Lacey's haunted by something, watching her. Waiting for her.
But isn't everyone? Isn't this just a part of growing up?
Something always watched Lacey through her bedroom window.
The something wasn’t always an actual person, honestly, she never saw someone actually watching her. Sometimes the sensation trickled onto her shoulders with the shock of cold water. Other times the rustle of a bush or the call of a bird opened a pit of anxiety in her guy. She’d run and pull the blinds down, maybe watch for a few minutes between gaps until she knew nothing remained.
She’d check the locks. Once, twice, three times, then the screens, then she’d hide in the space underneath. Usually she saw eyes that (according to those who admonished the habit, friends and family alike) didn’t exist. In every shadow. Every crevice, every threat and unknown she’d learned to fear.
Right.
Learned…she needed to learn.
It became something of a ritual for her. Ever since
some point
some point she couldn’t remember
some point with laughter and the TV on and adults gathered by as a man sliced meat from bone and boiled it all
Ever since.
She was young.
Back in some nebulous point, she developed this instinct. She started to imagine not the wonders that laid outside, but the threats that came for her. Nothing would catch her unawares again if she prepared herself for the worst before it manifested.
She became acquainted with the quirks and flaws of her window that way. Lacey named the spiders which rested in the crevices, cleaning up bugs and dusts before they died and left their webs behind.
Maybe whatever watched her outside took them. She didn’t know. With how small spiders were, she imagined they felt just as defenseless when she watched them.
Small, defenseless, easy to kill, take, destroy.
Right.
Just like her.
The voices of the people who pass by their house make it to her window too, sometimes. Idle chatter from those on walks, though when they come too close, she brings down the blinds again and hides underneath. Sometimes she’d put her window to the test, too, checking and re-checking how easily the lock came undone if you wiggled the frame right, how someone could pop the protective frame out and bang, bang, bang! Until the glass cracks and they could do whatever they wanted inside.
Lacey only felt this fear around this window, honestly. No one would come this way unless they wanted her, right?
They found a young girl dead inside an oil drum, only bones by the time authorities got to her.
Or, the TV said something like that. Visiting family loved to watch those kinds of shows, even when Lacey was just a little girl and had no choice in the matter as to what garbage the adults threw on.
They loved the violent and eerie shows the most, ones that bombarded her with new fears and new ways for people to bleed out and die, all while a distant aunt or uncle wondered if her crying was just how she was, something she needed to grow out of or have forced out of her.
Or.
Or, something.
She’d need to get used to it. One day, somehow, by someone’s hand or another.
As long as they could all ignore it, no one minded seeing her scarred.
“It feels like it’s been forever, right?”
Lacey twirled and cuffed herself around the wire off the landline as she kept the phone pressed close to her ear, eyes trained on something else as Maisie’s voice kept her cemented in the moment.
Somewhat. Maisie tried, as she always did, to keep everything together.
“I know!” Maisie laughed. “I almost missed out on telling you what your lucky item is for the week! It’s sooo important you get all the good luck you can before it changes next week and you need to get a diamond ring, stat!”
Lacey pouted. “I don’t get that much in allowance, anyways. Not enough to keep up with everything those articles tell you to buy.”
“It’s not that much! They give the prices and everything, and it never goes above thirty dollars.”
So it was an ad, Lacey thought, but she knew better than to take something away from her friend, so she kept her mouth shut. “Well, I’ll see. What’s mine for this week?”
“Uhhh, it says here—wearing a cleaned bone around your neck will bring all the luck you’ll need for the rest of your life.”
The phone cracked and shattered as it hit the ground. Behind Lacey, outside her room, the crunch of branches followed her, walked around to her window, until a nondescript hand attached to no soul nor body pressed against it. As if it turned glass to water, it phased through the surface and grabbed Lacey’s arm.
At its touch, her skin burned.
Day snapped to night as Lacey jolted out of bed and rushed for the phone in the kitchen, drawing the curtain over the window above the sink as she dialed a familiar number.
“Maisie?”
“Lacey…? It’s three AM, what’s wrong?”
Too kind for her own good. Maisie became all too familiar with these late night calls in her years of knowing Lacey. Despite the exhaustion in Maisie’s voice, she still expressed concern—and Lacey knew, too, that Maisie wasn’t so different from her.
They both provided each other this comfort, needing one another, clinging to someone who’d understand.
“Just—a stupid dream.
“…Or, um, more like a nightmare. It’s hard to avoid them sometimes.”
“I know what you mean. I had one of those sleep paralysis episodes a couple nights ago, and it messed with me too. The brain can come up with some really vile stuff, huh?”
Maisie tried to laugh. Dry, lifeless, it shriveled up and left an awful stench of awkwardness between them.
“Hey, but,” Maisie said, a cough thrown in as if to blow away the smell of death, “I forgot to tell you. I got this week’s Horror’s Horoscope in. You wanna know your lucky item? It might help get rid of your nightmares.”
Lacey swallowed. “Um…sure, yeah. What is it?”
“A pearl. Anything pearl-like’ll do, though.”
