Speaker 1: Hullo. I'm welcomed stories all the time. Glad you are here.
Let's get into it. It's strange how a building can
teach you things about the dock, how its walls behave
in the i os, when everything else around you is sleeping.
Last Tuesday night, after two m my hand drifted from
the thin insulation of my blanket to the little digital
recorder on the bedside table, all on its own. I
wasn't sleeping. The sound and other low, almost determined thump
like a heavy object dragging across linoleum, rose through the floor.
I sat up, holding my breath, convinced for a moment
that some one else was listening to as if the
entire building could feel the rumble and wanted to hush me.
In return, static buzz across the open mic esquinted at
the dark ceiling and pressed record. My eyes took too
long to us. The hum of the fridge on the
far wall cut in, and a faint count point to
chorus of quieter sounds, the neighbor's pipe stuttering, a distant
elevator shuddering, elevator cables grinding, A single cough from somewhere
above three minutes passed with nothing, then clear as a
somewhat removing furniture. Just overhead, there was a shove and
a prolonged scrape that rattled the glass of my water
on the night's tent. I counted a gap of twenty seconds,
then a low muffled voice, two or more people arguing
I couldn't tell. The voices kept leaking through, impossibly distant
for how present they felt, flattened by layers of ancient
tile and plaster. I pressed my fist into my pillow
and stowed up at the cracked white paint. Hence were
tharms were silent most nights, aside from the predictable cycles
morning shift, evening tiredness, the odd drunken the stable steps.
But to night above me on the fourth floor, a
sequence and spoiled that shouldn't have been possible. Apartment four
hundred seven was supposed to be empty. I checked the
building's tenant direct dream months ago, out of idle curiosity,
and there was no listing, just three units on my floor,
blunt the fourth floor, in the faded schematic they give
you when you sign your lees, barely acknowledge the space existed. Still,
something urged me up. I slipped on shoes, shrugged into hoodie,
and tucked my recorder into one pocket, letting a little
red early dee flicker against the palm of my hand.
My own footsteps sounded like sacoleage, echoing crisply as I
climbed each stout, tread creaking on the foot, crisp and
cold in a way that made me feel exposed, more
active than occupant. The landing on forcemelt of ald adhesive
and bleached scraped tile in a faint hint of sun
baked dust. The lights along the corridor flickered overly bright
and then dull. One sconce was loose in its socket,
angling toward the floors of apologizing for being out of date.
Peeling wall paper the old kind thrown up sometime in
the late seventies, had never properly stripped, hung cockered, hiding
under scribbles from previous residents. It looked like no one
had set foot here in weeks, and yet the air
shimmered with someone else's breath. I pressed my ear to
the thick, dark green dawn near the stair will turn
four hundred seven. My knuckles brushed a tarnished metal number.
I was about to knock for no good reason. When
a drawn out drug sounded on the other side. As
something heavy screeted a cross bare floors, punctuated by a
breathless grunt, my thumb flicked over the volume dial. The
audio spiked with the rattled friction of furniture leggs. I
stood stirring at the unremarkable door, steady now in the
middle of the corridor, listening for someone to finish what
they'd started. But the noise is cut off. Silence replaced
them whisper of someone moving away from the door. A
soft coff echoed in the stair will behind me. I flinched,
turning to see a giant of gray coveralls an off
brown mop pausing by the stair rail with a pile
of trash backs slung over one shoulder. He was bolding,
maybe late fifties. I was darting up and down the corridor.
Let me guess, I half whispered, cheeks flush in the
sudden chill. I'm not the first to be up here
listening for ghosts. I tried not to sound like an idiot.
He shook his head quickly, almost alarmed. His left hand
closed tighter around the trash back handles. Don't mess with
this floor, he said quietly, as flickering to the silent
doors after midnight. Best not to be up here. You
get me, He didn't wait for an answer. Without meeting
my gaze again, he turned, stopped to wage the elevator
cold button with his elbow, and disappeared as the battered
door slid open, leaving behind the stink of lemons scented
cleaner and a silence that felt twice as thick. I
stood in the center of the corridor for another five minutes,
goosebumps prickling up my arms. Every window done, The hall
was dark, the little brass door numbers dull besmrges, My
phone clock read to thirty four, and when I finally
gave up, recorded another minute of absolute nothing, and headed downstairs,
trouting softly to avoid explaining myself to any one else
awake at this hore. Daylight came grudgingly when I returned
to the full four at ten the next morning, the
corridor scene transformed. It not with the easy warmth of day,
but with the impersonal polish that comes after a job
has been swept clean. Every door was closed, the number
plate for four hundred seven had vanished. Just a faint
rectangle of clean of paint hinted at where it had been.
No marks, no sign of tampering. Shoky dust freshened the
door mat, as if it had been poured out, just
to settle over recent footprints. I knocked quietly. No one, sir.
I pressed my finger tips to the door knob, cool
and disturbed, with an edge of lingering deterdent. Whatever had
happened last night, it left no mark. I spent the
rest of the morning wandering the hallway, coming up with
excuses to talk to other tenants. The Ceeseline third four
caramel candis in her cardigan pocket chuckled when I asked
her who lived in four hundred seven. There is no
four hundred seven, she said, as if I'd asked about
a room under the stairs. The only maintenance caused its hem,
boiler pipeways, has been for as long as I remember.
A press careful not to seem obsessed. But no one
else recalled any recent tenant. One younger guyas over, who
worked layshift, said he'd never seen a soul up there,
not in two years. Man, not ever. Yet last night
I'd heard voices behind that vanished door. I had it
on tape. By noon, I realized I was the only
one who cared. It's funny how rituals accumulate when you're
intended a way to construct a sense of self. It's
been just over a year since I signed the lease
at Hemsworth Arms. The move from my old apartment on
the other side of the city. Equal parts relief and retreat,
left me with the bitter affetist of upheaval. So I
started catalog in the New World and sound as a
kind of therapy. Field notes, radiators, hissing, thus as, climbing
the far curbe a neighbor's parakeep, rehearsing classical scales at sunrise.
My gear is nothing special, but I have folders dating
Baquier's hundreds of little snippets tagged ambient, a city, be roll,
a sudden, loud, a weird late. My routines are dull
but specific. French press in a crack mug of coffee
by a window, scribbling in a cheap notep with headphones
around my neck. My attempt at a creative life, or
at least a product dividleness. I used to be more social,
pretended at parties, met friends at Noisy Dinos, but most
of that foul way. After the break up, sound walks
replaced company. I'd catch snippets from street musicians or record
the door plus shift of traffic after rain, and decided
it meant I was learning to listen. Over time, the
microphone grew less like a tool and more like something confessional.
