The story begins with a prologue set in the past and told from the third-person perspective of an omniscient narrator. This prologue introduces the novel’s protagonist, Ethan Marsh, who is 10 years old and slowly waking up on a humid July morning. He has just spent the night “camping” in a tent in his backyard with another boy who is not yet named.

As Ethan slowly swims out of sleep and into consciousness, he realizes he is alone and this is strange. Because, when he fell asleep last night, someone else was with him. And that person has now disappeared. The omniscient narrator asserts that “this is the last carefree moment he’ll have for the next thirty years” (1).

Chapter 1 is set in the present and narrated from Ethan’s first-person perspective. Now an adult, he is haunted by a recurring nightmare that begins with a distinctive “scritch” sound. Ethan checks the clock by his bedside table and realizes that—once again—he has been unable to sleep through the night. Ethan has experienced this dream every night between midnight and two o’clock in the morning for the past 30 years.