We heard something... though we didn't know what at first. In the still of the early morning, it sliced through the silence like an athame. When we heard it again, we were both a little more certain of what it was. It sounded to us like the Reaper had taken and snapped an old, dry bone in his skeletal hands. By the third time, there was no question as to what it was. Twigs breaking, accompanied by the sound of leaves crunching underfoot. Someone was outside our house.

I looked without moving my head and gestured to my older brother, Michael, to go get dad. He quickly shook his head no and turned his eyes back to the window. In the all-consuming darkness, we lay there listening to the sound of brittle leaves crumbling under the weight of this intruder and the snapping of dead branches with every other step. At last, Michael looked at me again. "Listen, I think he's heading to the back porch. I'm gonna grab daddy's shotgun and give him a headache." Silently, I vehemently told him no, that it was a bad idea. He didn't seem to care. Still in his Spongebob PJs, he cracked open the door to our room inch by inch and slipped out into the hallway.

Rolling my eyes and groaning inwardly, I scampered after him. Of course, I thought about waking our father, but what would he do? The same thing that Michael was about to do, only with him, we'd probably get yelled at for being up at such a late hour.

Out in the hallway, the footsteps were louder. Much louder. There was a very short hallway from the kitchen to our bedroom door. There was another longer hallway that made up the back part of the house. There was a bathroom on the right of the hallway with a linen closet against the three-foot wall beside it. There was our bedroom on the adjoining wall with only wood paneling until you reached the office, where our mother worked from home. At the end of the hall was a six-foot-tall mirror that had always creeped me out. It took up most of the wall. Finally, on the other side of the hallway, the wall we were both leaning against had two doors, which lead to the laundry room and our parent's bedroom.

Up until that point, I thought I knew the definition of fear, but when terror turned to horror, my blood transformed into liquid nitrogen before my heart could resume its thundering beat. Everything stopped for a moment. My chest, arms, face, and legs all went numb and then flushed with heat before returning to me the previous sensation of being inhumanly cold. The next footstep we heard didn't come from somebody walking around in our yard... it came from somebody climbing the stairs to our deck. We shared one wide-eyed glance before we booked it to the sliding glass door in the back.

I nearly scraped my fingers trying to lock the door before I realized the reason it wouldn't turn. It was already locked. Phew! Michael was fumbling around in the closet near the door, throwing things about and making the place look like it had already been broken into. He stopped when he heard the door. The trespasser yanked at the handle a couple of times before slowly waving goodbye to me and my brother and walking backward into the cover of the night. He wasn't gone though. We heard running footsteps and enough crunching that it sounded like someone being trampled to death in the stampede, but only for about ten seconds.

We both had the same thought: our parents' room. Our mother was hot-natured, so she usually kept the window at least cracked at night, and Autumn was her favorite season. We heard somewhat of a commotion coming from the other side of her door while we pounded against it from our side. "Mommy! Wake up! Someone's trying to get in the house!" Michael yelled.

All of a sudden, the door creaked open and the man who had been trying to enter took a measured step forward and slowly waved to me. I tried to scream, but nothing came out, and hurriedly skittered after Michael, who had turned tail and run back to the sliding door. I heard the lock click just as I reached him. We looked like conjoined twins almost as we scrambled outside, but Michael went down the stairs first. I only made it to the second-to-last step before the man grabbed me from behind. He picked me up by my hair and hauled me skyward. My brother delivered a kick into the man's shins that Chuck Norris would be proud of. The man instantly dropped me and I crawled as far away as I could before I heard a more solid thud.

The monster had knocked my brother onto his back and he wasn't moving! Unable to breathe, I tried to will my limbs to move, but succeeded only in making it a few feet before I felt a hand clap down hard on my shoulder. I gasped and spun around, my rear planted firmly in the dirt and dying foliage. Michael sat up as the man reached for me. "Wait!" he screamed. "Don't hurt her! Just let her live! She won't tell on you! She can't!" The man straightened back up as Michael said this. He ploddingly turned on his heel to face Michael and removed the ski mask he had been wearing.

It was Michael's turn to gasp. His jaw opened wider than the entrance to the Cave of Wonders. As for the man, my stomach turned inside out without a moment's notice That hair... and the tattoo on the back of his neck... it couldn't be. But it was. The man turned to me and addressed Michael at the same time. "I know," he said in that same, familiar voice, the same one that had read me bedtime stories countless times. "Goodnight sweetheart," he said to me as he took my hair gently into his hands. Michael screamed as daddy withdrew the blade he had stuffed in his jacket pocket.