The thing about old New England houses is that there are always noises. They’re easier to ignore in the day, when you’re moving around the house, living your life, making noise of your own. The daytime house is busy and noisy, even when it’s calm and you’re curled up on one end of the sofa with a steaming cup of tea.
But at night, trying to go to sleep, the small noises seem to get louder. I had to get used to them when I moved into what used to be a larger single-family home that, at some point, got chopped up into several much smaller apartments. It always seemed a shame that had happened. Little touches of the old space remained, oddities in a one-bedroom that would have made more sense in a full and proper house: the disused staircase blocked off halfway up, now used as a bookcase; the fire place with the huge permanent mirror hung over it, filled not with logs for a parlor-warming fire but instead the reclaimed-wood shelves that I used as an open wardrobe; the ornate carved molding, paint chipped, that curled around the edge of the doorway. It was a strange space made of what-had-been, my bed shoved into a corner where there might once have been a grand piano - or half of one, at least, before a wall was built to chop off part of the space to go with one of the other apartments.
That there WERE other apartments actually made it a lot easier to acclimate to a lot of the weird sounds. Footsteps overhead aren’t at all creepy when you’re on the first floor and your upstairs neighbor has a heavy tread. Whispery noises are conversations filtered through walls and closets and more walls. The ticking sound is just the heating system starting to kick on at the turn of the year, when the days are still up in the seventies but the nights dip by thirty degrees or more. The creaking of the old wood ends up being comforting. It speaks of a building so much older and stronger and long-lived than I, expanding gently in the sun, contracting in the cool dark like when I curl up under a thick blanket. Enough was explicable that whatever weird sounds I couldn’t track back to their definite source - the sound that was like the outside of the house being slowly and irregularly swept with a broom, or the soft tapping that seemed to come from the fireplace late at night - didn’t really bother me much.
So you can imagine what a shock it was to roll over in bed one night, wriggling a little to get more comfortable, and as my eyes were briefly open I saw a dead woman at my window.
I didn’t realize she was dead at first, although it was clear there was something super wrong. She was all but pressed up against the big window that looked out on the side yard, her hands flattened against the glass and her hair wild, stringy and windblown all about her head. It was hard to see her well - the light from the streetlamps was mostly behind her, and her silhouette was doubled over by a tree that had already started to drop its leaves. I couldn’t tell you how I didn’t manage to make a noise, although I went tense as stone beneath my suddenly too-inadequate covering, staring and waiting for...something. Something awful.
My heart was probably going a mile a minute, but I was far more aware of how my stomach was twisting, watching her. It felt like a thousand acidy churns before I realized that the woman at the window, in her threadbare flannel, wasn’t even looking at me. She was looking toward the fireplace, her head slowly tilting one way and the other. Once she pulled a hand away as if she was going to smack the glass, and stopped just before she made contact. Her skinny fingers curled into a fist, and fell to her side.
There was something intensely pathetic about the gesture, and finally my heart beat out my gut in terms of clench. Gathering the blanket tightly around me, I swung my feet off the bed and in a few short strides was in front of the window, my hip bumping the old table there with the old timey photo and the vase of dried flowers that had come with the place. Still, somehow, the woman did not seem to see me. Not until I snaked one hand out of the blanket and pressed it against the glass, separated from her own palm by mere millimeters of short and fragile clarity. That was when her head jerked back to look up at me.
The movement was enough to let the edge of the security light on the front corner of the house illuminate her unvarnished shock, surely mirrored by my own face as I took hers in - sallow, thin, sunken. The wild hair looked unbrushed in weeks if not months at best. Her eyes were vernal pools, hollowed and watery. Her lips were so wrinkled that it took me several more moments to realize, perhaps because my mind fought to not recognize what my eyes were seeing, that they were methodically sewn shut.
My own felt weirdly rubbery as I flipped the latch on the window and raised it a few inches.
The question felt inadequate, and I still wonder if it was the right thing to be asking as opposed to, say, ‘what the hell are you doing lurking outside the window?’ But I’ve been in a weird place myself, sometimes, and...something about her just… like I said. Pathetic. Not in a disrespectful way. But the way of when you see an animal you know is someone’s pet, slinking down the side of the road in the rain, its head hung low and the water streaming off its fur. Maybe pathetic isn’t what I mean. Pitiable? That feels more right.
She stared at me a long time, long enough for me to start wondering if I should slam the window and try to find late night social services, when finally the idiocy of my question was made clear. Her hand left the window to touch her sewn lips, and then her head shook, slowly.
