The Lookiloo

"It is the creak at night that fills you with despair,

And behind that creak, a dreadful sight with long thin strands of hair.

All you'll see are old pale fingers and one big lonesome eye,

For when the Lookiloo takes a good long look at you,

It's then you know that you soon will die."

That was the rhyme we used to run around saying on the playground when I was a kid. Nobody could tell you where it came from. It was just one of those things that seemed to have always existed, passed down from fifth graders to fourth graders and then to the younger kids beneath them. By the time I started school, even the first graders knew at least part of it. There was no tune to it. You just lowered your voice and dragged the words out, usually while trying to scare somebody. In my case, that somebody was usually me.

The Lookiloo was our school's monster. Every playground seemed to have something like that when I was growing up. There was always a haunted bathroom, a teacher who had supposedly murdered a student, or some dead kid who would appear in the mirror if you said their name enough times. Ours happened to be a thing that watched children.

Nobody agreed on what the Lookiloo actually looked like beyond what was in the rhyme. Some kids said it had one eye because the other had been cut out. Others said it was nothing but an eye with arms growing out of it. One boy told everyone his older brother had seen it crawl under a car on six legs. Although that same older brother supposedly knew a kid who had been eaten by an alligator in our town's sewer system, so his credibility was questionable at best.

The parts everybody agreed on were the pale fingers, the long, thin strands of hair, and the eye. Most importantly, if the Lookiloo watched you, “took a good long look at you,” then you would die. We didn't need any real specifics to be scared. Not at nine years old.

The fact that children really had gone missing around town over the years gave the whole thing more weight than it deserved, even if it was only a few over several decades. We knew about a boy who vanished sometime in the seventies and two sisters who went missing in the eighties. There had been another boy in the early nineties, not long before I was born. The actual explanations changed depending on which adult you asked, and at least one of the missing kids had probably just run away, but none of that mattered to us. To us, the Lookiloo had taken them. That was the better story.

Needless to say, I was terrified of it. I could always be scared by the simplest of ghost stories. But the Lookiloo rhyme scared me like nothing else. Once the other kids realized that, they never let me forget it.

Mason was the worst of them. He was in my class and had the particular talent of discovering people’s buttons, and then pushing on them hard. He started by whispering the rhyme behind me while we were standing in line for lunch. When he saw how quickly I turned around, that was all the encouragement he needed.

Soon he had two other boys joining him. They would follow me around the playground chanting it, sometimes covering one eye with a hand and staring at me through the other. Mason liked to wait until the last line of the rhyme before getting close enough to whisper directly in my ear.

"It's then you know that you soon will DIE!"

He’d laugh as I covered my ears and squeezed my eyes shut. The more angry and upset I became, the more fun it was for them. Eventually I started running, sprinting away as fast as I could. But of course that only made it more fun to torture me.

One afternoon in October, they chased me all the way to the back of the playground. The school playground sat behind the building, the fence line bordering a not so dense forest. I could hear all three of them behind me chanting the rhyme between bursts of laughter, and by the time I reached the fence I was crying hard enough that I could barely see.

There was a gap near one of the far posts where older kids had bent the chain-link away from one post. We all knew it was there, but we never went through it because nobody was supposed to leave school property. I was the first of my class to squeeze through. Without thinking, I kept running into the woods away from the school, desperate to get away. Mason shouted something after me, but he didn't follow.

I ran for about a minute, tripping over fallen branches and ditches that were covered by leaves. I couldn't have made it all that far. Still, I was far enough out that the sounds from the school had faded. My mind was reeling and overwhelmed. I slowed to catch my breath, my blood still racing, as I stumbled upon an old foot path, mostly covered with leaves. It clearly hadn't been used in a very long time, and, despite my current situation, I wondered if anyone even knew it was here.

Soon I came to a narrow, wooden bridge crossing a creek. It was just a footbridge without any railings. It sat about a foot over the water. The creek was only a few feet across, brown and slow-moving, with roots jutting from the banks and branches hanging low over the water. There was nothing particularly frightening about it or the current situation at all. In fact, the sound of the running water began to calm me.

I sat down on the bridge, my legs hanging off the side just over the water. I took a few deep breaths and started to really settle down. I mostly remember feeling embarrassed. I hated Mason for making me cry, but I hated myself even more for letting a stupid playground rhyme get to me. I picked up a stick, chucked it into the water, and watched the current catch it and carry it away.

