I came closest to the monsters when I was ten. It was in my old house’s basement, which I went down to explore in the middle of the night.

A jingle emanated all the way up to my room, like the music from a jack-in-the-box.

At the bottom of the stairs, there was a ghost. I’d nicknamed him Swamp Steve because his hair was scraggly and dirty, like he’d just emerged from a swamp. He was rocking back and forth, hugging his knees, whisper-singing to himself, “Half a pound of treaaacle. That’s the way the money goes.”

I thought it was a corpse in front of him. Looked like a dug-up body. An arm was ripped off, its socket a mauve gap with dry tendons hanging out like power cords. But the thing rose, and I realized it was only a ghoul, gnawing on a piece of its own arm.

Swamp Steve sang, “Pop goes the weasel,” and broke into a fit of giddy laughter.

I scrambled up the stairs on my hands and feet, splintering my knee. I was halfway to the top when a cold, hard hand gripped my ankle and yanked me backward. I spun around, kicking, and my foot went through the ghoul’s face, reducing its entire skull to a plume of smoke.

Steve began singing again, louder. “Half a pound of black en-er-gy! Half a pound of power!”

I leapt upward two steps at a time, toward the light spilling out of the door.

“Pop go the people!”

“Jake, come inside, please!” Mom’s waving me into the house because the officers are leaving now.

I walk past them with no acknowledgment. Mom says we should install security cameras on the front door, patio door, and first-floor windows.

The thing is . . . none of the doors or windows were unlocked when we got here. There were no fingerprints in the blood scrawl either. It’s like someone imagined the letters into existence.

Nobody can explain the stuff ghosts do, because nobody can see it happening, So everyone is treating this like a breaking and entering and nothing else.

But it is something else. And I’m the only one who’ll be able to take care of it, because I’m the only one who knows that it’s real.

I should be sleeping, but I can’t get that sloppy blood and those letters out of my head.

I’m under the comforter with my laptop, switching between a mindless conversation with Grady and research on the Heritage shooting last November. Matteo became known as a survivor, so the news thought to connect his death back to the occasion.

The backlight sears my eyes as I read the chilling headlines.

School Shooter Opens Fire on Classmates and Then Takes His Own Life

6 Dead and 12 Wounded in Devastating Heritage Shooting

An Unthinkable Act

A Shocking Slaughter

What Was the Motive?