For Some Context, My family used to live in a small cabin in the middle of nowhere. My room was pretty small, and I slept on the bottom bunk of a Bunkbed that’s top bunk never got used except for the occasional sleepover. There was a sort of nightstand by my bed that I usually stacked with books and empty cups that had a kind of antique lamp resting on it. Above the lamp was a window.
You see, this cabin was built on a kind of hillside, and my room was on the side of the house that overlooked the trees beyond the said hillside. So you can imagine that that window was pretty high up off the ground. About 30 feet.
That’s what made what happened even more terrifying.
It was a snowy day in December. We live up in a mountain range at a high elevation, so you can imagine that we would get buckets of snow poured on our cabin from the starry sky above. On this particular night, we had had a mountain of snow blocking our driveway and therefore could not get out and even have a pipe dream of getting to school.
So I and my brother were allowed to stay home and drink Hot Chocolate by the fire.
Night fell, and eventually, our parents told us to wrap it up and brush our teeth. I crawled into bed and opened the book I’d checked out from the library to the place I’d had it bookmarked. I read until I could barely lift my eyelids and passed out asleep.
I was aroused from my slumber at an unknown time and was just wiping my sleepy eyes when I heard a
TAP TAP TAP
On my window pane. I immediately seized up and a chill ran from my shoulders to my feet. I stayed like that, barely breathing for about 30 more seconds until I snapped out of my trance. The noise hadn’t happened again. Maybe it was just our old cabin creaking on its foundation. How could I be sure the sound had even come from the window-
TAP TAP TAP
Went to the windowpane again. And this time I was sure I’d heard It right. It sounded like a tree branch tapping against my window. The only problem about that was that our family had gotten rid of all the trees near the house in fear of them falling.
T A P T A P T A P
This time the tapping was slower. I told myself I would Roll out of bed, click on my bedside lamp, and get a good look at whatever was doing that.
I somehow convinced myself to do that on the count of three.
1
2
3
I rolled out of bed, my elbow absorbing most of the impact. I shot up off the floor and yanked the cord on my bedside lamp. That was when I first saw it.
It was a shriveled thing. It seemed as if its entire face was melted wax. Even more accurately, It looked as if the thing’s head had been put in a fire because its eyes were popped. Like, I could see the remnants of them in the socket, and there was dried blood streaked down from the bottom of the eye sockets to the chin of its face.
Then I saw what was making the tapping.
It looked like it had once been a hand with its pointer finger up, but the hand too looked like it had been melted together. What once was the rest of the fingers were now a glob of crisp flesh.
I thought I would scream. Do something. Even clench a muscle. But instead, I just sat there. My mouth hanging open.
Then It smiled, horrible yellow teeth which seemed to have been sharpened by unnatural means were all that shone, they glinted in the light of the lamp. Then It started feeling for the edge of the window. It was trying to get inside. I was still paralyzed, gaping and gawking at the charred thing while it fumbled around the window until it found the edge.
And that’s when I knew I was as good as dead. It would’ve gotten inside if my dad hadn’t reminded me to lock the window that evening. But even with its goal destroyed, that godforsaken thing kept its smile the whole time it disappeared from sight, dragging it’s gnarled and melted hand down my windowpane, leaving a smudge on the pane.
I just remember staying in that same position all night, never taking my eyes off the window. When the birds finally sang and my dad came in to drag me out of bed, I snapped out of my trance and hugged him, squeezing him as tight as I would a stuffed animal. I think he suspected I might have a screw loose.
I heard the tapping every night since, and now I make a special habit of triple-checking that my window is locked before bed.
The morning after it first happened, I went around the back of the house to see if there were any footprints, but as I suspected, the snow had covered up what little evidence I might have had. But oh, I knew that night wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t some figment of my imagination. Because ever since that night, the smudge that that printless finger made running down the glass has been there.
. . .
But we eventually sold that Cabin to a couple looking for an escape from the big city.
Maybe I should have told them that I left the window in that room unlocked…