No one knew. No one but her and the thing that had crawled up out of the ground when she was only six. No one else was aware that the thing that had clawed its way out of the hole, dirty and smelling of the soil from which it emerged, was responsible for the death of her father. She alone had seen the thing before that day, seen it extend one wrinkled and bony hand after the other, its filthy talons gaining purchase with each grasp, pulling its grotesque and deformed body through its hole in the earth until it reached the daylight. Then its head emerged, and she could see its white hair streaked with dirt and tangled with the dead leaves of Fall. Finally, free of the confines of its hiding place, the thing had stood upright, and looked at her through the big picture window of their country home. And Langley Delamar knew the thing had come for her.

At night, she had been afraid to sleep, fearful the thing outside would find its way into her bedroom and take her while everyone else was slumbering. She could sometimes hear it scratching at the doors–first at the front, then the back–and then pecking on the windows to taunt her. Langley lay in her bed, covers over her head, praying there was no way the thing could get inside. The harassment went on, night after night, until Langley no longer heard the thing scratching, and was hopeful it had somehow disappeared. Curious, she worked up the courage to look outside, peering cautiously through the curtains that hung at the picture window. On that night, as moonlight covered the ground like a silken blanket of silver, Langley saw something other than her supernatural enemy. In the highest branches of the big walnut tree close to the road, there was a bird, a black bird, very large and with a wingspan that made the child gasp in wonderment. Surely this was something good…something extraordinary.

Sensing Langley at the the window, the wicked thing in the hole began its laborious journey to the surface. The child imagined it salivating at the thought of her own quick, but horrible demise. But the black bird would have no part of the evil thing’s presence, and it swooped down upon the thing, nipping at it with its unnaturally long beak which glamed like jet in the moonlight. The thing could not prevail over the black bird, but retreated angrily into its hole. Such was it every night, after sundown, regardless of moonlight or starlight alone. Langley’s protector was there, perched high in the tall tree, where its sharp eyes could view the thing’s hole and any activity that might be produced from it. And the child slept.

During the daylight hours, Langley avoided the front yard diligently, telling no one of the threat for fear they, too, would become prey for the awful thing that lurked in the hole. Knowledge of the thing, she felt, would put them in danger from it. The risk of not telling was a calculated one…and one that she later came to regret. For one afternoon, when she and her mother and the Delamar siblings were grocery shopping in town, the thing struck down their beloved Frayne, taking their father from them and leaving Althea Delamar with five young children to raise on her own.

The doctor they called said it was a heart attack that felled Frayne Delamar, but Langley knew better. She knew that the thing had taken him from her, angry that it could not have Langley and finding a way to wound her deeply in retribution. That much had been accomplished, for Langley had adored her father. And the secret of his death was a burden of guilt the child would bear upon her soul  like a leaden cross. Her father had died in her place, and she had not warned him of the danger.

Two days after Frayne Delamar’s death, Althea moved her five now-fatherless children from Hardin’s Creek, the only home they had ever known,  to a town named Lilly. It was not far away, but far enough that Langley would forever feel an alien there.  Soon after the move, she began having dreams, dreams of the dirty white thing that crawled out of the ground. When Langley’s thoughts were dark and her mood was reclusive, she again encountered the thing in the nightmare world where Langley felt the ponderous weight of her solitude and darkness more profoundly than ever. There the thing reigned unchecked from a large house, the door open, but the way paved with moss and slime, and the stench from the house smelling of death and decay. Something beckoned Langley inside that house, but she refused to enter, knowing the evil that lurked within those mildewed and putrefying walls.

Instead, in the dreamworld Langley stood outside the thing’s rotting house and watched. She had a score to settle with what dwelt inside, but not yet….not yet. She knew the time would come, and she waited.