When the Lamps Went Out

“Dawn doesn’t bring answers. It just turns the dark into something you can no longer hide in.”

Dawn broke with cruel indifference to my vigil.

The transformation from night to day was not the dramatic unveiling I'd half-expected—no sudden flood of golden light, no theatrical revelation. Instead, it came as it always did in Hobart's winter: grudgingly, incrementally, as though the sun itself were reluctant to acknowledge this corner of the world.

The darkness didn't retreat so much as thin out, dilute itself into something only marginally less oppressive. Black became charcoal became slate, the gradient so subtle I couldn't identify the exact moment when night ended and day began. It was liminal time, that uncertain hour when the world exists in neither one state nor the other, when shadows lose their depth but light hasn't yet gained its strength.

The streetlamps, which had burned all night with their sickly sodium glow, began to sense the changing conditions. One by one, they flickered and died, their work done, their light no longer needed. The timing was imperfect—some extinguished while darkness still clung to the corners, others burned on stubbornly into full dawn, reluctant to surrender their posts. The effect was unsettling, a pattern of lights dying across the street like a wave of small extinctions.

I'd sat there for hours—motionless, unblinking—eyes fixed on that house. Willing something. Anything. Willing movement, confirmation, an admission in the form of a twitching curtain or a flickering light. But none came.

My body had become a monument to stillness. I'd barely shifted position in seven hours, maintaining my watch with a discipline that bordered on pathological. My muscles had progressed through several stages of discomfort: first the mild ache of sustained tension, then the sharper pain of cramping, then a dangerous numbness where sensation began to fade entirely. Now, as dawn arrived, I existed in a state beyond pain—a kind of dissociated awareness where my body felt separate from my consciousness, a vehicle I happened to occupy rather than something integral to my being.

The irony wasn't lost on me. I'd conducted countless surveillance operations over the years, stakeouts that had tested patience and bladder capacity in equal measure. But those had been professional, sanctioned, shared with partners who could spell you for bathroom breaks and coffee runs. This was different. This was personal obsession masquerading as police work, a vigil maintained not by duty but by the desperate need to be proven right.

Nothing.

The house remained as it had all night: inert. Impassive. Still as a painting. A shell of rendered brick and glass giving away nothing. No silhouettes passed behind the windows. No creak of a door. No shift in the shadows. It was a stage set without actors, every detail too perfect in its stillness. A silence that felt deliberate. Mocking.

As the light grew, the house revealed itself in greater detail. What darkness had rendered mysterious, dawn exposed as merely ordinary. The cream bricks showed their age in the improving visibility—slight discolouration from weathering, a fine network of hairline cracks in the mortar, the beginnings of efflorescence where moisture had leached minerals to the surface.

These details should have humanised the house, made it less sinister. Instead, they only emphasised how utterly normal it appeared. There was nothing about this dwelling to suggest it harboured secrets, contained fugitives, or played any role in the drama I'd constructed. It was just a house. A well-kept suburban house where people lived ordinary lives.

The realisation sat heavy in my chest. Had I been watching the wrong place? Or had I been watching the right place for the wrong reasons?

Even the neighbour's tabby, which had prowled the fence earlier, its yellow eyes flickering in and out of the dark like will-o'-the-wisps, had long since vanished—its instincts sharper than mine, apparently. I was alone now. Truly.

And as the darkness retreated, so too did my certainty.

Not all at once. But incrementally, like erosion. Like frost melting on windshields. Quiet. Subtle. I could feel it leeching away from me with every tick of the watch on my wrist.

The conviction that had burned so bright in the immediate aftermath of that whisper—that absolute, unshakeable knowledge that Luke was inside, watching, waiting—had begun to cool. Not extinguished, not yet, but no longer the white-hot certainty that had sustained me through the small hours. Doubt crept in at the edges, finding purchase in the cracks that exhaustion and cold had opened.

