Chapter One: Intruder Alert

The air in here is moist and rotting and full of spores. They clog what thin shafts of moonlight manage to crack through the high windows, dirty and unreachable. When the school closed down in '32, this pool was left to stagnate. It's thickened over time, a soup of algae, almost gelatinous. Slick green moss, black mould, strange fungi sprouting from the cracking tiles – this place is an ecosystem of sponge and slime and chills that run down one's spine. A breeding ground hiding in the dark. I cover my mouth with my hand and fear it will not be enough to stop my insides being colonised.

And, in the thick green pool that has half-evaporated in the last fifty-two years, are the bodies. Joe and Mikey. Stuck face down in the gloop and unmoving in the vague light of my torch. I identify them by their football jersey numbers. Joe had a nice laugh and an easy smile and sat behind me in Math last year. Mikey was always gentle with me in dodgeball or softball or any other ball game in Phys Ed.

Why are they dead?

Where's Tyler?

God, why have you brought me here?

A boy's shout trickles through the splitting concrete roof.

.

I don't meet anyone on my way, nor do I hear anyone besides the hollers of the boy – "HELP! HELP! For God's sake get me out of here!" – but when I get to the small landing and the attic door, I pause. The lock was broken recently. In the torchlight, I see the splinters of the paler, fresher interior where the wooden door was forced open. Whoever did it was strong and desperate and I hope it was the boy screaming on the other side, not someone waiting in silence to attack.

God, give me strength.

My mouth is dry regardless, and the heavy flashlight shakes in my hand. I have no other weapons. Why would I? I'm here to investigate the history of Hawkins College. I felt safe to come at night because Tyler and his friends, the nicest ones on the football team, would be here for an overnight adventure.

I'm not here to get murdered.

"Tyler?" I choke on his name. It's so dark up here. So dark. I hate attics. I cough up the last gob of congealed spore dust on the floor and try again. "Tyler? Is there anyone else in there?"

"No!" Tyler shouts back. "Who are you? Get me out of here!"

I reach for the handle and try not to cry and pray God please don't let me die and push the door open.

The top storey of the East Wing is long space with exposed black beams and cobwebs smothering every corner. Slit windows shine pale light between free-standing cages, stretching in two rows along the entire length of the building. This is where the girls were locked up. It's icy, far below the thirty-two degrees outside. All the warmth in the world is sucked up by the steel bars, the webs, the bloated wood. I can imagine the girls locked here in their pyjamas, having been dragged from bed to have the heat leeched from their fingers and toes as their bodies scrabbled to keep hearts and lungs working. Breath misting. Tears freezing. Unable to speak a word for fear of further abuse.

I don't need my flashlight to find Tyler in the middle cage, a great mass of teenaged lineman pressed up against the bars. He's a dark, bear-like shape whose eyes glow in the moon.

"Who are you?" he asks, voice hoarse from screaming.

"Asher. Is there anyone else here?"

"No. He's gone." Tyler suddenly jerks against the bars and rattles them. "Get me out of here!" he roars.

I dart forward, hairclip in hand, and make quick work of the rusting lock on the cage door, while Tyler explains, "He was nuts, Ash. He knocked us out and dragged us to the pool and I woke up when he threw Mikey in. I ran up here, got myself stuck in this thing. He must have heard you or something. He ran ages ago. He kept going on and on about building something, about some guy who needed him to build. He was nuts . . ." The lock relents and Tyler barely waits until I'm clear before shoving the screeching door open and scrabbling out. At eighteen, he towers in the middle of the attic, but he's hunched, shaking. I stand too and touch his shoulder and I can feel how cold he is, even through the down jacket he wears.

"Joe, Mikey," he mutters, looking towards the open door. His lips are black in this light.

I say what I wish someone had said to me, all those years ago, with as much feeling as I can muster even as I try to contain my horror. "I'm sorry." I try to find that safe space within me, the one of peace and strength and wisdom. It's not there – it's shrivelled up and shrunk away. There's only this trembling, growing hole of fear slowly enveloping my chest. It reaches up and closes off my throat.

Tyler Matheson, somehow, doesn't crack. He straightens instead, takes one look around this awful place. "Let's get out of here. We need to tell the police."

.

