“Have you met the man in the curtain?”
Sarah sighed and pushed her thumbs into her eyes, exasperated. She was beyond tired of having this silly conversation. For nearly a week, every evening had ended with this question. This was the last time.
“Yeah, sure, I met him,” Sarah said by way of appeasement. “Go to sleep now.”
Annie scrunched her little face. “Did you really?” she asked.
Great. The same creepy question for days and now that I finally give her what she wants she doesn’t even believe me . . .
“Yes,” Sarah answered, punctuating the word with a curt little tug on the girl’s bedsheet. She had a habit of sleepwalking and Sarah was sick of being startled by a tiny, silent waif staggering down dark hallways. It wasn’t going to happen tonight. She tightened the sheets further.
“Alright, well, good night,” Sarah said and straightened.
“Did he ask you to play with us?’
Sarah shuddered. For just one night, she would like to not be creeped out to her core. Turning back to the bed, she found Annie lying there, waiting, looking up at her with those strange, vacant doll eyes of hers.
Was this really worth the pay? Yes, but not by much. The Andersons were rich, but unlike the misers one might expect to live in such a palatial estate, they were not tightfisted. She was being well compensated (extremely well compensated, if she was being honest) for what amounted to a few hours of babysitting an eight year old girl over the course of one week. But this particular eight year old girl . . .
Annie was . . . strange. Pale as milk and delicate as a finch, she was more like an expensive figurine than a little girl. She was soft spoken but not shy. In fact, she talked a lot, but it was mostly to herself. On multiple occasions, Sarah had found the frail child whispering to herself, often stroking an idle hand across the back of her pet rabbit. That alone may not have chilled Sarah as much had it just been the idle nattering of a bored child, but no, what she had heard from Annie was pointed conversation, always whispered and always to a window. Whenever Sarah would come near, Annie would stop, turn and smile.
Something about the girl’s smile made Sarah’s stomach go all prickly. There was nothing overtly wicked or sinister to it — it was wide and missing a few teeth, a child’s smile — but something was just off with it, false. A facsimile, to borrow a word from her English Lit course.
In fact, the word applied to everything in the Anderson’s home. It was ornately decorated and lavishly furnished, all the doors were real and led to corresponding rooms, there were no secret tunnels or passageways to Sarah’s knowledge, yet it all seemed unnatural, not lived in. Like it was staged for an open house.
The money was real enough, though, and that kept her coming back, to watch over the world’s creepiest child and field her even creepier questions. Two more nights. At least now you can afford therapy.
“Did he ask you to play with us?” Annie asked again in that flat voice of hers. Her eyes were dull beads above milkwhite cheeks.
“Listen, Annie, you need to go to sleep, okay? And I need you to stay asleep tonight. In this bed. Got that?”
“He’s very shy,” Annie replied, ignoring Sarah’s questions and carrying on her own conversation, as she did. Sarah was not having it.
“Annie! It’s bedtime. I’m leaving now, go to sleep. Goodnight.”
“He doesn’t talk to everyone. I don’t think he’s rude, just shy. He likes to play. Didn’t he ask you to play with us?”
“Yes, okay?!” Sarah snapped. Her patience for this had expired and she just wanted Annie to sleep so she could drink a glass of the Anderson’s nice wine, watch television and grind out the rest of this week so she could take her cash and leave this little girl and her weird, freaky obsession with invisible men far, far behind her. “He asked me to play with you. I said yes. We’ll play tomorrow, when it’s not bedtime. Does that work for you?”
“Good,” Annie answered. She smiled and then closed her eyes, that doll’s head of her’s sinking deeper into the pillow, filled with whatever bizarre thoughts she had buzzing about up there. “He has the best games.”
“Great,” said Sarah, shaking her head as she walked to the door. “Go to sleep.” She flipped the light and closed the door quietly.
The hallway outside Annie’s room was long and narrow, lit on one end by the distant chandelier of the foyer and descending into shadow on the other, which led into another wing of the Anderson’s estate. There was a large window, lined with billowing drapes that hung from an iron rod high overhead, between the girl’s room and the foyer. Moonlight pooled through it now, painting a relief of the windowframe against the slant of floor and wall.
