Entity story · 3 min read · Set in Tenth Street ·
The Unlit Window on Tenth Street
One window in a lit terrace on Tenth Street is always dark, and the people who live on either side of it have learned that when they look directly at it, the lamps in the windows beside it begin to dim, one by one, until the glass goes black.
The terrace on Tenth Street has twelve houses, all built in the same year from the same yellow brick, each with a bay window at the front and a small garden with a privet hedge. In the evenings the lamps come on one by one, and from the street the terrace looks like a row of warm amber lanterns. Every window glows except one. Number seven, the third house from the corner, has a dark front room and a dark bay, with the curtains drawn and no light showing through them at any hour of the night.
The residents have lived with it for years. Mr Pardoe at number six says the house was empty when he moved in, and that he has never seen a light there, though he has sometimes seen the curtains move. Mrs Yates at number eight says the window has been dark since the Second War, when the family who lived there went away to the country and never came back. The council keeps the house on its books as occupied. The rent is paid each quarter by a bank transfer that nobody can trace.
Nobody in the terrace looks at number seven if they can help it. It is a kind of unspoken rule. You walk past it with your eyes on the pavement, or on the lamp across the road, and you do not glance up at the dark bay. The children are told not to point. It is something to do with the glass, Mrs Yates says, which is very old and very thick, and which seems to hold the light in rather than let it out.
Then, in the autumn, a young student named Clare Lindqvist moved into number nine, next to the dark house, and she did not know the rule.
She noticed the window the first week. She stood at her own front window with a cup of tea and looked across at the dark bay, out of curiosity, and saw that the lamp in her own room had begun to dim. Not much. A soft fading of the glow, as though the bulb were running down. She looked at her lamp, and then back at the dark window, and the lamp flickered and went out completely.
She switched it on again. It glowed. She looked at the dark window, and the light went out again.
She told Mrs Yates. Mrs Yates was not surprised. She said that all the windows along the terrace dimmed when you looked at the dark one, and that you had to look away quickly if you wanted your lamp to stay on. She said the window seemed to draw the light toward it, the way a black hole pulls at stars, and that the only way to stop it was not to look.
Clare did not believe her. She sat at her window that night and stared at the dark bay, deliberately, for a long time. The lamps along the terrace dimmed, one after another, from number six to number twelve, until the whole row was in shadow except her own, which burned very faintly. Then the dark window seemed to move. The curtains did not part, but the shadow behind them shifted, like a figure stepping back from the glass to get a better view of her.
She looked away. Her lamp came back to full brightness at once, and the terrace glowed warm and steady again, and the bay window stayed dark.
She has not looked at it since. But she has noticed a change in the street. Each evening, the lamps along the terrace are a little dimmer than the night before, a little slower to come on, as if the light is being quietly collected and stored in the dark house at the end of the row. And at night, when the street is still and she is lying awake, she sometimes hears a soft, patient sound from the empty room across the pavement: the slow turning of a page, very carefully, the way a reader turns to a new chapter, and waits to see whether the story will pick up where it left off.