From a young age, I have seen or experienced things that could be terrifying to some. When I was 7, I would stay on my grandparents’ farm in Colorado, and while there, I frequently had dreams about a young boy with a brutally injured head speaking to me. When I woke up, I would swear to my parents that I saw a little boy running across the room, and I would see flashes of light across the basement, where I slept.
They always calmed me down, explaining that I had an active imagination, and put me back to sleep. It wasn’t until I was much older that my mother revealed, hoping not to scare me mindless, that a little boy had died on my grandparent’s property. The interesting part is that he had died from falling off his horse and being dragged through the back pasture, his foot caught in the ropes, killed by being dragged headfirst into a rock on the ground.
That was not the only incident I had that was unexplainable, but as I grew older it became challenging for me to distinguish what might be paranormal, and what might just be my imagination acting up. I had nightmares constantly, two or three a night most nights.
My parents slept on my floor on many occasions throughout my childhood, as my nightly terrors frequently resulted in me knocking on their door, ashamed, asking for help to make it through the night. The weird thing about these dreams, however, was that sometimes they followed me after waking up. After some dreams, I would lie in bed and feel like there was something else in the house, wandering around. It felt like whatever was in my dream piggybacked a ride into my house by using me. Over the nights, I began to put together, whether from imagination or actual experience, that when I woke up from a nightmare and sensed something in the house, they could also sense me.
More importantly, I felt they wandered around with supernatural hearing, hearing every single small thing I did, sensing my every movement. I would hear a rustling down in our kitchen, so quiet that only someone awake and actively listening could catch it, and I would freeze, trying to not make a single sound to hear better. Eventually, I would need to swallow, and every time I did, I noticed the movement downstairs would change. Sometimes it directly related to how many times I swallowed, as ridiculous as it sounds. I would swallow, and I would hear a footstep going up one of the stairs. Swallow again, and another step was taken.
Naturally, this terrified me, which was part of how I ended up running to my parents’ door every night. Luckily, the footsteps never really made it to the top of the stairs, and for the most part, I became used to the process.
However, there was one night when everything changed, and the dream I had frightened me in a way none of my previous dreams had before. I was about 8 years old at this time, and in the dream, I was standing in the living room of my grandparents’ house, with my mother, sister, and father standing next to me. My grandparents were nowhere to be found, but the three of us were conversing with smiles, happy about something I was unable to put together in the haze of the dream.
In the middle of saying something, my father turned and looked down the hallway from the living room where we were all standing, his smile dropping and his demeanor changing instantly. It was at this point that I noticed how dark the house was, and how the end of the hallway melted into a suffocating pitch black. My father remained transfixed on the end of the hallway, and I saw my mom’s expression change similarly, as if they were coming to the same conclusion in their head that I was unable to attain myself. What did they know?
Suddenly, my mom frantically pushed my sister and I onto the couch a few feet behind us. She handed us a pillow, and as she was talking to us, I witnessed my father begin walking down the hallway into the darkness. “Hold these as tight as you can to your face and think about the funniest joke you can remember. Do not remove these pillows from your eyes, no matter what. Do you understand?” I recognized that she was battling to appear as if she was not worried, while still conveying an intense sense of urgency and seriousness to us.
Without saying anything, I pressed the pillow against my eyes, fear beginning to swell in my stomach like a balloon. I knew something was horribly wrong, but I could not understand what. I heard my mom’s footsteps softly move away from us on the carpet, towards the direction my dad had gone down. I began to see fuzzy shapes from how tightly I had my eyes forced together. The faint presence of my sister sitting on the faded leather couch a few feet to my right comforted me slightly, but it was not enough to counter the unexplainable terror that soaked me like cold water.
My attention shifted, as I heard the smallest commotion from the end of the hallway; not a crashing, or a banging, or even a sound as loud as a normal conversation. The way I remember it, with the sound muffled by the corners of my ears being folded into the coarse pillow, was like a quiet slicing noise, like what it would sound like to cut through a ripe peach, only a little louder.
What happened after this was unexplainable to me. After years of nightmares, I had developed the ability to sense when I was in a nightmare and use that realization to calm my nerves with the rebuttal that it was all fake. In this dream, I did not feel that way. I felt a paralyzing fear, and even recognizing that I was dreaming, I knew something was different. There was a weight of dread that had never been in any of my previous dreams, something that clearly separated what was happening now from anything I had experienced.
