The Shape Beneath the Window

Chapter 1: A special window

The first thing I noticed about the house was the window.

It was not a special window. It was old, with a wooden frame that had been painted over so many times the corners looked swollen and uneven. The glass was slightly cloudy, the kind of glass that never looked completely clean no matter how many times someone wiped it.

But every night, just before midnight, the curtain behind that window moved.

At first, I thought it was the wind.

The house sat at the end of a quiet street where the trees grew too close together and the branches scratched against the roof whenever the weather changed. The neighborhood was old, filled with families who had lived there for decades. Everyone knew everyone’s business, but nobody knew the full story of the abandoned house at the corner.

That was the strange thing about old places.

People knew the paint color. They knew who owned it. They knew when the grass needed cutting.

But they rarely knew what happened inside.

My name is Daniel, and I never believed in haunted houses.

I believed in broken pipes, loose floorboards, bad wiring, and people letting their imaginations run too far. Every strange sound had a reasonable explanation if you looked long enough.