Psychological horror · 4 min read ·
The Lodger I Invited In
A widow rents out her spare room to a quiet young man who pays on time and never leaves the house, and it takes her three months to notice that his breakfast plate is always clean, and that she has never once seen him eat.
- perspective: close-third
Irene Vale had never let a room before. Her husband had been against it, and after he died she had simply not thought about it. But the mortgage on the terraced house in Pell Crescent had grown too heavy for her pension, and when the advertisement went up in the post office window, a young man with a slight stammer and a neat grey coat knocked on the door the next morning and asked, very politely, whether the back room was still available.
His name was Edmund. He said he worked from home, in something to do with records and files, and that he would pay three months in advance. He did. He took the back room with its narrow bed and its view of the garden, and he moved in that afternoon with a single suitcase and a box of books.
He was quiet. That was the first thing Irene noticed. He did not play music, or use the bath at odd hours, or leave the television on. He came down to the kitchen each morning at seven, dressed and shaved, and sat at the table by the window while she made her tea, and he thanked her for the bread and the marmalade. He spoke when spoken to. He asked after her health and her garden and her late husband, and he listened to the answers with a close, almost tender attention that made her feel, for the first time in years, that she was worth listening to.
In the second month she began to notice the breakfast plate.
Every morning she laid a place for him: a plate, a cup, a knife and fork, a slice of toast with butter and marmalade, a boiled egg in its cup. Every morning he sat down and thanked her and talked for half an hour. And every morning, when she came back to clear the table, the plate was empty and clean, as if it had been washed, the toast gone, the egg shell neatly cracked and set aside, the cup drained to the last drop.
She had not heard him eat. She had not heard the cutlery, or the chair scraping, or the sound of a man chewing toast with his mouth full. She had been in the kitchen the whole time. She would have heard.
She watched him closely after that. At breakfast, he ate nothing, though he sat with his cup in both hands and nodded and smiled and talked. At lunch he was out, or upstairs in his room with the door shut. At dinner he was not at the table at all, and when she went up with a tray and knocked, there was no answer, only a faint rustle, like pages being turned very quietly.
In the third month she went up and opened the door.
The room was small and tidy. The bed was made with hospital corners. A row of books lined the shelf, all of them the same grey binding, with no titles on the spines. A pen lay on the desk beside a neat pile of paper, and on the top sheet, in a careful, slanting hand, someone had written a list of names and dates. Irene's husband was on it. So was her mother, and her son, who had never been born, and Irene herself, with a line through her name and a date beside it, three months ahead.
Edmund was sitting on the bed, his hands folded in his lap, his face quite calm.
"You've noticed," he said, and the stammer had gone. He sounded like a man reading aloud from a book he knew by heart. "I'm sorry. I should have said. I don't need to eat. I only come to keep you company, while you're still here to be kept."
Irene asked him what he meant. He looked at her with the same close, kind attention he had always given her, and said that the room had been empty for a long time, and that he was the only lodger who had ever been invited in.
She went downstairs and made a cup of tea, very carefully, and set a place at the kitchen table for two. He came down at seven, as always, dressed and shaved. He sat by the window, and thanked her for the bread, and waited, very politely, for her to begin talking. She did. She talked until the light changed in the garden, about her husband and her mother and the son she had never had, and when she finally stopped, the plates were clean, and the cups were empty, and he was smiling at her, very gently, the way a man smiles at a woman he has been expecting for a long time.