The House That Closed Its Eyes at Night

By the time Maeve realised she was living inside one of those haunted window tales she loved to read, it was far too late to move out. The house had already learned her name.

It started, as these things often do, with a bargain. The letting agent called it “atmospheric” and “full of character”. Maeve translated that as: draughty, cheap, and probably full of spiders that paid less rent than she did. Still, the bay window in the sitting room was beautiful in a chipped, Gothic sort of way, the glass bowed slightly as if the house were trying to blink.

“Old glass does that,” the agent said. “It sags.”

Maeve, who read too many ghost stories, thought it looked less like sagging and more like the memory of a scream.

On her first night, she stacked her books in tottering columns around the room, a paper fort against the dark. She placed her favourites nearest the window: “The Haunting of Hill House”, “The Woman in Black”, a battered collection simply titled “Spectres at the Pane” whose stories were all, rather specifically, about things that watched you through glass.

Rain began to tap against the window while she read, a polite, bony finger asking to be let in. The room grew colder, the kind of cold that feels less like temperature and more like attention. She pulled her blanket tighter and read on, losing herself in other people’s ghosts.

It was only when she looked up that she realised the rain had stopped. The tapping had not.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

She froze. The sound came from the window, but not from the outside. It was the crisp, hollow sound of nail on glass, from just behind her reflection.

There was nothing there, of course. Just her pale face, the stacked books, and the distorted street beyond, stretched by the bowed glass into something that looked almost like a painting of her road, done by someone who had only been told what streets were in theory.

She told herself it was the old frame settling. Or mice. Or weather. Or anything except what it felt like: a knock from the other side of a mirror.

The next morning, she found smudges on the inside of the panes. Long, vertical streaks, as if someone had dragged their fingers slowly down the glass. She wiped them away with her sleeve. They came back that night, a little lower, like something testing the barrier.

Maeve did what any sensible, modern, deeply irrational person would do: she went book shopping. If she was going to be unnerved by her own windows, she might as well lean into it. She picked up a copy of “The Little Stranger” and a thin anthology called “Haunted Glimpses”, a collection of eerie vignettes where people saw the impossible reflected in everyday glass.

Back home, she propped “Haunted Glimpses” on the windowsill like an offering. The tapping stopped for three nights. On the fourth, it returned, louder, impatient, like a reader who had finished the book and wanted the sequel.

It was around then that the house began to close its eyes.

Every evening, at exactly eleven, the light from the streetlamps would warp across the sitting room, then vanish. Not dim, not flicker. Vanish. The window would go from translucent to black, a flat, depthless dark, as if someone had painted over the glass from the other side. The first time it happened, Maeve reached out. Her fingers met cold, ordinary glass. But no light passed through, no reflection looked back. It was like touching the surface of a pond at midnight and finding stone.

She started keeping a notebook of what she began to call her own haunted window tales. Each night she wrote what she heard: the tapping, the faint scrape of something moving along the sill, the whisper of fabric as if someone outside was brushing past curtains that did not exist. Some nights she swore she saw movement in the black glass, the suggestion of shoulders, of a head tilting, listening.

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