It’s 9:35 at night. The show on your TV is silent, the volume turned down. Maybe you’re one of those people that has to have a static noise and picture, even when listening to or watching something else.
The living room light is on. Two of the five bulbs have burnt out. The one in the back seems the next to go, but you don’t think much about it as you stretch out in your chair.
Something begins gnawing at the back of your mind. It’s just a normal Monday night, the rain outside a steady drizzle that freezes as it hits the road. Something that makes you want to look out the large panel window beside you, covered up by a Harley Davidson blanket to keep the warmth in the house.
You try and distract yourself, turning on your favorite band. Maybe it’s Collective Soul, or Rammstein, or anything. Something to take your mind off of it. It’s only 9:37 now, just a few minutes later, and you still have this urge to turn around and look out that window, shrouded by a black and orange blanket. You hear a slight tapping on the glass, like a fingertip trying to get your attention. You turn the music up louder, trying to drown it out. It becomes louder and more insistent now, faster and faster, still trying to draw your attention.
“It’s in my head, I’m just worked up, too little sleep. Last night was crazy,” you tell yourself. The tapping on the window ceases, and you begin to settle back in. It’s 9:41. You turn your attention back to the TV, commercials flooding your brain. The tapping returns. A simple, sharp tap. Curiosity overwrites fear, and you lift up the blanket with your left hand, expecting to see a stray limb from a tree smacking the window from the wind outside, or maybe nothing at all.
A long, pale white tongue drags across the window, smacking back with another tap. Your heart stops as you look up, seeing two great, white staring eyes bulging from an elongated face, lacerated with boiling cuts and celluloid scars, coated with burns; its face nearly as long as your window itself. It’s upside down, hanging from your ceiling. Its mouth is lined with razor-sharp teeth, there may be thousands or millions of them. Several are rotten and pulsating, and it keeps staring at you. Its cavernous mouth seems to be smiling. Like it knows something you don’t…