The Previous Owners Left a List of Rules

The handover was normal — keys, meter readings, the warranty for the boiler. Then the seller, an elderly man moving to be near his daughter, pressed a sealed envelope into my hand at the door, held my eyes a beat too long, and said, 'Read it the first night. All of it. I'm sorry.' Then he left, quite quickly for a man his age.

Inside was a single sheet, typed, headed HOUSE RULES, and a list:

'1. Do not lock the back bedroom door. She doesn't like it and she'll make sure you know. 2. Leave the landing light on between midnight and dawn. It's not for you. 3. If you hear the piano at night, don't go and look. Just say "goodnight, Margaret" from your room, and it stops. 4. The cold patch on the stairs is hers. Don't stand in it; step around, it's only polite. 5. She won't hurt you. She just wants the house run properly. We were happy here. You will be too, if you keep to these.'

We laughed. Of course we laughed. We're rational people; we assumed a lonely old man's eccentric joke or an elaborate estate-agent quirk. We locked the back bedroom the first night purely out of contrarian spite.

The door was unlocked in the morning. From the inside — the little key was on the floor of the room, on the far side, though we'd locked it from the hall and pocketed the key, and I found that key still in my dressing-gown pocket, so there were two keys, or the one key had made a journey no key makes.