I’ve tried everything I can think of.  Enough is enough.

I first noticed the thing when I looked up at my window after taking a short nighttime walk.  At first, I reasoned that it was just my mom, putting something in my room.  But as I came closer and looked harder, I saw its shape was hardly feminine.  Hardly even human.

What stood in my window was a tall, skinny figure, completely nude and lanky like a teenager, its skin the color gray.  It stood taller than I did, and it looked down from my window at me whenever I was outside of my house.  Its face was more humanoid than the rest of it, as it had a mouth, a nose, and two eyes, the whites of which shone like dimmed car headlights.  It had an expression that was hard to read; fear mixed with exuberation, and entirely psychotic.

The first night I saw it, it just stared down at me.  It didn’t move at all.  I didn’t move at all.  I couldn’t.  I was dumbfounded by its presence. 

I felt a sneaking dread climb up my spine, and it settled on my neck.  My mother and sister were in the house with that monster.  I ran for the door.

When I burst through, nothing was amiss.  My family members sat downstairs, watching television as they always did.  Panting, I stood before the screen and looked at them, wondering how they couldn’t have noticed someone breaking into our home.  Looks of concern showed on both their faces.

“What’s the matter?” my mom asked, frowning.

“There’s someone upstairs!” I exclaimed.

“What?” she cried, her voice raised.  “How can that be?”

“I saw him in my window!”  Without waiting for them to follow, I stormed up the stairs, determined to catch the criminal.  I took a baseball bat from the closet on the way and, with a moment’s hesitation, I exploded into my bedroom.

The gray being had inexplicably vanished.  Gone, without any trace.  I checked my sister’s room, my mother’s room, every bathroom and closet and pantry I could.  The thing had disappeared.  Somehow, its vanishing disturbed me more than its being here.  That night I barely slept, waiting for it to emerge from some excellent hiding spot.  It never did.

After then, I’ve looked up to my window when I was outside, and every time I saw the thing glaring down at me like I was the freak.  Sometimes I locked eyes with it, making threatening gestures to try to stare it down and scare it off, but it never affects it.  It just stood there, watching.

Waiting.

After a week of seeing it whenever I walked my dog late at night, and even during the day when I looked up from car as I parked it in the driveway, I resolved to do something.  What a mistake.

First, I tried shutting the blinds and turning off the light before I went out with my dog.  Sure enough, when I glanced up at my window the thing stood as it had before, with the blinds completely up and the light juxtaposing its gray mass against the yellow-colored room.  When I climbed back up to my bedroom, the shades were as I had put them.  I started to feel crazy, and unsafe.  I started sleeping downstairs.

The second thing I tried worked as well as the first.  I stacked chairs and heavy boxes full of reams of paper before the window to see how determined this spirit was.  As I should have guessed, all of the things had been removed from sight when I peered up to the gleaming portal.  It just stood alone, its expression constant, its body not feeling my desperate eyes upon the gray of its form.

As a final attempt before resulting to setting actual traps to catch the beast, I told my sister to check my room after I’d gone.  She was still sitting on the couch when I walked through the front door, loath to postpone her sedentary life for even a few minutes.  When I returned, she reported that my room was empty, and asked if I felt okay.  Feeling the concerned and fearful eyes of my family members made me fearful for myself.

For some weeks, I managed to come to terms with the gray being’s existence.  I looked at it less and less, found its presence to be of decreasing importance to me.  It seemed as if we could occupy the same space in comfort, staying out of each other’s way.  I had almost completely forgotten about it when the tragedy came.

It was a Saturday, a day I typically spend out with friends.  The evening was a time of stress relief in the form of driving around the suburbs I live in and causing a ruckus in a variety of ways.  I left around 4 in the afternoon, and it was only 4:26 when I received a frantic text from my mom urging me to come home.

When I got back, I looked up to my window, remembering the being that had become nearly invisible by its consistency.  I froze when I saw that its gray, strange mouth was twisted upwards in a horrid smile.

I burst through the front door.  My mom was collapsed on the front room carpet, telephone held limply in hand having just called the police.  I knelt by her a few moments, comforting her in her distress, wondering where my sister was.  Sentence after incoherent sentence streamed out of her mouth like dribble, so I left her there to check if the house had any clues to her distress.

My natural response upon entering my house is to get upstairs to my room as soon as sociably acceptable.  Logically, I would check their first.  Each day I awake, I wish I hadn’t looked at all.

Blood coated nearly every surface, as if some explosion of red paint had sent it splattering the walls and ceiling.  Parts of my sister were strewn on my bed, some of her organs lying on my desk, a good deal of her torso still and motionless in the center of my carpet.  Her face had been torn off and nailed to the wall with a pencil, the eyes missing and nowhere to be found.  The eyeholes were ghastly, elongated things, made to look like demon’s eyes by the bloodied wall that was visible through them.  I retched onto the crimson floor, making the stench in the room even more sickening than the hemoglobin-iron smell that fucked my nostrils mercilessly.

I stumbled downstairs back to my weeping mother, and collapsed as she had.  I did not cry, however.  I only thought.  And it became clear to me then.  The being is too dangerous to let live.

From then on, after police had come to retrieve the body and found no viable perpetrator of the crime, I spent most of my time at every public library in the county or on so-called witch websites I knew to be hoaxes, trying to find a method of purging the spirit from my home.  I ordered holy water purported to be bottled at the Jordan River, spread it in the still-red room only to see that same gray beast looking down upon me from within.  No amount of charms or amulets or enchantments could repel the gray being.  I cast protection spells, spirit wards, positive repels, waving my hands and chanting like a manic cultist.  In a stupor of frustration, I tried pleading with the spirit, making a pact with it, left it offerings like it was some god to revere.  Nothing could remove it from the window.

And that brings me to my current state of mind.  I have exhausted all possible means, save summoning a demon of my own or burning down my house.  I would do the latter if I could convince my mother of the gray being’s existence, but she always claims she can’t see it when I show her its creeping vigilance.  For some reason, I know nothing can rid me of this malevolence.  That’s why I’ve written this tale, this explanation of my next action; I’m going to climb onto my roof and go in through that window.  I want everyone to understand why I’ve done this, and to make sure that this does not happen again.  Believe someone if they tell you that they’re afraid, and believe in what causes their fear, no matter how preposterous, no matter how gray.

I’ve tried everything I can think of.  Enough is enough.

A guy: chokes her

Mathew Fraser, via The Morning Chalk Up (via fuckyeahcrossfit)