Chapter 4: Apartment 5B

Chapter 4: Apartment 5B

"I'm not crazy," Leo said, his voice a raw whisper. He stood with Maya in the threshold of his apartment, the morning light glinting off the window he'd cleaned with such desperate ferocity. "Look."

He pointed. Maya, her expression a careful blend of skepticism and concern, stepped inside. She leaned close to the glass, her breath fogging a small circle next to the evidence. She squinted, adjusting her glasses. And then she saw it. The faint, dusty silhouette of a handprint on the outside of the glass. The long, slender fingers, the narrow palm, impossibly suspended five stories above the alley.

Her skepticism crumbled like old plaster. "Oh my God," she breathed, pulling back as if the glass were electrified. She looked from the spectral print to Leo's haggard face. The dark circles under his eyes were chasms; his skin was pale and slick with a cold sweat. He wasn't just tired or stressed. He was haunted.

"The sound," Leo said, his gaze flicking nervously toward his front door. "Last night, it wasn't at my window. It was coming from 5B. The empty one."

Maya’s mind, sharp and logical, immediately began to connect the data points: the whispers she heard from her ceiling, the scraping sound from a vacant apartment, and now, tangible, impossible evidence on Leo's window. "Okay," she said, her tone shifting from concerned neighbor to determined investigator. "Okay. Let's work the problem. Come on."

She led him out of his oppressive apartment and down the hall to hers. The contrast was jarring. Where Leo's place was dim and smelled of fear, Maya's was bright, clean, and organized. Books were neatly stacked, a sleek laptop sat open on a minimalist desk, and the air smelled faintly of green tea. It was a pocket of sanity in a building that was rapidly feeling anything but.

"My apartment is 4G, but the layout is weird. I'm not directly under you," she explained, pulling a chair up to her desk for him. "My bedroom is under 5H. But my living room… my living room is right under 5B."

The whispers she'd been hearing were seeping through the floor from the empty apartment.

"We need to find out about 5B," Maya stated, her fingers already flying across her keyboard. "Something is wrong with that room."

Leo sat hunched over, watching as she navigated the digital world with an ease that felt alien to him. She started with the city's public property database, then moved to digitized municipal archives and online newspaper databases she had access to through her university. She typed in their address, followed by "Apartment 5B."

The first hit was an obituary from seven years ago. A financial analyst named Robert Miller, age 42. Tenant of 5B. The cause of death was listed as a fall from a height, ruled an accident. "Police report suggests Mr. Miller lost his footing while cleaning his window," Maya read aloud, her voice tight.

Leo flinched, the word "window" landing like a punch.

"That's just one," she said, trying to sound reassuring, though her expression was strained. "It could be a coincidence."

She kept digging. Ten minutes later, she found another. A police blotter entry from 1998. "Domestic disturbance call to Apartment 5B. Officers arrived to find the tenant, a Miss Elaine Vance—" Maya paused, shooting Leo a wide-eyed look at the shared surname, "—in a state of extreme distress. She was institutionalized after claiming a 'man in the walls' was telling her to let him in." A sudden psychotic break.

"Keep going," Leo urged, his voice a dry rasp.

The history of Apartment 5B unspooled across the screen, a grim litany of misery. In 1983, a gas leak. An elderly couple, the Petersons, found dead in their beds. The coroner's report cited a faulty stove pilot light that had extinguished itself. In 1965, another fall. A young artist, who according to neighbors, had become increasingly paranoid in the weeks leading up to his death, convinced someone was watching him from his window at night.

Fall. Psychosis. Gas leak. Fall. A pattern, cold and undeniable, stretched back through the decades. The apartment itself seemed to be a predator, consuming its tenants every few years in a rotation of plausible tragedies. 5B wasn't just vacant; it was a trap that had been reset, waiting for its next victim.

"The entity... it's tied to that apartment," Leo murmured, staring at the list of names. "But why is it coming to my window? Why me?"

Maya didn't have an answer. Her face was pale. She delved deeper, pushing past the 1950s, into the grainier, less-indexed archives of the city's oldest newspapers. She cross-referenced the building's address with keywords: 'death', 'accident', 'strange'. For an hour, there was nothing but the sound of her frantic typing.

Then, she stopped. "Leo," she whispered. "I think I found him."

She turned the laptop screen toward him. It was a scanned image of a yellowed, brittle newspaper page, dated November 28th, 1937. The headline was small, buried on page six: Vagrant Perishes in Winter's First Bite.

The article was short, written in the curt, dispassionate prose of the era. It described how the body of an unidentified man had been discovered that morning, frozen solid on a long-forgotten window-washing scaffold on the north side of the newly constructed Excelsior Arms apartment building. Police speculated he had taken shelter there during the previous night's sudden, brutal blizzard and had succumbed to the cold.

But it was the last paragraph that made the air in the room crystallize into ice.

The deceased was known to local authorities, though never formally charged. A grifter and con-man, he preyed on the sympathies of the public with elaborate, tragic stories, often concerning sick or dying family members, in order to gain money or shelter. He was known colloquially to those he pestered not by a name, but by a chilling moniker earned from his habit of pressing his face against shopfronts and windows while he pleaded: 'The Beggar at the Glass.'

Leo stared at the words, his mind connecting them to the weeping old man begging for his fictional daughter, Clara. A con-man. A predator who weaponized pity. A man who had died outside, in the cold, after being refused entry.

The scraping wasn't just a sound. It was an echo of a final, desperate act. The pleas weren't just manipulation; they were a phantom reliving its fatal obsession. The thing at his window wasn't just a monster. It had an origin. It had a name. And its hunting ground, the source of its unending rage, was the empty apartment just a few feet from where Leo slept. The curse of Apartment 5B was spilling over. And it was now begging at his glass.