Windows

He’d always felt the house looked a little like it was blinking when the woman fiddled with the shutters in the windows. Especially with the lights on at night, when the tendrils of purple mist came in from the sea and wrapped around the base of the house like an overfed cat. He could see into the window on those nights, in brief spurts as the woman opened the blinds and closed them again. A kitchen table. A glass chandelier. A bright red rain coat hanging from the wall—odd, because the woman never went out. There was a boy, her son probably, college age, who went in with an armful of plastic bags every weekend, and presumably cleaned the house and took out the trash; Reynoulds wasn’t interested in the boy, so he hadn’t paid much attention. Generally, he watched the windows blink, sitting on his parents’ porch and nursing an after-work beer, exhausted and cold, wondering when Charlotte would get better, when they’d be able to start saving up again for a house of their own. Charlotte wouldn’t want a kid, but maybe they could get a cat, let it run loose in the fog.

But the night came, a perfectly ordinary night in all other respects, when the windows stayed open and lights stayed off. The glass reflected the streetlamps popping into life, but the glass was dead, the house unseeing. Reynoulds watched it for a while and felt the chill soak into his bones. He shivered, tried to chase the unease away with his beer, but it didn’t work. He got up, checked that his parents were still watching TV, and crossed the street.

The front door looked older up close than it did across the street. The doorbell was broken, probably from a mouse chewing through the wire, a disconnect between trigger and sound. He knocked gently on the door, then harder. Nothing. The cold was getting worse, and the fog thicker, and the inside of the house had always looked so warm. He tried the doorknob, and it swung open with a sigh. The darkness stretched out before him, wide and yawning, purplish light glinting weirdly from the glass all around. Everything was still as death.

“Hello?” he called, and fumbled on the wall for a light switch. He found it, but when he flicked it on, nothing happened. Another broken wire. He’d left the door open behind him, and mist crept in, low to the ground at first, then rising when it was met unchallenged by the open hall. Reynoulds closed the door and waved his hand at the mist, driving it into thin air. He moved deeper into the house, driven by the cold and a viscous sense of dread. Here was the kitchen with the windows. It was incredibly normal, exactly like a healthy middle-aged woman would have set it up, a façade of normalcy, now neglected. The jig was up. A bowl of fruit sat sadly in the middle of the table, and the raincoat hung just as sadly, washed out into a bluish-purple color by the darkness. From here he could see out the kitchen windows into his parents’ house, could almost hear the wash of noise from their TV, see the shadows of his parents leaning against each other, and for an instant he wondered if she had been watching him like he had been watching her: for comfort, familiarity, and a bit of envy. He tried the light here too, but again—nothing. Had the woman stopped paying her electricity bills?

But there, what’s that? The slanting knife-blade of an orange light, bleeding through the edges of the door down the hall. Reynoulds felt a shock of relief and hurried toward the door, calling, “Hello? Hello, ma’am, is anyone here?” He knocked on the door, and hoping, praying, he called again, “Ma’am, are you alright in there? Please say something. Ma’am!” Finally he tried the doorknob. It was locked. And he knew then that she was dead, and was struck by a deep sorrow, even though he’d never spoken to the woman, never even really seen her face, only saw a little bit of the light in her windows—but the light was something, wasn’t it?