“Daddy, did you hear the man last night?” My eight-year-old son asked.
I was in the middle of making a light breakfast on an early, Saturday morning: buttered toast, and a small plate of scrambled eggs to go with it. I turned around to face him, a spatula in hand.
“What man?” I asked.
In the back of my mind, he was obviously telling me about a dream, or had overheard me from my bedroom, talking to my wife, who happened to be on a business trip.
“He was screaming, very loudly. He was outside my window.” He said, big, blue eyes staring up at me curiously.
My stomach pitted, as if it were emptying out onto the ground. A cold dread began to fill it like sludge. It wasn’t only the idea of him hearing a man, but the fact that the man had been screaming, outside my son’s window, which happened to be multiple feet off the ground.
I started running through the list, trying to find a reason why my son would possibly lie to me.
“What was he saying?” I asked. I put the spatula down and sat next to him. It was the least I could do, to humor myself.
“He was screaming at me, asking me to help him. He kept telling me to help him over and over again. It was scary.” My son replied.
“I’m sure it was.” And I rubbed his arm softly.
“But he disappeared after.” My son finished and he took a big bite of his cereal bar.
“Where do you think he went?”
“I don’t know, but his screams kind of just, faded away. It took a while for it to stop. I could still hear it from far away.”
I bit my lip, thinking. Out of all the things he’d said, that one got to me the most. The screams, fading. Granted, my son does have quite the imagination, but to add the fact that the man’s screams faded away, slowly, added a disturbing detail to an otherwise banal lie.
“Well,” I said, standing up. “I hope he doesn’t come back. Or else I’ll knock his block off.”
I tussled his hair and went back to making my breakfast.
“Oh, I don’t think he’ll be coming back.” My son replied.
I stopped, turning back to him. I tried to look for a hint of smile. I waited for him to say “GOTCHA!”, with a big grin spreading across his innocent face. But all I found was my eight-year-old son, biting aimlessly on his cereal bar, staring out the kitchen window oddly enough.
I took a deep breath, trying to push it to the back of my mind, but it kept coming back to me throughout the morning.
And by late evening, it was all that I could think about.
So, I did what any father might do. For a brief moment, I considered what my son said to be true, and went to the garage and grabbed a ladder.
“Where are you going Daddy?” My son asked from the fence gate.
“I’m going to look for that man outside your window.” I replied, hoisting the ladder against the side of the house.
“You won’t find him there.”
“Why not?”
“Cause he isn’t anywhere. He’s gone.”
I laughed and told him to go inside, and eventually, he did.
I trickle of discomfort passed through me.
Kids, I thought. They can be really fucking creepy sometimes.
——
At first, I wasn’t looking for anything. In the back of mind, I still believed that all of this was a lie, some nightmare my son had conjured and relayed to me as if it were reality.
I climbed up the steps on the ladder, the brick wall climbed up and up and up wit me until I was at my son’s window.
I cupped my hands to my eyes, blocking the sun, and looking through the window.
It was easy enough to see almost everything. I could see his bed clearly, and I imagined him sleeping there, peacefully, in the dark. I imagined the man peering in through the same window, his face turned into a grotesque caricature, screaming at my son. A chill passed down my back and through my body. I assured myself that it was a dream, but a part of me still wanted to make sure.
I scanned the ledge of the window for marks, any kind. I ran my hand across it, seeing if hair would stick to my hand, or if any belongings might’ve dropped there. But I found nothing.
I started to laugh, in spite of myself. I knew when I got back inside, my son would be laughing hysterically.
I began my descent down the ladder; and that was when I found the skid marks.
At first they looked like black streaks, something that could be mistaken for filthy runoff water, staining the wall. But this was not the case. The skid marks were in line. One after another. No doubt the marks of shoes climbing.
I climbed back up the ladder, slowly, following the marks up to the window once again, where they stopped. I checked around at the ledge once again, but this time I took it a step further, examining the inside near the screen over the window.
That’s when I saw the scratch marks. Tons of them, jagged and torn across the flimsy metal. Blood had dried across it, crusty and black.
That was when I realized.
Something in the back of my throat rose but I swallowed it down.
The skid marks on the wall, the scratches on the screen; the man was crying for help, this was certain. Something had been trying to take him, dragging him down as he climbed up. He’d been hanging on for life, begging my son. Pleading. Helpless.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. I leaned my head back and looked at the sky, the clouds, the mass expanse of blue wonder.
My eyes fell from the sky down to the roof, to the brick wall.
I stopped.
Above the window, only a few feet away from the shudders, was a black stripe. Not just one, but many. A row of them. Skid marks. Shoe marks.
I followed them, down and down, all the way to my son’s window, and further down until they met the ones that lead up to the window. A single line of marks, made from the shoes of a man desperate for life.
My eyes looked back toward the top of the house, tracing back the steps. I followed the marks again, to the window.
More blood, but this time, it was at the top of the window, falling up and splattered ever so slightly across the bricks, turning the cement between the edges a dark brown. The blood continued on up, disappearing completely beyond the roof, just as the shoe marks had.
With my legs shaking, I began my descent down the ladder, keeping my eyes glued to the brick wall, noticing the small smudges of brown between the bricks.
I finally reached the ground, throwing up in a pile of bushes near the corner of the house. My knees kept shaking, a cold shudder making its way through me.
I stepped back a ways from the house to gain a full picture.
Skid marks, blood on the bricks, leading up and up to the window, scratches and more blood on the screen, leading up and up to the top of the house, and disappearing forever.
Of course he wasn’t being dragged down, I thought. Because he hadn’t been going down at all.
My son appeared in front of the window then, and he stared out across the backyard and spotted me and waved. I didn’t wave back.
I stood out there for God knows how long, studying the picture before me.
I pictured the man; maybe the color of his eyes, or his hair. How old had he been? My age? What had he been doing out so late at night?
How had he found himself in my backyard? How had he found himself being dragged up the side of my house, screaming, crying, his fingernails being whittled away by the bricks, the blood streaming across them as he pleaded for his life? How had he found himself in front of my son’s window, screaming at a helpless child for what it lacked in return, as if he might save him?
And as the sun faded in the distance, the sky turning from orange to purple to black, the moon, covered by an array of clouds, casting not even a shadow upon my house, I wondered.
I wondered where the man had been dragged up to.
I wondered, as the clouds parted, the moon shining its terrible light upon my house, what had dragged him up there.
What had dragged him, up to those endless depths, where silence lay steadily across the bottomless pit of stale darkness
And for a moment, I wonder if I’ll be able to see it.
Can you?
Right there, can you see it?