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There was a man on the roof.

Judith Larousse had been sure of it ever since she was a little girl. She could hear him, day and night, going back and forth in endless circles. She didn’t know what he was doing, but he was always there, his slow, limping step permeating her life.

When she was very young, Judith had thought that this was normal, that everyone knew about it. She sometimes mentioned it to her parents, Edgar and Thérèse Larousse, a couple of solicitors well established in their small provincial town. They always looked at her with wide eyes, impressed by the little girl’s overflowing imagination; these children’s games didn’t bother them too much.

Although Thérèse and Edgar were amused at first, they soon grew tired of it. Their daughter was full of crazy ideas and creativity, but this imaginary friend who lived high up in their house kept her awake and restless at night. The child’s insistence on mentioning this “gentleman on the roof”, as she called him, had become stranger and stranger, over the years. Her insistent questions, her desire to meet this man who appeared at any time of the day or night, were too far-fetched; they obsessed the young girl, who was sometimes unable to talk about anything else.

On one occasion, her father had taken her up to the roof of their house, tired of hearing, for the umpteenth time, that “the gentleman on the roof came back last night”, veins of anger threatening to burst in his neck. He had grabbed Judith by the arm, furious, and dragged her up on the slippery tiles as the sun set the horizon ablaze. Between sobs, the little girl could think of nothing better to say than “you scared him, Daddy, he ran away”. She was forbidden to mention this wanderer of the heights again. And Judith had never been one to disobey her parents.

The little girl didn’t talk about this strange phenomenon for a while, after this. Even those around her seemed to have forgotten all about the man on the roof. Judith started telling herself that it had just been the whim of a child looking for company or attention, desperately trying to get into the mould she was supposed to fit in.

But on the eve of her starting Year 11, at the lycée Paul Valéry (one of the best in the region according to the Larousse), she heard those muffled bangs and scrapes against her ceiling again; the man on the roof had returned.

Her parents, of course, didn’t believe her, telling her to grow up, or at least to keep quiet. It wasn’t possible that she was still playing such childish games at her age; they were fed up. The teenager would often find herself screaming all night long, unable to stop the dull footsteps echoing on the ceiling, beneath the arch of her skull. They took her to numerous specialists, psychologists and exorcists, to no avail: all of these analyses came back empty of any issues.

Judith couldn’t sleep. She was convinced she could hear a stranger dancing on the zinc roof. She was going crazy, she could feel it, the insanity tingling under her skin. All around her, people were distancing themselves from her, noticing her ever darker circles and deep-set features. The teenager grew increasingly alone; those who had tried to help her were distancing themselves. With no friends, no hobbies, she shut herself away, her only company being the haunting routine of the footsteps on the roof of a stranger who seemed to be laughing at her. Exhausted, she could take no more, ruined by fatigue.

Her attacks became more frequent and stronger. Judith could no longer sleep, trapped in a cycle of constant anxiety, dreading to hear those insistent footsteps. She kept walking around with earplugs in her ears. She played music far too loudly through her headphones to drown out the outside world. Her parents watched helplessly as she sank into a seemingly infinite darkness. Thérèse and Edgar had tried everything, or so they thought. The Larousse family even ended up moving, this time to a smaller flat on the ground floor, far from the attic and the zinc-coated roof. But nothing helped; Judith still fell victim to this auditory invasion.

The only thing that more or less worked, that calmed the teenager’s nerves and allowed her to rest, was to sneak out. She slept under the enchanted canopy of the sky, under the stars and their scintillating glow; it was the only time she felt at peace, tranquil, far from everything. She revelled in the perfect silence, in the delicious calm that brought her the peace she so desperately craved, alone under the infinite sky, in much better company than her family or the teasing she pretended not to hear.

As time went by, the meltdowns lessened. Like all teenage phases, Edgar and Thérèse Larousse thought. Judith barely managed to get her baccalaureate, and was even accepted into a good school; she decided to leave her family, to travel and see the world before starting her studies. The days passed by like grains of sand against the smooth walls of an hourglass; little by little, she heard nothing when night came to surprise her.

The young girl, now an adult, met people from far and wide, with stories big and small. She let herself get carried away by endless conversations and chosen sleepless nights. People no longer took her for a madwoman, a fanatic who had corroded her parents’ lives and her own, all because of a childish nightmare.

One day, between shifts in the small café where she worked, Judith decided to finally start her studies; she wanted to do something with her life. She began to attend law school, yawning between two evening classes. There, nobody talked about people strolling around on roofs, or recurring noises; perhaps her parents had been right, after all, and that there was nothing to worry about. Besides, she went home too exhausted to be able to think at night; between her intense lessons and her exhausting job, she was left with little time to think.