After hearing the noise and concluding in my head that the sooner I could figure out what was happening, the sooner I could wake up, I slowly removed the pillow I had been forcing against my face to reveal the room. I could still taste the leathery fabric of the pillow. The first thing I noticed was that my sister was no longer on the couch next to me. Her pillow was, but it was torn, and stuffing was falling out of it. In a normal dream, I would have found blood on the pillow and that would have been the end of it. But this was not a normal dream, and the lack of blood or apparent horror unsettled me even more. I have never had a nightmare that has built suspense intentionally. I felt trapped in my dream. It was an inescapable prison, and my conscious mind was screaming, attempting to wake up so violently that my mind was ringing, but I could not get out. How did I hear something down the hallway, but not hear my sister leave from a few feet next to me?
Terror and confusion intertwined in my head as a blaring siren, indistinguishable from one another but both begging for me to wake up. I panned over the room, from where my father had been standing to the left, where the hallway he had walked down lay, meeting the corner of the living room. The next thing I noticed was how the overwhelming darkness at the end of the hallway had seeped out into the living room I was in. It reached just over the first quarter of the room, about ten feet away from where I sat on the couch. My body filling with the indescribable lead of panic, I scanned for an explanation of where my family had gone.
As I finished my scan, I finally found what I had been dreading. In the darkness at the corner of the living room, buried beneath layers of black nothingness, it was hiding. I couldn’t see its shape from the darkness, I had no idea what it was or how large it was. The only thing visible from the darkness was a pair of stunning bright white eyes, and a few inches beneath them an inhuman white smile that jutted out of the darkness. The smile consisted of clearly human teeth but was double the length of any normal person’s best grin, and it leered at me, smiling directly and intentionally at me across the room. It was mocking me, and it had been waiting for my eyes to find it. My heart sank and dread swallowed me whole, and as the smile widened, I was thrust back into my bedroom, finally awake.
Upon waking up, for half of a second relief relaxed me; thinking the horror was finally over. The rustling in the kitchen quickly eliminated this feeling. In tandem with the rustling, the almost instant sense that something was in my house draped over my mind. I tried to calm myself, stating that I had done this hundreds, maybe thousands of times over the past few years, and I was used to it. But deep down I wasn’t consoled, I was terrified. Even the presence, which I felt everywhere, was infinitely more overwhelming than any I had experienced before. The part most frightening was that I knew it sensed me. I felt it crawling around the walls of my mind, listening to me, mocking me.
I tried not to swallow, but after about twenty minutes I failed for the first time. Hyper fixating on not swallowing makes it so incredibly hard not to. You notice how dry your throat is, it feels as if it is swelling with sand, you are drowning in your own saliva, and eventually, you always fail. The normal goal for me was not to make it through the night without swallowing, though, it was only to swallow few enough times to fall back asleep before whatever was in my house took enough gentle steps to make it to my room. I had never allowed anything into my room before, and I tried to reassure myself of that fact after my first failure.
Following my swallow, the slight commotion downstairs in my kitchen stopped immediately, and there was a painful silence for a few seconds. I knew better than to be relieved, and following the few seconds of silence, there was a pounding of footsteps downstairs, as if someone was sprinting from the kitchen towards the stairs as fast and as violently as they could. Fear crawled across my skin and down my spine, and I panicked, unsure of what to do but too paralyzed by terror to move. I envisioned the smile standing on the steps, pointing at me as if it could see me through the layers of walls. It felt like more than a vision. I knew the smile was doing exactly what I pictured. I knew it as if it were a fact. I felt it.
I lay flat in bed, frozen, and listened as the stampede of footsteps stopped with the first one on the staircase. I knew when the first step had hit the staircase, as it always gave off a recognizable squeak from the old wood under the carpet. I tried to compose myself and shut my eyes, desperately trying to recite the lyrics to a song in my head (a trick I used to try and fall asleep faster and distract myself).
