Halloween

In our family home, my bedroom is on the ground floor. Not a great spot, but it’s pretty big so that kind of makes up for it. Despite the fact that we live in a kind of dodgy area, nothing bad had happened. Nothing until one night a few months ago.

            My sister can be a bit of a douche sometimes, no need to sugar-coat it. She’ll tell me the endings of books before I've read them, put salt on my cereal, that kind of thing. This incident was last Halloween; I was fifteen at the time.

            It was about 7 p.m. and I was sat at my computer in the corner of my room, like always. As we nerdy types sometimes do, I had lost track of time and hadn't realised it was dark, the only light coming from the glow of the screen. I was waiting for a video to load and as the screen went black I jumped up and screamed like a little girl. Next to the reflection of my face was another face: a huge, smiling, white face surrounded by matted hair.

I freaked out and turned around to find my sister taking off a Halloween mask and laughing. Needless to say I was pretty annoyed. I yelled at her and threw her out my room, slamming the door behind her.

Later that night I went to bed. It was early for me, like 1 a.m. My bed is in the very corner of my room, and so I was surrounded by vast darkness. I was just drifting off to sleep when I heard something, like the creak of a floorboard. I opened my eyes to the sound and saw something shift in the dark. It was rustling and grunting quietly. I was too scared to speak.

Slowly, the thing began to come closer. A figure was approaching my bed from the darkness. It was wearing the same mask as the one my sister had worn. A smiling white face in the blackness.

Naturally I screamed the place down. The figure had clearly thought I was asleep and when it realised I wasn't it ran from the room. For a while I just sat in my bed, tears rolling down my face. Rationality began to set in and with it came anger. My fucking sister. I ran upstairs to yell at her. I banged on her door and shouted her name really loud, so that my Mom came out and asked me what I was doing.

‘Jane keeps scaring me and it’s not funny,’ I yelled. ‘She was just in my room wearing this fucking freaky mask!’ I didn't even care that I’d just sworn in front of my mother for the first time. I was furious.

My Mom looked at me confused and said, ‘Jane’s not here, sweetheart. She’s sleeping at Katie’s tonight.’

I was terrified then. I ran downstairs, for some reason thinking I would find my sister and it would all be an elaborate joke. When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I saw that the front door was open.

Jane came back the next morning, complaining about how she’d had a lousy night. She’d wanted to go trick-or-treating with her friends, but realised when she got to Kate’s house that she’d forgotten her mask. She said she swore she’d put it in her bag.

I don’t know who was in my room that night. My Mom filed a police report but they never caught the figure in the dark. The only thing they found was a pair of discarded binoculars across the street from our house. He was watching me.

I always check the front door is locked before going to bed now. And next Halloween I’ll make sure I’m staying at a friend’s. I don’t know what the figure in the dark would've done to me if I hadn't been awake, but I don’t think I would've been here to write the story today.