"So, your newspaper buddy orders you to head over to Hawkins College and you hop on your bike, ride over and, uh, find two dead bodies and a kid locked in a cage?" I nod. "And why did your buddy want you to check out the College in the first place?"

Chief Hopper is an intimidating man at the best of times, though whenever I meet him he tends to tone it down to merely gruff. Now, he's downright scary. He's got two kids dead, another who barely escaped, and a murderer on the loose with my bike . . . though it could have been worse. They could have taken Tyler's car, which would have left him and I stranded miles east of Hawkins, in November, in the dark of the night.

I can understand the policeman's mood, not in the least since it's been less than two weeks since the Chicago Sun Times ran that story and Hopper's small town became a hotbed of investigators and reporters. Two dead kids? Yeah, that's not going to help quiet things down.

I just hope the news vans parked along Randolph Road at the moment don't end up outside my door.

Clasping my hands together, I fix my gaze on his Hawkins PD mug full of pencils and pens and an orange highlighter. A pencil mug is safe. A pencil mug is not an algae-infested grave or an old cage built for holding girls. A pencil mug doesn't kill people.

"It was a local history piece," I tell the mug in as stable a voice as I can manage. "Students have been going up to the school for years – they treat it like a haunted house. You know the story – of the headmaster letting those girls die? Well, my friend, who runs the school newspaper, he thought it would make a good story to find out if anything from that story was true and if there are any traces of what went on still left. I was going to go up tomorrow with a camera if I found anything tonight."

"Why tonight?" says Hopper. "Why not during the day?"

"A pipe burst in the downstairs bathroom this morning. It took all day to fix it."

Hopper is incredulous. "You could have gone tomorrow. In daylight."

"My friend wanted the story. And I knew Tyler and – and his friends were, uhm, over there for the weekend. I wasn't scared." Then.

"Well . . ." Hopper groans and rubs his face, looking suddenly haggard. This past year has not been easy on anyone, least of all our chief of police, and it shows. He's exhausted. My heart goes out to him, what little piece of it isn't curled up in a corner, hiding.

He drops his hand, gives me a quick hint of a grateful smile. "You probably saved that boy's life, tonight. Good job."

"Thank you," I whisper, looking back at the pencil mug again.

"I'll get one of my men to take your statement, then they'll drive you home." He checks his watch and imperceptibly slumps. "It's going to be a late night. Wait here." He stands, comes around the desk and briefly rests his hand on my shoulder as he goes. Alone in his tiny office that's really too small for such a big man, I keep looking at the mug.

Then curiosity, that well-nourished trait of mine, nudges me to look at the papers around the mug.

There are police reports, eye witness statements, the Hawkins Post article from November seventh that reran the Chicago Sun Times story. Barbara Holland's pleasant face smiles next to a picture of the blocky Hawkins Laboratory. A chemical leak. I scoff quietly. "Right, even though Barb lived on the other side of town."

Oh, now that's interesting.

An A4 piece of paper covered in writing, with SDPD – Desk Sergeant written on the top. If I'm not mistaken, it's Hopper's handwriting. It doesn't take much reading to understand what it's about; a series of questions and the desk sergeant's answers, all related to a certain ex-officer of his, recently moved from San Diego. And that officer's son. Seems like Hopper wrote down a telephone conversation. He even signed and dated the bottom of the page. Sunday the 28th of October, three weeks ago.

. . . yeah, the boy . . . nah, kids need a thrashing sometimes, 'specially troublemaker like that. Though, I've seen Hargrove with some perps . . . I'd hate to be in that house on a bad day . . .

It's nice to have a pet-theory validated. I hoped Billy Hargrove hadn't been born with violence already cemented in his psyche and here is the proof. His father is, at least, in part to blame.

I pull the paper closer towards me, then get distracted by what's underneath it. An adoption form? With Hopper's signature too. That's something to add to The Wall. The name of the adoptee is covered by the interview . . .

"Powell will take your statement and give you a lift on our way out to the College," Hopper declares behind me. I shoot to my feet and face him, an innocent expression hastily erected, though it leans towards terror more than anything. Hopper just frowns. He jerks his head for me to follow him into the waiting area of the precinct. It's a stub of corridor linking the bull pen to the front entrance and to the back offices and holding cells. Tyler sits on the long wooden bench next to the kitchenette with its untouched instant coffee and ancient teabags. Flo's desk is opposite, the guard dog of the bull pen. Tyler sees me and attempts to smile. Mrs Matheson, a lady half his size, clings to his hands.