It was then I noticed something beneath the bridge, partly hidden under the muddy bank. At first I thought I was looking at a piece of trash. Whatever it was, it was something pale and murky beneath the water. It was roughly circular, with a dark spot in the center. I stared at it for several seconds before my brain finally realized what it looked like. It looked like an eye. A very large one. I shifted my position, laying down on the bridge on my stomach, leaning my head down over the water to get a better look.

It didn't just look like an eye. It was an eye.

Quickly the dark center of the orb darted towards me, fixating on me. I shot up screaming and sprinted back towards the school. I climbed back through the chain-link fence then ran across the playground with my shirt torn at the side and my hands bleeding from the bent metal. The teacher scolded me for what I had done, and I didn't have the courage to give her any details. To this day I still regret my shy and timid nature back then.

By the time school ended, I had already begun constructing explanations for what I had seen. It was a fish. It was a turtle. It was some kind of plastic toy trapped beneath the bank, and the water moving across it had made it look like the pupil moved. I settled on the toy explanation because it frightened me the least.

For the next three nights, I struggled to fall asleep. That rhyme bored a hole through my head constantly, and the incident at the creek didn't help at all. But nothing happened. Night after night I'd lie awake, watching the corners of my bedroom, the closet doors, even the window. And I'd listen for that creak. The one talked about in the rhyme. The lines played in my head as I lay there, terrified.

It is the creak at night… that fills you with despair.

And behind that creak, a dreadful sight with long, thin strands of hair.

I tried to console myself with the fact that night after night I hadn't seen or heard anything. But it was no use. The closet door never creaked open, and neither did my bedroom door or even my window. Still, in my head creaks were happening everywhere.

On the fourth night, I woke up sometime after midnight. I took my routine scan across my bedroom, making sure to check all the shadowed areas for a big eye staring back at me. And once again, the coast was clear. At least, my bedroom was clear. Our house was one story, and my room faced the backyard. My curtains didn't quite meet in the middle, leaving a narrow gap that let in a thin line of moonlight.

There was an eye in that gap.

I could only see the eye and a small amount of pale skin around it. It was much too large, and it was completely still, staring at me. I lay there staring at it for several seconds before pulling the blanket over my head, my breaths coming in fast and shallow bursts. I was actually too scared to scream.

I stayed beneath the covers, listening for the creak of my window opening. Waiting for the Lookiloo to climb inside. But I didn't hear a thing. I didn't hear a creak, or a bump, or footsteps outside my window. Even still, I did not move until sunlight shone onto my covers. Finally, I peaked out, carefully looking toward my window. The gap in the curtains glowed with sunlight. And that was it. There was no eye.

I already knew what my parents would say if I told them. So I didn't tell them anything. I had spent weeks coming home upset because Mason had scared me with the Lookiloo rhyme, and now I had dreamed about it. They would never believe that I actually saw the Lookiloo, and frankly, I still don't know if I actually did. It's true what they say about a child’s overactive imagination. Even back then, I convinced myself that that's all it was.

At school that day, Mason and his goons clocked in and got to work, just as they always had. Apparently there was nothing that could keep them away from a long, hard day of tormenting me. And after the previous night, whether I truly believed what I saw was real or not, my nerves were more fragile than ever.

This time their taunting elicited a primal response from me. My looming sense of danger began convincing me that running was no longer an option. It was hardly even a conscious thought at that point. On Mason’s third repetition of the rhyme, as he neared the final word, ready to say it with enough vigor to cut straight to my core, I reared back and swung at him with all the force I could muster. Mason went down, hard, and his buddies stood there, quiet and in utter shock.

I started crying. I cried because my hand hurt, yes. But more than that I had scared myself. I wasn't a violent person by any means, and the sheer thought of being unconsciously capable of hurting someone in any way terrified me almost as much as the Lookiloo did.

I went crying back into the school to tell my teacher. I didn't get suspended, seeing as how my teacher knew of the situation and knew I was in no way a trouble maker. But my parents decided to keep me home from school for a few days anyway. I could see Mason and his parents glaring at me as we drove off. But I felt no relief in going home.

