The night window

Source: an original fiction extract.

“For a week, the window in the empty house opposite had lit up at exactly eleven. At eleven ten, it went dark. Mara watched from her desk while pretending to finish a geography assignment. The house had been unoccupied since the previous winter. Its garden gate was tied with string, and a folded council notice had softened inside the letterbox. On Friday, Mara asked her father about the light. He said that empty houses were not always as empty as they looked.

At night the house seemed to draw the street towards it. Its unlit windows were deep squares without reflection. Ivy climbed the drainpipe in a black, tangled hurry, stopping just below the one room that shone. Inside that yellow rectangle, nothing moved. The light had the flat, unwavering quality of a stage waiting for an actor who was late.

On Saturday evening, Mara saw a woman opening the tied gate. She carried a canvas bag and a small watering can. Mara went downstairs so quickly that she forgot the question she had planned. By the time she reached the pavement, the woman was at the front door. 'Do you live there?' Mara called. The woman turned. For a moment she looked annoyed, then merely tired. She said it had been her mother's house.

Mara asked about the light. The woman looked up at the window and laughed once, without much amusement. A timer, she explained. Her mother had used it to make the house look occupied when she went away. Nobody had changed it. She opened the canvas bag: letters, a packet of biscuits, a small pot plant with yellowing leaves. 'I keep thinking I'll finish clearing it,' she said. Mara looked at the watering can. The woman followed her glance. 'That one keeps growing.'

At eleven, Mara sat at her desk again. The window lit up on time. It was still a yellow rectangle in a dark house, and still nothing moved inside it. On her own windowsill, the spider plant had sent a long shoot towards the curtain. Mara turned it gently towards the room. Then she finished the last paragraph of her assignment before the light opposite went out.”

Refer only to the second paragraph. Analyse how the writer uses language to present the mysterious atmosphere of the empty house. Support your ideas with quotations from that paragraph. You could consider words and phrases, language features and techniques, and sentence forms.