Maybe my posting this is selfish, to gain some sort of closure over what happened. After all, I wasn’t really hurt. To the public’s knowledge, I had no part in it: in the papers, I am an anonymous employee, and the reporters were vague about who exactly complained to the boss about the strange man that always peered in through the windows, never entering the building. So maybe it’s selfish for me to air out what happened, I hope someone else out there has some explanation, or at least comforting words. Maybe it’s selfish that I need comfort, because in all of the confusion, the dead-end research, and tragedy involved, there is one thing I know for certain: he was after me, and he didn’t get what he wanted.
If you’ve ever worked a customer service job, you already know how bizarre it feels to be watched by customers. Behind a counter or behind the store windows, people will stop and watch you work, and as much as you try to mind your own business, it can be near impossible to shake the feeling of being watched.
It’s like being an animal in a zoo, like being deli meat behind the glass case, or an actor on a stage. The worst of it, for me, at least, was when I worked at a coffee shop. People would stop by and watch through the windows, sometimes deciding to come in, sometimes not. It was almost supernatural, the way I could feel eyes on me, and though I tried to ignore it, I couldn’t always hold it in: I had to look up, acknowledge that I was aware of their presence.
That was usually okay. When I made eye contact with the people looking in through the windows of the coffee shop, they would be the ones to look away first, walking away and minding their own business in the little shops and restaurants that lined the streets of my town. Until one of them didn’t look away.
He watched from across the street, standing in front of the dumpster of a little mom-and-pop pub. It was hard to make out exact facial details, but I could at least tell what he was wearing. A red sweater with horizontal blue and yellow stripes. Tattered blue jeans and black loafers. His hair was short, but not well-kept, like he cut it by himself at home, and greasy. I couldn’t make out an eye color at the time, nor any specifics on what his face really looked like. However, those were the details I relayed to my boss at the time, after two days of that man watching us through the window.
He never came in, never looked away. Sometimes he would move a few feet up or down the street, but I never caught him walking, only looking. My boss acknowledged my concerns, but told me that he couldn’t do anything: the streets are public property, and as long as he wasn’t on the coffee shop’s premises, there was nothing that we could do. He was unsettling, and it only dawned on me recently how bizarre he really was. Here in Michigan, the winter weather easily reached well below freezing temperatures, yet he never shivered, paced for warmth, or wore anything other than that sweater, for hours on end. I tried ignoring him, but I couldn’t always stop myself from looking up.
Still, it persisted. He wasn’t there every day, but I always noticed when he was. I would be making a latte or cleaning the tables in the café, and feel that instinctual urge to look up, my mind telling me, someone is watching you. Without fail, I was right. The same red sweater and stripes every time, the same stare from across the street, his facial expression imperceptible at that distance. I soon grew afraid of working the closing shift, and changed my availability so that I would never have to walk home at night, but I still had two weeks left of those shifts before I would start working in the mornings.
I complained to my manager again, and he said he would try to see if there was anything the police could do, but I knew, even with my limited knowledge of the law, there was no crime being committed. I had done a lot of Googling, and all of the anecdotes and case files confirmed one thing: stalking is notoriously difficult to prosecute. After all, there was no way I could even claim that his gaze was directed at me, as he only appeared when my coworkers were around. For all I knew, he was stalking one of our regular customers that sat in the café all day long, or another one of my coworkers.
I went home one night, and started cooking dinner, relieved to be back in my apartment. Walking home was scarier than looking up and seeing that man, because at least at work, there were always people nearby. I alternated between being too afraid to look behind me, afraid of what I might see, or being unable to stop looking behind me, scared that he was tailing me. If he was there, I don’t know if I could even run far, I might slip on the ice and that moment of weakness would give him everything he needed.
But I was able to relax in the safety of my apartment, behind several locked doors that only residents had the keys to. The first door into the mailroom. The second door into the halls. Several flights of stairs, another door. Finally, my apartment, warm and comfortable in contrast to the freezing temperatures and poorly-heated halls of the complex.
I got out of my work clothes and poured myself a glass of wine to enjoy while cooking dinner, and I played a podcast as I began chopping veggies and adding them to the stir fry. The vegetables sizzled in the pan with olive oil and garlic, drowning out the sound of the podcast hosts, so I turned up the volume on my phone a little bit, took another sip of wine, and went into the fridge to get the tofu.
