Chapter 4: The Fourth Floor Feeds

Chapter 4: The Fourth Floor Feeds

The mirror shard sat on the desk, a sliver of impossible light in the oppressive grey of the room. It was a ticking bomb. Every second that passed, Eden imagined Lilith on the other side of the door, her serene smile tightening, her patience wearing thin. The confrontation in the hallway had stripped away the last vestiges of ambiguity. This wasn't a quirky apartment complex; it was a cage, and she had just rattled the bars in full view of the zookeeper.

Her fear was a cold, metallic thing in her gut. She’d spent the last year learning to recognize the quiet prelude to punishment, the unnerving calm before her ex would unravel. Lilith’s silence was a thousand times more terrifying. It was the silence of absolute confidence.

That night, the journal on her desk felt heavier, its presence more malevolent. She opened it to a new page, her hands shaking. A new prompt awaited, penned in Lilith’s perfect, elegant script. It was a scalpel, aimed directly at the wound of her transgression.

Secrets are a weight we carry. Describe the heaviest one you are hiding in this room.

It was a trap. A demand for a confession. If she wrote about the mirror shard, what would happen? Would the door unlock on its own? Would Lilith glide in to confiscate the forbidden object and… what? Evict her? The thought was almost laughable. People weren't evicted from the Azure Arch. The skeletal man from 3D was proof of that. You just wasted away.

No, she couldn't write the truth. But another pathetic lie about coffee shop change wouldn't work either. The jagged scrawl from the first night was a promise: Do not waste our time.

A new theory, cold and terrifying, began to crystallize in her mind. This wasn't about therapy. It wasn't about her psychological well-being. The journal entries weren’t for her benefit at all. They were for someone, or something, else. The prompts were designed to excavate truth, to mine for raw, painful honesty. The journal was a vessel, a delivery system. But for what?

A desperate, reckless plan formed. She would conduct an experiment. She wouldn't confess to having the shard, but she would give them a lie that felt like the truth. She would craft a secret with weight, texture, and the bitter tang of regret. A story with all the emotional components of a real confession, a gourmet meal of falsehood.

Drawing on the dregs of her past, she began to write. She wrote about her last apartment, before she’d met her ex. She invented a roommate, a kind, trusting girl. Then, she wrote about stealing money from the roommate's wallet, not once, but over the course of months. She filled the page with fabricated details: the worn leather of the wallet, the specific bills she took, the knot of guilt and self-loathing that tightened in her stomach with each theft. She poured every ounce of her memory of shame and fear—emotions she knew intimately—into the ink, twisting them to serve this new, false narrative.

When she finished, the page was full. It was a convincing performance. She placed the pen down, her heart hammering.

As per the building's unspoken ritual, she placed the journal outside her door on the cold concrete floor. But tonight, she did not retreat to her bed. Tonight, she would not sleep. The paranoia that had been her tormentor was now her only weapon. She had to see what happened next.

She killed the desk lamp, plunging the room into near-total darkness. Lying flat on her stomach, she pressed her cheek to the floor, her eye to the thin, bright crack of light under the door. It offered a sliver of a view of the hallway—a long, distorted strip of white wall and grey floor.

And then she waited.

The silence in the building was absolute, a pressurized void that made her ears ring. Minutes bled into an hour, then two. Her muscles cramped, and the cold of the floor seeped into her bones. Doubt began to creep in. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe a custodian just came and read the entries. Maybe this was all a product of her exhausted, traumatized mind.

Just as she was about to give up, a change. Not a sound, but a subtle shift in the quality of the silence, a deepening of the shadows at the far end of the hall.

The door to Lilith’s apartment, 3A, opened without a sound.

But it wasn't Lilith who emerged.

The thing that glided into the hallway was a nightmare given form. It was tall, impossibly so, its head scraping the ceiling. Its shape was wrong, indistinct, like a column of folded darkness, a tear in the fabric of the visible world. It had long, skeletal limbs that seemed to bend at impossible angles. It didn't walk; it flowed across the floor, silent as spilled ink. It was not a person wearing a costume. It was ancient, primal, and utterly, terrifyingly real.

Eden clamped her hand over her mouth, a scream building in her throat, hot and sharp. This was the source of the dragging sound. This was what lived here. Lilith wasn't the warden; she was its priestess, its caretaker.

The shadowy figure glided down the hall, its movements unnervingly smooth. It stopped outside each door, and a long, spidery limb would reach down and retrieve the journal left there. It collected them all, stacking them in its grasp. When it reached her door, 3B, it paused. For a heart-stopping second, Eden felt as if it could sense her, that its unseen face was turned towards the crack of light where her terrified eye was pressed.

Then, its spindly hand descended, and her journal was gone, added to the pile.

With its collection complete, the entity did not retreat to Lilith's apartment. It turned and flowed towards the forbidden stairwell at the end of the hall. It didn't walk up the stairs. It simply began to ascend, its dark form rising into the shadows of the upper floor, disappearing towards the place that supposedly didn't exist. It was going up to the fourth floor. It was going to feed.

Eden scrambled back from the door, crab-walking until her back hit the bedframe. She was hyperventilating, her vision tunnelling. The journals were offerings. Sacrifices. And she had just served a plate of poisoned food.

She didn't know how much time passed. She sat shivering on the floor, her mind a vortex of terror. Then, she heard it. A soft, solid thump outside her door.

It took every shred of her remaining courage to crawl back and look.

Her journal was back.

She snatched it inside, locking the door and leaning against it, her body shaking uncontrollably. The leather felt wrong. It was cold. Not cool from the hallway floor, but a deep, penetrating, unnatural cold, like a stone pulled from the bottom of a frozen lake. It felt dead.

With a sense of ultimate dread, she opened it.

She frantically flipped to the entry she had written, the carefully constructed lie about the roommate.

The page was gone.

It hadn’t been erased. It had been violently ripped out, leaving a ragged, gaping tear in the binding.

Her eyes fell to the new, blank page that followed the tear. There was a fresh prompt from Lilith, her script as serene and perfect as ever.

Deception is a fragile shield. Tell us what you truly fear we will find.

But below Lilith's question, seared into the paper like a brand, was a single, dripping sentence. The ink was a dark, viscous, horrifying crimson, and it looked sickeningly like fresh blood. The handwriting was not Lilith's elegant loop or the previous jagged scrawl. It was something else, something primal and angry.

DO NOT WASTE OUR TIME.