It’s impossible to live a life without windows. Every room in every home has at least one glass pane with light filtering through it. Though in a day we may never so much glance outdoors, if we were surrounded by four blank walls our thoughts would soon become withered and bleak, even if we wouldn’t understand why.

When it comes to people poets call eyes ‘the windows of the soul’ because through someone’s eyes you can witness their emotions and inner thoughts. But I believe that it’s more accurate to say that souls themselves are like windows. Just by being around someone, and finding, yes, the spark in their eyes but also their voice, their thoughts, and their touch, I can view another world. And like a window in one’s home, I almost never understand how important the light they bring me is until they’re gone.

Isn’t that a nice metaphor? But as it happens, the reason I’m thinking this is literal. I’ve just noticed that my hotel room suite, behind the curtains, has a lone window sealed over in dark iron.

[1:25]

My bedside clock illuminates the hotel room in a faint red light. Though the mattress is soft as clouds, my eyes are fixed on the ceiling, watching the water-stains.

The [Rat] on the other side of the wall isn’t tapping, or if he is, then very softly - I’m not bothering to listen.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

But then there’s a sound.

*Thump*

It’s from the other side of the wall; the wall between me and Lily. For the first hit, I’m frozen. But then there’s a second, then a third –

*Thump* *Thump*

I struggle out of the blankets as if this is a call to arms.

Furniture runs all alongside the far wall; a set of drawers, a flatscreen-TV perched on a desk. I push against one of the wooden dressers and it moves so slightly that it might as well have been made from rock. In desperation I bat aside the TV (it falls face-first on the carpeted floor), climb onto the desk’s surface, and press myself against the wall, listening.

A door creaks open, and then there’s a sharp crack! as if rock, or bone, had struck wood. A soft tun-tun-tun sound, and then..

Glass breaking. And it’s quiet now, except for my heart.

“Lily?” I speak, then call through the wall. “Lily?”

There’s no answer. But it’s so late, [1:34] in fact, and the day so long that perhaps it’s a hallucination.

Sleep deprivation. Of course.

Powerless behind the wall and behind my locked door, I don’t allow myself to think of another explanation.