The Window Between

When I was six, we lived in a half-timbered cottage at the edge of a village called Harlow’s End, where the woods pressed close and the train tracks ran behind a line of hawthorn bushes. My room was at the top of the stairs, a small square with a single window that looked out over the back garden. There was no balcony, no ledge, no way for anyone to reach it from outside—just a sheer drop to the rose bed below. I used to press my face to the glass and watch the night trains go by, their yellow lights flickering through the trees.

One autumn, I began to see things at the edge of sleep. Not dreams, exactly, but images that slid into my mind as I lay drifting—a horseshoe crab on a tennis court, a woman in a raincoat holding a fish, a door that opened onto a brick wall. I told no one, because when I tried to speak them, the words felt like marbles in my mouth. My mother would just say I had an overactive imagination, and my father would wink and say I was ‘seeing things that weren’t there.’ But one image did not fade. It came on a cold October night, when the wind rattled the frames and my curtains billowed even though the window was shut. I turned onto my side and looked at the glass, and there—pressed against it, so close that his nose was flattened—was a face. A man’s face, but wrong. His skin was pale as lard, and it hung in flaps from his cheeks, as if someone had taken a knife and peeled it back in strips. His eyes were open, but they were glassy, like a doll’s, and they looked directly at me. His mouth was a dark, wet hole, and it moved as if he were trying to speak, but no sound came through the glass. I tried to scream, but my throat was frozen. Then he blinked—slowly, like a lizard—and he was gone. I lay there, heart pounding, until the sun rose, and I convinced myself it had been a nightmare.

Two nights later, the doorbell rang at three in the morning. My father swore, and my mother shuffled to the door in her robe, muttering about foxes. When she opened it, she let out a yelp that brought my father running. I crept to the top of the stairs and peered down. There, on our doorstep, stood a man. His face was a ruin. Blood streaked from his scalp down his chin, and his left cheek hung open, revealing the gleam of teeth and muscle. He was swaying, and his eyes—those same glassy eyes—found me at the top of the stairs. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, his voice wet and slurred. ‘I fell on the tracks. I need help.’ My father pulled him inside, and I saw his hands were scraped raw. My mother called an ambulance, and while we waited, the man sat on our couch, leaking blood onto the cushions. He kept looking at me. Not with menace, but with something like recognition. ‘You saw me before, didn’t you?’ he said. ‘Through the window. I saw you seeing me.’ My mother thought he was delirious. But I knew. I had seen his face exactly as it was now, two days before he was hurt. And in that moment, I forgot to be afraid. I felt a strange warmth, as if I had been chosen for something.

The ambulance took him away, and we learned later that he had been a patient at the asylum on the hill, out on a day pass. He’d tried to cut across the tracks and stumbled. Why he came to our cottage, no one ever knew. But that night, before they drove off, he caught my eye one last time. And he smiled—a grotesque, broken smile—and mouthed something I couldn’t hear. I think he said ‘thank you.’

After that, the small things I used to see became clearer. I would wake at night and find myself standing at the window, my nose pressed to the glass, looking out at the dark. Sometimes I saw shapes moving beyond the hawthorn, too tall to be deer. Sometimes I heard a tapping on the pane, soft and rhythmic, like a finger asking to be let in. I never told my parents. I was not afraid. I was waiting. Because I had learned that the window between awake and asleep is not a barrier, but a door. And the face I saw in it was not a stranger, but a herald—a promise that the world we walk is only a thin skin, and that beneath it, other eyes are watching, waiting for us to turn our heads. I am just glad I looked. I have never stopped looking since.