"How're you feeling?" I ask, pausing in front of him. Hopper goes into the bull pen to talk to one of his men.

Tyler shrugs. "I'll be okay."

I touch his shoulder again, the extent of my comforting techniques. "Hang in there, big guy."

Suddenly he envelopes me in a hug. He's warm, finally, and no longer shaking. "Thanks, Ash," he murmurs into my ear.

I pat his broad back and dread going home.

Tyler pulls away and then it's Mrs Matheson and as her spindly arms come around me and she tugs me into her small, cosy embrace, I find myself on the edge of awful, snot-filled sobs. I can't handle this. I can't handle any of it. Smiling, nodding at her thank yous, I extricate myself and hurry out into the cold and the space and freedom from grateful, loving mothers.

.

While Hopper's Chevy continues along Cornwallis to that pine stand on the other side of the prairie, where Hawkins College waits inside, Officer Powell turns onto my drive. He pulls up, peers through the windshield, and whistles. "I always thought this place was haunted."

"Just by me," I sigh.

"I don't envy you."

"I don't envy me either."

"Ever think about renovating?"

"I tried once. Then school and journalism got in the way. Well, thanks for the lift."

"You sure you're gonna be all right?"

I slide out of the passenger seat. "I've been here seventeen years. Another night won't kill me."

"Hey." He leans over the gearstick towards me. "Call the station if you've got any problems. Callahan's on night shift. And the Chief and I will check in when we come back from the College." He glances at the house and shudders. "Hate to imagine you being alone here after the night you've had."

"Thanks, Officer Powell."

The soft-spoken Calvin Powell smiles. "Call me Cal."

"Will do."

He touches his hat and straightens up. I close the passenger door, moving closer to the house so he has room to turn on the gravel drive. The car heads along the prairie road, takes a left, and goes east, after his Chief. I track the cruiser by the beams of yellow flickering through the tallgrass and the twin red dots that rise and fall and curve with the gently undulating land. The thrum and drone of the engine fades in and out of hearing. Then the car vanishes into the trees. Silence snaps. Crickets, rattling tallgrass, the babbling of hidden brooks and their croaking squatters amongst the frozen soil, the constant orchestra of the night swells in the absence of humanity. Fifteen miles in the other direction, Cornwallis Road enters another pine forest that separates my lonely prairie from Hawkins proper.

I feel very, very alone.

Above, the vast sky glitters, dense clouds of stars thick and bright in the absence of the moon. They bathe the landscape in silver and, far in the distance, the brilliant nightscape lands on the hills of the northern horizon. There is enough faith in me, even after today, to be impressed by Roane County's display.

But tonight I don't want to linger in the sub-zero temperatures. I want a closed door and a cup of tea and the crackling kitchen fire to beat back the terror.

So I turn to the monstrosity that is my home. It's an 1882 nightmare of black-stained weatherboards and fish scale shingles clinging to the steep mansard roofs. As I told Cal, only I haunt this place. There were once people with me. Mom and Dad and Kato lived in this house and filled it with their voices and their noise and their ambitions that took them away.

An old, well-worn dream plays out before I can stop it; the porch light flicking on and the door opening and someone – a mother? A friend? A boyfriend? – saying, "What are you doing? You'll catch your death out there? Come in, there's dinner on the table," and the fire would be already lit . . .

Stop it, Ash. You're only hurting yourself.

Into the shadows of the porch then, where the starlight does not reach, fingertips on the iron knob in the centre of the door. The heavy slab of oak swings. It's never locked. Groping past the leadlight panels around the door, finding the switch, flicking it down with a thunk. The fake candles in the electric chandelier start to heat. It's always a good minute before they shed enough light to see by and I pass straight under the brightening filaments, avoiding the sideboard and the newel post of the central staircase and the ticking grandfather clock and making for the unearthly red light throbbing at the back of the house. The air gets warmer as I walk down the narrow passage between the dining room and the bathroom under the stairs – though not by much. Just enough to not be freezing.

The embers are still hot in the hearth and with two new logs and careful blowing, flames start to lick at the bark. I sit cross-legged on the yellow linoleum and stare at the fire as it grows and breathe in the aroma of burning pine wood.

