1
He almost missed the building.
Marrowgate Tower didn’t loom so much as sink into the skyline, a vertical bruise between brighter, healthier structures. The taxi dropped him at the curb with a sigh of exhausted brakes, and Alex stepped out with his duffel and one cardboard box cradled in his arms, staring up.
From the pictures online, he’d expected something… worse, actually. In the listing, Marrowgate Tower looked like the kind of place where people went to disappear: warped doorframes, peeling paint, a single sick yellow light over the entrance. The sort of building that appeared in the background of crime scene photos.
But up close, it looked… almost respectable.
Almost.
The bricks were dark and slick-looking, as if they’d been recently washed or… licked. Rows of narrow windows rose in rigid columns, some lit, most not. The sign above the door was metal, the letters smooth and softened by time:
MARROWGATE
No “Tower.” Just that. The word tasted wrong in his head, like a secret muttered through clenched teeth.
He shifted the box in his arms, felt the tape strain.
“This is stupid,” he muttered to himself. “You are absolutely going to get murdered for four hundred a month.”
Four hundred. Utilities included. That was what had hooked him.
Well, that and the ad itself, buried at three in the morning in a forum thread that wasn’t usually about apartments at all.
17th floor. One bedroom. Window view. No pets. No questions. Discretion preferred.
Four hundred, utilities included.
Must be willing to move in immediately.
Marrowgate Tower.
Contact: DoNotReply.
He had replied anyway. Of course he had. Rent anywhere else in the city was a joke, and he was already half-packed when he stumbled on the message. He hadn’t expected an answer.
Instead, ten minutes later, an email:
Apartment 1704.
No lease necessary. First month in cash.
Come tonight. After 7pm. Do not be late.
No name. Just an address and an attached photo of the front door to the building, as if to prove it existed.
Now he was here, standing on the cracked sidewalk outside Marrowgate, the sky over the city turning that oppressive grey-purple that meant the night would be too warm, the kind that grew things in the dark.
He swallowed, adjusted his grip again, and went inside.
The lobby surprised him.
He’d been braced for mold, for graffiti, for the stale tang of garbage and failure. Instead, Marrowgate’s lobby was… quiet. Not clean, exactly, but worn in a deliberate, almost curated way. A checkered tile floor softened in spots by years of foot traffic. A dusty chandelier that looked like it belonged in a better building, dangling from the ceiling like a crystal skeleton. Old brass mailboxes lined one wall in neat rows, each slot with a little glass window like a watching eye.
The smell was the first strange thing.
Not urine. Not bleach. Not fried food.
No, the air here smelled faintly of powder and warm skin, like someone had just dressed and left, the echo of perfume and sweat clinging to the walls. Under it, a trace of something metallic and cool, like coins rubbed between fingers.
“Hello?” Alex called, voice bouncing off the marble and tile. “Uh… landlord? Manager? Creepy old guy with a ring of keys and no boundaries?”
His words hit the back of the lobby and came back to him slightly warped, as if they’d passed through someone’s mouth on the way.
“…creepy old guy… no boundaries…”
He froze, box pressed tighter against his chest.
It was just echo. The acoustics. Old buildings did bizarre things with sound.
Still, the hairs on his arms rose.
There was a front desk, though no one sat behind it. A ledger lay open on the counter, blank pages yellowing at the edges. An old-fashioned brass bell perched near the corner, the kind you were supposed to tap.
He set the box down at his feet and pressed the bell with one finger.
It did not ring.
The inner mechanism clicked, the metal head depressed, but the sound never arrived, swallowed somewhere between movement and air.
Alex frowned, pressing it again. Same thing. No cheerful ding, no dull ring, no sound at all.
“Okay,” he murmured, “that’s not unnerving at all.”
“Second-hand bell,” said a voice.
He jerked so hard he bumped the desk with his hip. “Shit— sorry— I didn’t see you.”
A man stood at the far end of the counter, where an empty hallway met the lobby. Alex could have sworn that hallway had been empty ten seconds ago, nothing but a dead strip of carpet and a fire extinguisher.
The man was short, with a narrow face and hair that might have been blond once, now washed-out. He wore a dark suit that fit decently but not well, and his eyes were pale in a way that made it hard to tell what color they actually were. Grey? Blue? White?
