Free The Neighbor by Dean Koontz Page B

threatening nature, compelled the sleeper to wake. In this case, it called to mind a long sword being drawn from a metal scabbard, the stropping of steel on steel.
    Even in an older residential neighborhood like ours, far from the high-rises and the Midtown bustle, the city is never silent, and long before you’re twelve years old, you learn to tune out its most familiar rattles, clashes, and percussions to get a good night’s rest. What woke me now was alien to the ear. I threw back the top sheet and got out of bed.
    Earlier I had raised the lower sash of the window in hope of a draft, but the night air remained warm and still. As I bent to the window, the sound came again and seemed to vibrate in the screen as if the blade of a stiletto had been whisked across that metal mesh, so that I startled backward.
    When the stropping came a third time, softer than before, I realized that it originated not inches from my face but from the house next door, and I leaned close to the window screen once more. Between the houses stood an ancient sycamore in full leaf. Perhaps because in its early years it had received too little sunlight or had suffered a bout with disease, the tree had attained a tormented architecture and did not entirely screen my view of the Clockenwall place. Through the twisted branches, I saw lamplight bloom beyond a downstairs window.
    The late Rupert Clockenwall’s only surviving relative was a brother who lived half a continent away. Until the small estate was settled, the house could not be put on the market for sale, and there had been no activity at the place since the day that Mr. Clockenwall died. Naturally, having the usual fantasy life of a twelve-year-old, I sometimes imagined dramas where none existed, and now I wondered if a burglar might have forced entry.
    Lamplight brightened another window on the ground floor and, soon thereafter, also one on the second floor. Through the sheers that hung over that upstairs window, a sinuous dark form whidded past the curtained glass. Although any moving shadow is bent by light and by every surface over which it travels, this one seemed particularly strange, bringing to mind the supple wings of a manta ray swimming the sea with all the grace of a bird in flight.
    Overcome by a sense that someone sinister must be prowling the Clockenwall house, I waited at the open window for a while, breathing the warm night air, hoping to glimpse that lithe and eerie shadow again or something more. Eventually, when I was not rewarded by anyphantasmic shape or further peculiar sounds, even my boyish desire for mystery and adventure couldn’t sustain my attention. I had to admit that neither a burglar nor a vandal was likely to announce his invasion of the property by switching on nearly every light.
    After returning to bed, I soon fell back to sleep. I know that I had a bad dream in which my circumstances were desperate, but when I suddenly sat up in bed at 4:00 A.M. , I could recall nothing of that nightmare. Little more than half awake, I went to the window, not to observe the house next door, where lights still glowed, but to close the lower sash. I also locked it, though the night was hot and a draft was much needed. I don’t remember why I believed that I should engage the lock, only that I felt the urgent need to do so.
    In bed once more, I half slept through the last sweltering hour of the summer night, muttering like a victim of malaria in a fever dream.

2
    Most mornings, our old man preferred a sandwich for breakfast, usually bacon and eggs on heavily buttered toast. In bad weather, he stood at the sink to eat, staring out at the small backyard, silent and remote, as though he must be pondering important philosophical issues—or planning a murder. On the nearby cutting board stood a mug of coffee. He held the sandwich in his right hand, a cigarette in his left, alternating between the two. When witness to this, I always hoped that in error he would take a bite of the