The Thing Upstairs

We had rented the cottage for a week in January, mostly because it was cheap. By the second night, I understood why.

It was a damp little place at the end of a lane in Cornwall, and the cold got into everything. Cass had gone to bed early. I was sitting by the fire when I first heard it: a slow creak from the room above me, like someone walking very carefully across the floor.

I told myself it was the wind. Old houses move in the wind. But the night was completely still, and the sound came again, and then again, always at the same slow pace. I had locked the doors myself. There was no one upstairs.

The next morning I asked the owner about it. She laughed in a way I didn’t like. A girl had died in that house a hundred years ago, she said, and people sometimes heard her at night. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but I didn’t sleep well either. The story had got into my head, and every creak now sounded like a signal from somewhere I couldn’t see.

On the third night, the creaking woke me at two in the morning. This time I was frightened enough to go and look. My heart was beating hard as I climbed the stairs. I pushed open the door of the empty bedroom, expecting horror.

A pigeon was sitting on the windowsill inside. It had come in through a broken pane days before, and every night it walked the length of the loose floorboard above my chair. The mystery had wings and feathers and looked at me with one annoyed orange eye. I opened the window, and it flew out into the dark, and I finally slept.