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Enjoy the show. It was Christmas time.

My wife and I were staying at her childhood home, where her mother now lived all alone.

Well, not if you include the cats. The house was on a quiet coldest sack in the suburbs.

If you picture freshly mowed lawns, American flags, and empty sidewalks, you're picturing it right.

It was a single-story home with an attached garage out front. The garage has two doorways, apart from the electric garage door.

One leads to the garden and backyard. This had an old doggy door from their days with dear old

Macs, that they covered with a piece of nailed in wood. That had always made me slightly uncomfortable before.

But I figured it had always been that way for years,

so what's the worst that could happen?

The second door leads to the kitchen, holocor.

It could stop a mouse, but not much else.

Definitely not something that wanted in or someone.

We were asleep in my wife's childhood bedroom at the front of the house.

3 a.m., I was in that deep, dark recess of sleep.

You know, you're in the diving bell,

and you're submerged hundreds of meters below the surface in black water, protected from the real world by miles of nothingness. Then I heard it, a scream.

What are you doing? It was, in my mother-in-law's voice, that I heard this echoing down the hallway.

To me, lost in a sea of sleep, it sounded like a jet engine roaring past my eardrum. I bolted up.

What happened next happened in a matter of seconds. But about that scream, even though I was dead asleep, I heard it enough to sense

an urgency behind it. It wasn't an, oh, you scared me type of scream. It was different, and I knew it.

...