Unseen (fiction)

This morning dawned behind rags of fog and cloud, grey and dew laden. I stood at my kitchen window, sipping from a cup of coffee. Heat seeped through the chipped ceramic and into my hands, but did nothing to dispel the bone deep chill I felt.
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Leaves dappled the lawn, ochre and sepia and gold littering the grass and moss. The responsible thing to do would be to rake them up, but I could not bring myself to step out there. Daylight may have been safe, but daylight would reveal evidence of what had happened the previous night. I refused to face it, so my yard would have to remain untended.

Every year, I kiss summer goodbye with mixed feelings. I miss the longer days and shorter nights, but the humid, inescapable heat of the summer months drains me, and I have always been the sort of person who enjoys colder weather.
You see, the most frightening thing about summer is the necessity of open windows.

Open windows mean putting myself at risk, especially at night.

The moment I had been able to afford it, I moved away from my childhood home, and rented a flat on the top floor of the highest apartment building I could find. The higher the better, and I felt safe for the first time since I was a small child. I found I could sleep easier at night, and even leave the windows open just a crack if it was too warm.

I sound like a paranoid shut-in, I know.

Sometimes paranoia is the result of spending one's formative years in utter terror.

My earliest memories involve silence, my own hand clamped over my mouth to stifle my cries at night. Even during the daytime, silence was preferred.

As I grew older, I learned fear at my mother's knee. We had the newspaper delivered daily, so we would know what time the sun would set. When I discovered the internet at school, we purchased a computer, so we wouldn't have to venture outside to retrieve the newspaper.

An hour before dusk, my father would lock the house up tight; shutters bolted across the windows, doors locked, curtains drawn, blinds pulled.

After sunset, no music or sound was allowed.

I learned to read books by the dim glow of a night light, hiding under my bedclothes.

When my parents discovered I had taken such a foolhardy risk, the nightlight was smashed, and I pretended to sleep while the house creaked and groaned, not knowing if the silence was worse than the sounds late at night.

Years passed, and even at college, staying in a dorm room on the fourth floor, I couldn't rest at night without locking everything up tight. One well-meaning room mate opened my window on a particularly warm night, and the panic attack I had when I discovered it resulted in her moving out, claiming I was “batshit insane”.

I think I went through five room mates before the college gave up trying to make me share my space.

I was halfway through my master's degree, a hundred miles of safety between me and that creaky old house when I got the call.

I had never intended to go back there.

Most people I meet speak fondly of their childhood homes. I would prefer to burn this place to the ground.

My parents knew they were in danger, but my father stubbornly refused to leave his home. Moving was unthinkable for a man as stubborn as he, and he would rather live a half life of fear when the sun went down than retreat.

“There are sins that must be atoned for,” he said. “What has been seen cannot be unseen.”

I tried to pretend I didn't know what he meant.

They took my mother first.

They never found her body, just her slipper out in the snow.

The police assumed she fell into the creek in the woods, dementia in her old age making her leave the safety of her home. The only thing the inspector asked us about was the strange claw marks covering the wood facade of the home.

“Hurricane damage,” was all my father would say.

No need for the police to think there was another senile elder living there.

Her funeral was a strange affair, an empty coffin holding her photograph, and only two mourners. We stood in the parlour, the empty coffin haunting me.

Even in the face of my mother's death, neither of us could talk about what had caused it.

“You don't have to come back for good, you know,” my father grumbled. “I'm perfectly capable of taking care of myself.”

This was true. He had a nice lady, named Diwata, stop by three times a week to help him with chores and anything else he might need, and he was capable and able of caring for himself.

I took him at his word, and left the day after the funeral. One night in that damned house was more than enough. I had safety in the city, a security in my high rise apartment that I could never have in my father's house.

I was a moderately successful artist, painting concept art for movies and games. My work was praised for how imaginative it was, and how chilling the monsters I painted were.

I can paint fantastical beasts with snarling, gaping maws and rippling muscles designed to tear meat from bone. I can draw zombies devouring humans, hellish landscapes more flesh than flora, monsters that people claim have left them unable to sleep at night.