Two nights later, I laid in bed, my ritual unchanged. Corners, closet, door, window. I checked them all thoroughly. My bedroom was clear of eyes. But again, a creaking sound continued to echo through my mind along with the lines from the rhyme. That night, it was the last two lines that stuck with me.

For when the Lookiloo takes a good long look at you, It's then you know that you soon will die.

Had it taken a “good long look” at me? That thought plagued my mind for a while. But eventually I was able to fall asleep.

It must have been well into the night when I awoke. I didn't jump awake, I wasn't startled. My eyes simply opened, gently. I didn't know why I awoke, I just felt… off. I had a strange feeling creeping up my body. The feeling of being watched. Immediately I shot up and looked over at my closet doors. They were shut, no gap between them. I quickly checked the corners of the room, and the bedroom door was fully shut too. Then I checked my window, expecting that huge eye to be there again. It wasn't.

I sat back down against the headboard of my bed and took a deep breath. But, that feeling hadn't gone away. I still felt as if someone was watching me. Then I looked back to the gap in my curtains. I couldn't see anything through it, so I got up and walked over to the window. Then slowly, I put a hand through the gap, and pulled one curtain slightly aside.

I peered out into my backyard, the moonlight barely illuminating the world. I didn't see anyone back there. Just the small swing set, still and silent. It didn't creak. We had a small tool shed out there as well, but the doors to it were also unmoving, shut, and silent. But the fingers wrapped around the side of it were new.

My heart stopped, and I froze there looking through my bedroom window in the middle of the night. There, on the side of the shed, were long, pale fingers, clutching it like the shed was in the way. And above them, just to the side of the shed, was that big… lonesome… eye. Still. Unblinking. Staring.

I called for my dad. The shed stood near the back fence, maybe thirty feet from the house. Those four, white fingers wrapped around its edge. My dad opened the door to my room in a hurry, and I turned to face him. I didn't say anything, I just looked at him with pure fear in my eyes. He asked me what was wrong, and I turned back to look out the window again. The fingers were gone. And wherever they went, they took the eye with them.

My dad walked outside with a flashlight at my request. He checked behind the shed and along the fence, then came back inside irritated because it was cold and he had been halfway through watching his show. There was nobody, no thing, there. And yet, for me, it was still everywhere. I did not sleep again that night.

I stopped looking out of windows after dark entirely. But that didn't help. My parents could tell that the problems they thought were caused by bullies at school seemed to be getting worse. But they clearly didn't know what to do. And I didn't blame them. As what I suspect was a last ditch effort, my parents let me stay up late watching some of my favorite movies on VHS. Movies on VHS tapes always felt cozier and more comforting for some reason.

That night there was no incident, and once I finally managed to fall asleep, I slept soundly until morning. But the next night, I had just brushed my teeth and was climbing into bed when I realized I hadn't performed my ritual the night before. I didn't remember going to bed. I just fell asleep on the couch. My mom or dad must've moved me into my bedroom because I woke up there. But I never checked around before falling asleep. Corners, closet, door, window. It could have been there. It could have been watching me all night. It could have taken a good… long… look at me, and I would never know.

As I was contemplating this, feeling the terror rise within me, I heard a long, slow creak. My heart froze, my breath stopped. The creak sounded again. I turned toward the sound, toward the closet where it was coming from. A gap in the closet doors had appeared. Or, maybe it was always there. I hadn't checked on it the night before, and while I was worrying about that, I hadn't been checking it just then either. I couldn’t be sure if it was open or closed before.

Then, as my brain raced to remember, four long, old, pale fingers creeped out from the blackness that was the gap in the closet doors. They slowly curled around the edge of one of the doors, opening it a fraction of an inch further with the slightest, barely audible creak. A cry welled up in my throat, but I couldn't coax it out. I sat there in bed, choking on air, failing to breathe properly. And that's when the eye came into view, slowly; big and lidless, with no discernible emotion behind it. And it stared from the darkness of the closet. Several strands of thin hair hung down out of the gap, and over the knuckles of the fingers.

Finally, my mind failed and my body took over. I screamed loudly enough that both of my parents came running. My dad burst in, swinging my door open. I suspect I was involuntarily pointing at the closet as I screamed, because he turned the light on and yanked the closet door open.