Sarah had walked past that window every night over the past week. Since that first evening, she had dreaded doing it each and every time. The “man in the curtain” lived there. Well, obviously, he didn’t. It was just a window and they were just drapes. But to Annie, it was the home of her strange, hidden friend. Sarah had come across the little girl whispering into those curtains more than once, catching some hushed snippet of conversation that made no sense, words that sounded strange from a child’s tongue.
Two more nights.
Sarah hurried down the hallway. When she reached the window, she hesitated for a moment, then picked up her pace. She made a little skip-hop around the moonlight, avoiding it as if she were playing the-floor-is-lava. There was no thought to do it, she just did it. Almost instinctual. She kept her head down, as if looking at the drapes would somehow conjure up some spirit or ghoul or whatever stupid, beastly thing that lived only in imagination. Still, her eye caught the drapery in periphery, dark and folded. There was a familiar shape to them, wasn’t there?
And then she was past. Her skin felt less cold, her heart took up its regular rhythm once more and a quiet shame crept over her for how stupid and childish she had let herself become. She made her way towards the front of the Anderson’s home, where the lights were bright and there was wine and comfortable things and sanity.
Behind her, the drapes shifted against the moonlight silently.
The night took on a regular cadence as Sarah sank into the Andersons’ couch, wine in hand. Hours slipped by uneventfully as she scrolled through her phone and passively eyed the television. It was nearly midnight, after two tall pours of wine and far too much scrolling through photos, that the first noise came.
Drip. Drip.
Drip.
She paused, inclining her ear, unsure if she was actually hearing it or imagining it. It came again.
Drip.
Likely the faucet in the kitchen, she must have not turned the handle all the way. But she know that wasn’t right. It wasn’t a steady sound, not mechanical. It was wilder than that. And the drops sounded thicker than a few drips off a leaky faucet.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
It was louder. Sarah sat up. From her position on the couch she could see into the open kitchen and the darker hallway beyond, which opened onto the foyer before continuing down into blackness towards Annie’s room. There was nothing there, at least nothing she could see.
It’s the sink. Grow up, already.
Sarah pushed herself from off the couch. Her legs felt like rubber noodles.
Grow up!
She shook out her limbs, one by one, in an attempt to shed the anxious little bugs that were crawling up her skin. It was just the sink. She was letting the weird quirks of an eight year old go to her head. It’s just the sink.
On legs that still weren’t quite steady, she made her way to the kitchen. The wine bottle was still on the counter, the corkscrew next to it. The sink, with its fancy curved faucet, sat in the center of the marble platform. Sarah approached it warily, as if it were a cornered animal that may bite if she moved too quickly.
The handle was depressed, off. The basin was dry.
Drip.
She gasped. Before she had even realized it, Sarah had spun towards the sound, towards what her body instinctually told her was danger. Why, when startled, would instinct force you to face a threat, she could never say, but she was now staring down a dim hallway.
She didn’t see anything — rather, she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. The chandelier hung in the foyer, illuminating a waist-high oak table topped with tulips. Beyond that little island of light was Annie’s hallway. She could not make out any shapes there. It was too dark.
“Annie?” She was whispering, perhaps because the lump in her throat still hadn’t gone back down. Sarah could not make out any shapes in the hallway, but, as she knew all too well, the little girl had a knack for sleepwalking. Maybe she had peed the bed or spilled some water on herself or something and was now stumbling around.
“Annie,” Sarah said again, sliding her bottom across the marble countertop in an attempt to keep as much distance between herself and that hallway as possible. “Annie, is that you?”
Drip. Drip.
It was definitely coming from the hallway. Sarah squinted against the light of the chandelier. Was there a shadow there, darker than the hall around it? She couldn’t tell. The moonlight that pooled through the window had crawled higher up the wall, but besides that little illuminated patch, all was black.
