The Creature Outside the Window

I recently moved to St. Petersburg and now live with my boyfriend, Igor. Let me say right away—I’m not timid. I practice hand-to-hand combat, lift weights sometimes, go to the stadium with my football-fan friends, and I’ve been in plenty of scrapes. I don’t believe in supernatural nonsense—or at least I didn’t until recently…

A couple of days ago, in the evening, I met up with my beloved after work. We took a short walk and then went home. We sat down to drink tea, and his brother Ilya joined us in the kitchen—their mom was working a night shift. So there we were, laughing, enjoying pastries. We decided to watch a movie before bed, picked a comedy, and settled in front of the monitor.

When the movie ended, we were all getting sleepy and decided to turn in. Ilya wished us good night and went to his room. I should explain—the brother’s room is next to ours, but our windows face the long side of the building, while Ilya’s windows are on the end wall. About a meter and a half from our windows grow huge birch trees. Without much thought, we made the bed and collapsed into sleep, since we both had to work the next day. Just as we were drifting off, I heard a strange noise from the window. Igor, half-asleep, muttered something about mischievous birches and started snoring. I tried to fall asleep too, but no luck… Something kept rustling against the mosquito screen (almost all the double-glazed windows have them), and along with the rustling came a creaking and faint squeaking. The room suddenly felt cooler. Cursing those very birches, I climbed over my boyfriend (I always sleep by the wall), switched on the bedside lamp so as not to wake him, and, rubbing my eyes unaccustomed to the light, went toward the window, quietly swearing and stumbling over the cat, who for some reason was grunting (our cat doesn’t meow—he “creaks” or “grunts,” I don’t know how to describe it) and getting under my feet.

When I got closer to the window, I froze—those weren’t birches misbehaving. Something that looked like a person was staring at me—something pale, with dark circles under its eyes. The eyes themselves were almost colorless, with large pupils. With its long fingers it scratched at the screen and squeaked thinly. I can’t say exactly what it was saying; I only remember separate words: “give,” “came,” “where”… I probably can’t fully describe what happened: I started shaking, the hair not only on my head but all over my body stood on end—it felt like I’d been drenched in ice water. I wanted to scream, but no sound came out. Instead, I lunged at the window, slammed it shut in one motion, and turned the handle. Then, grabbing the cat, I jumped onto the bed and shook my boyfriend awake. When Igor opened his eyes, he had no idea what the cat and I wanted from him: I was sitting there hugging the grunting cat, barely breathing, wheezing instead (I’m asthmatic). Hearing my wheezing, he instantly woke up and rushed to the table where my inhaler lay. To our mutual horror and relief, the table stood right next to the window. Igor saw the unknown creature outside and leaped onto the bed in a single bound, handed me the inhaler, but grabbed the cat. Now all three of us were in panic.

No, it didn’t try to smash the glass, chew a hole into a parallel world, summon Satan, or smear slime on our window. No. It just hung there and watched. Occasionally it slapped the mosquito screen with its fingers. On the fourth-floor level! After a while, the creature froze, then very politely tapped on the window with its finger. Staring at us intently, it simply hovered there, carefully tapping with its spider-like finger against our window. Apparently realizing we didn’t quite trust it, it smiled. I nearly soiled myself: there were maybe six teeth in its mouth, but what teeth they were—long, white… I whimpered and hid under the blanket. I was shaking all over, quietly whining with the blanket over my head (any child will tell you the best protection from a boogeyman is a blanket). I trembled for about three minutes, or maybe it just felt that way—time stretches in moments like that. Igor and I were snapped out of our stupor by the sound of Ilya’s balcony door creaking. I looked at the window—the thing became alert and slowly moved aside. I exhaled; Igor did too. But then it hit us like a blow to the head—the creature had moved toward the corner of the building, and around that corner was Ilya’s balcony! And Ilya hates heat—his windows and balcony door stay open almost until November…

We jumped off the bed and rushed into the hallway, sprinting to Ilya’s door. When we flung it open, my legs gave out, Igor’s arms dropped like limp ropes, and the cat simply collapsed on the floor and crawled back into the hallway, leaving stinking puddles behind. Ilya was sitting on the floor under the balcony door, tears streaming from his eyes, one arm slashed open. On the balcony roamed the unknown creature. It wandered back and forth, tapping at the balcony door. I began gesturing for Ilya to come to us. He looked at the door, then at us, and finally, gathering his strength, crawled quickly on all fours toward us. We huddled together, grabbed the soiled (literally) cat, slammed the door to Ilya’s room, and wedged it shut with a stool from the hallway.

“Crawling and sprinting,” we made our way to the kitchen. With trembling hands, I poured valerian drops into mugs for everyone (including the cat), and we all downed it in one gulp. The silence lasted about ten seconds, then we all started swearing, shouting, hiccuping, groaning, asking: “What the hell was that?!” Ilya’s arm was torn up as if someone had slashed it with a razor and poured boiling water over it. The skin was blistered, and blood still seeped from it. I began washing his arm in the bathroom, then treating it with peroxide, alcohol, cologne—every remedy I could think of. In the middle of this rescue operation, we heard Igor scream wildly from the kitchen. He had recovered slightly from the shock and checked the front door, the kitchen windows—everything—closed all the windows and checked a hundred times to make sure they were shut. We burst out of the bathroom and screamed ourselves. The creature was tearing at the screen and scratching the windowpane. We flew into the hallway at incredible speed, sat there, and stayed quiet as groundhogs. After some time, the terrible scraping sound stopped, and silence fell. The three of us crawled back into the bathroom and continued tending to Ilya’s arm, periodically peeking into the hallway—but thank God, nothing appeared there. After about ten minutes, we realized the cat was missing, figured he’d been left in the kitchen, and decided to rescue the poor thing—after all, he’s family. We armed ourselves with whatever we could grab—a stool, a mop. Peeking into the kitchen, I was stunned—there was a hole in the outer pane of glass the size of a large apple. The cat lay under the table in his own puddle, trembling, and that creature was flickering outside the window. Just hovering, not misbehaving, not scratching the glass—only whining and whistling. And that whistle—it cut to the bone. The creature wandered outside our windows until dawn. Long after that, we were afraid to enter the rooms—who knew what might happen… Needless to say, we didn’t sleep that night, nor the next. For a week we slept only in shifts, and after dark we didn’t go outside alone. We lied to their mom about the window—said something about a suicidal seagull. Ilya made up a story about his arm too—we managed to “cover it up.”

The story didn’t exactly fade (you never forget something like that), but we somehow began to look at it more calmly, even with a bit of humor. We’re generally cheerful people, though after that night Ilya and I both got gray hairs (I’m 23, and he just turned 15). Igor has started talking in his sleep. The cat, though, is fine.

What worries us is that lately one of us occasionally wakes up at night from some incomprehensible whistling and hissing under the window. The cat has become nervous again and won’t go near the windows at all. And Igor’s mom said that someone followed her across the yard in the evening—not just followed, but hid in the bushes. And someone has started ringing our intercom at night. You pick up the receiver—there’s silence, and only some kind of whistling and hissing. So what are we supposed to do now?..