Someone Was Watching

His parents told him the strange noises coming from the wall vent were just the normal sounds of an old house settling. They said the sour smells were fumes from the nearby plant wafting through the drafty windows.

They didn’t believe him when he told them of finding chairs and dishes moved in the kitchen at night. Instead they scolded him for sneaking midnight snacks after bedtime.

Who could blame them? After all, their son was only nine years old. And no one else in his family had experienced the eerie phenomena. It was almost as if the nocturnal goings-on were centered around him.

One late night, despite his parents’ warnings, he crept downstairs–taking care to walk on the edges of the creaky steps so as not to wake the house–and snuck into the kitchen.

There, backlit by the spectral green microwave clock, sat the shadowy figure of a man. Silverware clacked on china as the lanky apparition dined on unseen victuals at the kitchen table.

The boy stifled a scream, hurried back to bed, and hid under the covers until dawn. When he summoned the courage to venture back downstairs for breakfast, his mother and father once again took him to task for breaking their ban on midnight snacking. There was no use denying it. Neither of them had left the bowl and spoon in the sink and drunk milk from the noticeably lighter carton.

After that, the activity became less dramatic but more pervasive. The boy saw no more midnight shadows, but the scuffing, thudding, and clanging in the walls grew more frequent. Even alone in his room, he felt like someone was watching him.

His parents insisted it was just his overactive imagination.

Until that summer, when such a rancid stench began to emanate from the air vents that his father called in a heating and cooling specialist to check the ducts.

The workman made a grisly discovery. From the extra-wide spaces between the old house’s walls he pulled the shriveled corpse of a ragged scarecrow of a man. The police found even more disturbing artifacts inside the walls which indicated that the invader had been living in the house unnoticed since the previous winter.

Between the workmen and the police, every trace of the home invader’s secret occupancy was removed.

Including several loose sheets of filthy paper covered with crude drawings found behind the vent in the boy’s bedroom–through which the dead man had spent many a night watching its young occupant.

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