The Eye At Number 12.

In Ashworth Close, the curtains twitched as regularly as church bells. You could not walk a dog or put the bins out without someone taking note. It was not cruel, not exactly. It was habit. People on the Close had lived there long enough to know each other’s rhythms as well as their own, so that any variation rang out like a cracked note.

And she was variation made flesh.

Number Twelve had stood empty for months before she moved in. A single, black and childless young woman in a cul-de-sac where the youngest marriage was celebrating its twentieth anniversary. She was not the sort who looked worn down by age or children either. She was in her thirties by rumour, but her skin was unmarked, her eyes sharp, and her manner brisk. To look at her was to feel wrong-footed, as though she had been placed in the street by mistake.

She did not invite people in. She did not join the residents’ gatherings, though she nodded when spoken to in the street. Sometimes she walked to the shop with music still echoing faintly from her house, and the neighbours, standing behind their door holes, watched her as if she were a performance passing by. She watched back. They knew she did. More than one resident had glanced out and seen her eye at her own door hole, cool and patient, as if she had expected the looking.

By October the gossip had curdled. A woman who set herself apart was a woman asking for trouble. Mr. Collins said she thought herself too fine for them. Mrs. Dyer muttered she must be hiding something. Mrs. Fenton, whose word carried weight, declared she had never once seen a visitor enter Number Twelve, which in itself was not natural.

So it was decided, in the way such things are decided, without being written or voted upon, that something must be done on Halloween. A little lesson. Harmless. Only enough to show she could not remain aloof forever.

The night came wet and sharp with wind. A handful of neighbours gathered at the edge of her path, half laughing, half uneasy. The house was unlit. Not even the murmur of music. The air felt heavy, as if the Close itself was holding its breath.

Collins was the boldest, or perhaps the most foolish. He went first, creeping up to the step. He rapped his knuckles against the wood. Nothing. He bent low, muttering that he would see if she was crouched inside listening.

He pressed his eye to the door hole.

He had a moment to whisper something that made no sense. A word no one quite caught. Then he reeled back with a cry that tore through the quiet street. His hands clawed at his face. He stumbled on the path, striking the paving, howling that he could see nothing, nothing at all.

The others stood rooted, too frightened to help, too horrified to run. The door hole of Number Twelve darkened. She was there in the gloom, her face unreadable. Her gaze drifted over them, lingering long enough to still their breath.

The hole cleared again. Silence returned.

Collins whimpered on the path while the neighbours looked at one another, their little plot undone. Not one of them spoke. Not one of them ever peered through her door hole again.

In the weeks that followed, the curtains twitched less. The gossip faltered. And when music returned to Number Twelve, low and steady, nobody said a word.

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Author's note:

This story is in response to the "Through The Keyhole" challenge.