The Unfurnished Window

The boarding house stood at the edge of the town, a skeletal structure against a bruised sky. I’d arrived with a cheap suitcase and a heart full of stale regret, having traded the anonymous press of the city for the silence of this forgotten corner. My name is Lydia, and I was twenty-five, a number that felt less like a milestone and more like a countdown. My parents had dissolved into their own private hells years ago, my father’s sins a stain I couldn’t scrub off, my mother’s blame a wound that never healed. I’d drifted from foster home to foster home, but Sacramento had been the only constant, a place I’d left behind like a shed skin. Now, I was here, in a town called Hollow Creek, because the rent was cheap and the landlord didn’t ask questions.

The house itself was a relic, its Victorian bones creaking in the wind. My room was on the third floor, a cramped space with a single window that looked out onto a courtyard choked with weeds. The previous tenant had left a few things: a sagging bed, a cracked mirror, and a dresser with a missing drawer. The window, though, was pristine, the glass so clear it seemed to bare the outside. I’d been there for a week, and I’d already noticed the rhythm of the house: the way the pipes moaned at 2 a.m., the scuttle of mice in the walls, the faint smell of rot that clung to the baseboards. But it was the window that unsettled me most. Every evening, as the sun bled into the horizon, I’d see a faint smudge on the glass, a mark that looked like a handprint pressed from the outside. Yet my window was three stories up, and there was no tree or ledge to reach it.

I tried to ignore it, chalking it up to my frayed nerves. I’d taken a job at the local diner, flipping eggs and wiping counters, saving every penny for a bus ticket out of this place. The town itself was a vacuum, absorbing sound and light. People looked at me with a kind of detached curiosity, as if I were a ghost they’d seen before. The diner’s owner, a stout woman named Mabel, was the only one who spoke more than a few words. ‘That room,’ she said one day, ‘has a history.’ I asked her what she meant, but she just shook her head, her eyes darting to the window as if expecting something to appear.

On my eighth night, I woke to a sound like fingernails scraping against glass. I sat up, heart hammering, and saw that the handprint had multiplied. Now there were dozens of them, overlapping, smearing the window with a grimy film. The moonlight filtered through the chaos, casting shifting shadows on my wall. I crept closer, and as I did, the prints began to move, sliding down the glass as if something was crawling down the outside. I pressed my face to the pane, my breath fogging it, and saw a figure standing in the courtyard below. It was a woman, pale as the underbelly of a fish, her hair hanging like wet ropes. She was looking up at me, and her mouth was open in a silent scream that showed black, hollow depths.

I stumbled back, tripping over the rug, but when I looked again, she was gone. The handprints, however, remained, a constellation of despair. I didn’t sleep that night. The next day, I tried to scrub the glass clean, but the marks wouldn’t budge, as if they were etched into the pane itself. Mabel noticed my haunted look and pulled me aside. ‘You’ve seen her, haven’t you?’ she whispered. ‘They all see her, eventually. The window isn’t a window. It’s a door.’ She told me the story: a previous tenant, a woman named Elara, had thrown herself from that window decades ago, but her spirit was trapped, forced to relive her fall forever. And anyone who looked through the glass too long would see her, and soon, they’d hear her voice, urging them to open the window, to let her in.

I dismissed it as superstition, but that night, I felt a presence in the room. The temperature dropped, and the faint smell of lavender and rot filled the air. A voice, thin and reedy, whispered in my ear. ‘Let me in. I’m so cold.’ I spun around, but the room was empty. The window, though, was now ajar, even though I’d locked it. I rushed to close it, but as I reached for the handle, a hand—gray, translucent—shot out from the gap and grabbed my wrist. I screamed and wrenched free, slamming the window shut. But the handprint of that hand was now overlaying all the others, larger and more defined, like a brand.

I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat. I avoided the window, covering it with a blanket, but I could still feel its pull, a gravitational drag on my sanity. I knew I had to leave, but I had nowhere to go. The money I’d saved was barely enough for a bus ticket to the next town, but I was desperate. As I packed my meager belongings, the voice returned, softer now, almost seductive. ‘You think you can leave? I tried that once, but they always bring you back. He brings you back.’ I didn’t know who ‘he’ was, but a chill ran down my spine.

That night, I heard footsteps in the hallway, slow and heavy, approaching my door. The lock clicked, but the door swung open anyway, revealing a shape that was not quite human, a shadow with too many angles. It stood in the doorway, breathing in loud, ragged gasps. I scrambled to the corner, pressing myself against the wall, but it moved closer, its presence cold as a grave. It reached out a hand, and I saw that it was the same hand from the window, but now corporeal, decaying. ‘You opened the door,’ it said, not with lips but with a vibration in the air. ‘Now you must take my place.’

I shut my eyes, waiting for the end, but when nothing happened, I peeked. The figure was gone, but the window was open, a cold wind blowing through. And I realized, with a sickening clarity, that I was now No. 47, the latest in a long line of tenants who had been lured to this room, only to be consumed. The marks on the window were not handprints—they were the signatures of all those who had vanished, including Elara, including whoever had come before me. The door was real, and I had just unlocked it.

I didn’t die that night. Instead, I became a permanent resident of the house, my body trapped in the room, my spirit bound to the window. I see the newcomers when they arrive, hopeful and alone, and I watch as they too approach the glass, drawn by the same inexplicable curiosity. I try to warn them with my faded presence, but they never see me until it’s too late. I am now part of the smudge, a print among prints, waiting for someone strong enough to break the cycle. But I fear there is no one. The house feeds on loneliness, and I have so much of it. As the days blur into years, I stare out at the world I once knew, and I understand the poet’s words: it is not revelation that waits, but our unfurnished eyes, open to a darkness we never imagined. And I know, with a certainty that chills my spectral bones, that I will never see the sun again.