The Window Walker

I finally moved out of my parent’s home and into my own flat. I say my own, but it was my brothers. I was lucky we got along; his flatmates and I are friends too, which is nice. I have not been living with my parents for a few years, but I am in a position where I no longer need their financial help, so it is like I am finally my own person for the first time.

The flat is at the back of a cul-de-sac that leads out to a forested area, so there was literally no one behind us. The entrance leads to the kitchen on the left and a toilet on the right. We have a “downstairs”. It is only a few steps down, more of a lowered floor than anything else. Down there, we have the lounge, and that leads to a deck that faces out into the wooded area behind our flat. We also have an upstairs that has four bedrooms and two bathrooms. There were already four people living in the flat when I asked, but fortunately, there was a linen cupboard that was not being used.

The cupboard was about a meter wide and 170 cm long, so I could nearly lie down in it without my feet sticking out. It was fairly high, well over two meters, with a roof access hatch in it. I was gifted the opportunity of flatting with friends, and I was in a fortunate situation where I owned very little. I had a two-door car, bike, computer, war hammer, and a small selection of clothes. It was all I had ever wanted, and now I also got to live with the people I enjoyed being around.

My computer went downstairs in the lounge out of the way, and the bike was just outside, locked up to a rail. Since my computer was downstairs, I was downstairs a lot. At the present time, I did not have a job, so it was a lot of late nights and mid-day starts. During this time, I managed to catch up on gaming with a little side practice of painting and writing. Really I should not have wasted my time, but my friends were playing, and my motivation was really low because I had no callbacks from CVs that I had handed out.

About a week had gone by, and I had started staying up till the next morning and then sleeping only a few hours just to return to my computer. Late one night or early one morning, I remember sitting alone downstairs, wanting to head out to grab a beverage. I stood up, grabbed my keys, and wallet, and was just about to head out when something moving in the corner of my eye caught my attention. There was a man out in the trees, but he was too far away to determine features; he kept on weaving in and out of trees, so I constantly lost sight of him. I figured it might be one of our neighbors looking for their dog; there were four of us in a row at the end of the cul-de-sac, so it was very possible. But still the more I stared the more uneasy I felt so I decided to stay in that night, something about it just seemed odd a man pacing out in the woods, a little eerie even.

Over the next two weeks, I would see what I assumed was a man pacing outside in the woods; in the end, I decided that it was just some crazy person doing late-night fitness. Even after coming to this conclusion, he still creeped me out; there was something odd about him. Fortunately, I did not have that much time to dwell over him as I got a job which ended my late-night sprees.

It was a nice feeling as if I had purpose again; as much as I enjoy being lazy, I feel useless and like I am letting my life waste away even after just a few days of doing nothing. I managed to round up an impressive 27 days straight of work that was interrupted once by me getting sick, probably because I was not used to the long hours. Sadly though, this all came to an end, and my freelance work supply dried up, and I returned to my lazy lifestyle.

The first night staying up late, and just like before, he was pacing in the woods, but this time, he stopped; he was so far away I could not tell whether or not he was staring at my flat or facing the other way. No matter what the answer was, it was nothing less than unnerving. I closed the curtains and decided to go to bed that night. I was clearly too tired, and he was getting into my head.

Since I had gone to bed so early, I was up before the sun was. To me, this was very strange but nice because it meant I got a decent amount of laziness in the morning then I could go for a bike ride. I had gotten downstairs, and all wrapped up in my blanket when I heard the cat scratching behind the curtain, playing with some tinfoil from Domino’s pizza garlic bread. Reluctantly I got up and opened the curtain picking up the ball of tinfoil and throwing it upstairs giving out a little laugh as the cat chased it so blindly.

I turned back to close the curtains, but instead, I ended up staring down the man outside; not that he was close enough to pick out features, but he was definitely close enough to know he was facing me. He was still way too far in the trees to be concerned, so I just closed the curtains and made sure the sliding door and the windows were locked. Then I went back to my computer and continued gaming. By the time I reached the next night, I had completely forgotten about the man in the window as I spent the whole day with my Brother. We ended up deciding to stay downstairs to watch movies, but unfortunately, he got a late-night call for work and had to ditch me.

I ended up finishing the movie we started but decided to leave the other ones for another night with him. Naturally, I went for my computer; no point going to bed this early. I wish I had, though; between standing and walking over to my computer, I had to stop; eyes were on me, and I could feel a cold burn on the side of my head. I turned outside to see it, not him, it. I could not move. It was so close; it definitely was not facing me, but it stood just a few meters in front of our porch, hunched over. I stepped back and put my foot quite precisely on the cat’s tail, causing her to jump and hiss at me. This shocked me, and I looked away to see the cat run under my desk; I turned back to see it was closer, slowly moving backward towards me. By this point, I could see everything.

Its fingers were long; they reached the ground from the side of its body. Its body was anorexic, not an unhealthy skinny, organ-less; its rib cage gave the only definition to its upper body below that. The only thing showing definition was its pelvis. The rest of its body was skin wrapped tight around its bones. Still, it faced the other way, just standing there now, with no movement from either of us, I was too afraid to move, and it was just standing there toying with me. I moved to my left to line up with the stairs behind me, but as I did, the image of it disappeared partially; it hit me. It was not outside; I was blocking its reflection. I noticed then its feet were not on the ground. It was hovering in the glass, but still its feet stood firm. This thing was standing behind me; my breathing got faster and faster. eventually, I got the nerve to turn around only to see the stairs leading to the kitchen.

My neck snapped back around to the thing in the window. Still, it stood there, back to me, hovering off of the ground, an image distorted by my own. I had no idea what was going on at this point. I was beyond confused, in my confusion. I moved closer to the sliding door; I needed to see unobstructed what it was; I needed to see without interference. I got to the door and undid the hatch; this made the thing more awake, its head rose, and its body straightened. still, I persisted, I slid the door open, but as I did, the less I saw of it; by the time the door was fully open, it was nowhere. Again I looked behind me just to double check but still just an empty room; I pushed the door fully open and looked out, reassuring myself that I had been having too many late nights.

I turned to my right to grab the handle of the door to see its head sticking through the window, not from either side but out from the glass. Its head was no different from the rest, a tightly wrapped skin across the skull, no mouth, just scars where it had been sewn shut. The eyes of an adrenaline hysteria beaming around the room in opposite directions. I opened my mouth to scream, but only a slight whimper was let out; the head of it  cocked to the left, and the long fingers lashed out at me multiple knuckles allowing it to bend an unnatural amount of times, wrapping me up It climbed out of the window and carried me upstairs all the way to my room. It placed me down in my bed with one of its hands and opened the ceiling hatch above my bed with the other, not once breaking eye contact.

It used its one free hand to climb into the roof, leaving me in my bed wide-eyed and staring; slowly, it disappeared into the black above me. As it closed the hatch, my eyes got heavier until finally the hatch and my eyes were closed. Ever since then, it has not returned, but I feel its cold eyes burn on my neck some nights when I sit in the lounge.