The whole house, the big living room, the kitchen, the bathroom under the stairs, and the dining room leading out back -- it all seemed to open in Kevin’s imagination like a dark flower or a paper unfolding. Was there someone inside? Was it the Dough man? He was seized by an impulse to run blindly back up the stairs and dive into the safety of his bed -- but that seemed just as bad as staying put. So for the moment he froze, and stood still, and listened.
There was nothing to hear, nothing but his own too-loud breathing. He opened his mouth and tried to shape it in that way that every child knows from hiding under covers, to breath as quietly as possible. Still he could hear nothing. Only the solid, weighty tock of the old clock on the wall to his left, which he had forgotten to notice when he’d frozen up. Then he realized there were things he wasn’t hearing, he just had to wait and listen for them.
He could still feel the breeze from the window on his cheek and the side of his neck, and soon he realized he could hear it, too. There were some creaking insects outside singing their echoes out into the night also, but that seemed faint and far away, a peaceful noise that had nothing to do with this frightening darkness. Something clicked or settled in the basement, the water heater or the furnace or something turning on, but it made him jump and he didn’t recognize the sound until it steadied and hummed into familiarity. Then silence.
Then finally he heard it; a squeak, a shuffle that might have been a step. Someone holding just as still as he had been. Had he heard it? He realized he was trembling, and he felt cold. He wondered how much longer he could stand there in the dark without bolting, or falling straight down in a heap. Then he heard it again, sharper and clearer than before. It had come from the kitchen.
What should he do?
He knew at once, in a burst of strange intuition, that he couldn’t retreat back up the stairs. To do so, even if he made it all the way up without getting snatched from behind by the hands, would be to invite a night full of unguessed terrors from the darkness below in the house. He would lie awake until morning imagining impossibly horrible things happening below him, and lacking the courage to venture out for a second time and prove to himself that they were not real.
Some part of him decided, and he felt the rest of him reluctantly agree, that there was nothing for it but to go to the kitchen as quietly and calmly as he could, prove to himself that there was nothing there, and then he could go safely back to bed. He had quite forgotten, in his effort to be as still as he possibly could, to feel thirsty. Without a sound that he could hear, and concentrating mostly on the air around him, which was drifting easily in from the open window, but seemed full of violent gusts just waiting to burst into life, he lifted one foot slowly from the paneled floor, planted it again in the direction of the kitchen doorway, and shifted his weight to it without daring to breathe. He waited, hearing nothing. No lights, no movement anywhere, except the dim glow coming around the corner ahead, the light kept on over the kitchen sink. He took another step, and then another.
It was maybe twenty steps down the corridor to the kitchen doorway. Halfway there, after what seemed like hours of careful movement, he thought he heard the sound again; a definite step-shuffle, and then a clink, a bright sound almost like glass breaking. He wondered if they were being burgled, if the Dough man would shatter all the windows on the way out. Or maybe he just wanted one sharpened piece of glass to keep with him…
At this Kevin froze in his place, unable to take another step forward. A terrible vision of the dark stranger, eyeless and with an abnormal mouth hanging black and open and hissing, rose up behind him in the dark hall, glass shard dripping gore as he reached for him. He nearly flinched and fell over, though it was all only in his imagination, so vivid and intensely real feeling it was when it came upon him. He steadied himself and didn’t flinch, or swing around in place as he felt inclined, though this was less from bravery than from not trusting himself to be brave enough to look. He waited until he could hear the still house over the beating blood in his ears, and forced himself again towards the kitchen to see the thing through.
As he eased his feet forward one agonizing step at a time, he found his thoughts wondering who the Dough man could be. One idea, which had occurred to him almost at once when he’d first heard that there was a stranger searching for houses to get into, occurred to him again then, and for the tenth time or so he told himself that it was silly. But it was an irresistible comfort in a way, and it came back to him with the same force and clearness as the nightmare lurker had done only moments since.
There were definitely noises of some kind coming from the kitchen, now, but it didn’t bother Kevin for some reason, and he didn’t stop again, or slow his already too-slow soundless pace, but he kept listening. It sounded as if someone were shifting from one foot to the other restlessly, and the small clinking sounds were coming more or less steadily, and though they didn’t sound quite like breaking glass anymore, Kevin couldn’t place what they could be. He steeled himself and kept walking.
