alt.books.ghost-fiction

THE WEST WINDOW

by

rbadac
 
 
 

He saw the house in the pre-dawn hours most mornings, when he was leaving to go to work. It stood on the corner opposite the building that contained his own rooms, and loomed against the pearlescent sky in that strange time before true sunlight found its features, in the hour when most people were still in bed, and the streets, so usually full of life, were secretive and desolate.

It was empty, had been for a long time; a small outcropping of porch with slim white columns, roof as flat as a warehouse's, and tall narrow windows. Those on the ground floor were boarded up; the second and third story ones, unstyled and curtainless, revealed only the house's emptiness from the viewpoint of the street below; standing in a certain place one could see through the upper west corner window through its northern counterpart and straight through to the sky beyond.

When he left to make his deliveries he forgot it in the press of business; returning home, he scarcely gave it a look, desirous only of his own dwelling, where he usually went back to bed and slept til noon. By the time the rest of the city was awake the house had disappeared into mere architecture, no more noticeable than the others on the street. Life pushed and pulled around it and distracted with its energies the eye and ear and other senses, offering more than enough to dissuade the attention from the condition of essences in vaulted- ceilinged rooms, or of voices that had not spoken in so long their lips cracked from the effort.

He got the telegram stating the news of the death of an old school chum, and attended the funeral in a distant town. There he offered his condolences to the family, who were anguished and distant, and did not remember him at all. The fellows who collared him afterward and dragged him to the taphouse drank themselves stupid while they told stories about the deceased that dismayed him. He went off early, confused and half-drunk himself, and went to the cinema, where he stared in the darkness at Tyrone Power and Anne Baxter and felt vaguely sick for a couple of hours before going back to the hotel and collapsing into bed. The morning train back was full of appliance salesmen on their way to a convention who were loud and abrasive, and he threw up in the cramped lavatory and stumbled out under the disapproving gaze of the next patron, went to the last car and fell asleep in a seat. He woke up with a numb leg barely in time to disembark awkwardly at the stop past his own, and had to walk on it several blocks before his neighborhood was regained.

In the house a section of plaster fell within a wall; an industrious spider essayed with its waving strands the distance between the arms of a broken chair, and the taps, long dry, began to drip rusty moisture.
 
 

The donning of strange feathers, the storming of inimical heavens, symbols of pride for those who could afford them-- no one wrote or sang of the ones who kept chaste of these or their more benevolent counterparts, however they may be presented in their supposed sanctity-- they were only confirmation that no one dared aspire to escape the mundane. One could only fall, or be thrown; to simply bow to its oppression was to be dead to either view or, more correctly, not to exist at all. Men who seek to become angels or angels that covet Godhood are lusting for retranslation, and must eventually seduce new forms. A destiny seeks its own moment, the one that captures it in its extremity. Whether as a Lucifer or an Icarus it becomes what it sought to be from the beginning, a descent, not from a state that was its own, but to a state that was waiting for it, in order to be made complete.
 
 

Something woke him in the middle of the night, and he felt for his glasses on the nightstand.

The clock said 2:23, hours before he needed to get up. He lay back and sighed. He was very tired. He did not want to rise. He stared at the angle of broken streetlight from the window where it met the bureau and was diverted to the floor a cripple. Sleep would not return; he rose and went to the kitchen to warm some milk.

Sipping it, he sat in his chair and smoked; the air was chilly and close.  No sounds rose from the street outside. He rarely felt lonely anymore, but at that moment he seemed more alone than he had ever been. Snapping off the lamp to return to his bed in the dark, he passed the window and looked out.

The house was still there, and its upper corner, now on a level with his own apartment, no longer communicated with the heavens. It was the next building down of course, its bare brick wall denying the windows even the scant light that might have existed beyond them. Like the silvering of a mirror, it made the house's west window reflect whatever pointless view it had of the opposite side of the street. He went back to bed, bored enough now to sink into a doze; vague, anxious visions occupied him in his dreams, the clock's alarm sounding too soon, too soon, but driving them and their undeciphered message away with an appropriate and deserved finality.
 
 

At work Albright, another driver in his district, talked him into taking his route for the week he would be on vacation. It meant twice as much work, and not twice the pay, but Albright assured him of the favor's return when his own vacation was due. Thereafter he had to get up even earlier, and pack his truck to the ceiling; his insomnia became entrenched, his later sleep extended well into the afternoon, and he found himself entering a routine of drinking more after dinner, which made him all the more irritable when he had to get up for work again.

