Third Part Here: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/d06zjv/it_watches_part_3/
I didn’t leave the house for quite a while after the incident in Casey’s mother’s room. I tried my best to act like nothing was wrong, since I didn’t want my parents to know I had snuck around and almost been caught by the police. I was also trying to convince myself that everything was alright, but I was constantly haunted by memories of the things that he, the monster-man, had said and done, and the unsettling way he moved. With all of that time spent remembering the events of that night, questions started to form. If he was a man, where did he come from? Why was he the way he was? How long had he been terrorizing the neighborhood? What was the “first house” he had mentioned?
These questions eventually prompted me to leave the house of my own volition again. I needed some answers. Luckily, the city archives were nearby, and I had recently learned in school that old records and newspapers would be kept there. Someone had to have seen something strange in our neighborhood at some point. I couldn’t have been the only one.
So, on any days I had free time, I started riding my bike down to the archives. I always made sure to leave myself plenty of daylight for returning home, but it was still nerve-wracking to be out and about in the neighborhood after all that had transpired. I noticed during these daily journeys that my neighborhood had an inordinately large number of missing pet posters as compared to other nearby neighborhoods. I could pretty easily guess why that was the case.
I think I expected my search for information to be like the movies. I would spend a few days at most searching through dusty boxes full of newspapers, then I would find an article that would tell me everything I needed to know. Truth is, I spent months searching, with little results. I did manage to deduce that the increased pet and child disappearances in my neighborhood were relatively recent, as a news article had recently been written revealing that the neighborhood had gone from one of the safest and most desirable to one of the more dangerous in the area in just a few years.
After spending a large amount of my time there for multiple months, I drew the notice of one of the employees at the archives, Joanna. She was young, probably in her twenties or thirties, and thought it was cool how interested I was in the past. She confided in me that she had been much the same when she was my age. She gave me a lot of useful tips for searching through materials. Eventually I started asking her for help with things like obtaining real estate records and police reports.
So it was that I eventually got my hands on the records for the sale of my house to my parents about seven years before. My plan was to check all of the records of houses in the neighborhood, since he had mentioned his “first house”. I wanted to know where he had been living, and how he could have escaped public notice for so long. The records about my house were interesting, because the name of the seller was different than the name that was on the most recent record of the title that I had found. That gave me two names to investigate. Devin Langis and Shirley Holtzman.
It was around the time of this discovery that another one of my friends, Tim, went missing.
I think my parents were trying their best to avoid scaring me, but they once again made me promise to always be home before dark. I would hear them whispering sometimes about the man who had “kidnapped” Casey, but they always tried to change the subject when they noticed me.
Devin Langis was dead. I quickly found records of his death as I searched for more information on him, but I could not find anything on Shirley Holtzman. Joanna pitched in to help, and told me about this new function you could use on the internet. I was not too familiar with computers, but Joanna helped me google the name. Shirley lived in another state, but I did get a phone number. So one night, when my parents were going to bed, I snuck our handset into my bedroom, and prepared to call. I wasn’t sure what I was hoping to find, but I was desperate for any information I could get at this point.
The phone rang three times before she picked up. “Hello?” a tired voice said.
“Hello Ms. Holtzman,” I answered, my heart racing. “I’m doing a project for school about the history of the house I live in, and I found your name on some of the records. I was hoping you could tell me some stuff about my house.”
“It’s a little late,” she said, “but alright. Which house is this?” I gave her my address, and was strangely heartened when she gave a slight groan in response. “That was my brother’s house. Devin left it to me when he died, and I sold it. I’m afraid I don’t know a lot about its history. My brother and I weren’t very close.”
“Any interesting tidbit would be helpful ma’am,” I said, my heart sinking.
“Well...There is something strange. It’s morbid, though. How old are you?”
“Sixteen,” I lied, probably not very convincingly.
