It’s not a bad boarding house, as these things go.
We’re not allowed up to the fourth floor, for any reason – but I don’t blame the landlady for wanting her privacy.
Nobody but the landlady answers the strange willow-patterned telephone on the third floor landing.
We all lock our windows on full moon nights.
No couples are allowed, ever. Only single women and girls.
And sometimes, if you go down the hall to the kitchen late at night, there’s a strange black door that’s never there by daylight.
For some reason, it’s hard to get new lodgers to stay. I don’t know why. It’s a little strange, maybe, but the meals are good, Mrs Hallow the landlady is kind, and the rent is ridiculously cheap. I’ll take the strange black door and the phone that rings even when there’s no wire going to it over rats in the walls and cigarette ash in the food any day. My last boarding house was like that. I like it here.
I’d been living here for nearly two years when I lost my job working at the telephone exchange. It wasn’t my fault – they cut the night shift back, and one of the girls cut was me. Mrs Hallow told me not to worry – as I was an old lodger, she’d let me work for room and board while I looked for another job. She’s so nice, I don’t know why people say she’s creepy. It’s not her fault she’s so tall and thin, and her bones show through her fragile old skin.
I worked hard, wanting her to be glad she’d kept me. One of the jobs she gave me, since I was used to working nights, was packing lunches after supper. For the Night Gentlemen, she told me, but didn’t say more. Every night, I packed twenty lunches in twenty tin pails and filled twenty thermoses with strong coffee. I made sandwiches, and boiled eggs, sliced pickles and cheese, and packed a paper napkin into each pail. I was to have everything done by eleven, Mrs Hallow told me, for the Night Gentlemen came at midnight to collect their meals, and I should be in bed by then. By morning, the pails were all gone. By evening, they were all stacked neatly in the kitchen again, clean and ready to be filled. I never saw them come, but I supposed it must be while I was sleeping.
Then I started to worry that my lunches were dull. I baked cookies for the lunch pails, and pies and pasties. I put in different kinds of fruit and vegetables each day. The Night Gentlemen worked late hours, if they came for their lunches in the middle of the night. They needed to eat good food. I looked through Mrs Hallow’s old recipe books and tried new dishes, like german apple pancake and potato dumplings. Mrs Hallow was pleased, and said she would pay me a little wage in addition to my room and board, if I didn’t mind continuing. She was getting too old, she said, to make all those meals every night.
I had been working at the boarding house for nearly six months when I really messed up. I’d burned a whole batch of cookies to a crisp, so I had to start all over, and I didn’t have time to decorate them before evening. It was Valentine’s Day, and I felt so bad that I decided to stay up late to finish them. The Night Gentlemen didn’t come until midnight, so I had time… I thought.
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