What if I'd been wrong about the whisper's origin? What if it had been carried from elsewhere—sound travelling in odd ways through the house's architecture, something I'd failed to account for? What if my mind, already primed for confrontation, had interpreted an ambiguous sound as a deliberate taunt?

I tried to replay the moment with objective detachment, to analyse it as I would evidence in any other case. But the memory refused to stay still, shifting and reforming each time I examined it. The voice had been behind me—I was certain of that. Or was I? Could it have come from the side? From ahead, distorted by the hallway’s acoustics? The more I interrogated the memory, the less reliable it became, like a photograph that fades with each viewing.

This was how doubt worked. Not a sudden revelation of error, but a gradual undermining of confidence. A persistent voice suggesting alternative explanations, highlighting inconsistencies, asking uncomfortable questions. If you were so certain, why did you find nothing? If Luke was there, where did he go? If the whisper was real, why didn't Sarah hear it?

I shifted in my seat for the first time in what felt like hours, and pain lit up my joints like broken glass. My hips ached. My neck was locked. My bladder throbbed with insistent protest. Every movement sent needles into my limbs—punishment for holding myself so rigid, for becoming a monument to my own obsession.

I moved in stages, millimetre by millimetre, the way you might approach a bomb that could detonate at any moment. Straightened my back against the seat. Flexed my fingers, hearing the small pops as knuckles released. Rotated my neck with glacial slowness, feeling the vertebrae grind and click. Each adjustment brought fresh waves of pain, but also relief—the paradox of circulation returning, nerves firing back to life after hours of compression.

My bladder's protest had progressed beyond discomfort into genuine distress. I'd ignored it for hours, too committed to the vigil to even consider leaving for a bathroom break. Now it demanded attention with a sharp, cramping insistence that made me wince. The pressure was intense enough that I briefly considered the indignity of relieving myself in a bottle, before recognising that I had no bottle, and the idea was absurd besides.

The realisation that I'd have to leave, that physiological necessity would force the end of my watch, brought a strange mixture of relief and failure. My body had made the decision my mind couldn't—time to go. Time to surrender.

The car was freezing. Condensation fogged the windscreen from within, breath forming tight clouds that vanished before they could settle. A sheen of moisture had formed along the dashboard. I rubbed at the glass absently with my sleeve, smearing droplets into streaks that distorted the house beyond. It didn't matter. There was nothing left to see.

The cold had become absolute, pervasive, the kind of penetrating chill that seeps into bones and takes hours of heat to dispel. The Commodore's interior temperature had matched the exterior somewhere after midnight, and for the past six hours I'd been essentially sitting outside, protected from wind and the occasional fog but not from the deeper cold that radiated from every surface. Metal, plastic, glass—all of it served as a conductor, drawing warmth from my body and offering nothing in return.

I'd become a hermit crab in a shell of glass and steel, cut off from the world by barriers both physical and psychological. The fogged windows had transformed the car into a kind of sensory deprivation chamber, reducing visual input to vague shapes and movements, amplifying the sound of my own breathing and heartbeat until they seemed deafeningly loud in the enclosed space.

I checked my watch—nearly seven. The luminous hands glowed unnaturally bright in the gloom of the car, their precise tick-tick-tick an indictment of time wasted.

I'd achieved nothing. Not a shred of evidence. No validation. Just the darkening stain of my own compulsions soaking through the seams of professionalism.

The watch seemed to mock me with its precision. Each tick was a small accusation: Here is a second wasted. Here is another. Here is your life, measured out in sixty-second intervals, spent sitting in a freezing car watching a house where nothing happens.

How many other things could I have done with those seven hours? Slept, certainly—my body screamed for rest. Made amends to Sarah, if she'd even take my call. Begun the process of damage control with the department. Faced the consequences of my actions like a professional rather than fleeing into obsessive surveillance.

But I'd chosen this instead. Chosen to sit in the dark, feeding my obsession, convincing myself that vindication was just a moment away. Chosen the comfortable fiction of the vigil over the uncomfortable reality of accountability.

