The Apartment

When Olivia Moore moved into Apartment 6B of the vintage Brickland Lofts in downtown Chicago, she didn’t think twice about the strange questions on the lease agreement.

“Are you a light sleeper?”

“Do you believe in coincidences?”

“Have you experienced déjà vu more than once a week?”

She laughed them off. Quirky landlords, she assumed. The rent was impossibly low, and for a freelance writer trying to rebuild her life after a messy divorce, it was a deal she couldn’t ignore.

The building was old but charming, its narrow hallways echoing with creaks and the faint scent of wood polish. Her neighbors were scarce and distant—polite nods in the hallway, occasional thuds through the walls—but no one she could really talk to.

Except for the man across the hall.

He introduced himself as Mr. Lennox. Gray-haired, dressed like a retired detective from a noir film, always holding a copy of Ulysses or The Trial. He spoke in metaphors, often staring into her apartment with a look of curious concern.

“You know,” he said one day, “apartments are like time machines. You never know what was left behind.”

At first, Olivia wrote off the odd behavior. Artists. Old men. Chicago. It was all part of the flavor.

But things started to shift.

It began with the footsteps. Every night at exactly 2:13 a.m., she would hear someone walking above her. Not pacing. Walking—rhythmically, deliberately—back and forth. Yet, Apartment 7B had been empty since she moved in.

Then came the phone calls.

Static-filled, anonymous calls where no one spoke. Sometimes music played in the background—old jazz from the 40s, or a woman humming what sounded like a lullaby. When she called the building manager, he claimed the line had been disconnected years ago.

One morning, Olivia discovered an envelope slid under her door. No return address. Inside was a black-and-white photograph of her apartment… from decades ago. Same window. Same radiator. But a woman stood by the window. And the woman looked exactly like her.

She raced to Mr. Lennox.

He listened, then gave her a slow, heavy nod. “It’s happening again,” he whispered. “It always starts with the photo.”

He told her the legend of 6B. That every few years, someone moved in and began to lose touch with time. They’d see things—versions of themselves, glimpses of people who never aged, echoes of conversations they never had. The apartment, he believed, was a nexus, a sort of temporal fault line where lives intersected… and sometimes, overlapped.

“Some call it haunted,” he said. “I think it’s haunted by possibility.”

Terrified but driven, Olivia began digging into public records. She found past tenants of 6B who had disappeared. Others who ended up in psychiatric institutions claiming they were “split” between years. One had written a diary titled The Apartment Remembers.

The more she read, the more the apartment changed. Wall paint peeled overnight. Mirrors fogged when she hadn’t used hot water. A crack appeared near the ceiling, growing like a vein. And always, the footsteps at 2:13.

One night, Olivia set up cameras. When she reviewed the footage, her heart froze. The feed showed her sleeping in bed—but also showed a second version of herself, standing in the corner, watching.

She packed a bag. Called a cab. As she opened her door to leave, Mr. Lennox was already standing there.

“You can’t just leave,” he said softly. “You’re part of it now. The apartment doesn’t let go that easily.”

She ran past him.

Two weeks later, in a café in Milwaukee, Olivia thought she was safe. She’d rented a cheap room, quit writing, and kept her phone off.

But one evening, she checked her bag and found something strange.

A key.

Old, rusted. Tagged: “6B”.

And when she looked in the mirror of her new apartment, she saw something behind her. A woman. Smiling.

That woman… was her.