The Porch Light at Number 17

By the time Mara Bell moved into Hawthorn Close, everyone had already learned not to talk about Number 17 until October. It was a small road of pebble-dashed houses, trimmed hedges and wheelie bins that never seemed to be collected on the right day. Nothing about it suggested a story worth keeping quiet. Number 17 stood halfway down the close between the Delaneys, who owned three noisy terriers, and Mr Pike, who washed his car every Sunday whether it needed it or not. The house itself was ordinary enough: brown brick, narrow windows, a white front door faded to the colour of old paper. The strange thing was the porch light. For eleven months of the year it stayed dark. Then, on Halloween night, at exactly six o’clock, it came on.

Mara first noticed it because her son Theo stopped in the middle of pulling on his vampire cape and pointed through the sitting-room window. “That house is empty,” he said. Mara had been told as much by the estate agent, and again by Mrs Delaney over the fence. The owner, an elderly man named Arthur Vale, had died several years earlier. No relatives had claimed the place, or perhaps there had been some problem with probate; the details changed depending on who told the story. Yet the porch light glowed warmly behind a glass shade, clean and steady, while the rest of the house remained black. Mara assumed a timer had been left on. Mr Pike, when asked, stared at her for long enough to make the answer uncomfortable. “Timer would need electricity,” he said at last. “Electricity’s been off in there since Arthur died.”

Children came down Hawthorn Close in noisy groups that evening, plastic buckets knocking against knees, parents hanging back under umbrellas. They crossed the road before reaching Number 17. No one instructed them to do it. They simply did, as though the habit had been passed from older brothers and sisters until it no longer needed explaining. Theo noticed. Of course he did. Children always notice the rules adults pretend are not rules. He asked Mara why no one knocked there. She said because the house was empty. He asked why the light was on. She said she did not know. Then he asked the question that made her wish she had turned on the television instead of watching the street. “If nobody lives there, who is the light for?”

Later, after Theo had gone to bed with a pillowcase full of sweets hidden under his duvet, Mara stood at the sink washing mugs and looked out through the kitchen window. Rain had polished the road. The last trick-or-treaters were gone. Number 17 still shone. There was something almost tender about the light, not threatening at all. It made the empty doorway look expected, as if someone inside had set the lamp for a late visitor. Mara found herself thinking about Arthur Vale, a man she had never met. Mrs Delaney had said he used to sit on his step every Halloween with a bowl of chocolate and remember every child’s name. Mr Pike had said Arthur’s wife died on Halloween, though he could not remember the year. Another neighbour insisted it was Arthur’s daughter. Hawthorn Close had plenty of facts, but none of them agreed.

At half past eleven Mara heard a knock. Not at her own door. It came faintly from outside: three slow taps with a pause between them. She opened the curtain. The close was empty. Then the sound came again, and she realised it was coming from Number 17. Someone was knocking from the inside. She stood very still, one hand wrapped in the curtain fabric. Three taps. Pause. Three taps. The porch light did not flicker. Mara told herself old houses shifted when the temperature dropped. Pipes ticked. Wood contracted. A loose branch could strike a window. She went upstairs, checked Theo, then came back down and found herself putting on her coat. The rain had stopped but the air was cold enough to sting. Every sensible part of her mind objected as she walked across the road. She could see Mr Pike’s curtains move. Mrs Delaney’s hall light came on. No one opened a door. Number 17 seemed smaller up close. Moss had gathered between the paving stones. The brass letterbox was green at the edges. Mara climbed the two steps and stood beneath the glowing porch lamp. There was no sound from inside now. She raised her hand, hesitated, and knocked once. The noise travelled into the house and returned as a soft hollow echo. Nothing happened. She knocked again, three times, matching what she had heard.

