Moving cities and working nights had pretty much destroyed your social life. Every week, you spent your days off sitting around the house in your pyjamas eating copious amounts of beige snack food whilst watching hour after hour of elaborate cooking videos on YouTube. It wasn’t the life of glitz and glamour you’d imagined when you moved, but it was certainly comfortable. Plus, working nights was actually paying you well enough to live on your own, which was a luxury you relished in your every waking moment. You loved the peace of living by yourself; you loved putting something down and knowing exactly where to find it the next day, undisturbed, untidied, just waiting for you.

Solitude was your natural habitat.

The home you’d moved into was pleasant if a little dated. The area was far enough outside of the city centre to be quiet, but your commute was easy. The house itself was compact but more than big enough for just you, and had been sitting empty for long enough you’d snagged a really good deal on the rent. The move had been a bit strenuous on your own, but you had several years of sitting around doing not much of anything planned to recuperate.

Dawn on Friday morning found you in a hot bubble bath with the bathroom door locked, every candle you owned lit, and the blackout blinds closed. The small room was a sanctuary for you, and as you watched the shadow of rising steam flicker and writhe against the wall, you felt the tension of your night’s work start to loosen its grasp on your belly. Just the day before you’d unpacked the last of your things from the move, and the house was finally starting to feel as though you really belonged there. You’d even figured out how to put the heating on a timer so it was warm when you got home but didn’t cook you when you were trying to sleep: pure adulthood. You reached out towards the sink, grasping for the bottle of beer perched on the edge closest to the bath but not quite managing to reach it. You wondered absently how much it would cost to hire a plumber to move the sink four inches to the left when the bottle you were reaching for slipped from its perch into your waiting hand. The hairs on your arm stood on end as you sunk back into the bath, beer in hand.

“Thanks, ghost.” You stated to the room, sipping from the bottle and picking up the book you’d left split over the edge of the bath, determined to find out whodunnit by bedtime.

Your next week passed without incident. Working, sleeping, eating microwave meals whilst watching Nigella Lawson purr up feast for 20 best friends. You kept yourself awake most nights convinced there was someone vveerrrryyy slowly creeping their way up the stairs to your room, but the swift application of three deadbolts to your bedroom door was starting to allay that particular night time anxiety train.

It wasn’t until the next Friday night, when you were tucked up in bed and settling in for the traditional 2-3 hours of browsing on your phone before sleep, that you heard it. The door at the bottom of the stairs opened. Immediately your internal monologue switched from silence to ceaseless blood curdling screaming, but outwardly you were rigid and silent. You dialed 99 on your phone and waited, listening intently. You could hear your heartbeat in your ears and your breath came in short gasps.

You waited.

And waited.

Nothing happened.

The next morning, high on having only had a couple of hours of fitful sleep, you went downstairs with some trepidation and confirmed that the door at the bottom of the stairs was indeed open. You probably just didn’t close it properly. Nothing to worry about. No need to hyperventilate. No reason to continue to have the internal monologue screams. Nope. No problem. You just had more deadbolts to buy, that’s all. What murderer breaks into a house just to open a door then go home anyway? Made no sense. It was going to be fine.

You busied yourself with your days-off housework, sweeping here, mopping there, scraping the detritus of four days of microwave meals up off your kitchen counter, changing the bin bag, cleaning the rotten salad you’d bought in a moment of blind hope for your future health out of the fridge. The tasks relaxed you. You reasoned with yourself. You knew you had a proclivity for disproportionate anxiety, you knew there had been no one in the house, it was just air pressure or something.

You sank back into your normal routine.

All was quiet for another week.

You had your bookcase setup just how you liked it (organised by author, then by spine colour), your sock drawer was fastidiously sorted (by sock height, then by colour), and your fridge was full of vegetables you had no real intention of eating. You hadn’t spoken to another human in over 70 hours. Life was good.

Pausing the TV, you hoisted yourself out of the sofa groove you’d been tirelessly excavating for the last several hours and padded barefoot towards the kitchen in pursuit of a pack of biscuits. The tile floor was pleasantly cool to the touch as you rooted around the cupboards. Emerging victorious, you placed your prize down on the counter, deciding to preheat the oven to cook yourself a potato (probably a vegetable and therefore inherently healthy). You turned the dial and opened the oven door, leaning down to place your hand inside the oven to feel for warmth, making sure it was on. When you felt the movement of warm air against your hand, you closed the oven door and stood up, catching a glimpse of yourself in the shiny splashback behind the hob. You realised with a snap of cold terror that you weren’t alone in the reflection. It was only for an instant, but you saw something tall and dark standing behind you. You screamed, but it was already gone.

Your biscuits were like ash in your mouth. You’d immediately grabbed your keys, wallet, biscuits and coat and evacuated the scene. You were currently sitting in a café in your pyjamas, stress eating Outside Biscuits and being glared at by the barista from her position behind the counter. So you’d finally snapped. You plucked your phone from your pocket and googled:

Whilst you did immediately and viscerally relate to the spooked looking guy in the accompanying evidence (“illustration”), these people sounded nuts. That must mean that hauntings were nuts. It was nuts to believe in hauntings. Only nuts people called the police about being haunted. Ok, no haunted house. Just a spooked lady living alone for the first time high on hydrogenated fat and a weird sleep cycle. You let out a shaky breath and determinedly ate another biscuit.

By the time the next Friday rolled around, the door at the bottom of the stairs was laden with deadbolts. You’d taken to pushing your wardrobe in front of your bedroom door when you were trying to sleep which had the twin benefits of making you feel like no one could get in and also slightly muffling the sounds you could hear from the hallway, which stopped you whipping yourself up into an anxious frenzy quite as easily.

In your second or third hour of scrolling through the Tumblr / Twitter / Reddit trifecta of sleeplessness your ears pricked up. You thought you heard the door at the bottom of the stairs rattle. You sat bolt upright in bed and dialed 99 on your phone, waiting in rigid silence to see if anything else happened. You were trying your best not to hyperventilate. After a minute or two of straining your ears against the quiet night, you thought you heard the metal slide and rattle of a deadbolt being undone downstairs, but that was impossible.. they could only be undone from the inside.

Suddenly, you heard heavy footsteps sprinting up the stairs 3 at a time and you frantically fumbled with your phone to call 999, eyes fixed on the wardrobe in front of the bedroom door. Something huge and heavy and strong SLAMMED full force into your bedroom door, and then there was complete suffocating silence once more. Tears of terror were streaming down your face.

“Hello, 999, what’s the nature of your emergency?”

Quietly, slowly, the wardrobe door opened.