"Windowpain" - a short horror story

Ever been sitting at your desk procrastinating on doing work and then looked outside to see one of your neighbors staring at you? Yes? No? Well Lauren Miles has and I wrote this short horror story about her for a writing contest at my University. Hope you enjoy!

“Hey Lauren, are you coming with us tonight?” screeched the high pitched voice of Lauren’s housemate, Mikayla Andres. The epitome of downtown Toronto University partygoers, Mikayla – who prefers to be called “Kayla”, with the ending vowel stretched out longer than Eric Clapton singing “Layla” – lived in the room next to Lauren at the top floor of their University of Toronto apartment house. The house was first built to accommodate a single family in the early twentieth century but after many subsequent renovations, splitting the areas such as the former master bedroom and living room into individual bedrooms, was now rented out to University students. The house sat tight on its street next to other houses that shared origin stories just like it which made the street look like commuters packed together on a crowded bus or subway train, staring straight ahead and not speaking about their common plight. Lauren and Kayla’s apartment house itself was small with the individual rooms being even smaller. However, to a 20-year-old University student, any space at all to foster their own independence and live of their own accord in the big city was worth the landowner gouging them for hundreds of dollars in rental fees every month. Wearing a t-shirt with a rock band on it that she didn’t listen to which matched her baseball cap adorned with a hockey team logo whose team she could not name two players on, “Kayla” informed Lauren that the party she was attending was going to be “very lit” and that “Jeff and his friends” were going to be there. Lauren’s ears perked up and she considered all the fun she could be having partying with Kayla, but she had a ten-page essay due Monday and had only completed an introduction.

On the surface, Lauren Miles was an exceptional student – she graduated high school with honours, had been accepted to the University of Toronto on a partial scholarship and had averaged nearly straight A’s in her freshman year. The latter of these accomplishments is quite the feat when you consider that she was able to keep her grades up while withstanding a rigorous commute from her home in the small rural town of Caledon, Ontario – a two-hour journey consisting of two bus rides and then a subway - which only operates at 6AM. A deeper analysis of Lauren reveals her impetus for wanting to move downtown. The stress of the commute five days a week did indeed wear her out significantly, especially in the winter and created a desire to be closer to her school but this was not the main reason for her choice to move. Lauren’s “exceptionally well written” essays and her test grades that surpassed the averages of her peers were stained with the blood of her procrastination. Lauren was a professional at time mismanagement and always avoided her pressing tasks at hand like the plague. Her average assignment or preparation for a test occurred only after at least a week of thinking, staring at a blank page and stressing over minutia such as the word count and the quality of her bibliographic references - before even opening the book or reading the article. She was easily distracted and knowing that she had work due for completion made anything and everything else she could be doing seem blissfully attractive. A day planned to be spent doing an assignment almost always began with Lauren sitting at her desk ready to tackle her work but ended with Lauren doing something completely different – like leafing through an old family photo album or playing a computer game – a mere two hours later with little to no work done. This would usually all add up to Lauren completing her assignments or finishing her studying the night before and on many occasions, the assignment being finished at the last possible moment - with a laptop and a binder balanced on each knee on the bus ride to school. Ultimately, Lauren’s days upon days of stress, avoidance and distractions never really caught up to her. Whether she finished the assignment at 11 PM the night before its due date or stumbled into class a minute before it ended, interrupting her instructor with her paper in an outstretched hand - Lauren always felt like her procrastination was worth the good grades she received in the end. She had developed a notion that her procrastination was just a normal part of her creative output and that she “works better under pressure”. She felt that her final reward justified her cathartic and unhealthy journey to attain it.