He made mistakes; his old route suffered from later deliveries because of the extra duty. The new route was poorly-charted, and the customers, some of which perceived quite early on that he was a substitute, complained to his supervisor, who himself was a substitute of sorts, the previous one (who had been better known to him) having retired four months before. He was given a talking-to that was half company litany and half impersonal observation of the difficult job market nowadays, a hint that did not go unnoticed. Staying later and making notes he managed to piece together an improved route chart, but the inference that he had been lax stung him, and he went about his duties in a greatly deteriorated mood, with no pride in their accomplishment.

He thought briefly of asking for his own vacation when Albright returned, but the timing was so obviously poor for such a request that he dismissed the notion as soon as it occurred to him. Albright came back with his own infuriatingly cool response to his efforts; after the most perfunctory of thanks he avoided speaking thereafter, apprised, no doubt, by the supervisor, or perhaps by his route customers, of what had gone on in his absence.

The world had inverted for him, who had paid it little enough attention before; with his horror of failure he had learned long since to take smaller and smaller bites of possibility, to ensure the successful assimilation of it. The formula worked, that was undeniable; for a long time he had collected many small advantages, like pennies in a sock, and felt at once secure in their accumulated reality and unshaken should one occasionally slip his grasp. The avoidance of any great undertaking meant no great disillusionment, and this had suited him. It was, perhaps, his answer to some greater disillusionment having already visited him and stripped him of ambition without his being aware of it, a death so sudden his spirit had flown from the ungainly body it had inhabited with reluctance anyway, and afterward could not remember the event. Now however the sands seemed to run the other way, grain by inexorable grain, and the previously unimportant had now become too important to allow to escape, its loss a source of the most piercing grief.
 
 

Coming out to his truck one morning, woozy and impatient, he flooded the carburetor trying to get it to start. He swore, switched off the ignition, and sat back in his seat.

He fumbled for his cigarettes, lit one, and blew the smoke out of the half-open driver's-side glass. Looking up through the high windshield he could see the house's west window beginning to take on its accustomed glow.

There was a man up there looking down at him. He squinted his eyes to make sure. It was a futile exercise; the figure in the window was not made more definite by this means, nor less. The incipient sunlight was already showing the shape in relief, standing quite close to the pane. It was dressed in a brown overcoat and a felt hat of the same color, as far as could be ascertained, and had a yellowed, sunken face with a short, spare black beard. It did not make a movement of any kind, though it was plainly looking down at him in his unresponsive vehicle, the only one up and about on the street at that hour.

He almost waved up at the figure from pure, idiotic reflex before he realized the impropriety of the gesture, and stubbed his cigarette out instead. There was a wrongness here; he did not recognize the man, was sure he shouldn't have been up there in any case-- glancing at the lower floors he could see the boards were still intact, which didn't mean much-- the front door was closed, the rest of the street silent.

He looked up again and saw the figure withdraw. The light poured unrestricted through the now empty upper corner, and all was as if nothing had happened.

He waited briefly to see if it would make a reappearance, then decided it was none of his business, started his truck without difficulty, and drove off.
 
 

He would have preferred, he thought later, to have been able to tell someone about it; to mention in passing between other subjects how he'd thought he'd seen someone in the old empty house, maybe even embellish slightly on the story, describe the intruder in suitably ominous terms and go on about the turn it had given him, as another would certainly have done. It would have been a pleasant diversion in a conversation, an opportunity to make a listener's eyes widen with interest, if only a little; even without additional trappings theories could be put forth, opinions given, an array of possible explanations could be opened up for speculation. If he were overtly accused of entertaining fancies then or covertly accused afterward, at least he was entertaining in some sense of the word. It was with a curious regret that he realized that he knew not a single soul with which to effect such an interchange. To relate it to a stranger would have been a waste; he might as well tell the story to the stranger who was in it.

But if someone was living in the old house that did not belong there, didn't this present a likely problem of some kind? A transient or Gypsy, or an escaped convict, or worse-- such a one could easily observe the comings and goings of everyone else on the street, and thereby determine the best hours to break into their homes and do whatever it was that he did. Maybe the police should be notified? Maybe, and then again, maybe not. He did not feel confident enough to make such a determination, especially if the intruder had left already, or had not been there in the first place.
 
 

During a neighborhood fair that weekend he thought he saw the man in the brown overcoat again, standing between booths on the other side of the street. There was a parade in progress; it seemed that the man recognized him and turned to flee, and for some unfathomable reason he felt compelled to pursue. He stepped out behind a group of marching veterans and tried to hurry across, but the next group of musicians bore down upon him more quickly than he expected, and he was jostled and spun around by a line of drummers, then collided into by the brass; his glasses flew off his head and into the path of oncoming feet. By the time he reached where they fell, they were only a crushed tangle of glass and plastic.