The year before his older brother Derek has left the house after having an argument with their parents, and hadn’t been back since. Kevin didn’t know where he’d went; at first he’d assumed he’d gone to stay with his friends (with whom their parents didn’t agree on his spending so much time in the first place), but there was no news for a long time, and every time he asked where Derek was it only seemed to make Mother unhappy, and at last he’d stopped asking.
Now in the night it came back upon him again that the Dough man was his brother Derek come home, that somehow he’d gotten the house wrong the first few times. To his midnight brain the idea that he would force his way in didn’t seem strange at all, in fact it seemed like a kind of tribute, “see Mother and Father what I will do to get back to the house I love,” or something like that. He would later on of course realize that this was bizarre, and more or less backwards: of course it was worse than just asking to be let back in to force or break windows, but on his way to the kitchen, hearing the shuffles and the squeaking going on with glassy clinks accompanying, Kevin was able to easily imagine it was his brother he’d meet up ahead and no one else.
He was only a few steps away, and the sounds were clear; he recognized them at almost the same instant that he turned the corner and the kitchen came into view. As soon as he saw what was making the sound, he realized the obviousness and wondered how he could have been so dense as to not place the sound before, like the feeling one gets after hearing the answer to a riddle. He took his last two steps in one bold dart, like a jump except he didn’t leave the ground, unable to bear the suspense any longer, and when he saw into the kitchen at last he did freeze.
It was a stranger in the kitchen, but this wasn’t the part that caught Kevin’s attention first: the stranger was washing dishes in the sink.
It wasn’t Derek. It was an old man, downright elderly, who didn’t seem to have noticed Kevin’s appearance in the doorway at all. He calmly and cooly moved his arms, up nearly to the elbows in sudsy water with his shirt sleeves pushed up, and lifted the next plate out of the water and set it on the drying rack. When he reached back into the sink there was a small clink. Kevin edged along the wall, staring the whole time, but trying to pretend as if he weren’t there.
The old man was short, and sort of shriveled-looking in the only light from the fluorescent bulb over the sink, with a hooked nose and a long beard. He had round silver-rimmed spectacles that had fallen about halfway down his nose. He was dressed, Kevin thought strangely, like a young person, in a hooded sweatshirt and blue jeans. From where he edged along the wall Kevin couldn’t see his feet, because they were blocked from view by the center island in the middle of the room, but he assumed given the rest that the man was probably wearing sneakers, and Kevin thought this was odd too.
When Kevin reached the edge of the refrigerator, he realized he had reached an impasse. He could move no further along the wall without stepping out into the room, because the side of the fridge jutted out farther than the wall of cabinets he’d been moving along up to this point. He had a feeling that it was only his sneaky and smooth momentum that had kept him from being spotted, and if he stood still for too long the jig would be up. At the same time he was confusedly convinced that if he stepped out into the room in order to clear the fridge he’d be spotted instantly that way, too. So he stood and kept his mouth open to make no sound breathing and waited for a solution to present itself.
Eventually one did, in that the old man finished the dishes and pulled the stopper with a gurgling little rush, and when he did he took up a towel, dried his hands, and turned and faced Kevin and said, “How do you do.”
Kevin was silent.
“It’s a little late for you to be up, isn’t it?” asked the old man, not unkindly.
Kevin did not move a muscle.
“I am sorry to have disturbed you,” said the old man a little meekly, “I saw that the dishes had been left, and I do try to do a good turn like this when I can.”
Kevin stared at the old man without a word.
“May I ask,” said the old man after a moment, “how you knew I was in the house?”
Kevin was sure he would not answer.
“I won’t harm you,” said the old man, “I think you know that.”
Kevin swallowed, and realized he’d forgotten that he’d been thirsty.
“Did you come in through the window?” he asked at last, and his voice sounded strange.
“It’s a young person’s trick,” said the old man, looking pained, “but it was the best I could manage. I’m glad I didn’t throw my back out entirely, but I don’t relish going back out.”
“Are you the Dough man?” asked Kevin then, his capacity for reason beginning slowly to thaw.
“The who?” asked the old man.
“The Dough man,” said Kevin.
“I thought that was dough boy,” said the old man. “And aren’t I a little too tall?”
