Window Pain
“Goodnight, Scara,” I said to the twisted face outside my window as I made my way up to bed. “I'll see you in the morning, I'm sure.”
A part of me still sang out that I should try to do something about the disembodied head of the girl I saw beyond my window pane, but the more rational aspect of my mind knew that wasn't possible. She'd hadn't been there when I moved in, and there was no event I could tie to her appearance. One night, coming home from an evening at the bar, I saw her face, floating just beyond the window glass, staring at me from the night. I panicked, but was drunk enough that when I stumbled into my room I collapsed on my bed, fell asleep, and promptly forgot the whole thing.
The next day she was gone, and I didn't see her again until a week later, again at night but this time when I was sober. I was coming down the stairs, and her head phased into existence, long brown hair and bright blue eyes a sharp contrast to her pale skin. She wasn't deformed or ugly, and where her neck should have been there was no gore or blood, just a convalescing of mist that moved as she did. She looked just a bit like a girl I knew – Sarah – so I'd taken to calling her Scara, a blend of what she looked like and what she did.
Of course, I couldn't bear to look at her for months. The first dozen times or so I just ignored her, pretend that I didn't see her floating along the edge of the glass or bumping forward into the pane. She didn't make a sound, and though her eyes watched me, I had no interest in meeting them.
After two months, I decided I needed a solution. Scara had begun showing up during the day, but always backed by a night-darkened background. The other windows in the house might be streaming bright sunlight, but hers was always surrounded by the deepest black. I ran outside one day on a bright noon to see if there was anything odd outside my house, but the window was clear and clean. I didn't touch it – I couldn't bring myself to put my hands on its smooth surface, and I'd gone back inside, frustrated.
Next was the blind I installed. For three days I had relief, and kept the blind drawn at all times. So long as I couldn't see her, my anxiety went down, and I felt like I could deal with whatever might lay beyond the glass – at least it was outside.
On the fourth day I came home from work and found that the blind had not only fallen to the ground, but that the brackets I had mounted were ripped out of the wall. I've never been a particularly good handyman, but I had made quite sure that the brackets were well-anchored.
I'd collected the parts of my blind without so much as a glance in Scara's direction. There was no point in re-installing it, but that didn't mean I was out of options.
Curtains came next, and I anchored them to a point far away from the window and then at regular intervals leading up to it. The result was a strange monstrosity of metal, but it got the job done, and the curtains did not fall down.
Instead, they burned up.
I'd been in the study, going over a text for my next seminar when I smelled the fabric burning. I was down the stairs with a fire extinguisher before the blaze got out of hand, and I took everything I had not to throw the metal canister through the window. My rage gave me enough courage to reach out and touch the glass, just at Scara's forehead, but it was cool under my fingertips. The girl's dead eyes stared up at me, and her teeth cracked open in a wide smile.
I ran.
I'd spent the last two weeks fighting with myself, straddling the line between complete ignorance and destroying the window altogether. I wasn't sure if that would usher in some sort of awful demonic force, but I was almost at the breaking point.
I finally decided that I could live with it if I just went back to ignoring it. Scara had never done anything to me – she just seemed to like to watch me move around. Ignorance was the best course.
Pulling the sheet up around myself in bed, I tried to find comfort in that thought, but little came. Just on the edge of sleep, a cutting screech tore me awake, and a burst into the hallway, flicking on every light I could find. Scara stared up at me, eyes narrowed, and opened her mouth. This time, the pictures on my wall rattled with her force.
“What do you want?” I screamed, but to no effect. Her scream was far more powerful, droning on and on as the moments slipped by.
I don't remember going back into my room to get the heavy flashlight I kept by the bed, but finding it in my hand I knew just what to do with it. A hard throw sent it down the stairs, twirling end over end to meet the glass at Scara's forehead. It ripped through the surface, sending shattered shapes down and onto the landing. Outside, the street-lit night wavered into view, rain-slick streets reflecting orange light into the air.
“Thank you, Thomas,” came a voice from behind me, but I refused to turn. The tone was kind enough, but there was an absence there, a lack of human quality that I couldn't explain but knew for a certainty.
“Please,” I said, but that was as far as I got before I fell to the floor, clutching at my stomach. It felt as though a hand was crushing me, pinning me to the ground by my midsection, and trying to force a spectral object too big by half into my small frame.
I lost consciousness, but when I came to, the window was whole once again and Scara was gone.
Bed called to me, and I lay there, unsure if what I had experienced had been real or the final result of my own mind's efforts to cope. My eyes drifted slowly closed, and sleep began to creep in.
“Hello, Thomas,” a voice said, and a familiar face appeared, locked in place behind my eyelids.
Scara had found a new home.
- D
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