When I was around five years old, me and my mum lived in a house on the outskirts of town. The street we lived on ran along like five big hills in a row, and the property sat on one of those slopes.
I remember being so excited when we would drive down that road in the crappy old Holden that used to belong to my nana. It was steep enough that your stomach would do flips as you came down each side.
The house was a hundred years old at least. The rent was cheap because the owners couldn’t be bothered to do it up. It was made up of solid wood darkened with age and peeling paint. It had creaky floors and mysterious drafts in every room.
Moldering dark green and velvet curtains framed every doorway. They were impregnated with decades of dust and would puff it everywhere at the slightest touch. The kitchen had that slightly greasy feeling really old ones get, and every fixture groaned like a fat zombie when we turned the taps.
We weren’t wealthy, in case that wasn’t already obvious. In fact, we were dirt poor, and so we had to have a flatmate to afford this place. Her name was Olive, and she was the same age as mum. She had a massive chocolate cake made for her birthday not long after we had moved in.
I didn’t get sweets often, or at least not as often as I wanted. I engineered a window of time to be alone in the kitchen with it, and when she and mum returned I had taken great big bites out of it. Right out of the cake, no knife or fork. Kids are animals. Olive laughed it off, which was big of her.
We had been in the house for a few months when my mum first saw a prowler in the yard one night. She opened the front door and yelled obscenities into the dark, and he left. The next night he was back. This time, mum quietly called the police. By the time they got there, he was gone.
Weeks went by. Sometimes the prowler was there, sometimes he wasn’t. The cops brought sniffer dogs. They found nothing. Mum and Olive were on edge. They talked of moving out. They talked about old boyfriends and creeps at bars. There were no suspects. I don’t remember being unsettled by any of this, though I don’t know why.
My bedroom was a smallish space that might once have been a study. I wanted it because the walls were painted blue, just like my room at my grandparent’s house. There was a single window set low in the wall opposite the door, which looked out onto the countryside to the south of the property. I slept in a single bed underneath it.
One night I woke to a tapping sound, a finger or a knuckle rapping on a pane of glass. Peering up at the window, I could see nothing. Whoever was trying to contact me was crouched down beneath the sill. “Danny” they whispered. “Let me in” I don’t know how they knew my name. I know I wasn’t as frightened as I should have been. I got out of bed and went and told mum what had happened.
Looking back, the thing that’s most unsettling about this is imagining what might have happened if I had unlatched the window when he asked me to. What unspeakable acts might have occurred in our home that night if the thing had been given unfettered access?
Mum woke Olive, and we went into her room and turned on all the lights. She made tea for the two of them, and they debated whether they should call the police. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe me. The cops hadn’t been very effective in keeping the prowler away before, so they were deciding if it would be better just to ignore him.
I remember the next bit from a third-person perspective rather than through my own eyes. I guess it’s easier to see it that way, analytically and divorced from the terror the memory might otherwise inspire. I had been describing what had happened again. Nobody had asked me to, but I talked a lot as a kid. I liked the sound of my own voice too much. Still do.
Suddenly, the blood drained from my face and I screamed. I pointed. “There he is! In the window right now!” The light from the room illuminated his face all pressed up to the glass. The rest of him was just a shadowy outline, barely differentiated from the yard. His features were unremarkable, a regular man’s face. Mid-thirties perhaps, five o clock shadow, thinning but not bald.
Maybe it was the light, but his eyes were pitch black, and just a little too big to be entirely comfortable with. None of these details were disturbing by themselves. It was the expression. Or actually, the lack of expression.
His whole face was blank and hanging like he’d been given a tranquilizer, as if he’d never smiled or frowned in his life. An orb of slack, rubbery flesh floating in the night. I wondered if he was even looking at us.
Yes. If there was anything in that face, it was a glimmer in the eyes. A glimmer of Intent. He had plans and they involved us. He had plans, and I didn’t want to know what they were. I was clutched tight as we all huddled together on Olive’s bed, just looking at the face and screaming.
This is gonna be really annoying, and I am sorry, but I honestly don’t remember anything after that. I have to assume the police were called and that the man left before they got there. I don’t know. We lived in the house for at least another few months, and when we moved out, it was for mundane reasons.
I never saw the prowler again. My desk where I work from home is near the mail slot in my flat, and every so often I look over at it and imagine how scared I would be if I saw those black eyes looking back at me. So why am I writing about this online all of a sudden, thirty years later?
I saw headlines from my hometown this morning. “Tragic triple homicide: family butchered and home desecrated.” The article described how a couple with two kids had been brutally tortured over three days in their own house. They had made several calls to the police before this describing a prowler in their yard, watching them and whispering in their windows.
They had seen the man. They said he was mid-thirties, with five o clock shadow, thinning but not bald. There was a picture of the place included. It’s the same fucking house. Done up, but I checked google maps. Did I mention it’s been thirty years? I’m at a loss with this. I’ll tell you one thing though, I am never looking out of a window at night again.