This is safe. This isn't a dank pool made of mould. This isn't a frozen cage. This isn't a crying mother. It's just me and the flames and God – somewhere – and if I have to sit here all night and stoke the fire in order to not . . . succumb, then so be it. How could I sleep tonight, anyway?

I stare at the fire. The old house creaks around me. The entrance hall chandelier at last reaches its dim zenith.

Get me out of here!

"Shush," I whisper.

Mikey. Joe. Face down. Bright white numbers – twelve and three – illuminated in my torch.

"You're okay."

God, why have you brought me here?

I hug myself. I'm fine. I'm going to be fine. God is with me. God is –

What's that?

An engine roars down Cornwallis Road and it's not the Chief's or Cal's or any police vehicle's. This engine growls, tearing at the night. I wait, listening. Frown. It's turned onto my drive.

So I get up and leave the kitchen, passing through the narrow passage again with its slightly ajar bathroom door and firmly shut dining room. Into the entrance hall. Here is the sideboard with its hideous heirloom vase and rotary phone. Here the Hawkins College founder and headmaster W.J. Morell glares at me from his portrait. Here are the doors to the music room and parlour that are never opened. Here is the hideous orange carpet tracking up the stairs. And here is the glare of approaching headlights through the green-and-gold leadlight windows around the door. I squint. Is that Van Halen playing on the car's stereo?

I groan. Of all the nights for Tod Bacliff to pull this stupid prank – of all the people to pull this prank on. Gah. This can't be happening.

A floorboard creaks behind me and I twist to look out of reflex – this house is often louder than me, bending and shifting in the wind – but then the car skids to a halt and I turn back.

Arms strangle me from behind.

My scream is cut off. I scratch at skeletal, jaundiced elbow, drawing blood, achieving nothing but to make them choke me tighter. Prickling darkness starts to swarm, a million tiny dots flickering on and off at the edges of my vision. They drag me into the kitchen and away from the new arrival and no matter how I kick, how I claw and scrabble and whine, they're too strong.

"He needs me," he breathes in my ear, hot and foul.

The engine cuts out, door slamming. "Bacliff!"

He throws me onto the lino between the kitchen table and the icebox. I lunge for the fire poker and get kicked for my trouble, thrown onto my back. He grasps me by the wrist and his cold weight presses me into the lino.

"Get off," I croak.

The skeletal man snarls, his teeth glinting in the flickering firelight. Spit collects at the corners of his mouth in his laughter.

"He needs me. He needs my help. He's going to rebuild the world and he wants me to do it. And he needs you." His voice is sibilant, lisping. Insanity dwells in those yellow eyes, the black veins. His tongue is grey. He's freezing and sweating and looks as sick as a dog.

He's the spitting image of his grandfather, right down the W.J. on his blazer.

"Get off!" I screech. I drive a knee between his legs. He jerks and falls face-first into the grate, screams, releasing me to paw at the burning ash on his face. I scramble out from under him.

A newcomer enters the kitchen to see me scrabbling away from W.J. Morell's mad grandson. "The hell?" he says, and then he jerks back because Morell is at him like a snake, hissing and spitting and going for the eyes.

The newcomer punches Morell across the face and Morell falls against the icebox. The newcomer hits again, again, again. At last Morell collapses and sprawls, unconscious, on the floor.

"Thanks," I say, panting, scared . . . so, so thankful to Tod Bacliff.

The newcomer has a mullet, a leather jacket, a black wife beater, and appears nothing more than intrigued despite the fact that he just knocked out a total stranger. The fire casts him into sharp plains of red and gold and black and reveals a catholic medal shining on his chest. He hooks a thumb into a belt loop.

"Who the hell is that?" demands Billy Hargrove.

I flop to the floor and start to cry, half-hysterical with laughter.

.

This has been a weird night. From that soon-to-be-beaten-to-a-pulp moron Bacliff giving him the wrong address on purpose – Billy really should have known that 'mansion on the prairie' wasn't a prime party spot – to being attacked by some murderous bastard in said mansion and a strange girl having a mental breakdown on the kitchen floor . . . was this Bacliff's idea of a prank? Surely not.

Then again, this was Hawkins, where government labs have chemical leaks that kill people and RadioShack workers get eaten by wolves. Who knows what the residents consider 'all in good fun'.

This town is a bloody nightmare.

