Chapter 3: Whispers Outside the Window

Chapter 3: Whispers Outside the Window

The quiet click of the window lock being thumbed into place was deafening. Liam stood there for a long moment, staring at the brass latch, his own pale reflection superimposed over the blackness of their backyard. He didn’t dare look out. He didn’t have to. The open window, the trail of blood, the empty frame on his laptop screen—they formed a syllogism of pure dread.

“Liam.” Sarah’s voice was thin, stripped of its usual warmth. She hadn’t moved from the office doorway.

He turned from the window, his movements stiff and robotic. “Check the doors,” he said, the command gravelly in his throat.

That broke her paralysis. Her training, her ingrained instinct to act in a crisis, took over. While he went to the front door, checking the deadbolt and chain, she moved through the downstairs, her steps quick and sure. The slide lock on the kitchen window. The bolt on the patio door. Every potential entry point was secured. They met again in the central hallway, two prisoners fortifying their own cell. The comforting familiarity of their home had evaporated, replaced by a suffocating awareness of its fragility, of the thinness of glass and wood against the night.

“It’s just a precaution,” Sarah said, trying to force normality into her tone. It cracked. “Probably just… a raccoon got in the office, cut itself, and we scared it off.”

Liam looked at her, at the lie she was trying so desperately to construct for both their sakes. “Did a raccoon erase a figure from a 20-year-old JPEG, Sarah?”

Her face crumpled. The lie died. They were in this together.

They retreated upstairs, not speaking. The act of climbing the stairs, a mindless daily ritual, now felt like ascending to the last defensible position in a siege. They didn’t bother changing, crawling into their bed fully clothed. The blankets offered no warmth, only a flimsy shield against the oppressive silence of the house.

For an hour, there was nothing but the thudding of his own heart and the distant hum of the refrigerator. Liam’s eyes burned from staring into the darkness of their bedroom, mapping every shadow, turning every shape—a discarded shirt, the wardrobe door—into a potential threat.

Then came the first sound.

It was a scrape. Faint, but distinct. It came from the side of the house, from just below their bedroom window. It was the sound of something hard and sharp being dragged across the concrete of the narrow path that led to the backyard. Scraaaape. Pause. Scraaaaape.

Sarah’s breath hitched. She heard it too.

Liam’s entire body went rigid. He strained to listen, every nerve ending alight. It wasn’t an animal sound. It lacked the frantic, scrabbling quality of a squirrel or a cat. This was slow. Deliberate. Methodical. The sound of a tool being used. Or a claw.

He thought of the pale thing’s impossibly long limbs, the smooth, featureless face that held more menace than any snarling beast. He imagined it out there, dragging a sharp stone or a broken branch along the foundation of their home, testing the walls. Marking its territory.

The scraping stopped. For a full minute, the silence returned, somehow heavier and more menacing than before. Liam’s muscles screamed with tension, waiting for the sound to resume.

It didn’t. Instead, it was replaced by something worse.

A wet, dragging noise.

It started in the backyard, a soft, rhythmic shhhhhh-thump… shhhhhh-thump… It was the sound of a heavy weight, something sodden and limp, being pulled across the damp grass. Liam’s mind, rebelling against his will, supplied the image: the ruined body of the deer from the photograph, its dead weight being dragged through his lawn. But that was impossible. That was twenty years ago, hundreds of miles away.

Shhhhhh-thump…

The sound was closer now, just beneath the window. He could almost feel the vibration through the floorboards. Sarah’s hand found his in the dark, her grip crushingly tight. Her knuckles were white. He could hear her trying to control her breathing, taking shallow, silent sips of air.

This was psychological warfare. The creature wasn’t trying to get in. Not yet. It was demonstrating its presence. It was reminding them that the locks on their doors were meaningless. It was telling them that the space just outside their walls, the manicured lawn where they’d hosted barbecues and watched their kids play, now belonged to it.

The dragging noise circled the house, a slow, patient patrol. It lingered by the front porch, then moved back around the far side. Hours crawled by. Sleep was an impossible luxury. They lay there, two statues carved from fear, listening to the obscene sounds of the thing that had followed them out of a photograph.

Sometime before dawn, the sounds stopped completely. The silence that followed was absolute, empty.

The first slivers of grey morning light finally filtered through the blinds, painting pale stripes across the room. The world outside was waking up. A bird sang. A car started up down the street. The sounds of mundane life felt like transmissions from a different planet.

“It’s morning,” Sarah whispered, her voice raw.

Neither of them had slept. Exhaustion was a heavy cloak, but the terror was a spike of adrenaline keeping them wired, raw.

“I have to look,” Liam said, his own voice hoarse. He swung his legs out of bed, his body aching from a night of coiled tension.

Sarah was right behind him, but she stopped in the hallway to grab the heavy iron poker from the fireplace set. The metal was cold and solid in her hand, a stark contrast to the intangible dread of the night. Her face was grim, her earlier attempts at rationalization burned away by hours of auditory torment.

Downstairs, the house was still and silent. Sunlight streamed through the windows, illuminating dust motes dancing in the air. For a heart-stopping second, it looked so normal, so peaceful, that Liam felt a dizzying wave of hope. Maybe they had imagined it. A shared delusion. A folie à deux brought on by stress and a bizarre photograph.

He reached the front door. He peered through the peephole. The curved glass distorted the view of their porch and lawn, but he could see nothing out of the ordinary.

His hand trembled as he reached for the deadbolt. It made a loud, grating clack as he turned it. He undid the chain, the metallic rattle echoing in the quiet hall. Sarah stood just behind his shoulder, the poker held ready.

He pulled the door inward, opening it just a few inches.

The first thing that hit him was the smell.

It was the same smell from his office, the scent that had bloomed in his mouth with the returning memory—a potent, coppery tang of fresh blood. But here, in the open morning air, it was overwhelming, thick enough to taste.

He opened the door wider. And there, on their cheerful "Welcome" mat, lay the reason for the smell.

It was a squirrel. Or it had been. Its grey fur was matted dark with blood. Its body was twisted into a grotesque parody of life, its back arched and broken. Its stomach had been ripped open with a surgical, almost deliberate, savagery, its tiny organs glistening in the morning sun. Its head was cocked to one side, one black, lifeless eye staring up at them.

It was not an animal attack. It was a presentation. An offering.

Liam stared, his stomach churning. The whispers in the dark, the unseen scraping, the dragging sounds—they had been abstract terrors. This was real. This was viscera and blood on his doorstep. The horror was no longer a memory, no longer a digital anomaly, no longer a whisper outside the window.

It was here. And it was watching them.