Have you ever heard the Magnus Archives podcast? Your story Dorm Window seems like one of the episodes. -R
I am aware of the Magnus Archives because it’s frequently talked about around here, but I’ve never heard any of it. When describing pieces like this, I tend to invoke The Twilight Zone because that’s the closest thing in tone I’m a little familiar with. Horror isn’t usually a genre I’m drawn to, believe it or not!
“Dorm Window,” like all my weird short stories, was inspired by something in real life. I recently moved into an apartment across the street from my old dorm, within sight of windows of two different rooms I stayed in. Though I’ve never seen anyone in those windows, I’ve wondered who lives there now and wouldn’t it be creepy to see one’s old self there?
Also when I came back to my alma mater to work at the library four years ago, my sister was in her senior year and I kept getting mistaken for her--even offended one of her friends by not responding/noticing when he tried to greet me from a distance as her. We look kind of similar but not enough (I think) to be thought the same person so often.
I never thought I’d be back on campus, but here I am, with a new job and a new apartment, across the street from my old dorm. It’s as if I had never left. The same shriveled grass. The same cracks in the pavement. The same screaming birds in the trees competing with the clock’s bells.
Of course it’s not exactly the same, several years after I graduated. Almost none of the faces shuffling off to classes or the cafeteria are familiar. I don’t frequent most of the buildings I used to. No one expects essays or participation anymore.
All the same, when I’m home in the evenings and look out, I can see the window of my old dorm room, high on the top floor, with light glowing behind the blinds. I don’t know who has that room now, but knowing someone is there both reassures me and makes me shudder, as if someone were walking on my grave.
There’s no reason it should. I left that room long ago. I don’t live there anymore. It has no claim on me, despite the nagging feeling insisting against reason that I’ve forgotten some unfinished business.
Perhaps I wasn’t the only one who thought so. Soon after I returned, a girl waved at me across the quad. I fluttered a hand back, not recognizing her but not trusting my vision at that distance enough to ignore the gesture. As she neared, she greeted me like a friend.
I had never seen her before.
“Oh, sorry,” I said. “You might be thinking of my sister. Maybe you have a class with her?”
The girl reddened and said she supposed so, but while she walked away, she stole another glance over her shoulder, to double check.
My sister and I had a laugh over that later, and the next time something similar happened, and the next. Students who were total strangers approached me with surprising frequency. I described one to my sister—about so tall, dark hair cut this direction, wearing a neon sweatshirt today—and she shook her head.
“I don’t have any classes with her. I never did. She’s a history major.”
“But you know her, don’t you?” I asked. “Or she knows you?”
“I don’t think so. I mean, I guess I’ve seen her around, but we’ve never done anything together.”
“She seemed awfully friendly for someone you’ve never done anything with.”
My sister rolled her eyes. “Are you sure you don’t know her? From when you were here?”
Technically, I am still “here,” but there’s a fine distinction among the student body between being at a university and working there.
“No,” I said firmly. “All my people graduated ages ago.”
“Right,” she said. “Because you’re old.”
Our four-year age difference might as well be centuries on campus. People had come and gone, and her world bears little resemblance to the one I had known. I belong to a new circle, apart from the student herd like a fortuneteller in a glass box, so I had no response ready for strangers who approached me with complete confidence that I could give them homework help.
“You know,” said one relentless fellow. “The midterm. For Dr. M’s class. I sit across from you—remember? And you just—you seem really smart, and I thought we could study together.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not in that class. I’m staff.”
They would apologize and walk away, but they seemed to never quite believe me. Some tried to dispute my identity or jog my memory. Others would murmur things like, “Yeah, I guess your hair isn’t the same color.” And I had to keep disappointing them. I received so many questions I started to feel as if I were in their class and somehow had forgotten it.
The evening after one of those incidents, I had gone home and half-shut the blinds against the dark, when I noticed my old room was brighter than usual. The raised blinds sent the light blazing into the night, highlighting a figure looking out.
Even at that distance, I would have known that face anywhere.
It was mine.
The height, the strong jaw, the slouched posture—all mine. The reddish hair was drawn back the way I used to wear it, and I thought I could make out a hoodie I hadn’t worn since graduation. If I hadn’t known better, I could have sworn that I was looking at myself as I had been when living in that room.
I froze, watching her—me?—and waiting for what she—I?—might do. She gazed blankly out into the night before drawing the blinds and obliterating herself from view. The light remained on, but I didn’t see her again, not even her silhouette.
The next morning, I waylaid my sister on the way to her first class and asked if she knew of any girls on campus who resembled me.
“No,” she started to say, then corrected herself. “Maybe? Some English major. I’ve seen her around. Hey, you two should meet! You’d get along great. I can take you to her room later.”
I agreed without question. Abrupt though the introduction would be, my nagging feeling needed proof of the separate identity of the face in the window.
That afternoon, my sister led me through the lobby, past the wing she lived in, toward the stairs I had trudged up every day after class. The climb came much easier when not burdened with a backpack.
We wound our way past the landings, amid a soundtrack of loud music in the distance, cries from one end of a hallway to the other, shorts- and T-shirt-clad forms flapping in and out of doors. The faint odor of dozens of girls living in close quarters permeated the air. I had forgotten it. We passed an emergency light still perpetually pulsing its eerie red glow and—there we were.
My old hallway, dark as ever. The only sign of habitation was a crack of light visible under some of the doors, including mine, at the top of the stairs.
My sister poked me in the back. “Well? Go on.”
I inched toward the door. Every other room had its occupants’ names taped on, but this girl must have removed her nametag. The torn tape remained. “What if she isn’t in?” I asked.
My sister shrugged. “So we come back and try another time. What are you waiting for?”
A wisp of song floated through the door, something about “empty tables” that I had played on repeat most of my junior year.
“Well…it’s awkward.”
Her solution to this problem was to shove me closer to the door and bang on it herself over my shoulder. The door rattled in its frame, but no sound answered besides the faint music. No startled gasp or rustling of the stiff mattress or creak of the floorboards.
“Hello?” my sister called. “Do you have a moment?”
She knocked again, harder. This time the music was cut off, and the door swung open, from the force of her blow, presumably, for no face greeted us inside.
I recognized at once the paneled walls, solid plain furniture, ragged carpet, and crooked half-open blinds. It was how the room had looked after I had moved out almost four years ago.
Exactly. For there was nothing else in the room.
No bedding. No clothes in the open closet. No pictures pinned to the walls. No homework or textbooks teetering on the desk. The room was empty. No one lived here.
My sister insisted this was where the RA had told her to go. None of the other rooms in the hallway could have belonged to this mysterious girl. But my sister could have sworn she had seen a redheaded form trudging up these stairs or skipping down, multiple times. Only in passing, though. She couldn’t say she’d ever seen the girl’s face.
That night, in the silence of my apartment, I watched from my window again—watched as the light came on in my old room, as the blinds raised, as that familiar form appeared, solid and real and unmistakable.
I waved.
The figure did not wave back.
My sister and I never went back to that room. But the students still come with homework questions, and I’ve caught myself wandering into the English classroom building at precisely nine twenty-five AM some Tuesdays and Thursdays, with no errand or intention of being there. And I still see her—me—us—glowering down from that window, most nights.
