Only A Story

The mountains in the springtime are less cold, but not much less wet. Snow drifts melt into sludge on the roadside, and the rain just doesn’t stop. I never quite shake the feeling of damp socks until June, but at least icy stairs don’t try to kill me every time I walk to my car. Above all, the transformation of scenery into the cool blues and greens of the rainy season takes my breath away every year.

Usually my husband accompanies on my trips to the cabin, but as an accountant in peak tax season, he is currently too busy to take a mid-week break. I’m looking forward to being alone, if I’m being honest with myself. I love my husband dearly, don’t get me wrong, but I haven’t had a good idea for my next novel in months, and it’s killing me inside each second I’m not sitting at my laptop typing something up. I’m hoping that isolation in the cabin will spark some ideas for me.

I park in the designated spot outside my cabin and notice the spots adjacent to mine are vacant. I guess my neighbors are gone too, and I will truly be alone up here with only my thoughts to keep me company. Taking the groceries I bought at the local market from the back seat, I shuffle awkwardly down the steep steps to my cabin door.

Hours later, after the food has been unpacked and I’ve made myself dinner, I seat myself at the dining room table with my laptop open to an empty document. My hands hover over the keyboard, hesitating on where to begin. I type out my train of thought, erase everything I’ve written, then start again. Once that page is full of nonsensical half-baked ideas, I open a new document and stare at it. At some point, I end up on my phone, and an hour has passed with no progress on novel ideas.

I am so frustrated I want to pull my hair out. I know I have just gotten to the cabin and ideas take time, but I have had months of writer’s block and I need it to end.

I swivel my body to face the window behind me and look out into the night to calm myself down. The sun set hours ago, and the only illumination in the yard comes from my cabin windows and the street lamp by the parking lot. As I’m watching, not really focusing on anything in particular, I notice a shadow between the trees. The longer I watch, the more I convince myself it looks humanoid. The hair on the back of my neck prickles, and I bolt upright.

Car lights twinkle through the trees, and the humanoid shadow stretches, distorts, and eventually fades away. I bend over in relief, chiding myself for my overactive imagination. It was just a trick of the light, and there is nothing to be afraid of. I laugh, low and breathy. Sure, there’s a man standing in my back yard, watching me. What is this, a horror movie?

But if he were there…what a great story that would make.

I gasp, darting to my laptop. Ideas flash in my brain, and I struggle to type them down before I’ve thought of the next one. In less than ten minutes, I have three pages of ideas. In another ten I have two pages of outline for the story idea I liked the best, and I want to sob in relief. An itch to write runs through my body, and I don’t want to stop the momentum I have, so I continue into the meat of the story.

A teenage girl sits at home watching TV while her parents are out on a date, trusting their daughter to stay home alone. She revels in the independence she has for the night, watching hours of movies on the large flat screen in the living room her dad usually takes over to watch sports and local news. It isn’t until the late hours of the night the she notices something through her living room window. A face. Watching her.

I shiver in my seat as I type, remembering the mistaken shadow I saw earlier.  I glance out the window behind me, just to double check that the shadow is gone. It isn’t. I squint, thinking it must be another car, but no lights peak between the trees. The cabin is chilly in the rainy weather, but I begin to sweat. I rub my hand across my face, and the shadow has vanished into the night once again.

Christ. My mind is playing tricks on me, inventing a shadow where I expected to see one. I am unsettled to say the least, but it’s a great atmosphere to write a scary story. I pull away from the window and back to my laptop.

The girl in the story screams when she sees the face, and darts behind the couch. When she emerges a minute later, the face is gone, and she is left alone in the house once more. Was the face she saw real, or just a reflection of the TV screen on the window? She debates opening the front door and checking outside, but the thought of encountering someone out there is too much to bear. The girl shakes her head, moving away from the door. She only saw the thing in the window for a brief second, and it was probably just nerves that convinced her the shape was a face.

The girl makes a sweep of the house and all its windows but doesn’t see anything amiss. Whoever or whatever it was is gone, if it ever existed in the first place. The girl sits back onto the couch to watch TV, taking occasionally glances out the living room window as a precaution. Hours pass, and the girl’s parents are due home soon. Nothing else has appeared in the windows, and the girl blames it all on stress from being home alone at night. She walks into kitchen to get a glass of water before bed, when the face appears in the kitchen window with a palm pressed to the glass. The face is smiling.

I feel a tickle up my spine as I write. The feeling has been building for the last several minutes, but I had willed myself to ignore the sensation and keep writing. Now though, I can’t help myself. I look out the window behind me.

The shadow stands closer now, halfway to the cabin. I hold my gaze with it, wondering if it will dematerialize like before. I cannot see a face, but I feel as though eyes are watching me from out in the dark. The shadow does not move or fade away.

Trembling, I run to the living room and fling open the sliding glass doors to the patio. I lean against the railing, searching for the shadow in the trees. It’s so dark outside that I can’t tell what’s a distant tree and what’s a shadow. In fact, I’m not sure how I was able to see the shadow figure before, considering how everything out here blends together in the blackness.

Just to be safe, I duck back into the cabin and search for the flashlight kept in the supply closet. It’s beam extends fifty feet into the yard, casting all sorts of shadows, but nothing particularly stationary. No one is out there, only trees. I sag once more against the porch railing, breathing heavily. I’m ecstatic to have a new story idea to work on, but this anxiety is killing me. I will have to limit my writing to daylight hours only if this keeps happening.

I’m shivering when I return to my seat in front of the laptop. Part of me wants to quit now and curl up in bed, hidden under the covers, but another part of me feels an overwhelming urge to finish the story. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so scared in my life, and I want to convert everything I am feeling into the best horror story I can manage. My hands hover over the keyboard, and I type.

The girl screams once more at the face in the window and stumbles back. This is undeniable proof that what she saw earlier was not just a figment of her imagination. No, someone was watching her. Someone had been watching her the whole time.

Trembling from head to toe, the girl rushes from the kitchen and up the stairs to her bedroom. She knows all the doors downstairs are locked, so the person outside would have to forcefully break in to reach her. If she can just hide upstairs until the police come, she should be safe. Her fingers shake as she dials 911 on her cell phone, listening to the operator on the other line.

I sit back in my seat and tap a finger to my chin. I can’t have the girl get away this easily or that would spoil the mood of the story. I can’t have the figure break in downstairs either, because that would be too predictable. What would be the scariest thing to happen if I were in this girl’s situation? What would I dread hearing right at this moment, in my isolated little cabin?

I nod to myself, finding the perfect ending for the story.

The girl sits huddled on her bed with the door locked. She doesn’t hear anyone downstairs, and the operator is helping her through her explanation of the night, promising a car will be by her house as soon as possible. Tearfully, the girl thanks the operator and hangs up. Everything is so quiet in the house that the girl is fears the stranger outside will hear her pounding heart. She desperately hopes they have left by now, fearing the inevitable arrival of the police.

Minutes tick by. The girl’s adrenaline wanes, leaving her energy spent. Wrapped in her comforter on her bed, the girl’s eyes sag closed with the promise of sleep.

In a dark, dark night, at her quiet, empty house, three knocks rap quickly on her bedroom window.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

My own blood freezes. As I type the final sentence onto my laptop, the sound of knocking on glass echoes in my tiny dining room. Back rigid, and trembling from head to toe, I turn to look at the window. A shadow looks back.