“The man taking food from people,” said Kevin. “He was on TV, only they said his name was Dough.”
“Ah,” said the old man. “I’m afraid I might be.”
“Will you leave please,” said Kevin, “without hurting anybody?”
“I was actually about to leave when you spotted me,” said the old man, “but since you were so good as to refrain from raising the alarm, as it were, I thought I would just finish my business before getting on my way.”
“I will let you out the front door if you like,” said Kevin hesitatingly, “if you promise to go and not to come back. I will have to tell my parents about this, but I won’t tell them until the morning if you leave right away.”
This was not altogether sound thinking on Kevin’s part, but in his defense he was a very young boy, and the old man had taken him completely by surprise, first by not doing anything horrible to him, and second by being polite. He didn’t want to cause the old man grief if he could help it, but he certainly would have been within his rights to do so. It’s just that he’d never had a conversation with a home invader before, and had no idea what one is supposed to say or do in such a situation if the person seems to make themselves agreeable.
The truth was the idea that it could have been Derek returning had got planted too deeply in his expectation to be let easily go of, and now he felt like if he acted towards this intruder like it really was his brother, and not a strange old man, the disappointment was lessened a little. He now essentially just wanted the whole interview to be over with as soon as possible, and, if he had only known it, his feelings matched the old man’s exactly.
“That would be fine,” said the old man, “thank you very much.”
He picked up a ratty-looking backpack from the floor where it had been concealed from view by the center island and eased it wearily over his shoulders.
“Do you have some of our food in there?” asked Kevin.
The old man looked rather embarrassed.
“Do you have enough?” asked Kevin after a moment’s pause.
“Quite,” said the old man, seeming more unhappy and embarrassed than ever at this. Kevin did not realize that he was humiliating the old man, and wouldn’t have done so if he’d known better.
“Would you like some of my pop tarts?” Kevin asked then, in another strange burst of feeling. “They’re s’mores flavor, it’s my favorite.”
“That would be very kind of you,” said the old man, sensible of the courtesy.
Kevin went to the cupboard, took down the box, took out the last foil packet of the dried pastry, and put it on the center island where the old man could get to it. He instinctively didn’t get within arm’s reach of the old man, partially because he half suspected he was dreaming (except for the odd smell the old man emanated) and partially because he had wound his body too tight to take any real chances in case it decided to let go the tension, in which case he would surely just fly into pieces.
The old man took the foil packet and tucked it into his backpack.
“I will take my leave of you if you don’t mind,” he said then, not looking at Kevin’s face.
Kevin didn’t say anything else, but walked carefully around the opposite side of the island, around the fridge again, and towards the open doorway leading back to the front hall and the door. He wished he could turn on a few lights, but he was sure that would wake the household, and then he’d be in trouble. He was sure that he wouldn’t tell Mother after all.
The old man shuffled out after him, and there were a few horrible moments when Kevin realized he was alone in the dark with this stranger walking up behind him. He forced the mouthless hideous imaginings from his mind, unlocked the front door and pulled it open, standing as far to one side and out of the way as he could.
Without another word, but with a solemn nod to the small boy that was seen only by the light of the streetlight outside, the old man shuffled over the threshold and disappeared into the darkness. Kevin shut the heavy front door as quietly as he could and locked it carefully, and then as quickly as he could, before he lost his nerve, he dashed into the living room and shut and locked the window there, too.
The next morning he would realize he should have gone around and made sure no other windows or doors in the house were open, but the thought simply didn’t occur to him then. He was suddenly overwhelmingly tired, and still as thirsty as ever, and he felt the darkness like chill air around him, although the house was quite climate-controlled even with the window having stood open for a while.
No longer moving as quietly as he could, but still fairly quietly for fear of being caught out of bed and having to give an explanation (he was sure he’d probably burst into tears and declare all, and then things would probably go badly for the old man, and surely worse for him), he went back to the kitchen, got a plastic cup out of the dish rack (he had forgotten already whom had washed them), filled it with cold water from the tap, and tip-toed carefully back to bed.
It wasn’t until he woke the next morning that he realized that the dark in his room hadn’t bothered him anymore, and that after his drink he had fallen asleep as soundly as a stone falling into deep water, settling on the bottom without dreaming or feeling a thing, wrapped up in the quiet work of his own rest and hidden from sight even from himself.
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