Why Won’t You Look at Me?

I was so used to it lingering in the dark, watching my every move, listening to my breath at night, and when at least expected it, it would approach carefully, not because it was afraid to be seen. I had the chance to do so many times before. Maybe that's what it wanted, But I'll tell you when I finally saw it, I wish that every single fiber in my body belonged to anyone but me. And isn't that fear the reason why we started to believe in God in the first place, pretending that someone else is in control. But I know it's there watching me, hearing. Let me tell you this. It knows me, and now it knows you too. Who's to say that nothing lingers around your home, watching you while you're clean, or listening to your breathing next to your bed. Who's to say nothing's listening with you right now? My name is Edwin, and here's a scary story. It all started one evening while talking with a friend on FaceTime. She was by herself, like I was just across town, her husband again away for work, and me alone in the house for another week. As always, she would ask about my sons and how they were doing, and as always I told her where they were and how proud I felt of them. One of these days, I said, my oldest will be coming around one of these days. I could see her folding her clothes in her bedroom as we spoke. The new way of keeping each other company, a thing we learned over the pandemic. I went down to the kitchen, phone in hand, in flicked on the lights. With the other hand, I opened the fridge and took out everything I needed for my turkey sandwich. I just wanted something quick this time. Dirting up two pads for just myself seemed like too much these days. Mayonnaise, mustard, and slices of turkey from yesterday. I was warming up the bread in between the long stretches of silence with her on the phone. But I needed both hands to spread the mayo on the bread, so I put the phone down, leaning against a large tin of coffee that I had on the little table in the kitchen, and it looked away for what must have been five seconds. But when I looked back at the screen, all I saw was the screen with the list of contacts. She probably got disconnected, I thought to myself, Hurrying with the bread and waiting for her to call back, but she didn't call. I ate my sandwich in peace, even turned on the television for a little bit. And once I was done and the silence was beginning to spread around the house, I decided to call her back. Tracy, I said, you hung up on me, you jerk. She laughed. How's your son, she asked, out of nowhere. My son, he's all right. I responded, a little wearded out by the question, and after a little gap of silence, she continued, that's why I hung up, because your son got home. A soft chill ran down my back. My son wasn't home. Nobody was. I had been alone for several days now, especially those evenings. Well mine is the two dogs. I asked if she was joking, and she nearly spilled her coffee when she saw how serious I was. My son wasn't at home. I saw him, she said, he was walking up behind you. I thought he was going to surprise you. I stood there in silence. My son hadn't gotten home. I was the only one in the kitchen. Quit scaring me. I remember saying, there's no one home. I saw him. She insisted, he was all he was, her son, I know him, he was standing right behind you. I begged her at this point not to hang up on me again. Not at that moment. I was, after all alone in the house, or at least I thought it was, and I never heard or saw anyone else come in. All of the doors were locked, and the dogs had embarked. All I could think of, at least at that moment, was just how someone approaches when they're trying to surprise you, and how eerie it can look if you don't have context watching someone approach you silently. It's something I still can't shake off. But several things that happened to me already at this house, and this confirmed to me that I wasn't safe. I should have listened to those signs, to those shadows that appeared out of the corners of my eyes, the footsteps in the middle of the night, but I didn't. It was a cold afternoon and it had just gone work, tired, thinking maybe I was getting sick. After one of my customers showed up sneezing all over the desk. He apologized after the damage was done, but still anyway, I came in through the main door, the one by the living room, and I sat on the couch before the silence started creeping in. It was like a deafening kind of silence that I can only explain as when the refrigerator turns off, the thing that made you realize that there was a humming filling up the house that you never noticed until it was gone. It was like that, like that rare silence between the crashing waves by the pier, or when you close a window from your bedroom. Stillness, not peaceful, uncomfortable. I immediately opened my eyes, not noticing that they were closed before, and I watched the shadow moved into the column of the living room, a pillar that had been there ever since we moved in. I would have said that it hit behind, but no, it went into the column and vanished completely. Maybe I was tired again and imagining things. Sure, that's a possibility, just like how it's a possibility that it was real. So I got up and stepped outside for a second, but that tiredness was already there. I knew that once I