I was much too terrified for this to work, unable to get the vision of the smile out of my mind, and after about another 10 minutes, I swallowed again, furious with myself for failing. Like the first time, the house went quiet, even though there was virtually no noise in the previous minutes, as whatever was on the stairs had remained motionless since finishing its sprint. Three seconds later, I heard the staircase shake as something pounded up the stairs towards my room, the wood in the banister shaking and the steps squealing with each progression. At this point the fear was nauseating for me, I began to feel like I was going to either throw up or pass out, and I hoped for the latter. I found myself wishing for death just to escape the feeling, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything.
I tried to weigh my options with the few minutes I had before I would fail and swallow again. I could run for my parents’ door at the opposite end of the hallway, but I would go right past the top of the stairs to do so, which eliminated that option for me. My door was open, so I considered trying to shut and lock it and scream for help, but again, from the top of the stairs there was a direct line of sight into my doorway, which I could not see as my bed was tucked into the corner of the room parallel to the door. Yet, this option felt vain as well. I knew there were only a few steps from the top of the stairs to my doorway and based on the speed at which it had been moving, I knew it would reach me before I could close the door. All these options felt meaningless anyway, I was glued to my bed like a plank of wood, my legs cramping from how tightly I coiled myself, every one of my muscles now painfully stiff.
As the minutes went on, I realized that I was stuck, and I genuinely thought I was going to die. There was nowhere to go, nothing to do, and I couldn’t fall back asleep or stop swallowing for the rest of the night. I fought as hard as I could, but after 25 painful minutes, I eventually swallowed as the rest of my body fought it, making a sort of half-swallow. There was complete silence, and I heard no footsteps for at least a few minutes. At the exact point that I began to wonder if I had survived, and maybe that thing had left, my thought was interrupted by the feeling that something was in my room. It had chosen not to sprint into my room this time, but I knew it was here. I had been squeezing my eyes shut out of fear, listening intently, and had heard nothing walk towards my room and enter it. Nonetheless, I knew it was within a few feet of me, somewhere, everywhere, surrounding me and laughing at me. Again, I wished I could die to escape the fear, unable to move at all or even open my eyes.
Without hearing anything out loud, I knew something was in my closet across the room. I don’t know how I knew, but I did as if someone placed the thought in my head intentionally. For the same reason we can’t look away from car crashes, with logic gone and the anticipation taking over my mind, I opened my eyes, just as I had done in the dream about an hour ago. Exactly as it was in the dream, across the room, in the endless darkness of my closet, the same pair of eyes and smile looked back at me. The smile widened, just as it did in my dream, but this time there was nowhere for me to go, I couldn’t wake up like I did from my dream. Instead, I forced my eyes shut, praying to all gods that might exist to please offer me salvation from what was smiling at me across the room. I prayed and squinted my eyes shut as hard as I could, using all my willpower to not open my eyes again.
There was no noise, no movement in my room, but as I lay on my left side, facing the room and the closet across from me with my eyes forced shut, something leaned over my right shoulder and exhaled a shaky, warm breath into my ear. Within the first second of feeling the breath in my ear, I flew out of my bed, my leg catching on my sheets for a second before I kicked it loose. Refusing to look at my bed or the closet to my left, I tunnel-visioned on my door and took off, propelled by an insurmountable amount of fear.
I raced down the hallway towards my parents’ room, wasting no time in shrieking as loud as I possibly could. I reached their room, banging on the door, until they opened a few seconds later, petrified that something was wrong. As you can probably expect, they checked my room, and nothing was there.
Though that was the first time I encountered him, it certainly wasn’t the last. That smile followed me through the next 6 years or so of my life, appearing randomly every few weeks or months to ruin one of my nights and reignite the fear I had of it. The dreams always started the same, I was with people I trusted, happy and having fun, and suddenly the entire mood of the dream would switch, and despair would cover every surface. The people I loved and trusted would mysteriously disappear, with something always indicating that they had been killed, and at the very end of it all, hidden somewhere in my vision, was that smile leering at me from the darkness.
That continued for a while until the first real relief I found was when we moved to Pennsylvania when I was 14, and I saved up and bought a cute little pug to keep me company. Rosie, my new pug, slept at the end of my bed around my foot, and since the night I bought her, my nightmares reduced by nearly half. Whether it was from the move or Rosie, or both, I had a few-year stretch where I didn’t see the smiling thing, and I finally thought I shook it.
