The Face behind the Window

On a cold autumn night just about a year ago, me and a couple of my friends, James and Tyler, grew very bored. We did our typical thing involving drinking, smoking cigarettes and lighting the driveway on fire. I don’t remember how it was brought up, but we ended up on the discussion of sneaking around people’s houses. Maybe pull a little prank or two, possibly steal something little. Who cares? It’s not like people couldn’t afford to buy it again. Normally we wouldn’t do extreme things that typical bad boys do but we decided to add some juice of excitement into our lives. After all, what’s a good life without good memories?

We walked down the block towards the forest area around where I lived. After walking for about a half mile, we noticed the neighborhood started becoming much less familiar. We’ve never seen these parts around before when we went on walks. The sidewalk ran out. All that was left was grass, leaves, and surrounding trees. It grew darker than it ever was before. We decided that it was a good idea because then we would be fooling with neighbors that didn’t recognize us. So we pushed on walking, taking random turns wherever the hell we wanted while trying not to lose our sense of direction.

As we explored deeper, we started to feel very creeped out and the lack of familiarity was unsettling. But none of us wanted to admit to each other that we were getting the willies. So we kept going.

By the time we decided to stop, after a while, we came to a site with houses that had quite a bit of distance from each other. They weren’t too far apart, I’d say about 25 yards in-between. Oddly enough, the only type of road flowing along was barely even a dirt path. It was one of those paths that must have been created by cars continuously driving over the same track. The houses were small and there were barely any cars. One of the houses had a dim light barely illuminating the windowsill. There was an old rusty truck resting on the hill near one of them. It seemed too old to be functional. Another house had a car skeleton with no wheels laying on some cinderblocks. It didn’t look like a good place to go sightseeing. In fact, it would probably be one of the worst places to be for that sort of thing. The scenery looked dead and eerie. We walked further down the line of houses until we came near the end. The second to last was what seemed like a collapsed house, caved in under the weight of its own poorly built structure. Seeing it just gave your gut a feeling that made you feel very uncomfortable.

The last house was old fashioned and covered in decaying white paint. No lights were on. It had a front porch with a broken swing chair. It looked like it hadn’t been used in a while. We decided that this was probably the best house to fool with. As if we weren’t freaked out enough from the dark location, we had to get up the guts to do it. Eventually.

We walked around towards the back doubting ourselves the whole time. Just then, we saw what looked like a poorly built but more recently developed backway. Maybe supposed to be a shed built into the house? We weren’t sure. We snuck up to the door of the shed. The door was white as well with mildly decaying paint. It just stared back at us seemingly unwelcoming. “It’s now or never” James said. So we slowly pushed open the door. It creaked pretty loudly. Loud enough for us to question if the owners heard us. We debated going back but we didn’t come all this way just to chicken out. So we snuck in. My one friend had a camera and a flashlight. I told him don’t turn on the light all the way and to make it dim but he didn’t listen in time. He turned it on brightening the whole shed. He quickly dimmed the light as we walked around. We managed to find some odd antique tools. There were some old wrenches, rotten plywood, and saws lying around. There was a glass sliding door that led into the house with curtains on the other side. We found these brown rough hooks which were strangely interesting. I was definitely taking those. My friend found a broken ashtray laying on the ground with ash smeared on the metal table and the ground but there were no cigarette butts. Strange we thought.

BANG!!! DING DING!!!

Suddenly me and my friend were instantly startled and frightened at the sound of a wrench clanging on the concrete ground.

“What the FUCK was that you fuckin idiot?!” I whispered loudly.

“Sorry! I hit the wrench by accident,” Tyler whispered back.

“Be careful you fuckin dumbass,” whispered James.

Just then, we heard a sound coming from the second floor of the house. *Bdum boom*

“Oh shit. Shit shit.” I said quietly.

“Dude let’s get the hell out! Get out!” whispered James.

“Alright chill hold on a sec.” Tyler replied. “Wait, I’m gonna take a few pictures first.”

“Are you crazy? We just heard something upstairs!” said James.

“The lights are off. Relax they’re not gonna come down here instantly.” Replied Tyler.

He took a flash picture anyway. We both panicked thinking he was an idiot.

“Stop! Let’s go!” I said.

“Hold on, one more. Hehe look the curtains are slightly open.” Tyler silently chuckled.

He took a picture of the glass door. The camera flashed

Right when it flashed, we saw a face… For a little glimpse, we saw someone’s face glaring at us with wide eyes giving us a death stare from behind the crack of the curtains.

“Oh fuck run!” I said as silently as I could under the adrenaline of panic.

We hustled out the door trying to stay calm, bumping another wrench on the table.

We sprinted all the way back without looking behind us. We kept going until we saw the slightest familiar portion of my neighborhood. Then we slowed down and I gave a quick scan behind me to see if anyone followed. No one seemed to be coming. We walked fast the rest of the way to my house.

After a few minutes of catching our breath, Tyler remembered about the pictures he took. We decided to look at them. There was one that he took of the shed which looked very grim with the flash lighting up the dark. There was something about the shed that made it seem like an abandoned dark slaughterhouse. It was probably just the look of it.

But then… When Tyler pressed next… We came upon the most frightening terror stricken photo we’ve ever taken or even seen in our lifetimes. It was a picture of somebody with their eyes widened to the point of insanity. The face was pale. Their mouth was open producing menacing teeth. This face stared back at us with the most threatening eyes we could ever imagine. Every nightmare that we’ve ever had must have been combined into this single photo and leaked terror upon us. The photo is here, yes, but we sure had a hard time uploading it.

Oh… And did I mention that we left the flashlight back at the house?...