Which tenant hasn't been seen leaving their apartment in three weeks? Why do the other residents avoid the third floor, and what causes those strange sounds echoing through the ventilation system? Who keeps painting those peculiar symbols in the stairwells?
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Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.
― J.G. Ballard
The advertisement had been too good to be true, but Eleanor needed somewhere to live, and the High Street apartment building offered sanctuary at a price she could afford. The landlord, Mr. Voss, had been eager to fill the vacant units, his pale eyes darting nervously as he handed over the keys without asking for references.
The building possessed an architectural oddity that Eleanor noticed immediately: the floors numbered 3, 7, and 11 were accessible only by a separate, narrower staircase that branched off from each landing. When she inquired about them, Voss muttered something about “storage” and “private units” before quickly changing the subject.
Her neighbors were cordial enough during daylight hours, but Eleanor began to notice their peculiar habits. Mrs. Chen from 4A would only retrieve her mail after sunset. The young man in 6B always wore thick gloves, even in summer heat. Most unsettling was how conversations would halt mid-sentence whenever she approached, resuming only after she’d passed.
It was the silence that truly unnerved her. Every night at precisely 11:47 PM, the building would fall into an absolute quiet that seemed to extend beyond its walls. No traffic, no distant conversations, no urban hum---just a suffocating void of sound that pressed against her eardrums until morning.
Three weeks into her tenancy, Eleanor discovered the truth about the missing floor numbers. Following a maintenance worker up the narrow stairs, she glimpsed through an accidentally opened door on floor 7. The apartments there were furnished and lived-in, but the residents… they moved wrong, their limbs bending at impossible angles, their heads turning too far on their necks.
That night, she packed her belongings and prepared to leave at dawn. But when morning came, Eleanor found herself unable to remember why she had packed, or why the idea of leaving filled her with such inexplicable dread. The building had residents on floors that didn’t exist, and now she understood---some tenants were meant to stay forever, their lease agreements written in terms far more binding than mere money.
