The first morning I was home alone I foolishly started reading Stephen King’s It. After inhaling the famous opening chapter in which Pennywise sweet-talks poor little Georgie (who was my younger cousin Danny in my head) into his sewer doom, I apoplectically quit and returned the beat-up paperback to the bookshelf in the living room, spine facing in, so It wouldn’t see me when I walked by on my way to the kitchen. I would’ve been on what’s-that-noise edge anyway, given my physically and emotionally vulnerable state, but the book catalyzed my level of freaked-the-fuck-out to DEFCON 1. I became my own ghost, Art the Friendly-When-Given-the-Opportunity Ghost, haunting my own house, or more accurately, frightened by my own haunted house as I drifted around the first floor listening until I heard the sounds for which I listened. There was plenty to hear. Because my parents left their bedroom door open upstairs in the morning, it slammed shut as the heat of the day increased and coastal breezes gusted (that was my working theory, not that I investigated). There were more noises, sources unidentifiable, coming from other rooms; sharp knocks, low rumbles that started but didn’t finish, what sounded like footfalls on the floors in other rooms, and worst of all, noises from the basement. Even in the light of day the basement was a nightmare factory made of steep wooden stairs, spiderwebs, exposed beams and wires and dangling lightbulbs, stone foundation that sweated and wept water and shadows, slab floors dusty enough they might as well have been earthen, a bulkhead escape hatch to the driveway, and a crawlspace at the far end, under the kitchen. It was too easy to imagine something (something with a face, the face) slithering on the basement floor or worming through the crawlspace. Prior to lunch, I walked through the dining room to the kitchen, avoiding even looking at the basement door (and who’s the asshole that designs a house with a basement door in the dining room, in the middle of the goddamn house, anyway?), and I heard a languid groan on the basement steps, a weight settling or readying for a spring-loaded leap. It took every ounce of mousy courage I had to work the basement door’s flimsy hook and latch into place without making any jangling sounds.