For the past several nights I’ve been woken up, give or take, around two or three in the morning by bright lights.
It started on Friday. I really didn’t think too much about it. My next door neighbors, the James’—older couple, both kids are out of the house—go out for drinks on Friday nights and they usually come back pretty late. Around this time, maybe a little earlier.
What I’m trying to say is, it wasn’t on my list of priorities to investigate. I was tired. I had just been woken up and all I wanted to do was go back to sleep. I assumed it was just those obnoxiously bright car lights coming in through the window. Case closed.
Was I annoyed? Sure. Did I give a big enough shit to get out of bed? No.
Late night disturbances aren’t exactly unheard of out there. This isn’t a gated community, anyone could just mosey on in. Crackheads. Drunks. Some weirdo going for a midnight stroll. Kids sneak out all the time to meet and get high, or hook up together. Racoons have fights over garbage. And living in a household with three cats and a dog, some bumps in the night are to be expected. I wasn’t about to haul my ass out of bed for nothing.
I just laid there and tried to go back to sleep. At some point Beantly, my black cat, batted the door open, which I will admit startled me.
I wasn’t spooked by the light. I was just a little on edge. I don’t like the dark. There’s always been something about it that’s unnerving to me. Maybe it’s just the fact that it’s harder to see in general or maybe because it’s easier for my eyes to play tricks on me: shapes turn into figures, walls of shadow become hiding places for lurking, hungry things, and suddenly I feel very, very vulnerable.
My cats and my dog make it a little easier. When I felt Beantly’s familiar weight hop onto the bed and wander towards me, I calmed down and, eventually, drifted off.
When I woke up Taco and Marbles had joined us as well as Molly. Molly is my dog, I don’t know what breed she is. She came from the animal shelter, taken off the street after someone called animal control to pick up a litter of puppies under their shed. I don’t need to know what she is. She’s my Molly and that’s all that matters.
It’s pretty common for them to sneak into my room when I’m asleep and join me. They never want to lay down with me when I first go to bed. Molly likes to sleep at the bottom of the stairs, Taco on the bathroom mat, Marbles sleeps on the couch and Beantly hangs outside my door. I don’t know why. Now it’s just become the expected pattern. I can always rely on them being there when I wake up, though.
Saturday and Sunday played out the same as Friday. Bright lights wake me up. I’m pissed but I’m too tired to do anything about it and eventually go back to sleep.
I was a little more irritated Sunday night/early Monday morning because I would have to get up early for work. Being woken up in the middle of the night usually meant that everyone in the office was going to be just a little bit more annoying. I can usually deal with Shannon with a baseline amount of sleep (aka not being woken up in the middle of the goddamn night). Sleep deprived, she is a nightmare.
I can’t stand her—or anyone really—when I’m tired. Everyone’s voice sounds like nails on a chalkboard and the ambience grinds on my every nerve. Sip from your coffee mug? I wish death upon you? Get the printer going? You deserve to be kicked in the shins. God forbid you start clicking your pen? I will set a blood curse upon your future kin.
It’s nothing personal. I just hate my job. I would quit but I’m not going to be able to buy food, unless I slave away at my desk for at least eight hours a day, five days a week.
Monday was when everything got a little… weird. I don’t really know what to make of it and I’m really freaking out. Maybe some of you know?
First day of the work week started slow, but was surprisingly bearable. David forgot his coffee mug, no one needed to print extra papers. Shannon still clicked her fucking pen though.
I was grateful to leave, when the day was over.
All of this happened because I stayed up late on Monday. Though I think if I had just done to sleep, the same events would have played out, I just wouldn’t be as terrified as I am now. Ignorance is bliss and knowledge of these past late night dwelling has set its ass on my doorstep without prompt.
Though I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised about it. Aren’t most discoveries made by accident?
I shouldn’t have stayed up that late anyway. And it wasn’t even for a good reason. I was just binging a show and had two episodes left before I finished the season finale. The only problem was that episodes were about an hour long each and it was already about ten.