A bolt slid back on the other side of the door. Mara’s body reacted before her mind could: every muscle tightened, breath caught high in her chest, heels ready to turn. But the door did not open. Instead, something moved behind the letterbox. A square of paper pushed slowly through and fell onto the mat by her shoes. Mara waited. No footsteps retreated. No shadow crossed beneath the door. She bent and picked up the paper. It was a photograph, slightly curled, showing Hawthorn Close perhaps thirty years earlier. Children in homemade costumes crowded around Number 17. A younger Arthur Vale stood on the step holding a bowl. Beside him was a woman wearing a witch’s hat, laughing at something beyond the edge of the picture. On the back, written in blue ink, were four words: KEEP THE LIGHT ON. Mara carried the photograph home. The next morning the porch light was dark again. She showed the picture to Mrs Delaney, who covered her mouth with one hand. The woman beside Arthur, she explained, was his wife June. Every Halloween they had kept the porch light on until midnight because June hated the thought of any child walking home through a dark street. After she died, Arthur continued the tradition alone. He had done it even in the final year of his life, when he was too ill to answer the door. “He sat in the hallway,” Mrs Delaney said quietly, “just so he could see the light under the door.”

Mara asked about the electricity. Mrs Delaney shook her head. Mr Pike, summoned from his drive, repeated that the supply was disconnected. Neither wanted to discuss the knocking. Before returning home, Mara placed the photograph in an envelope and slid it back through Number 17’s letterbox. She expected the matter to end there. Instead, the following October, a week before Halloween, an electrician’s van appeared outside the empty house. Mara had spent months finding out who technically controlled the property, then several more weeks persuading a solicitor that she was not attempting to trespass, steal, squat or conduct a séance. Eventually, with permission and more paperwork than any ghost should require, she paid to have one small circuit restored. On Halloween night, Hawthorn Close looked different. Mara ran an outdoor cable of orange lights along her hedge. The Delaneys put lanterns in their windows. Mr Pike, after insisting he was not participating, set a bowl of sweets beside his immaculate car. At six o’clock Mara walked to Number 17 and switched on the porch lamp from the new external timer box. Children still hesitated at first. Theo, taller now and dressed as a skeleton, crossed the road and placed a pumpkin bucket on the empty step with a handwritten sign: TAKE ONE. Soon the old house was part of the street again, not a place to avoid.

At eleven thirty Mara stood in her kitchen, watching the last families head home. She had almost convinced herself that the previous year had been a mixture of nerves, grief borrowed from strangers and an old photograph pushed loose by a draught. Then the porch light at Number 17 blinked once. Not off and on like a faulty bulb, but slowly, deliberately, as though someone had covered it with a hand. Across the road, Mr Pike looked up at exactly the same moment. Mrs Delaney came to her window. The three neighbours saw one another seeing it. Nobody waved. Nobody needed to. The light steadied again and burned until midnight, warm against the October dark.

The House That Played the Same Song

The house at the end of Larkspur Road had been empty so long that nobody called it by a number anymore. It was simply the Bell House, named after the family who had lived there before the windows were boarded and ivy climbed over the conservatory. Every October someone from the council attached a fresh warning notice to the gate. Every November the paper peeled away. Children dared one another to touch the front door. Teenagers climbed the wall and came back claiming they had seen footprints in dust. Adults dismissed all of this. What they did not dismiss was the music. At 11:11 p.m. every Halloween, a song played inside the Bell House. It lasted three minutes and forty-two seconds. People had timed it. The tune was faint enough that newcomers often thought it came from a neighbour’s radio, but everyone who lived nearby knew otherwise. It came through the boarded windows as though someone had placed an old record player in the front room. No electricity served the property. Police had checked after complaints. So had council workers. Nothing was found.

