The Uninvited Tenant

The séance was Marnie’s idea. She’d been feeling the cold spots in the hallway by the radiator for weeks, and the way the bathroom door would creak open by itself at 3 a.m. had worn her patience thin. So after a bottle of cheap red wine and a lot of bravado, she and her roommate, Jules, decided to try a spirit board. They had no proper plan, just a piece of cardboard with the alphabet scrawled in marker, a shot glass, and some candlelight.

Marnie, usually the skeptic, was the one who warned against it. ‘You can’t just leave the door open and expect nothing to wander in,’ she said, her voice low as she lit the last candle. But Jules was already giggling, her finger on the glass. ‘It’s fine, we’ll close it when we’re done. Let’s see who’s been borrowing my earphones.’

They called out a name, any name. ‘Is anyone here?’ The glass didn’t move. Marnie rolled her eyes, but then she felt a draft, cold as a grave, snake around her ankles. The flame on the candle nearest to her flickered, turning a sickly blue. The glass jerked, slid across the board, and spelled ‘H-E-A-T.’ Not a name, not a welcome. A word. ‘It’s the radiator,’ Jules said, but her voice wasn’t so steady now.

They asked again, ‘Who are you?’ The glass moved with frantic energy, spelling ‘LET ME IN’ with such force the shot glass cracked. Marnie pulled her hand away, and the glass stopped dead. The room went silent, save for the hum of the fridge. They laughed nervously, but that night, Marnie couldn’t sleep. She kept hearing a faint scratching from inside the walls, like nails on wood, and a smell of old pennies and burnt toast wafted through the vents.

The next morning, the photograph on the mantel had been turned to face the wall. The mirror in the bathroom was cracked, a single word scrawled in the fog on the mirror: ‘MINE.’ Jules laughed it off, but Marnie noticed the house had a new tenant. She felt it in the weight of the air, in the way the shadows in the corners seemed to breathe.

That evening, they tried to close the board, to say goodbye, but the glass wouldn’t cooperate. Instead, it spelled ‘NO’ over and over, growing more frantic until it flew off the table and shattered against the wall. The candles snuffed out, and in the dark, Marnie heard something padding across the ceiling, heavy and deliberate. A voice, hoarse and wrong, whispered right behind her ear: ‘Your lease is up.’

They fled to the car, but the doors wouldn’t unlock. Inside, the house lights flickered, and the front door slammed shut, the deadbolt clicking into place. Through the window, Marnie saw their own shadows moving, but they weren’t casting them. The shadow in the kitchen waved at them, and then it raised a hand and pointed at the ground, as if saying, ‘This is my place now.’

They escaped, finally, when the neighbor came out with a flashlight. But even as they drove away, Marnie couldn’t shake the feeling that they had left something behind. That the house had taken something from them, and it would be waiting, patient, for their return. She looked at Jules, whose face was pale, and saw that Jules’s reflection in the rearview mirror was smiling, a grin that was far too wide. And it wasn’t Jules’s smile.