The old farmhouse had been in our family for four generations. When my parents died in a car accident, I was sent to live with my grandmother in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by cornfields that stretched to the horizon like a golden ocean.
Grandmother was a strange woman. She moved through the house like a shadow, her footsteps barely making a sound on the creaking floorboards. Her eyes were the color of storm clouds, and when she looked at me, I always felt like she was seeing something beyond my skin—something deeper.
“Emma,” she said on my first night there, her bony fingers wrapping around my wrist with surprising strength. “You must always lock your bedroom window before you sleep.”
I was twelve years old, grief-stricken and exhausted. “Why?” I asked.
She leaned close, and I could smell lavender and something else—something old and earthy, like freshly turned soil. “Because of the things that come at night.”
I thought she was just an eccentric old woman, trying to scare me with rural superstitions. But I locked the window anyway, if only to make her stop staring at me with those unsettling eyes.

The first few weeks passed without incident. I enrolled in the local school, made a few friends, and slowly began to adjust to life without my parents. Grandmother kept to herself mostly, spending hours in the basement doing what she called “her work.” I never asked what that meant. Something told me I didn’t want to know.
Every night, without fail, she would come to my room before bed. She would check the window lock, run her fingers along the frame, and whisper something under her breath—words I couldn’t understand. Then she would look at me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Good girl,” she would say. “Stay in bed. No matter what you hear.”
And I did hear things.
It started as scratching—soft at first, like branches against glass. But there were no trees near my window. Then came the tapping, rhythmic and deliberate. Sometimes I heard breathing, slow and wet, fogging up the glass from the outside.
I never looked. I pulled the covers over my head and squeezed my eyes shut until morning came.

One night, about three months after I arrived, I woke to the sound of my name being called.
“Emma…”
It was my mother’s voice.
I sat up in bed, my heart pounding. The room was dark, but moonlight filtered through the curtains, casting silver shadows across the walls.
“Emma, sweetheart… open the window.”
Tears streamed down my face. It sounded exactly like her—the warmth, the love, the gentle way she would wake me for school.
I threw off the covers and ran to the window. My hand was on the lock when I stopped.
Outside, in the moonlight, stood a figure. It had my mother’s face, her hair, her nightgown—the same one she wore the night before she died. But something was wrong. Her smile was too wide, stretching past where her cheeks should end. Her arms hung at strange angles, like a marionette with tangled strings.
“Let me in, baby,” the thing said with my mother’s voice. “I’ve missed you so much.”
I stumbled backward, a scream trapped in my throat. The thing outside tilted its head—too far, impossibly far—and its smile grew wider still.
“Don’t you love me anymore?”
I ran.
I burst into grandmother’s room, sobbing, barely able to form words. She sat up in bed, unsurprised, as if she had been waiting for this moment.
“You didn’t open it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“What was that thing?” I cried. “It looked like my mom!”
Grandmother rose from the bed and took my face in her cold hands. “That was not your mother. That was something old—something hungry. It wears the faces of the dead to trick the living.”
She led me back to my room. The window was empty now, but I could see handprints on the glass—too many fingers, pressed flat against the surface.
“As long as the window stays locked,” grandmother said, “it cannot enter. Remember that, Emma. No matter what it promises, no matter whose face it wears—never open the window.”

Years passed. I grew up in that farmhouse, learning to live with the nightly visitors. I heard my father’s voice, my best friend who moved away, even a boy from school who I had a crush on. They all came to the window, all wore faces I loved, all begged to be let in.
And I never opened it.
Grandmother grew older, frailer. She spent more and more time in the basement, and sometimes I heard chanting rising through the floorboards. I told myself it was just her way—old people had their rituals.
The night she died, I was nineteen.
I found her in her bed, peaceful, a small smile on her lips. The funeral was quiet—just me and a few neighbors who had known her decades ago. They spoke of her kindness, her wisdom, how she had protected this land for so long.
I didn’t understand what they meant. Not then.

That night, I did something I had never done before.
I forgot to lock the window.
I was exhausted from the funeral, from the grief, from the weight of being truly alone in the world. I collapsed into bed without my usual ritual, without checking the lock, without whispering the prayer grandmother had taught me.
I woke to the sound of the window sliding open.
Cold air rushed into the room, carrying the smell of lavender and earth—grandmother’s smell. I sat up, my blood turning to ice.
A figure was climbing through the window.
It was grandmother.
She moved wrong—her limbs bending at angles that made my stomach turn, her joints popping and cracking as she folded herself through the frame. Her nightgown was the same one she had been buried in just hours ago. Her feet touched the floor without a sound.
She looked up at me, and I saw her face.
Her smile was too wide. Far too wide.
“Such a good girl,” she said, and her voice was grandmother’s but also not—layered with something else, something ancient and hungry. “You always followed the rules.”
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
She took a step closer, her body swaying unnaturally, like a puppet learning to walk.
“Grandmother always reminded you to lock your window,” she continued, and now there were too many teeth in that smile, rows upon rows of them. “Warning you about the things that come at night.”
Another step. Her hand reached toward me, and I saw her fingers—too long, too many joints.
“But I was never trying to keep them out, sweet Emma.”
She was at the foot of my bed now. I could smell her—death and dirt and something else, something that made my mind scream.
“I was keeping you in.”
Her jaw unhinged, dropping down to her chest, revealing a darkness inside that seemed to go on forever. And from that darkness, I heard voices—hundreds of them, thousands, all crying out in terror and pain.
I understood then.
The window wasn’t to protect me from the monsters.
I was the meal she had been saving.
For something much, much worse.

THE END