Come Through The Window

9

The next day I went to see how Mike was doing, but he and his dad were gone the whole day. I asked him later where he went, but he wouldn't tell me. I think it must have been to a psychiatrist, because by Tuesday, the next time I saw him, he seemed to be better, if a little zoned out. I figure he got some drugs to calm his nerves, but that's just a guess. I never really found out. Over the next few days, the four of us hung out, and while Mike was quiet, he didn't say anything about what had happened. We just talked about stupid, unimportant stuff. Girls we liked, classes at school we hated. I wish we had said something to him now, though I don't know if it really would have helped, we had no idea what we were facing, and to this day, I still have no clue. But we avoided the subject of what happened that Saturday, and the practice of passing out in general, like it was the plague.

It wasn't until the following Saturday that he said anything related to what was happening to him.

We were walking down the quiet street of our neighborhood, towards the wooden footbridge that crosses the creek that runs between the houses, separating the development into two halves. I was going on about this hot girl who was a grade above me and who, consequently, wouldn't give me the time of day, and he, staring at the ground, walked on with his hands in his pockets. Suddenly, out of nowhere and right in the middle of one of my sentences, he says, "I won't be around much longer."

"Huh?"

"They'll be coming again tonight, and I don't think I'll be able to keep them out this time."

"Hey. Hey, what are you talking about? Who's coming tonight?"

"The hands, the voices."
At this point I was like, "holy shit." I could feel my breathing get quick and shallow and I felt my face and hands get hot to hear him talk, so matter-of-factly, about some horror that I couldn't even imagine. But I'll never forget that conversation. It's etched into my mind like the stone tablets in The Ten Commandments.

I stammered a few times, then said, stupidly, "What hands?"

"At night, I look at the tree out my window, then it goes black and the hands, dozens, a hundred of them, push in against the glass."

"And what do you do?"

"I push back. All night. But I'm tired. I can't keep them out anymore. And the voices say I have to let them in. Little kid voices, and little kid hands." He lowered his voice to a whisper, but I could tell, in what he said next, that he was struggling to keep the panic at bay. "Sometimes, I see their faces," he said in a trembling voice.