“Alright then,” she said. “If I was closer with my brother I probably wouldn’t tell you this. I don’t care much for preserving his reputation, though, so here it is. I flew out to get my brother’s affairs in order when he died. His wife had passed away a few years before you see, and I was his last living relative. He had died in the hospital from cancer, and no one else had been to his house for years. When I went inside to make sure it was ready to sell, it was in horrible disorder. The fridge was open, and scraps of rotting food were strewn everywhere. I think someone might have broken in, but that wouldn’t explain what I found in one of the bedrooms.” She hesitated.
“What did you find?” I prompted.
“Well, I’m not sure I should be telling you this, young man, but the room was in quite the state. The window was covered and blacked out, so it was hard to see at first, but when I’d gotten the light on, there were brownish stains all over the room. I wasn’t entirely sure, but it looked like it was blood. There was also a heavy chain attached to the wall, but it had been broken. I would have called the police had I not found all the animal bones in the backyard. I don’t know exactly what my brother was up to. Maybe he was a satanist or something, but he was no murderer.”
“Which bedroom was this?” I asked, feeling a bit lightheaded.
“The one just to the right of the front door if you’re facing the house.” I froze. That was my room. The room I was sitting in right now must have been used by him. But who was he? Had Devin known about him, or had he broken in after Devin had been put in the hospital? What about the chain? Why was he- “Hello? I’ve gone and frightened you haven’t I?”
“No,” I sputtered, “Thank you ma’am this has been really helpful. Just a couple more questions. Did Devin have any children?”
“No, not since the fire. That’s when we stopped talking to each other. When he lost his son.”
“When was the date of that fire?” I asked. Though I was disappointed in the lack of information, a fire was something else to look into. She rattled off a date from forty years before. “And what was his son’s name?”
“Robert. They called him Bobby.”
“Thank you ma’am.”
“You’re welcome, young man.”
I hung up the phone and moved to the center of my room. I spun around slowly, looking at the walls. I tried to imagine brown bloodstains on the walls and floor, and I wondered if the reason he had been frightening me for so long was because I had taken the room from him. I walked to the window and ran my hand along the side of it, trying to imagine it being covered, leaving this room in complete darkness.
Tap tap tap.
My breath caught in my chest. The blinds on the window were closed, but my shadow was falling on them, cast from the light behind me. And something was tapping on the window.
Tap tap tap.
I remembered the incident from earlier in my childhood where a cat sitting at my window had terrified me with its accidental tapping. I sighed, and started pulling up the blinds a bit to check. When they had cleared the level of the sill outside I stopped and stooped down to look. There was nothing there.
Tap tap tap.
I peered out further, trying to see if anyone was standing in the dark. I couldn’t see anything.
Tap tap tap.
The tip of a fluffy orange tail swished past the little sliver of space from which I was looking out. Confused, I started to pull the blinds higher. Was it climbing up the wall?
Tap tap tap.
The tail kept going higher, and I kept raising the blinds. I wanted to know how this cat was doing what it was doing. The blinds stopped at their apex, and a lightning-bolt of fear struck me, leaving me paralyzed. His head was hanging down over the lip of the roof, upside down. In his left hand he was holding the body of a cat, and I could see chunks of flesh were missing. His right hand tapped the window, an unnaturally long nail playing a staccato rhythm. Tap tap tap. His eyes were half-closed, as if the light was too strong, but he smiled his wide smile, and there was blood in his teeth. His hair hung down and blended into the darkness of the night as he waggled a few fingers at me in greeting.
I let the blinds drop, I turned off my light, and made sure my door was locked. I made my way back to my bed and laid there. I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I just laid there and listened to his footsteps move across the roof. I listened to the light slapping of bare feet on the tiles of the hallway. I listened to my door knob rattling. I listened to the raspy breaths being pushed through the space under my door. Then I listened to the silence, and eventually I fell asleep.
Submitted September 10, 2019 at 09:14AM by Grothnag https://ift.tt/31aRbb7
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