Long White Fingers

This is the first creepypasta I ever wrote, about seven years ago now. If you haven’t seen it before, enjoy! And if you have, feel free to enjoy it again!

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I press my foot a little harder on the gas pedal, propelling my car forward even faster down the highway. I’m already breaking the speed limit by about twenty miles an hour, but I barely even notice. All I care about right now is putting as much distance as I can between us and that house, the house Susie and I have shared since her mother left when she was very small.

Susie’s in the back seat now, asleep. I can tell from my occasional concerned glances into the rear-view mirror that her slumber is fitful, restless, neither silent nor still. I’m not surprised by that. After what she went through, actually, I’m surprised she managed to get to sleep at all.

I can still remember hearing the shy, sheepish terror in her voice early one morning before the earliest rays of dawn chased away the shadows from the farthest corners of her room, when her closet door remained shrouded in oddly-shaped shadows framed by the stuffed animals lining her windowsill. “Daddy,” she said, “I… I think there’s a man living in my closet. He’s not there all the time!” she added quickly. “Only in the night time. And only sometimes.”

That was three weeks ago. Of course, I did nothing. Who would take such a child’s claim seriously? Who wouldn’t simply write it off as a vivid nightmare, or an overactive imagination?

But Susie persisted. “He looks like a man,” she added a few days later, the second time she broached the subject, “but I don’t think he’d a real man at all! He’s got long white fingers… too long to be a person! I see them poking out the closet door… like he’s reaching for me.”

That was only a few days later. From then on those “long, white fingers” seemed to be the only subject ever on her mind, particularly after dark. Oh, sure, when she first arrived home after kindergarten on any given afternoon her mood might seem brighter and bubblier, more akin to the precocious little girl I’d always known her to be as she discussed school or the playtime activities of her friends. But, as night began to fall and small shadows began to grow like moss from around the edges of her closet and outward, her smile started to fail from the moment she entered her room and her eyes were drawn to that darkest corner of the room, wondering if those long, white fingers would be there tonight.

And then, finally, horribly: “Daddy! He’s here! He’s here! He’s outside the closet, in my room! The fingers man! Help me! Help!”

That was just yesterday.

I can hear Susie stirring in the back seat. In the rear view mirror her eyes flutter open and for a moment she almost seems peaceful before she sees me looking back at her and begins to scream.

I don’t react to that at all. I just look away, turning my attention back to the road, and wrapping my long, white fingers a little more tightly around the steering wheel.