The Room Above the Shop

• 4 minute read
• Ages 10-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

My father rented a shop on a busy road and we ran it for eleven years.

It came with a room upstairs, reached by a narrow staircase at the back, and my father used it for stock.

He put boxes in it for eleven years and he never once slept in it, and neither did anyone else, and there was a reason for that which he told me on my first day working there and never mentioned again.

The condition

The landlord had put it in writing.

The tenancy was for the shop and the storeroom. Nobody was to sleep in the upstairs room. Not staff, not family, not for one night.

My father had asked why, at the signing, and the landlord had said it was a fire regulation, and my father had accepted that because he wanted the shop and the rent was low.

He told me afterwards that he had known perfectly well it was not a fire regulation, because a fire regulation would have been about the shop as well.

Eleven years

Nothing happened for eleven years.

I want to be clear about that. We went up and down that staircase forty times a day. I spent whole afternoons up there sorting stock with the door open. My father did the accounts at a table by the window.

It was an ordinary room with boxes in it and a view of the road.

And every evening we came down and locked the shop and went home, and that was that.

The night of the storm

Then one night in my last year there was a storm that took a tree down across the road and the buses stopped, and I was at the shop, and my father was at home twelve kilometres away.

He rang and told me to lock up and stay put and sleep upstairs.

I said the room.

And he was quiet on the phone for a long moment, long enough that I heard my mother ask him something in the background.

"Sleep downstairs," he said. "Behind the counter. There are sacks."

"There is a bed frame upstairs and it is freezing down here."

"Behind the counter," he said. "I will see you in the morning."

What happened

I slept behind the counter on a pile of sacks and it was cold and uncomfortable and absolutely nothing happened, all night, at all.

That is the whole of it. Nothing.

I woke at six with a bad back and unlocked the shutter and the road was full of men with saws.

Afterwards

My father came at eight and did not ask me how I had slept.

He asked me where.

And when I said behind the counter he nodded once and went to put the kettle on and we never discussed it again, and we gave the shop up two years later when the lease ended.

I am telling this as a story with nothing in it, because there is nothing in it, and that is exactly the thing I have never been able to leave alone.

Somebody wrote that condition into a tenancy agreement. A solicitor typed it. The landlord signed it. My father read it and knew it was not about fire and signed anyway.

And in eleven years not one of us broke it.

So I do not know what is in that room. Nobody I have ever met knows what is in that room.

It is entirely possible that nobody has known for a very long time, and that the only reason for that is that the rule has held.