My family is fairly normal I’d say. Happy and with enough money to get by life easily enough. We live just about 30 miles from the closest town and I find myself wondering how anyone chose to settle around here in the first place.
I should probably explain my situation so that people can understand this. Like I said, my family lives a fair distance from town, and along with this solitude and peace from factors such as light pollution came a rule. The rule was simple enough, don’t look outside at night. I asked my mother why such a rule existed a few years back and according to her it became a rule because of what happened to my father.
According to her, there were noises outside at night and so my father went outside to check them out after they wouldn’t stop after a few nights because they were losing sleep over them. After a few minutes, he just came back inside, didn’t say a word, and went straight to bed. My mother said he was gone the next morning. The noises happened every night from then on.
That story led me to where I am now, over the years I wondered more and more what it was that happened to my father and tonight is the night I made up my mind. I stayed up late enough for the noises to start and to make sure the rest of my family would be asleep. Tonight was the night I would look outside, just to see what it was that my father saw. I decided I would see it too, even if it killed me or I disappeared like my father.
I went to the window in my room, opened the curtains, and stared out. What I saw was the woods surrounding our home, but there was an obvious intrusion in the black scenery. There were two orbs of yellow piercing through the treeline. My eyes immediately locked onto the unfamiliar sight as I tried to figure out what they were. Then two more appeared, slowly fading into my vision. Then two more, coming in from the side of my vision. Slowly increasing until at least 40 orbs of yellow were in the trees. Then I saw them, the slits of black in those orbs slowly dilating as I realized that all the eyes were looking directly at me. I closed the curtains as quickly as I could after that.
I rushed to my computer to at least get something typed down. That was when I heard it, louder than ever before, the noises outside, the soft thumps upon the ground approaching closer towards the window. I jumped up to make sure the window was locked, hearing nearly the same noise move away from the window before circling the building. Then the breathing began, a heavy breath outside the window, then another.
The thumps then came down the hallway of my house, my door was already locked to make sure no one else would interrupt me in seeing what my father saw yet I still felt a sense of dread as the noise approached it. Then a second pair of lungs began to breathe just as heavily, just outside the door to my room. That was when it sank into me that I wouldn’t be leaving my room alive tonight or at least wouldn’t be leaving of my own volition.
I saw the eyes at about 12:30, it has reached 2 AM as I write this. My eyes are growing heavy. I recognize that the moment my guard has lowered and my eyes have closed, I will suffer the same fate as my father and I see that it may be an even worse fate than I had imagined. I will be going to sleep soon after typing this.
My only hope is that my mother and younger brother don’t make the same mistake I have. I will suffer the consequences for breaking my family’s one rule, “Don’t look outside at night.”