Red Eye

 I want to share a story that happened to me as a child. It was 1978; I was a five-year-old boy and lived in a Siberian village in the Kemerovo region with my parents and my aunt (my mother's sister) in a house that my father had built. My aunt went to boarding school and lived with us in my room.

One winter evening, my parents were sleeping in their room, and my aunt was doing her homework (history, I think). I asked her to tell me a story, and she read her homework to me from a textbook in the dim light of the sconce above her bed. I must admit, I wasn't interested in listening to her homework, because I asked her to tell me a story. And at that moment, something on the other side of the door began to climb it. There was a distinct noise, as if someone small was clinging to the ledges of the door and climbing up. I should add that the door was wooden, and there was a gap on top between the jamb and the door, about the width of a matchbox. My aunt and I immediately fell silent and stared at the door expectantly. Something from the other side got to the top...

The first thing we saw in the crack was a small hand, similar to a human's, only black. She reached through the crack and grabbed the top edge of the door. Fear took my breath away. I stared at the hand without taking my eyes off it, just like my aunt. At this time, a second hand appeared, which also caught on the edge of the door: the creature began to pull itself up on its hands.

What my aunt and I saw then, I still can't describe in detail. It looked like a huge bright red eye the size of a tennis ball, which began to stare at us. I couldn't see the rest of the creature, because the terrified aunt abruptly told me to cover myself with a blanket over my head, and she covered herself too. So we sat under the blankets most of the night.

We told our parents everything in the morning. My father didn't believe us and said that my aunt should do her homework earlier, and not stay up late, then she wouldn't be imagining things. Recently, my aunt and I recalled the night when I came to visit her, but we were still unable to rationalize this incident.