The sky was as thick as the bramble choked grove. Black clouds stirred and changed shape, riding on the quiet summer wind. It was a night that left dogs barking in the darkness, at the strange forms only they could sense.

The trees rattled, shaking the dew and night birds from their canopies. An ice white light appeared, burning through the branches. There was the soft hum, the song of young spring cicadas, as hundreds of spotlights hovered restlessly through the woods.

Only now was she visible, appearing like a praying mantis as her head spun, watching the great mangroves sink into the darkness as they fell, the hum of the giant locust machines as they mowed the forest floor. Her fingers spidered over a small square stone, gliding and tracing over intricate hieroglyphs.

One of the great silver locusts lay frozen in its tracks. Emerging from the hull was an immense silhouette shaped like a man. Even the mist of light could not reveal his face, covered in a bulky armor the color of gun metal, if there was indeed a face underneath the heavy machinery. Another locust had stopped, yards away and now the figure was joined by two beings, equally armored as he. The beings walked like men, but drew heavy claws instead of hands. The first armored figure signaled his attendants, tapping at a protruding rock from the ground. It gave a metallic ring.

By now she had fled, deeper into the cavern, its walls echoing her panic. She hums something inaudible, the notes unheard by the stones of the cave. She lights a match, revealing only green water and frightened bats. Reaching a rock just beyond the cavern stream, she tucks the medallion deeper into her cloak. Before her eyes can flicker shut, the cave rattles, stirring the waters of the underground stream. A violent explosion from without that now sounds like thunder. Johnny Sars will dream again.

It was the first time he had the dream since moving into the house.
“Johnny, come down for breakfast! It’s almost seven!” Agnes banged on the door.
She pushed a bowl of oatmeal and a hard boiled egg in front of him as she moved soundlessly across the kitchen in slippers and a pale cotton bathrobe, smoking a cigarette.
“You hear that idiot neighbor of ours on his bike last night?” George muttered behind his newspaper.

Johnny felt some relief. He remembered the dream, even before the shapes became clear, but never what triggered it. He wasn’t sure if the explosion was part of the dream, or his father kicking open the door at eight o’clock every morning at their apartment on the South End. The locusts in the dream must have been the trucks downshifting on the highway outside. But who was she?
He plucked an orange from the fruit bowl on his way out.

“Johnny! You doing anything after school?” George folded his paper.
They both knew the answer.
“Someone wants to see the room upstairs today. Wonder if you’ll show him around? Good. Alright, Agnes, I better get going.”

“So who can tell me the name of the last emperor before the fall of Rome? Anyone?” Miss Blakemore’s eyes stopped in front of Johnny, watching him rustle through the pulp pages of Prehistoric Planet.

Johnny felt her stare, and realized she had let it slide. His history teacher was probably the only friend he had at the entire school. The beatings from his classmates had stopped, but that was only after word of what was in the papers a year ago had spread into town by way of gossip. After that, even his most brutal tormentors stopped talking to Johnny, not even to borrow a pencil. The circumstances of what happened were ambiguous, even to Johnny.

One autumn night his father shook him awake, dizzy and horrified. It would be the only time he saw Richard Sars genuinely afraid.

“It doesn’t want me here!” He yelled louder and louder, “The damned thing doesn’t want me here!” He spit scotch-scented blood onto the floor. It dripped from his chin onto his grease stained undershirt. More blood leaked from his swollen left eye.
“You have to help me! Help me, godammit!” The rotund man sunk to the floor, his face crunching against the floorboards.

Johnny wrapped himself in a cocoon of blankets. His eyes peered through the cloth as he watched his father flail helplessly on the ground, kicking into the wall.

“Sonofabitch! My arm…I can’t move it…” A gurgle rose from his throat as he struggled to speak.

The next moment Johnny would continue to disbelieve, were it not for the obvious evidence otherwise. Richard’s body was dragged across the hallway as he clung to the carpet with fingers and teeth, the threads splitting between his jaws. There was a scream and the thud of flesh against the stairs. Johnny was certain he heard a door splintering at the bottom of the stairwell.

In the morning, the neighbors found Johnny sitting on the landing outside, and the swollen lump of a corpse that was once Richard Sars. They were quick to call murder. The elder Sars fought his family as though fighting a boxing match, Mr. and Mrs. Phelps said. It was a matter of time before he couldn’t get away with it any longer. Mr. Wilkinson, who once had to wrestle a 9mm from his neighbor’s hands after a drunken binge, knew better.

“Ol’ Rick once put a gun to his brain an’ neah rip my head off when I tried get it away from him,” was what he told the coroner, “doubtful this heah kid a’ his coulda done this to him.” The police took his side of the story. While the neighbors whispered as they pleased, it was ruled a burglar had broken into the apartment and Richard died after a long struggle. A judge wanted to send the boy to live with his mother in Dallas but Johnny vanished before the papers were signed.            

At age 14, with only a suitcase and five dollars, he arrived in the little town of Nightshade, Connecticut, and knocked on the door of George and Agnes Higby’s boarding house.

“How are things with you and the Higbys?” Miss Blakemore waited for Johnny at the door.
“Good, Miss Blakemore. They’re both very nice.”
“And no trouble here at school? I was wondering if you wouldn’t mind staying later today…”
“Well, I don’t know. Mr. Higby wanted me to show someone around the house later. This isn’t about history class, is it?”
“I’m afraid so. Can you come in early tomorrow?”
“I’ll see you at six then tomorrow, Miss Blakemore.”
“Alright we’ll talk then. Goodbye!”

A white Chevy Impala pulled up to the curb. Johnny could hear the crunch of a parking brake.

“Hello there. Your folks around?” A white-haired man in a tweed suit rolled down the window and removed his hat.
“Uh, hello, sir. You’re here about the room?”
“That’s right. Name’s Sturges,” the stranger offered his hand.
The screen door flapped open and Agnes fluttered down the stone steps.
“Hello, colonel! Did you have a good ride out from Washington? George isn’t home but he said to show you around.”
The old man released the trunk.
“Just fine! You New Englanders have such wonderful little homes!” He climbed out of the car. “Your boy helping out with the luggage?”
“Luggage? I thought you would like to walk around a bit first?”
“Already made up my mind,” he smiled.