Hempsworth's arms felt right when I moved in Crucily anonymous,
just the right amount of historic decay, a block off fine,
three stores of exposed brick and faded tile, battered art
deco lines on the facade. The elevator, when it bothers
to work, carries a twed patchwork of stickers, a little
mirror cracked at the edge like a fractured eye. The
holes are strangely wide, always muffled by thin runner carpets,
and the faint chemical tang of cleaning fluid. Most neighbors
you come to know from habit. Misseslin's door was always
open in the afternoons, the smell of tea curling into
the hallway. The nurse sun lives alone above me. I'd
sometimes passed them, carrying a duffel full of scrubs and
energy bars between these anchors. Unknown people at their doors close,
their names only half remembered, if at all. The building
was like that fall of a lifers and urban ghosts.
Gossip trickle through the walls, usually about personalities rather than events.
Miss Eeslyn once told me someone went missing upstairs the
previous February, but then she'd laugh it off, as if
she didn't really expect it to be true. There's an
entire ecosystem to petty annoyances. The mail books's jam if
you look at them twice. Light bulbs flicker for weeks
before getting replaced. Package is sometimes vanished from the may room,
only to reappear months later, and claimed and dust jerked
tenants circulate rumors about management turn over and unlucky force.
One guy swears at last winter his neighbor moved out
before the snow thought, and no one's seen him since.
Conversations trill off if you press current runs through the
place that says, don't dig too deep, don't notice too much.
The fourth floor specially feels forbidden in a tired, so
fulfilling way. I found myself avoiding it. Except for the Audita.
The elevator almost never stopped there. Always creaking past with
an apologetic ding. Once after I signed my lease, i'd
wandered up, curious since the directory listed floors, but only
to rewelabel for tenants. Mostly it was a baige corridor
of closed doors and odd mechanical closets. Even the cleaning
staff skipped it. According to some whenever the topic came
up downstairs, someone would crack a joke, unlucky floor, or
maybe it's for the old ghosts, and then change the subject.
So the thing that happened last night, the noises, the voice,
the janitors, Sadden discomfort felt less like new information and
more like brushing up against a code everyone already knew
but never explained. Still normalst he reasserts itself quickly. I
make coffee, edited some studio samples for podcast client, walk
twice to the boga. Each time I climbed the stairs,
I glanced up at the fourth floor landing, half hoping
to see some sign of repel of activity or a
shadow cass against the wall. Instead, all I found was stillness,
a corridor sealed off by routine, neither inhabited nor abandoned,
as if waiting for a que to become real again.
I tried to force myself back into the rhythms I
had cultivated, throwing myself into work, scheduling coffee with Sam,
letting the strange events fade into the gray weave of
daily accumulated irritations. I kept the strange audio from that night,
my own voice, the furniture scraping, the echoing mumble, saved
in a folder labeled night Anomalies. I wrote a one
line note in my diary four hundred seven something is
off check again, don't let its light. The phrase became
a talisman, something half joking to myself, but the idea
wouldn't let me go. I'd learn after a year that
sometimes it's the persistent on examine details that unravel everything
you think YE know about a place. It's always the
background sounds that reveal the real story. I spent two
evenings replaying the most recent recording, then pulled up old
files looking for comparison. Barely aware I was doing it,
I cataloged everything I taped from the hallway outside four
hundred seven over the past twelve weeks. Strange how little
I remembered actually being there, or why I bothered recording
certain stretches of silence but there was a pattern, faint
but insistent. Every week or two at odd iris two zero,
sometimes three fifteen, Once just before midnight, a sequence in
the background, dragging low bursts of muffled voices, furniture or
boxes shoving against the floor, always in the vicinity of
a four hundred seven. Curiosity or stubbornness, or maybe loneliness
in disguise were whatever it was, I couldn't let it lie.
I scrolled through my messages and realized I hadn't seen THEO,
my neighbor from one floor up, in almost two weeks.
His mail box had started gathering circulars. The edge is
finally curling from being stuffed too long. The little nameplate
by his box was scratched across, as if some one
had tried messily to erase the evidence of his tendency.
I asked Sam the Nose if they'd seen him. Sam shrugged,
dark circles under their ice, and said he might have
forgotten a new contract somewhere. When I checked with Missesesline,
her face went blank for a moment, like the gears
of memory sticking THEO young fellow with the big headphones.
Her eyes clouded, then suddenly cleared no, no, I think
he moved out ages ago, or was at last bringing
hard to remember people come and go. I started asking
around a little more pointedly. No one gave the same
answer twice. The day manager, or a compact, always moving
woman named Arlene, brushed me off. Not my department, don't
track who's in what unit unless there's a plumbing complaint.
She offered a brittle smile and retreated to the office, door,
shutting before I could finish my question. Meanwhile, the sounds
didn't stop. I jogged the recorder again. Three nights later,
right around two seventeen am, a time that started to
feel predictive. Something bumped hard against the wall, followed by
a russell and the soft cadence of speech overlaying it
all as if two people were whispering behind a thick panel.
This time, I watched from the stair while angling for
any light beneath the door, any movement, Not then, just
that same sensation, something within reach but systematically hidden. I
tried to cross check the patterns on paper down in
the mailroom, the tenant director's three of them over the years,
spanning from retrofitted flip shots to an ancient excel print
up screwed, crooked to the wall, didn't agree in. Some
apartments were missing altogether. Staff shrugged at my questions, or
laugh about clerical errors, or just changed the topic. The
package lobook was incomplete, names blurred or wided out, keep
by numbers that didn't match any rooms I could walk to.
By this point, suspicion became its own feel. The unease
wasn't just about the noise or the corridor anymore. It
was the way to building itself, seen to conspire, a
haze of denial and collective confusion, thickening each time I
pressed for answers. The more I searched, the weirder it became,
the deeper idulk, the more it all seemed to point
at one place, one stretch of corridor I was never
supposed to pay attention to. Two days later, I tried
something far more concrete, a low stake's bribe, a six
pack of cold sert by way of a plea to
the night desk clerk. She in her fifties, with a
tiet practiced airing crosswood puzzles always half filled, waved me
behind the desk after the labby quieted down, muttering you
didn't get this from me. The Hempsworth's security feed was
a salvage operation at best, cheap cameras, low frame rates.
Everything rendered in those worshtets sickly greens. But the fourth
FOS corridors should patch the oddly angled footage, the views
stuttering every time the digital cock crawl passed eleven third
of them, whole minute vanish jump cuts, sudden drops to static,
a screen saver pulsing, then frames resuming with no visible change,
no doors opening, no one entering or leaving, just the
same old paper and fluorescent flicker. I asked for older reels.
She shrieked, no attention before last month system's glitch. A
lot more on foward than anywhere else. Hath always been
like that. When I tried to broach the subject with Aline,
the day manager, she curtly reminded me that video access
is privileged building property and not my concern. Flecking her
pen at think rublel Like the matter was settled, I
took the elevator down onto the city library, squinting at
microfilm underful reescent headache lighting, and found a building brochure
from nineteen eighty three. All block fonts and faded pictures there.
It was the fourth floor, back when the Hempsworth Arms
still hosted white glove bell huts in a breakfast lounge.
The blueprint was different, four even five full apartments on
the fourth floor with a walled off section label to
private passage. In to day's structure, those units were missing
or renained. Some walls didn't line up in the spot
where four hundred seven should have been, now a corridor
terminating in nothing much. If all this was only the
forgetful artifact of an old building, I'd have laughed it off.
