I turned and ran, slow out of the blocks, clipping the closed French door with my left shoulder. As I foaled through the living room toward the front of the house and the stairs, I didn’t dare look behind me. I didn’t have to, because Mercy joined the chase. I heard and felt her closing in with that evolutionary extra sense, a holdover from when the earliest of us were on the plains fleeing from all manner of beast. If this were simply a nightmare I would’ve slowed down, been stuck in the quicksand of the dream, but I ran faster and took the stairs two or three at a time. Mercy was right there, her fingertips stretching for the collar of my shirt, the hair on the back of my head curled away. I missed a step and stumbled as I hit the second-floor landing, but I used the momentum to pitch me forward into a head-first dive across the narrow hallway. I skidded on my belly and chest into my bedroom. Blinking away tears of pain, I crabbed around on hands and knees and flung my bedroom door shut and turned the lock in the center of the doorknob, the kind you had to pinch between your fingers and turn right, like that delicate mechanism would keep any monsters out of my room. Instead of sitting with my back against the door, I stood and groped along the wall for the overhead light switch. I hesitated when I found it, afraid to see what was waiting in there with me, or for me, that my own bedroom would be the trap all along like I always feared it would be.

I squinted and blinked in the light, and the menagerie of menacing creatures were the slumping clothes piles and kicked-off bedcovers. The locked doorknob rattled as it reluctantly refused to turn. The door creaked, too, as though Mercy pressed herself against it. She whispered my name and told me to open the door, and her whispers ricocheted and echoed in my Humpty Dumpty head.

I said, “Leave me alone,” and retreated to my bed. There was nowhere else to go.