The Light in the Window

The Ashwood house had been empty for thirty years when Mara first saw the light in the upper window. Chapter 1.

She told herself it was a reflection. The property was adjacent to the highway; trucks passed at night; their headlights could, theoretically, find a path through the overgrowth and the boarded windows and the years of accumulated grime and cast a pale glow across a pane of glass that no human hand had touched in three decades. This was the reasonable explanation.

She stopped believing reasonable explanations on the third night.

The light did not flicker. It did not move. It sat in the upper-left pane of the attic window with a steadiness that suggested intention, and it was the color of old ivory, the color of things that have been preserved past the point where preservation is kind. It looked, if she was being honest—and at 2 a.m., alone in her car, she found she had very little patience for dishonesty—it looked like something watching.

Her grandmother had told her about the Ashwoods. Her grandmother had told her never to park on this road after dark. Her grandmother had been, by almost any measure, the sanest person Mara had ever known.

She started the car. She drove away.

She was back the next night.