But late that night I interviewed missus Lynnan tape. She
started recalling a neighbor she called the one with the
university books, mentioning his punctual watering of fernes left in
the hallway. But midway she stopped mid Sinden's and trailed
off Priggis, hollowing at No, that wasn't here. I'm sorry, Alex,
I forget the name. She looks so embarrassed that I
stopped recording. Everything pointed at as secret held by Hemsworth
Arms itself, something unnamable that smudged people out of memory,
or maybe just trickled away their details one uncomfortable omission
at a time. I come through the maintenance request files
i'd scavenged from the basement, stacked in dusty folder centuries
old in appearance. One sheet creased and coffee stained read
four hundred seven hot water Leak seven slash nineteen follow
up aclet the same note repeated three years running, an
identical problem for a unit no one officially lived in,
serviced by contractors long since replaced. I'd visited the basement
storage area only twice before, a cement labyrinth, where aging
cardboard boxes lined the wire mesh shelves, many stamped with
names I didn't recognize. While poking around for any other
out of place artifacts, I found two battered boxes at
ankle height, marked in block letters with the names to
four nand estates. Each label matched, and they had seen
half remembered on tenant directory's residents, now scrubbed from records,
almost as if by design. Inside photo albums, a child's
faded teddy bear and neat row scarves about it softable,
all of it cleaned but gently flecked with dust. A
series of moving labels of four hundred seven move out
t BA or return to desk I snapped several photographs
on my phone, hot knocking as I picked through the items.
Here was proof at last. When I brought them to
upstairs management, pressing for information orlean's attitude curdle, she swept
away my questions, lips thinning, hands tight on the desk.
If you want to stay in this building, stop interfering
in business that doesn't concern you. The next day, the
boxes were gone, no note. The shelf stood empty, hollow
as a pick clean roup cage. Things began to shift quietly.
In my own life. My keekout failed twice in as
many days. The mail carrier claimed my packages were not deliverable.
The microwave in my kitchen blinked twelve zero after an
outage I never registered. When I passed staff in the
lobby of stairwell, it's sometimes overhere. Not whispers exactly, but
a certain tone. The words nosey and bus's body repeated
an annoyance, somewhere between a threat and a warning. The
closed system of the building, once so MorphOS and backgrounded,
now clamped around me tightly with the pre I sure
of I was watching firmer step. The true escalation came,
as these things always do not all at once, but
in the form of a single intrusive note. It was
slipped under my door the night after another restless and
satisfying sleep, a single folded scrap of codstock with careful
handwriting and the quickest possible message. Ask about the wall
behind four hundred eleven. That was it? No signature, no context.
I stared at it for several minutes, flipping it over
and over, knowing immediately that nothing about this was random.
Apartment four hundred eleven sat a floor up on the
north end, and I knew half from habit, half from
late night eavesdrop in at its current occupant, a nurse
named Franz's, was on month long vacation. The implication was clear,
now or never. She it has clung to me as
I waited for the building to quiet, plugging in my
recorder for another field tests. At one forty a m
I patted up the staircase, who soft against the thin carpet, hard,
thudding so hard I was sure it would register in
the tape. The door to four hundred eleven gave a
brittle why not its hinges My key guard, meant for
cleaning emergencies worked in the first try off luke, or
perhaps a programmed absence no one expected me to exploit.
Inside four hundred eleven was dark and still a scent
of powdery soap lingering. The rooms were neat, the personal
bare walls, an empty couch. I found the closet near
the hall, a small square barely wide enough for one person,
stuffed with cleaning tools and canvas bags. At the back,
just behind the mop, I trace my fingers a long
paneling that didn't match, rough, dry, slightly hollow. When tapped,
I ran my hand along the seam, fingers trembling. There,
the faintest of hinges had grew, not painted over like
the rest. A small refrigerator magnet on the shelf pried
it up and with a faint pop, behind a false wall,
a wedge shaped corridor, dark as a throat, lined with
faded flowered. While pepper must by does so thick, it
blurred every detail. I pressed record with the shaking thumb,
muttering under my breath into the microphone. My skin prickled
in the chill. Every miner sound echoed weirdly, as if
the passage led somewhere bigger than the building allowed. The
corridor ran only ten feet, but a branch left, ending
at three locked doors, each place where on the earl
obluprint those missing apartments had existed. Numbers were stencil faintly
as a flaked by acid four hundred seven, four hundred nine,
four hundred fifteen. The doors themselves were battered, their knobs
polished by countless hands. The air felt dense press of charge,
not with the sense of presents, but with a debris
of absence, A secrets layered over until the substance of
time itself bent out of shape. I then voices lo
in distinct two people just ahead. I froze hot battering
against my ribs, the recorder trembling in my praised fist,
overlapping conversation, the words indistinct but urgent, as if arguing,
incurred a soft click, the sound of heel scuffing against
warped floors, anik roarse up my throat. I heard a
door open faintly ahead, a hinge quealing against a jam.
I backed out, the false warp breathing closed behind me
with a rustle my breath. Now hide and shop in
the microphone. Back in the sand shined world of four
hundred eleven, the stillness was profound. I half fell into
the hall, double checking that no one saw me. In
my audio log, my voice jumps, whispered wild. I described everything,
breathless and incertain, the false corridor, the vanished doors, the
unmistakable feeling of having trespass in a place not mentor exist.
As I locked up behind me, as slow, cold certainty
settled in my stomach, I slid the note back into
my bag, repeating the words to myself, have I finally
stumbled somewhere I can't walk back from my own voice,
frictional and raw lupy in my ears on play back,
As I hunched by the window, watching dawn barely smudge
the horizon, the secret was real, and suddenly my own
existence felt disturbing. The provisional caught between clearance coats, half memories,
and a corridor that should never have existed. Some boundaries,
it turns out, hold for a reason. Sleep was impossible.
After that, I lay on the bat of futon irbuts
in playing back the hissing under late recording from the
hidden passage, hunting for more than what my memory conjured
two voices, maybe three, The heavier of the murmuring and
clipped almost sing some tones. I clipped and reclipped the audio,
slowing it down, boosting the noise floor, writing little ways
of static. No words surfaced, just that background sensed two
people conferring about something urgent, their tones swapping between heard
and resigned, like elevator mechanics with the dead line. Are
bird was planning and exit. But what'st all my nerve
W wasn't the literal sound. It was how my own breathing,
fast and staccatto laid over the recording, each inhale, re
acting not outside for it, but a sense that the
false corridor and no were part of the same secret.
I set the file aside. Some discoveries I realized fell
too large, generate, at least alone. Apartment four hundred eleven
limned in my thoughts all the next day like a
private joke. I didn't want any one to overhear. I
forced myself out for coffee, sat on the front step,
shelling sunflower sees a driver's neck by trying to convince
myself I wasn't making more of this than I should.
