Speaker 1: If you wake in Belvedere towers at midnight, you might
wonder at the silence. If you're unlocky, you might strain
for signs that you're not alone. That's what happened to me.
Marion Ellie's are tired right and well acquainted with all
the noises, and old high rise is apt to make
once the world outside is finally quitted. It was past
midnight when the shuffling started. Even through the thickest streams,
something in the city building will always rouse you, as
if the concrete itself has a nervous system. That night,
I found myself emerging from sleep just as the wind
shifted outside my nine four window. I heard heels clicking uneasily,
rubbersalls squeaking against the battered corridor tiling. For a breathless moment,
I simply listened, unsure whether it was the shifting pipes
were real footfall. Soon, only silence answered your dense expectant.
I lay flat on my back, half keeping its own
an easy time. Then came a soft, almost apologetic, scraping
at my door, like someone hesitating. I prop myself on
my elbows. No one visits as such, I was, unless
they are desperate for trying not to be noticed. Seconds passed,
the scraping came again, hesitation, then the whisper of something
sliding under, Almost frivent in its quiet, I podded barefoot
across the chilly linoleum and flicked in the dim hall light.
My building has a particular smell at night, bleach memory,
a little meldy. I bent down and saw a crooked
scrap of yellowed paper, folded once unevenly torn. The penmanship
was amistakably rush looping, left handed, dark strokes that pressed
her to the wood. I picked it up. The chill
at my toes ran up my legs. The page contained
to sketch, not a message in words, but a crude,
insistent drawing of a window, boxed in by the outline
of her building's face. A single heavy line marked the
seventh floor. Rough black shapes filled the pane, repeated childlike,
as though someone wanted desperately to be seen. My first
thought was a pranker, childish late night dare, for the
Belvedere wasn't a place where children played tricks at midnight.
Most of the young families stay close, and the seventh floor,
as everyone knew, was vagant left empty after tragedy struck
five years back. No one lingered there for long. I
clutched the note in my palm, the paper unusually warm,
as if just left. I let a heavy latch click
as I pulled the door wider and looked up and
down the corridor, nothing just to fade a navy runner
last cleaned sometime last spring, and the whirring security like
marking the elevator's distant descent. Curiosity turned my gaze up
my own window, then crossed the open courtchard to the
other block that paralleled mine. The weather loomed in the
courtyard three stores below was only half illuminated by dusk
orange street lamps, but the seven floors window directly across
caught a GLIMMERU silhouette stock still just visible behind pale curtains,
not a reflection, A definitely presents proared at the shoulders,
head cocked as if staring directly through the night, and
concrete and glass to meet my eyes. Even then, all
rational thought tried to explain its sleep paralysis and old memory,
a trick of nightclare. Yet as I watched, a figure
didn't move for three measure breasthts then dissolved suddenly into shadow,
leaving the window vacant and the curtains and touched fusepumps
climbed up my arms. A ridiculous reaction from a former
school teacher whose greatest job hazard had been forgotten homework
and stubbed toes. I reached for my phone on the
kitchen sideboard, thumb poised over the security desk number. But
somehow I knew before I even dialed that I would
find nothing. My senses strained for more footsteps, for the
distant sound of an elevator, or the reverberating thud of
a stair while the building slow heart beat, nothing came.
I left my phone beside the kettle and set the
note gingerly on my bedside table. I watched it in
a thin strip of hallway light and wondered if come
morning it would have faded to dust, to just another
product of overactive nerves, that's sleep. When it did come,
was shallow and restless. Every creek or distant voice amplified,
every draft at my window, cold touch against my cheek.
When the morning light finally nutched its way through my curtains,
the note was still there, thinking no less insistent. The
strange marked window no less clear in my mind. I
had not dreamed it. Most days in Belvidere towers of
their own, lettles script a kind of routine choreography that's
both exhausting and oddly comforting. By seven each morning, the
pep tub began their percussive tap, a signal for the
entire block to shuffle out in their slippers, tea or
instant coffee in hand, on to their patruck. Buccanies. Mine
faced the cities went a dull sky line, and when
the breeze wasn't too stiff, I could just make out
the green shimmer of the river half a mile away.