It took me a little while to realize that maybe I didn’t. When I was at the end of my senior year of high school, now 18 years old, I slept over at my closest friend’s house on the last weekend before graduation. Having smile-free dreams for years now, the thought of the man reappearing never even crossed my mind.
In a way, he didn’t reappear for me. I just found it strange that the following morning, while we were eating breakfast, my closest friend, Charlie, mentioned that he had the worst dream of his life the night before. Still suspecting nothing, I asked what happened, and felt the dread creep back into my body as he mentioned his dream. He had been with his family at an amusement park, and then his family had disappeared. Following that, he had been looking around and found a roller coaster that was going with only one person on it. He said that the person on it was flailing around with a huge smile on their face, and it was the only thing he could see from where he was at.
“Yeah, that does sound scary,” I told him the conclusion of his story, trying to mask my own fear. “No no, you don’t get it,” he insisted, now way more serious than he had been before. “That wasn’t the scary part. The scary part was when I saw it when I woke up.” I was now too scared to want to hear more details and wanted to move on. “I’m sorry Charlie, that sounds freaky, but I am glad it’s gone now. It probably was just your imagination messing with you,” I consoled, hoping to convince him.
He shook off the fear, trying to regain his normally humorous and unconcerned mood. “I don’t know man; I am just glad it wasn’t looking at me.” He chuckled nervously. I stopped in the middle of my walk to his kitchen sink, with the dirty cereal bowl in my hand. “Wait what. What do you mean? What do you mean it wasn’t looking at you?” I felt my heart picking up pace, my nerves were on end and I began to feel like I was being watched. “No man, it wasn’t looking at me thankfully. I thought it was looking at you. The eyes were looking to the left of me, down where you were, and the smile kept like getting wider and narrower in the same pattern of your breathing. It would like widen every time you inhaled and then get smaller when you exhaled again.”
My heart was bursting through my chest at this point, and I didn’t feel safe in his house. “Why would you not wake me up, why didn’t you shake me or something?” I questioned, the panic beginning to come off like irritation. “I’m sorry man, I scooted forward to reach out and touch you, but as I was reaching out I looked to the doorway again and it was gone. I just figured it was tweaking out like you said. Why does it matter?” He questioned, apologetically. “It doesn’t, that’s a creepy dream though,” I reverted, trying to downplay it. I left his house that day terrified to go to bed at night, convinced that the smile would visit me as soon as my eyes closed. Luckily, though, he didn’t. I never fully understood why.
A few years later, I went to college, and met someone in my hallway whose family friend was apparently a “psychic.” My college friend knew a little of my history, after asking one time why I was so tired and I briefly explained that I had multiple nightmares a night. She recommended I visit this psychic, and curious for myself, I obliged.
When I met with her, I explained everything weird that had happened to me, cynically, noting how I didn’t really believe in any of it and knew it was just my imagination. She met with me for free as a friend, so I felt fairly convinced she wasn’t playing anything up for money. After hearing my story, she said she suspected, among other things, I had an ability to “dead talk,” simply just meaning that those who have died could communicate with me. She said most of the time their communication is unintelligible, and they only really try to show me feelings. Most of the spirits that are strong enough to appear in a dream or make a noise in my house were spirits that were traumatically trapped, whether it be from a painful death or something along those lines. Thus, when they tried to converse with me it often came across as fear, confusion, and anger, explaining how they concocted nightmares for me every night with little tie to my life.
When I went into detail about the smiling thing, I could tell she was a little bit more uncomfortable, and I almost got the sense she was trying to relax me the same way I had tried to relax my friend, Charlie, without letting him know the full story. She essentially said that if something terrible had been following me for a few years, I had somehow found a way to force it out. Except, if it was still appearing to those that slept near me because apparently sleep was its way in, it was never fully gone. Instead of having free rein in my head, torturing me whenever it wanted, I had unintentionally created a barrier that prevented it from reaching my dreams, according to her. I thanked the psychic lady for meeting with me, unsure of what to make of her information, and continued with my life.
