Personal Horror Stories - Written By Will from the UK
I moved to Wren Street in October, six weeks after my marriage ended, into a narrow brick house with a bay window on the upper floor and pipes that knocked all night like someone politely asking to be let in.
I proofread legal contracts for a living, which meant I could do it anywhere, which meant I did it alone. I turned the front bedroom into a study and pushed the desk up against the bay window, because it was the only place in the house with decent light. By the second week I had spoken to no one but the woman at the supermarket checkout, and only to tell her yes, I have a bag.
He first appeared on a Tuesday, at dusk.
A tall, stooped man in a long brown coat, standing under the streetlamp on the far side of the road. It was the stillness that caught my eye. Everyone on Wren Street is doing something: walking a dog, hurrying home, wrestling a bin to the kerb. This man had simply stopped, hands at his sides, and was looking up at my window.
Then he raised one hand and waved.
It wasn't a hail, and it wasn't the big over-the-head wave you give a bus. It was slow and easy, three gentle swings from the wrist, the way you'd greet a neighbor you'd known for years. Then the hand came down, and he walked on.
I looked over my shoulder, which is a foolish thing to do in a room with no one else in it.
He did it again the next evening, and the next. On the fourth evening, I waved back.
It felt like breaking a small rule. Under the lamp, with the light behind him, I couldn't make out his face, but I saw his head tilt, pleased, as though I had finally understood a joke.
After that it was ours. Every evening at about ten to seven he'd walk into the lamplight, stop, and wave. I'd wave. He'd nod once and move on. He never crossed the road. He never spoke, and I never opened the window to speak to him; it would have broken the arrangement, the way calling out to a deer at the edge of a field sends it off into the trees.
It's ridiculous what that did for me. Twenty-two evenings. I know because I started putting a small pencil mark on the calendar. I began finishing work by half past six. I bought a desk lamp so I'd be properly visible. I stopped feeling, at ten to seven, like a man who lived in a house alone.
There were small things. I'll tell you them, because I've had time to go over them.
Once the sky went dark and the desk lamp came on, the window stopped being a window and became a mirror with a street behind it. My reflection hung out over the road like a transparent twin, hands at its sides, the man under the lamp standing somewhere inside its chest. And sometimes, and I noticed it the way you notice a clock ticking slightly wrong, its hand seemed to come up a fraction before mine did.
There were evenings, too, when I realized I was already standing at the window, arm raised, mid-wave, with no memory of getting up from my chair.
I put it all down to tiredness. I put a lot of things down to tiredness that autumn.
On the twenty-third evening, he didn't come.
I'd been across the city at my accountant's, and the trains were late, and I let myself in at ten past seven, cold and furious. I didn't turn on the hall light. I took the stairs two at a time. The study was dark, and colder than the rest of the house, colder than a cellar, and I remember thinking I must have left the window open. I hadn't.
I switched on the desk lamp. There I was in the glass, laid over the empty road. The streetlamp was lit. The pavement beneath it was bare.
I stood there until nearly nine. Long enough to feel absurd, and then long enough to feel something worse, which was bereft. A grown man, hollowed out because a stranger hadn't waved at him. Before bed, I raised my hand once to the glass, just to see. My reflection raised its own at the same instant, exactly as it should, and I was so relieved I nearly cried. It didn't occur to me to wonder why relief was what I felt.
The knock came the next morning at twenty to eight.
He was standing on my doorstep. In daylight he was older than I'd imagined, and grayer, with the sort of face you forget while you're still looking at it, the face of a man on a bus. He hadn't shaved properly. He was breathing hard, as if he'd been running, or had been standing out there a long time working up to it. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking past me, down my hall, at the foot of the stairs.
It was the first time I had ever heard his voice, and it shook.
"Please don't wave at me anymore."
I said, "I'm sorry?"
"Please." His eyes came back to me and moved over my face, my hands, my collar, the way you'd check a stranger against a photograph. "Not ever again."
"Why?" I said, and heard how thin I sounded. "What have I done?"
He didn't answer. Instead he lifted a trembling hand and pointed, not into the house but up, past the porch roof, at the bay window above our heads.
"Because whatever is waving back isn't you."
I laughed. It's what you do. It came out badly.
"I came last night," he said. "I always come. I turned into the road at ten past seven, and you were ahead of me. I watched you walk up your path with your bag; I watched you go in and shut the door. I was still at the corner when I looked up at the window."
He swallowed.
"The light was off. And someone was standing in it, waving. Slow. Three times, the way I do. You'd been inside ten seconds. You couldn't have been up there yet." His voice cracked. "I watched it wave at the empty road for as long as I could stand it. Then I ran."
"That's—"
"I didn't sleep. I started counting back, all of it, all the weeks. I think it was you, at the start. I know it was. You wave like a man who's embarrassed to be waving. It never is. Not after the first week. It waves like it's practiced." He shook his head. "And it only does it when someone answers. Every night I stood there and lifted my hand and gave it something. I think I've been feeding it."
I remembered the dark room. The cold. The empty pavement.
"You're mistaken," I said.
"Then look at it," he said. "Please. Just look."
I don't know why I did. To shut him up, I think, to prove it. He stayed on the step. I walked down the path in my socks, over wet flagstones, backwards, until I could see the whole bay window, and looked up.
The morning had turned the glass to pale sky and the shifting branches of the plane tree. And behind the reflected branches, close against the pane, someone was standing.
My height. My cardigan, the green one I had put on twenty minutes earlier, with the missing button at the hem. My face, unshaven, gray with sleep.
A reflection, I told myself. Of course. A trick of the light.
But I was on the path. I was thirty feet from the window, my feet soaking on the stones, and my reflection could not be in the window. It could not be inside the house, standing on the boards where I'd stood the night before, with the desk behind it. A reflection doesn't stand where you aren't.
My own hand had begun to lift, out of habit, out of three weeks of habit. I pressed it flat against my thigh.
The thing in the window did not wave.
It looked down at me with my face, wearing an expression I have never once worn: calm, patient, pleased. Not embarrassed in the slightest.
Then it lifted its right arm. Slowly, so slowly, the way you would if you'd rehearsed it for weeks.
It did not wave.
It pointed.
Not at me. Its eyes stayed on mine, but its arm went past me, over my shoulder, and its finger stopped, perfectly steady, on the man standing behind me on my doorstep.
I heard him breathe in.
"Oh, God," he whispered. "I only wanted to be kind."
I tried to turn around. I couldn't. The cold from the study was here now, pouring down my spine and out through my arms and legs, and every thought I owned had shrunk to a single one: I don't remember coming down the stairs this morning.
I looked at my own right hand.
It was rising.
I hadn't told it to. I strained against it with everything I had, every muscle screaming, and still it lifted, stiff and obedient and slow, in perfect time with the thing in the window. The finger straightened. It turned. It began to swing toward the man.
Up in the glass, my reflection smiled.
And for the first time in my life, I understood which of us was the reflection.
End