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Chapters I Wrote in the Dark — 4
Saturday Shadows — Story 4: Apartment 4B
Continuing in this series of Saturday Shadows — the weekly slot where I dig up the kind of story that makes you check the lock twice before bed. This week’s tale comes from a building I can’t stop thinking about, even now that the story’s written down.
The first thing I noticed about the Aldric Building was the smell — old pipes, older wood, and underneath it something faintly sweet, like flowers left too long in standing water. The second thing I noticed was that apartment 4B had a waiting list, even though four tenants had vanished from it in the last six years.
I wasn’t there to rent it. I was there to write about it.
Missing, Presumed: The Mystery of 4B — that was the working title I’d scrawled on a legal pad three weeks earlier, back when this was just a pitch to my editor and not something that followed me down the stairwell at night. Four tenants. Four leases signed, four move-in dates confirmed, and then — nothing. No forwarding address. No bodies. No signs of struggle. Rent paid on time, right up until it wasn’t, and then silence, as if each person had simply stepped sideways out of the world and pulled the seam shut behind them.
The landlord, a thin, courteous man named Grosvenor who wore his cardigan buttoned…