About 6 months later, in the summer after my freshman year of college, the next incident occurred. My girlfriend, who I had been dating for a year, was over at my house one afternoon, while my father and mother were home as well, working. My sister was living in Colorado, having moved there during college. My girlfriend was taking a nap in my bed while I was working on my computer to the right of the bed. My mom and I had planned to go to Lowe’s; I was going to buy her some flowers and plant them for her as part of her Mothers’ Day gift. My father tagged along, and I left my girlfriend, not wanting to disturb her. I sent her a little text saying we would be back in an hour or two in case she woke up and headed out.
Thirty minutes later, I was in Lowe’s when I got a call from her. I picked up and stepped to a side aisle while my mom continued looking at flowers, and was bombarded by her, blurting out words in a frenzy. She was clearly upset and was choking out sentences between flowing tears. Eventually, she was able to calm down enough to get out a few broken sentences: “I just had— I just had the worst d- dream of my life. Can you please g- get back ho- home, I really need you?” “Yeah, yeah, I will be home in maybe thirty minutes or so, can you make it that long?” I was looking for my mom to get an estimate of what flowers she still wanted to look at, calculating in my head how quickly I could be home. “No, I think I am j-just going to go home, I don’t really want to b- be here right now,” she responded, improving slightly from her last sentences. “Okay, okay, I’ll stop by your house when I am done, please get home safe and we can talk later.” I wasn’t too worried about the drive because she was literally one street away from her house, but I was still concerned about her.
When I stopped at her house an hour later, she was still visibly upset, but obviously much more put together than she had been before. She was reluctant to talk about it, but I finally was able to coax her into telling me what happened. She informed me that she was in a dream where she was standing in my driveway, with me next to her, and we were laughing while talking about something. She said it looked like a pretty day, and it was a nice dream. There were lots of birds flying around, and she was happy. “Well, I was happy. And then everything changed really fast,” she explained. “The birds that were flying through the air froze in place, and I turned to ask you what was happening, and you were laughing at me, and then you were just gone.”
I grabbed her hand and looked at her intently, pushing her on without saying anything. “So, I was turning around and trying to look through all of these frozen birds, and then the day felt a lot worse. I felt like it was the worst day of my life, even though nothing had happened, and it felt so dark.” This fit the formula so far, so I was pretty convinced it was him. Sure enough, she continued: “I walked out into the street in front of your house, looking for you, and I just felt like something horrible was next to me. I felt like something terrible was looking at me, and I couldn’t find it. I did circles around the street, with all those birds frozen everywhere around me, and then I saw this thing on the roof of your house.” Just by saying that, she clearly grew more upset, and tears welled up in her eyes. Bursting with fear and anticipation now, I squeezed her hand and asked what it was she saw. “Well, it was like a bird, but a lot bigger. It covered the entire roof, and it was lying flat on it, not standing up,” she continued, fighting back tears. “It had a long neck that was missing feathers, so it was all red and bloody, and the worst part is that its neck was all twisted and broken, so its head was completely upside down while the rest of its body was lying flat on the roof.” Any doubt that I had left was eliminated, and she confirmed my suspicion. “But its head wasn’t normal, it had these huge human teeth, and it was smiling at me with its upside-down face from the roof, and I swear it was looking directly at me.”
Now that I had all the information, or at least I thought I did, I shifted into comforting mode instead of interrogation, reaching forward to try and rub her arm and begin working on making her feel better. She winced back though and continued talking. “No, I’m not done. I kept trying to wake up after that thing was grinning at me, and I couldn’t wake up. I was trying so hard to get out and there was nothing I could do, I just felt stuck. And then I did wake up, but not because I wanted to, because there was something tapping me on the shoulder.” It was at this point that she began to burst into tears again, overwhelmingly upset from the recollection of the feeling. “Something w-was tapping me, and then I rolled over because I thought it was you napping with me. But i-it wasn’t y-you. There wa-was something j-just smiling at me an i-inch from my face!” Her voice picked up, and she began to lose control of herself. I tried my best to help her as she finished. “It was smiling at me! R-right next to me! And I s-s-saw its finger still poking out!” She was now standing, pointing her shaking finger at me to display what she saw. The smiling man had never gotten that close to me, so at that point I was beginning to panic as well, but I didn’t want to make her feel worse, so I did my best to hide it. “W-what happened after that?” I asked, my voice shaking for the first time. “I jumped out of the b-bed, and it was gone!” She was incredulous, and I could tell she was worried about what I thought of her. I grabbed her and held her, not asking anything else while my mind raced through what to do. I had never told her about the smiling man, and there was no way that many coincidences could line up.
