"Check on the Children"

“Did you look in on the children?” Those were the words that shattered the calm of a fall night

in 1979. A high-school girl had taken a babysitting job deep in the Minnesota woods,

the kind of house where the silence feels heavy. After tucking the kids into bed upstairs,

she curled up on the living-room couch, flipping through TV channels to pass

the time. Then the phone rang. She answered, expecting a wrong number — but all

she heard was someone breathing. Slow. Wet. Close.

And then a man’s voice, low and icy: “Have you looked in on the children?”

Uneasy, she told herself it was some creep playing games and hung up.