As I closed the fridge, I got the feeling again. This time, it felt visceral, charged, like the moment before a full-body shiver takes over.
It’s just paranoia, I told myself. Paranoia caused by that man’s gaze, the way that he never seemed to move, even for a second. His image flashed in my mind, and I shook my head, trying to stop thinking about it. He hadn’t followed me, I knew that much- today was one of the days I felt brave enough to throw an occasional glance over my shoulder, and he wasn’t there.
I drank some more wine, hoping to calm my nerves, and tossed the vegetables in the pan, then cleared the ends of the carrots and onion skins off the cutting board so I could begin to slice the tofu.
I used the blade of the knife to scrape the scraps into the trashcan. As I did so, I looked down into the alley below my apartment’s window, and the fear I felt, that he might have been watching me through the window, made that action almost physically painful.
Relief flooded my system as I saw nothing. Just the empty alley, a few corrugated metal trashcans, fast food wrappers and other miscellaneous garbage, murky grey snow piles, and the recycling bin and dumpster. I looked down into my own trash can, wondering if I’d need to take it out this week, or if I could put it off until the next garbage day. I decided to put it off, looking out at the near-overflowing mountain of trash bags, and that’s when I saw him, peering out from behind the dumpster. Looking right at me.
I stared. He waved.
I stumbled back, away from the window, and slid to the floor against the cool metal door of the refrigerator. My knees to my chest, I gripped my own shoulders, hugging myself in order to keep somewhat collected. My heart was beating so quickly, I thought it might stop at any moment, and after the initial jolt of fear subsided, I leapt to my feet, running around my apartment, closing every single curtain and shutter. I didn’t even think to call the police until about half an hour later, as I shut off the stove and scraped the charred remains of my stir fry into the trash. He was gone. I called the police, they said they would do a drive-by, but of course, they found nothing.
The next morning, I called into work, and looked at my bank account to see if I could afford a security camera or something to keep my apartment safe. I ordered one, deciding to wait another couple of paychecks to buy that new gaming computer I really wanted. The next day, I went to work again at about 10 AM. He wasn’t there, as I expected. Maybe the fright he gave me was all that he wanted, but that thought was quickly dismissed by my paranoia: if he was willing to find me where I lived, he wasn’t just in it to scare me.
It was dark outside, and I was helping to close up shop by sweeping the floors. I would always work methodically, mentally sectioning off a part of the floor before sweeping around the perimeter of that space, then doing the middle part. I started near the back of the store, making my way towards the front window, trying to avoid looking outside- hoping that the man wouldn’t show up again. Flashes of terror plagued me, remembering how it felt to realize that he was there, and the last hour of my shift was filled with the ghost of the sensation of being watched, but never the full-fledged, near-shivering awareness of it. Sweeping under some of the tables right next to the window, the feeling descended upon me again. I didn’t want to look, my heart couldn’t handle another fright like that again, but of course, that instinctual fear, the deep, evolutionary response to the feeling of being watched, took over.
I glanced up, and he was across the street. Looking at me. I stared, ready to go beg my coworkers for a ride home or call an Uber, telling the closing manager that I was suddenly feeling very unwell, that my sickness from yesterday must be coming back, and that I needed to go now. I rationalized. Finish my job, don’t take my eyes off of him, and he won’t be able to hurt me. I stared, awkwardly sweeping while looking right at him, and he never moved, never took his eyes off me, either.
Finishing up sweeping, I just needed to brush all of the dust and empty sugar packets and muffin crumbs into the dustpan. I tried, but glanced down for only a moment, to make sure that I was getting all of the dirt off the floor. I had only looked down for only a moment, but when I looked back up to return to the staring contest, he was right in front of the window, mere inches from my face, separated by a thin pane of glass.
I felt frozen, and in the brief time I got a close look at him, I realized he was far beyond human. Bulging eyes, as though he hadn’t blinked for hours. His skin was pallid, anemic, looked moist, and beads of sweat glittered on his brow beneath the streetlights. That expression, the facial details that I had never been able to discern before, was crystal clear now. A gleeful grin, like this was all a game to him, the grin that a child wears when they realize that they won this round of checkers or tic-tac-toe.
