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It was during this remodeling that Henry, one of the electricians, said as he reconfigured the relay control panel, “You know, this is the old x-thirty model. Had a bug.”

“Bug?”

“A flaw. A design flaw.”

“How so?”

“Well, y’see, during a brownout—a dip in the power—the relays could all release. The lights would go off, but the emergency backups would not come on, ‘cause the x-thirty was still sensing voltage, low-level though it was.”

“Oh?”

“Yar. But it was no big deal: all y’hadda do was hit the override button on the remote. Then the emergency lights’d come on, stay on, until the brownout was over.” Henry clipped another wire. “The replacement x-forty took care of the bug.”

“I wonder if it ever happened to my uncle. A brownout, I mean.”

Henry shrugged and kept working.

At that moment Harlow was called away to pick out a china partem.

And the work went on.

And on.

Until at last it was done.

As the final worker, a plumber, pitched his toolbox into his van and drove away, Harlow turned and stepped back into his now gracefully livable home.

* * *

Shouting to the world that his creature was alive, an ecstatic Colin Clive clutched the edge of the laboratory table and stared upward in awe and triumph and disbelief.

God, but I love these old classics.

Harlow lounged in his customized Eames recliner, the remastered black-and-white gleaming on the digital screen before him. But then—What th—?

A shift of darkness in the dimly lit room caught the corner of Harlow’s eye, yet when he turned to look, nothing was there, nothing but a cluster of shadow by the couch.

Hmm. TV flicker.

Still, the back of his neck crawled with ill-defined apprehension. In the wavering light, as Frankenstein played on, Harlow stood and looked about the darkened room. Nothing. No one. Empty of all but glimmer and shade.

Shaking off the vague sense of unease, Harlow stepped to the kitchen and got a Sam Adams and took a long, steady pull. Carrying the beer, he returned to the movie, reversing the DVD back to the loosing of kites into storm-filled, lightning-streaked skies.

A week went by with nothing untoward, and then another. But now and then in nights of the third week after, off to the side a flicker of movement would catch his eye; yet when he looked directly on, he found only shadows lying there.

His unease returned.

And Harlow began approaching unlighted rooms in mild trepidation.

Come on, you idiot. There’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a primitive reaction. Coded in the genes. A holdover from cavemen days. Or perhaps from before we descended from the trees. It isn’t fear of the dark, but fear of the unknown instead.

Even so, he began to feel that something stood in the shadows behind, or waited in the shadows ahead.

God, my imagination is running wild.

There came a night when in that paralyzed in-between state of someone who is neither awake nor asleep, Harlow groaned in dread, for something dark stood in the gloom at the foot of his bed, black on black, something sinister, something silent, something watching him.

His heart pounding, sweat pouring, his moans turning to whines, Harlow managed to wrench himself fully awake, and gasping, he fumbled at the bedside lamp, finally finding the switch, snapping it on, and no one, nothing, no thing, stood at the foot of his bed.

Lord, I’m jumping at shadows.

Feeling drained, still it was a long time before Harlow fell back to sleep.

The next day Harlow got a dog, a rottweiler. Yet it seemed cowed by the unfamiliar surroundings, or so Harlow thought, and he literally had to drag it into the house. At the first chance it got it bolted out the door. Harlow never saw it again.

Son of a bitch.

Harlow had a monitored burglar alarm installed: all the doors and windows were armed, and in several of the downstairs rooms he had motion detectors positioned, tripped by heat plus movement. He accidentally triggered the alarm himself several times before learning all the codes and remembering when to disarm the system—the damn whoop, whoop, whoop of the