She saw a cover in the closet doorway, picked it up, and spied the carefully hidden stack of horror comics beneath. “What the hell?” She kneeled down beside the magazines and books and felt her face flush with anger as she sifted through the Fangorias and GoreZones and Famous Monsters of Filmlands. Many of them were emblazoned with dripping monsters and hideous mutants and imaginatively dismembered victims.

“Dammit, Delbert,” she muttered as she leafed through one of the magazines, “how many times have I told you not to buy this junk?” She dropped the book as if it might bite her fingers and just sat, fuming. No wonder the boys were so rattled. How could any normal child read such trash and not be affected? A horrible thought struck her—what if she’d been placing the blame on Chris unfairly? What if she’d had it backward all the time, that Del and Bart had convinced themselves that it was a vampire who beat them up, and when poor troubled Chris came along he was unwittingly drawn into their fantasy world?

They all have to go, she fumed. I won’t have this trash in my house. She scooped up the whole stack, wrapped it in the blanket, and went out into the hall. The trash cans were out back, along the side of the garage. But when she got to the back door, she hesitated. She felt a twinge of fear, though not because of the vandals who’d been out there earlier. They were long gone by now, she reasoned. Seeing a nut with a machine gun would have put the fear of God in them readily enough. No, this was a more familiar fear, one she knew most every day. Namely, fifty-five pounds of canine muscle named Bruiser. The Citozzi’s pit bull next door always made her nervous, even out of sight behind a boundary hedge and a tall chain-link fence. Del had assured her that the dog was docile, but she had seen too many news reports on TV . . . She turned and crept back into the living room just long enough to retrieve Bart’s customized broomstick. Then she unlocked the back door and stepped outside.

It wasn’t as dark as she’d expected; the security lamp on the corner of the garage to her right did a good job of keeping the night at bay and spilled a cone of liquid light across the backyard. It illuminated the tire swing on the lowest branch of the big oak and the grill that hadn’t seen charcoal since two summers ago and the lawn-darts set that the boys seemed incapable of putting away. The mower was in the middle of the yard, its last meal digested and waiting to hibernate in the back of the garage until spring.