“Didn’t mean to startle you,” the man said.
His voice was calm, unhurried, with a dryness that suggested he didn’t bother apologizing often. He moved closer with a sound that wasn’t quite footsteps, more like fabric sliding against itself.
“Uh. Yeah. Hi,” Alex said, trying to get his heart back down out of his throat. “I’m, uh, Alex Cord. I emailed about the apartment? Seventeenth floor?”
“Yes,” the man said. “Apartment 1704. You’re late.”
Alex checked his phone out of reflex. 7:13 p.m.
“Sorry. Traffic. And the driver kept missing the turn and—”
“No lease,” the man interrupted, as if this were the continuation of something Alex had said. “You were informed of that?”
“Yeah. The email said, uh… cash, first month.”
“Do you have it?”
Alex patted his jacket pocket with his free hand. The envelope was there, too-thin but still heavier than it should have been, full of twenties and tens that had made him nervous on the train.
“Right here.”
The man didn’t hold out his hand. Instead, he jerked his chin toward the ledger.
“You’ll write your name, today’s date. That’s all.”
Alex hesitated. “Don’t you need my ID or something? I— I mean, what if I wreck the place and disappear in the night?”
The man’s mouth did something that might have been a smile if it had cared more.
“If you wreck the place,” he said calmly, “you won’t disappear. Write your name.”
Something in the way he said won’t made Alex’s fingers go cold.
Still, rent was four hundred. In this city, that was worth a little weirdness.
He picked up the pen, the nib scratching softly as he wrote:
ALEX CORD.
The pen left too-dark ink, almost black-brown, with a faint reddish sheen. The paper seemed to drink it.
He started to write the date, but when he looked up, there it was already, neatly inscribed in the same handwriting as his name.
He frowned.
“I didn’t—”
“You have the money,” the man said.
Alex swallowed and nodded, pulling the envelope from his pocket and placing it on the desk. The man did not touch it, did not move at all for a moment. Then, with an oddly delicate gesture, he slid the envelope off the counter and out of sight.
“Your key,” the man said.
Alex looked around. “Where—”
The man had already turned away, walking back into the hallway. He didn’t say follow me, but the expectation lay in his wake like a command. Alex grabbed his box and duffel and hurried after him, sneakers smearing faint dust over the floor.
“Do you, uh, get a lot of tenants through that… ad?” Alex tried.
The man didn’t turn his head.
“Enough.”
“Right. And no lease is just… your thing?”
“Less paper,” the man said. “Less trouble.”
“For you or for me?”
The man’s shoulders hitched, just once. “You’re on the seventeenth floor. Elevator’s this way.”
He said seventeenth in a way that made the number feel like a private joke.
The elevator was old but not decrepit. Steel doors, brushed and dull, a faint reflection of Alex’s face hovering back at him. The man pressed the call button. It lit with a soft amber glow.
Alex stared at the reflection in the doors: brown hair too long at the back, dark circles under his eyes from too many late nights, a growing beard he’d been too lazy to shave. Twenty-six and already carrying himself like someone older, shoulders slightly hunched as if braced for impact.
Behind him, in the reflection, the lobby looked darker than it did when he turned around to glance.
Just the angle, he told himself.
The elevator chimed, a real sound this time, and the doors opened.
He stepped inside, dragged his stuff in after him, and turned.
The man did not follow.
“Uh,” Alex said, hand on the door. “Don’t you need to, I don’t know, show me where the apartment is?”
“You’ll find it,” the man said. “Seventeenth floor. 1704. The key is inside.”
“The— inside the apartment?”
“Yes.”
“And I’m supposed to get into it… how, exactly?”
The man regarded him with those pale almost-eyes.
“You’ll find it,” he repeated. “The elevator knows your floor.”
Okay. Cool. That wasn’t creepy at all.
Alex opened his mouth to make a joke about haunted elevators deciding people’s fates, but the doors slid shut before he could speak, his own face smearing into steel and then gone.
The elevator lurched faintly and began to rise.
No panel.
He noticed it after a few seconds of reflexive reaches for non-existent buttons. No numbers running up the side, no emergency stop, no red phone behind glass. Just three walls of brushed metal and one that was mirrored, a little warped. The ceiling lights were dim but steady, casting his reflection in soft, washed-out tones.
