Chapter 1: Because I Said So

Chapter 1: Because I Said So

The rule was as old as my memory, as solid and unyielding as the walls of our house. Never open the bedroom window.

Not when the summer air grew thick and heavy, turning our upstairs rooms into stifling ovens. Not when the scent of freshly cut grass and neighborhood barbecues drifted tantalizingly from outside. Not even a crack. The window in the room I shared with my younger brother, Luis, was to remain shut and locked. Always.

When I was twelve, and brave enough to ask why, my father’s face had hardened into a mask of granite. “Because I said so.”

My mother, her hands twisting a dish towel into a tight braid, had simply echoed him with a nervous flutter of her eyes. “Listen to your father, Elara.”

In our house, “Because I said so” was the end of all arguments. It was the Eleventh Commandment, the one that superseded all reason. It was the foundation of the quiet, orderly, and deeply anxious world my parents, Mark and Carol Vance, had built.

The summer I turned sixteen was a crucible of heat and teenage rebellion. For me, rebellion was a quiet, internal affair—a desperate desire to understand the logic behind the rules. For Luis, who was twelve, rebellion was a lit fuse.

“It’s stupid,” he grumbled one suffocating August afternoon. We were sprawled on our respective beds, the air so humid it felt like breathing through a wet cloth. Sweat slicked our skin. “It’s a hundred degrees in here. What’s it going to do? Is the house going to fly away?”

“Dad will kill us,” I said, my voice limp. I was staring at the window. It was an old double-hung sash, the white paint on the frame yellowed and cracked. Decades of being sealed shut had fused it together, a faint line of grime outlining the seam like a scar.

“He’s not here. They won’t be back for hours,” Luis shot back, pushing his dark, unkempt hair off his forehead. He had our father’s defiant jaw, but our mother’s anxious eyes, a conflict that was always simmering just beneath his skin.

My desire was simple: a breath of fresh air. A cool breeze to cut through the oppressive stillness. But the obstacle was insurmountable: the ingrained, bone-deep fear of my father's wrath.

Luis, however, didn’t have the same internal governor. He swung his legs off the bed. Action.

“Luis, don’t,” I whispered, sitting up. My heart began to thud a nervous, heavy rhythm against my ribs.

He ignored me, his wiry frame tensed with determination. He fiddled with the brass latch, which was stiff with disuse. It didn’t budge. He grunted, his face reddening with effort. “It’s painted shut.”

“See? It’s not meant to be opened. Just leave it.”

But Luis was never one to leave things. He disappeared and returned a moment later with one of our dad’s screwdrivers. He wedged the flat head into the seam between the sash and the frame.

“Luis, stop it! You’ll break it!”

“Good,” he muttered, and with a sharp, violent grunt, he twisted the screwdriver.

The sound was shockingly loud in the quiet house. A sharp CRACK of splintering wood and breaking paint. The seal was broken. The result was instantaneous. Luis shoved the lower sash upward. It protested with a long, groaning scrape, but it moved.

Cool, fresh air, smelling of honeysuckle and distant rain, flooded the room. It was glorious. Luis grinned, his chest puffed out with victory. “See? Nothing happened.”

For a moment, I believed him. I took a deep, greedy breath, the first truly fresh one I’d had in that room in my entire life. It felt like a small, perfect rebellion.

The turning point came two hours later. The sound of our father's car crunching gravel in the driveway was a gunshot in our peaceful mutiny. Panic seized me. We scrambled to close the window, but the old wood, warped and angry, refused to slide back down. It was stuck, open a defiant six inches.

My father walked in first. His eyes, which were always scanning for imperfections, for any deviation from his rigid order, went straight to the window. His face didn't just darken; it seemed to collapse, all color draining away, replaced by a terrifying, stark white fury.

“What did you do?” His voice was a low growl that vibrated through the floorboards.

Luis, ever the defiant one, squared his shoulders. “It was hot. It’s just a window.”

What happened next was a blur of motion. My father crossed the room in three strides, grabbed the window sash with both hands, and slammed it shut with a force that rattled the glass in its frame. My mother appeared in the doorway, her face a mask of pure terror, her hand clamped over her mouth.

“Get out,” my father snarled at us, not looking away from the window. “Both of you. Now.”

We fled. From the hallway, I heard the sound of a hammer. Three loud bangs. Bang. Bang. Bang. When we were allowed back in an hour later, a thick nail had been driven through the sash into the frame, brutally and permanently sealing it shut. My father’s unspoken message was clear: this would never happen again.

That night, the subtle terror began.

The room was colder. Not just the normal chill of a summer night, but a deep, penetrating cold that seemed to emanate from the window itself. I buried myself under the covers, but it felt like wrapping myself in sheets of ice. A faint, cloying scent, like wilted funeral flowers and damp earth, hung in the air, a scent no amount of air freshener my mother sprayed the next day could erase.

I told myself it was my imagination, my guilt playing tricks on me. Luis, though he’d never admit it, was spooked too. He started sleeping with his back to the wall, his gaze constantly darting towards the window as if expecting to see something looking in.

The true surprise, the moment that fractured my carefully constructed reality, came a week later.

It was late. Luis was asleep, his breathing a soft rhythm in the darkness. I lay awake, staring at the ceiling, my mind replaying our father’s terrifying anger. The cold in the room was worse than ever, a damp, cellar-like chill that made my teeth ache.

I heard a sound. A soft, dry scraping from the direction of the window.

Scraaaape. Scraaaape.

Like a fingernail being dragged slowly across the old wood.

My blood turned to ice. I held my breath, listening, praying it was a branch from the oak tree outside. But there was no wind tonight. The air was dead still.

Scraaaape.

It was inside the room.

My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic bird trapped in a cage. I squeezed my eyes shut, a child’s instinct to make the monster go away. Don’t look. Don’t listen.

But I couldn’t block it out. The scraping stopped. The silence that followed was somehow heavier, more menacing. The cold intensified, settling over my bed like a physical weight, pressing down on my chest. I felt it before I heard it—a presence, a shift in the very substance of the air beside me.

It wasn't the cold that made me stop breathing. It was the whisper that followed, breathed directly into the shell of my ear. The voice was female, ancient, and brittle, like the rustle of dried leaves skittering across a tombstone. It spoke three words, not of rage, but of cold, absolute possession.

“This is mine.”