The girl called the police too, just to make this night even more hellish. The Chief himself is on his way over. The Chief, who, alone in this town, knows exactly why the Hargrove family moved to Hawkins, and who has had Billy on a leash ever since he beat Steve Harrington half to death a fortnight ago. Billy's community service is yet to be sorted out, which is a joke because Harrington didn't press charges but still the Chief dragged Billy into his office the day after the incident and declared that he is going to do the damn time or else and in a small town like Hawkins, Jim Hopper is the law so you better shut up and listen, kid, because I'm doing you a favour and I'm not your father.

Whatever that meant. Cops are all the same. His dad. Hopper. Everyone in San Diego PD who looked the other way when his old man would take a nightstick into the cells. Cops don't care about the law. They care about how much they can twist the law, how they can use it as leverage, a threat, a we're out here because I had to clean up your mess, boy, be grateful you're not in juvie.

He'd prefer juvie.

Billy takes a drag from the cigarette and hates everything. Especially the psycho jabbering away, slumped on the porch. Every time he comes to he goes on and on about building, "–Build, I have to build, he needs more to build with–" So Billy does him a favour and kicks him in the head so he doesn't have to worry about building. A careful kick, though. It wouldn't do to get the man's blood on his boots. The stuff is black and sticky and looks contagious. It took forever to clean off his knuckles.

The truck Billy's been tracking across the prairie finally turns onto the drive. A squad car trails behind it. The cavalry have arrived, though not from the direction of town. Hopefully they'll take the bastard away and he can drive off to some girl's house where it's warm.

The girl comes out of the house. "Finally," she whispers as she passes him, avoids the psycho laid out at Billy's feet, and waits on the steps for the police. She wraps her arms around one of the support beams and Billy takes the time to examine her now that she's not crying or calling the cavalry.

Who is she? That's Billy's biggest question of the night, even more than why she was being attacked by the living skeleton in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere with no one else in sight.

She looks like Mom.

If his mom was a teenager who dresses like she lives in the fifties and has never seen the Californian sun. What teenager wears fur-lined ankle boots and a shirtwaist dress and a flaring coat like that? It's the eighties.

The only thing current about her is her hair – thick bangs and masses of blonde hair crushed under a beanie. It's tangled and unkempt. Billy's mother's hair was blonde too, thinner, shorter, completely different if he thinks about it, but he can't get the association out of his head. When the girl looked at him and her blue eyes were reddened and glistening and the tear tracks down her cheeks and yet she was pretty, really pretty, exactly like . . .

He never expected it. That's what has him thrown right now. All the other Hawkins High girls are frumpy and boring and he'd grown used to that, used to having everything here be a disappointment compared to San Diego and then this girl turns up. This girl who is dressed out of time, has a face that both is and isn't his mother's, and apparently lives all alone in this creepy murder mansion in the middle of nowhere, and he just saved her life.

She's not Mom, he tells himself and sucks in another lungful of smoke. His mother's gone. His mother left him. Just because she's blonde and she was crying on the floor after being attacked by some violent bastard it doesn't mean anything.

He studiously doesn't think about why he didn't just tie the psycho up and split ages ago.

Hopper, swollen in khaki and small-town importance, thumps to the gravel and trudges over to them. He sums them up in a second – Billy raises an unconcerned eyebrow in return – and makes the girl sit on the step. He and Officer Powell, the black one, approach Billy. "What you doin' here, Hargrove?" Hopper asks while he and Powell hoist the psycho up.

"Doing your job, Chief," he drawls, and he grinds the cigarette butt under his heel and lights up another and doesn't lift a finger to help. Hopper just shakes his head and directs the efforts to get the psycho into the back of the truck.

Then Hopper approaches the girl on the step, considers her, taps her on the shoulder.

And she screams.

"Sorry," she blurts out. "Sorry, I'm just – I – Tonight –"

"Hey, hey," says Hopper, "It's been a long night. I get it." He looks up at Hopper, eyes narrowing, then glances back at Powell. How he can see anything under those thick eyebrows, Billy doesn't know. The dude's a frickin' bear.

"Hargrove?"

"Chief."

"You're staying here tonight."

"Excuse me?" says Billy.

The girl's head snaps up. The bearded wonder leans away from her, shoves his hands in his pockets. "It'll be part of your community service. You get to help Asher renovate her house for the next month."