He watched himself for lack of anything better to do. The way his jaw clenched. The way his own eyes kept flicking to the corners, as if expecting company.
“You’re being weird,” he told his reflection quietly. “Stop being weird.”
His reflection’s lips moved a half-beat behind his own, a fraction of a second out of sync.
He stilled.
The hairs on the back of his neck rose, prickling, a slow wave that rolled down his spine. He stared into his own eyes. His reflection stared back. It looked like him. It moved like him.
But that delay—
It was gone when he spoke again. “Okay,” he said aloud, just to check. “That’s… that’s fine. That’s totally fine.”
His mouth and the mouth in the mirror matched perfectly this time.
He laughed— a short, nervous sound—and scrubbed a hand over his face.
The elevator hummed around him, carrying him up through the building. No floor numbers flashed. Time stretched.
Then, with a barely audible sigh, the elevator stopped.
The doors slid open onto the seventeenth floor.
Silence.
The hallway outside looked freshly vacuumed, the carpet a muted wine color that swallowed his footsteps. The walls were painted a deep, almost-black green, interrupted at intervals by cream-colored doors with brass numbers set at eye level.
All of the doors he could see were closed. No sound of televisions. No muffled arguments. No music. No cooking smells.
Alex stepped out, dragging his things, and the doors slid shut behind him with a soft whisper.
He glanced back at them, wondering if he should prop them open, some stupid instinct craving an escape route. But the elevator had no buttons, and he had no desire to go back down to the lobby and the pale-eyed man and the silent bell.
He turned to the hallway.
He walked slowly, the carpet pressing back gently at his soles. He passed 1703, gaze lingering on the peephole. No light leaked from under the door.
1704 sat at the very end, tucked into a shallow corner as if the building itself wanted to keep it close.
The door to 1704 was slightly ajar.
Alex stopped.
The gap was thin, a slice of darkness where the latch should have caught. He could see nothing beyond it, no hint of the apartment itself, but a draft flowed from the opening, cool and smelling faintly of that same perfume-skin mix from the lobby, stronger here, threaded with something sweet, almost like a woman’s shampoo after a shower.
He licked his lips without meaning to, mouth suddenly dry.
“Hello?” he called. “Sorry, I— is someone in there?”
No answer.
He nudged the door gently with his foot.
It swung inward without a sound.
For a heartbeat the apartment was just darkness, a black mouth yawning before him. Then a light flickered on somewhere inside— not overhead, but off to the right, a lamp maybe—casting a soft, golden glow across the edge of the hall.
Alex’s skin crawled.
He thought of backing out, going back to the elevator, demanding… something. A lease. An explanation. A refund. Anything.
Instead, he tightened his grip on his box until the cardboard creaked and stepped inside.
The first impression was: someone lives here.
Not the bare echo of his last few apartments, all mismatched furniture and sagging mattress and that never-unpacked box in the corner. Marrowgate’s 1704 looked… deliberate.
The entryway opened into a small hall that led to a living room. The light he’d seen came from a floor lamp in the far corner, its shade tilted slightly, spreading a dim pool across the room.
There was a couch. A low coffee table. A cheap but decent TV on a stand. A rug underfoot, soft and worn at the edges. Off to one side a doorway led to a small kitchen, stainless steel appliances humming quietly. Another doorway, half-open, hinted at the bedroom.
Everything was neutral colors, muted greys and creams, but the arrangement was almost cozy.
It felt like walking into the set of someone else’s life.
“Okay,” Alex breathed. “Okay, this is… nice. Too nice.”
His voice sounded small in the space, as if it wasn’t sure it had permission to be here.
He set the box on the rug beside the couch and slid the duffel off his shoulder, flexing his fingers. The apartment’s air felt denser than the hallway, as if it pressed against his skin. That smell— warm, human—wrapped around him.
“Hello?” he called again, a little louder. “Landlord guy? Minimalist serial killer? Anybody?”
On the wall opposite the couch was a large mirror, rectangular, in a plain black frame. It reflected the room back at him: the couch, the lamp, the doorway to the kitchen, himself standing slightly hunched, hair a mess, t-shirt wrinkled from travel.
Behind him, in the mirror, the open front door appeared.
It was shut in real life.
His heart stuttered violently.