By late afternoon, though, my patience broke. I needed to
see if any other clues were hiding in the old blueprints,
or just maybe someone with answers who wouldn't retreat. The
usual circuits offered nothing new. In the laundry room, the
wer of Friar's camouflaged any whispered confidences. Miss Eselyn refused,
with gentle insistence to revisit the subject of lost neighbors. Sam,
crossing paths with me in the stairwell, met my raised
eye brows with a dry still recording the musical pipes.
Alex then disappeared behind their door without waiting for an answer.
Upstairs and down, everyone seemed unusually preoccupied. Packages clutched as averted,
doors closing softly before I could greet them. I tried
comb in public records again, this time tracing ownership, transfers
and fire inspections, anything at all that might point toward
a reason at building would hide rooms or race histories.
I found hems with arms had changed hands six times
and fifteen years, ownership rolling for shell companies that sometimes
didn't exist on any other paperwork. In every stretch of transfer,
there was a brief spike in missing persons loved in
the city, names not local enough to raise alarms, but
present none the less. It was chilling seeing the bureaucratic
pattern and the statistical bump back in the apartment, muffle
thumbs drifted down from the ceiling, white as the clock
flipped two twelve of them. They were softer, more erratic
as time, a sequence that felt more like code than accident.
I could almost picture it. Quick determined movements behind in
a raised door where every sound was measured by the
risk of exposure, building nerves had a way of fraying.
I found myself glancing around corner, suddenly pausing at intersections
to listen for anything unusual, fingerprints of pressure in the air.
My kikout, which had never given me trouble before, failed
again on entry. I waited in the lobby for ten
minutes until Arline saw her faced opened the door herself,
scanning the card with a look I couldn't decipher. Try
not to break the system, she said, too flatly to
be a joke, bushing past me into her office. I
retreated to my unit and sat about organizing my findings,
laying out folders, photos, coppied email threads from the city,
audio snippets labeled with star ratings. By three in the morning,
my own exhaustion forced surrender. The last thing I did
before sleep was to scribble in my note, but to
ask Sam about Franz's absence, confirm how often four hundred
seven's been service to keep eyes open for janitor. When
I woke, the city was already hamming, but a strange
hush clung to the halls. I stealed myself and waited
for the old elevator, the doors convulsing open to whist
me up toward my next attempt. On four the corridor
mirrored as daytime silence, dust and a faintly sweet rot
in the air. The scows in the wallpaper were more pronounced,
or maybe my eyes were just calibrated. Now, no janitor,
no voices, no signs any one had been here since
my last incursion. I crept to where the number four
hundred seven had been in croached, holding my phone's flashlight
to the threshold. The dust pattern was subtly different, a
single narrowswath, as if some one had crossed in or
avant light feet. Mindful not to leave a mark for
the uninitiated, I pressed my hand to the door. The
surface vexed faintly under my palm, as if hollowed at
no ordinary maintenance closet could sound that way. Impulse propelled
me forward. I knocked, then held my breath. No answer.
Down Stairs, the day manager's office was locked a silent
a band of afternoon some casting shadows in the mottled linoleum.
I lingered at the mail room, where a tall man
invaded blue scrubs, one of the fried E c Stoda
staff as sometimes saw with stuffing mis ad dress mail
into a box already overflowing with chunk fliers. He eyed
me briefly as a hover, then turned away, humming tunelessly.
This cussed meat. I said, lightly, you've worked here a while, right,
Can you tell me who sorts out the store rooms
on four closets, unused apartments, that kind of thing. His
expression flickered weary. If it's locked up there, it's not
meant for you, he muttered, almost too quietly. Instructions above
my pig grade. You seen Arlene, She's not in. He shrugged,
finished his stack and pulled the pasta crate tight against
his torso as if it contains seekers with more than
all credit card offers. Just if you hear anything odd late,
it might help to let someone know. Okay, I tried.
He regarded me a second longer than was comfortable. Some
floors just get quieter than others. Truth is, most people
like it that way. He walked off, closing the door
behind him softly enough that the impact seemed designed to
avoid leaving a trace. The day blurred by some texted
canceling our attentive coffee with a sorry slammed to night,
an unusual chill underlying their words, as if something was
shifting in the social and a current I could feel
but not see. Misses Lyne declined my offer to carry
groceries upstairs, waving me off with a tired but polite smile.
The little web of daily interactions so crucial a month ago,
felt thinner, as if stretched taut from behind the walls themselves.
The Stone Front rolled in by evening, flattening the city
with a grade oppressed close, damping any hope of clear thinking.
I found myself prone to my recordings again, But this
time I tried fouksy, not on late night anomalies, but
on the rhythms of everyday life within hemswith arms, the pipes,
the elevators because of cling door latches testing their strength,
voices calling names down stair walls, then a spliced in
the new truck, the trembling, barely audible corridor sounds, the
mechanical wine, my own panic breath. The contrast was stunning.
Every day sands position side by side with these secret
moments had a way of making the secret stand out
so much more like a ripple in a reflection that
never truly smoothed out again. I ate dinner at my desk,
half a sand which I couldn't finish, and scan forms
devoted to lost urban history. In one thrid, a user
described the decade's old memory of visiting a secret room
in a deco tower west of the river, and names redacted.
No follow up story. All the stores trailed off in
un answered replies, a digital echo of the silence that
seemed to dominate the fourth floor. Some time after midnight,
I tried one more time, returning upstairs, this time with
no intention of pushing past the limits. I simply stood
at the threshold, letting the stillness settle outside. Lightning flickered distantly.
For half a minute, I thought I caught the faint
vibration of forces through the floor. Their tones layered in
time with the rolling thund out, until I realized it
was only the city itself, alive, indifferent, going about its cuckles,
whether I understood them or not. I stayed there until
my calf muscles ached. There was nothing else, just the
same batter door, the numbered plates still missing, an atmosphere
left behind by architecture itself. Heading back down, I paused
on the third floor, landing the building's hum. I've been
flowed a voice in the radio, bleeding through a half
open window, the husher of a TV game show footsteps above.
There was warmth here, reminders that whatever happened in the
shadow of the fourth floor, the world went on below
and troubled before bed. I listened to my early field notes.
Dire is stuff of frustration and sudden delight. I heard
behind it all a cohesion I no longer felt. A
year ago, the world had an order, days made sense,
Sounds told a story I couldetic intoherence. Now. Even the
rhythm of my own voice felt provisional, as if remixed
by an unseen editor. Yet they urge to prove further
refuse to EBB. Some part of me needed to understand
what held all of this together, and what or whom
the building's silence protected. I promised myself. I'd rate, gather information,
let patterns rise organically. But I had already crossed that line.
There's a point beyond which curiosity is in the choice.
I was there now around free. I slept on headphones
to escape the mounting storm. The city hissed on one channel,
my own heartbeat on the other. In the space between
hempsworth arms whispered, holding more than I had ever imagined,
a soundscape at the threshold of memory and forgetting. I
pressed recoup one last time before sleep. Nothing but silence returned,
But somewhere in the static I was certain lay the
next clue. I pressed record one last time before sleep.