A pearl—cleaned and perfected. Almost like a bone. Lacey’s stomach lurched as she forced a smile Maisie couldn’t even see.
“…I think I have a pearl necklace somewhere around my room.”
“Oh, cool! I hope it helps.” …
The silence left Lacey with the budding hope Maisie had put aside the reason Lacy called entirely. She waited—waited so long, until a small sigh brushed through the speakers.
“Okay. I’m gonna…go back to bed now. Goodnight.” Before Lacey managed to get a last word in, the line went dead. She put the phone back, glanced at it a few times as if it somehow had the power to come back to life and…eat her, or something as ridiculous as a monster taking her through her bedroom window, and trudged back to her room.
Lacy slid into bed and shut her eyes. She dragged the covers over her head, curled into a ball, anything to make herself smaller, quieter, harder-to-notice, less of a target to anything that might ever see her.
Beyond her stupid fears. Beyond the cruel reality around her. Being seen meant being hurt—her window was just the epitome of that fear. It called attention towards a sliver of someone else’s world. It exposed you, fairly for others, but so unfairly for the object of attention.
Some nebulous thing on the other side.
Maybe something you wanted to destroy.
Lacey woke up with a jolt an hour later, a shadowy figure on the other side, casting darkness over the head of her bed.
When the moment came, she thought she might scream. Fight it, whatever it was that came to take her like it always took anyone who seemed so easy to kill.
But she accepted it fine enough.
She accepted what came next—when fighting it came with such a heavy burden, embracing suffering, a helpless tired choice. Do people fight against earthquakes, or do they cover their heads and hope for the best.
Do people fight death, when their beaten bodies, holding only a scrap of strength, sink into the soft covers with such resignation?
“Lacey…”
It made no sense.
So she made a choice.
Not even a choice, really. That’d imply more will than she felt she could—
“Um, Lacey!”
She sat up, and saw the figure as it was. The sight of Maisie at the window, pointing towards the lock, reminded Lacey that despite her deepest dreads, some monsters only existed in nightmares. She rushed to undo the lock, pull the window back and (carefully, as her parents still slept), take off the screen so Maisie could slip in before she shut it again.
Scooting over to make room for her, Lacey regarded her friend with wide eyes. It’d been a while since they saw each other face-to-face—far too long, really.
Not.
Since.
Lacey shook her head.
Maisie shared her exhaustion, she realized—what a terrible friend she’d been to not notice until now. The deepened, weighed bags under her eyes much like her own. The weight of exhaustion, with the force of Lacey’s perpetual despair.
The loneliness. The waiting. For some monster on the other side to look upon her helpless form and get it over with already.
A monster.
Something that made sense to die to.
But reality offered no easy mercies, only a perpetual grief which joined together and pushed Lacey to inch closer, wordlessly, and drag Maisie into a hug. The other girl melted into it—a badly needed reminder of something soft.
They stayed like that for a while, in silence, as the cloudy night cleared ever-so-slightly and revealed a sliver of moonlight to scare away any shadows.
“Sorry…” Maisie muttered, after a long, long moment. “I shouldn’t just drop by whenever. I bet I scared you, huh?”
“It’s fine,” Lacey said, and it really was fine—a good kind of surprise. Maisie smiled and pulled back, resting her hands in her lap.
“How’ve you been—like, really been? I know, everything’s been different. Since…stuff happened. And neither of us’ve been the same.”
Tell me about it, Lacey thought. “I don’t know. I’m sorry for not hanging out as much anymore.”
It’s hard to cling to normality, when shadows watched from a place you could never reach. “It’s not the same. It’s all…a big nightmare. And I want it to stop watching and just—get this over with.”
“…” Maisie’s poor attempt at a friendly smile fell into something more desolate, yet far more genuine than any pre-prepared joy. “Me too.”
Whatever this was. Whatever it was. Whatever happened to monsters which stayed forever and pain that seared to your skin and burned, burned, burned—
Lacey reached over, took Maisie’s hands.
“But…it’ll always be there. From a place we can’t see.” Maisie teared up at Lacey’s words, the implacable grief always out of reach.
“It’s—like that, yeah,” Maisie said, before she looked out the window, at the slivers of stars amidst the parted clouds. Lacey envied her knowledge of the stars, the way with only a glance she puzzled out the patterns and stories those little lights held.
Even a tiny beam of hope rested in the smallest sparkles. Light, life—a reminder of something there.
In shadows, nothing and everything existed. Nothing but nightmares, in a mind willing to find anything but the best.
“There’s something I like to do, sometimes,” she continued. “Since we have the space on the roof for it, I managed to get a chair up there in case I ever want to do some stargazing.
“Maybe, tomorrow night…
“You’d like to come stay over? It’s better when it’s earlier in the night—you’ll see.”
See something good, maybe.
Lacey nodded—for that unreachable sparkle mixed in the implacable, observant grief. The kind that never left her alone, never let her be safe, but let her forget, even just for a little bit.
“Yeah. Okay, yeah. Tomorrow—I’m down.”