When I returned home later that day, as it was getting late, I noticed that my room felt particularly uninviting. This could have been a placebo from the story, but the room seemed to hold hostage an all too familiar sense of dread. I slowly cased my room, not sure what I was looking for but unsure of what else to do. I eventually gave up, thinking that I was going to have to sleep in my bed at some point, so it might as well be tonight. I was thinking about how scary it was that this smiling thing appeared in the sunny hours of the day, for the first time ever, when I felt my leg brush against something. I reached down under the blankets, pushing my precious Rosie a little to the side to see what I had felt. What I pulled out from under the blankets made my heart drop again. In my bed was a large bird feather, one about four times the size of a crow feather but of similar color. There was no blood on the feather, no smile, no other message, but it was enough. I knew what he was saying. After years of searching for a way in, a way to finally get close enough to impact me physically, he had done it.
This all brings me to today, about a week after I discovered the feather, and my girlfriend experienced the terror I grew up with. I began writing this yesterday afternoon, and I have not slept since. The night after finding the feather, and every once since then, I have seen him in my dreams. When I woke up, the past few days at least, I have not seen anything. It was almost worse, not being able to see the smile somewhere in my room. I feel his presence, the helplessness looms over me as I sit paralyzed in my bed every night, waiting for him to finally appear. At this point, I am confident this is all part of his game. Years of interacting with him have shown me how clever, and more accurately, evil the smiling man is. Whether he gains something from it, or just does it because he enjoys it, he will bleed out my fear until it is impossible to live with, and I feel like I would tear off my own skin just to escape.
Even worse, he is smart about the way he appears, and does it almost insultingly, as if to add emphasis to how powerless I am. For example, the birds my girlfriend saw in her dream were all mourning doves, birds that I had told her a few weeks before gave me comfort and made me feel safe because I grew up with them. I find it no coincidence those were the same birds in her dream. He mocks me in every little detail, dragging out the torture.
Now I don’t even need to be sleeping to sense him arrive. Even in the middle of a warm summer day, I notice something watching me while I am out mowing lawns. The trees sway in the wind, and I catch the silhouette of something behind the leaves every few seconds. I never can find him, but I know exactly when he appears, feeling the cold seep into my skin.
I put up with it for a few days but concluded that if he was this powerful while I was awake, the next time I slept would be the last for me. Thus, that is why I haven’t slept in a day, and that is why I have begun writing this as both a coping mechanism for what I believe is my final day alive, and hopefully a warning to anyone else. You may be wondering why I am giving up so easily, why I am not going to a priest or calling anyone, or trying to stay near my family. The simple answer is I don’t think it will matter. He clearly has found a way into the minds of any of my friends or family just from sleeping in the same room as me, and now that he is apparently more alive than ever before, I don’t know what sanctuary anyone could provide from me. In fact, they would probably just be killing themselves as well.
As far as a priest or supernatural help goes, I did try. I called the psychic lady I talked to a few days ago, and clearly sensing my panic, she tried to reason out with me what was going on. A few minutes into our call, I began to feel like I had someone I could rely on for support. Yet, while detailing which crystals to buy, she concluded her recommendations by saying, “In the end, you know it won’t really matter, anyways. He is already there. He is all around you, watching and laughing, and no crystal will be able to stop him. Can’t you see me right now?” The switch to first person at the end of the sentence, paired with the lowering of the voice into a deep, guttural octave, confirmed to me that I was not talking to the psychic lady over the phone. I did not know if I ever had been. That’s my entire point. I don’t know what is real or what is a game anymore. His real form is so well shrouded by layers of false security that reaching out for help only stresses me out more. I would prefer to just die than to be built up and let down repeatedly. My eyes are watering typing this, and I feel the exhaustion beginning to catch up to me.
However, I have one last act of defiance, residing in the plate of sleeping pills I have resting on my bedside table. Or maybe that is exactly what he wants, either way, I don’t care. I am tired of being terrified. As I type this, it grows later into the nighttime, and I feel his presence waiting for the right time to begin the show. Panic is bubbling in my gut slowly, and though I am tired, my mind still provides me no peace from the fear. Right on queue, I hear a pan drop in my kitchen downstairs, shocking me and making me jump from where I am sitting on my bed. My mind pumps adrenaline, and I am painfully aware that this time he has a lot more capabilities than just a breath in my ear.