Nothing but silence returned, But somewhere in the static I
was certain laid the next clue. The next afternoon brought
the drowsy town of statnant air and the rumble of
trucks out on vine. I stared at the ceiling until
the glooey gray faded, then dragged my recorder and files
into the kitchen, determined to come them through in daylight
when things felt less spectral. I played the most recent
Seeker Corridor audio volume low. Headphones perched lissly over one
air to keep myself grounded in the here and now.
Occasionally a voice would echo up from the alley where
someone would slam the front door below. Every time I
heard a gnase, not in the track my heart. Not
once a morning brown tupum as a carpenter hamerclott of
somewhere in the block behind I was. I noticed a
cyclical rhythm pattern in the dragging noises overlaying my tape.
Three scrapes appoused, two quick shifts thin a thumb. I
rwan listening again. Same cadins appeared a month ago, cropped
at the end of a recording I'd almost deleted. This close,
I could half imagine a code, as if someone was
telegraphing signals through the building floors. I tried transcribing the
intervals by hand, numbers, letters, dots, and dashes. Nothing made sense,
but the act itself lent weight to the idea that
there was more order here than any kind of accident.
Maybe someone upstairs was mocking time or just fighting the
creepy solitude by keeping a ritual, panicked heartbe I decided
I would try to map the fourth floor, compare it
to my collection of blueprints in the corks. I could
recall from the late night in cushion, A graph paper,
pad ruler, and a mug of last night stale coffee
kept me company. I parted window positions, dray stock coats,
and half walls from memory, trying to mark doors that
no longer had numbers. Some walls from the surface blueprinted
in the line with where the corridor had taken me.
There was a wedge shaped void behind four hundred five
and four hundred eleves, too big for nothing but not
claimed as belonging to any registered apartment at space, I
realized would light directly behind the vanished threshold of four
hundred seven. The exercise left me more agitated. When I
stood to stretch licks asleep, a heavy, fitful knock from
above a concentrated measure tap, then as squeak, as if
some one had shifted a chair. I tried to tell
myself it was a coincidence, the biproduct of all building
settling and restless tenants. But I was well past coincidental
explanations now. A little before dusk, while washing breakfast slowne spoon,
I heard quiet voices right outside my apartment, or the
sort of not quite whispering that signaled staff conference, pausing.
I inch closer, holding my breath. He's poking around more,
came a male voice, probably just bored, replied a woman.
Maybe arline. There was a mottering of agreement, a choked laugh,
keep and eye closed the records. Footstets were treated down
the hall, and their voices ebbed into silence. The message
was clear I was being noticed. On impulse, I texted Sam,
did you ever hear from France's in four hundred eleven?
Or see anyone moving stuff at weird Eyre's. I tried
to sound off into it, off as gossip, not paranoia.
The little blinking ellipses hovered a beat longer than normal.
No idea been heads down, you are right? Not really.
I consider typing, but deleted it and settled for a
neutral just curious. Outside, as the city's evening clatter began,
I sat by the window, tracing my mate floor plan
with a finger, marking potential alternate entry ways, and wondering
how far down this rabbit hole had gone. Lights clacked off,
ins cattered apartment at police siren mobbiled four blocks away.
I turned the tape of her den, hearing only the
hum of waiting the anticipation of revelation, pressing at the
seams of the mundane. When the building finally settled and
the distin was seated, I resolved to rest, if only
for an hour, knowing that the silence of night would
bring new questions. The record arrested on my chest. Its
little light were assuring a single, glowing proof that in
alders accumulating strangeness, I was still here, still hearing, still
searching for a story beneath the noise. I didn't sleep
the night after discovering the corridor behind four hundred eleven.
The darkness, usually a comfort, felt restless. The building's nighttime
homesh pricked with the awareness of something just past the
edges of sense a laine bad head, fronds of a
one air to catch the fainted sums any sign I
hadn't misunderstood that what I'd found wasn't simply the result
of exhaustion or too much isolation. I kept replaying my
own recording and clipped sections. The voices from the head
and corridor were too faint and possible to pass even
with filtering and pitch correction. The words fell apart into
syllables that suggested instructions of bargaining. Every so often, my
own whispered commentary cut through, agitated, disbelieving proof of how
much had let the silence get to me. Rains started
at about four a m. Custing against the windows and squalls.
Even the familiar shape of my room was unsettled by
street lights fanning erratically across the ceiling. I got up
not long after, making coffee, while the sky began to pale,
unsteady enough balance, My mind kept suckling back to what
I'd seen, had the corridor branched off, how each door
had its own weight, its own muffled silence. I wrote
a list of things that were now beyond doubt real
the concealed hallway. The markings were riesed, apartments once worth
the old blueprint's matching spaces never meant to be entered.
I checked the corridor twice that morning in daylight. The
closet in four hundred eleven was perfectly ordinary, no sign
of how the false wall opened. It clicked cleanly into place,
revealing nothing but a small dent worn smooth by hundreds
of cleaning bottles. I tested the wall for seams with
bare fingers, but if above me the angle of its surface,
just a fraction different from memory, as if the trick
of entry was always one step removed from her production.
No one else seemed to wear of any disturbance from
the third floor or landing. I watched as the morning
shift cycled through the mail carrier's heavy steps, Arlene bustling
back and forth with the clipboard, and the building resumed
its steady, self healing rhythm. Franz's unit above remained dark.
The absentee's careful stillness was indistinguishable from vacancy. I caught
Sal in the lobby sleep mustard moving fast, and asked
again about any night nose or of recent staff changes.
They looked at me skeptical. If you're joking about the
walls again, I'm working doubles. Don't have time for weirdness.
They sounded more tired than a night but there was
a third of caution in the voice now, like they
were auditing every question for intent. Every object around me
seemed charged with meaning. The bent male slot labeled THEO theyk,
thump of maintenance carts upstairs, even the banality of elevator
music drifting lazily through crack speakers as I rode between floors,
At some point, the feeling of being watched thickened, more
oppressive than before, a subtle shift, like all the air
was filtering through surveillance before I breathed it. In the
best traditions of paranoia, I started talking aloud as I
moved through my routines, rating not just for the recorder,
but for any unseen audience that might be monitoring my progress.
My kitchen became the war room. Floor plans and tenant
rosters taped to the linoleum, highlighters and colored pins tracing
lines from missing apartments to maintenance closets, red circles around
every unexplained door. I made copies of every document I'd found,
to brochure pages, service requests, time lines, even the photo
of the basement boxes before they disappeared. Everything was organized
by evidence level, hard proof, witnessed to event, plausible, cover, hearsay.
It was the sort of compulsive, overbuilt preparation that comes
after you realize there's less separating small questions from big
ones than you though. I called the City Record's office
and tried to ask for the third time about ownership
of the hens with Arms and its renovations, but the
woman on duty told me should fax what she could,
and hung up before I could press for specifics. No
facts ever arrived. Brown noon, I left my phone on
record and watched through the peep holes. Building staff, non
specific in manner and dress, a kind of generic and enimity,
paraded in and out of the stairwell. One pause at
my door, looked at my number, and for a moment
I was certain she could see me through the inch
of glass. She lingered, pentapping on her notepad, then moved
away without knocking. By late afternoon, my nerves were drawn out.
