Silas was a cheerful child, especially for someone who'd experienced multiple tragedies at such a young age. Six was old enough to recognize abnormality but young enough for the grown people in his life to want to hide it from him. His mother's death had been sad but expected—cancer had no regard for age or obligation—but his father's untimely demise was something else entirely. No one had told the boy exactly what had happened. All he'd officially heard was that his father had died in the hotel where his step-mother worked and that it had been due to some sort of heart problem. Unofficially, though, he'd heard a few other things, worrisome things . . . the sort of things that kept a child up at night. He'd heard Anjulie (it was still difficult for him to think of her as his mother, even if she legally was) and his new step-aunt, Marie, whispering heatedly in the kitchen about how expensive it was going to be to clean "brains and intestines" out of the carpet. He'd caught Bijou speaking to a friend on the phone, linking his father's name with the descriptor "freaky serial killer shit." And he'd seen snippets of the news, bits that talked about some missing people around town: a few different guys, all in their late teens or twenties, and a young boy not much older than him.

Yes, there were certainly scary things going on in a world that had once seemed unfair though not exactly terrifying, so it was a small mercy that little transition had been necessary after his father's death. Emmett, Silas, Anjulie, and Bijou had been living as one big family for months, so the biggest change in Silas's life had been only that the man he'd known for all of it was suddenly no longer there. For a child whose time had been spent in daycare, school, aftercare, and summer camp, the hours didn't pass too differently. It was only in the evenings, the time his father had eaten with him, read to him, prayed with him, tucked him in, that Silas felt his boyish version of grief, and though his step-mother had tried to make up for the loss, it was Bijou the child clung to.

When he needed a drink of water before bed, it was her name he called. When he woke with a nightmare, it was her room he ran to. When he needed comfort in the middle of a dark night, it was her bed into which he climbed.

Yes, his step-sister was his new comfort, and yet that comfort was at risk of being whisked away. Several nights, Silas had woken in need of a snuggle, but his sister hadn't been in her room, regardless of the late hour. And now her mother was threatening to kick Bijou out of the house entirely!

With all the anxieties and mixed bits of information in his life, it was no wonder, indeed, that Silas couldn't sleep.

On one of such increasingly frequent nights, at an hour too late to be the day before but really too early to be the next, the boy lay trembling in his fleece blanket—the one with his favorite PBS cartoon figures on it, which his father had bought for him after his mother's death—the embers of a fading nightmare still glowing within his thoughts. Did he have the courage to sneak out of bed? To run to his step-sister's room, taking the chance that she wasn't there? Why were the corners so full of shadow? And those slivers of moonlight gleaming through the slats of his blinds—they were too still, too lifeless. The closet was open several inches. Hadn't he asked Bijou to close it? Silas knew things peered from it at night. Maybe monsters, maybe other kinds of things, but that vertical strip of extra-dark darkness held too many possibilities for his comfort. Perhaps he wasn't the only breathing creature in that room; perhaps the darkness itself was animate, speculating with a brain he couldn't sense, salivating for that unpredictable yet certain moment when a small boy would become aware, would misstep . . .

Silas let slip a little squeal, jumped from his bed, and darted from the room. He chanced the even gloomier hallway, moving quickly toward the door beyond which he hoped his step-sister slept, but a sudden noise from the first floor brought him to a halt. His breaths a bit wild, the boy strained to know what he'd heard, whether he'd heard anything at all, but then it came again—the open and close of a cabinet in the kitchen.

Bijou was still home! She was probably hungry, and Silas himself felt a sudden rumble in his stomach. When his father had been alive, he'd sometimes made Silas a "midnight snack" when they'd found both of themselves awake at night. Perhaps Bijou could do that for him, now.

Down the carpeted steps his feet padded, onto the wooden floor below. The house wasn't particularly large, just a bungalow with its three bedrooms up top and the communal rooms on the first floor, but in a six-year-old's imagination, nighttime expanded every space, ballooned each into a cavern of obscure nooks and worrisome crannies. After his mad dash down the stairs, Silas was inconsistently more hesitant to move through the lower floor and paused at the end of the bannister. Suppose it wasn't actually Bijou in the kitchen but a criminal—a serial killer (though admittedly, the boy wasn't entirely sure what that was)! What if it was whoever'd killed his father? What would he do, then?

Oh, but no. It had to be his step-sister. There wasn't another possibility. Silas loved Bijou. He thought of her striking red hair, the sparkle of jewelry along her nose and ears, her warm and beautiful arms and body. He loved the way she smelled and how she liked to boop his nose and mess up his curly black hair. He was far too young to understand much of the world, and yet even at his tender age, Silas recognized a sort of desire, not linked to physicality so much as to affection and refuge. He wanted to marry Bijou, some day. He wanted her to hug him forever so he could live in that comfort. Thoughts of her drove him past the living room, Anjulie's small office space, and a dining area toward the kitchen. The sounds he'd heard before became clearer—cabinets softly creaking open and then closing again, chairs scooting across the tiled floor, silverware clinking gently—and Silas understood as he approached that if someone were in the kitchen (of which there could be no doubt), they weren't alone.

