Short Scary Stories

It's the Little Things

If there was one thing I knew for sure it was that the moment our new neighbors moved in next to us, things in our quiet little suburb seemed to fall out of place. Now don’t get me wrong, the walls of my house didn’t start to bleed or anything, but, something just changed.

The first day the Smiths moved in, my mom made it her goal to make the new foreigners feel welcomed in our little covenant controlled community. My mom, although she was a flight attendant and was often out of town, liked to welcome any new comer to the neighborhood, which sadly involved her dragging me, her awkward seventeen year old daughter, to welcome any new family.

The Smiths, if I could describe them in a word, seemed very…. strained. The couple both had a set of dark circles under their eyes, and after flashing my mother and I with an exhausted smile, they introduced themselves and their baby, whose name seems to have escaped me. It’s understandable that having a screaming, pooping hellion roaming around one’s house would increase the levels of stress, but these people looked like they had been through an uphill battle. Several things betrayed the normality of them, like the bandage wrapped around the husbands hand, or how the wife seemed to cling just a little too close to her baby. After giving them a batch of slightly burned cookies and saying our goodbyes, my mother and I took the unbearable 20 second walk back to our home.

“Well,” My mother started, “They seemed like a nice couple.”

“I just hope that we won’t be able to hear that baby screaming at ungodly hours of the night,” I mumbled, instantly getting scolded about how I needed to be more friendly. Easy for my mom to say because she would be out of town most of the time and didn’t have to deal with whatever obnoxious family moved in next.

It was actually was a couple of weeks before anything strange started to happen. Between school and my mom heading out to catch her next flight, I didn’t really have time to add two and two together about what was going on. At first it was only little things, trash cans being knocked over, mail scattered out of our mailbox, keys being misplaced, and even finding my toothbrush knocked off the bathroom counter. But nothing that made me think something malicious was taking place.

One thing that did raise my suspicions was when I was home alone (nothing new to me) and had just returned from school. I walked into my kitchen and looked out the window over the sink, which, much to my dismay, looked right through the backyard and into the kitchen window of our new neighbor’s house. Whether they were home or out, the Smiths always had their blinds shut, but when I walked up to the sink to wash my hands, I saw what looked like someone parting the blinds and looking straight at me. Feeling slightly taken back, I quickly gave them a short wave and turned away. I mean, both of the couple’s cars were in the driveway, maybe one of them was looking out into their backyard for something. I didn’t realize that the eyes from behind the window kept watching me until I disappeared down the hallway to the bathroom.

Sitting at the kitchen table and dining on the cheapest Chinese take out I could order, I strained to finish my math homework. I nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard a crash from my garage, accompanied by my dog barking like an idiot.

“Kimbo!” I yelled, throwing open the garage door, looking accusingly into the dog run, trying to get a glimpse of the clumsy canine. However, Kimbo stood innocently in the center of the caged enclosure, but stared intensely at the once neatly stacked pile of wood. Walking into the cold room and flicking on the light, it looked as if someone had pulled out the bottom of the stand the wood had once sat on, leaving all of it to topple to the floor. I sighed and lazily nudged the wood into a makeshift pile, not feeling motivated enough to re-stack it all. But as I reached the back of the pile, which had the highest stack of wood on it, something shifted under the wood and moved deeper into the garage.