A man describes his son Douglas, a bright boy with an affinity for violent art and games. At one point, an ad for a movie on TV shows a terrified blonde girl in a cage. The man can tell that he and his son are similarly fascinated by the advertisement. As a kid in a small town, the man would hang around in his neighbor's yards at night, "drink in" their lives, and play small pranks on them. He'd also peek inside their houses, and watch the Legges’ daughter as she slept. His childhood was pretty normal; his dad would take him golfing on weekends, even though he hated it. One abnormality was that his mother was a sex worker before he was born, which the man doesn't mind, although his mother is very embarrassed by it. When he was fourteen, he began getting excited by the thought of girls being hurt or killed. When he watched horror movies featuring pretty girls, he would get turned on and mentally transport to an invisible world he called “the other place,” where he sometimes passively watched a killer or even became one. When he takes his son fishing, he senses that a frustration in his son that parallels what the man felt towards his father when they golfed.
As the man aged, he made regular visits to a college campus to follow lone female students, and planned to make his murderous fantasies real. He got a gun and would hitchhike to get picked up by women, but he never did anything. One time, he actually tried to kill one of the women who picked him up, but when she pulled over and dared him to shoot her, he couldn’t, so she kicked him out and sped away. The man takes his son Doug fishing again, and this time Doug doesn’t move away from his father. The man muses that inside Doug, too, is “the other place,” but that Doug, unlike him, won’t be alone in it, even if he doesn’t know it.