The Woman In Apartment 7

Mara looked at the digital clock. 12:18. Her pulse had begun to beat in her throat, but beneath the fear was something harder and more insistent. She needed to know whether she had really heard it.

She crossed the bedroom, stepping over the book, and opened her apartment door.

The hallway lights were on, though one of the bulbs near the stairwell flickered with a faint electrical buzz. The carpet smelled of dust and old detergent. Apartment 7 waited opposite her, its brass number dulled beneath a film of fingerprints and grime.

Mara leaned into the corridor.

“Hello?”

Her voice seemed absurdly small.

No answer.

She glanced toward the stairs. Empty. The elevator doors stood closed at the end of the hall, reflecting a thin, distorted version of her in their metal surface. She was barefoot, wearing gray sleep pants and a black camisole, her hair loose around her shoulders. In the elevator’s reflection, she looked like someone who had wandered into the wrong building.

She should have called the police.

The thought arrived clearly. So did the answer: not yet.

If she called and the scream had been a television, a pipe, a dream, she would become the woman in 3B who reported noises that did not exist. The building had enough stories about her already. She had heard them in the laundry room when people assumed she was upstairs.

Mara stepped into the hallway.

The floorboards gave a soft complaint beneath her feet. Apartment 7 was only eight paces away, but the distance lengthened as she crossed it. She watched the gap beneath the door. No light. No movement. The old lock had been changed after the previous tenant left, though Mara had never seen anyone enter to do it.

She stopped in front of the door.

The metal was cold beneath her knuckles when she knocked.

Once.

Twice.

“Is someone in there?”

Silence.

Mara pressed her ear to the wood. At first she heard nothing but the blood moving inside her head. Then, from somewhere beyond the door, came a faint sound.

A scrape.

Not a voice. Not footsteps. Something dragging lightly across a hard surface.

Mara pulled back.

“Hello?” she said again, louder. “I’m calling the police.”

The scrape ceased.

She reached for her phone, which she had left charging beside the bed. The screen would take her thirty seconds to retrieve. Thirty seconds was nothing. Thirty seconds was everything.

A sharp knock sounded from the apartment below.

Mara flinched so violently her shoulder struck the wall.

“Who’s there?” a man called.

It was Mr. Vale from 5A, his voice thick with sleep and suspicion.

“It’s Mara,” she called back. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“The screaming.”

A pause followed. She pictured him standing behind his own door, deciding whether she was worth opening it for.

Then he said, “No.”

The answer was too quick.

Mara looked at Apartment 7. The door remained still, featureless except for the brass plate and the black keyhole.

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure I want to go back to sleep.”

His door opened a fraction. One pale eye appeared in the gap.

“Did you see anyone?” he asked.

“No.”

“Then leave it.”

“What if someone’s hurt?”

“Then they’ll make noise again.”

The door closed.

Mara stared at it, anger cutting through the fear. She had expected him to come upstairs. She had expected another human presence to make the hallway less narrow, less watchful.

Instead, she was alone.

Her phone was still in her bedroom. She could call from there. She could lock herself in and wait for sirens. But the unanswered scrape behind Apartment 7 had lodged beneath her ribs.

She turned back toward her door.

That was when she heard the whisper.

“Mara.”

It came from behind her.

She spun around.

The corridor was empty.

Apartment 7’s door was shut. The elevator remained closed. At the far end, the stairwell door rested in its frame, its narrow wired-glass window black.

Mara’s skin prickled.

“Who said that?”

Nothing.

She took a step toward the stairwell. The door’s metal push bar gleamed under the flickering light. No shadow moved behind the glass.

Then something tapped from inside Apartment 7.

Three slow taps.

Mara’s breath caught.

The sound came again, softer this time. Tap. Tap. Tap.

She should have run for her phone. Instead, she reached toward the doorknob.

The brass was cold and slightly greasy.

It turned.

Mara stopped.

The door opened inward by less than an inch, revealing darkness. A stale draft touched her face. It carried the dry, chalky smell of plaster and something else - something metallic, faint but unmistakable.

She pushed the door wider.

The apartment was unlit. Moonlight from the hall fell across bare floorboards and a wall stripped of pictures. There was no furniture, no rug, no sign that anyone had lived there recently. The emptiness seemed deliberate, as if the room had been cleared not by movers but by someone erasing it.

Mara kept one hand on the door.

“Hello?”

Her voice vanished into the dark.

She reached inside and found a switch. The light clicked on, flickered, and steadied.

Nothing moved.

The living room was completely bare. No sofa, no boxes, no curtains. A narrow hallway led toward what she assumed was the kitchen. The walls were marked by pale rectangles where furniture or photographs had once covered the paint.

Mara took one step over the threshold.

The air was colder inside.

She looked behind the door, expecting a body, a crouched figure, anything that could explain the screams. There was only a strip of peeling paint and a brass chain hanging loose from its mount.

Her phone chimed from across the hall.

The sound made her jump.

She turned toward her apartment. The open doorway stood opposite, black beyond the warm rectangle of her bedroom lamp. Her phone screen glowed on the nightstand, lighting up with a message.

Mara did not move toward it.

A soft sound came from the kitchen.

She faced the darkness beyond the bare living room.

“Is someone there?”

No answer.

The kitchen door stood open. Mara advanced slowly, her toes curling against the rough wood floor. A small white mark near the baseboard caught her attention. She bent, but it was only a fleck of paint.

The metallic smell was stronger here.

She found the kitchen empty too. The cabinets had been removed, leaving exposed plumbing and square shadows on the wall. A single strip of blue tape clung to the floor beneath the sink.

Mara touched it.

It came away easily.

On the underside, written in black ink, was a number.

• Her fingers tightened around the tape.

A noise sounded behind her.

Mara turned so fast her heel slipped.

The living room was empty.

The front door had moved.

It stood nearly closed now, leaving only a thin slice of hallway visible.

She had left it wide open.

For a moment, she could not breathe. Then she crossed the room, keeping her eyes on the dark gap beside the door. The corridor beyond was empty. The flickering bulb buzzed overhead.

“Mr. Vale?” she called.

No reply.

She reached for the door and pulled it open.

The brass knob pressed coldly into her palm. Something wet dragged across the back of her fingers.

Mara looked down.

A dark smear stained the inside of the doorknob, glossy at the edges. It had been left where her hand now rested, transferred onto her skin in three narrow streaks.

She lifted her fingers toward the light.

The substance was almost black.

Not paint. Not grease.

The metallic smell rose from it.

Mara backed away from the door. Her shoulder hit the wall. She stared at the smear on her hand, then at the empty apartment around her.

The screams had stopped.

She had found what she came looking for.

But the smear was on the inside of the door.

And Mara could no longer remember whether she had opened Apartment 7 - or whether someone had opened it for her.

End of chapter one. 9 more chapters and about 17,517 words in the full book.