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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/EmmaWatsonButDumber on 2024-10-13 18:48:29+00:00.
I really felt like moving out, but it was never that easy. You know when you watch horror movies and say how stupid the protagonists are? Well, sometimes that stupidity has its reasons. Move out? I couldn't, because I was broke and I had nowhere else to go. Investigate? Investigate what? I wasn't in a mood to play detective. All I could do was ask around about the old man.
The thing is, maybe I'm just not one of those people who can afford to watch out for themselves. I had one option left - keep going in the same way.
The tapping had stopped, but the fear hadn’t. I spent my nights in a state of high alert, every creak of the floorboards, every whistle of the wind sending shivers down my spine. I counted my windows—twice, three times, sometimes more—obsessively checking the locks and double-checking the latches. Yet the paranoia never left. It was as if the house itself had become hostile, its walls too thin to keep out what lurked just beyond the glass.
The old man did have relatives, but none knew anything about this and just claimed his mind had begun to slip up.
I tried to contact the previous tenant, but she'd left without a trace. I desperately sent word out for her to help me, even sent a letter to where her address was supposed to be now.
It was mid-afternoon when I heard the knock. A sharp, deliberate rapping at my front door. For a moment, I thought it was the tapping again, but this was different—more human. I approached cautiously, peering through the peephole. A woman stood on the porch, her face partially obscured by the hood of her jacket. She looked tired but determined.
“Can I help you?” I called through the door, not willing to open it.
“I think we need to talk,” she said. “About your windows.”
My blood ran cold. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Claire. I lived here before you.” She paused, as if weighing whether to continue. “I know what’s happening to you.”
I had not expected her to reach out. Why would she? If I could leave, I'd selfishly never come back to help whoever would live here after me.
I hesitated, then unlatched the door just enough to open it a crack. Claire’s eyes were dark, sunken, and she looked like she hadn’t slept in weeks. There was something haunted about her, a desperation that mirrored my own growing fear.
“Thanks for coming.”
She sighed, her breath fogging in the cool October air. “The windows, the tapping, the… thing that comes at night. You’ve seen it, haven’t you?”
I opened the door a bit wider, my heart thudding in my chest. “You knew?”
Claire nodded grimly and stepped inside, glancing nervously around the house as though expecting something to lunge at her from the shadows. “I tried everything,” she said, her voice low. “Moving out didn’t help. They followed me. They always do.”
“They?”
She looked at me, her eyes filled with the kind of fear you can’t fake. “There’s more than one. I don’t know what they are or where they come from, but they’re drawn to certain houses. This one… it got... infested... The old man next door, he was the only one who knew how to keep them out."
"Yeah, he died."
Her eyes widened, bloodshot and twitching. "No."
"Yes."
She frowned, then shook her head. "His advice—count the windows twice every night—it’s a warning, not a superstition. Did you follow it?”
“But I did that!” I protested. “I counted them! Twice, just like he said. They still came!”
Claire’s expression darkened. “Did you ever stop to think that maybe the problem wasn’t the windows themselves?”
I blinked, confused. “What do you mean?”
“They don’t just want to get in. They want to replace.” She paused, letting the weight of her words sink in. “You have five windows, right? What if, one night, there were six?”
I froze, the implications of her question slicing through me like a blade. I’d never thought to question the number of windows—just that they were closed and locked. But the memory of that night, the feeling of something being off, came rushing back. The handprint on the glass, the figure outside the window—what if it hadn’t been outside? What if it was already inside, a window I hadn’t counted?
Claire watched the realization dawn on my face. “They don’t always come from the outside,” she said quietly. “Sometimes, they’re already here. They mimic what’s familiar, but there’s always a flaw. A detail you missed. Maybe it’s the number of windows. Maybe it’s something else. You have to be vigilant.”
My mind raced, recalling every night I’d counted the windows, every creak and whisper in the house that I’d dismissed as normal. Could it be that I’d already let something in without even realizing it?