My neighbors emerged as predictably as sunlight. Mister Geoffrey from
a to leaned his elbows over the rickety railing to
cold greetings, while his wife, still in night rollers, barked
teasing corrections in Punjabi down the hall. Missus Olive from
Tendy would water the stubborn petunias hanging baling wire, humming
some minor quy lulla by her grandchild taught her Velvidio
wasn't damrous, but it had survived wars of economics and neglect,
most recently a disastrous fire which had emptied half of
one flour and left the scar on every residence memory.
I was the building's unofficial tutor and part time sage.
Having outlasted all but a handful of tenants, I taught
for thirty two years in city School's history in English mostly,
and in retirement I'd become the one neighbors came to
for advice with schoolwork, tax papers, or certain kinds of
trouble their own families couldn't solve. On a good day,
I felt needed. On a quiet day, I took comfort
in the routines I'd built, tending to my gardening pots
along the window, drying herbs from my little rope sharing
stores in the community room. Every Tuesday and Thursday. Young
Samir from seven B, with her perpetually tangled hair and
weary brown eyes, would visit after school, sometimes even lading
her guard down enough to ask for help with her essays.
Mister Hobson in eight CE eed a stog army veteran
which joined me and Samir in the reading circle, interrupting
every other sentence to point out historical errors in whatever
war novel we'd picked that week. Despite its blemish as
cracked tiling, flickering lights, unreliable, Boiler's belvetere had its warmth.
Our manager existed mostly by email, and our security guard, Tony,
was nearly as harrid as a plumbing genial, if a
bit slow to respond when things got out. Twice a
week I hosted the building's reading circle in the first
floor community room, presiding overbeaten up paperbacks in the musty
room of bent coffee. Retirement had suited me until nights
like the one before, when my mind shuffled ceaselessly against
the idea that something had shifted in the bones of
the building. No one spoke of the seven floor any more,
not beyond muttered reminders that half its apartment stood empty
after the fire. The doors padlocked and in tiiors remained
only so far as insurance alowed. Every now and then,
residents would repeat the usual legends, phantom footsteps, voices. At
three in the morning, children heard laughing along the empty hall.
I'd always dismissed them. Cities have ways of making spaces
seem haunted, especially when they're really just priorly maintained memories,
pool and idle corners and loneliness is a master of
the skies. Still, those old stores crawled back, now sharpened
by the memory of the note left at my door.
I found myself glancing toward the seventh floor as I
breathed my morning tea, counting windows as if the mart
were mightly bout neon and accusing sleep depriy. Nerves and
tatters are considered confiding in some mirror or mister Hobson.
Before rationality took over, I would not be the origin
of new rumors, nor the one to revive old ghost tales.
My reputation for levelheadedness was hard when I had no
intention of letting one night's bizarre en counter ruin it.
But the suspicion lingered throughout the day. As I pressed
the elevator button or paused by the risers in the stairwell,
my mind kept circling back. Hadn't there been a family
on the seventh just after I moved here? Wasn't there
a little boy who liked to wave at passing cars
from the very window that had been so grimly marked
on the sketch. His parents had been proud of him,
clever quiet He disappeared after the fire I seemed to recall,
but details blurred, as if the years themselves were scented corporation.
That day, as Docca s lengthened the shadows creeping across
the courtyard, I checked my own locks with careful deliberation,
tested the windows, made sure nothing sentimental was left sitting
too close to the edge of memory. The note I
wrapped gently in a clean handkerchief and slipped under the
corner of my jewy box. It was a matter of principle.
Even if my nerves had gotten the better of me
last night, I would not feed a story I could
not explain. But the world has its ways. I thought.
I was done with seeing patterns, with expecting mystery, with
fearing the subtle edges of Belvedere's old bones. I would
soon discover I was only in the first step. By
Tuesday morning, muted rumors began building with the arrival of drizzle.