He whirled around.
The door was closed. Firm, latch engaged.
He stared at it, then looked back at the mirror.
In the reflection, the door slowly, silently swung shut on its own, clicking into place.
“Right,” he whispered. “That’s… weird. That’s—that’s just me being tired.”
He rubbed his eyes. When he looked again, the mirror showed the door closed, same as reality.
He forced himself to breathe. The air went in too fast and came out too slow.
He moved to the door anyway, tested the knob. It turned easily. The door opened. The hallway outside lay empty and quiet.
He peered out, listened. Nothing.
He shut the door once more, deliberately this time, watching the latch catch.
When he turned back, his reflection turned with him, in time. No delay.
“See?” he told it. “Totally fine. Just nerves.”
“Just nerves,” something in the room echoed softly, a half-breathed mimicry.
He spun, pulse hammering.
“Who’s there?”
Silence.
He stood, listening.
Nothing but the hum of the refrigerator, the faint whirr of something in the walls—pipes, maybe. Old buildings talked to themselves. Creaks, groans, settling bones.
He swallowed.
“You’re jumpy,” he told himself.
“You’re jumpy,” the echo seemed to agree, but quieter now, buried in the apartment’s noise.
He explored.
The kitchen was small but functional. A narrow counter, two cupboards, a fridge that was empty except for a single glass bottle of water. No label. He picked it up, felt the chill condensation on his fingers, and reluctantly put it back.
Someone had wiped everything down recently. The sink shone. The stove was spotless. No crumbs. No stray coffee grounds. No dishes. As if whoever had lived here before had scrubbed every trace of themselves away.
The bathroom was off the short hall leading to the bedroom, its door standing half-open. White tile, small tub, a mirror above the sink.
He avoided that mirror at first, focusing on the shower curtain (plain white), the towel bar (empty), the toilet (clean, thankfully).
Then, unable to resist, he lifted his gaze.
His face looked back at him from the bathroom mirror, closer than the one in the living room. His eyes were slightly bloodshot. His lips looked paler than usual.
“You look like hell,” he told himself softly.
“You look good,” someone breathed, right at his ear.
He jerked, elbow slamming into the doorframe. “Fuck!”
He twisted around. The bathroom was empty. The hall beyond was empty. The jolt of pain in his arm flared, tingling.
He touched his earlobe. No one there. No breath. But the sensation lingered— the ghost of warmth, like lips had grazed the curve of his ear when he wasn’t looking.
He stared at the mirror again.
The reflected bathroom looked the same. But for a split second, before he blinked, he thought he saw a shape standing behind him: a suggestion of a woman’s outline, long hair spilling over bare shoulders, close enough that her mouth would have been at his ear.
When he blinked, she was gone.
He exhaled, shaky, a rush of nervous laughter bubbling up.
“Okay,” he murmured. “Okay, yeah, that’s— that’s fine. It’s just… your brain. You haven’t slept properly. You scrolled weird forums at three a.m. and now you’re moving into a place you found on a cursed thread. Of course your brain is being a freak about it.”
“If you knew what this place cost me,” a woman’s voice whispered, faint but clear, “you wouldn’t call it cursed.”
He froze.
This time it wasn’t echo. It wasn’t his voice. It was… someone else. Female. Low. Amused.
“Who’s there?” he asked again, throat dry.
Silence. Then, as if the apartment had decided to pretend nothing had happened, the refrigerator hummed, the pipes ticked behind the walls, and somewhere a faint, rhythmic thud sounded like the building’s heart.
The bedroom was simpler than the living room.
A double mattress on a basic frame, pushed against the wall opposite a tall window. Thin curtains hung there, drawn halfway, letting in a wide slice of city light. No headboard. A single nightstand with no lamp. The overhead light worked but was dim, as if the bulb refused to fully commit.
He dropped his duffel on the floor beside the bed and sat down.
The mattress gave under him in a way that suggested it had known other bodies, other weights. It wasn’t sagging; it was broken-in. Familiar. Heat rose through the fabric like someone else’s warmth had never entirely left.
He leaned back on his hands, the room’s air close around him.
“Four hundred a month,” he said aloud. “Utilities. Basic furniture. View. Constant low-level haunting included at no charge.”
