The Neighbor's House Has No Windows
My new apartment is great. Third floor, decent light, cheap rent, and a view of a quiet, tree-lined street in an older part of the city. I was happy, right up until I noticed the house across the street.
Itās an older Victorian, the kind with steep gables and dark wood trim. Not unusual for this area. What is unusual is that the entire front-facing facade, the one I can see clearly from my living room window, is perfectly, unnervingly blank.
I thought maybe it was just a strange architectural choice. Perhaps the front rooms faced the sides or the back garden. But I started looking closer. I pulled out my cheap binoculars and scanned the wall. It wasn't boarded up. It wasn't stuccoed over. It was simply a continuous, unbroken surface of grey-painted clapboard. Not even a hint of where a window might have been.
Even the front door was strange. It was set deep into a dark alcove, almost like a recessed tomb entrance, and it was perpetually closed. Iāve lived here for two weeks, and Iāve never seen it open. Iāve never seen a light turn on. Iāve never seen a car pull up.
The house is dead silent.
I asked my landlord about it. Old Mrs. Albright. She went stiff. She just said, "Oh, that old place. The Millers own it. Theyāre very private. Keep to themselves." I pressed her, "Private, sure, but the lack of windows... is it being renovated?" She gave me a look that shut me up instantly. "No, dear. It's just... old."
I couldn't let it go. Last night, I got out of bed around 2 AM. I couldn't sleep. The silence from that house felt like a weight pressing against my apartment. I looked across the street again.
And thatās when I saw it.
It wasn't a light. It wasn't a movement. It was a ripple.
Imagine dropping a stone into a still pool of water. A perfect, circular disturbance. That's what happened in the exact center of that blank, grey wall. A circle appeared, about the size of a dinner plate, and the grey clapboard didn't break or crackāit shimmered.
The ripple subsided, and the circle remained for a moment. It wasn't glass. It wasn't air. It was a patch of utter, absolute blackness, the kind of black that seems to absorb light rather than just reflect none of it. It was a window, yes, but not onto a room. It was a window onto nothing.
I stood there, frozen, gripping the windowsill until my knuckles were white.
And then, something happened that made me physically recoil.
From the center of that perfect black circle, something pushed out.
It was thin. White. Like a finger, but too long, too smooth, and tipped with a small, rounded pad instead of a nail. It felt its way along the edges of the circular opening, slowly, deliberately. It was surveying the night.
It stayed there for maybe three seconds. Long enough for me to register the cold terror of being seen by something that has no face, only an appendage. Then, the finger retracted.
The black circle rippled again, closing smoothly, silently, and the wall was once again a perfect, continuous sheet of old, grey clapboard.
This morning, I drove down the street to the house and walked up the front steps. The wood was cold and dry. I put my hand on the grey wall where the circle had been. It was solid. Unbroken.
But as I pulled my hand away, I felt something tacky on my fingertips. I looked down.
It was a smear of clear, viscous fluid. And embedded in that fluid, like a splinter, was a single, tiny, perfectly formed white scale.