The Looking-Glass Window

Glimpses of another place, another time.

There was something not quite right about the window. The one at the end of the upstairs hallway, right before the door to her bedroom.

Ashley hadn’t noticed it when she first toured the house for sale, but within the first week of moving in, she found she couldn’t ignore it any longer. It would catch her eye as she walked past, make her stop. Look more closely. Check the window in the room next door, and compare the view outside.

There was a certain tree outside her home. It had been pulled apart by a storm, branches cut away for safety in the aftermath to spare the nearby homes from damage. But in the hallway window, the tree was whole. Undiminished. Flourishing.

Sometimes there was wind, whistling through the cracks and shuddering the rickety old frame of the upper story. But in the hallway window, the tree didn’t move. Still as a painting.

Nor did the flower beds along the neighbor’s front patio…did the neighbor have flower beds? Such vividly colored wildflowers, herbs, untended and untamed? Not through any other windows, nor when she looked from outside.

She’d already tried opening it. Flicking the locks back and forth, wrenching at the handles. Ashley had pushed up against the glass with all her might, trying to fit her nails under the sliding frame to no avail. The hallway window just would not open for her.

She couldn’t figure out why. Even going outside in the yard, squinting up at it from below gave her no answers. No nails. No caulk that she could see. The window was simply stubborn as far as she could tell.

So for a time, she had tried to pretend it wasn’t there. She made a point of looking down or away as she walked by. She’d hum a tune, something to focus on that was relentlessly and rigidly normal.

For weeks she tried to immerse herself in her favorite things. Movies with her friends. Music. Dinner with her family. Her work. Although that last one was not so much a favorite as an unfortunate necessity.

But no matter how hard she fought for distractions she couldn’t fully shake the curiosity. There was a puzzle in her new house. A looking-glass hovering over a question that simply didn’t make any sense.

And so she gave in. She went about her examination like a field researcher on a mission. The glass was normal, at least. It would fog with her breath on cold days. She could see her fingerprints on the pane, draw smiley faces and write messages. Nothing odd there.

The wood of the frame was another story. She’d discovered that on the second day, comparing the hallway window to one of the others in the building. It was a little warped, and uneven. She couldn’t have noticed it from afar, but running her hands along the surface let her find the knots and whorls.

Where the other windows in the house were all built of sturdy planks and sanded smooth, the wood of her very own looking-glass was rougher. Left a little bit more natural. It felt as if the designer had tried to preserve the untamed character of the tree as much as they could.

In spite of this discovery, she wasn’t any closer to solving the mystery. And in the end, she went so far as to drag a chair into the hallway, setting it up in front of the window so she could look down upon the world.

Looking through the window in this way gave her an unsettling feeling, like an itch under her skin. But she found herself captivated anyway, losing track of hours and minutes as she watched the world outside in all its strangeness. Tracking all of the little details that made no sense.

Weeks, then months, nearly a year of fascination. And it seemed that the more she watched, the more different the window world became from her own. There was the tree. And then it seemed to her that the houses were off as well. Did that porch have those gorgeous pillars before? Was that lawn really so overgrown?

Sometimes the difference was shocking. Through the windows downstairs she would see a bright sunny day, flowers rustling in a light breeze. Only to find when she returned to her post that a storm had come in, harsh rain lashing the world outside with the distant sound of hushed thunder. It sounded distorted, as if from very far away.

She had lost her job some time ago. She hadn’t even noticed. Her friends, family, and neighbors had been checking in regularly. She would drag them to the window and they would look at her as if she’d gone mad. But Ashley was adamant; she had to know what it was.

And then, on her birthday, she awoke suddenly in the night. There was no sound in the house. None of the usual creaks and rumbles of the old foundation shaking off the evening chill. The stillness was eerie.

Cautiously she crept into the hallway, her breath unsteady with nerves. Somehow she already knew what she would find. Sure enough, at long last. The looking-glass window was open. Just a little, barely cracked.

There would not be another chance to find out. This would be her only shot. She was sure of it. And so, reverently, she came to the window and reached out her hands. Slid it up, slowly. Pulled the screen out and set it aside. The cool night air felt wonderful.

She braced her hands on the warped old wood of the sill and swung one leg out, then the other. Stepped out onto the old shingles of the roof. The unattended window slid slowly shut behind her. The lock clicked.

And when her friends next checked in, there was nobody home. When the police were called, they found a home undisturbed. No sign of a struggle. Nothing was missing except the woman who had lived there.

The old house stood empty.

The looking-glass window was closed.