There was a short man in her house. Maggie knew it and she was petrified! She had seen him initially out of the corner of her eye and brushed it off, but over time he would catch actual glimpses of him and he would be gone in an instant.
Two days ago, she had walked into her room, right out of the shower in just her towel, and she had closed the door and turned around to see this short crumpled figure in the corner of her room on the other side of her bed, all warped and crooked with beady eyes that made her skin crawl. A startled cry escaped her as sheer terror overtook her. She heard her mother rushing to her room and took her eyes off him for one second, and he disappeared without a trace.
Maggie was terrified! She tried to tell her mom, but all she did was tell her to stop watching horror movies. She was too busy. She had a promotion coming up so she wasn’t about to start indulging her daughter’s fantasies. She tried to tell her dad but it was like it went in one ear and out the other. Her older brother had just moved out and her little sister was sensitive and she didn’t want to scare her. Her brother lived in another town and her parents would never allow her to move in with him because she was too young and they didn’t believe her reasons anyway.
Both her parents were the busy type and this coming week her father was traveling abroad, her mother worked 6 days a week and her little sister was travelling for a volleyball tournament. She had a 7 o’clock curfew and her mother didn’t get home before 9:30 these days. That meant she had at least a week of looonggg!!! periods of time alone in this house.
Maggie felt caged. She considered her options as a 16 year old girl. First this thing was either a ghost of some sort, or some vagrant. Either way, she was screwed. She didn’t want to invite her friends over for a week-long stay because they would find her behavior weird for sure and if in the event they saw him/it for themselves…she would have no friends. She was sure her mother wouldn’t approve of her spending the entire week in another person’s house who wasn’t a relative because her mother was weird about that sort of thing even when it WAS relatives.
She wondered if she could call her brother and ask him to come home for week, but he had a job and a girlfriend and all day today, she could swear she had been hearing whispers. She was facing a mental breakdown. Maggie wasn’t the rebellious type, but desperate times called for desperate measures.
Armed with pocket money, laptop and her mobile uber app, she all but moved into the neighbouthood Java. The waiters would laugh asking if alifukuzwa nyumbani. She ignored them. She would leave home at the same time as her mother and stay till closing time around 10 oclock. If possible, she tried to come in AFTER her mom got home, even though she would get chewed up for it. Her mother was stressed out already at work and so she had a short fuse. A few times she had caught herself before throttling her child, but she was too worked up about work and would just confiscate her phone and laptop. Maggie just used her brother’s old tech and didn’t stop and by the third time her mother gave up trying because there was too much going on in the office.
Around this time, Maggie got to know Tim. He was some nerd that lived in their block that she saw around but never actually talked to. He was a recluse and kinda didn’t have friends, so her weirdness and his gravitated towards each other. And as it happens when you are on the same wavelength, she spoke about her problem to him. He was skeptical, but didn’t laugh at her.
It turned out the saying that a problem shared is half solved was true. He had an almost ingenious solution, she felt dumb that she hadn’t realized it sooner. Cameras!!! So that day, while her mom was out, they went back to her house and set up the cameras in all the places she’d seen him. Her room, the corridors, the kitchen…every place she could think of. Of course she could imagine that it would be difficult to capture a ghost on camera, but anything was better than nothing.
Naturally the camera weren’t transmitting because she wasn’t about to invite a voyeur into her life, but they agreed to check after a couple of days. Things remained pretty much the same and about 4 days later, they took the cameras back and checked. She had been careful in that time not to strip in her room in that time and what they found out was horrifying.
Sometime the second day after she installed the camera, in the middle of the night, when she was asleep, she saw a figure crawl out from under her bed. And stand over her on her side of the bed. She saw him creep around and go through her drawers; he lifted the covers at her feet and bent down and licked her feet. He jumped back and crouched out of sight at the foot of her bed when she flinched, woke up and looked around only moving again when she went back to her blanket pulling it over her head no doubt freaked out.
He would the room wander the house during the day, eat the food in the kitchen, use the toilet and flush, lean over her face whispering while she slept, sometimes run his hands over her figure, lightly, so she wouldn’t wake up. She couldn’t see his face clearly when he did this but her whole body immediately convulsed in revulsion. She felt immediately dirty. All those sensations she sometimes felt and refused to acknowledge, keeping her eyes stubbornly shut and the “voices’ she heard were all him, messing with her. Seeing this now, there was nothing ghostly about him at all, but he was without a doubt a GHOUL.
She showed her disbelieving mother that footage that very day, the moment she got home and they called the police who moved her princess panel bed to find a HOVEL, with a startled him frozen and cornered. Apparently, he told the police, he had moved in while they had been away over the long weekend about 3 months before.
It turned out he had been a vagrant in the neighborhood for a while. But as it was a high end estate, there was no way he would have been allowed to stay there by the neighborhood security but he had managed to evade their attention because of his small stature and sneaky ways. He had been watching her and had found a way into the house through a manhole that opened into the basement and picked the lock into the main house.
When her father received the footage abroad, he called her right after to apologize for not paying attention when she tried to tell him. Her siblings were horrified to hear what happened. It turned into a huuuuuge thing where the security company was compelled to put surveillance cameras in every house as part of the package and she got sent to counselling and made a new friend.