The apartment did not laugh, though he thought he heard the faintest snort, as if someone in the next room had tried not to.
“You could laugh,” he said. “It was kind of funny.”
A whisper brushed his neck.
“I’m laughing,” the woman’s voice said. “On the inside.”
He shot upright, pulse jumping.
“Where are you?” he demanded. “Seriously, if you’re some ex-tenant hiding in the vents or something, this is— this is not cool.”
“Ex-tenant,” she repeated thoughtfully. “That’s one way to put it.”
The words seemed to come from everywhere at once— from the corner of the room, from the wall behind the bed, from right by his shoulder. There was texture to the voice, like fingers tracing his spine.
“Landlord said nothing about a roommate,” Alex muttered, forcing bravado into his tone.
“He wouldn’t,” she said.
The edge of the bed dipped.
He felt it. The unmistakable sensation of someone sitting down beside him. The mattress shifted, the weight subtle but present. The bed’s slight creak vibrated through his palms.
He looked.
No one.
The impression of weight was still there, the fabric slightly indented, the air cooler in that spot.
He stared at it, chest tight.
“You’re imagining this,” he whispered.
“If you want to pretend,” the voice murmured, “I can let you. For a while.”
His mouth was dry again.
“Who are you?” he asked.
There was a pause, a little stretch of silence that felt deliberate, like someone tilting their head, considering how much to confess.
Finally:
“I lived here,” she said. “Once. Before you. Before a lot of you.”
He couldn’t think of a good response to that.
Instead, he said the first stupid thing that came into his head. “Is this… like some kind of prank? Hidden camera thing? Did my friends—?”
“You don’t have friends,” she said, not cruelly, just as a fact. “Not close enough to set this up.”
He flinched. Her voice was soft, but the words slid under his skin.
“You’ve been watching me?”
“Oh, honey,” she said, and the endearment slid over him like a hand. “You applied to Marrowgate. You answered that ad. We’ve been watching you since you clicked.”
“We?”
The bed’s indentation smoothed out. The pressure lifted, leaving the mattress feeling suddenly cold.
“For someone so nervous,” she said, “you still came. That’s interesting. I like… interesting.”
He stood abruptly, hugging his arms around himself.
“Okay. Okay. I’m leaving,” he said, moving toward the door. “This is… I’m not doing this. I’m tired, and I’m hearing things, and I haven’t eaten since—”
He opened the bedroom door.
The living room was darker than it should have been.
He hadn’t turned off the lamp. He was sure of that. But now only the city light seeped under the curtains, painting long smeared shapes across the floor. The mirror on the wall reflected a slightly different version of the room, everything a shade deeper. In it, he thought he saw a figure reclining lazily on the couch, legs up, head tilted back in laughter.
In the actual room, the couch was empty.
“Leaving already?” the woman asked. Closer. “You haven’t even unpacked.”
Her voice drifted from near the mirror now. He approached it slowly, heart snaring in his chest.
His reflection looked strained. Sweaty, even, though his skin felt cool. Behind him, in the mirror, the couch was occupied.
She was there.
Not a clear image— more like the residue of one. A woman stretched out along the cushions, one arm thrown over the back, hair tumbling over her shoulder. She wore something dark and barely-there, maybe not clothing at all but the idea of it. Her legs were bare to mid-thigh. Her face was turned slightly away, but he could see the curve of her mouth, tilted in a smile that was all teeth and amusement.
He turned around quickly.
The couch held only his box and the impression of old cushions.
He faced the mirror again.
She was still there, watching him now, head turned toward the glass. Her eyes were dark, fixed on his.
“Hi,” she said.
The sound came from nowhere and everywhere again. Not from the mirror. Not from the couch. From the apartment itself.
He swallowed.
“Hi,” he said back, because what else was there to do?
“You’re taller than I pictured,” she said, studying him. “Skinnier, too. But the shoulders are nice. You carry tension like someone waiting to be touched.”
Heat flooded his chest and neck. It felt unfair that a disembodied voice could make his body react at all.
“You— you talk like an ad,” he managed. “For a terrible dating app.”
She laughed, a low ripple of sound.
“You answered a terrible ad,” she pointed out. “One that says no questions in big letters. And you still clicked. You still came. I like that about you, Alex.”
“How do you know my name?” he asked softly.
