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| Free Story Friday: The Woman in the Window |
A new original tale every week—twisted, terrifying, and inspired by the darkest legends you thought you knew.
Elias had a name for what he did. He called it borrowing.
Not photographing—he was careful about that. He never pressed the shutter on a face, never captured anything more than silhouettes and lamplight and the geometry of strangers' evenings. He was a night-shift architect who worked until three in the morning and couldn't sleep past five, and somewhere between those two hours he stood on his apartment balcony with a 600mm lens and borrowed small pieces of other people's lives.
The couple in 4C who danced in their kitchen to music he couldn't hear. The old man on the ninth floor who read in a leather chair until dawn. The teenager in 7B who stayed up painting canvases she hid whenever her parents appeared. Elias watched them all, and he told himself it wasn't loneliness. It was observation. An architect's habit.
He had lived across from the Metropole Building for six years without thinking much about it. The old hotel had been closed for decades—boarded up sometime in the seventies, its windows papered over or nailed shut. Nobody talked about it. Nobody seemed to remember what had happened inside.
Most of the windows were dark.
One was not.
Fourth floor. Far right. The glass was cracked but not covered, and on the night Elias first noticed it, the streetlight below caught the pane at an angle that made it glow like a lantern. He swung his lens toward it out of habit, the way a compass swings north.
She stood at the center of the window.
A woman in a long pale dress—something from another era, the fabric soft and full in a way that nothing was cut anymore. Her hair was pinned up at the sides, waved gently at the temples. She stood perfectly still with her hands at her sides, and she was looking out through the glass with an expression Elias couldn't name.
He studied the curve of her cheek. The delicate architecture of her collarbone. The way she held herself—not frightened, not restless, but with a terrible patience, as though she had been standing there for a very long time and had made peace with it.
He told himself she was trapped. A squatter in an abandoned building, maybe. Someone who had wandered in and couldn't find her way back out. He told himself she looked sad, and that was the only reason he kept watching—because someone should.
He told himself a lot of things that first night.
She was there the next night, and the night after that.
Always in the same window. Always in the same dress. Always still.
He began to notice the small things. The way she was never visible when clouds passed over the moon—not obscured, exactly, but simply absent, as though she required the light to exist at all. The way she never turned her head enough to look directly at him, but the angle of her gaze had shifted slightly, degree by degree, over the first week. As though she was becoming aware of him the way a plant becomes aware of a window.
He dreamed about her on the fifth night. Not a narrative dream—just a sensation. A vibration that settled in the roots of his back teeth, a frequency he felt rather than heard. And through it, like a radio signal resolving from static, a voice that was barely a voice at all:
You're almost here.
He woke up at 4 AM convinced she was calling for help. He stood on the balcony with his lens for an hour in the cold, watching her window, and she was there—impossibly still, impossibly patient—and he felt with absolute certainty that she had been waiting for him specifically.
He stopped going into the office.
He told himself it was temporary, that he was working from home, but what he was actually doing was cataloguing her appearances. He had notebooks now, filled with timestamps and weather conditions and sketches of her silhouette. He recorded her nightly on his phone's video app. He began to know her schedule the way he knew his own heartbeat.
She appeared when the light was right. She disappeared when it wasn't. She never moved beyond the lit portion of the window.
She was waiting, he was certain of it. She had been waiting for a long time.
He was the first person to notice.
On the ninth night, he took a high-resolution photograph. Just one, he told himself—just to see her more clearly. He uploaded it to his laptop and zoomed into the cracked pane of the fourth-floor window, bringing her into focus degree by careful degree.
She was beautiful. He had known that from the balcony, but up close there was something else, a quality he couldn't name—as though her features were precisely, intentionally arranged, every plane and shadow placed exactly where it would be most effective.
He zoomed further. Past her face. Into the reflection on the glass.
Across the street, on a balcony, a man stood with a camera.
Elias stepped out from behind his lens and looked at the screen again. The figure in the reflection was closer than the geometry allowed. It should have been tiny, a figure four floors down and across a full street. It wasn't. It was close—too close—and slightly washed out at the edges. Slightly translucent.
He went back to the balcony. The street below was empty. No one standing there, no one watching from the sidewalk.
He went back to the photograph.
When he looked at her through the lens after that, she was looking directly into it.
her.
One night she raised her hand. Slowly, with the careful gravity of someone performing a ritual, she placed her palm flat against the glass.
Elias didn't decide to do it. He simply found himself raising his own hand to mirror hers, his palm extended toward the dark window across the street.
