When the Windows Showed
I pass the boarded-over window on the way to the office every morning and stop to peek through the slats. I’d get in trouble if anyone caught me doing it, but of all the windows I’ve come across at the ends of weird alleys and in the backs of quiet bodegas, this one’s by far my favorite. It’s a nice window, and they’re not all nice.
Through the foggy glass, I watch leaves fall from a willow tree and onto a smooth lake. Around me, the city is cold, and a truck blares its horn at a man crossing in the middle of the street; they shout at each other for a few seconds. It’s always autumn through this window. In the distance, little speck-like boats float and bob, and I think today there’s a family having a picnic on the far bank. I stay there for as long as I can, letting the warm light filter across my face before heading to work.
An open seating floor plan: a pure nightmare. It takes a minute of scanning before I find a reasonable place to sit, but reasonable still means completely exposed to everyone around me and all their noises. Which doesn’t matter all that much since nobody stops to say hello and I wear headphones, but I guard my computer screen like a dragon with its horde, shoulders hunched, fingers curved. I go through my usual morning ritual of pretending to type important emails before pulling up the first few images.
Long swathes of desert. Small marks, maybe rocks, maybe cars. Forms, curves in the sand, a body or maybe a burned tire. I recognize one particular shape, and from there it’s easy to figure that the satellite photos were taken outside of Mosul, likely fifteen years ago midway through the Panic. I write up a report, include my analysis, and move on to the next image. Green, too much green, some churned dirt that looks like it could be a valley or a trench. Pre-Panic is my guess, somewhere in Eastern Europe, possibly Ukraine or Poland. Shapes in the woods, the hint of an outbuilding. Another report, another expert.
Hours of images flash across my screen. Drone footage, street-level phone pics, grainy dashcam stills. I figure out where they were taken, analyze any figures, buildings, objects, vehicles, or anything I find interesting, write it up on Form 8340, and submit the whole package.
I have no clue where the images come from. I don’t ask, and they don’t tell me. Some are old, some are recent. It’s rare to see actual living humans, but that happens sometimes. If anyone else in my office knows what I do for a living, they never comment on it, and I don’t bring up their jobs either. We exist in an unspoken arrangement. This place is strange, and we deal with it.
Sometimes, there are windows in the photos. That’s a dead giveaway for post-Panic. They’re always at oblique angles, hard to see through, but obvious in the way they hang out of sync with the rest of the image. A window high up on a concrete wall, a window in the middle of an old oak tree, the edge of a window buried in mud and halfway drowned in a lake. Strange light, incongruous shapes. Whenever the windows show up, I take out my phone, snap a picture, and save it for later. If anyone ever caught me doing that, I’d probably end up thrown off a bridge in the middle of the night with a black hood over my face.
There’s almost nothing visible pre-Panic on the internet these days. It’s all buried under geologic layers of dense fake information, bot-generated news cycles, worthless SEO junk, and arguments between AI clones. The real stuff’s in there somewhere, but it would take an archaeologist and a fine brush to sift through a mountain of dust just to find the first corner of the truth.
These pictures, though, they’re real. I don’t know where they come from, but they’re the first glimpse into a world nobody really remembers anymore—a world everyone’s trying very hard to forget. Back before the windows showed up, when the world lost its mind, and the very bad years right after. Back when blood splattered roadsides and corpses were piled in mass graves, right up until the survivors decided that, actually, the windows aren’t a big deal after all, so long as everyone agrees to pretend like they don’t exist.
Work ends at five-thirty. I have one last stop to make on my way home. Every day I tell myself I’m not going to do it, that I’m going to go straight home, that I’m not going to torture myself. And every day I stop anyway. It’s a window outside of an old train station, shuttered and ruined at this point. The window faces an alley behind the ticket building, and nobody’s ever bothered to cover it up. The glass is dirty and greasy, but the view is the least obstructed in this whole city: a long, undulating landscape of snow stretches past a frozen lake and into a copse of trees. Footprints mark a little girl’s passing.
I know it was a little girl because she told me where she was going.
Which is impossible. Nobody goes through the windows. Break the glass, and it just shows up somewhere else. Try to pull it open, and you end up staring at a wall.
But there were no footprints before, and there are footprints now, and Melanie’s been gone for fourteen years.
If she did it, I don’t know how.
But I’m going to figure it out, and I’m going to bring her home.
***
The window on Second and Market was covered over by wooden boards in the first weeks of the Panic, but they came loose a while back. I stand on my toes and look through at a hillside scarred by what looks like artillery shells. The sky is purple-gray, and it’s raining. Mud clogs the broken earth, and small clumps of grass cling to each other. Only the small rivers of rainwater move in this window. “I’m not sure what you think you’re going to see through there,” Janine says. She’s looking around the block, waiting for someone to stop and complain.
“Don’t you want to look? Aren’t you curious?”
“You know I am.” She’s small, with dark hair and dark skin, and has some of the most expressive eyebrows I’ve ever seen. “But this is too public. You know it freaks people out.”
She’s right, and maybe that’s why I can’t help it. The transgression is part of the appeal. But I don’t like what that says about me.