Her smile in the mirror widened, just a little.
“How do you think?”
His gaze flicked involuntarily to the ledger in his memory: his name inked in, the date already there before he wrote it.
“Great,” he said. “So I’m stuck in a building with a voyeur ghost who hacks paperwork.”
“Don’t be jealous,” she murmured. “You’re a voyeur too. You just prefer screens to mirrors.”
His throat closed.
“That’s— what does that mean?”
“You know what it means,” she said. “Night after night. Alone. Phone in hand. Lights off. Curtains drawn. You like watching. You like being watched even more.”
He opened his mouth to deny it, then shut it again. The worst part was that she didn’t sound mocking. Just… entertained.
“Say please,” she added conversationally.
“…What?”
“If you’re going to leave,” she said, “say please. It’s polite, asking a place to let you go once you’ve stepped inside it.”
He stared at the door.
It wasn’t locked. He knew it wasn’t; he’d just opened it minutes ago. He could walk over, grab the handle, and pull, and the night air from the hallway would wash in.
Say please.
He moved toward it anyway.
The room felt thicker around him, like wading through warm water. His steps faltered once.
“Please,” he said, quietly. He wasn’t sure who he was talking to. The building. The voice. Himself. “Please let me leave.”
Silence.
Then, a soft, amused hum.
“Not yet,” she said.
The overhead light flickered hard and went out.
The darkness wasn’t complete. City light leaked through the curtains, painting the living room in watery grey. His eyes adjusted quickly, nerves sharpening everything.
He could see the outlines of the couch, the coffee table, the mirror.
He could also see his own shadow on the wall.
It stretched long and thin in the sideways light, following his stance perfectly. Shoulders hunched. Head turned toward the door. Hands slightly lifted.
He moved one hand experimentally. The shadow moved too.
He exhaled, a shaky almost-laugh.
“See?” he whispered. “Silly. Of course it’s moving. It’s just—”
The shadow moved its head before he did.
Just a fraction of a second. A tiny tilt, like someone cocking their head to listen more closely.
Alex went very, very still.
He did not turn his head. He did not move his hands. He watched the wall.
His shadow stood there, his outline.
Then, slowly, the right arm of the shadow uncurled from his side and lifted, even though his real arm hung motionless.
The dark hand hovered for a moment, fingers slightly spread. Then it traced a line through the air, down from the height of his shoulder to the curve of his chest, hovering over where his heart would be.
A prickling warmth followed on his skin, as if an invisible fingertip dragged there in perfect parallel.
He made a sound that was all breath and no word.
The shadow’s hand flattened against the wall-version of his chest, pressing in. On his actual body, pressure bloomed. Not painful. Not gentle. A firm, testing touch.
“Sensitive,” the woman’s voice observed quietly, very close to his ear now. “Good.”
Alex squeezed his eyes shut.
“This isn’t happening,” he whispered.
“It is,” she said. “And you like it.”
His cheeks burned.
“I don’t know you,” he said, hating the tremor in his voice.
“You will.”
The shadow’s hand slid slightly, its movement echoed by the pressure on his chest, gliding up, then loosening. His own body wanted to react, to lean into the contact, to shy away; both instincts collided, leaving him frozen, muscles taut.
Then, abruptly, the touch disappeared.
On the wall, the shadow’s arm dropped back into place at his side, snapping into alignment with his.
His skin still buzzed where the unseen fingers had traced him.
He opened his eyes.
The room looked exactly the same as it had before the light went out. The couch. The mirror. The curtains. His reflection stared back at him from the glass, eyes wide.
Behind him, in the mirror, the shadow was wrong.
While he stood very still, the darkness behind his reflected body leaned forward, as if peering out from the outline of his shoulders, a second, deeper silhouette pushing through.
He watched it, unable to look away.
The deeper shadow curled, amused, like smoke in the shape of a grin.
“Welcome home, Alex,” the woman’s voice said.
This time her breath was undeniably there, warm at the back of his neck, as if her lips hovered just above his skin, close enough that if he turned his head, he might feel them fully.
He didn’t turn. He stood there, heartbeat pounding against his ribs like a fist against a door that had already decided it wouldn’t open.
The apartment’s silence tightened around him, intimate and close, as if the whole place were leaning in to listen to what he would do next.