This all changed when Lauren realized, after her freshman year of University, that she would have to develop a portfolio of written work in order to achieve any sort of career out of her degree. As much as Lauren loved reading fiction, debating literature and developing grammatical and creative writing conventions, she knew she did not want to stand in front of a classroom and teach any of it. She did not enjoy public speaking and would rather create than teach. Lauren walked around with a plethora of ideas for stories in her head each day and sought inspiration at every turn. A homeless man outside of a coffee shop became an idea for a beggar turned billionaire, an argument between a couple in her school cafeteria became an idea for either a romance novella or a pulp true crime series involving death at the hands of a poisoned pastrami sandwich or a cleverly concocted framing of a despised captain of the high school football team by his lover. Even beyond this, Lauren – an avid reader of J.R.R. Tolkien and George R. R. Martin – wished to cultivate living and breathing fantasy worlds of her own. Fantasy worlds and drama stories centred on tampered cured meats would never be read - Lauren realized - if she did not put pen to paper and create them. For the first time in her life, Lauren was faced with a goal without a due date and no guaranteed reward for her time squandered. She had the leering feeling that if she did not get any extra-curricular writing completed in her next year of schooling, that her procrastination would consume her. Lauren felt like a new and secluded setting would be beneficial to her focus and the elimination of the tiring and stressful commute would increase her creative spirits. So she started looking for a place downtown and asked her parents for the financial aid necessary, to which they were supportive as long as Lauren kept up her grades. With this, Lauren moved into her new place with high hopes for the following year of school.

“Thanks for the offer Kayla, but I should really get some more work done on my essay for French lit class”, replied Lauren to Kayla’s offer to join her in her weekend festivities. “Weren’t you doing that last night and like, the night before?” asked Kayla. “Well yeah, I did a bit but I got pretty distracted by this new Netflix series about Pablo Escobar and I ended up just watching that” said Lauren, ashamed of not finishing her research sooner. The truth is, for the first month of living downtown, Lauren was indeed sticking to her goals. She used her time wisely to read and research material in the University library, she did her assigned readings quickly and efficiently so she could check out local cafés and thrift stores with some friends from her classes. She even wrote an outline for a drama story set in Victorian England and decided to eventually finish it and submit it to her school’s Fictional Period Piece competition, that had its deadline at the end of the semester. However, she quickly fell back to her old habits of procrastination and traded the excuse of “too many distractions” at her Caledon home for “nobody to keep an eye on me so I don’t get distracted” now that she was living alone. Having to cook her own meals and do her own laundry took further focus away from her tasks. To combat this, she began to not go out at all and to refuse Kayla’s requests to party, meet Jeff and his subsequent friends and to go out during the day with her classmates in order to devote the entirety of her focus to her studies and stories. Yet, there she still sat. Her story ideas banged against the front of her skull to be let out as she stared anxiously at something on her computer screen that was entirely unrelated to any sort of production while the due date for the competition loomed on the horizon.

Following Kayla’s departure, Lauren sat sadly as she heard the distant footsteps and laughter of Kayla and a roommate on a lower floor named Nicole walking down the stairs and she felt like her procrastination was not only ruining her chances at being an author but her social life as well. As she nervously stared off into space realizing the paradox that she was procrastinating about finding a solution to her procrastination, she noticed an old woman staring back at her from the window adjacent to hers. Startled, she wondered how long this woman had been there. The woman had a wrinkled face that looked almost leathery. Her hair was grey and matted around her head. She had cavernous lines above her thin lips that looked like they were each hallowed out with a knife. She looked at Lauren straight on from a room that appeared to be completely dark besides the light of a lamp close to the woman that illuminated her face. After staring back at her for a couple minutes, Lauren noticed that her visual image of the old woman appeared to be fuzzy, as if she was shaking. Blaming this on her own vision, Lauren moved closer to the window to sharpen her focus and was shocked that her eyes did not deceive her. The old woman, watching her from the window at the side of the house next to hers was trembling incessantly, with the knuckles in the middle of her fingers in both hands rubbing against each other under her neck. Lauren decided to open her window and wave to her in an attempt to get her attention, thinking that she might want something from her. The woman greeted Lauren’s act of concern through the same unwavering staring and trembling. Following this, Lauren attempted to go back to her studies and ignore the woman. However, she found herself continuing to catch the woman’s gaze over her shoulder. Lauren recalled the familiar feeling felt after watching a horror movie or walking through a shady part of the city that someone is watching you from behind. The scary part was that in this situation, this feeling was a reality. It made her feel uncomfortable and uneasy. So, she decided to put it out of her mind completely by closing the blinds above her window. After several more hours of writing but only half a paragraph completed due to overwhelming thoughts about the woman, Lauren reopened the shutters out of curiosity to see the woman still sitting there, shaking with knuckles pressed tightly together rubbing back and forth under her neck. Only this time, while Lauren attempted to ignore her again by watching a movie on her laptop, the woman turned her neck rapidly to the left to focus on Lauren’s computer screen. The movement of her neck was sharp and stiff and the motion made her head look like that of a crow’s. Previously sunken eyes now became wide and beady to reflect the illuminated screen off of them. This was enough to make Lauren slam down the blinds and not open them again for the rest of the night.

