Outside, under a grayish sky of torn clouds and fitful predawn winds, a night heron called kwawk, kwawk, and a wooden door banged and banged. Then he carefully climbed out of bed, and walked across to the window. There were his clothes, his jeans and his T-shirt, over the back of his upright ladder-backed chair. There was his toy box, its lid only half-closed because of the model tanks and cranes and baseball gloves that were always crammed in there. There was the carved pine footboard, at the end of his bed. He lifted his blond, tousled head from the pillow, and looked around the room with widened eyes. He waited and waited, but nothing happened. Or it may have been the sea, sliding and whispering over the dark beach, just a half-mile away. It may have been nothing more than the rustle of the curtains, as they rose and fell in the draft from the half-open window. Soft, suppressed sighs, as if they meant sadness, or pain. He was sure he could hear somebody sighing, or breathing. His parents were sleeping right down at the other end of the corridor, and that meant safety was two doors and thirty feet away, across a gloomy landing where an old grandfather clock ticked, and where even in daytime there was a curious sense of solitude and suffocating stillness. ' Daddy,' he said, but the word came out so quietly that nobody could have heard him.

His pulse raced silently and endlessly, a steeplechase of boyish terror that ran up every artery and down every vein. He strained his eyes and his ears in the darkness, looking and listening for the slightest movement, the slightest squeak of floorboards. He froze, not daring to breathe, his eight-year-old fingers clutching the candy-striped sheet right up to his nose. He woke up during the night and he was sure there was someone in his room.

Revenge of the manitou graham masterton