got to my room, my eyes would shut. I would wake up in a few hours and follow my simple nightly routine. It turned out to be anything but that. I don't know how I got to bed, but that sleep was deep. I shut off my phone and everything, just to be sure that I wouldn't be woken up. I left it by the front door. We had no nearby neighbors, were all separated by a semi large field around here, and the only sounds that would come from the outside would be the people honking along the dirt roads for no reason, to dogs maybe, or to say others to come open the gates. But there was a different sound this time, a vaguely familiar sound that I had learned to ignore some night, the soft creak of a bending floorboard next to me. I turned away like I always did, but it must have been just how tired I was that I miscalculated, and I rolled my shoulder off the bed and the rest of my body landed straight on the floor. I tried to get up immediately, so I put my hands on the floorboards next to my bed when I felt it, a cold, bony foot and a leg against my arm. My eyes were open. Had forgotten that even at night, in the pitch darkness, I would open them and see nothing. But this time the sun was still out, and I sighed for the first time. I looked up as I leaned against the edge of the bed, my legs failing to hold me up as I called laps to the floor. My arms were reaching to the bottom corners of this bed, and I begged them to pull me away from this thing. I crawled as far as I could before my eyes looked up at this figure. It was wearing a sleeping gown ripped from the top, an old creature, thousands of wrinkles, some of them cracked at the folds, with dark blood forming lines and strange patterns, patterns that looked like symbols all around its legs and arms, but its face, dark hair missing in patches. It would reach its nose and just below the ear. It was greasy, falling straight down as if wet. It covered part of its eyes, large and dark, looking steadily in my direction, it just stared. The deafening silence was around me. Once more, I could see its jaw dropping little by little. The gums and the inside of its mouth were a dead purple. The few teeth that remained were stained yellow, and its breath, that of sulfur and sewage that escaped its lungs reached me. Nothing worked, not my arms or voice. All I could feel where the tears streaming down to my chest. As I sat there frozen, it slowly rotated its body and started approaching me, leaning its face closer to mine, and I wasn't sure if I was breathing anymore. I could smell nothing and feel nothing, not even the heartbeat that had been thumping at the side of my neck and blocking up my ears just a few seconds ago. It opened its mouth very slowly and stared into my eyes. Mom, It said, Mom, can you open the door? It was my son, or at least his voice. I finally managed to scream that it realized that I could se see it. I screamed even louder once I caught my breath loud enough that I felt my throat burned from deep inside my chest. It smiled and backed away, crossing straight through the small gap between the frame and the door, and then it disappeared into the hallway. I sat there, vomit, finally working its way up my throat into the floor if the rest of my body could only hold me up. As I waited for the thing to return, I listened for its dragging footsteps, but there was nothing. For that rest of the afternoon, I sat there wondering if anyone would believe the explanations of what I had just seen until the sky turned orange outside. It was going to get dark soon, so I dragged myself toward the doorframe. I pulled myself up and managed to get myself out of the living room from the side table by the door. I grabbed the phone and keys, stumbled into the car and locked the door. Or out from the car, I watched the windows for movement, but there was nothing. I stayed there deep into the night, so I finally managed the courage to call my friend and wake her up. I didn't tell her anything about what happened that night. I told her enough to not feel like I was losing my mind, that I had taken a nap and had a nightmare, but that I felt different. I put my lie together on the spot. I think someone got into the house, or something got into the house. I don't know. You saw something the other day, too, Remember your son? Yeah it was not my son, I said, regretting it immediately. I'd just woken her up and was asking for her help, and now I was treating her like this. She stayed quiet. Okay, maybe not your son, but I saw somebody. Then he stopped before he got to you. I felt that sensation vomit crawling up my body again. He was standing there behind you, waiting for you to turn around. I didn't go back inside the house that night. It was like at work, where you let the work drip into another day or onto someone else, thinking that if I simply stared at the windows, I would see something and I would have proof that I wasn't going crazy. But nothing happened. It was three in the morning by now, and I was finally succumbing to the exhaustion. It was like those nights at the airport, shallow, restless sleep where your body is shutting down, but your mind is un alert, watching for sudden movements or for the tugging at your luggage. Everything from the flapping of the wings of the moths to the frogs in the distance. Any change in the rhythm