At first, Ms. Carter thought nothing of it. Children in her second-grade class drew strange things all the time — castles floating in the sky, animals with too many legs, families with stick figures and crooked smiles. But one boy, Daniel, seemed different.
Every day, while the other children sketched flowers or superheroes, Daniel drew the same scene over and over. A small house. A tall man in the doorway. And a child — always a child — standing outside in the dark.
At first, Ms. Carter smiled politely and praised his creativity. “That’s very detailed, Daniel,” she would say, slipping the paper into his folder. But after weeks passed, the drawings grew more unsettling.
The man in the doorway became sharper, his face shaded heavily with dark pencil strokes. Sometimes, red crayon smeared across his hands. And the child outside — always smaller, always looking away — started to look eerily like Daniel himself.
One afternoon, while the children played outside, Ms. Carter stayed at her desk, flipping through Daniel’s folder of drawings. Her hands began to tremble. The pictures weren’t random. They were sequential, almost like a story unfolding one page at a time.
The first showed Daniel alone. Then Daniel near the house. Then Daniel standing in the dark. And then… the man, closer and closer, until he filled the entire page.
On the final drawing, the child was gone. Only the man remained.
When Daniel returned from recess, Ms. Carter knelt beside his desk. “Daniel, sweetheart, who is the man you keep drawing?” she asked gently.
Daniel looked up with wide, innocent eyes. For the first time, he smiled.
“He told me not to tell,” he whispered.
A chill ran down Ms. Carter’s spine.
That evening, unable to shake the feeling, she called Daniel’s parents. His mother answered, tired but polite. When Ms. Carter described the drawings, there was a long, heavy silence on the other end of the line.
Finally, the mother whispered, “But… Daniel doesn’t know about him. He died before Daniel was born.”
Ms. Carter’s breath caught. “Who?” she asked.
“My father,” the mother said, her voice breaking. “He… he used to stand in the doorway at night. Just watching us. I never told Daniel.”
Ms. Carter hung up the phone, her hands ice-cold. The images of Daniel’s drawings swirled in her mind — the house, the shadowed man, the child outside.
That night, as she turned out her classroom lights, Ms. Carter glanced at the window. For just a moment, she thought she saw him too — a tall man, standing in the darkness, watching.