Fred I heard movement of her head, quiet delibered for
nearly twenty minutes, as if some one was positioning furniture
by hand, then stopping to listen. Of all the kinds
of dread at rehearsed, this slow, careful counter surveillance was
the hardest to shake. I wanted to believe I was
being irrational. Instead, every new silence blossomed with threat. That evening,
I copied back up files of audio and documents to
three thumb drives, labeling them with numbers rather than names,
and hid them in separate places, stuffed inside a hollowed
up book, tucked in an unused coffee tine slid under
my mattress. One drive I kept in my jacket pocket,
the closest thing I'd ever had to an emergency credential.
I drafted two emails to old fe ends I hadn't
talked t in age's, leaving the subjects blank, attaching only
a please read, trust me, tell someone if you don't
hear from me soon. I have heard over the sand
button waffling, then closed the drafts and scent. Something about
it felt like it would draw the wrong kind of attention.
The storm rolled away by sundown, leaving the city washed
and iridescent under the sodium lamps. I felt like a
ghost to my own building, floating from room to room
in search of clues that kept losing detail the harder
I chased them. Dinner was a dull affair, the act
of eating mechanical, just placeholders for time, passing until I
could risk another and cushion upstairs. I waited until after midnight,
head phones on, gear checked, speare, battery added, sneakers tied.
I placed the thumb drive in my left sock. On
the off chance I needed to get away with only
what I could carry, I wore a dark hoodie pulled low,
not out of theatricality, but in concession to the seriousness
that now hummed under my skin. The air in the
hallway was heavy with the recidue of cleaner and sweat.
I paused outside Sand's door to bited knocking, then press
my urgenda to listen. Total silence, either asleep or utterly still.
By intent, I crept up toward the fourth floor, landing
every fritzipparisndant against old tile, my nerves amplified by the
suspicion that someone or something weighted behind me. I listened
at the edge of the passage. No scraping this time,
no voices, only the building's chronic reluctance to divulge anything straight.
I was about to retreat when I heard a grinding
click from the end of the corridor, a deliberate, calculated noise.
I ducked into the alcove, holding my breath, the recorder
pressed tight to my rips. From the shadow of the
third door, the spot that lined up exactly with four
hundred seven light flickered once, sharp and unmistakable, like a
panel opening and closing. For a fraction of a second,
the passage existed again. The lockdown feeling of surveillance grew
sharper through the following morning. My mail stopped arriving, even
junk fliers. My laundry cycled through the machines, only for
half my clothes to go missing. I tried to file
a complaint about the fourth floor maintenance, but the surface
number I'd always used now played acle cannot be completed.
Message before cut into dead air. My apartment keep out,
replaced by management a month ago, had suddenly stopped working
in the main door. Each time I had to wait
in the lobby for someone to buzz me in their glance.
NIS is sharpened. The word is a body wafting by
like a suggestion carried on the scent of coffee. Sam
texted me mid morning, did you say someone was moving
things in four hundred eleven? The message was out of
the blue, terse like it was written while word about
being watched, I replied, careful, heard noises above, weired vibe
everywhere lately, saw anything. There was no answer for an ere.
Then Miriam's off got something for you. Meet behind bins.
The bins were at the end of the alley, behind
the loading doors, and I had only ever seen them
used in early morning. By the last shift, we met
behind the bins at Tupam. Sam looked over their shoulder
twice before coming closer. Their uniform was flat with bleach,
and their hands shook faintly. Found this at my door
to day count open it feels wrong. They held out
a manilla envelope, sealed crookedly and tidy. I took it
and stuffed it in my pocket, hesitating before asking, has
anyone else talked to you about questions? I've been asking.
Sam's muffed, which I'm sure not directly. But Jen, the
day clerk gone, deskke empty now Orlene looks at me
like I'm someone else worrying. We parted quickly. I ducked
into a bogue around the corner, turning the envelope over
in my lap. It wasn't addressed, but inside a small
key on a loop of green thread and a single
slip of paper, and leaping almost childlike script, don't trust
the records. If you have, do you hide? Back at
my apartment, the familiar rooms thought over exposed light too
bright on every surface. I tried the key on every lock,
I had none fit. That night, when I ventured to
the basement, I found the door to the archive room
nail shut with police tape, but no police around and
no sign of an actual investigation. I went to the
back storage again, but where I'd found the boxes before
now was an empty shelf. The outline of dust abruptly
ended in clean lines, like something dragged hastily away. The
only place left to check was the fourth in corridor.
Some agreed to meet at one thirty am, sighting a
scheduled over night shift. I brought the envelope key in
the corridor. We waited near the stairwell, pretending to have
her by the vending machines, until the last of the
evening's traffic subsided. Sam's hands were still, face drawn tight
with apprehension. Are you sure about this, I asked, trying
to pin tremble in my own voice. They only nodded
ice forward, scanning the darkest at every little sound. If
we don't, they said, we'll keep guessing. Better to know.
I didn't argue better to know, or at least better
than living in a thick fog of erasure. We found
four hundred eleven o'lot Franz's absentee status still in effect
in the closet. Sam sharper. I've found the catch for
the false wall, exposed by a rough scrape I hadn't left.
We ducked inside, pressing the panel close behind us. The
air was denser than before, stale with secrets head. The
corridor branched much as I remembered. The door was bracketed
in silence on either side. I led with the key
on its green threat, trying each notv slowly attentions, booing
tighter with every failed attempt. Finally, at the door mocked
four hundred seven, the keystuck, turned with a reluctant grind,
and the lockside open. Inside the room was stripped but
not empty, half lit by emergency fluorescence embedded deep in
the wall. It looked like someone had lived in a hurry.
Drawers left open, coats flung across the bed. A cup
appended on the counter, signs of recent abandonment. Sam made
a soft and voluntary sound at the sight of a
child's drawing on the wall. The crayon color smeared but
on mistakeably vivid pinned the side. It a photo of
people whose faces were blowed where I caught the paper sideways.
I checked the closet, then the bathroom. The old walls
rattled at every touch, giving the impression of coats or
storage bundle just behind. I flicked the lights, which nothing.
The min source came from within. Along the wall, a
service panel gapped slightly. With a gentle urge of curiosity
or dread. I pressed in. The panel swung open, revealing
a low doorway. Wires tangled across the inside. Sam hesitated,
but I pushed forward. Recorder held out breath, coming up
shallow as A squeezed inside. The passag hunt with electricity
at the end. A squat little room, half boiler maintenance,
half server closet has two battered silver towers and a
row of drawers. Wires dangled from the low ceiling their
endstritchen knotted together, liping round. A cluster of drives backed
up against the wall. An old desk covered in files
and marked up dias agreements looked like the detritus after
an office shut down. SAM flicked through the folders, mouth tight.
Each one listed names, tenants and service workers, date, reasons
for a termination. Every entry ended with the same notation erased.
There were cross references, payments and signatures that belonged nowhere.
