The Uninvited Guest

My house has 3, technically 4, floors. Two of my friends, Jack and Harriet, live next door. From my room on the third floor of my house, I can see some of Harriet's room. I can't see much of it, just along one wall to the door to her room. Nonetheless, I've always made a point to not purposefully look down into her room. I don't look out my window much, but every night I pull the blinds up, so the sun can wake me up in the morning. When I do this, I obviously look outside. What I've noticed for years is that Jack and Harriet's parents don't ever turn the basement light off. It is always on. But recently, I've noticed something else. The figure of a man, walking around in Harriet's room. Harriet isn't around very often. She goes to a dormitory high school. I've just dismissed the figure as being her father. He is often overbearing, and doesn't much respect Harriet's privacy.

I started seeing the figure about six months ago and I made a note for myself to tell Harriet about it the next time I saw her. Seeing as she is nearly always away at her school, I didn't see her until a couple days ago. I was sitting in my backyard, reading, when I heard one of their vehicles pull into their driveway. Out of instinct I got up and walked over to the fence to peer over and see who it was.

(When they moved in when I was perhaps around 4 or 5, Harriet, who is a year younger than me, used to stand at the antique metal fence separating our yards and talk to me and my brother. Her father then built a thick and entirely contiguous wooden fence that was twice the height of the metal one. He presumably did this because their family is conservative and Lutheran one, and my family is liberal and atheist one. He has always had a disdain for us, but thankfully the disdain didn't rub off on Jack and Harriet.)

I pulled myself up onto the fence and saw Harriet exiting her mother's van. I waited until her mother had gone inside to call out to her. She looked over, greeting me. I jumped down into her yard. We sat on a swinging chair in her patio and caught up. After a while, I asked her about the basement light perpetually being on. She made a confused face and responded that she had no idea that the basement light was always on. Her mother had left, having to unexpectedly go to the school at which she worked, so we couldn't ask her about it. Thus, we decided to go down to the basement and look around.

We descended the steep and narrow steps down into the basement and looked around. The fluorescent lights were indeed on. We looked around at the various cabinets and closets out of curiosity, neither of us having been down there very often. Once our curiosity was satisfied, Harriet turned the lights off and we ascended the steps. Seeing that it was around 7:30 and the sky was getting dark, I was reminded of the other question that I had planned to ask. As we sat down at the kitchen table, I did just that.

She was, unsurprisingly, quite cross. She posited that it might be Jack as well. After a moment of thoughtful silence, her face acquired a mischievous expression and she said that she had an idea about how to catch Jack or her dad. I gestured for her to elaborate. Her plan was to go to her bed and pretend to be asleep. I would be in the large closet that had been her and Jack's playroom when they were younger and was now used by their little brother and sister. I would have the door open at a crack and would look out into her room. Each of us would have a walkie talkie. If and when I saw someone enter her room, I would whisper into the radio and she would spring out of the bed to catch whomever it was in the act.

By the time we had acquired the walkie talkies, it was 8:10. She said that her father would be arriving soon with Jack, so I went into my position. I sat in the playroom with the radio in my pocket, waiting. After a couple minutes, Harriet poked her head in. She told me that her father had texted her that he was going to arrive home in around 10 minutes. She then said that she was going to wait outside the backdoor to greet them when they arrived and to make a show of being exhausted. She went to do so, and I crept over to the playroom door to wait for her return. After several minutes had passed, I heard footsteps in her room.

I opened the door and was greeted with something slamming into my head, which knocked me unconscious. When I awoke, I found myself lying on a cold cement floor with my hands tied behind my back, and my legs tied at the ankles. I lifted my head up and shuddered. A filthy man, clothed in what would barely qualify as rags, with unkempt black hair, was sitting in front of me, crossed legged. He smiled at me and waved. He then swiftly grabbed a towel and stuffed it into my mouth. After doing so, he waved again. He stood up and slid open a door that looked like it was part of the wall. I realised that I was in a crawlspace in the basement walls. After he closed the door, my gaze went to the wall that he had been sitting against.

It was plastered with many photographs, of every member of Harriet's family, though most of the photographs were of Harriet herself. Most were photos that he had evidently stolen, but others were photos that he must have taken himself. In turn, most of the ones that he had taken himself were of Harriet sleeping, but just to increase the horror that I felt, there were also some taken of me at my window. I then remembered the walkie talkie. After a minute of struggling, I managed to take it out of my pocket and hold down the button. I then began to tap it against the ground and the wall, attempting to do Morse code.

Me, Jack and Harriet had tried to learn it once, though Jack had given up, and me and Harriet had only just barely stuck with it. I tapped out what I thought was SOS and hoped that Harriet would hear it and recognise it. Relief flooded through me as she whisperingly asked where I was. I responded with 'Basement, crawlspace. Call 911'. She answered me by saying alright. Through the radio I heard her run across what I guessed was her room and I heard her slam a door. She let go of the button. A while later, she pressed it again and told me that she had gone into the playroom and blocked the door with a table, and that she had called 911.

A minute after that, the man re-entered the crawlspace. Chills ran through me as I saw that he was holding a knife. He held it and ran it across my neck lightly, nicking it. He held the knife to his mouth and licked the blood off of it. He then held the knife up high. Just as he had begun to plunge the knife downward, the crawlspace had been opened and a shot rang out. The man collapsed on top of me and I felt blood and pieces of his head fall onto my legs and then onto the floor.

I apologise for long sentences and any spelling/grammar mistakes. I just got home from the hospital, having been there since the incident, and I both want and need sleep. I might not get any, but I still need to try.

Posted Sep 10, 2016, 4:27 AM UTC · edited