A few of my collared shirts swung on their hangers as the door flew open. Nothing in front of them. Nothing behind them. My dad turned to me as my voice faded. My mom stood in the doorway, looking more than a little worried. Personally I was too terrified to feel embarrassed. But deep down I knew what they must be thinking. Their son had finally gone crazy. And to be honest, I may have even believed that myself.

For the next week, I slept with the closet completely open. I couldn't stand the thought of something hiding behind the door. And the threat of hearing any creak, whether it be by the Lookiloo or the wind, would have kept me up indefinitely.

Mason's teasing became almost unbearable during that time. The worse I looked, the more fun he had. He started telling other kids that the Lookiloo really was coming for me and that I would probably disappear before Christmas. And I failed to rule that out as a genuine possibility.

One afternoon my grandma picked me up from school. She lived ten minutes from our house, just outside of town. She was born and raised there, and even used to be a teacher at my school back in the day after she graduated college. Everyone in town knew her, or knew of her at least. She was a very likeable person and truly a calming presence.

As she drove, she found me sitting in the back seat with my arms folded against my chest. She asked what was wrong and I told her nothing. But of course she knew better. After a minute of her pressing, I finally admitted that some kids at school had been messing with me.

"What are they doing?" She asked.

"It's stupid." I replied.

"Oh I'm sure it is. Now what is it?”

I stared out the window for another few seconds before telling her.

"They keep saying this rhyme."

"What rhyme?"

I almost refused to answer, because saying it aloud to my grandmother somehow felt more embarrassing than anything Mason had done. Eventually, though, I gave in. I recited the entire rhyme, and grandma stayed silent until the end.

Finally, she asked, “Kids are saying that rhyme at school?”

“Yes.” I replied. “They know it scares me and they won't stop. It keeps me up at night. And I’m afraid of hearing the creak from the rhyme. And…” I hesitated. “And I'm afraid that the Lookiloo is going to get me.”

She was quiet for several moments. Then she said, "Creek."

I thought I had misheard her.

"What?"

"It's creek. Like running water. Not creak like the sound a door makes."

Something cold moved through my stomach.

Grandma continued before I could say anything.

"And the second line wasn't 'behind that creak.' It was 'beneath that creek.' At least that's how I remember it."

The old footbridge appeared in my mind so clearly that, for a moment, I could smell the muddy water again. I asked her how she knew the rhyme. She remained silent until we reached the house a few minutes later. Even then, she found several reasons not to sit down with me. She made sandwiches neither of us really wanted, washed some dishes, wiped down the counter, and stood looking through the kitchen window long enough that I finally asked her again.

"How do you know about the Lookiloo Grandma?"

Finally, she sat across from me. "There was a man I knew when I was young," she said. “His name was Arthur.”

As she spoke, her hands began to tremble. Apparently she had met Arthur toward the end of college. She was twenty-one and he was a little older, and they stayed together after she graduated. She told me that she had never been engaged to him, but they had talked about marriage often enough that she assumed it was where things were headed.

Arthur worked at a hardware store downtown, and one day somebody accused him of looking at children. Before Grandma said anything else, she reached across the table and put her hand over mine.

"He didn't do it." She said, “He never did anything like that.”

I had never heard her speak with that kind of certainty.

"There was never any proof," she continued. "And I knew him. He didn't do it."

Someone said Arthur had been watching girls through a window at the public swimming pool. Someone else claimed he had been caught near a changing room. Another person swore a child had seen him staring through one of the windows at the elementary school. Eventually, the police were called, and they arrested him.

Grandma said the local newspaper printed his name before the case had gone anywhere. And beside his name they printed “Local Looky-Loo.” Once that happened, people stopped talking about if he was guilty, and started talking about what to do with him now that he was guilty.

The charges eventually fell apart though. Witnesses contradicted one another, and one of the accusations supposedly happened while Arthur was at work surrounded by several customers and coworkers. The court ended up dismissing the entire case. The town, however, did not.

A few weeks later someone saw Arthur walking near the elementary school. Grandma never knew why he was there. There was a road that cut past it, so he may have simply been walking home. But by that point nobody cared enough to ask.

