They took his mother one day. It was raining. He came downstairs to find her gone and a puddle of water growing underneath the broken window. He didn’t know why they hadn’t come into the house and gotten the rest of them. Nothing they did made any sense. Randall nailed a piece of plywood over the hole where the window used to be while he sat and thought about things. Randall didn’t say anything but he put his hand on his shoulder when he was done with the window. Randall had square, stubby fingers with wide nails. He liked Randall.

Sometimes he could hear his mother out there with Them, afterwards. She didn’t sound much like his mother but he recognized her voice. Sometimes shouting, sometimes laughing, sometimes crying. It always woke him up, if he was sleeping, and dragged him downstairs. He always opened the front door and stood looking out for as long as he could hear her. Randall got very angry when he found out. He might have had to leave, that was how angry Randall was, but one night he came downstairs and Randall was gone. The front door was open. After that he sometimes heard Randall’s voice, too, laughing, shouting, crying, just like his mother, out in the darkness with Them.