would wake me up. The wind across the fields, the headlights of a car through the hills, even the soft knock from inside the house. I didn't go to work the next morning, didn't even bother to call in. Nothing was better then, and I don't think it was going to improve. I hadn't been to the bathroom and didn't want to. And now even the sunlight didn't seem to erase what happened the previous night. The thing was no longer afraid of it. It was done hiding. The dogs had stayed outside in their little dog houses, and they came wagging their tails up to the car door. I opened it and they lowered their heads. They trusted me, and so I walked over the door slowly, like the house belonged to someone else. The dog stopped walking right at the doorframe and whined as they took two steps back still. I stepped in and walked through the house, every room, closets, cabinets. I checked the windows and the locks. Nothing, no sign that anything or anyone had been there. And so I got to my bedroom. A puddle of vomit on the floor next to the bed, dragged on by the socks that was still wearing. I stepped in and went to check the windows. The curtains were shot, the same ones I had seen that night, the ones that were wide open just a few hours ago. The sheets were pulled down, like someone had gotten up in a hurry or fallen down. I didn't sleep in that room again. I moved to the living room. For the next few nights, slept with the lights on, the television running. I apologized that work made up an emergency that they believed. And it was like that for a few days, until the silence started finding its way back. The television and sounds from the outside were becoming nothing again, and that same familiar pattern when your mind ignores everything and hyper focuses on one thing, That one footstep, the creek on the floorboards, like something's moving around you watching It was the fourth day after the incident when it approached again, or at least try to. I just dozed off on the couch when I heard it. Footsteps, slow and careful crossing the hallway. There was nothing moving or breathing, but I felt it stop at the entrance of the living room. And then my son's voice, the oldest one. Mom It sounded scared, like when he was little and I would be with him until he fell asleep. It blended with when he wanted to know if I was home without waking me up. I try to answer, but I wanted to scream or turn my head. I wanted to open my eyes completely to make sure. But something else, something deep inside of me kept me still because now I knew that I had seen it already, and I felt like I was being tested. I was still facing the back of the couch for seconds that felt like hours before I heard it again, and it was closer. Mom, why aren't you answering me? The voice cracked a little bit, like a recording, a perfect replica of a voice I was familiar with. My hand twitched just a little, and then the footsteps continued, one step, then another, slow, careful, closing the distance between the back of my head and it. That's when I smelled that same air rot was right behind me. It was leaning closer. The air was moving near my ear. I could feel it, and it whispered quietly, almost curiously. Mom, why won't you look at me? I froze. Even though I had wanted to move, I couldn't. I don't know for how long I was there in that couch, but the sun had long been set, and that's when I left. I didn't pack anything. Instead, I borrowed a charger once I got to my friend's house. I also stayed in a motel and in my car for one of those nights, the ones when I was sure I was ready to go back to my house, but wasn't. And just last night I got a call for my son. I hadn't mentioned any of this to him, and it had been two days since we had last spoken. Had gotten a project across the state and would visit two times a month. I answered right away, Mom, it was him. It had to be. The voyays had the same tone, but still I couldn't be sure. It felt delayed. I don't know. Yeah, it's me, I said, are you okay? There was a silence on the other line, and then I'm home, the boy said. I felt another cold chill take over my body. What do you mean, I asked, I got here earlier. He said, you weren't here. More silence. I waited, he said, so. It was starting to form on my phone case and on screen. Where are you right now? I asked. There was silence again, as if I was thinking of what to say. I'm still here, The voice said, I don't know if that was him, but he hasn't answered his phone when I call him back. So still I sit here in the car at the end of the road, the house still visible from between the trees. In this place that's never silent. This episode of Scary Story podcast was written and produced by me Edwin ko Aruyez with the support of the Scary FM team and our supporters at scary Plus. Thanks again for your ideas for stories. I actually got an email about Japanese legends and basing a story off of one of them, which sounds like it could be a really really spooky thing that could get scary really fast. So let's see what I can come up with here. If you're subscribed, I'll be back next week with another story. So don't forget to share this story with someone who would be into it you or comment somewhere would also be super cool if you're able to do that. Anyway, Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, See you soon. M