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Benny said, “He doesn’t see or hear us. Bob sees and hears everything. That’s who Bob is.”

“Or he sees us,” Harper said, “but he’s not able to respond.”

Benny was distressed. “This isn’t the Bob we need, the Bob we know and love. He’s like in a trance. A spell’s been cast on him.”

“Spell? You’ve got witches and wizards in the neighborhood?”

“Or like he’s been bitten by some bug with paralyzing venom.”

“Bug? Don’t get weirder on me, Benjamin. Whatever this is, we’ll snap Bob out of it.”

The door between the garage and the laundry room fell shut with a solid thud.

THE MONSTER

The garage fluorescents had stopped fluttering, as if the cause of their malfunction had closed the door behind itself when it went into the laundry room.

Benny and Harper stood watching the door, not near enough to reach out and open it or to be snatched off their feet if something opened it from the other side with the desire to kill and eat them.

“Okay,” she said, “for Bob, we’ve got to go in there and deal with this. Find the bastard who did that to him. Get it undone.”

“Let’s think it through,” Benny suggested.

After maybe ten seconds, Harper said, “The question isn’t do we go in or not. We go in. That’s settled.”

“Settled? Who settled it?”

“The question is whether we go in by this door or instead the front door—maybe the back door, maybe a window—and surprise him.”

“Him? How do we know we’re dealing with a him? How do we even know we’re dealing with something human? Listen, we call nine one one and let the cops handle this.”

Harper gave him the kind of look a waitress gives a customer when she suspects he’s going to leave without paying the check. “And we tell them what? That a dangerous man or creature unknown is in the house, came here by airfreight, and Fat Bob has had a spell cast over him?”

“Bob,” Benny corrected.

She was clearly appalled that she’d said “fat,” more rattled by events than she was willing to admit.

With one finger, she tap-tap-tapped the face of her wristwatch, a gesture Benny interpreted as meaning,Come with me now, because I’m not going to wait until you get a testosterone shot.

He said, “Okay. All right. Let’s do it.”

“For Bob,” she said.

“For Bob,” he said.

Harper moved before Benny could. She threw open the door and cleared the threshold and swept the aerosol can of spray starch left to right, and then right to left. Brandishing the golf club, Benny followed her into the laundry room.

As Harper warily entered the kitchen, Benny felt his scalp crawling, as if it was trying to get out from under his thatch of hair. He told himself to calm down. This situation would unfold just like it did in most monster movies. The gullible audience was made to wait and wait for the first full-on appearance of the creature—teased with a distorted shadow here, a blob of discarded slime over there, a low snarl off-screen—until the big reveal, whereupon the alien or the mutant or the beast risen out of the bowels of time would be a ho-hum compilation of all the monsters perpetrated by Hollywood in the past. Having seen pale, moist, hairless Galsbury crawling the ceiling, Benny could face down anything. That is what he told himself as he followed Harper out of the laundry room, and he believed himself, was encouraged by his counsel. When the kitchen proved to be deserted, he was disappointed, just a little bit.

He admired how Harper Harper—so cute and colorfully dressed—moved lithely and stealthily, cautiously but confidently, past the refrigerator, toward the breakfast nook, where she turned left to the family room, the can of spray starch in a two-handed grip. Bob had correctly seen in her the inherent courage requiredof a trainee for his dangerous profession. She had moxie. She was a spunky girl. Plucky. Witty. Harper was nothing like Jill Swift, and yet so soon after she entered Benny’s life, her mere presence had a healing effect; a scab had already closed the wound that Jill inflicted. The memory of Ms. Swift no longer inspired pangs of heartache, and in fact when he thought about being dumped by her, he felt strangely relieved.

A violent crashing-cracking-splintering noise came three times from somewhere in the front rooms of the house, such powerful blows that flatware rattled in the kitchen drawers.

Benny pivoted, scanning the ceiling, but nothing crawled out of the downstairs hallway or through the open door to the dining room. Nothing on the floor, either.

Energized by having something specific to chase down, Harper dashed back through the kitchen, no less lithe and stealthy than she’d been before. Passing Benny, she whispered with conviction, “Living room,” and slipped away in yellow-sneaker silence, bouncing ponytail protruding through the opening in the back of her baseball cap.

The noise could have as likely originated in the study or the powder bath or the foyer as in the living room. Harper seemed to have discarded her heretofore professional conduct in favor of full-on Nancy Drew enthusiasm. If she rushed directly to the living room, the intruder could come out of the study behind her and bash her head in—or bite it off.