At the window

or, something I've never been able to share

When I was young, I was terrified I might go blind. For the best part of a year, I would wake up in the night, convinced that I had lost my sight. This process repeated for many months until, suddenly, it went away. The fear was superseded. What I’m trying to say is, I became haunted by something else. I’ve never told anyone this—not even my wife, to whom I tell everything. For some reason, I’m choosing to tell it here. I hope you don’t mind. Penning it to the page feels like a release. Or therapy, maybe. I don’t know. I’ve never been all that good at explaining things, so I’m just going to let this spill out, because I don’t know how else to tell it.

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It was 1996 and I was thirteen, having begun the slow and ungainly transition into my teens. Hormones assailed me, as did a creeping curiosity towards the opposite sex. Back then, I lived in a small village with my parents and brother. It was a peaceful location, nestled in the midlands and surrounded by the kind of undulating landscape so characteristic of the English countryside. Our house fronted a quiet road that circumscribed the eastern limits of the village, which in turn was fringed by a vast field of oilseed rape that in spring became a sea of gold so majestic it hurt. The road itself had no streetlamps and, because of its location, saw little traffic, so at night, especially when cloudy or when the moon was new, everything was dark. Totally dark. It was for this reason that I began to convince myself I was blind. Waking up in the middle of the night, I would stare intently at where my bedroom window should be, hoping upon all hope that I would be able to see a faint glint of light. But I never did. It was too dark and, as I have said, there were no street lamps and seldom would any car drive past to reassure my eyes. My father, amongst his many anxieties, had an irrational fear of house fires and so a bedside clock—battery-powered or otherwise—was banned, as was any kind of hallway lamp. (One doesn't submit to fear, he used to say, unaware of his own irony. One confronts it until it becomes nothing.) The point is, with eyes open or closed, the room looked the same, obliterated into absolute darkness. In this state, I would lie in total panic, convinced that I had awoken blind and that some catastrophic neuronal event—some unknown destruction wrought upon my optic nerve—had beset my eyes whilst I was asleep. It was idiotic. I was a child. But in those terrible hours between 2 and 4 a.m. (or, at least, what my clockless body took to be those hours), one can be convinced of anything. Eventually, of course, I would fall back to sleep. When I awoke, I would sigh a heavy relief, for light would be seeping into my room. I would walk up to the window, throw back the curtains, and bask in the glorious reality of sight.

I could say that I don’t know how long this went on for, but I do. It went on until the week of October 14th, 1996. Granted, that was a long time ago, but I know the precise date because I have thought about it most every week since¹.

The morning of the Monday of that week was just like the others. I woke up, exhaled my relief that I had not undergone some ophthalmic change, and made my way to the window. I drew back the curtain, most likely glancing to the sparse and patchy growth of the newly planted field, all before my eyes were drawn to something at the base of the pane. It was a smudge, or rather several smudges, on the outside of the glass. That in itself was nothing peculiar, as windows have a habit of dirtying themselves, but it was the shape and position that gave me pause. The smudges were about the length of my little finger, and there were two sets of them, each consisting of three thin marks, splayed like the tines of a fork. It was as though two three-fingered hands had been pressed against the bottom of the glass.

I can’t recall exactly what I thought in that moment, but I ran to get my brother. He was several years older and had his own room that was opposite mine, his facing onto the back garden. He wouldn’t come. I think he laughed at me and shut the door in my face, calling me childish. Soon after, mum shouted something from downstairs about getting ready for school, and so I tried to push the whole thing from my mind. I went back to my room, ignoring the window and its finger-like marks, got dressed, and went down for breakfast. For the rest of the day, I did my best to forget about the little smudges. With school, and the miraculous ability of daylight to crush all fears, I managed this soon enough. All until it was night time. Once I was tucked into my bed and the light was off, my brain could do little else but submit to fear, my rampant imagination thinking of those smudges—ones that I dared not verify were still there before I got into bed. For some time I lay awake, staring at the window as the last hope of light faded, my young and tired body eventually falling asleep. Then, like clockwork, some hours later I awoke. This time, though, I felt none of the usual panic about my sight, because a faint and distant glow of light was filtering into my bedroom. It was coming from some distant outside source, the light a soft blue. It seemed to pulse, growing more intense, fading, and becoming intense again. Then, without any sound or indication of change, the light was gone and I was plunged into darkness, left with nothing but the thrashing of my heart in my chest.

