Chapter 4: Echoes in the Void

For two days, Leo clung to the illusion of normalcy with the desperation of a drowning man. The police had been efficient, their presence a sterile, authoritative balm on the raw horror of what he’d seen. They had taken his statement, their faces impassive as he described the smell, the silence, and finally, the gruesome tableau in the upstairs apartment. They called it a "scene," a word so clinical it felt obscene.

They sealed apartment 1A with a broad strip of yellow tape, and the silence that followed was different from before. It was an empty, sanitized silence, the kind that follows an extermination. The source of the problem had been removed. The nightmare, Leo told himself, was finally over.

He scrubbed his own apartment obsessively. He threw out the incense and the air freshener, symbols of his previous helplessness. He opened the single high window, letting the cold, damp air circulate, praying it would carry away the phantom stench of decay that still lingered in his mind. He forced himself to work, losing himself in the clean, logical lines of a corporate logo design. He ate, even when he wasn't hungry. He slept, though his dreams were haunted by an impossible arch of a human spine and the memory of cabinets torn open from the inside.

He rationalized it all. Mr. Alistair was clearly a profoundly disturbed individual. The frantic scratching, the endless pacing—it was the prelude to a psychotic break. The whispers? His own mind, stressed and isolated, playing tricks on him. He had been living below a ticking time bomb, and it had finally detonated. Now, it was gone. He just needed to process the trauma of being the one to find the aftermath.

On the third night, as he lay in bed staring into the darkness, he heard it.

A soft, shuffling sound from above.

The building settling, he thought immediately, his heart kicking into a faster rhythm. Old buildings creak. The police were up there, forensics. They probably left things askew. It was nothing.

Then came the familiar, dreadful cadence. Ten steps, a pause, ten steps back.

Leo’s blood ran cold. It was impossible. The apartment was empty. Sealed. The man was dead, his body lying in a morgue somewhere. This was a hallucination. It had to be. Auditory pareidolia, that’s what it was called. The brain creating patterns from random noise. His brain was just replaying the sound because it had been his reality for weeks. He was traumatized.

He squeezed his eyes shut, pressing the heels of his palms into them until spots of light danced in the blackness. It’s not real. It’s not real.

The pacing stopped. Leo held his breath, his ears straining against the sudden quiet. Then, a new sound began. The sound that had always followed the pacing.

Scrrrrape. Scraaaaape. Scriiitch.

The sound of fingernails digging into wooden floorboards. Frantic. Desperate.

A strangled sob escaped Leo’s throat. He sat bolt upright in bed, his entire body trembling. This wasn't a memory. It was too clear, too present. It was happening right now, directly above his head. He could almost feel the vibrations through the mattress.

Then came the whisper.

Before, it had been a dry, distant thing, filtered through plaster and floorboards. He’d had to strain to hear it. Now, it was different. It was horribly, intimately clear, as if the speaker were kneeling on the floor above, their lips pressed directly to the wood.

"Let me back in."

The voice was no longer just the reedy hiss of an old man. There was something else woven into it, an undertone that was smoother, deeper. It sounded like his own name, whispered on the tail end of the phrase. "...Leo."

He scrambled out of bed, backing away until his shoulders hit the cold wall of his room. He stared at the ceiling, at the faint water stains and spiderweb cracks, expecting it to buckle and break. This was madness. He was having a complete breakdown. The stress, the horror of what he’d seen—it had finally snapped something inside him.

The next day was a fugue state of denial and frantic rationalization. He didn't sleep. He sat at his laptop, but instead of working, his fingers typed search terms into the glowing bar: auditory hallucinations after trauma. PTSD symptoms. Can stress make you hear things?

The internet offered a comforting buffet of explanations. Yes, severe emotional shock could absolutely trigger sensory hallucinations. The brain, struggling to process an event, can get its wires crossed. The sounds he was hearing were echoes, ghosts in his own neural pathways, not in his apartment. The whisper of his name was a classic symptom—the mind projecting his own fears.

He clung to this diagnosis like a life raft. He wasn't being haunted; he was unwell. It was a problem with his brain, not with the building. A problem with the brain was fixable. He could see a doctor, get medication. A problem with the building… that was something else entirely.

He spent the day in a self-imposed cocoon of noise. He played music through his headphones so loudly his ears ached. He left the television on, the cheerful inanity of a daytime talk show a bulwark against the silence. He refused to listen to the ceiling. He refused to give the delusion power.

By nightfall, he was exhausted, but he felt a sliver of control returning. He had a name for his affliction. He had a plan. Tomorrow, he would find a clinic.

He turned off the TV, the sudden quiet making the small apartment feel vast and empty. He stood in the middle of the room, listening. There was nothing. No pacing. No scratching. A wave of profound relief washed over him. Maybe it was working. Maybe by ignoring it, he’d starved it of the attention it needed to exist.

He allowed himself a small, shaky smile. He was going to be okay.

He walked into his small bedroom, the space barely large enough for the bed and a small dresser. He sat on the edge of the mattress, the springs groaning in protest. He looked up at the ceiling, just a flat, white, inanimate surface. Everything was normal. Everything was quiet.

That’s when it happened.

THUD.

It wasn't a sound. It was an event. A single, cataclysmic impact of immense weight and violence struck the floor directly above his bed. The entire room shook. The cheap light fixture rattled, swinging wildly on its cord. A fine shower of dust and paint flakes rained down onto his face and shoulders. A framed print on his wall, a minimalist landscape of black and white, crashed to the floor, the glass shattering.

Leo screamed, a raw, terrified sound torn from his lungs. He threw himself off the bed, crab-walking backward until he was pressed into the far corner of the room, making himself as small as possible.

He stared at the ceiling, his heart hammering against his ribs so hard it felt like it would break them.

You can't hallucinate an earthquake. You can't imagine dust in your eyes. You can't fake the sound of shattering glass.

His carefully constructed wall of rationalization was obliterated in an instant. This wasn't PTSD. This wasn't in his head. This was real.

The pacing, the scratching, the whispers… they were all real. The source of the disturbance wasn't Mr. Alistair. The old man hadn't been the monster. He'd been its prisoner. And now the prisoner was gone.

A cold, heavy dread, far worse than anything he had felt before, settled into the pit of his stomach. The nightmare wasn't over. It hadn't even truly begun. Whatever was in apartment 1A was still there. And now, it knew he was listening.