What I Saw From the Window

Number 14 had been empty for two years.

It had belonged, before that, to old Mrs Vogel, who had died in her sleep in November of 2042. Mrs Vogel had had no children. Her will had been — Pim had heard, vaguely — complicated. The house had become tied up in something to do with cousins in another country. The cousins had not, in two years, come to the village. The house had stood, dark and shut, with a for sale (estate) sign in the front garden that nobody had taken seriously because nobody could buy a house that nobody knew the right cousin to talk to.

The village had, in those two years, simply got used to the dark windows.

Pim was thirteen. His bedroom window looked, across the narrow lane, at the upstairs of number 14. He had had this view his whole life. He had looked at Mrs Vogel's curtains, every morning, for as long as he could remember. The curtains had stayed, after she died, in their last position — half-drawn, faded, with a small ornament of three china birds on the windowsill behind them.

In early November, Pim noticed something.

A light was on in number 14's upstairs front bedroom.

It was, when he first noticed it, just past nine on a Sunday evening. He had been doing his maths homework. He had glanced up. The window across the lane — Mrs Vogel's old window, with the half-drawn curtains and the three china birds — had a soft yellow light behind it.

The lightwas small. It was steady. It looked — Pim thought — like a battery-powered camping lantern, not an overhead bulb. Number 14, as far as Pim knew, did not have its electricity connected.

The light went off at ten-thirty.

Pim did not, at first, tell anyone.

He watched the window for a week.

The light came on, for about an hour and a half, every evening. Sometimes early, sometimes late. Sometimes the curtain shifted very slightly when the light was on. Pim could not see who was inside. He did not, in the first week, see any other windows of number 14 light up. The downstairs windows stayed dark. The other upstairs windows stayed dark. Only the front bedroom — Mrs Vogel's old room — had the small yellow light.

Pim was a careful boy. He had learned, from his mother, that careful meant not jumping to conclusions. He had also learned, from his father, that careful meant not assuming the dramatic explanation when a quiet one would do.

There were, Pim thought, several quiet explanations. Maybe the cousin had come, finally. Maybe a relative had been given a key. Maybe the estate agent was — for some reason — visiting at night. Maybe a workman had been let in to do some work and was, oddly, working in the evenings.

There was also the unquiet explanation: that somebody had broken in and was, very quietly, living in the empty house.

Pim, for a week, did not know which of these to believe.

He did three things.

The first: he kept a small log. He wrote down, every evening, the times the light went on and off, and any small movements he saw. He used a separate notebook from his school one. He hid it in his desk.

The second: he asked his mother, casually, whether she had heard anything about Mrs Vogel's house. His mother said no, the cousins still had not come, the for sale