The Lodger

We’d been in the house on Dalby Road for nine days when Izzy came down to breakfast and asked if the man in her room was allowed to be there.

She asked it the way she asks if she can have a biscuit.

Dan put his toast down. ‘What man?’

‘The old one. By the chimney.’ She climbed onto her chair. ‘He doesn’t turn round, even when I say hello.’

‘You were dreaming, Iz.’

‘I wasn’t. I was awake. I needed a wee and he was there, so I didn’t go.’

Dan laughed and looked at me to laugh too. I didn’t. At about three the night before, I’d got up for the loo and seen her door open a crack, the landing light falling across her carpet in a stripe. Halfway along the stripe there had been a bare foot. A man’s foot, long and grey, the toenails grown thick and yellow.

I’d told myself it was the radiator’s shadow; the moon creating the yellow and grey colours. Then I’d lain in bed until five with the duvet up to my eyes.

*

Izzy’s room is at the back, over the yard. In the corner there’s an old chimney breast, bricked up and papered over in that seventies orange with brown flowers. We were going to strip it at Easter. Her bed is on the opposite wall, so from her pillow she looks straight at it.

‘Get a camera,’ Dan said. ‘Then you’ll see it’s nothing and we can all sleep.’

He ordered one from Argos, the kind that sends black and white to your phone. On the first night it woke me at 3.10, buzzing on the duvet.

Motion detected.

Izzy was asleep on her side, hand under her cheek. Between her bed and the chimney breast stood a man.

He was too tall for the room. His head was bent sideways against the ceiling. He wore a vest and braces, and his trousers hung dark and heavy, wet to the knee. His back was to Izzy and his face was an inch from the wallpaper, and his arms were stretched wide, both hands flat on the bricked-up chimney, fingers spread.

Then he leaned. His shoulders bunched like a man pushing a car out of a ditch.

‘Dan.’ I shook him. ‘Dan. Dan, look.’

He banged his head on the headboard. ‘What? What is it?’

By the time he’d found his glasses, the room on the screen was empty.

We watched the clip back sitting up in bed. Forty-one seconds. For forty of them the man pushed at the wall. In the last second, without turning, he lifted his head off the paper and shook it at the camera, so fast it smeared. Side to side, like a film skipping.

Dan watched it four times.

‘That’s a glitch,’ he said. ‘That’s compression. It does that when there’s not enough light.’

‘There’s a man in our daughter’s room.’

‘There’s nobody in her room, Kel. I’ll go and look.’ He went. He came back. ‘There’s nobody in her room.’

‘Play it again.’

He didn’t.

*

In the morning there were handprints on Izzy’s wallpaper, higher than I could reach without going on tiptoe. Damp, and smelling of the beach at low tide. Dan scrubbed them off with Flash. When the paper dried they came back darker, as though they’d risen from underneath.

Izzy wasn’t frightened of him. That was what I couldn’t stand.

‘He was there all night again,’ she said, eating her Coco Pops.

‘What does he do?’

‘Pushes. Really hard. His nails are all broken. I think it hurts him.’

‘Does he ever say anything?’

She thought about it, chewing. ‘His mouth moves. I think it’s stay in bed.’

‘Have you ever got out of bed when he’s there?’

‘Once. I wanted to see his face.’ She stirred the milk round until it went brown. ‘But he did the thing with his head, and the lights went off, and I got back in.’

*

That night I sat on the landing with my back against the banisters.

At ten to three the nightlight under Izzy’s door began to fade. The bulb above me buzzed and dropped to a brown glow, as if something nearby was drawing every bit of power the house had. I stood up and pushed the door.

He was a yard from her bed, bent under the ceiling, hands on the wall.

The smell reached me first: wet coal and seaweed and, under it, something sweet, like meat left in a carrier bag. Then the sound, a long creak like a boat’s timbers. It was his arms.

I took one step in and his head began to shake.

The nightlight popped. In the dark I heard his head going, a dry fast knocking like a woodpecker, and his breath snorting in and out of his nose. Under that, so faint I took it for my pulse, came a scratching inside the wall.

He’s digging, I thought. He’s trying to get into the wall with those nails.

