10/08/2025
THE WINDOWS COLLECTION
By Tyrell Duncan
Published by Duncan World Building
The Windows Collection is a sprawling, interconnected Southern Gothic saga that unfolds over generations—each story a pane of glass, cracked but reflecting the same house, the same blood, and the same cycles of control, confinement, and inheritance. At its core, Windows is not about ghosts or monsters in the traditional sense—it is about the way memory itself haunts, how trauma passes through families like unfinished prayers, and how captivity can become a culture, a way of living, even after the locks have rusted away.
Every story in this collection peers through a different “window” of the same world—a cursed lineage bound by the Hemmings name. Through each pane, we see time folding in on itself, old sins mirrored in new faces, and generations trapped by the myths their parents made to survive.
The house changes. The years change. The people change.
But the evil is a permanent resident .
The Windows Collection is the complete anatomy of captivity—its birth, its repetition, and its inheritance.
I. WINDOWS
The Original Story
The story of Gemma, a girl raised by her guardians, Mal and Paul, in total isolation from the world.
At first, it seems like an eccentric, old-fashioned life: the house bound by rules, the world outside spoken of only as a threat, and routines so strict they feel almost holy. But Gemma begins to notice fractures—the same phrases repeated day after day, the same Wednesday trips to town, the same glances exchanged between her caretakers.
Through the dusty light of the Hemmings farmhouse, Gemma’s awakening becomes our own: the slow realization that she’s not living in protection, but in repetition.
Every rule has been inherited. Every lie was once believed.
And in uncovering the truth, she risks becoming what they were trying to preserve.
Themes: Generational trauma, routine as ritual, the illusion of safety.
Symbol: The window as both barrier and mirror.
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II. WINDOWS: THOSE BLUE-EYED BABIES
The Hemmings Children
Before Gemma, before Mal and Paul, there were Jeza, Emma-Jo, Billy, and Beth—the original children trapped under the rule of MawMaw and PawPaw.
Raised on fear and false salvation, the children’s world is confined to the house, its yard, and the dark rituals of obedience MawMaw disguises as love.
When Jeza, the eldest, catches glimpses of life beyond the fence, the fragile myth begins to collapse. PawPaw’s jealousy ignites, MawMaw’s control fractures, and the children become witnesses to a night that changes everything.
Themes: Innocence destroyed, religious delusion, inherited madness.
Symbol: The blue eyes—reflective, vacant, a lineage that sees but never escapes.
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III. WINDOWS: CLAUDIA “MAWMAW” REEDS
The Beginning of Captivity
Claudia’s story predates the Hemmings house as we know it.
Taken as a child and raised by her captor—a man she came to call PawPaw—Claudia’s mind becomes a battleground of love and terror. In her captivity, she learns to find safety in her own imprisonment, to confuse submission with devotion.
By the time she’s grown, she no longer remembers what freedom feels like. She builds her own prison in its image, raising children with the same rules that once destroyed her.
Themes: Stockholm syndrome, lost identity, the psychology of survival.
Symbol: The mirror—fractured reflections of a self she no longer recognizes.
IV. WINDOWS: THE HAND THAT BUILT THIS HOUSE
The Origin of the Curse
Long before PawPaw, there was William Hemmings—the man who built the house that would outlive him.
A widower, a father, a man of brutal discipline, William’s descent into isolation shapes the entire legacy.he had five daughter’s who he tamed through life long sexual abuse and psychological manipulation. His wife was ill leaving william “BIG W***y “ Hemmings nothing left but rage and a sick Agenda ,He creates a home out of command, silence, and control.
When his eldest son, W***y , turns against him in an attempt to free his sisters after one Dies from the abuse the violence becomes destiny. His death is not the end of the curse—it’s the beginning of its repetition.
Themes: Patriarchal rot, abuse as inheritance, the house as grave.
Symbol: The hand—the act of creation that becomes destruction.
V. WINDOWS: BILLY AND BETH
The Cycle Repeats
When MawMaw and PawPaw die, the youngest Hemmings children—Billy and Beth—wake up to an empty house.
Too young to understand what happened, too conditioned to question it, they continue the routines as if nothing has changed. They wait for voices that will never return.
In the silence, they rename themselves.
Beth becomes Mal. Billy becomes Paul.
And when hunger arrives, so does the idea—the echo of what Jeza once said about “making a family.” They find Gemma.
And the cycle begins again.
Themes: Learned behavior, memory as inheritance, creation through imitation.
Symbol: The echo—what remains after truth has been forgotten.
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The Windows Universe
Each story can stand alone, but together they form one continuous descent into—and escape from—the same idea: that trauma does not die with those who cause it. It survives in the rituals of those who remain.
Through shifting timelines, overlapping imagery, and recurring dialogue, The Windows Collection becomes a generational mirror. Every word spoken by one generation is remembered—slightly distorted—by the next.
It is less a series of books than a series of reflections.
Each story reframes the others until the audience, like the characters, cannot tell whether the house is haunted by the past—or built by it.
Final Note from the Author
The Windows Collection is not about the monsters who raised us.
It’s about the quiet ways we keep them alive.
The way we repeat their words when we think we’re saving someone.
The way love and control start to look the same in the dark.
Because some houses are never left.
They live through us.