My typing is speeding up, and as I am finishing this sentence, he is already on the first step toward my room. I heard the squeak. His steps are slow and intentional, different than the first time I met him. Now he is at the top of the stairs, pacing towards my room. My parents sleep blissfully, and my girlfriend one neighborhood over – they all have no help to give. There is nothing more dangerous than being the last person awake in the house.
There is a quiet, gentle knock on my door. Three slow, intentional knocks. I feel the smile through the door as if the door is not even there and I am looking right at it. My muscles tense, and I feel thrown back in time to the days of paralyzing fear in my younger days. Rosie, the last shred of comfort these last few days, looks up and tilts her head at the door, her ears raised. Tears are welling in my eyes, hopelessness battling fear to be the victor of my emotions.
My attention shifts, as I hear my closet doors rattle with three gentle, drawn-out knocks. I see the doors rustle over the top of the laptop I am typing on. I have closed it, anticipating in the nights past he might try to make an appearance there. Nonetheless, he smiles at me through the closet, and my shaking hands take a few tries to spit out each of these sentences. I don’t want to waste any time waiting for the sleeping pills to kick in, so I grab the plate next to me and force down as many as I can. Ironic that a few years ago I would fight so hard to not swallow in the presence of this smile, and now I do it as a form of escape.
The pills are down, and I can only hope for them to kick in quicker. The window on the left side of my room has the blinds open, how could I have forgotten that? In my peripheral vision, as I continue to type, I see two bright white shapes stab through the darkness of the night sky, dropping down slowly from the top of the window. I refuse to look at the window, knowing, as the third, wider white shape lowers over the window, it is him, smiling upside down. I live on the second floor of my house. A shadow extends over the white shapes, reaching down towards the bottom of my window. I see a dark movement, of what I can assume to be a hand, reach forward and exert three knocks, all of which are substantially more violent than the past ones, though they are delivered at the same slow, intentional cadence. I see the triangular smile widen after the third knock finishes.
The fear-induced nausea ignites in my stomach, and dread drops like a kettlebell in my stomach, weighing me down against the bed. It takes all my willpower to not look out of the window. I turn to my right, blocking the window out of sight. There are three more knocks on the door to my room and my closet at the same time. I want to scream and run and cry and die faster, I want to do anything to remove myself from where I am right now. Something is scratching on the other side of the wall to the right of my bed, and I feel the smile a mere two feet away from me, separated only by a thin layer of plaster, looking directly at me.
Rosie jumps off my bed and is now in the center of the room, turning to track all the knocks across my doors, walls, and now the tapping on the window as well. He is begging me to look at him, to see the smile. I know he is. But I won’t. My mind keeps reiterating that my parents are only a couple of steps away, down one hallway, and that I can make it somehow. But the pills are already down, and at this point, I don’t know if I want to continue living. I sympathize with the survival instinct periodically giving me desperate pushes to do something, knowing it will not win tonight.
Suddenly the noise stops, all at once, and I freeze. I hear my heart pounding, and my mind races through instances of our interactions. I remember the first time I recognized this silence before he began sprinting across the first floor of my house, the first night I met him. This is not a good silence. The noise may have stopped, but the weight of all the smiles around the room has not. This is his final act, and he mocks me before killing me. I am frozen in place, my heartbeats erratic and loud.
I focus on Rosie in the middle of the room, refusing to give him what he wants. My beautiful, perfect pug is the only thing I will devote my attention to. I feel his smile waiting for me from every corner, and I feel my stomach climbing into my throat, my vision getting blurry, hopefully from the pills. I will myself to die faster. I focus on the details of Rosie’s fur, the patterns I have grown up identifying, and try to find the memories I have with her from the depths of my fear-scattered mind. I study her floppy ears, and the back of her head as she continues to watch my door. I love her more than anything, and my heart sinks as her head begins to turn, her body not turning with it. Her head rotates, her neck breaking as it turns towards me while the rest of her face doesn’t, her poor smushed nose replaced by a smile that wraps around nearly half of her entire skull, filled with human teeth that gleam at me.