Trouble arrives
Let me start by saying that I am a generous and helpful-natured person. I’m vegetarian. I recycle. I hold doors open for strangers. I have also volunteered for community service on multiple occasion. But this generosity of mine is usually not reciprocated by others; in fact, most of the time I get in trouble for doing what I consider a good thing, and this has led to massive internal anger issues, which I have managed to hide from everyone except my mom. The reason I am telling you all this is that soon you will read about some events that will make you doubt my judgement. I want you to remember this paragraph then. I am like this, and I can’t help it.
My name is Maeve Calloway, I’m nineteen, and I made an extremely questionable decision to move to Dunmore, Ohio for college. I know what you’re thinking. Dunmore? Really? You could have gone anywhere, and you picked a town with a population of four thousand, one diner, and a gas station that closes at seven p.m.? In my defense, Dunmore has a small, fairly respected liberal arts college with a killer creative writing program and a scholarship generous enough that my mother cried when she read the acceptance letter.
There was also another reason. My dad, an architect by profession, had passed away when I was seventeen, in a car accident, and the insurance company, doing what they do best, refused to provide us with any claim. We cannot confirm or deny whether the person driving was under the influence of drugs or alcohol; they said. My mother, on the other hand, was already having a midlife crisis of her own, and she was working really hard since Dad passed to raise me. At that time, I was in a situation where I could have either afforded accommodation or college tuition. So, instead of going to a fancy college and living as a homeless person, I chose to have a roof above my head.
The house I leased was a small two-bedroom place on Christchurch Lane, about a ten-minute walk from campus. It was surprising to find a property that was even below my shoestring budget. My roommate was supposed to be my best friend Beth, with whom I had to split the rent, but she got into a study abroad program in Edinburgh at the last minute (I am thrilled for her, I am, I’m just also furious) and so I was alone in a house that was slightly too big for one person and in a town where I knew nobody.
The house itself was perfectly fine. Old, a little creaky, with wood floors that announced your every movement like a snitch and a kitchen faucet that dripped in a rhythm suspiciously close to the opening of “Succession” web series. The landlord, Mr. Feeney, was a retired postal worker in his seventies who described the property as having “a lot of character,” which is real estate language for “things will occasionally break.” But it was mine. My name on the lease, my mismatched second-hand furniture, my collection of potted plants on the windowsill that I was determined not to kill this semester. I had a life here. Keyword being had.
It was the third week of October when the strange things started. First, it was small stuff. A window I was certain I’d latched would be open in the morning. The smell of something cold and unfamiliar would drift through the hallway at night. Once, I woke up at 2 a.m. convinced I’d heard someone knocking, but when I looked outside, the street was empty and still. I told myself it was the house settling. Old houses do that. They breathe and shift and make sounds that belong to no one. I told myself that, and I almost believed it.
Then came the night of October 19th. I was on my couch in my pajamas, the faded ones with the little foxes on them, for full context, eating microwave popcorn and watching a documentary about competitive dog grooming at an embarrassingly late hour. My laptop was open beside me with three tabs of half-finished homework that I was actively ignoring. It was, by any measure, a deeply unglamorous evening.
That’s when someone knocked on my door. It was a slow, deliberate knock. Three beats. A pause. Then three more. Like whoever was on the other side had all the time in the world and knew it. I checked the clock; it was 11:47 p.m. I looked at my phone for any notification and then at the door.
The sensible, horror-movie-savvy part of my brain said: Do not open that. You are a young woman alone in a house. It is nearly midnight. Do not open that door. The deeply nosy part of my brain, which, I regret to inform you, is larger, said: But what if it’s something interesting?
Regrettably, I opened the door.
The man standing on my porch did not look like a serial killer. This, I would later learn, is actually something you should be suspicious of. He was tall, genuinely tall, the kind where you have to adjust your entire eyeline, and he was wearing a long dark coat that probably cost more than my semester’s tuition. He had dark hair that fell across his forehead like he’d been standing in the wind, cheekbones that a Renaissance sculptor would have wept over, and eyes the color of deep amber, almost bronze, framed by lashes that were frankly unfair on a person who was otherwise this intimidating.
He was also, I noticed, not breathing. Or rather, he was breathing, but it was controlled, measured. Like breathing was something he was doing on purpose rather than something that just happened to him. He looked at me as if examining me.