“Annie? Annie, you need to go back to bed, okay? You shouldn’t be u—”
Her throat snipped off the words. Like a stain through cloth, the girl emerged from the shadowed well of the hallway into the patch of moonlight. It painted her already pale complexion a shade whiter. She stared at Sarah with colorless eyes, pupil-less, pearls set in alabaster. With placid grace, she lifted up her arms and now Sarah saw the source of that dripping noise. A dead rabbit, mutilated, lay across Annie’s palms.
“You lied,” said the little girl, her terrible sightless eyes never leaving Sarah’s. “But he still wants you to play with us.”
Sarah gagged as the space between her stomach and throat shortened. Every cell in her body screamed, “Run!”, but she remained frozen, transfixed by the pale, blind-eyed thing that was once a little girl now striding steadily towards her. Each step brought a drip, drip, drip from her dead rabbit as its twisted body spat blood onto the tiled floor.
As Annie — or this thing that was once Annie — stepped under the light of the foyer, Sarah caught a flash of movement in the moonlit square behind her. The curtains had danced, impossibly, as if caught by a wind that could not have been there. The window was closed.
Sarah opened her mouth, but the voice that came out was barely a shadow of her own, hushed and strained. “Annie? Annie wake up.”
The girlthing said nothing. It stared with blank eyes and held up the rabbit, then let it slip from her hands to splat on the tile in a wet spray. A wicked smile split Annie’s face in two.
“Your turn,” she said, the words tumbling like polished stones from her grinning mouth.
Sarah shrieked. She was running, she realized suddenly, but though her mind screeched, “Flee!”, the legs which carried her were pounding their way across the floor towards the waifish little thing smiling under the glare of the chandelier.
She caught Annie’s shoulders in a panicked grasp, shaking her violently. “Wake up! Wake up, Annie! Annie!” Her screams took on a primal quality, emanating from deep within her. Annie thrashed violently in her grasp, her smile never dropping. A cold, bloodstained hand curled around Sarah’s forearm. She froze.
Annie inclined her head, looking up at her with a face terrific and alien. “It’s your turn,” the girlthing said. “You have to play. He wants you to play.”
The curtain moved again behind her, unmistakable now. Framed in its folds, Sarah saw the shape of a man, tall and broad. It was only a moment, but it was there.
“We have to go,” she said, swollen tongue slurring the words as she rushed to get them out. “Annie, we have to get you out of here. Wake up!” Sarah’s hand slapped across the girl’s face. “Wake up!”
“I’ve given you something of mine.” A pale hand motioned to the dead rabbit, but the dead eyes remained fix on Sarah’s. “It’s your turn. Give me something of yours.”
That was enough. Sarah wasn’t sure what she was going to do — what she even could do — but she knew they had to leave. She huddled Annie’s frail little frame beneath her arm and scuttled across the tiles as fast as she could move. They cleared the foyer, entered the kitchen. Without releasing the girl, Sarah groped at the cutting board on the counter, where she had left a large, black-handled knife earlier, used to cut some extravagant, fragrant cheese that would only be in the home of a family as rich as the Andersons. She gripped the knife tight, praying she would not need to use it, that all of this was just some strange nightwalk delirium of a little girl. That she hadn’t seen that figure in the hallway, wreathed in moonlight and velvet drapery.
The lights clicked off with a severe suddenty.
Sarah’s knee barked painfully against something hard. She felt her feet go out from under her and then the hard, unforgiving tile knocked the breath from her lungs. Her grip on Annie was lost but the knife was still clutched deeply in her palm.
From out of the newfallen darkness, she heard the piercing giggles of a young girl.
“Time to play, time to play,” the thing that was Annie chattered in a perverse singsong.
Sarah groaned and pushed herself onto her knees. The room around her was dim, but not completely dark. The moon was near full and the windows in the living room were large. Still, she could not find Annie within this menagerie of shadow.
An invisible gust stirred the curtains which hung loosely about the windows. Impossible, again. They were closed. She knew they were, but the curtains moved all the same. She saw the manshape again, enveloped by the drapery which gave it form. It loomed and then was gone.
“Time to play,” Annie sang. “Time to play.”
