I must begin by stating that I am not a particularly perceptive or sensitive person. I don’t ‘see things’ or feel any ‘energy’ from any particular object or person, nor do I have any particular experience with anything paranormal.
I lead a fairly normal, uncomplicated, mundane life, with little to distinguish it from the life of anyone else.
Except for one…let’s call it an “occasion.”
Some years ago, I had several friends over at my house for a weekend party. Everyone brought some drinks or food to share around, and we were all settling in for a long night of relaxing and entertainment after a long and taxing week.
There are a few attributes that my house possesses which make it an ideal location for social gatherings.
It is a decently large house. Not too large, not too small. I make use of all of the rooms, and only one room is ever kept completely empty. That’s usually where we gather to play card games or drinking games, or to store extra gear if I’m hosting a large sleepover.
It is out on the very edge of town – not positively secluded, but definitely out of the way of most casual traffic. In fact, it’s most of the way down a rather lengthy side road that ends at the boat ramp on one of the local lakes.
And there is, of course, the lake.
It is exactly one mile from my driveway to the boat ramp and the lake. I measured it once with my car’s odometer. One mile from house to lake, along a curving road that went up and down over a few dips and rises and a final, gentle slope down to the lake’s shore.
I used to go jogging along that road every morning. One mile out, and one mile back. Still do, when I’m feeling up to it.
I think I may be going off-course with this story. Let’s get back to the important part.
The party.
So, myself and the several friends I had over that night had been hanging out and snacking and drinking for a few hours, and having very serious and weighty discussions about various points of interest. I remember that zombies were the big topic for much of that summer.
After a few more drinks and a long discussion over the merits of a machete versus a frying pan for the purposes of dispatching zombies, someone suggested that we should all go out for a walk and make our way down to the boat ramp for some swimming and stargazing.
It was a warm summer night, with a full moon nearly overhead at that hour. Most of us had our phones to use as flashlights, but there was really not much need of them for the walk, as the trees along the road don’t really hang over it that much. A full moon night isn’t precisely ideal for stargazing, but we could still hope to maybe see something interesting.
After taking a few minutes to grab some fresh drinks and discard any unnecessary clothes and possessions, we all marched out of the house and began our merry trek down the road toward the lake.
Like I said before, it was warm out. It was the sort of warm that follows a really hot summer day, still with a hint of the day’s oppressive heat, but without that sweltering feeling of being boiled alive by the sun.
Predictably for that time of night, and along that particular stretch of road, we met no one and saw no one driving. The lake is not a particularly large one, and is closed to night boating anyway. Also there are only three or four houses along the road between my own house and the lake.
We walked along in a cloud of our own slightly inebriated conversation, still reverting occasionally to the previous topic of zombies and how they could never hope to come at us out of the woods along the left-hand side of the road without making a great deal of noise.
This carried us about two thirds of the way to the lake. We were just coming to a curve in the road at the top of a slight rise, where an old abandoned house stood overlooking the road. From there it was all more or less downhill to the lake.
I’ll take a moment to describe the house here, as it is important.
It had obviously not been lived in for years. It was the sort of old farmhouse that was built somewhere between fifty and a hundred years ago, and looked it. It had a very signature design, this farmhouse. Anyone who has grown up near places where large flat areas of farmland exist, has seen this style of house.
It is what the native Midwesterner imagines in their mind when reading descriptions of old dilapidated houses in stories by H. P. Lovecraft. It’s the sort of house that usually stands by itself, with one giant tree in the yard, surrounded by endless fields of corn.
Or in this case, on the top of a hill, fairly close to the road we were walking along.
It still had much of its most recent coat of white paint, but none of its doors or window glass. It was just…empty. The roof shingles were missing in places, the porch roof had a definite lean to it, and the yard was in the process of returning to Nature.
It was definitely abandoned, and definitely not a place worth visiting in the dark. Not when we had better things to do, like get to the lake and go swimming, and then look at the stars for awhile.
So we were just going to pass it by, when the Madman spoke up.
“Guys,” he said. “Let’s move over to the far side of the road.”
The Madman is a friend of ours. Most of us present that night had known him for years. He’s not insane…but he IS crazy.