“There has to be a way to stop them,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.
“There is,” Claire said, but her tone was heavy with doubt. “I’ve been trying to figure it out for years. They can’t stand certain things—mirrors, for one. They can’t see themselves. That’s how I spotted the one that got into my place. I saw it in a mirror, standing just behind me. It wasn’t a reflection of me, but something else, wearing my face.”
My stomach churned, the idea of something wearing me like a mask making my skin crawl. “And what did you do?”
“I broke the mirror,” she said simply. “But that only stopped it for a while. They’re patient. They wait.”
I felt a cold sweat form on the back of my neck. “How do you know they’re here?”
Claire turned to face me fully, her eyes locking onto mine with a gaze that sent a chill through me. “Have you heard the tapping lately?”
I shook my head slowly. “Not since last night.”
“That’s because they’re already inside.” Her voice was barely audible now, more a warning than an explanation. “They don’t tap once they’re in. They’re quiet, waiting for you to slip up.”
I felt my breath catch in my throat as I glanced around the room, my mind racing. I could feel it—the oppressive weight of their presence, the way the air felt too thick, too still. The house wasn’t empty. It never had been.
Claire stepped toward the door, her expression grim. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “But once they’re inside, there’s no going back. You can’t fight them. All you can do is keep counting. And hope you don’t forget again.”
She left without another word, disappearing into the gray afternoon mist. And I stood there, alone in the silence, the growing dread coiling in my chest like a snake.
That night, I counted the windows again. Five. I counted twice, then a third time just to be sure. But when I reached the window at the end of the hallway, I saw it.
A sixth window.
And something was staring back at me from the other side of the glass.
The sixth window stared back at me like an eye—a dark, gleaming pane where there should’ve been a blank wall. My throat tightened as I approached it, feeling the pull of its wrongness in my bones. This wasn’t possible. There were only five windows in this house. Always had been. But here it was, as real as the others, yet impossibly out of place.
And then there was the figure on the other side.
It didn’t move. It stood there, perfectly still, an outline against the faint moonlight. The features were indistinct, shrouded in shadow, but I could tell it was tall. Far too tall to be human, its shape contorted, limbs just a little too long, a little too thin. Its face, if you could call it that, seemed to stretch and blur as I looked at it, as though reality itself was bending around it.
My heart pounded in my chest, a cold sweat trickling down my back. I couldn’t look away. My breath came in shallow, panicked bursts. It wasn’t tapping. It was waiting.
The words of the old man echoed in my head, mixing with Claire’s warning: They don’t just want to get in. They want to replace.
I took a step back, my body trembling, trying to convince myself that this was a dream, a hallucination brought on by too many sleepless nights. But the figure remained. Its head tilted slightly, as if it were observing me with an almost predatory patience.
Then it moved.
Not in the way a person would, but with a slow, gliding motion that seemed to defy gravity, like a puppet pulled on strings. It drifted closer to the glass, the outline of its body becoming clearer, and I could see now that it wasn’t just a figure—it was a *reflection*. But not of me.
No. This thing was showing me *itself*, wearing something familiar, as if it had studied me, learned how to mimic, but got the details wrong. I watched in horror as its face sharpened into something resembling mine—eyes, nose, mouth—but all wrong. The features were too symmetrical, the eyes too dark, like black holes sucking in the light.
Panic surged through me, and I stumbled backward, nearly tripping over the edge of the hallway rug. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the thing in the window. The way it stood, motionless now, mimicking me but not quite right—like an eerie, distorted mirror image.
Suddenly, my phone buzzed in my pocket, jolting me back to reality. I fumbled it out, my hands shaking, barely able to swipe the screen to see the message.
It was from Claire:
"Whatever you do, don’t turn your back on it."
I felt a cold wave of dread wash over me. My hand tightened around the phone as I slowly backed away from the window, careful to keep my eyes locked on the thing mimicking me. The hallway felt impossibly long as I edged toward the living roo...
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