The regular faces exchanged wordless glances in the elevator and
along the trash chute. Valvedere is its own weather inside
moose shift for the forecast at a gray sky can
stoke anxiety like nowhere else. That day, Missasola, hurrying in
a rainspeck coat button. Hold me as I sord in
my mail. Marian, you see anything funny last night? She whispered,
voice heavy with urgency, as if afraid to be overheard
by the peeling pain itself. I shook my head. Funny
how window, seventh floor far end, she swallowed, glancing over
her shoulder toward the glass front doors. I saw someone
up there, just just standing. Marian looked lost, kid. Maybe
though she faltered, twisting the wedding ring on her swollen hand,
somehow reminded me of someone. I wanted to laugh it off,
to offer her a comforting explanation about her in Shadows
and Tricks at dusk, but the memory of my own
encounter with the shadow at the window stiled me. By
noon the next dotted hisself as to neighbor from nine
f Moore in the disappearance of a cherish scarf left
on her door knob. Overnight in the afternoon, Sam Mirror
found me at the community room, cheeks pink from her tears.
Mamma's brooch is gone, she said, voice trembling. It was
in her jewelry box. We didn't open it since he
did you hear anything last night? I hugged her, shook
my head, made empty promises that it would turn up.
I paid closer attention at the reading circle. My Jorwery
from six of fretted about a missing photograph, her late
husband's favor banished from the credenza beside her front door. Downstairs,
Tony muttered about a child's bout a teddy bear picked
up and misplaced, perhaps in the corridor, but when he
searched for it later, it was gone. Each of these
little losses was a familiar story in a building the size.
People always losing things, after all, but the frequency was strange,
the timing stranger. Still, each disappearance coincided with one of
those night's missus. Oliver, another resident reported something or someone
in the seventh four window. I spent the late evening
with a line notebook open, shouting the incidents in neat columns,
jotting dates, names, and a parks. The pattern emerged quietly
but unmistakably. Every misplace or lost item carried an emotional charge,
a connection to remembrance or loss. The scarf had been
a gift after the fire from a neighbor now passed
the bridge marked the anniversary of Saint Mir's parents immigrating
to the city. Even the child's toy was one that
rumors suggested had belonged to a family now gone. My
hunch grew if the stories were true, and if the
figure at the window was more than a composite of
our communal anxiety, than something or someone was collecting traces
of memory. One night at a time an idea cold.
I dug out my old teaching landaud worn but still
bearing my name. I placed it almost apologetically outside seven A,
one of the seal apartments, half fearing it might be
seen as a provocation, then resisting the urge to pace,
I waited well beyond midnight, in a pull of microwave
warm tea, watching the opposite building for any glimmer of movement.
At one fourteen I saw it, just a flicker, a
barely their outline at the seventh floor window, as if
someone stood behind the curtain, pivoted and then was gone.
Sleep when it came was a brittle thing, as though
every dreamersted atop a precarious stack of unanswered questions. In
the bright and charitable light of morning, I pressed my
glasses to my face, retrieved my house keys, and went
to look. The lanyard was nowhere to be found. What
began as a distant curiosity then cracked open, and I
felt something in Belvedere towers had begun to watch as well.
Sleep lost all its sanctuary. As I resolved to learn
the truth behind these strange events, tension had flared into obsession.
Each day spent cross reference in the tails and the
missing items, feeling for the thin line separating the explainable
from the uncanny. Tony, the security guard had always treated
me with polite respect to my decades in the building,
gave me a certain pull Tony. I started holding him
back one afternoon as he made his circuit with a
clipboard and battered electric lantern. Do we have any footage
from the seventh floor? It might help with some of
the recent concerns. He ran a tired hand across the brill,
then agreed. But in the dim basement security office we
found mostly disappointment. The screens old, as most of the
building flickered between colors, and every relevant recording from the
critical eyres was corrupted or missing. Happens a lot, Tony admitted,
gilbiting his words. Wires in the walls rats I don't know,
never have a clean angle when people actually need it.
One blurry freeze frames of eyed a staturette of a person,
blurry but sticking close to the proportions of someone roughly
my own height, which struck me as either a clever
trick or an unsettling coincidence. The image sure of the
figure poles beside the door to the empty seven to
four apartment and raised as if in greeting or warning. Meanwhile,
I became a slave, going door to door and sitting
awkwardly on living room sofas with neighbors prying into their stores.
Every item taken was loaded with nostalgia, tied to the
aftermath of the fire or to a departed loved one.
Some had been exchanged between residents as gifts of perseverance,
Some had survived the blaze and come to symbolize resilience.
Others simply tokens left behind by families forced to move away. Now,
my app on pencil in hand across reference the floor plans,
realizing the items clustered in apartments directly below or above
the seventh floor, or even ominously in those adjacent halls.