How strange, he registered somewhere in his thoughts, that the people aren't talking to each other. And the lights! The excess glow of the kitchen overhead bulb cast itself beyond the door and onto Silas's feet as he stood in the hall unable to quite see in, and it flickered every few seconds.

The little boy's heart was a hummingbird in his chest. He remained rooted, quavering in the dark in his blue dragon pajamas, until curiosity at last won him over and he peeped around the door frame into the bright kitchen. What he first saw in no way dismayed him. The lights did not falter; nothing moved. Two of the upper and one of the lower cabinets were ajar, and two of the four chairs around the table were pulled back away from it, but nothing else struck the child as frightening, initially.

When his glistening brown eyes registered what was on the table, though, Silas widened them in wonder. A pyramid of forks and spoons stood right up from the center of the wooden circle. There were something like fifteen utensils on the bottom row, standing straight up on their handles, their tines and bowls meeting with a smaller row of upside-down forks and spoons, which then met a smaller row and a smaller, until the whole two-and-a-half-foot structure ended with one butter knife at its very tip, nearly touching the bulb in the hanging lamp above. The pyramid gleamed with reflected light as it impossibly stood, as ghostly still as if some invisible string held each piece in place.

In a daze, the boy circled the table, not pushing in the chairs for fear of disturbing the inconceivable artistry before him. His chin hung well below its normal position; his gaze clouded with wonder. The fact that the noises and flickering lights had ceased didn't even register in his occupied thoughts.

Mystifyingly, Silas found himself speaking. "Hello?" he started, though nothing seemed to respond. "I can't see you," the boy went on, pausing at one of the chairs and placing his hands atop it. He looked over the table at the glass doors leading out onto the patio, saw the pyramid of silverware duplicated in the pane against the black night beyond. "Did you do this?"

The kitchen lights pulsed almost imperceptibly.

"What are you?" Silas waited but gave no indication he'd received any answer. "Did you hurt my dad?"

Another happy purr from the electric bulbs.

"Are you going to hurt a-all of us?" the boy added, his voice catching.

A third flare, this one stronger than those before it.

Swallowing, Silas nearly whispered, "What's your name?"

Whatever it was didn't appear to like that question, though, for at that moment, both bulbs—the overhead and the hanging lamp above the table—turned off, casting the kitchen in darkness. Silas would've probably run back upstairs had not a new marvel drawn his attention, for all of a sudden through the kitchen doorway floated a fleck of white, something small and yet so bright it almost hurt to look long at. The thing moved along an inaccurate path of its own design, not controlled by any bug or breeze, and soon it hovered directly over the utensil pyramid. Silas saw that it was spherical, like a ping pong ball twisting internally with self-produced illumination. It seemed almost to regard him as it lingered, and the boy stretched out a hand, reached a finger toward the orb as it concomitantly brightened his fascinated features. He saw across the table from him his own self and the light reflected in the sliding door, and then, without any warning, someone else was on the other side, slamming their palms against the glass.

Immediately, the sphere vanished, the forks and spoons and knives clattered across the table and onto the tile floor, and Silas fell to his knees, covered his ears, and screamed.

When Bijou rushed into the kitchen and flipped on the light, terrified that something horrible had occurred, she was relieved to find her step-brother alive and well, merely afraid. She avoided the mess on the floor, crouched down next to him, wrapped her arms about his small shoulders, and held him, soothing him with her voice. Rather awkwardly trying to pull him to his feet, stopping more than once to adjust the straps of her fitted tank so she didn't accidentally flash the boy, Bijou at last managed to draw him up and quiet his tears enough to talk to him.

"Silas, what is it? What's the matter?" When he didn't respond right away, Bijou pondered the scattered silverware. Holding him at arm's length, she asked, "Were you sleepwalking, hon? Maybe you came to the kitchen and didn't realize it. It's no big deal. We'll go back upstairs."

"No!" the boy managed at last. "No—I saw a, a light. It was—it was here, and then it left! It did all that, with the forks and spoons."

Bijou furrowed her brow. "That sounds like a nightmare, if I ever heard one." With a great heave, she lifted Silas up onto the counter, where she left him while she turned to the refrigerator. "Mom's staying overnight at the Inn, buddy; it's just you and me." She turned to him with a conspiratorial glint in her eye, her breath nearly visible in the frost of the freezer she'd opened. "What do you say to a little ice cream before we go back to bed?"

"It wasn't a nightmare," Silas insisted grumpily, the prospect of sneaking ice cream not resulting in the desired effect. He straightened his spine in recollection. "The window! I—I mean the door! Someone was outside it!"

Those words had more effect on his step-sister than the others had. She placed the ice cream on the counter next to Silas and shut the freezer. "You saw someone outside? Are you sure of it?"

"Uh huh! Yes!"

"Who? What did they look like?"

"I—I didn't see very well."

"Big creepy guy?"

"No . . ." Silas frowned. "S-small."

Without wasting another moment, Bijou rounded the table (nearly skidding on the forgotten forks and spoons) and glanced at the glass door before sucking in a breath. She unlocked it, and opening the pane just enough, she stepped outside into the summery night. Whether anyone was still out there in the small plot of fenceless yard, she couldn't tell, but someone surely had been, for staring back into the kitchen from the outside, Bijou recognized the distinctive bloodied outlines of two small hands, recently pressed against the glass.