It was one of my earliest memories.
I must have been right around three years old - I remember waking up in the middle of the night crying and afraid. I cried and yelled but my mom wouldn’t come, so I hopped out of my bed to wake her. Opening my bedroom door, tears in my eyes, is when I first saw it.
I was able to see out the front door from the hallway between our bedrooms. Our front door had four long, vertical glass panels, each about 4 inches wide. Stretched across two of the panels was an oddly-shaped figure peering in.
It’s hard to say whether my later experiences have colored this early memory of mine, but I can still see this figure in my mind with such startling clarity that I don’t think it unreasonable to suggest that the way I describe it to you now is the way it looked on that very night. It was not human, though it seemed to have a head - an oblique, boomerang-shaped head that spanned half the length of the door. Under its head was a body too narrow to hold the weight of its head. A flowing ribbon-like substance was draped around it, carrying an indistinguishable color that contrasted against the dull gray of its body.
In hindsight, the strangest part of this exchange was my immediate comfort from the figure. My fear was gone and I simply and easily went back to bed.
My memory is more sporadic after that first night, but over the next 3 years or so I would continue to wake in the night with giddy excitement to peek at the front door for the thing I called Arrowhead. He didn’t visit frequently, and sometimes it would feel like forever between sightings and my developing brain would question whether the previous sighting was indeed just a nightmare, like my mom kept suggesting. I always told her she was wrong! Nightmares were supposed to be scary, but I was never scared when I saw Arrowhead.
Things changed when I was 5 years old or so - I decided that the next time I saw Arrowhead, I would let him in the house so that my mom could see that the thing I was seeing at night was, in fact, real. I figured that he was visiting us for a reason, and standing outside the front door was its way of asking to come in. As luck would have it, Arrowhead visited shortly afterward, and I strolled downstairs in a childlike stupor to let him in.
When I approached the door, I saw its eyes for the first time. On both sides of the boomerang of its head was a single, golf-ball sized black pupil, hanging abnormally still in the center of a white membrane. The best I can compare it to now is the eye of giant squid; it was the eye of something that would not seem strange if you were told beforehand that it had evolved in the abyss of the ocean, but staring at me through my front door, I remember feeling an intense horror I had never quite felt before. I ran upstairs screaming to wake up my parents, but they just would not budge. I remember shaking them and screaming in their faces until I just couldn’t scream anymore. I locked myself in my room and cried until I passed out on the floor from sheer exhaustion.
The years after were difficult - I started seeing a child psychotherapist who attributed the experiences to night terrors caused by pediatric sleep apnea. She explained to my parents that I would stop breathing at night when sleeping on my back, causing terrifying and disorienting hallucinations involving the visitor at our door. I maintained that what I was seeing was real, but in any case, she taught me vital coping mechanisms that I still use to this day to navigate what she would call an “apneic episode”.
It’s simple but it goes like this: whenever I “wake” up, certain of Arrowhead’s presence at my door, I use cues to remind myself that I’m sleeping. It’s sort of like lucid dreaming, but as a nightmare therapy. I ask myself what time it is, or try to wake up someone in the dream. If they don’t wake up, I know I’m still “dreaming”. I know not to look for Arrowhead. I’m able to go back to sleep without issue.
But I’m never actually sleeping during these episodes. It’s hard to explain, but everything I’ve described above happens to me in a waking state. I’m convinced that these aren’t actual nightmares, at least not the ones most people experience.
In high school and college, sharing these stories actually won me a few friends, though none were ever convinced that I was anything other than an imaginative storyteller. More years went by. I married a woman I adore. I got my first job, and then I got a better job. I lost my dad a few years back. We were close but we never really talked about my episodes. The whole thing made him very uncomfortable, and we never really lingered on the subject.
I’m in my late twenties now and life is good. I’m married and my wife and I are expecting our first child (a boy!). We live in a one-bedroom apartment on the third floor of a walkup in Brooklyn, and like many before us, we’re eager for more space and an elevator. The only problem is that I don’t really want to move. Our apartment has a unique feature that I haven’t seen in any other NYC apartment: a 6x5 foot mudroom between the front door of our apartment, and the front door to our living space. My wife says that once we move, she’ll miss having a dedicated space to leave our boots during winter snow. I’m going to miss having another door between me and Arrowhead.
I wouldn’t be writing this post if everything were “normal”. I know Arrowhead still visits me at night, but like I said, it’s not really an issue if I don’t go looking for him. The problem started shortly after my wife became pregnant. I started waking up more frequently than usual from Arrowhead’s presence at the front door. Being used to the routine, I was more concerned by my lack of sleep than by any malevolence on the behalf of my visitor. Until last night.
I woke up to all the familiar sensations. I was in our bedroom, but something about the room was slightly off. I could recognize the furniture and dimensions of the room, but couldn’t really focus on anything in particular - as if everything in the room was in my peripheral vision. I asked myself to check the time, but I couldn’t convince my body to follow through with the idea. I caught a glimpse at my wife sleeping, and wondered whether she’d wake up if I screamed in her face.
That’s when I heard a knock.
My heart sank. It was a FUCKING knock and I’m certain of it. That’s never happened before. The same horror I felt as a five year old rushed through my chest and I felt like balling up on the floor and crying myself to sleep again. But reason quickly overwhelmed me and inspired a more primal terror when I realized the knock I heard was too quiet to have come from the front door. It had to have come from inside the mudroom.
I don’t know what came over me but I just acted without thinking. I ignored all my cues. I ran to the door of the mudroom and ripped it open to greet my old friend, but nothing was there. Nothing except the front door of the apartment standing tightly shut across six feet of darkness. Fluorescent light from the communal hallway of the building outlined the front door, but no light flowed through the peephole. I knew he was looking through it from the outside. I took a step forward to meet his eye through it - to invite him in and feel the warmth of our first encounter. But then I remembered those dead eyes of his. I closed the door and cued myself back to sleep.
I’ve calmed down a bit and wanted to share my story here. I don’t really have many other outlets and I fear my closest relationships would suffer from the revelation that I am still visited at night, so I mostly keep my episodes to myself these days. I wanted to share that I have a plan for when he visits next.
I’ve spent too long hiding behind the security and comfort of my door. With a little one along the way, I can no longer just ball up on the floor and cry. I need to discover what he wants from me and stop pretending that he’s not there. I need him to move on from me and my family.
Next time, I’m going to open the door, but it won’t be to let him in.
Next time, I will step outside with him.