I grabbed Izzy, duvet and all, and ran.

*

Lorraine next door has been on Dalby Road since 1968. She told us over the fence the next morning while I was still in my dressing gown.

‘You’ve got Albert Fagg’s house,’ she said. ‘Did the agent not say?’

‘Say what?’ said Dan.

‘Fisherman. Coalman later, when the boats packed up. Lived there with his wife, Jean, till ’71.’

‘And then?’

‘And then she went.’ Lorraine pulled a face. ‘One week Jean’s out the back pegging washing, next week she isn’t. Albert says she’s gone, and that’s all anyone gets out of him. Same month, he bricks up the fireplace in the back bedroom. Did it at night, on his own. You could hear him till gone two.’

Dan glanced at me. ‘Gone where?’

‘Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? There was talk. You can imagine.’

‘How long did he live there after?’

‘Fifty-three years. Never had a soul in. Never went on holiday, never went in hospital, never went anywhere. Postman noticed the milk in the end. They broke the door in and found him upstairs, in that back room.’ She leaned on the fence. ‘Dead on his feet. Leaning on the wall with his arms out, like he was holding it up. Ninety-six. Stubborn old sod.’

*

We sat in the kitchen that night with every light in the house on.

‘She’s behind there,’ Dan said. ‘Isn’t she. Jean.’

‘Don’t.’

‘He killed her and put her in the chimney, and he spent fifty years making sure nobody found her. That’s what he’s doing. He’s guarding her.’

‘Then what does he want with Izzy?’

Dan didn’t answer that.

‘He tells her to stay in bed,’ I said. ‘Why would he want her to stay in bed?’

‘So she’s where he can see her.’

We talked till four. By the end we had decided exactly what Albert Fagg had done and exactly what he was. And we had decided he wasn’t spending one more night beside our daughter.

* 

The first was the vicar from St John’s, a kind man with a streaming cold. He said a blessing and flicked holy water at the chimney breast. Where the drops landed, the wallpaper hissed.

‘Is that normal?’ Dan asked.

The vicar wiped his nose. ‘I’d rather not say.’

That night the man was back, and thinner. I could see the brown flowers through his back. He pushed harder than ever, elbows locked, his whole body shaking, and the scratching in the wall was louder.

Izzy was sleeping between us by then. Every night she asked to go back.

‘He’ll be on his own,’ she said.

‘That’s what he wants, Iz.’

‘No it isn’t,’ she said, and turned over.

*

The second was a medium from the spiritualist church in Ramsgate, a big woman in a fleece who’d brought her own sandwiches. She walked into the back bedroom and stopped as if she’d walked into glass. Her face went the colour of lard.

‘Can you feel him?’ I asked.

She didn’t answer. She stood with her head tilted, listening to something.

‘There’s two of them,’ she said at last. ‘One in the room, and one in the—’

Then she turned round and walked straight out of the house. She left her bag on the bed.

She rang an hour later. ‘I’ll post your money back. Please leave my bag on the step. I won’t come in for it.’

‘Two of what?’ I said. ‘Two of what?’

She’d already hung up.

Him and Jean, I thought. Him and what he did to her. And I hated him more.

*

The third was Gaz, off a Facebook group called Thanet Paranormal. Thanet Rugby Club fleece, white van with nothing written on it.

‘Three a.m.,’ he said on the doorstep, at a quarter past two. ‘That’s when they’re thinnest. Everyone in the room. Nobody leaves the circle.’

He poured rock salt from a builder’s bucket round Izzy’s empty bed and across the doorway. He lit a bundle of sage until the room was blue. Then he handed Dan a brass bell.

‘Ring it when I say. Keep ringing. Don’t stop whatever happens.’

‘What’s going to happen?’ said Dan.

‘Probably nothing, mate.’

At three the nightlight dimmed and the landing went brown, and there he was. A yard from the bed. As if he’d been there all along and we’d only now noticed.

Close up, under the sage, he smelled of the seabed. Water ran off his trouser cuffs without a sound. His fingertips were worn through to something black, and they’d left ten dents in the wallpaper, deep as thumbs in clay.

And the wall was moving. I hadn’t seen it before. Between his hands the paper bulged into the room in a shallow dome, and every time it swelled, his arms creaked and he pushed it flat again.

