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She woke with a start. As she did, her arm brushed the book which lay across her chest; it must have fallen there when she unexpectedly drifted off. She didn’t remember falling asleep or turning off her bedside lamp, and the only light now came from the bathroom across the hallway. It spilled from the space beneath the door and, because she had left the bedroom door open, shone right into her eyes. Kat must have left it on. Again. She closed her eyes and tried not to be frustrated, then looked over at Kat’s side of the bed. It looked like Kat had tried to sleep and given up. All that was left was a lump of blankets and pillows that, in the dim light, gave the impression of a person sleeping.

From down the hall, she heard the thumping of someone shifting boxes around in the spare room, and she guessed at what had woken her. It seemed that Kat was having another insomniac night and was trying to do something productive instead of just lying in bed staring at the dark ceiling. At least one of us is finally getting to those boxes, Ell thought. They’d unpacked most of the important items and had stuffed the rest into the spare room to be done at an unspecified later date. But it had been three weeks since they’d moved in, and everything in that room remained untouched.

The spare room was down the hallway. All the way down the hallway, as Kat would have said. When they’d first seen the house, Kat had remarked how long the hallway had seemed. Then, when they moved in and started filling the rooms with the assorted detritus of human occupation, Kat had stood at one end and waited for Ell to walk through the doorway at the other end.

Come on, Ell, come down here and give me a kiss. It’ll take you five and a half minutes to make the trip, but I’m worth it, right?

Ell had rolled her eyes and asked Kat to unload the next box from the truck.

Eventually, the house started to feel like a home. Ell had felt uneasy in the house for the first few days. It got worse at night, where she found herself unable to sleep for hours, afraid of every new creak and unexplained noise in the house. Kat had been fine; she was used to dealing with sleepless nights and didn’t find it any more difficult than usual to get to sleep. But, on the whole, they’d both mostly settled into the house. Mostly.

A few times since moving in, the alarm had gone off in the early hours of the morning, waking them with its piercing screech. When it happened, Kat rushed out of bed and quickly entered the code before an automatic alert was sent to the security company. At first, Ell had been terrified, convinced someone had been trying to break into their house. Each time, the system reported that something in the spare room had set it off, yet there was never anything out of the ordinary when they checked. Just a few stacks of boxes and a bed they still hadn’t set up. After the third time, Kat had told her that she thought it might be because of the boxes. Maybe the sensors get tripped up by them or something. They’d resolved to clear the room out soon.

But, of course, they never did. It wasn’t urgent, and there was so much else to do that neither of them managed to get around to it. Which is why, as annoyed as Ell was, she decided that she wasn’t going to ask Kat to knock it off and come back to bed. She could put up with the minor inconvenience if it meant the room got cleared out without her having to do it.

Then again, Kat wasn’t exactly trying to be quiet. The sounds had gotten louder, and it sounded to Ell like Kat was just throwing stuff around in there. It didn’t sound like she was unpacking; it was like she was ripping boxes open and scattering the contents around. After a few minutes of hoping it would calm down but hearing the intensity steadily increasing, Ell had had enough.

‘Oi!’ she yelled. ‘Can you keep it down?’

Something beside her moved and made an unintelligible sound. Ell flinched and looked down to see what it was. The lump she had taken for a few pillows under the blanket was actually Kat, hidden under the sheets. She stared at Ell with the glassy, unfocused look of someone who had just been woken from a deep sleep.

Ell stared back at her, equally uncomprehending.

‘Ell, what—’ Kat began, but Ell shushed her, a cold fear spiking through her.

Ell looked up to the open doorway. The sounds from the bedroom had stopped, she now realised, the moment she had yelled out. She had drawn the attention of whatever was in that room. Kat, now almost fully awake and attuned to the terror she saw on Ell’s face, opened her mouth to speak again.

Then the bathroom light went out.

In the sudden darkness, which seemed absolute and endless, Ell heard something like a sharp intake of breath from somewhere outside their bedroom. It made her think of a predator that had just spotted its prey, and her skin broke out in goosebumps. She felt Kat move to leave the bed, so she reached out and gripped her arm to stop her, dimly aware that Kat was shaking. The silence was oppressive as they waited, the seconds stretching tortuously on and on while they waited for whatever came next.

She was just beginning to hope it had all been some kind of waking nightmare when the silence broke at last. Something had started to run down the hallway towards their bedroom, its awful footfalls echoing through the walls, coming closer and closer and closer.