Some notes designated request fulfilled summer were set required. I
barely let the words settle. I found thumb drives match
in the colored ones I had hidden at home, bundled
in his ziplock, back stacked beneath albums of fovoes marked
with apartment numbers and outdates. Their faces again blowed or
scratched through a shipment log for digital recorders, then the
seats for hort drives and cloud backups, instructions to a copy,
all zero out dispose. There was a scuffle at the entry,
a flash of movement in the dark Santen's ducking back
toward the main room. If someone entered, Arline, face pinched
with exhaustion, blocked their path. She seemed bleached up by
the overhead light. Only her eyes lively. He should both leave,
she said, before either of us kodask a question. This
isn't what you think, and it's not your business. I managed.
People are disappearing. I held out the files, handshaking families,
no records, even to Polisa. Arline cut me off off.
Not my rules, here in the wrong place, and you're
out of time. She reached for a switch on the
wall as her hand hovered a whole space shuttered, the
wall's pulsing in and out of focus, as if the
air itself decided to flicker. Sam shouted, eared, leading people,
aren't you just what for money? What happens to them?
Arline's face stiffened. They're not deleted, They erased from this place,
moved on somewhere else. Payment covers everything, memory record traces,
clients pay, some want to escape, some don't. Same thing
in the end, not your concern. She pressed the switch,
and alarms wailed in the glow. I snatched the handful
of drives and files I could carry. Sam duck low,
shoving the desk to one side. As a heavy door
began to slide down, aiming to trap us inside. We
barely squeezed beneath its closing gap, scraping skin off our
knuckles and knees. In the corridor, the air was sharp
and insistent, red lights flashing at distant ends. As we ran,
everything felt off kilted, or's jumble, Sam's echoing wrong, as
if the geometry of the building shifted under us. I
lost track of how many times we took. At one
point we passed a door, rattling with desperate fist for
behind a voice screaming for help, before fading. As the
light spiked, we barreled back into four hundred eleven, bursting
through the false wall as the mechanism behind us lock shot.
Access lost. I kicked at once, testing for weakness, as none.
The path behind vanish seemed invisible, as if it had
never been there at all. Salmon had collapsed in the
empty living room, panting, clutching the hard drives and files,
adrenaline spiking so high the silence felt like a car
alarm ringing in a vacuum in a hallway, only the
sound of distant footsteps in the elevator's bell. Sam grunned,
rolling over what now? I didn't have any answer. I
copied everything we had done to the last thumb drive,
then walked Sam back to their apartment. We exchanged a
terror exhausted agreement to lie low for a while, stopped
talking about what happened until we figured out how to
safely reach someone outside the building. The next morning, I
sent files through every online channel I could trust. Encrypted
email to two journalists in another state, physical package to
a friends addressed in Detroit, copy uploaded to a secure
archive within irows. Emails bounced back as undeliverable messages to journalists.
When unannswered and the friend call confused, asking if I
had sent him something. Then Mick Call hesitated and said
nothing had arrived after all the digital arc I've listed
the files as uploaded, but the next day the fulldough
was empty. Helmsworth arms were organized around me. Movers in
blue uniforms shuffled furniture into units that had been empty
for months. The mail room, once a chaos of mislabeled boxes,
now held only sort of bundles. France's unit was suddenly inhabited.
Tenant files rewritten. Sam's name vanished from the mail books,
replaced by Anne Caldwell. Every conversation with management looped into
we have no records of that, or that's not your unit.
Some star vanished, replaced by new faces. Already weary with
the building's secret, Sam distanced themselves, warning me not to
reach out again. It isn't safe. They whispered for was cracking,
before cutting the line. I tried to leave backing wire court,
but my withdrawal from the bank's stalled in sufficient authorization.
The leasing office returned my calls with identical emails. Your
requests could not be processed. Please contact building management. When
I pressed for my old employment records, I was told
my name had never been listed my insurance and slapsed overnight.
I gave up trying to leave and instead barricaded my
door with half my furniture. Every night I loved every sound,
every unexplained flicker. My mail was returned marked no recipient.
On the third night, the hallways were empty. The only
evidence of other tenants came from the occasional mute, a
click of door locks, and the pimperk of light under
closed doors. On the fourth morning, I found a small
cardboard box outside my door and address, except for a
crooked alex H T and faintly marker. Inside the box
my old college ID, a ring I hadn't seen since
moving day, a battered notebook I remembered losing during the
first week here, and a blank contract for tendancy in
the henswift arms beneath it. My digital recorder its memory
wiped the files from my first week deleted. There was
also a single square of paper with the building's logo
and faded gray blank except for one clean crease down
the scent stirring at the recorder, I loaded the most
recent file, expecting nothing. Instead what play was my own voice,
much younger and uncertain, describing the move. I don't know
what I'll find here, but maybe I'll find out who
I was supposed to be. The words clipped away to
solve in a storm of static, replaced by another series
of entres that repeated, each one bleeding into the next,
the same questions, the same circular searched for hidden rooms.
I looked up, sudden urgency rising. I pressed my ear
to the hallway door and caught the cliine of ver
Janitor's cart, the murmur voices of two workers, and very
faintly echo footsteps heading up the main stairs toward the
four floor. He pulled in my hands. I followed, recoder
and palm, as if in trance. The corridor on four
was fluorescent and antiseptic. No door bore a number. Every
surface was smooth and clean enough to seem recently painted.
The only trace of the pasta too bright rectangle where
four hundred seven had once been. At the far end,
the faintest echo shuffling feet drifted from behind a locked door.
Silent spilled through every gap. I stared at the thirshold,
waiting for a sign, on any sign that some one
would return, or that the corridor might breathe again. The
sound of voices faded, replaced only by the subtle pulse
of the building's electrical system. In the hush, my mind
filled every recess with memory, layering what I'd learned and
what I couldn't recall. The door was blank, but my
name seemed to vibrate just out of range. I returned
to my apartment, unable to shake the sense that I
run the whole circuit, only to end up exactly where
I began. I placed the recorder on my desk, touched
every object in the return box, and watched the window
until dusk. All the while, the only thing that mattered
was the little red led blinking gently. I waited, and
as darkness filled the corners of the room, I pressed
record one final time. I waited, and as darkness filled
the corners of the room, I pressed record one final time.
This is a particular kind of silence that settles when
you press record, not to capture noise, but to summon
something hidden, almost as if the microphone itself is an
invitation for the room to fill up with what it shouldn't.
I sat up straight at my desk, feeling my own
voice enter the space. Except this time I had nothing
left in the right. There were no new knocks at
the walls, no urgent conversations outside the door, just the
sound of my own breath hanging between sentences. That and
the low, cyclical hum of the building's electrics wires buzzing
somewhere behind the pasture, as if in conversation with my nerves.
