Chapter 12: The Creature Visits Curtis

The sound was his father's voice. That was the first thing, and it was the thing that stopped him at the top of the basement stairs with his hand on the door frame and the linoleum cold under his bare feet and the house around him making its familiar 3 a.m. sounds — the refrigerator's hum, the settling of wood against itself, the particular creak of the third stair from the bottom that he had memorized, the way you memorized everything about a house when the house was where you spent most of your time.

The voice was coming from the basement.

That was the second thing.