The teenaged girl sat up in the night.
She could hear the strong wind outside, ripping at the trees and houses and telephone poles, gusting harshly through the streets. It was the sound of the darkness whispering its intentions, and the streetlights were bleeding orange light all over the wet asphalt.
Slowly, she gathered her legs and folded them up to her chest and slid her hands under herself.
There had been constant warnings in the local newspaper, over the loud speaker at school, in a special TV bulletin that played every hour on every channel: keep children under supervision at all times, check in with a call to a loved one upon reaching a destination, keep windows and doors locked at night. Because at night, he went from being a distant chilling threat to blinding, deafening, pounding terror. At night, they were all his victims, and he owned their bodies, their eyes, their screams.
His long smile extended into the daytime as well. There were messages scrawled on the sides of brick buildings downtown, words in red paint that no one could scrub off, not even the fire department blasting at them with hoses or the team of housewives with mounds of steel wool and buckets of soapy water that had worked all weekend. And every day that week, there had been thousands of leaflets scattered all up and down Main Street, leaflets with pictures and words that nobody truly understood, or wanted to understand. Each one was different, and before the street cleaning trucks had come to sweep them away into the gutters, most people had taken one for themselves, snatched it up greedily, and hidden it away somewhere, though they dreaded the sight of it.
It hadn't happened yet, but everyone in town could feel it drawing near. Everyone prayed for death, someone else's, anyone else's. They pretended to themselves that after someone died, he would leave them be again.
The girl had left her window wide open that night.
She breathed in once through her nose, slowly, and blew the air out through pursed lips, as if it was cigarette smoke.
A giggle, desperate and insane and squeaking over vocal chords, escaped from his throat.
Her eyes took in a figure at the foot of her bed that she had not noticed before. Broad shoulders, shaking with silent laughter, and something shining in his hand.
It was her chest caving in on itself, her heart overloading, because the childhood fear were true; there was a reason to fear the night.
She thought, I will not be afraid.
She said, "Kill me."
The shaking became more violent, and a manic, high-pitched laugh fell from him like a stream of water. The whine of it buzzed in her ears, soaring over the deep murmurs of the wind. Somewhere far above the that, the stars tinkled in the sky.
"You think I'm here to kill you?" he hissed through his teeth.
The bed springs groaned as he placed his hands on the mattress and leaned in towards her. She could see his face, white and red and ethereal and demonic, leering at her in the darkness. "I'm here to talk."