Of course she wasn’t fucking okay.
On the one hand I definitely did not think about what I was doing, and on the other hand I thought too long about it.
“It’s getting cold out. Go to the front door, I’ll meet you there.”
It was stupid, stupid, SO stupid to be inviting this pathetic - pitiable - stranger into my house but what the heck. They clearly needed some kind of hope, and I didn’t have it in me to leave someone standing out in the cold while I was wrapped up in a thick comforter. I watched her turn and sort of…. Lurch in the direction of the front of the house, and then slammed the door shut before hurrying to meet her at the door. Not without grabbing my phone and doing the world’s fastest internet search for local social services, though.
She was most of the way up the steps when I saw the holes in her jeans - lots of them, and in weird places, not like on the artfully slashed stuff you can get pre-distressed in stores, but in the places they’d wear if they were rubbed a lot against surfaces. Or maybe not long but really hard against rough ones. When she hit the narrow porch I could see her feet, the crusted dirt tumbling off with each step. She got as far as the doorway to the hose and stopped, swaying, as if someone had nailed those naked feet to the floorboards. It almost seemed like she was about to lose her balance, and then she swayed forward again, like she was trying to push her whole upper body forward, but was being held back. It wasn’t me, I was a good step or two back inside the common space of the foyer. Her forehead screwed up with effort, and I swear there were tears starting to flood her pale and watery eyes.
“Come on in,” I offered hesitantly, stepping aside a little bit, just in case it was me that was stopping her. She stumbled forward as if she had been struck from behind, then, and I darted forward to catch her by the shoulders before she fell right past me onto the floorboards, shedding dirt all the way.
“Come on,” I said again, “Come in.” She steadied in my hands and made the strangest low moan behind those sewn-shut lips, and I shuddered. What had she escaped from, what kind of monster that would do something like that to her? I didn’t want to think about it, except to kick the front door shut and guide her into my apartment, wrapping the blanket around her as we went. She needed it more than I did. She was so cold.
I offered to call for help and she stared at me uncomprehendingly, shivering even inside the warmth of the thick blanket, and I put that off. There would be time. She needed....a bath, definitely. Or at least a shower. Step by step I guided her to the bathroom and, with gentle suggestion, got her to agree that yes, she wanted to wash. I turned on the shower for her until it was warm, and stepped out to let her see to washing up herself.
When she emerged, she was wrapped in my blanket again instead of the towel, and I showed her my array of clothing. Skinnier than I ever remember being, she was, but I was able to find a flannel not too different from the one that was probably on my carpet, and fresh underwear that she did not protest taking, and a pair of pants. I made to turn my back, but she hurried back to the bathroom after a few long looks at the mirror. That made sense, I thought. Whatever she’d been though, it was probably the kind of thing that could make it hard for someone to look at themself. I paced back and forth across my room, fidgeting with my phone and debating trying to contact someone, anyone. Eventually the shuffling sounds in there stopped, and I knocked on the bathroom door. It never latched well, and creaked slowly open at the pressure.
The light was bright on there, and while I wasn’t trying to intrude, the eyes do what they do, and I could see as she pulled the flannel the rest of the way closed around her skinny middle that there was some big, nasty-looking injury to one side of her waist. When I gasped, she turned toward me, and pulled the cloth tighter around herself before hurrying through the buttons. It was wordlessly clear she didn’t want to address it. And she was moving around just fine, so I couldn’t be certain it couldn’t wait. Instead, I watched her fingers tremble the little plastic buttons into place, and then reached for the hairbrush sitting on the shelf by the sink.
“I can brush your hair, if you want?” Slowly, she nodded, and turned her back to me.
It was clear that she had done her best to clean herself up, but there’s a certain amount of matting and knotting that are awful to try to get out on one’s own under the best of circumstances, let alone when as malnourished-looking and shaky as she clearly was. I guided her gently to sit on the toilet, and set to work with a detangler, spraying and picking and tugging and teasing, sometimes as little as one strand free at a time. I couldn’t tell you how long it took. Probably well over an hour, given how sore my legs were by the time I tug-tug-tugged the last little knot free and set the brush at a few clear passes through her dark locks.
“Much better. You’re starting to look human again,” I joked. Her head snapped around sharply, brows drawing together with a sharply look that made me regret the attempt entirely. “I mean, your hair. No more tangles.”