She was with her students in her classroom when she heard shouting outside. At first she thought there had been an accident. Then she saw people moving quickly toward the school and gathering around. She knew most of them. That was the part she seemed to remember most clearly. They weren't strangers. They were neighbors, men from church, women her mother knew, people who owned stores she had gone into since she was a little girl. Some were shouting while others were simply standing there watching. And in the middle of them was Arthur.

Grandma couldn't remember whether it was rope, cord, or wire, but she remembered something being tied around his neck. Then several men pulled him away while others pushed and kicked him. They were dragging him toward the side of the school. Toward the woods. At one point, Arthur had fallen down, but the men kept pulling, dragging him across the ground. Finally he managed to get one knee beneath himself. Meanwhile Grandma stood near the front steps and watched. That was when he saw her.

It was at that point, while recounting the terrible event, that my Grandmother started crying. Subtle but sharp tears trailed down her aging face as she stopped speaking. She didn't wipe them away as she continued.

"He looked right at me," she said.

Arthur had stopped fighting for just a moment after he saw her. He didn't shout her name. He didn't beg for help. He just looked at her. But that was plea enough.

"I think he thought I was going to do something."

Grandma pressed her lips together.

"I could have screamed. I could have run toward him. I could have gone for the police. I could have done anything."

But she hadn't. She had been twenty-three years old and surrounded by a crowd of angry people who had decided that it was their duty to kill the looky-loo. She was terrified that if she tried to help Arthur, they would turn on her too. So she stood there, and watched.

Arthur continued looking at her until the crowd dragged him around the corner of the building. Grandma stood there for what felt like an eternity. Then, finally, she remembered her position, and tried going back inside to her students. But she was no fool. She knew what was about to happen. Another teacher took the kids for the day, and she went home. Nobody ever saw Arthur again.

The story people told afterward was that he had left town. Nobody admitted there had been a mob. Nobody admitted seeing him dragged toward the woods. Grandma knew better than to say anything. She had never seen the people of her town so ravenous with hatred.

I already knew what I was going to ask, but I was afraid of hearing the answer.

"What was behind the school?" I asked quietly.

Her face changed slightly. Then she looked up at me.

"The creek." She said, still sobbing.

My heart stopped as she said it. In my mind I could see the eye moving beneath the water. I didn't hold back anymore. I told her what I had seen beneath the bridge that day. Once I started, the rest came pouring out, like a full bottle tipped upside down without a cork. The eye outside my window, the fingers around the shed, the closet door opening in the middle of the night. Grandma listened without interrupting.

I expected her to tell me there had to be an explanation. That was what every adult had told me so far, and until then some part of me had still wanted them to be right. Instead, Grandma looked toward the hallway as if she suddenly expected someone to be standing there.

Then she looked back at me and whispered, "I'm sorry."

My eyes widened as I stared at her, unsure of what to make of her reply. It frightened me more than if she had said the Lookiloo was real. I didn't know exactly what she meant by it. But I could tell she was done answering questions.

I stayed at her house that night. Even being as young as I was, I could tell it was best for Grandma to stay put. I also liked staying over at her house. It had a nice, warm and cozy feel to it. Though part of that had faded in the wake of her story.

Neither of us talked about Arthur again, but I could hear Grandma moving around downstairs long after she normally would have gone to sleep. Of course I stayed up too. Her house seemed cozier than my own, but the story she told me, about Arthur and his connection to the creek, sent my mind reeling. I hadn't yet put it all together. And I still didn't know what to believe. Was it Arthur’s eye I saw in the creek? All beaten and swollen from his attackers? The thought frightened me even more than I had been.

I knew I wouldn't be getting any sleep that night. So I made up my mind to stay awake, even as tired as I was. Eventually, Grandma finally went to bed. I, however, continued to question everything I ever knew.

Sometime after midnight, I woke up to a faint sound near the other side of the room. To my horror, the closet door was beginning to move. It opened slowly at first, only a few inches. Then it stopped. I waited, but saw nothing. Growing paranoid, I looked to the bedroom door, wondering if I should wake up Grandma. I turned back to see four fingers wrapped around the closet door, barely poking through the tiny crack. I stared as my breathing picked up.