My fingers, stiff with cold, fumbled for the keys in my coat pocket. The metal bit into my skin as I turned them in the ignition. The engine coughed once, twice—then roared to life with a volume that shattered the fragile stillness like glass underfoot. I winced. As if it mattered. If anyone was home, they'd known I was there all along.

The heating system struggled to life with a series of clicks and whirs, beginning the slow process of warming the interior. The vents blew cold air initially, making me shiver, before gradually warming. The demister kicked in automatically, clearing small patches of the windscreen with agonising slowness. I watched the view resolve—house, tree, street—each detail emerging as the condensation retreated.

I glanced at the rearview mirror and recoiled.

The face that stared back at me was not one I recognised. Bloodshot eyes, shadowed with sleeplessness. Hair matted and stuck in erratic tufts from frustrated hands. Jaw dark with stubble and clenched so tightly I could feel the tension pulsing in my temples.

I looked like a man who'd lost the thread. Who'd gone too far down a tunnel with no light at the end.

My skin had taken on a greyish pallor, the colour of someone seriously ill or profoundly stressed. The stubble covering my jaw was uneven, several days of growth now, flecked with more grey than I remembered. I looked older than my years, worn down, used up. The face of a man at the end of something—a case, a career, perhaps his own sanity.

There were lines I didn't remember—deep grooves bracketing my mouth, creases across my forehead that seemed to have appeared overnight. Stress lines, they called them. Proof written in flesh that the body keeps score even when the mind refuses to acknowledge the damage.

I tried to smooth my hair, to restore some semblance of normality, but my hands shook and achieved little beyond spreading the chaos more evenly. The man in the mirror looked beyond such superficial corrections. He looked like he needed a month of sleep, a good meal, and possibly psychiatric intervention.

One last glance at the house.

Still nothing.

I studied the house one final time, trying to commit every detail to memory, as though closer observation might reveal what I'd missed during the long hours of darkness. The cream bricks, the dark windows, the tendered garden—all of it utterly ordinary, utterly unremarkable. A house like ten thousand others in Hobart's suburbs. Nothing about it suggested mystery or malice. Nothing about it justified my obsession.

And yet. And yet. Somewhere in my gut, that instinct still whispered. Something was wrong here. Something was hidden. The surface normality was too perfect, too maintained. Real houses had personality, character, the accumulated mess of actual living. This house felt curated, arranged, designed to deflect rather than reveal.

But instinct without evidence was just superstition. And I'd learned that lesson the hard way.

I shifted into gear, harder than I needed to—seeking the clunk of resistance as something tangible. Something I could control.

The gearshift resisted briefly before engaging with a solid thunk that resonated through the transmission. That mechanical certainty felt reassuring after hours of ambiguity and doubt. The car would obey my inputs, respond predictably to my commands. Accelerate when I pressed the pedal. Brake when I asked it to. Turn where I directed. These were facts, reliable and testable, unlike the treacherous territory of human behaviour and hidden motives.

I pressed the accelerator more firmly than necessary, feeling the engine respond with a surge of power that pushed me back in the seat. The sensation of movement, of agency, of doing rather than merely observing—it felt like liberation after the paralysis of the vigil.

And then I drove away.

The sound of tyres on asphalt was oddly soothing—a soft, continuous hiss that accompanied my departure. I watched the house shrink in the mirror, growing smaller, less significant, until a turn in the road removed it from view entirely. Gone. As though it had never existed. As though the past seven hours had been erased, rendered meaningless by the simple act of driving away.

But I knew better. The vigil might be over, but its consequences were just beginning. Sarah's injury. The assault witnessed by Gladys. My unauthorised presence at a civilian's home, maintaining an overnight watch without warrant or authorisation. The department would have questions. Many questions. And I had no answers that wouldn't make me sound delusional or dangerous or both.