The Rearranger

What it looks like, and what it does

Never seen, only traced: long even drag-marks in the carpet, a smell of hot dust, a single chair always turned to face the front door. Rooms arranged with an uncanny ease.

Works between two and four in the morning. Moves objects only along lines the owner would have wished for themselves. Leaves the oldest object in the house untouched.

What is known

Households first notice the sofa a hand's width to the left. Then the lamp, then the bed. The changes are exact and unaccountably comfortable.

Over months, the rearrangement converges. Residents say the house feels more like a home than it ever has, and that they feel more and more like guests. Estate agents have noted that such homes sell fast. The buyers say the rooms “felt arranged for them.”

What it can do

• Moves any object in a house, silently, a few centimetres a night
• Converges a house on a layout fitted to one particular person

Where it stops

• Cannot move anything within arm's reach of a sleeping person
• Stops at once if the occupant rearranges the room back by hand three nights running

An encounter

Fischer photographed the flat before and after a viewing with a tenant who said the place made her feel she was rehearsing. In the later photographs the bed has moved by forty centimetres. The tenant could not be traced. The flat let that week to a man who stood in the doorway a long time and said, “Yes. This.”

Lena Fischer, estate agent, Second-floor flat, Wexler Court, Ten weeks

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Photographs from nine homes show monotonic movement toward a shared floor plan.
• rumor: That houses it has finished stand empty for a night, and then a stranger arrives.
• interpretation: It may be building a copy of a home from the inside out, using real houses for scaffolding.

Still unresolved

Plans overlaid from nine rearranged houses converge on a single layout, a house that none of them is.

Where it has been recorded

• Wexler Court (confirmed) — Recorded by Lena Fischer, estate agent.

Stories about it

• The Rearranger in the Marlowe Building (Grotesque encounter, 4 min) — An office cleaner on the night shift at the Marlowe Building finds every desk on the fourth floor moved a few centimetres each night into a new arrangement, and the furniture in the directors' room has been shifted toward a window that does not exist.
• Made Ready for Someone Else (Entity story, 4 min) — Ten weeks into the tenancy Isabel Cray admits the flat has never felt so much like home and never less like hers, because each night something moves the furniture one inch closer to a plan.

Connected entities

• The Fire Drill — Both replace what is familiar with something fitted to someone else. Both are accepted at once.
• The Cartographer's Apprentice — Both lay out a place before anyone lives in it, and both lay it out for a particular person.