Was this a practical Joe creeping through the ventilation shafts,
or something older moving through the cracks in memory, my
resolve hardened by way of small bribes appetizer boxes. In
the promise of future favors, I coaxed the maintenance foreman
and teen to let me inspect thee in from a
seventh floor apartment. A narrow shaft of daylight cutter a
heavy curtains when we entered dis cloaked every surface save
for a channel worn straight to the window and a
patch besides the radiator oddly swept clean. It was there
in a curve of the battered old radiator that I
found the nest carefully tucked into a heap, were a
dozen objects. My lineout twisted in gray semrrors, missing brop
glittering beside it, the faded scarf looped a little too
precisely over a burned photograph, the missing Teddy bear eylesper
Instantly I recognized a handful of handwritten notes and hush
one frail book of children's stores, alternating scrolls and neat
print on its fly leaves. On the back of the
scorched photograph, the words hardly legible some one had scrawled
they forgot me, but I remember the ink quivered just
below the surface, as if the words themselves lon to
be spoken aloud. Something in the very air shifted. If
you've ever been in a room after tears fall or
after a laughter dies, ye know what I mean. Not
vibration occurrent, but the sense of it wouldell breath and
ache that has permeate a paint and ath alike. I
took only a moment to scan the rest directories, names
circled with pencil over mail and library cards, tokens of presents.
The room wasn't as untouched as it should have been.
The window latch was startlingly well alled, the curtains free
of dust. Someone something moved here or unseen form embarked
that my tour was over, and as scuttled out, palms
full of evidence that night's sleep was a labyrinth, My
dream suckled tncely endless climbs, apollo chitped stairs, pockets entering.
As I walked, I dawn. I realized the missing boy
might not be the only soul caught in a net
between Belvedere's stories and its silences. To make sense of
what I had inearthed, I devoted myself to the battered
city directory I found in the seventh floor apartment. It
was the last vestige of another era, doog ear fragile,
crowned with the names of tenants who survived or simply
endure the years after the fire. I spread the directory
across my kitchen table. Each pencil circled name link to
a memory, a vaguer collection, often accompanied by the hollow
notes of loss. Some names I recognized Missess Goldstein, who'd
lost everything in the fire and moved away to her
son's house out in the suburbs. Little Anniees from sixty,
whose family vanished the same autumn, never to return. Curiously,
each circle named tied to a narrow three year gap
after the tragedy. Tenants who derived I departed in their
specific shadowed window. Newspaper archives at the library, creased and
bleached with age, provided the rare the fire had got
not only the building but its emotional core. The list
of casualties, published tentativey while rescue teams still sifted through
smoldering wreckage, included a child from seven eight, Dyno Malik,
eight years old, clever and quiet, missing, presumed dead. The
report ran, which meant the city never found conclusive evidence,
no closure, merely a gap in the story, a sorrow
without an ending, I said the mysterious note beside a
grainy photograph and f from the archives. It was unmistakable,
the childish angle of the sketched window, perfectly mirroring the
boar's favorite patch. Even away. The heavy pencil sidled around
the frame was a kind of mimicry and attempt at memory.
Reality as I had always defined it tilted. It was
not just a shadow at the window. It was a
shadow with the name, maybe with hope, a present still
waiting to be recognized, speaking in the only language it
had left, the language of stolen tokens and board memories,
gathering the threads that no one else would hold. In
that moment, the boundary between pass and present, end the
ordinary vanished. I finally understood that the answer lay not
in loss or theft, but in a plea to be seen,
to be recalled, to remind us, none of us, lost
or living, are ever fully loft behind of someone anyone remembers.
Armed when you found determination, A collected my evidence and
set about constructing a coherent account. No longer was as
simply cataloging disappearances I was piecing together decades of grief
and remembrance, working to create what my teaching days had
taught me mattered most connection in the face of forgetting.
I wrote the report by hand, a neat precise annotated
with dates, photographs, and artofacts, pages clipped together in the
hope that management, with the residents committee might take it seriously.