"What the hell does that have to do with spending the night?"

"She shouldn't be alone."

Billy wants to throw something at him. "Call her parents."

A silence descends, long and uncomfortable, in which Billy is missing something and he hates it and Hopper waits for the girl, Asher, to say something.

"They left," she whispers, audible in the quiet of the night.

Billy raises both eyebrows. "When?" he asks.

"1974."

"You would have been, what, seven?"

"Eight. My older brother was here." She refuses to look at him. He can make out the side of her face and her glazed over eyes that are seeing something beyond him and the wary police officers.

"What happened to him?"

"He left too. 1978."

She'd've been about twelve then. Billy absently realises she must be a senior, like him, and somehow he's never noticed her in his four weeks at Hawkins High. The girl's a ghost. "How the hell are you not in the system?"

Asher looks at Hopper then. He takes over the story. "Made a deal with a couple at the local church," he explains. "Small town, bud. We look out for each other here. Right." Hopper claps his hands. "Give me your statements and then we'll clear out and we can all get some sleep. It's been a long night for everyone. Hargrove, I'll call your dad, don't worry 'bout him."

Punching the chief of police would be a bad idea. Billy repeats it over and over while he lights a third smoke and listens to Asher tell of being dropped off by Powell and then being jumped in her own house by the grandson of a headmaster who built her house and some college and then Billy turning up.

Billy, in as few words as possible, explains Bacliff's misdirection.

Hopper, for Billy's sake, explains in as few words as possible that Morell, the psycho, is suspected of murdering two kids up at said college and trying to kill a third, and they'll need to drain the pool to find the bodies, and that he left Asher's bike a few metres down the road from her drive's turnoff. Hopper produces the bike from the back of the truck. Asher wheels it around the side of the house and Hopper takes the opportunity to join Billy on the porch.

"You see why you need to stay the night?" he asks. It's not a question. "You screwed up with Harrington. This is your chance to fix that."

"By painting her house?" Billy drawls.

"She's been through a nightmare tonight. You're gonna make sure she's okay, and that means not leaving her alone in the house where she was almost killed."

"And you want me to do that? You're scraping the bottom of the barrel here, Chief."

"You're the one who saved her. That counts for something. And for better or worse, you're all she's got tonight."

Asher returns, crunching over gravel. Powell gives her a sad smile, a pat on the arm. "How are you doing?" he asks.

She murmurs, too low to be heard. Hopper claps Billy on the shoulder and stomps down the porch steps. "We'll be going," he says. "Lock the doors, get some food in you. Billy's going to keep you safe."

Asher's eyes meet his. She doesn't seem so sure. That makes two of them.

The police clear out without ceremony. Billy's Camaro, gleaming silver under the stars, remains. He could jump in and drive and say to hell with the consequences. No one tells him what to do – especially not a pig.

Except . . .

Her throat and wrists are red. They've darkened as the night has passed. Tomorrow morning they'll be ghastly purple. He can't stop himself from remembering.

More than that, he can't stop a very old, very childish fantasy from resurfacing. He once thought of himself as his mother's knight in shining armour, standing between her and her attacker, biding the time until he could whisk her away to a safe haven somewhere green and beautiful and right by the sea.

Then she left – and he can't blame her for it, and can't blame her for leaving him with Neil because Neil had the cops and Neil needed a punching bag and Neil was stronger than any fairy tale villain – and the fantasy died. He was no one's saviour.

"You're the one who saved her. That counts for something."

Could he . . . ?

Damn it, he thought he'd outgrown this. The world is hard and cruel and you either sink or swim because no one's going to throw you a rope. That's what living alone with Neil taught him.

Neil's not here.

She looks like Mom.

Both her parents and her brother left her.

She was just almost-murdered.

Something flickers inside Billy's chest, something he only ever feels around Max and ruthlessly crushes because his step-sister's got to learn to survive and he can't come to her rescue.

"You're the one who saved her. That counts for something."

Shut the hell up, Jim.

"Oi," he calls down to her. She jumps, swivels on the gravel. "You hungry?"

She touches her stomach, then her neck. "A bit." She sounds surprised by the answer.

"Fine. Show me what you've got in your cupboards." He drops his last cigarette for the night and stomps into the house. The girl who isn't his mother follows. He makes sure to lock the front door after her.