The next morning, the first thing she did upon awakening was to open the blinds. To her horror, the woman still sat there trembling and affixed in the last pose Lauren saw her in - with her head cocked to the left and her beady eyes focused on a movie screen that was no longer there. For the next two weeks, Lauren’s room was left dark and dreary - as her blinds were kept shut. Lauren grew more and more nervous as her procrastination continued and pushed her Victorian England tale towards the point of coinciding with her midterms, rendering the possibility of its completion by the deadline to be difficult and unlikely. Occasionally, she peered out of the blinds to check on the woman and was always greeted by the same frail and sickly trembling figure – with shaking knuckles pressed against each other under her neck. She felt depressed for having to keep refusing Kayla’s invites and making up excuses to her classmates for not attending café hang outs while spending her days and nights in a room that now appeared dark, dismal and a hideaway from the frightening gaze of the outside world.

The physical state of the Victorian England story by the night before the contest’s deadline was that of several crumpled pieces of paper under a stack of dirty plates and cutlery. Lauren was as usual behind on her midterm studying as a result of overthinking the structure of the exam instead of working towards learning the material to complete it. She made a sad but necessary decision to forego the story for the competition that was written and printed in her mind but forgotten and slightly coated with the dressing of a week old salad in reality. She had done it. She had let her procrastination consume her. Her anxiety peaked at this realization and she felt disgusted at herself for lacking the focus and determination crucial to structure and place her imaginative ideas to paper. She settled for the distant hope that she would enter this story in the next contest while at the same time, she feared that the ideas now raging like a tornado inside her head would soon lay dormant and be forgotten.

As she was slowly working to write out and summarize the symbolism in various Shakespeare plays for her upcoming exam with the roadblock of a YouTube sketch comedy video playing, she heard a tapping noise outside of her window. She paid it no mind at first, thinking it was a squirrel or bird or some other form of acrobatic Toronto wildlife. Then it got louder. And quicker. If it was indeed an animal, it would be akin to that of a woodpecker. With her curiosity peaked, she opened the blinds of her window to try and locate the source of the racket.

To her shock, it was the old woman. She was now leaning forward in her chair and trembling so wildly and ferociously that her face was aggressively banging against the window, generating an accelerated yet even timed sound that rang out at an almost inhuman rate, much like a metronome affixed to a great speed. She was shaking at such an alarming rate that it almost looked like there was an earthquake occurring only in her room. While withstanding such force to her head, the woman still stared directly at Lauren without even a flinch or twist of her face – or even a blink of her sunken eyes. As Lauren stared speechless, a stream of blood began to pour down the woman’s nose. With every forceful press of her nose to the window, a growing red stain began to develop on the glass, obstructing the bottom half of her face. Furthermore, her middle knuckles were being rubbed together so quickly that the skin was cracking and blood started to drip down the tips of her fingers. Lauren began to panic as the white edges of the figure’s hollow eyes faded to black as a thick stream of blood poured down the glass more with every beat of her skull on the window. Blood and skin spurted out of her grating hands and made Lauren think that if her fingers were made of metal or copper that there would be smoke arising from the friction. Lauren grabbed her cell phone and called for an ambulance, thinking the woman was having some sort of vicious seizure. All of a sudden, the woman ceased her incessant banging and sat still. Lauren’s eyes could finally adjust to the point of seeing the woman for the first time without the image appearing shaky and out of focus. With the banging still ringing in Lauren’s ears, the old woman finally separated her tight lips - which had the appearance of being sewn together - to reveal toothless discoloured gums marked by a greenish abscess that strangely looked like the growth of mold. As the blood from her nose trickled into her mouth agape, the old woman started trembling yet again. This time, however, it was a tremble that Lauren had not witnessed prior. The old woman was trembling upward, like she was trying to jump out of her seat. Lauren could even see the woman begin to shift from side to side as this motion was lifting the chair off the ground. Lauren flung open her window, screamed and raised her hands in order to try to get the woman to cease her violent shaking, but the woman still stared back at her and appeared to not even notice the warning in front of her.

