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face & descend into my feet, which then seemed to grow a powerful & elaborate system of roots,
so that I could not budge from the spot.
    â€˜You mus tel the mistris,’ said Fru Schleswig eventually, for she is a slow reader & it took a full minute for her fright
to catch up with mine. ‘You duz not tell her then it iz me wot will. Therez sumthin not rite in this howse. There be sum kynde
of eevil spirrit livin here an I duz not like it wun bit’
    And for once I agreed with her.
    Still rooted there, I stared in horror at the words that had been scrawled – apparently in blood that was still fresh enough
to be a glistening, scarlet red – upon the gruesome sign.
    Come not near, young madam, if you value your life.
    Now how would you react, O my dear one, if you were to be informed by a reliable & honest source that your dead husband was
living in the basement of your home, & was making his presence alarmingly felt just weeks before your nuptials to his successor?
Would you not fly into some kind of panic?
    I certainly imagined that the highly-strung Fru Krak would have difficulty containing herself in the face of such news, when
I conveyed it to her later that morning. I pictured her reaching for her smelling-salts, & taking to her bed, & summoning
the Pastor, whom she would beg to enact an exorcism or other such hocus-pocus to calm her fluttering feminine fears, & perhaps
revisiting Herr Bang at the apothecary’s for some more nerve-potions, & generally making the lives of Fru Schleswig & myself
as hellish as she could, with her demands & counter-demands, her fripperies, calamities & whims.
    But I was quite wrong.
    For instead of showing alarm, it was an expression of the foulest rage that washed over her pallid face as I told her what
had happened.
    â€˜And so I came straight to you, ma’am,’ I finished. ‘Knowing that you would want to be aware of such a terrifying thing as
an unknown inhabitant in your home.’
    She looked at me in steely silence for a moment with her dead, lopsided eyes, as though measuring how much energy she could
summon to answer me, & it struck me as she did so, that her face seemed even whiter than usual, indeed so bloodless that it
could be mistaken for a paper mask. ‘But this is no concern of mine!’ she finally burst out, in a tone whose harshness grated
on my ears. ‘And I will thank you not to mention such absurdities again! What is more, I shall be extremely angry if you bother
the Pastor with them. I am a lady, & I assure you I would never dream of descending belowstairs! Good grief, you worthless
little tart! If there are rats in the basement, get rid of them. That is your job!’
    â€˜Rats who have learned the alphabet so well that they can write notices in blood, ma’am?’ I queried, but she merely huffed,
& accused me of intolerable insolence & the like. But I was not fooled, for her voice had betrayed her, & just afterwards
when my back was turned & she thought I was not watching, I spotted her in the mirror reaching in a little leather bag around
her waist & swallowing three pills in a single hasty gulp.
    Keen to share the excitement of my discoveries, I made the excuse of needing to buy more soda crystals, & scurried out posthaste
to the florist’s shop to recount the story to Else, who by a lucky chance was playing cards with none other than Gudrun Olsen.
For a moment I watched the two women seated upright as alert as two bright birds, their fingers flying like the Devil among
the rose-buds & the snippings of flower-stalks on the table before them, & then, when their game seemed to come if not to
a halt then to a pause of some kind, where the cards required reshuffling, I greeted them & recounted the story of the noises
in the basement room, & the warning notice, & Fru Krak’s unusual reaction to being told of them.
    â€˜That means he’s in there!’ said Gudrun, slamming the