By his own admission, he has (he thinks) likely done his own body weight in hallucinogens during his life. In our group of friends, he is rightly regarded as somewhat of an authority on things unusual, weird, supernatural, or downright scary.
Remember how I said I don’t see things, or feel things, in any way that relates to things not quite in the sphere of ordinary, everyday things?
I’m not saying they don’t exist, or that people can’t perceive them. I’m just not one of the people who can. I’m not wired that way, I guess. I don’t pick up on that sort of thing.
Well…the Madman does. And we all know this.
So when he suggested, completely out of nowhere, that we should move over to the far side of the road when passing this old, rickety, abandoned house…
We just went along with it. We figured that he’d tell us if it was really important, and if not…well, best not to question it.
So we all just crossed the road and passed the old house by, with scarcely a glance backward. Except for the Madman, who brought up the rear of our nocturnal procession, and was giving the house the hairy eyeball until we were well past.
Soon enough we reached the lake, with its parking lot and the boat ramp leading right into the water. And after a pause to deposit our belongings next to the NO BOAT ACCESS AFTER 9 PM sign, we all just walked down the ramp and into the lake.
The water was warm, as one would expect in the summer after a few very hot days. There are no really deep spots in that area of the lake, and the bottom is mostly mud. Just the sort of water conditions that are perfect for treading water or floating on one’s back.
And at night, under the full moon, in an otherwise secluded location, the perfect water conditions to make an overactive imagination think about zombies lurking under the water.
I’d mentioned that zombies were the big topic that summer. I think every one of us had something to say about submerged undead at some point that night, while we were all splashing and floating and drifting about.
But nobody had the bad form to pretend to have been grabbed or pulled under by reachers, and whenever one or another person accidentally put a foot down and touched mud or a log or something and freaked out, the rest of us didn’t badger them too much about it.
We swam for maybe an hour, maybe two. I don’t recall exactly. Eventually we all got out and just sort of walked around the parking lot, staring up at the night sky and enjoying the cool feeling of our clothes slowly dripping and drying in the warm night air.
After finishing our drinks and responsibly disposing of our trash in the appropriate receptacles, we began our long trudge back up the hill. It’s not all that steep, but it is the best part of a quarter mile long. We were all a bit puffed when we got to the top, where we again caught sight of the old abandoned farmhouse.
The Madman was leading us this time, and again we followed him over to the far side of the road to go by the place. I was last in the line of people, and as I walked I took a good long look at the house.
That’s when I saw the eyes. They were in one of the side windows of the second story of the farmhouse.
Red eyes. That’s what I noticed first – the color.
Glowing red eyes. Looking out of a window in this vacant, decrepit old house.
They were exactly at the level that a person’s eyes would be at, if they were standing in a room in that house and looking out of a window.
And while they were at the right height for a person’s eyes, if they were standing near the window…they were way too far apart.
I’ve seen so many people looking out of windows…most of us have. We just have a feel for where the face should be when someone is looking out a window.
Except there was no one. Just the eyes. The glowing red eyes.
That’s…not entirely true, actually. I didn’t SEE anyone. Just the eyes. But I could perceive something…not with my eyes, but some other sense of perception…I don’t know how to explain it. But there was a body around and under and behind those eyes.
I guess the best way to describe it was that I saw the eyes and DID NOT see the body. It was as if the perception of there being nothing there was so strong that my mind took the lack of perceived input and flipped it, like a photo-negative.
Something was perceptibly NOT standing in that window, and regarding me with two glowing red eyes. It watched me the entire time I walked past that part of the house. I distinctly remember the moment when I passed the angle at which the eyes vanished, and all I could see was a thin angle of darkness before the window frame vanished from my view.
I remember feeling a moment of relief, followed by a quick surge of concern as my eyes darted over the windows in the front face of the farmhouse. I experienced a very real fear that I might see those eyes drift into view in the frame of another window, and that they would continue staring at me.
Or perhaps something dark and not-there would come slinking and stalking out of the empty doorway and onto the front porch.
Nothing.
Nothing in any of the windows. Nothing in the doorway. Nothing on the porch.
Nothing at all.
I looked at my friends walking in front of me. None of them seemed to have noticed anything amiss.