In the pages I laid by my theory, the vanished belongings,
the patterns in tendency, the uncanny clustering around the seventh
floor all pointed to one thing. This was not vandalism
or burglary. The apartment had become a gravitational center for
unresolved sorow receptacle for the lingering threads of memory, too
heavy for grief alone to dissolve. The comparison I offered
was drawn from memory Palace, as those places were. Thus,
emotions and events become trapped, circling in the mind, triggered
by the smallest token. Grief is, a scientist explained, It
draws maps out of heartbreak and compels us to return
time and again to the sight of our losses in
the hope of finding some new light, breaking the old pattern.
Skeptics met my findings with nervous laughter and deflections. Well
meaning marrying but surely you see old buildings are never quiet.
Yet the room's energy shifted as they read a loud
stores recounted by neighbors who had lost objects. Semurer, hessened
at first, described dreams of seeing her mother in the
old seven floor corridor, beckoning with outstretched arms. Missus all
of murmured that she'd felt talking pressure at her risks
last time she'd walked by the apartment. Even mister Hobson,
rational to her fault, admitted that his mother's photograph had
left his nightmares only when it was gone from its
usual place. I resolved to go further. Thus fell violet
and cold. I packed a camp's back, the scarf, the brooch,
the recued photograph, my own lane out, even an old
class room token from decade passed, a cricket ball initials
carved into the worn leather. I returned to the seventh
floor apartment door, slightly ajar this time, as if the
building encouraged truthmore than trestless. I arranged the objects with
care in the bare window ledge, one for each of
the people's memory seemed not to have relinquished. I spoke
their names, Daniel, Annie's, Missus Goldstein, and several more, loud
enough for the empty hall to bear witness shadows stowed
in the gathering gloom behind me. I recited a line
from one of Daniel's favorite books, recalling, as best I
could as stories he'd loved but no one had told
in years. The air pressed heavier, growing both richer and colder.
The glass of the window rippled, skewing the city's reflection.
For a fleeting second, a crowd appeared, shadows shaped by
longing thinning toward transparency. Their heads turned expectant, not toward me,
but to the door, as if waiting for an arrival
that would never come. The moments napped, the feeling passed,
but I left the room convinced the project was not
yet finished. There would need to be a reckoning, a
communal act of remembrance, if those memories were to find
their rest. The day arrived with almost ritual significance and
anniversary five years since to fire. With much coaxing and explanation,
I convinced the tenant's association to hold gathering and the
seventh floor directly within and outside the apartment that held
so many secrets. It was dusk again. City lights winked
on as residence assembled. Some were sammer, others merely curious,
but all bore a token, retrieved or remembered, a faded brooch,
a story recited aloud. Even the scarf brushed out and
re leaped with trembling fingers. I began by recounting the
tale of Dano Malik. Others followed, connecting their own vanished
objects to losses they had never before had the language
to express. Memory washed through the room like the tide.
As the night deepened, the temperature fell an improbable notch,
and the building's patchwork lighting flickered in time with the
rhythm of our stores. A wind no one could trace
whisper through the walls. Tears gathered as silence knitted the
voices together, everyone leaning in to hear the words spoken
and unspoken, pulling the weight of old sadness into a
Camino embrace. I stood at the window at last, facing
out justice Dane once had, looking not for an escape,
but for acknowledgment, to reason, to remain. My reflection ghosted
across the wart glass, interposing with dozens more a child's
outline just behind my shoulder. Faint snatches of songs once
sung in bedrooms and kitchens echoed over the hush lullabies
for an audience too long to night. In a trembling voice,
I apologized for having forgotten, for letting names and faces
fade beneath the weight of moving on. I promised out
loud to remember, to speak of them, to treasure what
the building had kept safe for so long. Then a
sensation of one filled the apartment, of palls of assurance
that nearly pressed tears from my eyes. The shadow in
the window sharpened, revealing a young boy, not frightening but hopeful,
lifting a hand to the glass as if bidding hello
and farewell. All at once. He smiled, hessened but genuine,
and several others gasped. They too, caught the image for heartbeat,
a child's longing suddenly seen. The moment lasted, and possibly
through the dying light. Then the room settled, The nest
of belongings seemed to dissipate its old power, each item
now simply an object, tangible but no longer unbearable, released
from the burden of holding loss in silence, the ghosts,
if ever there was one, did not vanish violently or
with spectacle. Instead, he left the smallest trace peace, the
room brightening subtly as the sun finally did below the
sprawl of roof ups, the faces reflected, and the glass
melted into nothing but the sense of something