into Kamp’s domain. Something with a need to show itself.

“I’m not ready!” he screamed. Then he clamped a hand over his mouth. The last thing he wanted was Mrs. Doris coming over again.

He was stuck that way, like a Sherman topiary of himself. Standing there like Eula the gorilla at the Goblin Zoo. But Eula was strong. And he felt helpless.

He thought of his heart. That unreliable muscle no bigger than his fist, pulsing uncertainly, ultimately a false support. Oh heart! Tell me…can you withstand it? The day the ghost shows itself…how will you fare?

He stepped to the television and rewound the tape. Saw himself on all fours by the front door. Saw himself in bed.

Saw himself scream, too.

You sonofabitch.