He stumbled through blurred forms and faces, perspiring and alarmed, negotiating curbs with frustrating difficulty, but at last made his way back to his rooms, and collapsed in his chair. When his breathing slowed, he got up and rummaged through a drawer until he found an old pair that were worn and scratched and missing the left lens. He put them on, went back to the chair, took them off again, and cried for several minutes.

The next morning he called in sick; the dispatcher, uninterested in whether his plight was real or imagined, said he would let the supervisor know. The rest of the morning was spent between the chair and the bed, neither of which provided consistent comfort. At around three he went out and bought a roast and some potatoes and a bottle of gin, and returned home to a hurried meal and a bout of drinking, during which he left a cigarette burning that rolled off onto a newspaper and started a small fire in the curtains, of which, nodding at the kitchen table, he was unaware until the sound of the fire trucks roused him to turn around and look where the flames were rapidly consuming the drape and smoke was billowing out his window.

They burst in while he was stamping out the little conflagration, followed by his landlady, who did not speak, but eyed him with tight- lipped disapproval. He tried to explain, but the smell of alcohol on his breath spoke louder to them than his mumbled words. When they finally left him, his landlady was saying something about the necessity of his collecting his belongings, but he closed the door on her in mid- sentence and, without bothering to remove his clothes, went to lie down on the bed, and was soon fast asleep.

He was awakened by a sharp rap on the glass, as if someone had thrown a sizeable pebble against it. It startled him considerably. Rising from his bed, he went to the window and looked out through the smoke- blackened  frame.

It was a moonless night, and the street was murky with shadow. The light from the streetlamps barely reached the area just below, but he perceived the one down there that beckoned up at him, then proceeded down the street, turning every now and then to make sure it still had his attention. After a moment he came away from the window, opened his door as quietly as he could, and went downstairs and out into the street, to follow.

His walk was not a long one; with each step he shed another portion of the fear that spoiled within him, until he was left an empty vessel, ready to be refilled with revelation. When he had reached the appointed place, Icarus came down to meet him in sparkling glory, his tattered wings burned brown by the sun, his red eyes aflame.
 
 

The aging police lieutenant's remembered account was supplemented with the newspaper's morgue files of the Colin Jarvis case, the malcontent who killed an estimated 11 people he had lured into his house between 1951 and 1956. The police might never have found him out had it not been for a lucky combination of events that enabled one officer to witness Jarvis fleeing from a former near-victim who had recognized him, and another officer to prevent his escape down an alleyway. That had forced Jarvis back into the house from which, as later investigation revealed, he had been operating unmolested for some time.

After radioing for an extra squad car they elected to pursue, chasing the figure in the ragged overcoat up the stairs where, before they could close in on him, he had leaped through a pane on the west side of the third story and plummeted to his death on the concrete below, in a shower of splinters.

Now, much later, the disappearances had begun again in the same vicinity; Jarvis' old house, closed up these many years, was an obvious candidate for inspection. Though superficially cleansed of its macabre past, its character persisted, and left it irreclaimable. The realty agent had not had any interested parties ever call for its key, and had to look for it. The old door lock yielded, after considerable pampering and applications of oil and graphite, and the undisturbed interior was made accessible. The lieutenant stood on the third floor and looked out the empty west window, unrepaired since Jarvis' fatal plunge long ago.

Whoever was afoot now was apparently not bothered with duplicating the former circumstances. Perhaps he didn't need to. He could have been elsewhere in the area and been just as efficient. A house-to-house search would be more rewarding than this stamping around in old derelict buildings.

The lieutenant sighed and turned to go, then stopped and bent down to pick up a battered old pair of glasses lying on the floor.
 
 
 

It would have been the easiest thing in the world of course for him to remove one or two of the boards that penned the first floor to get into the house; not that much harder to replace them so as to appear undisturbed. They could believe that if they liked, just as they believed those lies about his foraging in trash bins for clothing, or catching pigeons and cats and eating them raw, or of his wandering from room to room with blood down his shirtfront, talking to someone who wasn't there.

People felt more secure in such nonsense, he supposed, when the alternative was too much for them to understand. Nothing ever stopped any of them from speaking to him directly-- but none ever did, though he often offered opportunities for one or another to do so. In the end they were all very much alike, clinging to their ignorance as if it would protect them. He was quick to show them their error, yet never received any thanks for his trouble.

But he was used to ingratitude. He had been more or less invisible all his life.

No, he had not pried any boards loose to get in-- why would he? He used the front door, like anyone else; and when he saw his name written in the dust, he knew he was home.
 

The End