One day, one of my sisters came back home to stay for the weekend because she was having a bad time at her own house with work and stuff. It was normal, since this wasn’t the first time she came back to stay here for a few days. Though, bad luck, the next day we found one of her car’s mirrors had been broken. It was shitty, but we didn’t think much of it.
When my other sister moved back in with us for a short while, we all got scolded for leaving the backyard gates open while it wasn’t allowed, and that it started to break. It started to wobble back and forth and even though we had a lock on it, we found it open almost every morning. We speculated it must have been the wind. But when I observed closer, I noticed that every time, the gate was open, and the lock was shut. We also found markings of scaled off paint on the gate. someone was definetly climbing over into our yard, a lot.
The second time my other sister got here, the next morning, both her car mirrors were broken off and thrown into our front yard. My mum was at complete loss. she thought it might have been an angry neighbour passive agressively telling us not to park there? It was weird though… we went by all our neighbours asking if they knew what happened. But nobody did. Though, we were told one of our neighbours’ house was broken into last month.
I was starting to get nervous by my mother’s frantic thinking. There wasn’t a moment where she didn’t ponder aloud.
We decided to put protection on the gate, we bought a new lock, cameras and spikes worth 300 bucks all together.
Later that evening we were watching the news and the weather forecast told us it would be heavily stroming from that day forward. Before I went to bed, I walked my dog one more time and somebody raced away on a bike, sigarette in hand, and afro hair. We’d already gotten to the conclusion that it might be my sister’s ex-boyfriend but, that would have been strange, for him to suddenly be around when we hadn’t seen him in ages. Anyway, I went back inside and reported it to my mum, who had started keeping a log as she was told by her police friend. She also told me she ha heard voices under her bedroom window, out of the blue. (my mum’s a bad sleeper, so she’s awake most of the night.) she told me she found it very perculiar that the voice just, suddenly appeared. There were no footsteps or sounds of a bike that came before. No, there was someone standing underneath her window, at 1 am.
That was when I started to get afraid.
Like the news had said, the following days were shit. It was raining non-stop, the wind was howling like crazy and it was cold. But the strange things happening around us, had stopped.
Two weeks of intense storms passed, and we all thought everything had calmed down. Until a Sunday morning, at 6.15 am
I was already awake, because I always have to get up at 5 for school, so my internal clock woke me at 6 that day. I was playing some games or watching youtube videos when I heard something crash in the backyard. It was still kind of dark, and I didn’t wear my glasses so I couldn’t see too clearly. After a few minutes of scanning the area (I sleep on the attic so I can see the yard, the alley and the public alley) I decided it might not have been anything. I turned around and went back to my youtube videos. 5 minutes later, I heard a loud bang, 3 times. then, there was an insanely loud crash and loud footsteps running away.
I shot up and ran down the first pair of stairs. My mum had also opened her door and asked me what was going on. I said I didn’t know and we both ran downstairs. My mum ran to the back door and saw her own car mirror, broken and thrown at least 4 meters into the yard. She explained in panic while my sister and her boyfriend got downstairs. Only when he opened the door did we realise: our living room window had been shattered to pieces. my sister said ‘’if it is who I think it is, I know where he’s right now, I’m going after him’’ and took her work van. My neighbour had come out and asked us if a painting had fallen off or something, but quickly saw the window. She also told us she was going to look and took her car to the oposite direction my sister went. Lastly, my mum took her own car and left after telling me to call the emergency number.
at that moment it was 6.30, and, the police refused to come. I felt so incredibly useless when everyone was gone, but I had to stay home and ‘’protect’’ the house now that there was a free-for-all opening into the house. half an hour later, everybody returned, and we found out it was my sister’s ex boyfriend. she had indeed found him where she thought he was, and confronted him on the road. My neighbour had followed her and a few minutes after that, my mum found them. The police did come to them after my sister had called them saying she had the guy and if they wouldn’t come right at that moment, she’d have lost him.
He confessed to everything, the cars, the window, even to standing underneath the window and to breaking and entering to our backyard.
He finished paying my mum the window repairs only last month, and has a final warning at the police thanks to my mother’s mercy. But, she said, if there’s anything else that’s not supposed to happen, even if it wasn’t him, she would tell the police he was back and his parents would get involved. which he was really afraid of because he would have nothing left if that were to happen.
It turned out, he was still in love with my sister and couldn’t stand their break-up. But my mum knew he was lying, because he had told her ‘’I drunk a little too much and when I walked by… I got mad and couldn’t control myself.’’
She knew he lied, but said nothing about it.
To this day, I still jump up whenever I hear something that’s not supposed to be happening at the late or early hours. I was terrified, because until we were really certain it was him, it could have also been someone targeting us, just like the neighbours. It would have been a lot scarier if it were strangers, because they would be able to kill. My sister’s ex is too afraid to do that.
Only recently have I started letting my guard down, but I’ll never stop looking if I hear something strange