It was an oppressive night, unseasonably hot for early June, the kind of thick, muggy night that hung heavily, threatening to suffocate her. She’d opened the windows an hour before in the vain hope that even the faintest of breezes might stir the air, might cool her skin, might even drive away the madness that threatened to destroy her tonight.

She knew that’s what it was.

There was no man; there were no hands reaching out to her.

It was in her mind, all of it.

That’s what she’d been told, first by her mother, and then by the doctors her mother had taken her to.

The man who pursued her, who skulked eternally on the fringes of her life, existed only in her own mind. She’d made him up sometime long ago, and should have forgotten him, too, sometime almost as long ago.

She’d talked to the doctor for an hour a week, and tried to do what he’d told her, tried to figure out why she might have invented the man. For a long time the doctor had insisted that it was because she was adopted, telling her that she was imagining a father to replace the real father she’d never known. Kelly hadn’t believed him — after all, if she was going to create a father, he wouldn’t be anything like the terrible image she saw in her dreams. And why wouldn’t she have imagined a mother, too? Besides, she’d seen the man long before she’d ever known she was adopted, long before she’d begun to understand how different she was from everyone else.

Finally, when the nightmare man refused to go away, and she’d known he never would, she stopped talking about him, stopped trying to think of reasons why he might be there. Instead, she’d simply reported to the psychiatrist that he was gone, and at last she’d been allowed to stop going to the doctor.

For almost five years, she hadn’t mentioned him at all. But the frightening image that haunted Kelly’s nights had not gone away.

She’d stopped crying out in the night when he suddenly appeared out of the darkness of her slumber; stopped telling her mother when she caught glimpses of him at the veiled edges of her sight.