‘Now,’ said Gaz. ‘Ring it.’

Dan rang. Gaz threw salt at the old man’s back and shouted, ‘Albert Fagg! This is not your house! Get out of this house!’

Where the salt hit, the man came apart a little, like wet newspaper.

His head started to shake. Dan kept ringing. Behind the paper came a long scrape, like a nail drawn slowly down a blackboard, from the ceiling all the way to the skirting board.

‘Keep going!’ Gaz yelled. ‘He’s going!’

And the old man turned round.

He had to let go of the wall to do it. His hands came away from the paper slowly, with a sound like tape peeling off a box.

His face was coal-black in every crease and grey everywhere else. His eyes were stretched so wide I could see the whole wet red rim round each one. His mouth was full of brick dust.

He crossed the room to me in one step, the way you’d lunge for a child running into a road. His fingers closed round my wrist like a cold iron cuff, and he pulled me towards the wall. His mouth opened. Dust fell out of it. And from right down in him, in a voice like coal going down a chute, he said one word.

‘Hold.’

I screamed. Dan rang the bell in his face, and the old man went up like ash in a chimney, and he was gone.

The lights came on. The wallpaper lay flat. Gaz stood there breathing hard.

‘Told you,’ he said. ‘Nothing.’

My wrist had four long bruises on top and one underneath, purple going black. I didn’t look at them properly until days later. They weren’t the marks you’d get from someone dragging you away. They were the marks you’d get from someone pressing your hand flat against something.

*

We had three quiet nights.

On the second, Izzy went back to her own bed and slept for twelve hours. Dan opened a bottle of prosecco, and we drank it on the back step.

‘Gaz, though,’ he said. ‘“Probably nothing, mate.”’

I laughed so hard I spilled mine.

On the third night I tucked Izzy in, and she looked past me at the chimney breast.

‘Is he gone?’

‘He’s gone, sweetheart. For good.’

She chewed the edge of her duvet. ‘So who’s going to do it now?’

‘Do what?’

But she’d shut her eyes.

I’d put the camera in a drawer. That night I got it out again. I don’t know why. Habit.

At 3.10 my phone buzzed on the duvet.

Motion detected.

Izzy was asleep on her side, hand under her cheek. Nobody stood by the bed. For the first time I could see the whole chimney breast: the orange paper, the brown flowers, the ten black dents at the height of a tall man’s fingers.

The paper was bulging. A wide shallow dome, pushing out into the room. Nobody was there to push it back.

I turned the sound up.

Out of the phone’s little speaker came the dry, slow sound of wallpaper tearing from the other side. It went on and on. Someone being careful. Someone who had waited fifty-three years and didn’t want to wake her.

I don’t remember the landing. Izzy’s light wouldn’t switch on, so I went in by the glow from the hall.

The paper had split down the middle of the dome, a long ragged mouth from the ceiling nearly to the floor. The bricks behind were bowed outwards and grey with old mortar. One had fallen onto the carpet. Behind the hole was black, and a smell of cold soot and something sweeter.

Something moved in the black. The brick beside the hole shifted a quarter of an inch, with a sound like a tooth coming loose.

I didn’t pick Izzy up. I didn’t shout for Dan. I did what the old man had been telling me since the first night. I put both hands flat on the wall, either side of the hole, fingers spread, and I leaned.

It was like leaning on a door with someone on the other side. It pushed back, steady and patient and far stronger than me. My arms started shaking almost at once. Through the cold wet bricks I could feel the scratching, the way you feel a train through a platform.

Behind me the bed creaked. Izzy sat up.

I couldn’t turn round. If I took my hands off the wall for one second, I didn’t know what would come out.

‘Stay in bed, baby,’ I said. ‘Stay in bed.’

‘Mummy.’ She sounded sleepy and puzzled. She was looking past me, at the hole. ‘It’s talking to me.’

My arms were burning. The wall moved a fraction towards me. I pushed it back. It moved again.

‘What’s it saying?’

She listened the way she used to watch the old man’s lips.

‘It says you’re not as strong as him,’ she said. ‘It says it can wait.’