Nora Bell moved back to Larkspur Road at fifty-eight, after her marriage ended and her mother died within the same difficult year. Despite the surname, she had never lived in the Bell House. The people who had owned it were relatives she barely remembered: her father’s older brother Michael, his wife Anne and their daughter Lucy. Nora’s family stopped speaking to them when she was a child. Adults called it “a falling out,” the phrase families use when the truth is considered unsuitable for children and too embarrassing for neighbours. Nora rented a bungalow three doors away without initially realising how close she would be. On her first Halloween back, she was unpacking books when the music began. The opening piano notes made her drop the mug in her hand. She knew the song. Not its title. Not the singer. But the melody had been locked somewhere in her memory for half a century. She saw, with sudden painful clarity, a yellow carpet, a spinning record, her cousin Lucy dancing with socks on her hands. Nora was eight years old. Lucy was ten. They were laughing because Lucy’s mother had told them to quiet down and they deliberately danced more dramatically.

Nora walked outside in her slippers. Neighbours had gathered at garden gates, listening. The boarded Bell House seemed to breathe the song into the cold air. Nora crossed the road and pressed both hands to the iron gate. For the first time she remembered the words that came after the chorus. She began singing under her breath. The music stopped. It had played for only two minutes. The next day Nora visited her father, who was eighty-six and living in residential care. His memory drifted unpredictably, but when Nora mentioned the song he became sharply alert. “You heard it?” he asked. She nodded. Her father looked toward the window. “Lucy played that record every day.” “What happened in the house?” He refused to answer. Nora pushed until anger brought the truth where memory would not. Lucy Bell disappeared on Halloween in 1976. The family said she ran away. Police searched briefly but found no sign of her. Michael accused Nora’s father of interfering in the investigation. Nora’s father accused Michael of hiding something. The brothers never spoke again.

“Why don’t I remember any of this?” Nora asked. Her father’s eyes filled with tears. “Because you were there.” Memory returned in pieces over the following week. Nora and Lucy carving apples at the kitchen table. Michael Bell shouting upstairs. Anne crying beside the sink. A record playing too loudly. Lucy taking Nora’s hand and saying they were going to hide. The cellar door. Darkness. Then nothing. Nora contacted police. The case was ancient but technically unresolved. The Bell House had been searched in 1976, though perhaps not thoroughly by modern standards. Ownership had become tangled after Michael and Anne died, leaving the building untouched. Detectives obtained permission to enter. Nora insisted on joining only as far as the front hall. Inside, the house smelled of mould and old timber. Wallpaper hung in strips. The front room was empty except for a fireplace and piles of plaster. No record player. No speakers. Police searched the cellar and found nothing unusual. Nora felt foolish until one detective noticed scrape marks behind a built-in cupboard beneath the stairs.

A narrow door had been plastered over. Behind it was a second cellar space not shown on building plans. They found toys, blankets, a small battery torch corroded beyond use and a child’s shoe. No body. At the back of the space, an iron ventilation grille opened into a disused service tunnel running beneath several houses. Investigators believed Lucy may have entered the hidden room during a game and continued into the tunnel. Part of it had collapsed decades earlier. Nora remembered more. She and Lucy had hidden there together. Nora became frightened and went back upstairs. Lucy dared her to return. Before Nora could, adults began arguing. Then someone discovered Lucy was missing. Nora, terrified of being blamed, said nothing about the hidden door. By morning, when she finally told her father, Michael accused the child of lying. The cupboard was later fitted across the entrance. On Halloween, fifty years after Lucy disappeared, engineers opened the collapsed section of tunnel. They found human remains less than thirty metres from the house.

The music played that night at 11:11. Nora stood alone inside the Bell House with police permission. A portable work light illuminated the stripped front room. There was no source for the sound. It seemed to come from the walls themselves. This time Nora sang along from the first note. As the final chorus approached, another voice joined hers. A child’s voice. Nora closed her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said when the song ended. “I should have told them sooner.” Something moved upstairs. Not footsteps, exactly. More like the soft rush of someone running across carpet. Then the house became silent. The Bell House was demolished the following spring. A small terrace of new homes now stands on the site. Nora remained on Larkspur Road. Every Halloween she places an old-style portable record player on her front step and plays the song at 11:11. She eventually discovered its title in an archive of forgotten singles from the 1970s. But she never tells the neighbours what it is. Some songs, she believes, belong to the people who came back for them.