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Chapter 5:

There are sounds a building earns with age.

Pipes knocking like old men arguing in another room. Radiators hissing through bad tempers. Elevators waking with arthritic groans. Floorboards settling under the weight of years no one thanked them for carrying. Water somewhere in the walls trying to remember gravity.

Those sounds become part of the bargain. You live long enough in one place, you stop hearing them. They blend into the wallpaper of existence.

Then there are sounds no building should make.

Footsteps arriving from an empty hallway.

I heard them just after two in the morning.

Mercy slept against my thigh on the couch, warm and loose with trust. The television muttered low to itself—late-night voices selling medicine, miracles, and humiliation in monthly payments. The room smelled of stale coffee, wet wool, and dog fur. My apartment had finally begun to smell inhabited again.

The brass token rested on the coffee table, catching lamp light in small dull flashes.

I had tried throwing it away earlier.

The trash can rejected the effort by being empty again when I checked.

That was the sort of detail I chose not to think too hard about.

Then came the steps.

Slow.

Wet.

Measured.

Not one pair.

Several.

The sound carried oddly through the corridor, muffled and close at once, like shoes walking underwater directly outside my skull.

Mercy’s head lifted before I moved. His ears rose. A growl began in him so low I felt it more than heard it. It vibrated against my leg with a warning older than language.

The steps stopped outside my door.

The silence afterward had shape.

I stood carefully. My knees popped loud enough to embarrass me. Every room suddenly looked temporary. The lamp too dim. The lock too small. The walls made of apology and plaster.

I picked up the token without thinking.

Cold stabbed into my palm.

“Tell me that’s neighbors,” I whispered.

Mercy showed me a narrow line of teeth.

Optimism has never lived here.

Then I heard dripping.

No.

Tracking.

Something wet moved beneath the door in thin black threads, spreading over the hardwood in reflective fingers. It smelled of tunnel air: wet iron, mildew, old current. Beneath it floated a sweetness that turned my stomach.

Lilies.

Funeral flowers.

My pulse stumbled.

Then came the knock.

Three taps.

Evenly spaced. Patient. Civilized.

That frightened me more than pounding would have.

Violence is easy to understand. Manners in the wrong hour are another thing entirely.

The knob turned halfway on its own. Rattled once. Stopped.

Mercy barked—a sharp crack of sound that seemed too large for his body.

The hallway light beyond the frame flickered through the edges of the door, stuttering white and dark.

I don’t remember deciding to open it.

Some fears make cowards of us. Others make idiots convinced courage and stupidity are cousins.

I pulled the door wide.

The corridor stretched long and narrow under failing ceiling fixtures. Paint peeled in gray curls from the walls. Water gleamed across the floor in scattered trails. The whole hallway smelled damp and used up, like a hospital after visiting hours.

Footprints led from the far end to my threshold.

Bare feet.

Different sizes.

Too many sets.

Each print held a little water that reflected the ceiling lights like eyes.

At the distant end of the hall, figures stood in a drifting bank of mist.

Human height. Human outline. Human enough to offend the category.

Three in front.

More behind them.

Still as statues waiting for permission.

Mercy stepped into the doorway and growled with a violence I had never heard from him. It rolled through the hall like thunder trapped in a drawer.

One figure tilted its head.

Another shifted forward.

The sound it made was not footsteps.

It was wet skin meeting tile.

My stomach lurched.

“What do you want?” I asked.

My voice came out thin, papery, somebody else’s.

The front figure raised one arm.

Its hand opened.

Inside the palm lay something pale.

A folded note.

Then a woman’s voice came from somewhere behind them all—distant, layered through static, tunnel wind, and memory.

“You missed your transfer.”

Lena.

Or what knew how to wear her sound.

The hallway lights burst one by one toward me.

Pop.

Glass rained.

Pop.

Darkness advanced in sequence.

Pop.

Closer.

The figures began walking.

I froze.

That old shameful paralysis returned—the one from hospital corridors, funeral homes, unanswered phones. The body remembering every time I was too late, too stunned, too broken to move.

Mercy lunged.

And for one impossible second, the small dog I fed kibble and mocked lovingly became something else.

His fur rose in a crest along his spine. His eyes burned gold. Not reflected light—generated light. Ancient light. The bark that tore from him struck the walls hard enough to rattle framed numbers from their hooks.

The nearest figure recoiled as if hit in the chest.

The mist shuddered backward.

I slammed the door, threw the deadbolt, then shoved a chair beneath the knob because panic loves symbolism.

Outside came silence.

Then scratching.

Slow.

Deliberate.

Not on the wood.

On the metal number plate.

Apartment 17.

A nail. A claw. A wet fingertip. I couldn’t tell.

Mercy stood between me and the door, body rigid, growl constant. I sat on the floor behind him gripping the token until its edge marked crescents into my skin.

We stayed like that for hours.

The scratching stopped sometime before dawn.

I must have slept sitting upright because pale gray light was leaking around the curtains when I realized the apartment had gone quiet.

Mercy was still awake.

Still watching.

I opened the door three inches.

The hallway was empty.

Dry.

Silent.

No footprints.

No shattered bulbs.

No signs of intrusion.

Only a folded paper lying neatly on the mat.

My hand shook as I picked it up.

The paper smelled faintly of rain and lilies.

On the front, in handwriting I knew before I admitted it, were two words:

Next Stop