I caved and the final episode of season four rolled its credits about around twelve ten.
When I turned the TV off and the screen went black I sat for a few minutes and stared at my reflection. It wasn’t in some kind of philosophical trance, I was just so tired I contemplated just sleeping on the couch in my work clothes. I decided that I would regret that decision and, with some considerable effort, forced my limbs to comply with my begrudging decision.
I nudged Marbles, who had previously been purring as I absently stroked her piebald fur, from my lap. She glared at me, but hopped off and curled up in the corner of the couch opposite of where I sat. Then I rose to my feet and headed for my room upstairs.
I was about halfway through shambling up the steps when the light came. At the top of the stairs I could see it, shining through my cracked bedroom door. A line of bright white traveled up the wall.
Thoughts raced through my mind and half of them were nonsense.
Suddenly I was very awake and part of me wanted to run downstairs and see who was disturbing my sleep for the past couple of days. But something deep in my gut told me to stay still, so I did. And thank God.
I don’t know if I had decided to go downstairs if it would have changed the outcome, but standing there in the silence hearing nothing but my breathing and my heart thudding in my chest, I made an observation. It sat weirdly with me. And it took me a while to figure out why.
When it dawned on me—rather, when it slapped me in the face—my stomach felt a little heavier and my throat a little tighter.
There was no noise.
I had assumed that the light had come from a car. It made sense at the time, that light was bright and most people didn’t own flashlights that could produce that many watts. It had to be a car, but I didn’t hear the rumbling of the engine. It was just the sounds I was making: my breathing, the slight itching of my breath, and the desperate attempts I made to control it. That was it.
Suddenly I felt as if my heavy breathing was somehow dangerous. Like something might hear it and be able to locate me.
I’m a rational person, but every ounce of sense seemed to flee me for a second. Every single possibility flooded my mind and so many fears bubbled up, black and frothing to the surface.
When I had calmed down enough to think things through, My first thought was: had someone been snooping around my house? And then a slew of worries spilt after it, the floodgates once again open. What were they doing? What did they want?
Finally the reality of my situation laid itself out very clearly. I live alone. I don’t have a partner and I haven’t for the past five years. I’m not that tall and I’m not that strong. It was also the middle of the night. This would have been prime time to attack me without anyone coming to my aid. If someone broke and decided they wanted to hurt me, kill me, rape me, I wouldn’t be able to stop them.
This idea alone made my blood run cold.
My fears resolved themselves by the situation evolving into an even more bizarre scenario. This entire situation was like the cross section of a cabbage. I was trying to reach the core, peeling one leaf after another. Each time I shucked one second, there was another layer I had to deal with before I reached the core.
Monday was the night that the impossible showed itself around every corner.
I made another realization, the light was only coming from my bedroom. On the second floor. And it’s position was in such a way that I realized it could only be coming from my windows from my backyard facing the forest behind my house.
It mostly definitely was not a car. That idea had long left my head, but that was the final thing that killed that lingering thought.
So maybe someone was on my roof and shining their flashlight in through my bedroom’s back windows. Then the ‘whys’ spilled into my brain. It was all I could think about. Why now? Why wait three days? Why me? It didn’t make any sense.
When I moved here after graduation, my entire life was packed into two suitcases. The only thing remotely valuable were the electronics I bought with saved up birthday money, that amounted to a single TV and an iphone and the old as shit laptop glitched in the presence of a light breeze. What would someone gain from robbing me? Why were they on my roof?
But also, that didn’t line up either, I would have been able to hear them clomping around up there. There was nothing. The light was too still, too constant. It didn’t have that bobbing effect as my assumed would-be burglar supposedly paced back and forth.
Even if they were just standing still looking into my room, no flashlight can possibly be bright enough to have enough radius to cast through all three of the windows looking out into the forest. It just wouldn’t be practical for someone to have a light source so bright someone a mile away could spot them.
Nothing made sense.