One skinny hand rose and quavered slowly down through her hair, feeling the damp smoothness of her locks, and then again, shivering somehow even more.
“You look nice,” I whispered, setting the hairbrush down. Somewhere behind me came one of those noises, a tapping sound that I had grown used to ignoring.
She arose and rushed past me into the main room again so fast she almost knocked me over, darting toward the fireplace and reaching up toward the mirror, slapping her palm softly against it. Again and again she strained to her full height, slapping her hand against the ancient glass, and then shaking it in frustration.
She rushed toward me again, stopping short in the doorway. Over and over again she pointed at the overhead light and shook her hand in a single sharp cutting motion. The meaning eventually became clear to my exhausted mind, and I reached for the lightswitch, snapping the light off. She immediately darted back out to the living room and slapped her hand against the mirror once more. Puzzled, I followed.
The mirror was quite dark, little more than shadow mimicry of the room in which we were standing but not quite visible, but for her hand pressed against the glass. Then the mirror image of it on the other side shifted, the reflection moving of its own accord to rise up.
A woman, a wholly different woman, came into view in the mirror, and I looked wildly around my own room trying to figure out where she was. She could not have been anywhere, of course - she’d have had to have been as close to the mirror as my unexpected guest, to be reflected touching the glass as she was. This was not merely any woman, though. The neat spill of hair around her neck and shoulders, the simple dress that left the shoulders just bare with hints of painstaking embroidery in the cloth - I recognized her. I knew her. I’d seen her daily since I moved in.
Crossing the room, I grabbed the photograph off the table by the window, and turned to show it to the mirror woman. She was not looking at me, though; she was looking down at my guest, who gazed up at her with equal intensity, their hands pressed unflaggingly against one another but for the glass. Moving close, I held up the photo to show them both.
“Is this you? ...WAS this you?” The mirror woman barely glanced at it before nodded sorrowfully, and I could see that, unlike in the photograph, her lips too were stitched cruelly closed. It must have hurt terribly to smile sadly down at the window woman. She was older than she was in the photograph, though not by much, and my heart stung to see the way they could not look away from each other, their hands as motionless as if glued.
I cannot tell you what made me run to the bathroom and return again at speed with the nail scissors, except that it just felt like what was needed. Like opening the window, inviting her in, warming her, providing the shower, brushing her hair. It just felt right to hold up the tiny scissors where the window woman could see, and offer, “May I?”
She looked from the scissors to the mirror woman to me with my head spinning, and nodded gently. Her head tilted back a little as she leaned toward me, chin jutting forward, offering her mouth as if for a kiss. Trying to keep my hand from shaking, I brought the silvery point of one cutting edge to her lip and followed the line of a crease, slipping it beneath one of the thick strings binding her mouth closed. It parted with a snick, allowing the corner of her mouth to open the barest bit, and she exhaled the tiniest breath of sound. The tapping we’d heard before came again, and close - from the mirror.
The mirror woman was tapping on her side of the glass, pushing her face close and pointing toward her mouth with the hand that was not pressed to the mirror - a line has snapped free there, as well.
It made no sense, and perfect sense, and as quickly as I could without risking injuring her I snipped my way one by one through all the tight, greasy threads that had been holding her mouth closed. Each time the window woman made a soft noise of relief, and the mirror woman tapped the glass in excited encouragement. Soon, though not soon enough, I had snipped away as much as I could manage, and the strings binding the mirror woman’s mouth had fallen away as well. Both of them were smiling - a little at me but mostly and hugely at each other, unable to take their eyes off one another.
“Won’t you please come in?”
At nearly the same time they made their pleas, and I was echoing their soft and giddy laughter as the glass seemed to melt between their palms, fingers curling and twining together. Mirror woman pulled, and window woman climbed my shelves like they were a ladder, and somehow I was both laughing and crying as I placed my hand against her back to keep her from falling before she could get over the edge of that carved frame and fall into the mirror woman’s arms.
They both spared me a brief look before they were lost in each other, arms and mouths and hair, and I turned away to weep for something that was beyond comprehension and made perfect sense. Stumbling to the bathroom I turned the light on and set the scissors down, grabbing my blanket in shaking hands.
Even after I flicked the light back out again, there was little sign that anything had happened in the mirror; handprints, and the photograph discarded on the floor. My bathroom floor was muddy, and I crawled, exhausted, into bed, the comforter I pulled around myself smelled of grave dirt.
I lay awake, some nights, listening for tapping.