No one was even looking in the direction of the house. Not even the Madman, who was still resolutely tromping along in the lead, and very pointedly not looking at the house.
And so we passed the old farmhouse, and left it to continue its slow decline under the light of the moon. We walked the rest of the way back to my house, and everyone else went inside.
I stayed out on the porch for a bit, thinking back on the farmhouse and what I had seen…and not seen…in that second story window. I didn’t like what I had seen. And I didn’t like that I had seen it at all.
Like I said…I don’t see things. Not in that way. And I was perfectly happy with that.
The front door opened, and after a short pause the Madman came outside. He had a drink in each hand, some sort of bizarre vodka screwdriver of his own invention. They taste more than slightly awful, but they pack a punch. He handed one to me and then shut the door.
“You saw it too,” he stated, with no preamble at all. “The eyes in the window.”
I nodded but said nothing, instead taking a sip from the dubious mixture in my hand. Just then I felt I needed a distraction from my thoughts. The alcoholic sting of the screwdriver provided just that.
The Madman lit up a cigarette and proceeded to unlock his word-hoard, pausing occasionally for a drag on the cigarette or a sip of his drink.
He told me he’d seen the eyes when we were on our way down to the lake in the first place, and they’d made him uneasy. Very uneasy, to the point where he wanted us as far from the house as possible as we passed it by.
He hadn’t mentioned it to the group then, or down at the lake, or even on the way back, for good reason. We had a couple of people with us at the time who would absolutely have gone poking around someplace they shouldn’t have, at the mere mention of something out of the ordinary.
“Those dipshits would have pissed it off even more,” the Madman grimly asserted. “And it might have gotten loose.”
I asked him what it was, and if it was something he’d seen before.
He said he’d never seen one before, but he knew what it was.
Or, at least, where it came from. He said it was something from the places between places…something that didn’t make much sense to me at first. The way he went on to describe it helped clear things up…a little.
Apparently the things from the places between places only ever show up in our world when some place that is unfrequented and unwatched begins to age and then to decay, to break down. Old wells. Abandoned mineshafts. Ancient ruins of long-dead civilizations.
Aging, neglected farmhouses.
The Madman said he didn’t know what the thing could do if it got loose. Only that he personally would never care to interact with it, no matter how well fortified with his various chemicals of preference. He further hinted that, had the thing in fact gotten loose, someone might have gone missing this night, or worse.
In circumstances such as this, I was inclined to believe him.
I often think about that night. I think of the walk down to the lake, and of the walk back, and of the eyes I saw in that window.
I think to myself that it couldn’t have been some trick of the light, or a reflection. There are no radio masts or cell towers close enough to that place for me to have seen them in the window, and there was no glass left in any of the windows anyway.
It couldn’t have been a person inside the house, either. I know what I saw, and I know what I didn’t see.
I fully believe the Madman saw what he says he saw, and I’m fairly certain he does in fact know what the thing is.
I think about a lot of things related to that night.
In the months and years since then, I have seen quite a lot of the old farmhouse. I still go jogging past the place most mornings. But always on the far side of the road. I still drive down to the lake now and again to take my canoe out on the lake.
And the house is changing.
No one’s been to the place. The yard is still going to riot, becoming more and more overgrown. There are no tracks or trails to indicate that anything has been driven or carried in or out. Yet the house is collapsing in on itself, and disappearing.
At the end of that summer, the roof had fallen in. The next spring, the walls had started to sag and bow inward. By the following year, everything had collapsed into a heap, where once had stood an old and rugged farmhouse.
And now, in the height of this present summer…there is only a hole in the ground with a few boards and shingles sticking out.
I imagine by next spring even that will be gone.
But that is not the main focus of my thoughts now.
My thoughts mainly dwell on the next house down the road from my own. Maybe fifty yards of open ground between my walls and the walls that until this spring belonged to my neighbors.
You see…a few months ago, they decided to sell the place and move into town. The house was getting old, they told me. Old, and drafty, and expensive to maintain, as so many of the old houses along my road have become.
The house next to mine has been empty since then.
And yet, on nights when the moon is hidden from view…I can see eyes in one of the windows.
Glowing, red eyes.
And they are too far apart to be human.