When the milk started talking to him, Tim didn’t know how to respond.

“YOU SHOULDN’T EAT DAIRY! DAIRY PRODUCTS OF ANY KIND WILL KILL YOU, TIM. I AM ONLY TRYING TO HELP!”

He looked at the gallon jug of milk in his hand. He checked the expiration date: June 15, 2010. Still good. He tilted it back and forth slowly, as if it were a particularly delicate Christmas present, or maybe a bomb, and he felt something slide heavily within the milk.

With shocking force, the forms of two gnarled claws slammed against the plastic halfway down the jug. “YOU ALSO SHOULDN’T SHAKE MILK BEFORE SERVING! I AM ONLY TRYING TO HELP YOU … IDIOT!”

Tim screamed and half-dropped, half-threw the jug at the counter in front of him. It was two-thirds full, and so he couldn’t see the thing inside once it retreated back into the white murk. He could only see the disturbance of the milk itself, frothy and choppy in the jug, as the creature within resettled.

“W-w-what? Is … are you … I mean, what’s … ?” Tim was at a loss. How was he supposed to interact with a milk jug that shouted at him? “Have I gone insane?” he asked quietly.

“OH, FOR THE LOVE OF CHRIST!” the milk shouted. “NO, YOU HAVE NOT GONE INSANE! YOU ARE THE MOST BORINGLY SANE PERSON WHO HAS EVER LIVED! THAT IS WHY I AM HERE: BECAUSE YOU ARE A BORE! TO EVERYONE AND EVERYTHING. I AM HERE TO HELP. YOU CAN CALL ME REX.”

“Rex,” Tim said. “Okay. I’m … Tim.”

“I KNOW WHO YOU ARE! JESUS! I ALREADY SAID YOUR NAME NOT SIXTY SECONDS AGO! IDIOT! ARE YOU ALWAYS GOING TO MAKE IT THIS DIFFICULT FOR ME TO HELP YOU?”

“Well, I don’t–I mean, I’m not sure,” Tim said. “I didn’t even know I, you know, needed any help.”

“WHY WOULD I BE HERE IF YOU WEREN’T A MAN WITH PROBLEMS?” Rex said. “GET YOUR HEAD IN THE GAME, TIM! YOU NEED HELP, AND I AM HERE TO PROVIDE IT! TA-FUCKIN’-DA, THE DOCTOR IS IN, BITCH!”

Tim fidgeted. It was all so troubling. He stared at the jug, blinked, and chewed the edge of his thumbnail. “But,” he mumbled, his mouth full of dirty keratin, “what if I don’t, you know … want your help?”

The creature flung itself forward and its gray-brown, furry, cat-like face pressed against the plastic, pushing away the milk and revealing its brain-melting monstrosity.

“THEN WE ARE GOING TO HAVE PROBLEMS, TIM!” it screamed. “WE’RE GOING TO HAVE BIG, BIG PROBLEMS!”

And then Rex laughed a horrible, terrifying laugh, and it started to occur to Tim that maybe the fiendish creature wasn’t there to help him after all.

“POUR SOME HERSHEY’S IN HERE!” Rex said. “MAKE ME CHOCOLATE! THEN, AH-HAH-HAH-HAH-HAH, LET THE HELPING BEGIN!”

Driving back was always the worst part for George. Laura always cried, and it wore on his nerves. That day, coming back from Portland, the rain was oppressive, gray, and suffocating in the summer heat. Trapped in the car with his sobbing wife, George struggled to find NPR’s Global News report interesting.

Peter and Sarah were in the back, playing on their game systems as was the usual. Laura was staring out the window with her finger in the middle of a book she had already confessed to him made her feel stupid. By the look of things, she hadn’t made it more than twenty pages into it. Not that he wanted to read it, anyway–it looked like something she’d heard about on The Daily Show.

There was definitely something unseemly about his wife’s infatuation with Jon Stewart. Buying books she never read was bad enough, but she’d taken three separate vacations to New York just to go to his show (a show which, if he had to be honest, George found more than a little tedious).

The Global News was over, and he hadn’t retained a single thing. Marketplace came on. Why did he always have to try and listen to things he didn’t really like? After all this time, who did he think he was kidding?

“Did you put that hold on the new Dan Brown?” he asked her.

“Ugh,” she replied. “You really want to read that?”

He shrugged. “I liked Angels and Demons.”

“You have terrible taste.”

“Says the woman who never makes it more than thirty pages into anything,” he said. “Fine, though. Forget it. I’ll just buy it from the bookstore.”

She shook her head and defiantly reopened the book she’d been fingering for the whole ride. She lasted about four minutes.

She leaned her head back, closed her eyes, and sighed. “God,” she said, “do you ever wish you had a better brain?”

“All the time,” he said.

The following day, we kept the shades drawn. Dim light crept around the edge of the yellow plastic. We cowered, our nerves still raw from the terror of the previous night, until Gretchen got too hungry to stand it anymore and went to the door.

I couldn’t shake the thought of the door rattling and cracking during the worst of the night’s gusts. None of us knew just how the phantoms worked, but they were in the wind somehow–we knew that much–and if the wind hit you, you’d be convulsing and transforming into a monster within seconds.

Gretchen moved the pale blue towel we’d used to block the crack between the floor and the bottom of the door. I didn’t like seeing the daylight there; I felt so vulnerable. If I could see out, they could get in.

Same with the windows. Those thin slivers of light worried me.

Gretchen looked back at us guiltily. “We have to find something to eat. We can’t just cower in here forever.”

Penny drew closer to me and pressed her mouth against my ribs.

“Just hurry,” I said.

Gretchen put her hand firmly on the brass knob.

We waited for her to open the door and face whatever was out there.