When I moved into the house on Derringer Street, the landlord — Mr. Callow, a small man with the kind of face you forget immediately — handed me a laminated card along with my keys.
"House rules," he said. "Don't lose it."
I figured it was the usual stuff. No pets, no smoking, quiet hours. I didn't read it carefully until that night.
The rules were not the usual stuff.
1. Do not open the door at the end of the upstairs hallway. It is not a room.
2. If you hear footsteps above you, do not go upstairs. The house has no second floor.
3. Do not leave food on the kitchen table overnight. Push it against the wall. Against the wall is safe.
4. If you wake up and something in the house feels wrong, lie still. Wait. Do not turn on a light. It will pass.
5. The basement door locks from the inside. This is correct. This is how it should be.
6. Do not ask about the previous tenant.
I laughed a little when I read it. Old house, eccentric landlord, whatever. I taped the card to the fridge and went to bed.
The first two weeks were fine. Normal. Quiet neighborhood, decent commute, cheap rent for a good reason, I assumed.
Then I forgot rule three.
I'd made pasta and left it on the table — didn't even think about it, just went to bed. I woke up at 2 AM to a sound from the kitchen. Not loud. More like a careful, methodical sound. Like something shifting things around, looking for something.
I remembered rule four.
I lay still. The sound continued for maybe ten minutes. Then it stopped. The kitchen was fine in the morning. The pasta was gone. Not knocked over. Gone. Plate clean. Like it had been washed.
I started following the rules.
I followed all of them. I got good at it. Rule four especially — there were three or four nights in that first month where something felt wrong when I woke up, and I lay there in the dark not moving and it always passed, whatever it was.
The house started to feel almost normal.
Then the door at the end of the upstairs hallway opened.
I didn't open it. I want to be clear about that. I was at the end of the hall grabbing something from the linen closet, and it just opened. On its own. Slowly.
There was no room behind it. Mr. Callow was right about that.
But there was something in the space where a room should have been. I saw it for maybe two seconds before I did the only reasonable thing and closed my eyes and walked back to my bedroom.
I have not thought about what I saw. I am not going to describe it. I am choosing not to have words for it.
Mr. Callow called me the next morning. I don't know how he knew.
"You saw something," he said. It wasn't a question.
"No," I said.
"Good," he said. "Keep saying that."
I moved out three weeks later. I don't talk about the house. I'm not supposed to talk about the house. But the thing is, I moved to an apartment on the fourth floor of a building across the city, and last week I woke up at 2 AM and something felt wrong.
I lay still.
I waited.
It didn't pass.