The Knocking at 3 A.M.

Every lock in this house locks from the other side of the door.

The Hale family bought the Corbin house at 13 Widow's Lane for far too little money - a big old house at the end of the lane, still furnished with another family's left-behind life. The Ellerys walked out one March night nine years ago and never came back for a single thing. Not the dishes. Not the dog's bowl. Not the photographs with the adults' faces scratched out and the children's left untouched.

On the kitchen doorframe, where generations of children were measured in pencil, there is already a line for Milo, aged seven. It is dated tomorrow. It is two inches too high.

A century ago, Esther Corbin lost both her children in this house - and she never left it. She has been alone a long time. She does not want the parents. She is measuring the children: learning their voices, singing the song she sang over two small graves, counting them the way the house has always counted them. And at 3 a.m., something knocks from inside the walls, and from inside the small door at the end of the hall, painted shut for a hundred years.

Thirteen nights. One family. And on the thirteenth night, an eighth knock - which is not a knock at all. It is her, asking for a name.

THE KNOCKING AT 3 A.M. is a terrifying haunted-house ghost story for adults, and the first book in the Thirteen Nights series.

Do not count the knocks. If you count them, she will know you are listening.