“Good evening,” he said. His voice was low and precise, with an accent I couldn’t quite place, something old-world and unhurried, like he’d learned English from someone who spoke it in a different century.
“Uh,” I said, which was not my most articulate moment.
“I believe,” he said, glancing past me into the house with the casual assessment of someone reading a menu, “that you’re living in my house.”
I stared at him.
“Excuse me?”
“My house,” he repeated, patiently, as though I was the one being strange. “I’ve owned it for quite some time. I was away, and now I’ve returned.”
“You--” I looked behind me at my couch, still confused and processing his words. “This is my house. I have a lease. I’ve been here for six weeks.”
Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise, exactly, more like mild inconvenience. The way a person looks when they spill coffee on their sleeve.
“Yes,” he said. “That is a complication.”
“A complication.”
“Feeney,” he said, mostly to himself, closing his eyes briefly. “Of course, it was Feeney.”
“Okay,” I said, very calmly, considering. “I don’t know who you are, it’s midnight, and you’re on my porch telling me you own my house. You need to leave, or I am going to call the police.”
He looked at me, like really looked at me, and for one strange, vertiginous moment, I felt like I was being read. Like he could calculate the space between my words and what I meant.
“I apologize for the hour,” he said, which was not an apology at all, really. “May I come in? I’d prefer to discuss this indoors.”
I squinted at this ravishing but suspicious stranger on my porch, who was so clearly waiting for something, and I thought: well, he hasn’t tried to break in. He knocked. Maybe it’s fine. Maybe he’s just eccentric. This is a small town. They have different social norms.
“Sure,” I said. “Come in.”
The smile that crossed his face was brief and unsettling and immediately made me regret every decision I had ever made. He stepped over the threshold like he owned the place. Because, technically, he did.
His name, he told me, was Cyrus Vane. He said it as if I should recognize it. I did not. He stood in my living room with his hands clasped behind his back, surveying the space with an expression I can only describe as a man trying very hard to be diplomatic about someone else’s interior decorating choices.
“You’ve moved things,” he said, looking at the bookshelf I’d positioned under the window.
“It’s my house,” I said. “I have a lease.”
“Mm.” He picked up one of my potted plants, a small succulent I had owned for fourteen months and was deeply attached to, and examined it with the detached curiosity of a scientist handling an artifact.
“Please put Gerald down.”
He looked at me. “You’ve named your succulent.”
“I name all my plants. Gerald, put him down.”
He set Gerald back on the shelf, with perhaps slightly more care than I expected, and turned to face me fully. Up close, he was more unsettling, not less. His skin was very pale, not ill-looking, but the kind of pale that didn’t suggest any particular origin, more like the light just didn’t quite land on him right.
“Why are you staring at me?” he said.
“You’re in my living room at midnight.”
“It’s my living room,” he corrected, pleasantly.
“Absolutely not.”
He did not sit. He stood very still in the way that some people do, the self-contained stillness of someone who has no nervous habit, no unconscious fidget, no small human restlessness. And something about that stillness, more than the eyes or the accent, made the small animal part of my brain issue a quiet, insistent alarm.
“You’re very calm,” he observed.
“I’m actually having an internal crisis,” I told him. “I’m just polite.”
The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The ghost of a smile’s memory.
“Mr. Feeney,” he said, “appears to have neglected to inform me that he’d rented the property. I’ve been away for several years. When I left, there was an agreement that the house would be maintained in my absence, not occupied.”
“Well, there was a ‘For Rent’ listing on the college housing board,” I said. “With photos. There were photos of this kitchen. I signed a twelve-month lease. I have a document.”
He considered this for a moment and then replied, “I’ll speak with Feeney.”
“Fantastic. After you’ve spoken with Feeney, I’ll still be here, living in this house, because my lease is legally binding.”
He turned to look at me again with that particular stillness, and I had the sudden, ridiculous sense that he wasn’t accustomed to being argued with. Like this was a new experience he was processing in real time.
“Get out,” I said.
“Legally,” he said, just as pleasantly, “Your lease, if it was issued without my knowledge, is not valid. I have more claim to this property than you do. I own it. I’ve owned it since 1987.”
I was even more bewildered now. 1987? How? I could have bet he wasn’t even born before the 90s. I opened my mouth to speak.
“Before you say anything,” he added, “I’m older than I look.”
