We lived on East Street as I was growing up. It was a brick-lined, hilly road with our house set high on a terrace up an inclined driveway lined by two 10-foot stone walls. Two dormer bedroom windows jutted from the second floor that faced a castle-like house across the street.

My younger brother Peter and I shared one bedroom, while the youngest, Pat, had the other. My bed was next to the window that faced the street. During the summer, when the night cooled, my dad would turn off the large fan in the window that looked out on the backyard where we played wiffle ball. Without the rumble, I heard the sounds of the night.

When I was ten — the same year I read Mutiny on the Bounty, my first big book — I saw a newspaper headline when I picked up my forty-four Times-Democrat newspapers about a maniac who escaped from an asylum. Is a maniac like Dracula or the Wolfman, I wondered.

After supper, my mom walked up East Street to Middle Road to visit Aunt Marilyn and to play bridge. At bedtime, she hadn’t returned. As it got dark, I reversed my position in the bed so that I could look out the open window that faced the street, and hear the sounds: an owl hooting, car tires drumming on the brick pavement…But I couldn’t see the sidewalk. Or the creepy house across the street.

Where I was sure He was lurking, the humpback, shaggy-haired man, ready to strangle my mother as she turned to walk up the long, steep driveway, hidden from the street and our next-door neighbors.

So I stood watch at the window in my tennis shoes, holding a plastic wiffle ball bat, until I spotted her turn into the driveway, and then heard, outside the back window, the turn of the backdoor knob and the click of the lock.

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