For a moment they were perfectly aligned, her palm and his, separated by four floors and a street and whatever it was that she actually was.
After that, things changed in small ways.
His bathroom mirror began to lag. Not always, and never long enough to be certain—just a half-second delay, sometimes less, where his reflection moved a beat behind him. He blamed it on his eyes, on exhaustion. He had not been sleeping well.
His shadow looked faint some mornings, paler than it should have been given the light. His camera batteries drained overnight regardless of how fully he charged them.
He began to feel watched inside his apartment. Not frightened—he was past frightened, though he could not have said exactly when that had happened—but observed. Catalogued.
She needed him, he told himself. She had been there so long, alone in that dark building, and she had finally found someone who would come.
He decided to go to her.
The Metropole Building was worse up close. Forty years of rot had warped the door frames and collapsed whole sections of the interior ceiling; he picked his way across the lobby by flashlight, through debris and the smell of old water and something else beneath it—something sweet and wrong, like flowers left too long in a vase.
Fourth floor. The stairs held, barely. He counted the doors down the hallway until he reached the far right, the one that corresponded to her window, and he pushed it open.
Empty.
No furniture, no footprints in the dust, no sign that anyone had stood here for decades. The window was cracked as he'd seen it through the lens, the streetlight below still hitting the glass at that same angle, throwing that same pale glow into a room that contained absolutely nothing.
Except the mirror.
It leaned against the wall opposite the window, massive and ornate, its frame carved with figures he didn't examine too closely. Silver-backed, the old kind, with that slightly warmer tone that modern glass never quite replicated. It was older than the building itself—that much was immediately clear. It faced inward, facing the door.
Facing him.
He stepped in front of it.
He saw himself. Alone in the room, flashlight in hand, dust on his shoes. Just a man who had stopped sleeping properly and let something consume months of his life because he had looked through a lens and decided a stranger needed saving.
Then her hands slid onto his reflection's shoulders.
From inside the mirror. From behind the glass.
Up close she was more beautiful than he had understood. Every feature arranged with that same terrible precision, everything exactly where it needed to be to do exactly the damage it was meant to do. And her eyes—
Not hollow. Not empty.
Hungry.
His reflection smiled.
He had not smiled.
His reflection blinked.
He had not blinked.
Then his reflection stepped forward, out of the mirror, past him, and walked quietly out of the room. He heard its footsteps on the stairs—his footsteps, his gait, his weight—growing fainter as it descended.
Elias did not move. He found that he could not. He felt himself becoming thin, becoming flat, the way light flattens when it strikes glass. Cold moved through him—not the cold of the room but something fundamental, something cellular.
He was behind the window now.
He understood that.
She stood behind him, her hands resting gently on his shoulders, and he could feel her satisfaction the way you feel warmth from a fire—ambient, radiating, directed.
Through the glass, he could see his apartment balcony across the street. The telescope still mounted there, aimed at this window. He pressed his palm to the inside of the glass and looked out at the street below and understood, finally, what she had been doing all those nights.
She had not been waiting to be rescued.
She had been selecting.
The lease on Elias Vane's apartment transferred four months after he was reported missing. No signs of struggle, the police noted. Camera still mounted on the balcony. Keys on the hook by the door.
The new tenant was a graduate student named Priya who worked late and liked the view. She found the telescope on her second evening and thought about moving it, but something stopped her. Curiosity, maybe. Or the particular quality of the light across the street.
She put her eye to the lens.
Fourth floor. Far right.
Two figures stood in the window.
The woman in the pale dress—Priya registered her first, that stillness, that careful arrangement—and beside her, a man. Thin. Pale. Eyes wide and fixed, aimed directly through the lens with an expression that took her a moment to understand because it was so total, so unambiguous.
She adjusted the focus. The man sharpened.
He was mouthing something. Slowly. Once, and then again, and again, with the deliberate repetition of someone who knew they had very little time and needed to be understood.
Priya read it.
Help.
She pulled back from the telescope.
Her heart was slamming. She pressed her hands flat on the railing and breathed and told herself it was a trick of the glass, a reflection, a coincidence of shadows and the late hour.
She raised the telescope again.
He was no longer looking at her.
He was looking slightly to the side. Past her. Past her building and the street below and whatever he had once been. His expression had gone still and patient in a way she recognized without knowing how she recognized it.
Beside him, the woman tilted her head.
The light in that window never went out.
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved. This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog. Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission. This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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