One Door From Heaven

front of a clock radio, lie several coins and a used Band-Aid with a blot of dried blood on the gauze pad. This isn't much blood, but the intruder has recently seen so much violence that he shudders. He does not touch the coins.
        Accompanied by dog snuffles and a flurry of fur, the motherless boy moves stealthily to the closet. The door is ajar. He opens it wider. With the flashlight beam, he shops for clothes.
        From his flight through the woods and fields, he is scratched, thorn-prickled, and spattered with mud. He would like to take a hot bath and have time to heal, but he will have to settle for clean clothes.
        The dog watches, head cocked, looking every bit as puzzled as it ought to be.
        Throughout the theft of shirt, jeans, socks, and shoes, Curtis Hammond sleeps as soundly as though a spell has been cast upon him. Were he a genuine starship captain, his crew might fall prey to brain-eating aliens or his vessel might spiral into the gravitational vortex of a black hole while he dreamed of Britney Spears.
        Not a brain-eating alien but feeling as though he himself is in the thrall of black-hole gravity, the intruder returns quietly Jo the open bedroom door, the dog remaining by his side.
        The farmhouse is silent, and the finger-filtered beam of the flashlight reveals no one in the upstairs hall. Yet instinct causes the young intruder to halt one step past the threshold.
        Something isn't right, the silence too deep. Perhaps Curtis's parents have awakened.
        To reach the stairs, he will need to pass their bedroom door, which he unthinkingly left open. If the farmer and his wife have been roused from sleep, they will probably remember that their door was closed when they retired for the night.
        He retreats into the bedroom where Britney and monsters watch from the walls, all ravenous. Switches off the flashlight. Holds his breath.
        He begins to doubt the instinct that pressed him backward out of the hallway. Then he realizes that the dog's swishing tail, which had been softly lashing his legs, has suddenly gone still. The animal has also stopped panting.
        Dim gray rectangles float in the dark: curtained windows. He crosses the room toward them, struggling to recall the placement of furniture, hoping to avoid raising a clatter.
        After he puts down the extinguished flashlight, as he pulls the curtains aside, plastic rings scrape and click softly along a brass rod, as though the hanging skeleton, animated by sorcery, is flexing its bony fingers in the gloom.
        Curtis Hammond mutters, wrestles briefly with his sheets, but doesn't wake.
        A thumb-turn lock frees the window. Gingerly, the intruder raises the lower sash. He slips out of the house, onto the front-porch roof, and glances back.
        The dog looms at the open window, forepaws on the sill, as if it will abandon its master in favor of this new friend and a night of adventure.
        "Stay," whispers the motherless boy.
        In a crouch, he crosses the roof to the brink. When he looks back again, the mutt whines beseechingly but doesn't follow.
        The boy is athletic, agile. The leap from the porch roof is a challenge easily met. He lands on the lawn with bent knees, drops, rolls through cold dew, through the sweet crisp scent of grass that bursts from the crushed blades under him, and scrambles at once to his feet.
        A dirt lane, flanked by fenced meadows and oiled to control dust, leads to a public road about two hundred yards to the west. Hurrying, he has covered less than half that distance when he hears the dog bark far behind him.
        Lights blaze, blink, and blaze again behind the windows of the Hammond place, a strobing chaos, as though the farmhouse has become a carnival funhouse awhirl with bright flickering spooks.
        With the lights come screams, soul-searing even at a distance, not just shouts of alarm, but shrieks of terror, wails of anguish. The most piercing squeals seem less like human sounds than like the panicked cries of pigs catching sight of the abattoir master's gleaming blade, although these also are surely human, the wretched plaints of the tortured Hammonds in their last moments on this earth.
        The killers had been even closer on his trail than he'd feared. What he sensed, stepping into that upstairs hallway, hadn't been the farmer and wife, awakened and suspicious. These are the same