*At Night

***

This is my story, something that happened to me personally. Nothing in it is embellished — everything is told exactly as it was. And, by the way, I don’t believe in those popular horror tales about the “Stickman,” “Slender Man,” and the like. Especially since back in that distant year of 2004, I had never even heard of them.

This happened almost ten years ago. What occurred did not change my life, did not plant eternal terror in my soul, and did not grow into a phobia (although to some extent I did begin to seriously fear the night windows of private houses). It simply happened and remained in my memory as an event that has faded with time. I know it is unlikely to happen to me again, because it was not coming for me: I was merely an unwilling but active witness.

After a fun party, I stayed overnight at my friend’s place. We returned home around three in the morning, tired, almost sober after a long walk through the night city. Our town is small; after eleven there was no public transport, and we had no money for a taxi. And where would teenagers from modest — even poor — families get money? The district where my friend Zina (a fictitious name) lived — and probably still lives — consisted of private houses and was, to put it mildly, a bad area. People called it the “Gypsy district.” Roma families really did live there, dealing in drugs and stolen goods. Drug addicts were not uncommon, but they behaved quietly and did not bother the residents. They were probably afraid of the Roma.

It was late February. The frosty air mercilessly nipped at our noses and cheeks, but we were cheerfully chatting about this and that. When we reached her house, it began to snow. We went inside. Zina immediately brewed tea to warm up. Her parents were not home: both worked night shifts. Her father was a security guard somewhere; her mother worked as a seamstress at a factory. Zina, almost two years older than me, was already used to staying home alone and knew all the neighbors. Besides, her house was surrounded by a very tall fence — about two meters high — with a heavy iron gate.

We sat at the kitchen table, eating jam sandwiches and washing them down with hot tea, glancing out the window that faced the yard. Snow was falling in large flakes, and soon the ground, which had only recently shed its old snow cover, was once again dressed in a white shroud. It was so cozy to be in a warm, bright house, drinking something hot and discussing the party that had just ended. Soon we grew drowsy and decided to go to bed. We lay down together in the living room on an old Soviet-era fold-out couch, each wrapped up to the neck in our own blanket.

Before lying down, Zina put a cassette into the tape recorder. Some calm music began to play, reminiscent of a church choir. I joked that I imagined white sheep dancing in a circle on a green meadow, singing with the voices from the song. After laughing a little, Zina yawned tiredly and got up to turn off the tape recorder, which stood on the other side of the room near the window. In the silence that followed, I could still hear that choir singing in my ears. Shivering slightly, I turned toward the wall and prepared to sleep when I heard a rustling sound coming from outside. It resembled the rustling of thick plastic sheeting — rhythmic and persistent. I turned onto my back to listen better.

“What’s that?” I asked after a few seconds.

“The plastic on the window’s rustling,” she replied, but there was tension in her voice.

“Probably the wind,” I suggested.

“I don’t know. I checked this morning — it was pinned to the frame with tacks. The wind couldn’t have torn it loose.”

The sound did not stop for a single minute, and I decided to see what was happening. Sitting up, I stared at the window directly opposite our bed. It was indeed covered with thick, opaque plastic sheeting on the outside — probably to keep it clean during winter. It barely let in any light from the streetlamp, but I could make out the dark silhouette of a person. He was standing right behind the window, tugging at a torn lower corner of the plastic as if trying to rip it off completely.

I quickly lay back down.

“Is someone there?” Zina whispered, frightened.

“Yes,” I forced out.

Fear gripped my chest. I was afraid even to breathe so as not to make a sound, so he wouldn’t hear me. My friend seemed to feel the same.

“What should we do?” my thoughts raced frantically.

There was no telephone in the house, and mobile phones were a luxury back then, far from common. Screaming was pointless — the neighbors wouldn’t hear us because of the thick walls and the wide stone fence. We wouldn’t dare run — that would mean opening the front door and giving the uninvited guest a chance to get inside. And we couldn’t slip past him: the living room windows were only two or three meters from the fence, and the gate was on that side too, meaning we’d be in full view of the intruder.

“A robber?” I thought. “Of course! Who else could it be at this hour?” Surely he wasn’t alone — he couldn’t have climbed over that fence by himself, and the gate had been locked; otherwise, we would have heard its rusty hinges screech.

“Thieves?” Zina asked, as if reading my mind.

“Who else? There are plenty of junkies around here.”

I noticed the rustling had stopped and sat up again. The silhouette still lingered by the window, the corner of the plastic lifted. A faint metallic scraping sound followed, as if something not too heavy and made of iron was being dragged across the asphalt. The fresh snow muffled it.

“It’s a ladder!” Zina panicked.

I remembered seeing a short rusty ladder leaning against the wall a couple of meters from the window. He had dragged it over and set it up directly beneath the window.

“So that was the sound,” I realized.

We whispered theories back and forth — maybe they thought no one was home, maybe they’d seen us leave earlier. Nothing made sense.

The figure climbed halfway up the ladder and peered into the window, then climbed down and resumed tugging at the plastic, again and again, mechanically, like a wind-up toy. He never tried the window handles, never broke the glass — just looked inside as if searching for something he couldn’t see.

After a while — perhaps half an hour or an hour — something inside me snapped. I wanted to see him. To look him in the face.

Pressing my face to the exposed corner of the glass, I came face to face with him — separated only by two thin panes. I jumped back in horror.

It wasn’t a robber. It wasn’t a junkie. It hardly looked human at all.

The creature had no face.

On an oval shape covered in skin there were no eyes, no nose, no mouth — nothing. No facial hair. Nothing at all. He wore an ordinary cheap synthetic sheepskin coat, the kind every second person in town had, and a knitted cap. I saw it all clearly in the yellow light of the streetlamp.

“Zina,” I whispered, my lips numb. “Crawl into the other room. Pray.”

We backed away and hid by the doorway. I dropped the knife and the small stool I had brought for defense. Dawn was approaching; I felt certain he would leave with the sunrise. And strangely, I was sure he wasn’t looking for me. If he had seen Zina, I thought, his reaction would have been different. I don’t know why I felt that — but it gave me some comfort.

At some point, we fell asleep.

He didn’t break the window. He didn’t enter the house. He simply vanished as silently as he had appeared.

In the morning, Zina’s mother returned from work. We told her everything. She looked at us in surprise.

“I didn’t see any footprints,” she said. “Maybe you imagined it?”

And indeed, the snow was smooth and untouched. No tracks at all. Only the ladder and two intertwined loops on the clothesline suggested that we hadn’t imagined it.

A week or two later, Zina told me it had come again late one evening. Her parents were home that time. Her father went outside to chase it away but found no one.

Later, I moved to another city, and we lost touch. I don’t know if it ever returned. Years later I spoke with a mutual acquaintance and asked about Zina.

I won’t go into details — this isn’t the place for that.

But Zina’s life did not turn out well at all.