I have a bad habit of smoking in the shower. That was the reason the window was open in the first place, to let the smoke and steam out of the bathroom. It was only a few inches, I had told myself. And I lived next to the woods, so it wasn’t like I was really in an area known for peeping Toms. Still, the thin barrier between the outside and in had been breached.
I left the window open when I went to bed. I should’ve just let the bathroom smell like smoke, but I had family coming over the next day. I guess at the time of writing this, that would be today. Still, when I woke up at three in the morning having to pee, I didn’t expect to see the window open. Even less so did I expect a voice to come from the other side of it.
“Hello, may I come in?” Said a man’s voice outside my window. It sounded happy, gleeful almost. It had a deep, resonant quality that almost made it sound like multiple voices.
“No, thank you,” I said. Stupid to respond, perhaps, but he clearly knew I was there. And again, I was half awake. The voice behind the window started again.
“Oh, that’s no fun. Won’t you play along?” It asked. The timbre of his voice sounded almost disappointed, but I could still hear the smile behind it and it sickened me to my core. All of the sudden, I heard a loud and immediate knock at my front door.
“Delivery!” Said a slightly lower voice than the one at the window. I walked slowly across the tile, taking my time. When I reached the front door and finally looked through the peephole, there was no one there. As soon as I pulled away, the voice came again.
“Special delivery! Won’t you sign for your package?” It asked cheerfully. I realized that the voice sounded too loud, too clear. As if someone had been using a microphone. I was shaking my head no, but realized I hadn’t responded aloud to the voice.
“I’ll get it in the morning, thank you,” I said, still trying to somehow appease the voice that was very clearly, impossibly, on every side of my house. The shock still hadn’t hit me. It was too early to fully comprehend the severity of the situation.
“Please, sign for the package. Open the door. Let me in.” The deep voice was still jovial, but pleading now. It almost played on my sympathy. Almost.
“No one delivers mail at three in the morning. Whatever you are, I won’t let you in.” It was so hard being blunt in the face of the pure, unadulterated terror I felt. But I knew that my terror was what it wanted, what it was trying to feed on. I tried to act quickly.
I ran back to the bathroom as swiftly as I could, slamming shut the window in a futile attempt to get away from the voice’s attention. Walking up close to the window filled me with dread, and made the hairs in the back of my neck stand up. But still, I approached the window.
Nearly the second it was closed, something hit the window, hard. I jumped back in surprise. It took me a full minute to recognize the face of one of my neighbors, a quiet woman from next door, pressed firmly against the glass. The angle that her head was facing made it very clear that there was no body beneath it, as her neck was stuck to the left side of the window, clearly being held up. I wretched, but couldn’t keep my eyes away from where I knew my captor was standing, just to the left of my window.
“Ohhh, neighbor!” Came a practically singing voice, still the same voice as each time, but this time at a mockingly high pitch, clearly trying to emulate a woman’s.
“Won’t you let me in?” It asked. “Something out here is trying to rip me into bloody fucking pieces.”
I stood absolutely still, as if I could still pretend to not have heard the voice. What options did I have in this moment? What could I do against a force that clearly had me surrounded and took pleasure in the fact?
“Neighbor…please let me in. Please.” The falsely high-pitched voice was now begging. “He‘ll kill me. He’ll dismember me. Who knows what he’ll do to me then? Let me in. Let me in. Let me IN.” The end of each sentence was punctuated by a slam of her head against the window. I was crying now, unable to stop myself. I had done nothing to deserve this, nothing to provoke whatever creature was hunting me.
“Your lips aren’t even moving,” I whispered. This made the banging stop, and for a moment I thought I’d beaten the thing with just my words. I was so hopeful that this waking nightmare could come to an end that I didn’t even question why that would give it pause, I was just happy it was over.
“If you won’t even pretend to play along with my little game,” the creature snarled, “then why am I still pretending to need permission to come in?”
A slow, steady knock came from every window and door in my house. The one in front of me, the one with my neighbor’s head, the knock was being made by slamming her face into the window over and over again, turning it slowly into a bloody mess as I watched her skull fracture, and even then it did not stop.
I couldn’t look away. I wished I had run, then. But where could I leave from without being followed? I had never been particularly fast. Instead, I watched in mute horror as the face kept slamming into my window, growing more and more deformed, with knocking at every possible exit in my home. If my suspicions about my neighbor’s lack of body had been false, she was very dead at this point.
All at once, the knocking stopped and was replaced by a tiny metallic thump one at a time. I’m sure it could’ve unlocked every door at once if it’d had a mind to, but I think it was still, even then, toying with me. Still trying to convince me it was just one entity. That it could only be in one place at once.
I ended up hiding in my bedroom closet. I could’ve picked somewhere less obvious if I’d had time, but I don’t often catalog the best hiding places in my house. I’ve been sitting in here for about an hour, giving me time to type this. I think this is what it wants, to be known.
I can hear it against the tile floor. It paces back and forth around my bedroom, claws skittering against the floor back and forth. Sometimes when it’s closer, I can smell a musky forest scent mixed with the clear, unambiguous scent of my neighbors’ blood.
I tried calling the police, of course. But as the phone rang, I could hear the claws stop dead in their tracks, and I knew the punishment for telling them what was going on would be severe. I knew, somehow, that I was already dead and that this would simply speed up the process.
I tried then to call some of my loved ones, to let them know I loved them. When I did this, the voice laughed uproariously, so much so that I knew they wouldn’t be able to hear a word I said. When it laughed, I realized that it now sounded less loud, less clear than before. Muffled behind the door of my closet.
That’s where I am now. I know that it’s getting restless. I know that it’s waiting for me to finish typing this so that other people can know it, can begin to fear it before it even comes for them. I wish I had advice or a moral. I wish this story could have a warning, like “don’t talk back to the voices outside your window at night”. I wish all of those things, but know I was doomed from the moment I heard the voice, probably even before then.
Because I realized too late that the voice hadn’t been coming from outside my window, the two were unrelated. The voice had been coming from inside my house the whole time.