In the hills outside a forgotten Vermont township stands a house that no map agrees on. By daylight it has twelve windows, evenly spaced, ordinary. After midnight, a thirteenth appears — set into a wall that has no room behind it. Mara Whitlock inherits the house from a relative she never met, expecting nothing more than dust and old furniture. What she finds, behind glass that shouldn't exist, is herself: older, harder, and marked by choices she hasn't made yet. As she returns to the window night after night, two men are pulled into her orbit — Ethan Blackwell, a local historian who has spent years trying to prove the house is more than folklore, and Daniel Cross, a stranger with his own reasons for wanting to know what Mara sees. The house keeps its own count, and it is not finished counting.



Connor Hayes CH writes gothic and psychological horror rooted in quiet, unsettling places — old houses, small towns, and the things they remember. Drawn to stories where the supernatural feels less like a threat and more like a mirror, Hayes explores how the past follows us home. When not writing, Hayes can be found wandering rural New England, collecting the kind of local legends that never quite make it into guidebooks.