A serial killer thriller where the killer doesn’t speak: Read an extract from Clémence Michallon’s The Quiet Tenant

In her debut thriller, Clémence Michallon tells the story of a male serial killer, through the voices of the women around him

(Author photo: Gabrielle Malewski)

The idea for The Quiet Tenant came to me a few years ago, in early 2020. I was living in a house with my husband’s family in upstate New York. I was grateful to be there, given the exigencies of our world at the time, but also struck by the disruption we were experiencing. After years of having our routines dictated by our respective commutes and jobs, suddenly, we were spending a lot of time together without reprieve.

This got me thinking: what if someone had a dark secret they had been able to keep from their family because they never saw them during the day? And what if, suddenly, they were no longer apart, and the secret they were keeping risked being exposed?

I played with a few scenarios, eventually landing on a serial killer who keeps someone captive on his property. But then he must move, and as a result, his captive becomes somewhat adjacent to his life and family. To me, there was something irresistible about this narrative of worlds colliding.

Since the serial killer here victimizes women, I wanted to center the narrative on female voices. Telling the story through the voices of three women—my serial killer’s captive (who knows about his crimes), a woman who has a crush on him (who doesn’t), and his teenage daughter (ditto)—felt right.

***

CHAPTER 5

The woman in the shed

You wait for dinner, for splashes of tepid water. For anything. Even the groan of zippers being pulled up and down.

He doesn’t show.

You picture the shed, hidden in the trees. It has to be fall by now. He took away the fan and brought in the heater a couple of weeks ago. You close your eyes. What you remember of this time of the year: short days, the sun setting at six o’clock. Naked branches against the turning sky. What you picture: In the distance, hidden from you, his house. Yellow squares of light at the windows, orange leaves scattered across the yard. Maybe hot tea. Maybe apple cider doughnuts.

In the distance, the purr of his truck. He is here, on the property. Living his life. Tending to his needs. Not yours, though. You wait and you wait and still he doesn’t come.

You try to meditate the hunger pangs away. You flip through the books he brought you, taken to the shed in no particular order. Stephen King’s It. A tired paperback of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Mary Higgins Clark’s Loves Music, Loves to Dance. The books came used. Dog-eared pages, notes in the margins. You asked him one day, a long time ago, if they were his. He shook his head. More trinkets, you figured. Things he took from the ones who weren’t as lucky as you.

You squat in a corner of the shed. Without him to bring you the bucket, you have no other choice. He’ll be furious, if he gets back. He’ll wrinkle his nose, throw a bottle of bleach in your direction. Start scrubbing and don’t stop until I can’t smell it anymore.

You try not to worry, because worrying gets in the way of staying alive.

He has left you before. Not like this, though. Nine months into the first year, the man who kept you in the shed told you he was going somewhere. He brought you the bucket, a box of granola bars, and a pack of small water bottles.

“I need to leave,” he said. Not I want. Not I have to. I need.

“You will not,” he said, “do anything. You will not move. You will not scream. I know you won’t.”

He grabbed you by the shoulders. You felt the urge to wrap your hands around his. To hold on to him, just a little bit. You are Rachel. He found you. All you know is what he has taught you. All you have is what he has given you.

He shook you. You allowed the tremor to rock you. “If you try anything,” he said, “I will find out. And it won’t be good for you. Do you understand?”

You nodded. By then, you knew how to nod so that he’d believe you.

He was gone for three days and returned the happiest man on earth. A pep in his step, something like static buzzing through his limbs. He took deep, gluttonous breaths, like the air had never tasted so sweet to him.

This wasn’t the man you knew. A man of duties and responsibilities. He did what he came to do to you. Buzzing. A little wild.

Then he told you. He didn’t say much. Just that she went along with it. That she was perfect. That she didn’t know, until she knew, but by then it was too late.

It happened again. Right before last Thanksgiving. You knew because he brought you leftovers. Has done so every year. You don’t know if he knows that’s how you keep track of time. You suspect he hasn’t thought about it.

That’s two, total. Two he killed while he let you live. Two now added to the rule while you remained the exception.

Each time he left you, he prepped. This time, he gave you nothing. Did he forget about you? Did he find another project to devote himself to?

