The Face at the Window

This happened in the fall of '84. October, maybe early November. I was working night shift at the GE plant back then, which meant I was home during the day and gone from around ten at night until six in the morning. My wife worked days, so we barely saw each other that whole year. We'd just bought this house in Essex Junction, right outside Burlington. Two-story colonial, nothing fancy but it was ours. The bedroom was on the second floor, faced the backyard. There was a big maple tree maybe fifteen feet from the house, close enough that in summer the branches would scrape the roof when the wind picked up. I remember the day it happened because I'd burned my hand pretty bad on a piece of hot metal at work the night before. Had this nasty blister on my palm. Couldn't sleep worth a damn because of it. So I was up around three in the afternoon, wide awake, just lying there in bed staring at the ceiling. Completely alone in the house. Nobody else was home.

That's when I heard it. This sound. Like someone dragging their fingers down glass. Slow. Deliberate. Coming from the window right next to the bed. I turned my head and there it was. A face. Pressed right up against the glass. Second-story window, twenty feet off the ground, and there's a face looking in at me. But it wasn't right. The eyes, they were too close together. Like one eye almost, if that makes sense. And the mouth was way too low on the face, down near where the chin should be. The skin looked waxy. Gray. Like clay that hadn't been fired yet. It just stared at me. Didn't blink. Didn't move. Just pressed up against that glass, breathing. I could see the condensation forming around where its mouth was. Little clouds of fog spreading across the window. I couldn't move. I mean, I wanted to. I wanted to get up, wanted to yell, wanted to do something. But I just lay there frozen, watching this thing watch me. My heart was going so fast I thought I was going to pass out.

Then it smiled. That's what broke the spell. The mouth stretched sideways, way too wide, and I saw teeth. Too many teeth. All the same size, like little white tiles. I scrambled out of bed, nearly fell, and by the time I got to the window it was gone. Just gone. But there was something on the glass. This greasy residue. Shaped exactly like a face. Like someone had pressed their whole face against the window and left an oily print. I could see the outline of the eyes, the nose, that mouth. home alone during the day sounds lonely - Patrick' My wife came upstairs, wanted to know what all the noise was about. We both stood there looking at that print on the glass. It stayed there for days. I tried to clean it off with Windex, with ammonia, with everything. That grease just wouldn't come off. Eventually I had to scrape it off with a razor blade.