The Carpet in Room Four on Leagrave Road

Paulette said it was pigeons at first. That scratching under the sash window at two in the morning, claws on lead flashing, the kind of sound you get used to in old terraces. She told me this over tea in her kitchen, dunking a biscuit she never actually ate, just held until it went soft and dropped it in the bin. She did that with every biscuit, I noticed, the whole time I knew her.

Then she said it wasn't pigeons after all. Pigeons don't stop when you knock on the glass. This did, every single time, like it was listening for the knock.

She'd rented the room in '09 — or '08, she always got the year wrong and corrected herself halfway through the sentence — a bedsit above a shuttered opticians on Leagrave Road, the kind of let where the landlord takes cash and doesn't ask about references. Room four had a carpet nobody had thought to replace since maybe the seventies, a swirl pattern in brown and orange, the sort that hides stains on purpose. She used to lie on the bed and trace the loops of it with her eyes before sleep, the way you do with woodchip wallpaper when you're bored enough to.

After about three weeks she noticed the pattern wasn't the same as it had been. Not different, exactly. Denser, in one patch by the wardrobe, like the swirls had folded over themselves. She thought it was the light at first. Then she thought damp, and bought a dehumidifier off Gumtree for eight quid, and ran it every night, and it hummed and did nothing.

The scratching kept its own hours. Always between two and half two, always from under the floor, and always for exactly as long as it took her to sit up in bed. The moment her feet touched the carpet, it stopped. She timed it once with her phone, forty seconds, then forty again the next night, and after that she stopped timing it.

She said the patch by the wardrobe grew a face before it grew anything else. Not a face you could point to. More the suggestion of one — two darker knots where eyes might sit, a curve underneath that could've been a jaw or could've been nothing, the way you see faces in wood grain and burnt toast. She told her sister about it on the phone, and her sister, who was walking the dog at the time and kept getting distracted by it barking at something, said take a photo then. She did. In the photo it was just carpet.

By the second month the shape had shoulders. She started sleeping with the lamp on. The scratching moved with her — if she pushed the bed to the other wall, it started coming from under there instead, patient, waiting for her to lie back down so it could carry on with whatever it had been doing.

She left before it grew arms. She was specific about that, arms, as if she'd had a number in mind and stopped one short of it. Six weeks' rent lost, no deposit back, landlord wouldn't answer his mobile. She said it was the cheapest thing she ever paid for, getting out at arms.

I didn't believe her. Not the way you believe a bus timetable, anyway.

But I'm typing this in my own new room now, first night in it, and the landlord left the old carpet down because it was, in his words, still got some wear in it. Beige with a leaf pattern, repeating diamonds of ivy round a stem.

There's a knot in it by the radiator that wasn't there when I looked this morning. I'm on my knees in front of it now, and I'm reaching out to press my thumb into the pile, to see if it moves under the weight, the way real carpet should.