Startled, I dropped the dustpan, sending the crumbs and dirt flying. I ran into the backroom of the café, sobbing to the closing manager, but she went outside, searched the parking lot behind the store, looked down and up the street, and saw nothing.
“There’s nothing out there.” she said, handing me a cup of tea. “Whoever you saw, he’s gone now. Just try to calm down.”
I sipped on the chamomile and lavender tea, unsettled, but trying to calm my nerves. I felt crazy, that I might have been experiencing some sort of psychotic episode. No, that wasn’t right, because my boss told me that he saw the man, too, just that there was nothing that could be done legally. But maybe it was deeper than that: maybe my broken mind was fixated on some random person who just stood there waiting for the bus or something, and I had concocted the idea that they were stalking me, simply because they stood out there across the street from my workplace so frequently. Maybe the person stalking me was a real person, a normal person, and I had invented the rest.
The manager was kind enough to drive me home that night, and I thought about quitting right there, but then remembered that tomorrow was my first opening shift. It would kind of be a dick move to quit on them, because it’s so difficult to find someone to cover an opening shift. I decided to go anyways, and realized that it wouldn’t matter if I quit or not: he still knew where I lived.
I went in the next morning, jumping at every shadow on the walk to work, but none of them were him. Maybe it’d be better working in the morning, and I headed into the store with a tinge of optimism, walking into the back of the store to put my backpack and jacket away before I started working.
I didn’t make it into the breakroom.
The hallway to the breakroom passes by the punch clock and the safe where we kept all of the cash for the day, and as I rounded the corner to the punch clock, I saw my manager, laying on the ground, covered in blood.
I immediately fell to my knees by his side, whipping off my apron and pressing it against his throat, which appeared to have been entirely torn out. Muscles and tendons, his windpipe and Adam’s apple, exposed in a garbled mess of red, red, red.
The apron, once cotton-candy blue, was instantly soaked red. I don’t remember what I said to my boss, maybe I tried to tell him that everything was going to be okay, but what I do remember is his terrified eyes, the way they met my gaze as I tried to call 911, blubbering a response when the operator said, “911, what is your emergency?”, my phone screen smeared with rusty fingerprints. I squeezed his hand, and he could barely squeeze back. His eyes, staring up at me, then glancing away, towards the door that led to the break room.
A pair of legs, clad in black loafers and tattered blue jeans, stepped into the doorway.
I didn’t need to look at its face. I dropped my manager’s hand, and I ran. I felt like a coward, leaving him like that in his last moments, but I like to tell myself that he would have wanted me to run.
It gave chase, and I ran down the main street of my town, alone in the early hours of the morning. I knew that if I could just make it a few blocks, to the next café filled with other openers, I would be safe, at least for the day. I slipped on the ice, twisting my ankle in a nasty way, clambered to my feet, and kept running. Working in a small-business café, I abhorred Starbucks, but that didn’t stop me from bursting into their store, sobbing and screaming, and eventually calming down enough, when I realized he wasn’t following me, to explain. They had already called an ambulance and the police, sent them to my store, when I was able to tell them what happened. The work boot on my left foot was filled with blood. Apparently, I had broken my ankle by slipping on the ice, and all that additional running had stabbed my fractured bone repeatedly into the flesh of my lower calf. My socks and pants were ruined, but it healed up alright. I still have some feeling in my foot, and it’s still attached to my body, so I have no complaints. But my manager died.
And here come the selfish feelings again. I survived, he did not. I get to post this to random internet strangers for closure, and his family will never get any. I healed, he was buried. I have a scar, he has a headstone. So it goes. I guess.
I moved a few months later. I quit my job. However, I haven’t been able to forget what happened. The blood and gore, watching it step into the doorway in front of me. My left foot has almost no feeling, a daily reminder. I haven’t seen it since, but I’m always looking over my shoulder, I can hardly stomach looking at a mirror, much less a window.
As I sit typing this, the familiar feeling is overcoming me once more. I feel someone, or something, watching me, and I can see the window out of the corner of my eye. I’m resisting the urge to check, because, even despite all my precautions, there might be something more than the darkness and streetlights out there. I might look and see nothing but my own face reflected back at me, but on the off-chance that the man followed me here, I don’t want it to know that I know, I’m not going to give it the satisfaction.