The monster showed up just after midnight. As they do.

Conor was awake when it came.

He'd had a nightmare. Well, not a nightmare. The nightmare. The one he'd been having a lot lately. the one with the darkness and the wind and the screaming. The one with the hands slipping from his grasp, no matter how hard he tried to hold on. The one that always ended with—

"Go away," Conor whispered into the darkness of his bedroom, trying to push the nightmare back, not let it follow him into the world of waking. "Go away now."

He glanced over at the clock his mum had put on his bedside table. 12.07. Seven minutes past midnight. Which was late for a school night, late for a Sunday, certainly.

He'd told no one about the nightmare. Not his mum, obviously, but no one else either, not his dad in their fortnightly (or so) phone call, definitely not his grandma, and no one at school. Absolutely not.

What happened in the nightmare was something no one else ever needed to know.

Conor blinked groggily at his room, then he frowned. There was something he was missing. He sat up in his bed, walking a bit more. The nightmare was slipping from him, but there was something he couldn't put his finger on, something different, something—

He listened, straining against the silence, but all he could hear was the quiet house around him, the occasional tick from the empty downstairs or a rustle of bedding from his mum's room next door.

Nothing.

And then something. something he realized was the thing that had woken him.

Someone was calling his name.

Conor.

He felt a rush of panic, his guts twisting. Had it followed him? Had it somehow stepped out of the nightmare and—?

"Don't be stupid," he told himself. "You're too old for monsters."

And he was. He'd turn thirteen just last month. Monsters were for babies. Monsters were for bed-wetters. Monsters were for—

Conor.

There it was again. Conor swallowed. It had been an unusually warm October, and his window was still open. Maybe the curtains shushing each other in the small breeze could have sounded like—

Conor.

All right, it wasn't the wind. It was definitely a voice, but not one he recognized. It wasn't his mother's voice, that was for sure. It wasn't a woman's voice at all, and he wondered for a crazy moment if his dad had somehow made a surprise trip from America and arrived too late to phone and—

Conor.

No. Not his had. This voice had a quality to it, a monstrous quality, wild and untamed.