Without his visits, it’s hard to count the days. You think his truck signals when he leaves in the morning and when he returns at night, but you can’t be sure. Your body tells you when to sleep and when to wake up. Palm against the wall, you try to feel the warmth of the sun and the cold of the night. Based on your estimates, one day goes by, then another.

By the end of what feels like day two, your mouth is lined with sandpaper. Bats zoom around your brain. You suck on your fingers to make saliva, lick the wall of the shed in search of condensation, anything to relieve the thirst. Soon you are just a body, a skull and a spine and a pelvis and feet lying flat on the wooden slats, your skin clammy, your breath labored.

Maybe he overestimated your resilience. Maybe he’ll kill you without meaning to. He’ll return, open the shed, and find you cold and unresponsive, as you were always meant to be.

On what you tell yourself is day three, the padlock rattles. He’s a silhouette in the doorframe, bucket in one hand, a bottle in the other. You should sit up, snatch the water away, unscrew the cap, and drink, drink, drink until the world comes back into focus. But you can’t. He has to come to you, kneel at your side, position the neck of the bottle against your lips.

You swallow. Wipe your lips with the back of your hand. He doesn’t look like himself. Most days, he’s a man who takes care of his appearance. Nicks from a manual razor turn up on his cheekbones and down his neck. His hair smells of lemongrass. His teeth are white, his gums healthy. You’ve never seen him do it, but you can tell he flosses assiduously, every morning or every night, a swish of mouthwash to finish the job. But tonight, he looks rough. His beard is unkempt. His gaze bounces, unfocused, from one end of the shed to the other.

“Food?”

Your voice comes out raspy. He shakes his head no.

“She’s still up. Packing.”

You assume he means his daughter.

“So there’s nothing? Nothing at all?”

You’re pushing your luck, you know, but it’s been three days, and without the thirst numbing your body, you feel it all, the hollowness of hunger below your rib cage, the soreness in your back, a thousand alarm bells pointing to the broken parts of you.

He holds up his hands. “What? You think I can microwave a TV dinner and walk out the door and she won’t ask any questions?”

The food he brings you is always one part of a whole. A portion of lasagna, a bowl of stew, the center square of a casserole. Meals that can go missing unnoticed. Much more discreet than a slice of pizza, a whole cheeseburger, the leg of a roasted chicken. For all this time he’s been cooking in bulk, squirreling away parts of his dishes and bringing them to you. It’s one of the ways he’s found to keep you a secret.

He sits next to you with a groan. You wait for him to pull at the zipper on your jacket, wrap his hands around your neck. Instead, he reaches around his waistband. There is a glimmer, a flash of metal.

You recognize the gun. It’s the same one he pointed at you five years ago, a black pistol and the glossy length of a silencer.

Your toes twitch as if to prepare for a sprint. The chain tightens, cold and heavy against your ankle. Dragging you down as if to suck you into the ground, first your foot and then the rest of you.

Focus. Stay with him.

His chest moves up and down, one deep breath after the other. Without the fuzz of dehydration, you read him more clearly. Tired but not weary. Dizzy but not sick. He’s a mess, yes, but he’s happy. Like after an exhausting task, a long run or a steep hike.

Like after a kill.

He reaches into his pocket and drops something on your lap, a cat offering up a dead mouse.

Sunglasses. Designer, judging by the heavy frame and the logo on the side. Entirely worthless inside the shed, but the sunglasses aren’t the point. The point is these used to belong to someone, and she doesn’t need them anymore.

You feel it on him now. The triumph. The boundless thrill of a successful hunting trip.

She calls out to you. What kind of a job did she have to be able to afford sunglasses like these? What did her fingers look like when she slid them up her nose? Did she ever use them to hold her hair back? Did she wear them one summer afternoon in the passenger seat of a convertible with the top down, loose hair whipping at her cheeks?

You can’t go there. You can’t think about her. You do not have time to be shocked or devastated.

This is a chance. His hubris. Tonight, he will believe himself capable of anything.

The Quiet Tenant will be published on 20 June by Abacus in the UK, and on the same date by Knopf in the US