There is one painting I keep from everyone, concealed in my work room.

It doesn't seem terribly disturbing at first, just a nightscape of a ramshackle Victorian house set among lumpy pines. Then you begin to notice something lurking in the shadows, something that becomes clearer the longer you look.

Two storeys tall, long and slender of limb, the creature blends in with the darkness, illuminated only under the moon.

A patch of silvery moonlight reveals the limbs are grey bone, clad in ragged strips of flesh that grow more meagre as your eye travels from its feet to its head, like a corpse picked half bare by carrion birds.

Then the face ... oh God, the face!

I saw just enough to make that painting.

I was stupid, childishly angry after my father took away my nightlight. Emboldened by the words of kids at school, who told me that only babies were afraid of the dark, I tiptoed to my window one night.

It was locked tight, heavy curtains covering the glass that I was forbidden to touch after dark, much less open.

That night, I tweaked back a corner of the curtain, and looked out.

I had never been allowed to look at real moonlight before.

It was beautiful, eerie and limning the treetops with silver. Fog shrouded the trees, swirling around the dark green branches. I was enchanted, and I let myself watch for a while, my breath fogging up the window pane.

I reached up my hand and wiped away the condensation my breath had left, and my skin made a squeaking sound against the glass. Nervously, I glanced over my shoulder to make sure my father hadn't heard. Relieved, I let out a sigh, and turned back to the window.

And then I saw.

In that moment, I knew why my parents feared the night. I realised my school friends were naive fools, and so was I. And I knew in that dreadful, shuddering breath I took that it had seen me. It had heard me.

I spent all night, hiding in my closet, shivering under a thin blanket, pretending I didn't hear the rattle of glass in the window pane, rocking back and forth as I tried to will myself to sleep.

Morning dawned, rosy and safe, and when my parents found me hiding in the closet my face told the tale of my terror.

My mother wept. My father sighed.

“We tried to protect you,” was all he would say. “We tried.”

Under the garish light of a noonday sun, my mother sat me down and explained the horror I had brought upon myself by looking.

“They come from the woods,” she said, her voice never rising above a whisper. It had never raised above a whisper in all the years I knew her. “Noise, light – it attracts them. It's why we lock up so securely and don't make noise after dark. They try to find a way in, any chink in our defences – an open window, an unbolted door, a crack in a window pane – and then they attack that weakness.”

She sipped camomile tea, and I felt a frisson of terror chase up my spine.

“You have heard them at night,” she went on. “You heard them, tapping, rapping, thumping at the glass. You hear their mangled hands dragging across the walls, in creaks and groans, and you must stay quiet. If they hear you in a room, they will converge on that spot, and attack.”

“But what are they?” I asked. “And what do they want from us?”

She shook her head. “What they are, and what they want does not matter. Does it make it easier to know that it is both a lion, and a hungry one, when it tears out your throat?”

Tears welled in my eyes, and I whispered, “But why us? Why have they targeted us?”

“We saw,” she said. “That is reason enough.”

With that, she stood, and went about the chores she could only get done in the hours of daylight. My father put up a ladder and examined my window, horrified to find deep scores in the glass from claws too huge and jagged to be any animal. He boarded up my window, hastily hammering nails through plywood into the frame as the sun sank in the sky.

From that day on, I was different.

I went from a cheerful, if a little strange, child to a withdrawn and tearful one. Teachers at school commented on the change in me, kindly asking was “everything alright at home?”.

I wanted to break down and tell them the truth, but police and social workers could not protect me from this horror.

Nights were filled with cowering under blankets, pretending I didn't hear the dragging sounds of bone against plywood, the dull sussuration of what sounded like dead leaves scattering across the roof, but we knew was the light tap of claws searching for a way in.

I had known peace thanks to college, and my apartment.

I knew peace until Diwata called, and said those fateful words, “Your father has Alzheimer's.”

I was torn.

