The Leaking Window

When I was nine, the house on Cypress Lane taught me that the dead don’t always stay dead. I’d lie in bed, watching the rain streak down the window like tears, and see a woman standing at the foot of my mattress. She wore a yellow sundress, and her hair hung in wet ropes around her face. I never felt afraid. She’d smile, or sometimes just watch the rain, and I’d fall asleep to the rhythm of drops and the soft creak of the floorboards.

My mother, Elena, had her own gift. She called it ‘the drifting,’ and she’d been doing it since she was a girl. She’d tell me about floating over the rooftops of our small town, over the lake where the reeds bent like fingers, and into the homes of sleeping neighbors to see their secrets. I thought it was wonderful, a family heirloom passed from her grandmother, who used to soothe colicky babies by whispering in their dreams. We were a family of dreamers, we said. The window was just our special way of letting the world in.

But when I turned sixteen, the window began to leak. Not water—a dark, oily substance that collected in the corners of the sill and smelled of burnt sugar and wet ash. I’d wake with my sheets slightly damp, the scent clinging to my pillow. At first, I thought it was just an old house quirk, but then I started hearing faint, rhythmic tapping against the glass at night, like a fingernail testing the pane. The woman in the yellow dress appeared more frequently, but now her smile was gone. She’d press her palm against the window, and I’d see the glass fog under her touch, leaving a smear that took an hour to fade.

Elena noticed too. She’d stop mid-drift, her eyes wide, and tell me, ‘Marcus, something is at the edges of the dream—something heavy.’ She said it felt like being watched by a giant, a presence that pressed down on her chest when she floated too high. We started sleeping with the lights on, but that only made the shadows in the corners feel deeper.

The tapping grew insistent. It would come in patterns, like Morse code, but I couldn’t decipher it. One night, I decided to answer. I stood before the window, my nose almost touching the cold glass, and I tapped back—three slow knocks. The tapping stopped. For a beat, the silence was so thick I could hear my own heartbeat. Then the window exploded inward. Not outward, as if something had thrown it open, but inward, as if the glass had been sucked from a vacuum. Shards scattered across the floor, and the night air rushed in, carrying the smell of wet earth and something else—something like a damp basement full of old clothes.

I stared at the hole, expecting the woman, but instead, a shape coalesced from the darkness. It was tall, too tall, with limbs that bent at wrong angles, and its skin was the color of pond scum. Its eyes were not eyes but two pinpricks of violet light, and they fixed on me with an ancient hunger. It spoke, but not with a voice. The words crawled into my skull like centipedes. *’You are a window,’* it said. *’Your mother is a door. And I am the storm.’*

I tried to scream, but my throat closed. I tried to run, but my legs were roots. The thing reached out a long, wet hand, and as its fingers brushed my forehead, I felt something crack inside me—a barrier I never knew existed. My astral body, which I’d only ever seen moving in and out of my physical form like a phantom limb, suddenly snapped loose like a rubber band. I floated backward, watching my own body fall to the floor as if it were a puppet with cut strings. The creature grinned, its mouth splitting from ear to ear, and I saw teeth like broken glass. It turned from my body and began dragging itself toward my mother’s room.

I tried to scream at her, to warn her, but my voice was a wisp of air. I rushed through walls—through the kitchen where my mother’s teacups sat in a row, through the hallway where our family photos stared down like strangers—and burst into her room. She was sleeping, her face peaceful, her chest rising and falling. The creature was already at the foot of her bed, its head tilted, its violet eyes pulsing.

‘Mother!’ I shouted, but the sound emerged as a low hum, a frequency I felt in my teeth. She stirred, her eyelids fluttering, and I realized she was drifting—her astral body was halfway out of her, a shimmering silhouette of her form. The creature reached out and seized that shimmering form by the throat. A sound like tearing silk cut through the air as her astral body was ripped free. I watched as her physical body went slack, a single breath escaping before her chest froze. The creature swallowed her astral self in one long gulp, like a snake with a meal too large.

Then it turned to me, its violet eyes now holding a glint of her blue. It laughed—a sound like gravel grating in a drain—and said, *’Two windows, one door. I’ll take them all.’*

I woke up on my bedroom floor, showered in glass, my body tingling as if I’d been electrocuted. I ran to my mother’s room. She was cold, her face a mask of serene sleep, but no breath stirred her lips. The paramedics called it a stroke, but I knew better. I saw the creature’s work: a faint, oily residue on her forehead, and on my window, now repaired with a cardboard box, a single word scratched into the glass: *’COME.’*

Now, at nineteen, I live in a new apartment in a different city. I’ve tried to seal myself off, to ignore the dreams where I float over rooftops and hear that tapping. But every night, the tapping returns. It’s not at the window anymore—it’s at my chest. It’s a rhythm, a heartbeat not mine, and when I look into mirrors, I sometimes see a faint shimmer behind me, like a heat haze. My mother’s drifting gift has become a curse, and I know that creature is not done. It wants another window. It wants me to open the door. And the worst part is, a part of me—the part that was always a dreamer—wants to let it in.

Last night, I woke to find my hand pressed against the bedroom window, the glass cold and damp, and my fingers tracing a pattern I didn’t recognize. The leak has started again, but now it’s not liquid—it’s an oily shadow that creeps along the floorboards, and from somewhere deep inside the walls, I swear I hear my mother’s voice, calling me by my childhood nickname, telling me to open the window and let the storm in. And I’m afraid, not of the creature, but because I don’t know if I can resist much longer.