And then, she met someone good, someone she really liked. That’s how Judith described her: “a good person”. Judith had met Emma after far too long and difficult a day, and had been blown away. At the time, Emma was working in a small grocery shop; she had paid for Judith’s shopping one evening, when Judith was no longer able to make ends meet. They’d been together ever since.

They wanted to start a family, to have a little house in their own little corner of paradise, a hidden nest away from it all. Judith, who had just graduated, took a job in a big company to save as much money as possible; it paid well, but she no longer had time for anything. Her nights became shorter and shorter, heavier and heavier. She couldn’t remember anything when she woke up, at least when she managed to sleep. Insomnia loomed over her. The stress kept her in a semi-awake state; she was afraid, anxious, but she didn’t know exactly why.

Emma didn’t recognise her any more; Judith was back to being sleep-deprived, irritable and brutal with her words. It was no longer possible to have a quiet conversation with her. Her colleagues started avoiding her, sometimes laughing at her behind her back. She couldn’t take it any more, worn down by the tension and fatigue building up inside her and driving away everyone she loved. Emma almost left, one sad winter’s evening, her suitcases parked on the tiled floor in the entrance hall.

So Judith quit her job, her beautiful-job-that-paid-well-in-a-big-company. She started sleeping again, a lot, sometimes a little too much. Of course, it was a bit harder to make ends meet, but Emma managed on her own; she’d finally found a job she liked. With their savings and a little help, they finally settled down, away from it all. And they were both happy, surrounded by friends and endless laughter.

The years went by, filled with births and marriages; Emma had a son, Paul, whose giggles now filled their lives. In the dead of night, between the purring of their cat at her feet and Emma’s deep breathing at her side, Judith felt at peace at last.

For a long time, Judith was happy.

That is, until the day everything went wrong.

In the middle of the night, a harmless creak. A rustling of the floorboards, dust brushing the ceiling.

Judith woke with a start, breathless, trying to dilate her pupils as much as possible.

He had returned, she was sure of it.

Gradually, heavy footsteps stirred the depths of her thoughts. Their echoes scraped against the back of her brain, bringing about nausea and fright, her heart fluttering at the edge of her lips. This time, Judith was not going to let it happen.

She recognised the man on the roof immediately. It had taken him a long time to resurface. Judith got out of bed immediately, slipping silently through the darkened corridors. Fumbling around, she found a knife, something to defend herself at last against the man who had ruined her young life and still haunted her darkest dreams.

She acted out of instinct; without really knowing why or how, she went out into the moonlight, glancing at their roof. In the pale moonlight, she was sure she could make out a shadow over her little cottage. She wouldn’t let him threaten her family, not this time.

So Judith climbed up onto the roof.

But there was no-one on the slippery tiles, still glistening from the day’s rain. No one around. Nothing but emptiness, again and again. The emptiness she’d been bumping up against since she was a little girl.

A movement caught Judith’s eye and she struck without hesitation. Her blow sliced through something soft, and she gurgled, a hint of triumph in her voice. She had him at last.

She repeated her blows. Once, twice, ten times. She wasn’t counting any more. All her anger, her hatred, her sadness poured out against this unknown being, this man who had been over every roof she’d ever had the audacity to rest under. She sliced through space with force, less and less precise; soon, she collapsed, broken. She had finally vanquished the demon that had tormented her so.

Huh.

How strange.

She hadn’t thought that the man on the roof would be so small.

Or that there would be two bodies at her feet when she got up.

Two all-too-familiar bodies. Lacerated. Torn apart. Inert in lakes of their own blood.

We don’t know what happened to Judith Larousse after these events. She disappeared, leaving no trace behind her as if she had vanished into the night. Emma and Paul were found torn to pieces, on the roof, slaughtered by a savagery that knew no name. Some theories suggested a psychotic episode, others a temporary and incomprehensible crisis, a quarrel between the couple, all good answers but never quite the correct ones. Everyone thought that they were living a perfect life in their little cottage surrounded by rose bushes and wild flowers, as picturesque as can be. Everyone agreed: it was heartbreaking.

In the hidden recesses of conspiracy theories, even mythological ones, between two pages of police reports or medical entries, the implausible possibility of an external threat is mentioned. Some people claim to have seen a silhouette following her from a very early age, everywhere she went, never far away. Of course, these were just wild hypotheses, nonsense, unfounded fears, the sound of footsteps mingling with raindrops on a roof.