There’s a shadow in the corner of my room. Sometimes as I sleep, peering at my room through my eyelids with the vision of dreams, it crawls near, sits down on the bed, and watches me. Night creeping close to me. I wake and it’s gone: I’m out of bed and looking there it’s always dark in that corner. But it’s still and silent. It’s sat there still as a predator listening to my breathing, heavy in the silence.

My landlady laughs a lot. Sometimes in my dreams I suppose she’s talking to the dark …

I’m sat here trying to write – and in my sulk I close my eyes and I seem to go right up and peer closely into the laughter, which sometimes seems a response to some moment of my secret anger, and I feel her laughter mocking and I’m irritable and irrational, and sometimes I hear the dog howling. And it won’t stop: I hear the landlord shout on at it for about twenty minutes.

She came into my room today. When I saw her she’d been stood there a while. Her smirking smile. White hair. Callous grey eyes. I asked her what she wanted, but she just nodded down to the landlord. I asked her what she wanted, but she just asked me if I kept my door locked.

It’s hard to explain this. I see things now only with the vision of dreams. I see now only with eyes closed.

But the shadow I know for sure.

And I know now that there are shadows in the corners of rooms everywhere.