As my body slowly tried processing the sight before me, the closet door began opening more. It creaked as it was slowly, very slowly, pushed open. Then thin strands of hair drop from the darkness. The door stopped suddenly, the only movement remaining was the hair, swaying back and forth. Again I waited. It might have been a minute, or perhaps ten minutes before I realized that the eye had been there the whole time, piercing the darkness with that lidless look. It had merely been cast in shadow, not forward enough to catch the light of the moon.

I didn't scream. Maybe I had finally become too frightened for that. I lay in Grandma's spare bed and stared at it while one thought repeated in my mind. It had followed me there. To Grandma's house. I thought about Arthur seeing her outside the school. I thought about him being dragged away while she stood there looking back at him.

My thoughts were cut short by the door jerking open farther, the eye quickly moving right up to the crack, fully visible. My covers shot over my head as I cowered in fear. My head felt like a pressurized canister, ready to burst, as I shook beneath my sheets. To this day I find it remarkable they stayed dry. I was sure my life would end in that moment. But instead, my paranoia merely strengthened.

When I finally peeked over my covers the closet wasn't just devoid of horror, it was fully closed shut. No gape was visible. I knew if I really was imagining things then I was definitely crazy. I couldn't deny that anymore. My mind had either fully broken beyond repair, or it was all real.

The next morning, once I was finally able to fully lower my covers and climb out of bed, I asked Grandma if she had seen or heard anything in the night. She said she hadn't, which left me not knowing how to feel. After a quiet breakfast, I finally asked her what she thought had happened to Arthur after they took him behind the school. She didn't want to answer, of course. But I kept asking until she finally admitted there had been rumors.

Someone had supposedly bragged about it years later while drunk. Somebody else claimed rocks had been tied to Arthur before he was thrown into the creek. Supposedly it was deeper then, but even still that one sounded fake. Nothing had ever been proven, however. Grandma had never gone looking. She had never been back there at all.

I thought about that for most of the morning. Then, shortly after lunch, I decided to do something stupid. I took a small shovel from the garden shed and walked toward the school. Looking back now, I understand how ridiculous that was. I was nine years old. I didn't have a plan. I didn't even know what I expected to find. I only knew that something connected me, Grandma, Arthur, and that creek, and waiting for another night with the Lookiloo standing behind a door had become worse than the idea of going back there.

The school was empty because it was Saturday. I walked around behind the building and followed the path through the woods. When I reached the bridge, I stopped to take in the scene once more. The creek looked exactly the way it had the first time I was there. Brown water moved slowly beneath the boards, carrying leaves around exposed roots and disappearing beneath the trees farther downstream.

For a while, I just stood there watching the water. I didn't want to step foot on that bridge. I didn't even want to get closer to the water at all. I almost went back. Turning around felt so easy. As I stared at the water, contemplating my decision, I saw it. It was beneath the same section of bank. The eye.

My heart stopped, but I steeled my nerves just enough to take a step closer. Then another step. I watched the eye, looking for any movement at all. But it was still. Finally, I reached the creek. The mud on the bank nearly pulled one of my shoes off before I reached the water. I crouched near the bank and stared at the pale shape beneath the surface.

Once I was close enough, I could finally see what I hadn't understood the first time. The eye belonged to an entire face. Most of the head was trapped beneath the earth. Roots crossed over the forehead and cheek, and mud covered everything below the nose. Long gray strands of hair drifted in the current.

I started digging.

I stopped several times because I was shaking too badly to hold the shovel. I'm not sure how my body managed to keep going. At one point I threw up into the weeds, some of it spilled into the water and drifted away. Then I went back to digging.

Even at nine, I understood that what I found should not have looked the way it did. Arthur had been missing for more than fifty years. There should have been bones beneath that bank. Maybe scraps of clothing if anything remained at all. Instead, there was a body.

The skin had gone almost white. The face was sunken in some places and swollen in others, and one eye had forced itself so far outward that it looked impossibly large. Something was still wrapped around his neck. It was a thin piece of wire. The skin had closed around parts of it, leaving only rusted sections visible.

When I uncovered one of his arms, his hand came free of the mud. I stared at those fingers, recalling the rhyme in my head.

All you'll see are old, pale fingers…

They were pale, and they were old. Wrinkled as though they had spent a century soaking in that creek. For the first time, I understood that the rhyme wasn't describing a monster. It was describing Arthur. A noise came from the woods behind me.