I thumbed through the stack of recovered belongings as I spoke,
laying each down with a care that felt ceremonial. The
ring my old idea, the lease. My words fell out
soft and stilted, caring more apology than narrative. I wasn't
sure who I was recording for a future version of myself,
or version the building would eventually return to when it
was ready. Monday was some day pretending to be It's
after midnight, whoever you are, whoever I am. Now, I've
tried everything. The evidence emptied itself, like water evaporating from
the glass. In two days, the apartments up here have
filled and empted again, new locks, new names. The walls
are still humming and then talking into the dark, hoping
this time, something will catch and stay. The room poles
with its own uncertainty. One bulb over the sink, stuttering
along with my heartbeat. Another floor above, pipes banked in
a three beat rhythm identical to the thumbs I heard
behind the erased doors, a reminder or a prompt not
to forget. When I closed my eyes, it was easy
to convince myself I was still standing in the corridor,
feeling the pressurized air and hearing voices sliding through all
vents distantly. An elevator will cut the stillness three fours removed.
Maybe I heard footsteps of alaying my recording hesitation telegraph
and six measured steps. As I listened, there was a
suggestion of someone pausing at my door, but it dissolved
before I could decide if it was an echo, a memory,
or just the shape of fear fitting itself into every
day sounds. I never quite resolved to stop trying. Each day.
The follow drew a narrow circle life, folding in on
the tiny routines I could still control. My phone remained useless.
The building's wireless network clocked to every device I owned,
except for the app that recorded and erased Arlee was
never at her desk. Sam's phones stopped ringing. The faces
in the lobby were always new, different e coated in
the same sheine of practiced indifference, as if each had
replaced someone else recently memorizing their part. Others started to
vanish in subt o ways. Misseslin's plants arrived in the
trash room, the faded labels lost. The shop pharmacist from
two hundred nine, who used to always greet me with
the tired wave, was gone. His mail books restensled. Overnight
at breakfast, some one's child came knocking, asking if I
had seen their mother. I tried to ask which apartment,
but the child only shrugged and left, as if even
that was classified information. There was an undercurrent of panic,
always just beneath the surface, as flicked me more often
hushed voices stopp when I passed by. The elevator was
a roulette wheel stopping at fall with greater frequency. Doors
openly onto that unbroken wall. Sometimes briefly the panel inside
would flicker with numbers that didn't exist, seven eleven, then
blinking back to four. I once pressed the emergency button
just to see and got a burst of static. In
a firm accorded reply remained calm. Maintenance is on its way.
I kept to the second four as much as possible,
tension in my shoulders ever present, yet whenever noise folted
down from above, every nerve in my body seemed to
orient itself to the source. When them in net dragging
sounds began again, only this time more urgent, as though
there was actual purpose behind them, I was sure some
one somewhere expected me to act the compulsion one. At
half past two, I gathered the envelope key, a kitchen
ife tucked uselessly inside my coat, and about a digital recorder.
The hall was felt alien, even after a year here.
I knew suddenly that nothing about Hemsworth Arms had ever
belonged to any one who lived inside it. We were
tenants of denial, first, then memory, then absence. When I
reached the four floor landing, the scene was precise, dullus
expanse at the corridor's end, shadow locked against the wall
where four hundred seven years to be not a sound
but the chats whisper. For a moment I considered slipping away,
embracing ignorance, but the pulse of steps circled in the
cop it as if someone else had just left or
was about to arrive. A click suttle barely there broke
the tension. The janitor, the one who had first warned
me off Ford, turned the corner. Mab balanced on shoulder.
He paused, looked at me, and then, with strange gentleness,
invited me closer, looking for something, he asked, voice neutral
but not unkind. I nodded, I need to see if
there's someone's still in there four hundred seven or whatever
it's called. He hesitated, You sure you want to? There's
no reassurance in his tone, only the practiced resignation of
someone who's witnessed the routine a thousand times. Still oppressed on,
he handed me the old ring of keys, green threads
still lived through one. If the door opens for you, you'll
get what you're after or lose it. More likely. That's
how it works here at the threshold, I held the
key tightly, fitting it into the faint depression where the
knobs should have been. Cold metal met my palm. I pressed,
expecting resistance, but the surface yielded, not smoothly, but with
the sluggish, sticky movement of something meant to never be opened.
Twice inside I knew perfect repic of my own apartment,
put off by small, insistant details. The windows were switched.
The kitchen table had my grandmother's tablecloth, the one I'd
lost in the move. On the console were pictures from
ten years prior, when I still lived out near the docklands.
The air was warm and fresh, untouched by time or memory.
There was some one sitting at the table back turned
a posture that was familiar, at lengths of the arm
and neck, just wrong enough to make meet out everything.
They reached for the record of my recorder, turning it
over and over in their hands, as though it might
give up everything if only studied long enough. Without turning,
they spoke, it's easy to forget who starts these stories
or where they end. My own voice or something nearerly close, continued.
The contracts in the box. Just sign and you can
go or don't. Either way, the building remembers even when
you don't. The anxiety in my chest sure harpened. What
happened to the others? I Aske's voice strangled, no answer,
only the slow turn of the recorder tip wheel spinning soundlessly.
I stepped further inside, my reflection caught in a windowpane identical,
but wearing the wrong jacket, hair parted on the opposite side.
The figure at the table remained faceless. Their hands, though,
were exact copies of mine. Details piled up quietly revolting
on the fridge, hung a polo or to some in
the lobby, arms slung around my shoulders, both faces wiped
clean by shadow from the lens flare. It was unmistakealy real,
yet utterly erased. Suddenly I heard the corridor door creak open.
One step later, a shadow Arline or her double appeared
in the mirror. Voice low and measured. They never keep
up for long, nobody does not. Really. She set her
hand on my shoulder, and I realized the noise the
story is the careful collection of objects. The building gathered
them up, edited out what didn't suit, recompiled the pieces.
The lights flickered. The shape at the kitchen table disappeared,
as though it had been a miroage. Now it was
just all lean and me, standing amid the slightly off,
slightly too familiar trappings of my own erased history. She
pressed a slip of paper into my hand, a contract
already initiated, still blank, with signature and day should go.
You can let it go, she said, or hold on
to the story such as it is. But you can't
have it both ways. Decide. The air round us thickened
with thozone in the faintest electronic wine. I hesitated, hovering
between action and paralysis, knowing any step would reinforce the
building's made of memory and forgetting. At the threshold, I
made a choice. I didn't sign Holding the recorder, I pivoted,
pressing record harder than before, and bolted back for the corridor.
The doors warked as I passed a flicker of impossible geometry,
and the passage spat me out on the main staircase,
landing breathless and trembling with some new hollow certainty. The
keys in my hand were gone in my palm only
the paper now bearing my signature, ininga I didn't recall
lifting a penterite. I ran down the stairwell to my apartment,
feeling a world trink. Corridor by corridor behind me, the
doors shut themselves in sequence, each clickerase in the route
I taken. I collapsed into much air, setting down the
recorder with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. On playback, the
tape carried nothing but a dense static than the faint
hum of distant footsteps in a hole that no longer
mapped to any blueprint. After some minutes, my own voice surfaced,
asking over and over do you remember why you're here?
Do you remember who you were supposed to be? And
that is the end? Thank you for listening, and I
will see you in the next one.