The Window We Were Told Never to Open

 

The guesthouse in Santorini was exactly what we had hoped for. Small, whitewashed, tucked into a quiet street away from the crowds. The owner met us at the door, warm and unhurried, and walked us up to the best room herself. Good light, a pretty view, thick walls that held the cool air in.

Before she left, she paused at the window and said one thing.

Don't open it after dark.

She didn't explain. We didn't ask. It felt like the kind of request that comes with old houses, the sort of small rule that exists for a reason you don't need to fully understand. We nodded and she smiled and that was that.

We had dinner, walked along the caldera until the sun was completely gone, came back tired and satisfied and fell asleep without any trouble.

Then two in the morning arrived.

My husband gets restless when he can't sleep. He doesn't toss and turn, he just goes quiet in a particular way that I've learned to recognize after years of sharing a bed with him. I felt him sit up slowly, like he was trying not to wake me. Then his hand found my arm and closed around it, not urgently, but deliberately.

I opened my eyes.

He was looking at the window. He had opened it. The curtain was shifting slightly in the dark.

"There's a voice," he said. "Right below. A woman. Listen."

I sat up and listened.

He was right. Low and soft and completely steady, rising from the alley just beneath the window. No words, just a sound that had the unmistakable shape and rhythm of a human voice. A woman, older somehow in the way it felt, murmuring in the dark.

We looked at each other.

I leaned toward the window and looked down. The alley was empty. No movement, no light, no shadow that didn't belong to the walls themselves. Just the voice, continuous and calm, coming from nowhere.

We closed the window. We lay back down. Neither of us slept again.

By the time pale light started showing under the curtains, we had constructed a small collection of theories, none of them satisfying, and had mostly sat in silence listening to each other not sleep.

At breakfast I found the owner arranging cups in the courtyard and told her what had happened.

She was not surprised. Not even slightly.

She set down the cups and explained it simply, the way you explain something you have said many times before. The alley runs between the buildings at an angle that does something unusual to the wind coming off the water. It compresses it, shapes it, and by the time it moves through the narrow space below that window, it sounds almost exactly like a human voice. Low, soft, continuous. She said they had noticed it for as long as anyone could remember. They had given her a name. Yiayia. The grandmother.

I stared at her.

I asked why she hadn't just told us that instead of issuing a mysterious instruction and walking away.

She picked the cups back up and thought about it for a moment.

The voice, she said, was not the problem. The problem was the draft that came with it. When that window was open at night, it created a current through the house that slammed every interior door, one after another, like something moving through the rooms. Last week a guest had called the police at three in the morning. Two others had come downstairs convinced something was wrong with the building. The warning was about the doors. She had simply forgotten to say that part out loud.

She refilled our coffee.

"Most guests find it quite funny in the morning," she said, and smiled in a way that suggested she personally found it funny right now.

We looked at each other across the table.

A full night of sleep, gone. An hour of lying rigid in the dark listening to the wind and quietly imagining things that did not exist. A voice with a name that had been explained to dozens of guests before us and would be explained to dozens more after.

We did find it funny. Not immediately, but within about thirty seconds of sitting there in the morning sun with fresh coffee and the very mundane truth of it all, yes, we found it very funny.

We kept the window closed the second night. We slept perfectly.

We still talk about Yiayia.