I have reread the words above with amusement and discomfort. For goodness’ sake, am I turning into some sort of mystic? I knew I was smitten with the thing—I cannot remember being so thrilled with
The fact is, I have read today, and walked and chatted and all of that, but I have been thinking always of my window.
All manner of whimsies enter my head. The sun has gone, now. The darkening sky is moiling pointlessly with cloud cover. Perhaps the window is not a sun but an asterisk, interrupting the grammar of the sky, with me sitting below it like a footnote.
This is not healthy at all. The low(ish) spirits that settled on me on my birthday must have taken deeper root than I had thought. I think I must be lonely. I will make some phone calls. I think I will go out tonight.
Later
Well how terribly deflating.
My good intentions to snap out of this reverie have been stymied. I do not know anyone who is alive, local, and up for a meal, a drink, or anything else. Flicking through my address book was depressing and led to a meagre list—a pathetic list—of possibilities. And none of them wanted to come out to play.
It is night, now, very quiet, and I feel awfully bloody deserted.
5 October
I was not going to write today, as nothing of any note had happened by the evening (I will not dutifully record the tedium of shopping and television and more bloody reading). But then the oddest thing happened.
It is late, and my sitting room is cold and dark. I am still trembling slightly, nearly half an hour after the event.
I came into the study at about 10 p.m. to fetch a book. I did not bother with the light: I could see what I was after on the desk quite clearly in the light from the hall.
As I bent over for it, I felt a tingling on my neck, less than a breath but much more than the vague sense one sometimes has of being watched. I straightened quickly, in some alarm.
It was dark outside. Not a clear, starlit dark either, but a cloudy shadow. It was a drab night. Desultory sodium-light from the streetlamps before and below me, that was all. No moon.
But the red glass at the centre of my window was shining.
It sent icy scarlet light onto the desk below, and onto me. I swear that was the source of the raised hair on my neck.
I gaped up at it. My mouth must have been slack. All the impurities and the scratches on the inside of that central panel were etched and vivid. It seemed to have a hundred shapes, all of a sudden, to look momentarily like a huddled embryo and a red whirlpool and a bloodshot eye.
I must have been staring at it for no more than three or four seconds when it stopped. I did not see it happen. I was not conscious of any light going out, anywhere. Perhaps it was extinguished as I blinked.
All I know is that one moment it shone, and then it did not. My retinas retained no afterimage.
Perhaps it was an isolated light from some aeroplane or somesuch, that happened to shine directly and strangely through my window. I am thinking much more clearly now than when I started to write, and that seems the only possibility. Looked at like that, I do not know why I bothered to record this.
Except that when the room was lit up with that light, something felt very strange in the air. Very wrong. It was only three seconds, but I swear it made me cold, deep down.
There is something beyond the window.
I am afraid.
I am no longer bemused or concerned or intrigued but truly afraid.
I must write this quickly.
When I came home in the evening (having thought all day about what happened last night, even when I denied that that was what I was doing) I felt a peculiar disinclination to enter my study. When I finally conquered it, of course, there was nothing untoward in there.
I looked nonchalantly enough up at the window and saw the sky through it, just as I should. Pitted and cracked by the old glass, but there was nothing out of place.
I dismissed my nerves and pottered around for a few hours, but I never relaxed. I think I was mulling over the odd light of the previous evening. I was waiting for something. That was not quite clear to me at first, but as the evening grew older and the sunlight was smothered, I found myself looking up more and more through the sitting room windows. I was thinking of what to do.
Eventually, when the day was quite gone, I decided to go into the study again. Just to read, of course.
That’s what I told myself, in my head, loudly. In case, I suppose, anything was listening.
I settled down in the armchair and leafed through Charlie’s tedious book, that I am labouring to finish.
I glanced up at the window, now and then, and it behaved as glass should. I had turned off the main light, was reading by a little lamp to reduce the reflections. Beyond the window I could make out the occasional intermittent lights of some aeroplane passing from the left-hand windowpane through that central, much older one, and out again. They ballooned briefly as they slid behind old bubbles in the glass.
I read and watched for at least an hour, and then I must have fallen asleep.
I woke suddenly, very cold. I could only just make out my watch—it was a little after two in the morning.
I was huddled like some pathetic child in the armchair, in darkness. The bulb of the lamp must have blown, I remember thinking. I stood shakily and heard the book fall from my lap. I looked around, confused and shivering.
I think the white noise of rain was what woke me. It was coming down hard. I saw the dull shine of the streetlights glint and move slightly through the slick of water on the windowpanes.
I fumbled, trying to gather myself, and saw the room by red moonlight passing through that central pane.
As I turned, I saw the moon briefly.
I stopped suddenly. My throat caught. I looked back at the window.
The old pane was dry.
Dirty rain was pounding against its neighbours, but not a drop spattered against it.
The moon was shining full in my face through the glass, distorted by its impurities. I was quite still.
After a moment I walked closer to the old window. All around me was the low, mindless sound of rain. I stopped just in front of the desk and looked up at that moon. As far as I could see through the buckled glass, it was in a clear, dark sky. I could see stars around it.
The sky visible through the rain in the other windows was a mass of cloud.
I moved my head slowly to one side, watching the moon. It moved slowly out of the old starburst window and past the dividing frame. It did not appear in the right-hand pane. When I moved my head quickly back, it returned, to vanish again on the opposite side.
The new panes and the old looked out over different skies.
I pulled the desk quickly out of my path and stood directly in front of the intricate frame. I put my hands to it, trembling, and brought my face up to it, and looked out.
I stared through the glass and the moonlight, and then with a flash of fear that made me sick I saw the top of a wall. Through the greenish glass below the red centrepiece, in the light of some ghost moon, I saw old bricks and crumbling mortar only a few feet before me, topped with broken glass.
Beyond that wall there was a low, angled roof sloping away into the darkness. I looked right, pressing my face against glass which was colder than the other panes. The wall stretched off as far as I could make out.
I fumbled behind me for the desk chair, pulled it over, and stood on it carefully without taking my eyes from the view. I looked down through the old window, tracing the black bricks below me. And there, perhaps six feet below the glass, was the ground.
I rocked with disorientation. Sure enough, to either side of me, the windowpanes still looked out over the