In the morning, I thought of the strange light as I made my hesitant steps to the window. I jerked the curtains open and the scene was as usual: dad’s car in the driveway, the road, the field—little else. Except there was something else. The smudges were there, only they were no longer in the same position. They were a little higher now. They had crept a little higher and the previous marks were gone, as though they had been rubbed clean.

Seeing this, I felt the true tingle of terror in my spine and I pulled the curtains shut and ran downstairs. I thought of telling dad, getting him to look, but like all weekdays he was in a hurry to leave for the office and would only be irritated at my intrusion to his morning routine. Mum was an option, but I never thought she actually listened to anything I said and so I said nothing, instead keeping the fact of the little fingers to myself.

Another day of school passed, the events of which are long lost to memory, but I recall that in the evening I made a protracted effort to stay downstairs for as long as possible. This didn't last long. As a boy of thirteen, I was eventually commanded to go to bed. I thought of saying something to my father, but found that I could not, knowing full well the response he would give and how close it would align to that of my brother’s the day before.

Sleep came, but so did waking, and just as with the previous night, with it came the pulsing of the distant light. As I lay there on my side, eyes locked onto the outline of the window, I began to hear something. It was a faint scratching sound, like a piece of chalk being drawn down a blackboard but done with such delicacy as to only leave the slightest mark. I was used to hearing things in the night—the countryside hosts many sounds that are lost to a city’s traffic—but this was a noise I had never heard. The panic within started to grow. The scratching sound continued and I tried desperately to discern its source, my brain soon allowing that it came from the window. I drew the duvet up around me, encasing myself in its protection, willing the sound to stop, the pulsing light to stop, for everything to just return to the deep blackness I so previously feared. I don’t know how long I remained like this. Likely hours. It was the longest night of my life and I possibly didn’t sleep at all. The relief that dawn brought was incalculable, though I remained beneath the covers for as long as I could and only once mum’s shouting reached a level I could no longer stand did I extract myself from bed and make my way to the window. I drew the curtains, my heart thumping. Of course, the marks were there, now a little higher than before, the prior ones scrubbed clean.

It happened again the following night. Everything was the same. The light, the scratching, the terror that it sent through me. Only this time … this time there was something I will never forget and that convinced me I wasn’t imagining it all: there were two small red orbs at the window, spaced about a hand’s width apart, and they were moving slowly upward with each sound of a scratch against the glass, moving and glowing and pulsing their deep red. They were eyes, my mind insisted. There were eyes at my window.

I never went to the window the next morning. I never even drew back the curtains; I didn’t dare. Mum had done it when I got home from school, and by then, having had the day for the fear to fade, curiosity won out and I ventured to look. The marks were there. They were there and they were higher, and now there was a third smudge between them, as though some kind of nose had been pressed there and smeared its way up the glass.

That evening, I did tell my father. I got him to come look. He wrinkled his forehead at what he saw, studying the marks. He couldn’t explain it. He shrugged his shoulders and, in an act so rare it left me confused, he mussed my hair and offered me a hug, smiling as he spoke. There’s nothing out there for you to be afraid of, son, he said.

I don’t remember what happened when I went to bed. For some reason that night is absent from memory. All I know is that it never happened again after that. In the weeks following, though I continued to wake sporadically in the predawn darkness, I no longer questioned if I had gone blind. Instead, my eyes would just focus and stare and hope that they never saw anything again.

*

To this day, even though I have moved and travelled and lived far away from that village, often I lie awake listening out for the sound of that scratching, and in the mornings, when I draw back the curtains, I still find myself looking for the smudges on the glass; ones left by fingers so thin and little.

I should be clear: I do not believe in ghosts or monsters. I do not, in all rational thought, believe the Earth has been visited by aliens. But what I heard and saw that week when I was thirteen I cannot explain. It is as simple as that. And though I bear no physical scars I can offer up as formal proof that these events truly transpired, the scar I bear is within my mind—the memories that I have relayed here upon the page.

Photo by Ed Vázquez on Unsplash

1. I nearly just deleted this whole post. I stopped here and it’s taken me two days to actually want to continue on with this and commit what happened to the page.