Growing up, I lived in a subterranean house with a field behind it leading to a small section of woods. This house was strange — two-story, with the first being partially underground. My mother had recently divorced and remarried, which was why her, my brother, and I had moved. A side note of little importance is that my stepfather had no children from any previous marriages, so my brother and I were the only kids in the house.
I lived downstairs. When night fell and we turned the light off, it was pretty much pitch black, due to there not being many windows. Because of this, my brother and I used to play hide and seek in the dark. The stairs were the safe zone, but the rest of the room was fair game.
I remember one night, I hid up in the top shelf of the closet. I wasn’t exactly very big at that point, so it supported my weight. I remember an acute feeling of being watched that night, though I couldn’t place the source. Eventually, I got so creeped out that I let my brother find me. We turned the lights on. It felt safer that way.
“Ready for round two?” my brother asked me after my location had been discovered.
I was still mildly creeped out, but I wasn’t tired enough to go to sleep yet, and I wouldn’t have anything to do if I said no. “Alright,” I answered, trying to put on an enthusiastic front. “My turn to count!” I turned the lights back off and returned to the stairs to begin counting, while my brother retreated back into the darkness of the room to hide.
“...3...2...1! Ready or not, here I come!” I finished counting and went off into the darkness after my brother. It took me several minutes to find him tucked under the vanity in the bathroom. Once I did find him, I helped him to his feet and went to go turn the lights on — it was getting late, and we wanted to go get some sleep. But when I turned towards the exit, something caught my eye. I looked up at the door at the top of the stairwell and realized that it had been opened, light spilling into the room. This could have been a coincidence, but I could’ve sworn we’d closed that door.
I went up to it and looked through it curiously. Though there wasn’t anything out of the ordinary on the other side, I caught a hint of light blue flannel fabric out of the corner of my eye. It could’ve been a trick of the light, and my brother didn’t seem to see anything, so I said nothing.
That night, I just could not shake the feeling of being watched. I was pretty tired, but it took a long time to fall asleep, simply because of this. I awoke in the middle of the night to the unnerving feeling that someone else was in the room with me, standing over my bed. I froze up and turned on the flashlight I kept beside my bed for reading, but there was nothing there. Eventually, the feeling of being watched dissipated, and I managed to go back to sleep.
A few weeks passed with no developments worth noting. It was summer, so I didn’t have school, which left me feeling bored pretty often. It was during this time that I met the girl next door — I don’t want to disclose her name, so we’ll call her Lila. Lila was a few years older than me and my brother, and her mom was a bus driver. She also had a trampoline, so naturally, we spent a lot of time at her house. We would monkey around on the bus, or do flips on the trampoline. We were stupid kids; we had nothing better to do.
I never told Lila about the strange stuff happening around the house where me and my brother lived, mainly because I didn’t want her to think I was crazy. And she never mentioned anything of the sort either, so it was never discussed. But sometimes I’d turn towards my house and — always in my peripheral vision — catch a glimpse of light blue flannel peeking through the window. I tried to ignore it, to pretend it wasn’t there. I failed.
One night I walked home to find that one of the upstairs windows in the living room had been broken, and my mother was covered in scratches. Our cat had attacked her completely unprovoked, and she’d accidentally thrust her hand through the window. My brother and I had to clean up the glass.
After we finished with that, I went back down to my room. I can remember acutely a temperature drop — not by much, perhaps a few degrees — when I entered the room. I shivered, but entered regardless.
After about a year or so, my mother and stepfather divorced, and we moved out of that house. But I remember I met that girl — Lila — again in high school. We hadn’t seen each other in years, and were pretty much unrecognizable from who we were all those years ago. But I asked her, despite all the time that had passed, if she’d noticed anything odd about the house after my family had moved out.
“Actually, there was something,” Lila answered. “After you left, I saw this girl with red hair in the window of the stairwell, in a blue flannel dress. She just looked at me for a long moment, then calmly walked back across the field and into the trees. Never saw her again. Why’d you ask?”
“N-no reason,” I answered. “Just curious.”
But, walking home that day, I could’ve sworn I caught a glimpse of blue flannel out of the corner of my eye. And that night, sleeping in my bed, I couldn’t shake the image of a woman’s face, with copper hair and forest green eyes, staring back at me through the darkness.