I turned. Scanning the forest. But I saw nothing but trees. However, there was a particular tree about ten feet away from me. Four pale fingers were wrapped around its trunk. Thin strands of hair hung past the bark. And one, large eye watched me from the other side.

I looked back down at the creek. Arthur's body was still there. For several seconds I couldn't breathe. I looked between the creature and what I knew now to be its own body, wondering how any of it was possible. The Lookiloo stared at me, and I stared back. It was not moving, not even an inch. I looked back down at the creek, then back up again. It was still there. So, finally, I started digging again.

I dug for a few seconds then stopped to look back up. It was still there. I continued at that pace for I don't know how long. It was not a short process to say the least. Dig. Check. Dig. Check. Over and over again, slowly freeing limb after rotting limb. Roots had grown across his clothes, and mud had packed itself around his legs. I had to cut and tear at some of it with the edge of the spade.

At one point, as I was tugging at his leg, his last stuck limb, I heard what sounded like bark cracking; or more specifically, a tree creaking as if swaying in the wind. I looked up slowly, and it was closer. Now with its fingers curled around a tree not more than four feet away from me. Staring.

My heart nearly stopped, but fight or flight kicked in, and thankfully my subconscious chose fight. So I started digging, faster. But the strangest part came when I finally pulled him free. He should have been far too heavy for me. Instead, the body slid from beneath the bank with almost no resistance.

For one brief moment, I had the horrible feeling that I hadn't pulled him out at all. But rather had accidentally torn his top half from his bottom. But then as I looked down at his entire body intact, it felt more like something beneath the water had let go.

I dragged Arthur into the woods. I couldn't bury him properly. The ground was full of roots, and I was a nine-year-old boy with a garden shovel and blistered hands already. I found the softest place I could and dug until the hole was deep enough that I thought I could cover him. And when I looked back, the Lookiloo was the same distance from me it had been. Except I had moved, and so it had moved with me without me realizing it. Every few minutes I looked up toward the tree. It stared. It watched.

By the time I finished, the afternoon light had faded to orange through the branches. I covered Arthur with the last of the dirt and stood there exhausted, clad in mud, with both hands bleeding. Then I looked toward the tree again. There was nothing behind it. I left the shovel where it was and ran all the way back to Grandma's house. Not knowing how she would react, I kept my excursion to myself.

For the first few nights afterward, I barely slept. I left the closet open and watched the window until I succumbed to exhaustion. But nothing came. No fingers. No eerie feeling on the back of my neck. No eye. Despite all this, my paranoia remained.

A week passed. Then another. I stopped seeing pale fingers that weren't really there. I stopped waking up convinced that someone was standing beside the bed. Eventually I could walk past the backyard shed after dark without looking behind it. I never knew exactly what I had done at the creek. I never fully understood why I stopped seeing the Lookiloo. At nine years old, I was just grateful that it had stopped watching me.

A few weeks later, I noticed Mason standing near the edge of the playground during recess. He hadn't bothered me much since I came back to school. At first I assumed he'd finally gotten bored of teasing me with the Lookiloo rhyme, but there was something strange about him that day. He looked exhausted. Spent. There were dark circles beneath his eyes, and while two of his friends talked beside him, Mason kept glancing toward the school building.

During recess, I moved in closer to listen in on their conversation. One of the boys was laughing at Mason

"You're actually scared."

"I'm not scared," Mason said.

"You are. You're scared of the Lookiloo."

Mason told him to shut up. The other boy covered one eye with his hand the same way Mason used to do to me.

"It's taking a good long look at you."

Usually Mason would have laughed at that and joined in. Instead, he shoved the boy's hand away and glanced toward the school again.

"I'm serious," he said. "Somebody's been outside my window."

His friends laughed harder. Mason didn't even seem angry anymore. He just looked tired.

"I saw it again last night."

Smirking, one of the boys finally asked what he had seen. Mason hesitated. Then he lowered his voice.

"I don't know. I couldn't see all of it."

I had gotten close enough by then that I could hear him clearly.

"There were these fingers around my bedroom door."

His friends had stopped laughing. Mason looked down at the ground.

"They were really pale."

For a second nobody said anything. Then Mason added, almost too quietly for me to hear:

"And there was this huge eye looking through the crack."

A smile crept onto my face.