The first time I saw the Hobo I was just a kid, and I went screaming into Mom’s room about some maniac peeping in on me. Mom ran outside, threw on the porch lights, but no one was there. He was gone as a ghost.

Of course Mom punished me for making up stories, made me do all of Murphy’s chores for a week. So I didn’t tell her about the next time he was there, about a month later. Or the time after that, when I saw him watching us from the grocery store parking lot. He wore a grimy old coat and wretched clothes, like he had spent the last dozen years wandering, dirty and alone. The Hobo smiled, his teeth all rotten, and he gave me a little wave. It sent chills all over my body. By the time we’d loaded the groceries up, he had vanished.

I’d seen the Hobo a thousand times throughout my life. He’d been a constant, a fear lingering in the back of my mind always. And sometimes he climbed to the front of my eyelids, and there he stood before me. Every time I was terrified.

It wasn’t because he looked angry or murderous, because he didn’t, not exactly. The older I got, the more I saw him watching me, the more I realized he looked worried, concerned, curious even. So many times I’d wanted to grab him by the beard, to shake him, to make him tell me what he meant, what he was doing there, why he kept watching me at night. But I was afraid of what would happen if I tried.

I hated the Hobo. I hated him more than anyone, even Horace. I had nightmares about him when I wasn’t having visions of him: That he crawled through the window with knives drawn, his mouth agape. That he sliced my throat and gnawed my fingers off. That he bound me and abducted me. That he tied me down and made me listen to the screams of my mom and sister as he murdered them while I lay there, helpless. That he hid under my bed or in my closet like some kind of boogeyman, and when the lights went off he made himself known. And by then it was too late.

I remember one time during a terrible storm that blew in on an April evening when tornado sirens were wailing and Mom made us go hide in the hallway. The lights were flickering, soon to go out, and the rain stopped, and all went quiet and peaceful. I knew what that meant—that the tornado was coming, that it would be here any moment. For some reason, I don’t know why, I jumped up and went running. It seemed like fate, you know, this unavoidable calamity flung down from the sky. I was maybe eleven years old, but I knew I had to see it, I had to see what inescapable doom really looked like. I wanted to stare it in the eyes, menacing as an Old Testament idol, something a thousand pagan priests would rend their cloaks for.