Another groan, more harsh this time and, if at all possible, closer still.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Rector squeaked. He saw no one and nothing, heard only the breathing, the moan that came with an edge like gargling.

He ran, tripping over himself and the uneven, unstable stairs. Behind him they crumbled away; he heard them clatter, bounce, and break on their way to the ground. And he heard something else, too: a bang so loud that at first he didn’t realize it was a footstep. Not until a second bang followed behind it, then a third and a fourth, did Rector recognize the rhythm of something stomping behind him.

Not someone. Not this time.

For one ridiculous moment he wondered what’d become of the other guy, the one who’d come after him first. Where was he? Maybe he was evil, and maybe he was a murderer, but he’d been human—Rector was sure of that much. And whatever was behind him, this unseen foe, this was not a man. Men didn’t move so heavily, dropping from foot to foot with the weight of a horse. Men didn’t have such strides, longer than a half flight of stairs. Longer than …

A crash shattered the old building wall and ripped the rail out of the boy’s hands. He gasped and staggered, falling forward and catching himself. But the catch didn’t hold, and he slipped down farther, tumbling less gracefully than he might have if he’d gone down on purpose—but descending all the same, and face-first. On the way down, he whacked his chin on a step and knew it would mean more bleeding, but he couldn’t worry about that right now.

He scrambled on his hands and knees, ducking almost by accident, but his timing was good. As his head went down and his knees went out from under him, an enormous shadow leapfrogged him in a flash of terrible motion.

Through his one good lens Rector saw a shape that had two arms and two legs, but was in no way human. He watched it sail overhead, a lunging hop thrusting the huge, heavy thing from one turn of the stairs to the one below it, shattering the place where it landed.

It bellowed, and Rector’s heart nearly stopped. He still couldn’t see it well, not through the gum-thick air, but there it was, only a few feet in front of him. All he could make out was a person-shaped monster that couldn’t have been a person. No person was so huge, and no person had a face shaped like that, flattened and burnished like the leather on a rich man’s chair. The shape shimmered—or, no, it didn’t. It wasn’t an illusion, not a trick of the air or the dim, runny light. The shadow was just covered in hair.