I tried putting the pieces together. It wasn’t a car, I couldn’t hear the engine and it wasn’t even in the right position to be on ground level. The light only shined through on the second floor, looking directly into my bedroom. It probably wasn’t a bugler because I didn’t hear them walking around up there at any point.
Most importantly, there wasn’t any sound at all. Not even the night critters made a noise and didn’t sit well with me. I grew up in the country surrounded by forest sounds: crickets, howling coyotes, birds.
There was one universal rule you could always rely on. If the forest was silent, something dangerous was nearby and you needed to get the hell out and indoors.
It’s safe to say I was thoroughly spooked. Nothing made sense and I was being presented with a universal danger sign.
I don’t know how all this information went unnoticed by me over the weekend. Maybe it was because I was tired and I wasn’t able to process everything, nor did I even try to. It’s the best idea I’ve got.
I feel so stupid for ignoring it, but I didn’t think it was that big of a deal.
I guess that’s my bad for ignoring it for so long.
To my horror, the light started to move.
I don’t know why. Maybe whoever it was realized I wasn’t in bed or maybe this happened every night and I just ever stayed awake long enough to see it. I don’t know and I’m not sure which instills more fear in me. The fact that whatever this is searching for me, or that it’s scoping out the inside of my house while I’m supposed to be unaware of it.
Slowly the light rolled down to the first floor windows. I felt a deer in headlights as the light passed over my body and cast me in a stark white glow. My limbs locked and suddenly I was a statue carved from the cold blade of fear.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t scream. Everything was a burning ball inside of me, threatening to supernova. While my body remained perfectly still, under my skin simmered like asphalt in the sun.
In actuality the moment didn’t last long, maybe ten or fifteen seconds. But in that moment, trapped in that white light, it was an eternity before the beam shut off and I was once again left at peace.
Peace isn’t the right word. I can’t think of anything to describe it. It wasn’t relief. It didn’t feel like a weight had been lifted from my chest, or the world was taken off my shoulders. no—I didn’t feel anything different, but there was some sense of security that I was once again in the dark.
The worst is yet to come.
It was just a second. A flash and then it was over. Maybe my eyes were playing tricks, and—by God—I hope they were. If they weren’t, I don’t know what to think.
Because, I swear—on my grandfather’s grave—before the light shut out completely I could see eyes.
Two pairs.
They glowed the way a deer, or a cat, or a dog’s does at night when they catch the moonlight. When the light shut off, I saw them move in tight, brisk movements. Two figures, I couldn’t make out the shape of their bodies but they marched, for lack of a better word, back into the woods behind my house.
I watched them and didn’t take my eyes off until I couldn’t perceive it anymore, and even then, I just continued to stare. I stared for a long time.
Numb and cold and shaking, I felt like I was floating. I felt like my body was just gliding across the floor as I went upstairs. I didn’t change into my night clothes or bothered to shower or brush my teeth. Instead, I grabbed my blankets and my pillow, and herded my cats and Molly into the bathroom with me. Then shut and locked the door.
If they came back, if they tried to break in, I didn’t want to take any chances.
Despite all my efforts, I don’t think I slept at all.
The cats weren’t too happy about being locked up in such a small place. They kept pawning at the door and when I moved in front of it, they just meowed in my face. Molly was a bit more perspective and kept licking me and pawing at my lap, whining.
I scratched behind her ears, but I think she knew I wasn’t alright.
I’m still not alright.
I called in sick this morning. There was no way I was going to work, not after that. I don’t think I would have even been able to bring myself to leave the house.
I’ve missed some calls from my co-workers. I haven’t listened to them, I haven’t done anything. I feel sick and scared. And there’s anger in there too. Something has made me afraid in my own home.
Night has fallen again and I’m terrified. I don’t know what to do, but I need to know what is happening, I’m not going to sit and let whoever this is torment me.
I made coffee around dinner time, it’ll be the first thing I ingest today. I’m going to sit and wait and watch, and I’ll tell you what I see.