Same Hour

The flat downstairs had been empty for two years, and Iris knew this the way you know the small geography of your own building — not as a fact she had been told but as a fact she had absorbed, the way you absorb which stair creaks and which tap runs hot first. Number two had been empty since before she moved in. The letting agent had mentioned it once, in passing, the way agents mention things they would rather you did not dwell on: a probate issue, a family dispute, the flat tied up in something legal and slow, and so it sat below her, dark and shut, while she lived her ordinary life in number four directly above it. For most of a year that was simply a feature of the building. A quiet flat is a good neighbour. Iris worked from home, editing other people's documents into shapes their authors had failed to find, and a silent floor beneath her was, if anything, a small luxury — no television through the boards, no footsteps, no Sunday-morning hammering. The footsteps started in October. She noticed them first the way you notice a clock you have stopped hearing: not as a sound arriving but as a pattern resolving out of sounds that had always been there. Every night, at twenty to one in the morning, something moved through the empty flat below her. It moved slowly. That was the first thing she could say about it with confidence, lying awake in the dark of number four, listening through the floor. It did not hurry. It moved the way a person moves through a house they know intimately and are in no rush to leave — a slow deliberate progress, room to room, and Iris found, after a week of lying awake at twenty to one, that she could map it. It began at the front of the flat, by the door. It moved down what would be the hallway. It paused — there was always a pause, eight or nine seconds, in the place that corresponded to the bathroom. Then it continued into the room at the back, the bedroom, the room directly below Iris's own bed, and there it stopped, and the building went quiet again, and that was all, until twenty to one the following night. She told herself the obvious things first, because she was a sensible woman and the obvious things were where a sensible woman started. The flat had been sold at last, and someone had moved in, and she had simply not noticed the disruption of a move — except that there had been no van, no boxes, no name added to the buzzer panel, and the windows of number two, which she could see from the street, remained dark and bare and curtainless every single night. Squatters, then. That was the next sensible thing. Someone had got into the empty flat and was living there quietly. But squatters lived; they did not perform a single slow nightly procession from the front door to the back bedroom and then fall silent for twenty-three hours. Squatters made the dozens of small various noises of human occupation, and number two made one noise, the same noise, at the same time, with the patience of a thing that did not need anything the way the living need things. Iris went down, in the end. Of course she went down; you cannot lie above a sound like that for three weeks and not go down. She did it in daylight, mid-afternoon, with the bright November sun in the stairwell, because she had decided that whatever explanation waited for her would be a daylight kind of explanation. She knocked on the door of number two and there was no answer, and she had not expected one, and then she did the thing she had really come down to do, which was to crouch and look at the floor at the foot of the door. There was dust against the threshold. A soft unbroken line of it, grey and undisturbed, banked up against the door the way dust banks against a thing that has not been opened in a very long time. Nobody had gone in or out of number two through that door in months. The dust said so plainly, and the dust could not lie. Iris went back up to number four and sat in her bright ordinary front room and tried to make the afternoon's findings agree with the nightly footsteps, and they would not. Something moved through that flat every night. Nothing came in or out of its only door. She might have lived with it, even then. People live with stranger things than a sealed flat with a sound in it; the mind is a great accommodator. She might have bought earplugs and edited her documents and let number two keep its slow secret. But last night the footsteps did not stop at the back bedroom. Last night the slow deliberate progress reached the room below Iris's bed, the place it had always stopped, and it did not stop. It paused there, the way it paused at the bathroom, eight or nine seconds — and then Iris heard it continue. Heard it turn. Heard it begin, slowly, to come back, and she lay rigid in her bed in number four and understood that the sound was no longer beneath her. It was beside her. It was in the wall of her own flat. It was moving, slow and deliberate and patient, along the exact path through number four that it had spent three weeks rehearsing through number two — and Iris understood, lying in the dark with the dust-sealed flat below and the thing now level with her, that the tenant below had never, in fact, been below at all. It had only been working its way up.