“You have something for me.” I push the board back into place and turn toward her.
Janine takes a thumb drive from her pocket. “Footage from Colorado. But I’m not sure you want to see it.”
I count out a stack of twenties and hand it over. She gives me the drive. “Pleasure as always.”
“You know I can’t promise it’s real, right? I mean, how many of these have you bought from me now?”
“You definitely sold me at least a couple of verified fakes.”
“Maybe it’s time to step back.” Her eyebrows knit together in pity. “You know, think about yourself for a while.”
“Thanks for the information.”
Back home, the video plays: it’s blurry and shakes, but it clearly shows a window perched on the side of a rusting train car. A person approaches—black, skinny, hair in dreads—and reaches up for the ledge. The camera dips and refocuses. Was there a cut right then? The person pulls themselves up, and I expect them to hit the glass of the window—
But they don’t. Instead, their head goes through.
I lean forward, heart racing.
Half their torso is inside. Head gone, shoulders disappeared. Legs kick like they’re trying not to fall. Then the camera shakes again, and the person drops back out of the window. They land on the ground, and the camera moves; whoever is filming starts running. The video shows the ground, then ends.
I watch it fifty more times. I run it through analysis software, looking for tell-tale artifacts that will prove it’s generated. Nothing hits. Everything looks real.
Whoever that is, they got through.
***
“It’s fake.” Thomas shoves the drive back into my hands. Above us, a window glows with a strange bluish light. It’s too high on an old water tower, and I’ve never bothered to climb up and look through. The light makes me wonder, though.
“Come on. It can’t be fake. I went frame by frame. I spent hours on this.”
Thomas looks around and shakes his head. “It’s fake, Jay. I know how much you want this, but it’s fake.”
I stare at the drive. I stare at Thomas. He’s heavy, with a shaved head and bags under his eyes. If I’m good at recognizing places in grainy drone footage, he’s good at rooting out doctored images. We’ve done work for each other in the past.
“Tell me how you know.”
“There’s a cut. It happens right before the guy goes into the window. But it’s there.”
“I went over that fifty times. It’s not there.”
“Look again.” He hesitates, looking over his shoulder. “Seriously, are you okay? I know this is important, but lately—”
“I’m fine.” I step away from him and onto the gravel path. “Thanks for your help.”
“Just go easy,” he calls after me. “They’re not worth it. Just ignore them like everyone else does.”
Footsteps crunch over rocks as I head back to my car.
***
Fluorescent lights glow. Carmine talks on the phone for almost a half hour. She tries to keep her voice low, but it’s an open seating plan. We all hear, and we all pretend we don’t. I click through my stack and write my analysis, and every third job I pause to scroll through the video again, desperate to see whatever tells Thomas spotted. But I just don’t see it. The cut’s not a cut—it’s just the filmer moving around too much, which makes it look like there could be a cut. But there isn’t one.
If this person got through a window, even halfway, that means it’s possible. I’ve seen hundreds of videos over the years of the windows, sometimes showing monsters coming out, sometimes showing people diving through, and this is the first one that seemed remotely plausible.
The way they only go halfway. Like they’re afraid to get trapped on the other side.
It takes an afternoon to locate where the video was filmed and another week hunting down rumors before I find a name buried in a forum for window freaks.
I’m not the first person on this trail.
***
I wait in the bathroom at the Piedmont Triad International Airport for two hours, watching people before I’m sure nobody followed me. I flag a cab to a small neighborhood on the north side of Greensboro. Red brick 1950s ranchers line a hill. The woman who answers the door tells me to go away, but she doesn’t seem surprised that I’m asking around. I duck behind a trash can when a car rolls past with its lights on, going much too slowly.
I try again an hour later. This time, the kid answers, and now I can see that he’s a kid: no more than sixteen, wearing baggy jeans and a basketball jersey hanging off his shoulders. He tells me to take the path into the woods right behind the street sign and to keep walking until I find the trains. He says the video is fake, and if I want to prove it, I can find the window myself. He tells me not to knock again.
***
Leaves crunch underfoot. The window is just like in the video. It hangs in the center of an old tanker train left to rot and rust. There’s a gravel path leading back behind a chain-link fence, and the tracks are overgrown with weeds. The window is uncovered, and there’s graffiti sprayed all around it: Nobody’s Coming.
I’m worried my shaking hands won’t be able to get through when I reach for the glass. I’m sick, and my mouth tastes like dirt. It’s cold when I finally touch it, cold even though everything around me is humid. The other side is snowy, an old country lane disappearing around a corner, suspended in time. There’s a light nearby—maybe a village in the distance? A hint of people, somewhere beyond.
But it doesn’t open. It doesn’t yield to me. I push harder because I’m tired of tracking down all these fake leads and finding nothing. She’s been gone for so long, and every day I fail is another day she’s trapped on the other side. Do these windows go to the same place? Is it like our world, but different? Or are these all little portals into different worlds, and even if I get through this window, it wouldn’t make a difference? She’d still be gone.
The glass bends. It wobbles and flexes like plastic. I pull back in shock and stare, not sure if that was real or not. I’ve never felt it before. The glass is always glass, sometimes warm and sometimes cold, but always solid.
