The Rent Was Too Good

I want to be honest from the start. I didn't believe in any of this stuff. Not ghosts, not hauntings, none of it. If you'd told me a year ago that I'd be writing this down so somebody knows, I'd have laughed at you. But here we are. It started because I was broke. That's the whole boring beginning of it. I'd lost my job at the warehouse, I was three weeks behind on everything, and I needed a cheaper place to live, fast. So when I saw the listing for apartment six at the Calloway Building, I called before I even finished reading it. The rent was four hundred a month. In that part of the city, four hundred a month gets you a parking space, not an apartment. A one-bedroom should have been triple that, easy. I should have questioned it. I know that now. But when you're broke, a good deal doesn't look like a warning. It looks like luck. The landlord was a guy named Mr. Petrakis, older, tired-looking, and he met me at the building himself. The Calloway was old. Six floors, brick, the kind of place that probably looked grand a hundred years ago and now just looked like it was holding its breath. He took me up to the second floor and unlocked apartment six and I walked in and honestly? It was fine. It was actually nice. Big windows, wood floors, way too nice for four hundred a month. "What's wrong with it," I said. Because I'm not an idiot. Mostly. Mr. Petrakis didn't really look at me. He looked out the window. "Nothing's wrong with the apartment," he said. "The apartment is in good condition. The pipes are good, the heat works." He paused for a long time. "Tenants don't tend to stay. That's all. People take it and then they leave, and an apartment that turns over a lot, you have to price it to move. So I price it to move." "Why don't they stay?" And he gave me this look. I've thought about that look a lot since. It wasn't a scary look. It was almost sad. Like he was deciding whether to do me a favor and what kind of favor it should be. "You'll have a neighbor," he said finally. "In a manner of speaking. She keeps to herself, mostly. She keeps strange hours. If you're the kind of person who can mind your own business, Mr. Reyes, you'll do fine here. The ones who can't mind their own business — those are the ones who leave." I figured he meant some difficult old lady down the hall. A hoarder, maybe, or someone who played music all night. I'd lived next to worse. I signed the lease that afternoon. I want to tell you about the first night, because the first night is when I should have known, and I didn't. I moved in with basically nothing. A mattress, some boxes, a lamp. I was so tired from carrying stuff up the stairs that I fell asleep around eleven, on the mattress on the floor, no real furniture yet, just me and the lamp and the big dark windows. I woke up at 3am. I know it was 3am because I checked my phone, and I checked my phone because something had woken me, and the thing that had woken me was the cold. It wasn't winter. It was September, mild, I hadn't even needed the heat. But the bedroom had gone cold the way a freezer is cold, this solid wall of it, and my breath was actually fogging in the light from the streetlamp, and I lay there on my mattress completely confused. And then I realized I wasn't alone in the room. There was a girl standing by the window. She was young, maybe twenty, in a pale dress that was the wrong style for now, like something from an old photo. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking out the window, down at the street, with her hand pressed flat against the glass, and she looked so sad that for a second I forgot to be afraid. For a second I just thought, someone got into my apartment, this poor girl, something terrible has happened to her. Then I noticed the streetlight was shining through her. I didn't scream. I want that on the record because everyone assumes you scream. I didn't. I just lay there, dead still, and the cold poured off her in waves, and after a long time she turned her head and looked at me. She wasn't trying to scare me. I knew that immediately, the way you know things in dreams. Her face was desperate, but not in a threatening way — in a pleading way. Like someone behind soundproof glass, mouthing words at you, needing so badly for you to understand. She lifted her hand off the window. She pointed down — at the floor, at the building underneath us, at something below. And then she was gone, and the cold went with her, and I was alone in apartment six at 3am with my heart going like a hammer. The next morning I told myself it was a dream. Of course I did. New place, exhausted, weird old building. A dream. It wasn't a dream. I know that now, because she came back the next night, at exactly 3am, and the night after that. And every single time, she points down. She's trying to tell me something about this building. And I've started to think that the tenants who leave are the smart ones — and the reason Mr. Petrakis priced it to move is that he already knows what's down there, and he's hoping I'm the kind of man who can't mind his own business. Because somebody needs to be.