The Voice in Apartment 4B

The Voice in Apartment 4B
By [Ubaid khan]

The first time I heard the music, it was subtle — a faint piano melody slipping through the thin walls of my studio apartment. I paused mid-bite of my cereal, listening. The tune was soft, melancholic, like something from a forgotten vinyl spinning in a dusty attic.

I lived in 4A, and 4B — according to the building manager, Mrs. Evers — had been vacant for months.

“Last tenant left in a hurry,” she had told me, pushing her cat-eye glasses up her nose. “Didn’t take much with her. Spooked or something. Strange girl.”

That should have made me wary. But it didn’t. I’d only just moved to the city, trading a small-town existence for a one-room walk-up and dreams of a fresh start. If anything, the idea of a ghostly neighbor brought a kind of curious comfort. The city could be a lonely place.

The second time I heard the music, it came with a voice.

“You can’t just keep running,” it said softly. A woman’s voice. Clear. Intimate. As if spoken directly into my ear.

I dropped the mug I was holding.

The building was old, the walls thin, but 4B was still supposed to be empty.

I pressed my ear against the wall that separated our units. Silence. Then, a rustle. Another whisper.

“…but you already know that, don’t you?”

My breath caught in my throat. I tried to laugh it off, muttering to myself about faulty plumbing, echoing radios, air vents. I didn’t sleep that night.

On the third day, I knocked on 4B’s door.

Three raps. Nothing.

I tried the knob. It creaked open.

The apartment was dim, heavy with stale air. Dust floated like lazy snowflakes through the beams of sunlight slipping between the blinds. The place was barren, except for an old milk crate in the center of the living room.

Inside the crate: a small tape recorder, a stack of labeled cassette tapes, and a note that read:
"For whoever’s listening — listen closely."

The first tape was marked “Tape 1: Arrival.”

I brought it back to my apartment, popped it into the dusty recorder, and hit play.

A woman’s voice — soft, warm, almost familiar.

“If you’re listening, then you’ve heard me,” she said. “I wondered who’d move in next door. I’ve been trying to reach someone… anyone. But I didn’t expect it to work.”

She chuckled, low and bittersweet.

“You’re probably confused. I would be too. I’m not dead, if that’s what you’re thinking. At least… I don’t think I am. Not in the usual sense.”

A long pause. Then:

“I found these tapes helped me speak. Not just to record, but… somehow, to respond. I started making them when the dreams began. When I started hearing things through my walls.”

Over the next week, I listened to a tape each day.

They began abstract — musings on loneliness, time, sound, and silence. The woman (she never said her name) spoke of feeling like she was unraveling, like her thoughts were drifting into the walls themselves. She talked to me — not in the way a diary talks to a future reader, but like she knew me, knew what I was feeling.

“You wonder if you’re going crazy,” she said in Tape 3. “You’re not. But even if you are, sometimes madness is a doorway.”

I hadn’t told anyone about the anxiety attacks. About waking up sweating, heart racing, uncertain of where I was. I hadn’t told anyone because I didn’t know anyone here. But she knew.

The deeper I went into the tapes, the more direct the messages became.

“I heard you crying last night,” she said in Tape 5. “I remember crying just like that. When I couldn’t tell if I was escaping something or leaving everything behind.”

I stopped the tape. Stared at the wall between our apartments. My apartment. Her apartment.

How could she know?

I couldn’t resist any longer. I went back into 4B. This time, I explored.

The place had an eerie stillness to it, but also a strange warmth — like someone had just left and would return at any moment. I opened the closet.

There, taped to the inside wall, was a final cassette.

It was labeled simply: “For Her.”

My hands trembled as I placed it into the recorder and pressed play.

“I think I made this for you,” the voice said. “I don’t know how I know you, but I do. You came here to disappear, didn’t you? Just like I did. You wanted a clean slate, to leave the hurt behind. But it doesn’t work like that. Hurt follows. It echoes.”

A long pause.

“But healing echoes too. Maybe that’s what I’ve been trying to send — an echo of healing. A message in a bottle through time and thought.”

She inhaled, shaky.

“If you stay… write your own tapes. Leave something behind. Someone might need it. Someone like you.”

That night, I slept.

Not just laid down — I slept.

And the next morning, I pulled out a blank cassette from the crate, held it in my hand for a while, then wrote across the label in black ink:

“Tape 1: Beginning.”