And now Sarah saw her. Annie rose up before the window, backlit by the pale light of the moon. She rose higher. She was levitating, Sarah saw but did not believe.
None of this made sense. It wasn’t possible. She had just wanted some extra cash. It was only two more nights.
“Time to play,” the floating girlthing spoke unto her in a voice that was no longer Annie’s. “I have given you something of mine, now you give me something of yours.”
“Annie…,” Sarah pleaded. Her voice was weak. “Annie, I don’t understand. Please. Please, just wake up.”
“It is your turn,” the thing spoke without emotion.
Sarah was sobbing. Her knee throbbed. She looked at the girl, who she was charged with watching, protecting, suspended in moonlight. “I — I don’t know what you want,” Sarah choked out. “I don’t understand.”
“I gave you something of mine,” answered the girlthing. “Now you must give me something of yours.”
“I don’t have anything to give you!”
“Don’t you?” it asked and then split its smile further across its pallid face, invisible hooks tugging up on either side. “She gave you her pet. Don’t you have something here you can give to me?”
“No…,” Sarah said, suddenly following. The shape of the shadowman danced in the curtains beside Annie’s hanging body. “No. No, no I can’t. That’s not the same.”
“You said you would play.” Annie’s lips formed the words, but she was not speaking. “You can either give me what I want, or I can take it.”
There came a horrid scream, like ice across glass, as Annie’s back arched and her limbs splayed. Sarah covered her ears against the cries, gnashing her teeth as they pierced through regardless.
“Will you play?” the voice of the man in the curtain asked. Annie’s screams underscored his questioning.
“Yes!” screeched Sarah. “Yes! I’ll play!” She could think of nothing other than ending the little girl’s cries.
The room fell silent.
“Good. Come, then. It’s your turn.”
She didn’t know how she found her feet, but she did. Each step was heavier than the last. The girlthing watched her approach. The shadowman came and went with each unexplained gust that stirred the curtains.
The knife was heavy in her hand. The girlthing lowered itself. She saw Annie’s face now, young and pale and innocent.
“It’s your turn,” said a voice, but it didn’t come from the girl.
Sarah raised the knife. Tears made the moonlight shatter across her vision in a million directions.
She swung her hand, dimly aware of the way the blade caught the reflection of a man with no face as it descended. Its tip pushed through something solid…
The pain struck like lightning. She curled around it, her hand trembling on the knife’s handle as she drove it deeper into her own gut.
Sarah sunk to her knees. That impossible wind picked up all around her, swirling her hair about her face.
As she sank into darkness, she saw Annie’s face swim in front of her. Her eyes — her eyes — were blue and wide.
“Your turn, Annie,” a stranger’s voice, possibly her own but so very far away, said.
Before blackness enveloped her completely, Sarah heard Annie shouting. The wind collapsed inward. Glass shattered.
Nothing.
Dark.
No pain. No light.
No.
There was light. A pinprick.
It grew.
It was bright, now, coming at her. She could almost feel its warmth. It was widening and now she could hear the —
“Sarah? Oh my God, Sarah? Sarah!”
A familiar face filled her vision. It was her mother, she realized. That wasn’t right. The last thing she had seen was . . . what was it? Something odd.
Where was she now?
She was in a bed. Her family was there. There was a TV in the corner. Bright light streamed in through an open window.
It was a hospital room. She was breathing.
She was breathing and it was bright. That’s all that mattered to her now.
There were hugs and tears and laughter. They didn’t tell her everything, but she heard enough to spark the memory. She had survived an attack. She couldn’t feel much below her chest, but they said she would recover.
The girl had been okay, too. She was with her parents, who had apparently written some large check and paid for all of Sarah’s hospital bills.
She would care more about that later. Now, she was tired. She didn’t want to remember everything now. She didn’t want to talk. She just wanted to rest.
They left her to sleep as the sun gave way to stars.
Sarah sighed, relieved. She sunk into her bed and slowly closed her eyes.
Through a closed window, the night sky hung. In her room, warm and alone, Sarah drifted off as the curtains danced in an unseen wind.