The Pale Observer

I first noticed it during the fall, when the maples along Willow Creek turned the color of old blood. I was in the kitchen, making toast, and I glanced out the window that faced the old Meridian Apartments across the street. The building had been half-empty for years, its brick facade streaked with soot and its windows like vacant eyes. That day, in the third-floor corner window, I saw a face. It was white, a blank oval of skin, like a mask worn by someone who forgot to paint on features. It hung there for a heartbeat, then vanished. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, but the window was empty. I told my neighbor, Marcus, about it later. He laughed. ‘That building’s been dead since the gas leak in 2009. No one’s lived there in years.’ But I knew what I saw.

It happened again, a week later. This time it was the second-floor window facing the parking lot. I was washing dishes, the water running warm over my hands, and I looked up to see that face staring directly at me. It had no eyes, no mouth, just a smooth, waxy surface, but I felt its attention like a weight. When I blinked, it was gone. I started to avoid the kitchen windows after that, but my curiosity was stronger than my fear. I began to watch the building from my living room, keeping the lights off, my phone ready to call the police. I saw it move, or rather, I saw the face shift from one window to the next, not walking, but appearing, as if it were stepping through walls.

The third time, it was closer. It was in the window of the empty apartment directly below mine. I had never seen that apartment, but I knew it was vacant because the landlord, Mrs. Hargrove, had told me. She was the only one who seemed to know anything. When I asked her about the building, she grew pale and started talking about ‘the tenants who never left.’ She said that after the gas leak, a family had been found dead in the basement, and they’d never been properly buried. She told me the building was cursed, and that anyone who looked upon the ghost would become part of it. I thought she was insane.

But I couldn’t stop. I started setting up my camera on a tripod, pointed at the Meridian. I would record for hours, and then I’d review the footage in the dead of night. On the fifth night, I caught it: a pale face in a window, but this time it was in my own reflection. I screamed, threw the laptop across the room. When I looked again, the face was in my mirror, watching me. I tried to leave, but my legs wouldn’t move. The face grew, filling the mirror, and I felt a cold hand on my shoulder. I turned, and there was no one. But the face was in my head, a permanent afterimage.

I stopped going to work. I stopped answering the phone. I boarded up my windows, but the face was always there, in every reflective surface: the TV, the toaster, the water in my glass. It was patient, waiting. Last week, I finally understood. It wasn’t a ghost. It was a doorway. And I had been looking through it, but now I was on the other side. I stand here now, in the abandoned hallway of the Meridian, and I can see my old apartment across the street. I see a young woman in the kitchen, making toast. She looks out the window, and I know she sees me. I flash my pale, featureless face, and I disappear. I’ll visit her again tomorrow, and the day after. I’ll keep visiting until she, too, understands.