That felt thin, like if I had kept pushing, it would have let me slip through.
I reach out again. I’m terrified. But there’s a crunch of tires on gravel nearby, and a black sedan pulls into view, its high beams on even though it’s the middle of the day. I squint over, shielding my eyes, but the windows are tinted black.
It honks twice. Short bursts. I watch, and it watches me back, and I don’t know who’s inside, but I can guess.
***
“It flexed,” I tell him, crouched in the darkness behind the bowling alley. The sound is loud back here with the back door cracked open. “I swear, I felt it.”
“You’ve been really wanting this for a long time,” Jason says. His face glows as he smokes. “You sure you didn’t imagine it?”
“It was real.” I tell him about the kid, the video, the car. He nods along. “It’s possible. She could’ve gotten through.”
“Let’s say she did.” He drops the cigarette and stubs it out. “What’s that change? You can’t get through her window. What does it matter if you got through another one?”
I open my mouth to explain the theories but stop myself. I’ve known Jason since grade school, and he’s heard it all before. He knows my obsession better than anyone else. I don’t know why he still puts up with me after all these years. I can almost see myself from his perspective: manic, paranoid, too far gone to help. Except I’m right this time.
“She’s out there,” I say, and he nods along because he’s heard it before, and what else is there to do but listen again?
***
I prep for nearly a month. It’s not easy gathering supplies without tipping anyone off. I shop in cash when possible and wear a surgical mask to hide my face. What I can’t find locally, I buy online with pre-paid VISA cards and have it sent to the bowling alley, where Jason lets me pick it up before they open.
Images float across my screen at work: an abandoned car overgrown with weeds, a forest stretching endlessly outward below a rocky canyon, a series of suburban homes. Glimpses into the world before it ended. The thrill of finding true pre-panic moments fades as my plan comes into focus. Beside the ATM machine in an old WaWa that never got an update, I peek through a window into a dusty old barn. Hay is stacked in the corner, and it never seems to rot. Dust motes float across slanting sunlight. It’s always day there.
The flight is unimaginative. I park near the edge of the woods and leave my rental there. Someone will pick it up. Jason has a key to my apartment, and he’ll find the meticulous note I left detailing my banking info, my passwords, and everything he’ll need to take care of what I’ve left behind.
The window is still there. I don’t know what I expected. I’ve seen videos of people trying to smash them, burn them, or break them open, and it never works. At best, if the structure they’re embedded in is completely demolished, they show up somewhere else a few days later, usually nearby.
I’m terrified as I climb up to it. The old country lane is still there, still cold and snowy. Atlanta’s hot, but where I’m going? I shrug my backpack higher on my shoulders and take a deep breath.
What if she’s not there? What if the windows aren’t looking at a mirror place, but at different places? A hundred thousand different worlds instead of one? But it doesn’t matter. I have to find her, and this is the only way.
I push against the glass, and it flexes again. I push harder until it feels like thin cellophane under my fingers. Ringing fills my ears, and my fingertips are numb. I push, surging forward, and feel the membrane snap as I topple inward.
I hit the ground hard. I wasn’t really bracing for it. My wrist hurts, and I’m so cold it makes my ears hurt. I pull my jacket from my backpack as I get to my feet and look around.
It’s dark. Sometime after midnight. The lane curves around a stand of trees. I smell pine and dirt in the crisp air. The clouds look right. The moon and the stars look right. I turn back, and the window is stuck in the side of an old crumbling shed, the roof dusted with snow.
I see the train yard: gravel, weeds, blowing leaves, except finally, something is wrong. People flit across like moths. A face appears at the glass, staring in before disappearing again, moving way too fast. More faces, and the scene pulses, light then dark. Ten heartbeats between night and day. I look around, and this place hasn’t changed, and that’s when I realize.
Time isn’t synced. Here, time is slow. But over there? Every day/light cycle means a day’s passing.
I stand there and count them. A week’s gone by in almost an instant, and there are so many people studying the window now, covered in protective equipment, vast apparatuses unfurled around the structure, staring in at me, studying, appearing and disappearing like spiders under a crawlspace, skittering around. One face keeps coming back.
It’s Janine. She looks almost sorry.
By the time I get to the end of this road, everyone I know will have moved on or died.
I can go back. It’s not too late. I’ll have lost weeks, months, years, something like that, but it isn’t too late. I’ll be famous over there.
Or I’ll end up in a black hood and chained in a basement.
There are footsteps in the snow. They’re vague and filled in, but someone came through not that long ago. I picture Melanie, still little. How much time has passed for her on this side? Weeks? Months at best? She’s not going to recognize me, but that’s okay. I’ve aged, but she’s still caught exactly when she left. The window behind me pulses with faces, motion, and light. I’ve got a lifetime of stories to tell her.
Hello folks, if you’re reading this, thanks for sticking around. I’m way off schedule at this point, but I have a couple stories in the bank and I’m ready to restart regular sending.
Please, if you liked this story, share it! Post to Reddit, email a friend, whatever. My stories show up twice per month (or less, obviously) and they’ll always be free. Also hit that like button, it keeps the lights on in my slushy brain.