He bent to the porch despite the groan in his lower back and swept long, thin hands across the wood, hissing when they found splinters and peeling paint but not stopping, knowing better than to stop. It was too quiet; the silence was total and awesome and surrounding him and waiting, just waiting to be shattered by a—there, the keys! He scooped them up but couldn’t see them, felt blindly along their profiles and damned his fingers for their numbness. The round one, the round head, that one! Now, get it in the door . . . His hands were shaking violently now as he grabbed for the knob and stabbed at the keyhole three times before it sank home and turned and the lock clicked. The old man shouldered the door open, lurched inside, and immediately slammed it behind him, locking and bolting and security-chaining it in a few frantic moves. Then he slumped against the door for support and waited for his breath to catch up. And he listened.

Nothing. He sighed. There’s nothing out there. It was all your imagination.

Wasn’t it?

Leaning heavily on his cane, he moved away from the front door and crossed the entry hall as quickly as he could manage. He was almost to the staircase when he noticed the bar of light beneath the parlor doors to his left. He hadn’t seen the light from outside—the drapes must have been drawn. Who would be up at this time of night?

He slid open the double doors to find the television playing and three of his fellow boarders cast in its flickering glow. “Uncle Jim” Taggart’s wheelchair was parked at one end of the couch, his head thrown back and his pinched, half-moon face flexed from the efforts of snoring. At the other end sat Hubert Ranall, the only black roomie in the house and one of the few in all of Isherwood. He was the youngest of the residents, a mere baby at seventy-eight, and age had yet to shrink his solid frame. A big, amiable bear of a man with a fringe of frosted hair and a neon smile, he was scribbling away in his notebook as usual, adding yet another chapter to the memoirs of a decorated veteran in the Pacific.

Ida Fleming was there as well, wrapped in her shroudlike housecoat and hairnet, sunk deep into her recliner near the TV. The diminutive woman, with her granny glasses and basset-hound jowls, did not look well; her heart condition had worsened over the past few years, leaving her wilted and fragile. Still, come hell or high water, she made it to the television every day. For while Hubert had his Good-War memories to fill the hours of the day, she had her televangelists, and she followed their antics with great fervor. From Falwell to Swaggart to Tilton, she watched them all with a steely resolve and her leatherette Bible spread upon her lap.