The Neighbor on the Third Floor
Apartment 3B has been empty for two years. That's what the building manager told me when I moved in, in October. He said it with a naturalness that didn't seem strange to me at the time. Now it does.
The first few months I noticed nothing. It was an old building, from the seventies, with creaking pipes and thin walls. I attributed the nighttime sounds to that. To the structure settling. To the neighbors on the fourth floor moving around in the early hours.
"The footsteps weren't coming from above. They were coming from next door. From the apartment that had been empty for two years."
It was in January when I started keeping a record. Notebook, exact time, description of the sound. Three weeks of entries. Always between 2:10 and 2:40 in the morning. Always the same pattern: slow steps, from one end of the apartment to the other. Back and forth. Back and forth.
They never stopped in front of my wall. That was what disturbed me most afterward. As if they knew exactly where I was, and chose not to come closer.
I spoke with the woman in 3A, who has lived in the building for twelve years. I asked her if there had ever been a neighbor in 3B. She looked at me in a way I couldn't interpret at the time.
"There was a family," she told me. "About three years ago. A couple and a little girl. They left overnight. Without warning, without saying goodbye. The manager said they had broken the lease."
I asked if she knew why they had left. She took a while to answer.
"The girl said there was someone in the apartment who wasn't her mom or dad. That it visited her at night."
That night I didn't sleep. I sat on the sofa with all the lights on, listening. At 2:17, the footsteps began. Slower than usual. And for the first time, they stopped.
In front of my wall.
Building hallway — third floor. Security camera. 02:17 AM.
The next day I went to talk to the building manager. I asked him to open 3B. He said he didn't have authorization to do so without an order. I told him I had heard noises. He said it was impossible, that the apartment had been without tenants for two years and that he himself checked it every month.
I asked him when the last inspection had been. He took out his notebook. He looked for the page. He found it.
He told me he had entered 3B exactly three weeks ago. The same night I had started keeping my record.
This morning I found something slipped under my door. A sheet of paper folded in four. Inside, written by hand in handwriting I don't recognize:
"I know you keep the record. I keep mine too."
There is no one else on this floor. The woman in 3A traveled to Cali last week.
3B is still empty.