Fredrick Backman - It's one of those winter nights when the darkness is...

It's one of those winter nights when the darkness is so thick it's as if the whole area has been dipped head first in a bucket of blackness, and The Monster steals out of the door and crosses the half-circle of light around the last light in the street so quickly that if Elsa had blinked a little too hard she would have thought she was imagining it. But as it is she knows what she saw, and she hits the floor and makes her way down the stairs in one fluid movement.