          

Then, the unthinkable happened. In a powerful and abrupt motion, the old woman leaned forward and catapulted herself at the window. The glass shattered and Lauren screamed and fell back towards her bed, catching the edge of her desk to keep her balance. The old woman was now balancing her stomach on the window sill. Her head then cocked up and a flash of light ricocheted off her face and into Lauren’s eyes. Slightly blinded, Lauren then realized that the cause of this was the light from the lamp in her room reflecting off of a large shard of glass that was lodged diagonally into the woman’s face. As Lauren pleaded with the woman to shift her body weight backwards in order to not fall out of the window, the old woman shot out a stiff arm and tried to grab Lauren’s hand. Lauren, stricken with fear, noticed that the bones of the middle knuckles of the woman’s hand were protruding through the eroded, abraded skin of her fingers. Unable to think rationally, Lauren leaned out the window and reached out her hand in a futile attempt to grab the hand of the woman and pull her to safety. Just when Lauren caught a faint grasp of her hand, the old woman rocked herself forward and kicked at the top of the window frame with her feet. Her mutilated hand slipped out of Lauren’s and she fell head first down three stories to the concrete pathway which lay between both houses. Lauren screamed in terror and ran down her apartment stairs without even putting her shoes on. She burst through her house’s front door and ran in a frenzy to the entrance of the neighbouring old woman’s residence. She hoped to notify the landlord or owner or anyone else living in the apartment house of what had occurred on the top floor. As she threw herself into the gothic style door adorning the residence, she screamed to be let in as she pounded the door with her fists, completely ignoring the doorbell to the left of the doorframe. She could hear an ambulance’s sirens in the distance.

Lauren was hit with a wave of confusion as the door opened to reveal Kayla, with drunken lit up eyes and an outstretched arm to greet Lauren with a hug. Yelling over the sound of party chatter and the echoing bass of a rap song, Kayla exclaimed “Oh my gosh Lauren, you came! Let me pour you a shot!” while oblivious to the fact that Lauren’s skin, pulsating from hyperventilation, was as pale as a ghost. In between breaths, Lauren muttered, “the old woman…upstairs…beside my room…she shook herself too hard…blood…she shook out of the window”. Kayla, trying to calm Lauren down, placed her hands on her shoulders and said, “Did you fall asleep and have a bad dream or something while studying? This is Jeff’s friend Luke’s place. His Dad owns the house and lets Luke live here rent free for the school year as long as he keeps an eye on the other tenants. How do you not know that! I have no idea how his Dad is still cool with that, some frat boy idiots trashed the house last year during Luke’s Halloween party and..”. Lauren was too overwhelmed by what she had witnessed to listen and broke free of Kayla’s grip, spilling her can of Bud Light as she darted towards the stairs. “Lauren what the hell! Where are you going! I was just about to say, there’s no old lady living here! The only older person who lives here is Robert on the second floor, who’s here from Spain or something to work as a janitor!” Kayla explained as she ran up the stairs after Lauren. Lauren knew exactly what she saw and was ready to prove Kayla wrong. She flung open the door to the room on the top floor across from hers and thought for sure she had selected the wrong door. She saw baseball hats lined up on a shelf, Metallica and Breaking Bad posters on the walls and a flat screen TV with the green glowing light of an Xbox game system beside it.

Lauren struggling for words, stepped out of the room and realized that this was the only top floor room across from her window. “This is Andrew’s room, Luke’s cousin. You’d probably see him from your room if you didn’t have the damn blinds closed all the time, you vampire! What are we doing up here? Let’s go downstairs to the party before Luke notices that people are in his cousin’s room and you can tell me all about this bad dream you had”. “But the woman…the window…I saw it break”. Lauren, losing faith in the reality of her surroundings ran back into Andrew’s room in order to study the window for herself. She placed her hands on it and noticed no cracks or traces of blood. “Lauren please calm down; you’re scaring me now!” Kayla cried. Lauren then looked beyond the windowpane towards her own window and saw herself in her room staring back at her, sitting at her desk chair while trembling and rubbing the middle knuckles of her fingers together under her neck.