I couldn't, in good conscience, expect some live-in carer to move into that house. They would face a grisly end, the same as my mother. I also couldn't bear (nor afford) to move my father to a full time caring facility, not without selling his home. That would mean condemning some other family to the fate we all would endure.

What has been seen cannot be unseen.

I contacted a moving company, and began boxing up my things.

When I moved back in a week later, my father was still in hospital. I cleaned up the house, and drove to the hospital to pick him up.

Two years had aged him quite a lot, and I was shocked by the change in him. He had always seemed so much himself during our infrequent phone calls, but this was like a different man.

The most devastating part was that he seemed to know what was wrong with him. He would be angry, spiteful and bitter, threatening to tear the curtains down at night and let those things in. Within the space of a few hours, he would be tearful, and tell me that something was wrong with him.

It seemed like his disease had progressed rapidly, and he was a danger to himself.

But despite everything, despite that horrid disease ravaging his brain, his mind ... he never forgot the danger outside.

I spent my nights that first week in his room, frantically whispering to him to calm down, or waiting for the sleeping medication to kick in so he could drift off, and I wouldn't have to worry about him doing something as stupid as drawing the curtains.

We settled into a routine of sorts.

During the day, I would feed him, and keep him entertained and safe; Diwata would call around a few times a week to help out with the bigger chores, and on occasion help me bathe him. I think that was the most heartbreaking part of it all, that my once stubborn and proud father was now so far gone he needed help to clean and dress himself.

At night, I would do my lockup routine, and quietly lead him to his bedroom, now located on the ground floor so he wouldn't have to risk the stairs. I'd give him his medication, wait until he slept, and then return to my room.

Most nights, I cried silently into my pillow.

I was aware I was warding off the inevitable, but I could hardly leave my father to die, could I?

Several months on, I began noticing that the sleeping pills were having less and less effect on him. He was stirring earlier, staying awake for longer before the pills could make him drift off.

I pleaded with his doctors to up the dosage, change the pills, anything at all, and they all insisted that there was no need, with one even suggesting that perhaps he was at risk of becoming dependent on them and that we should wean him off.

I nearly wept.

Of course he was dependent on them, but not in the way she thought!

So I stayed awake with dread, dark circles underscoring my bloodshot eyes in the morning, but each sleepless night was a victory. Another night my father survived.

I was so exhausted I began falling asleep while doing the dishes, or passing out in an armchair when I sat down “just for a moment or two”.

It was my own fault.

I let my guard down by keeping it up for too long.

I had worn myself out so much, that one night I slept like the dead, and didn't hear his screams until it was too late.

I heard shattering glass, a strangled yell, and then silence.

I was too terrified to leave my bed. If I ran in, tried to save him, it would take me, too.

As soon as day broke, I went to his room, and fell to my knees.

The floor beneath his window was sprinkled with glass shards and blood. His heavy curtains shifted in the morning breeze, rays of sunlight spilling between them and illuminating his unmade bed, and the single scrap of torn flannel that had snagged on a broken pane. It was tartan. He had worn tartan pyjamas to bed last night.

I called the police, tearfully telling them my father was missing.

They were suspicious, especially because the glass was on the inside, not the outside. Had he been kidnapped? Had he left the house during one of his episodes?

They ruled his cause of death “unknown”.

It will remain unknown to them, as will mine. I hope this will die with me, but I write this in hopes that people will understand.

I do not know how they will kill me. All I know is that they will, and I am tired of living in anxiety and fear every time the sun sets. Tonight, I end this. I will leave my curtains undrawn, my window open, and I will face it with my head held high, and accept my end.

All I ask is that when my friends read this, they understand not to dig.

Let me die, and let these creatures die with me. Do not go to my father's house. Do not seek out answers to questions you can never unlearn.

There are things in this world that will forever be scoffed at by science and rational minds. There are things that will be debunked and explained, and then there are the mysteries that will stump even the most brilliant of our kind.

There are also things that you should never try to understand.

Some doors better left locked and unopened, some secrets never exposed.

What has been seen cannot be unseen.