I made the difficult decision earlier this year to return to a cheaper apartment than the one I was leasing at the time, so I could augment my savings for a house. I’d never been partial to apartments in the first place, and if my ultimate objective was to get away from them entirely, I figured I’d do better living in a ramshackle one until I hit 35 than a middling one until I was 40.
The result was my moving into a four-story complex with an online aggregate rating of 2.6/5 stars – it had the least expensive monthly rate I could find in my area, and was still one tenth of a point above “average”, I jokingly rationalized. Tenant reviews told me to expect the following:
“The building manager is always absent”
“Construction on the building across the street has been going on for months, which makes weird and bad smells for some reason.”
“maintenance woman is nice but sometimes just won’t show up to an appointment”
“Might lose hot water for up to two hours at a time”
“I’ve had to ask other tenants to be quiet at night, but they’ve always been respectful when I do”
What sealed the choice for me was the apparent friendliness of the people in the building. Whatever other troubles might have arisen, as long as there was no face-to-face rudeness or antagonism, I figured I could contend with them. I moved into my first-floor one-bedroom at the beginning of March.
Over time, I found myself experiencing most of the problems described in the reviews, but on the whole, given the low cost of rent, I think I expected worse. The apartment itself was actually pretty roomy, especially for someone who lived as spartan as I did, and armed with exhaust fans in the kitchen and bathroom, an air conditioner, and mountains of cleaning supplies, I never needed to deal with the maintenance people anyway. Things settled into a decent rhythm for me quickly enough.
One morning about six months into my lease, I woke up and found a piece of paper stuck through the side of my door. Contrary to my expectations, it wasn’t some stock pest control or event notice, but a handwritten note.
You don’t know me, but I live down the hall. I’m giving you this to ask if you’ve noticed a bad smell recently. Like worse than the usual around here. If not, don’t worry about this and sorry for bothering you. But if you have, text the number below, because there’s more that I need to say.
At the bottom of the paper was a phone number in the same careful print that composed the rest of the letter.
Before anything else, I considered the question posed – had I noticed a particularly bad smell recently? Truth be told, my instinctive answer was ‘yes’. Maybe two days before, I’d noticed the construction smell, but I’d become adept enough at minimizing the repulsiveness (immediately closing windows, closing doors, and staying in my bedroom for a half hour until it was just about gone), that it was hard to say whether that instance of it was especially bad or not.
What then struck me was how oddly dramatic this letter was, what with its “more that I need to say”. On top of that, why did its author need to corroborate claims of a bad smell rather than just lodge a complaint with maintenance? In fairness, maintenance couldn’t do much about construction across the street. The note was interesting, if strange. I mulled it over for about 20 minutes before texting the postscript phone number.
The ensuing conversation read like this: ___________
Hi this is room 106. I got your note. Short answer, yes, I’d say there’s been a bad smell lately. I thought it was just the construction outside though. Why did you ask me?
Hey, thanks for responding. I was afraid of that. If it’s okay, can we talk about this in person? I’m being really overly paranoid, but we shouldn’t talk over a phone call.
Um, okay. Are you here now? If you just knock on my door I’ll come out.
You know the park down the street?
Yeah I do.
Meet me there in an hour. Sit on the bench in front of the pond, or I will if I’m there first. ___________
And so nearly one hour later, I was watching the bench in question from across the park, and sighing heavily. As recently as a few years before, these clandestine trappings of a spy movie might still have fueled a nostalgic, childlike part of me, but by this point in my life, the exasperation of letting myself get dragged into something ludicrous had started to outweigh all that. This was potentially a practical joke, a ploy to get some random person to waste his time when he could’ve been working, which I would’ve found irritating but surely forgotten in a week. It was a Saturday morning, so the park was plenty populated – there were multiple people within ten yards of the bench – so there was no chance that someone was trying to kidnap or attack me. Worst case scenario, I’d have an uncomfortable run-in with someone whose mental state was, let’s say, something other than typical. Having weighed these possibilities, I traversed the sunlit grass and sat down on the bench near the water.
I then realized I hadn’t exchanged names or any identifying details with this person and didn’t know what to expect. Suddenly the prospect of the meeting held a lot more menace. Cursing myself for the oversight, I looked left at the person nearest me; it was a casually-dressed man about my age walking his dog – highly unlikely to be my correspondent. I looked to my right at a man who was large and imposing, but he was walking away from where I was. A couple minutes later, a woman who was probably in her mid-40s walked by without looking at me. Ten more minutes passed without anyone approaching. I’d texted the phone number again to let its owner know I was in the park, but got no reply. I was very close to cutting my losses and leaving, but then lifted my gaze to find a new figure at the park entrance – one walking purposefully toward me.
The first thing I took note of was that this person was pretty small, maybe even a child. It was difficult to discern much else, as they wore a sweatshirt with the hood pulled over their head, and looked downward, obscuring their face. Still, whoever it was walked directly toward my bench. If this was indeed my meeting partner, I immediately had about twice as many questions as the already considerable number I’d had before.
However, when the person had almost reached me, I saw that it was not a child – not quite. I saw the face under the hood and saw that it belonged to a young woman, one whom I picked for being about twenty years old, her abnormally small stature aside. She stopped in front of me and lowered the hood, better revealing her features and lending more credence to my assumption. Something about the youthfulness of her appearance mixed alarmingly in my mind with the odd circumstances of our meeting, and a protective instinct I’d never felt before sprang up inside me. I took initiative and began the conversation myself.
“So… I presume you’re the one I was talking to. Why did we need to meet out here? Are there prying eyes inside? Or prying ears, I should say?”
The girl looked left, right, and over her shoulder. Then she took a deep breath and began, “I didn’t want them to hear us talking through the wall – they’re right on the other side – and I don’t know if they can listen to our phone conversations, I mean we gave them our numbers after all. I tried to be as subtle as possible when I slipped the paper through your door, because of the security cameras…”
She took a step closer to me and whispered –
“I think they’re hiding a dead body inside the air ducts.”
“You… What?”
“I know it sounds crazy but they are, I really think so –”
“A dead body in…” This girl was alleging a conspiracy that was totally in alignment with the paranoia of insisting on a covert rendezvous. Maybe I really was conversing with a mentally unstable person.
“…In the air ducts, yeah.”
“…Okay, first of all, who’s ‘they’?”
“The maintenance people, they’re the ones. I think it’s probably above their work room – the whole reason I contacted you is that I live right next to that room, and you live on the exact other side of it.”
That much was true; Apartment 106 was adjacent to the maintenance office. By my quick calculations, that meant this girl lived in Apartment 104. The reason for my involvement had at least fallen into place, but plenty of other questions needed answering.
“So you think that the smell we’ve had… Is because of a corpse inside the ducts, not the construction that’s been going on?” I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice.
“Why would construction cause that smell? It’s like rotting food.”
“I don’t know, they’re digging underground… Y’know, pipes and stuff.”
“Well, I didn’t buy that when the smell went away faster when I left the windows open than when I closed them.” The girl took to pacing back and forth. “And I started wondering… What if every time someone nearby turns on one of their exhaust fans, the air gets sucked in and pushed through the vents, and forces the smell of something up there into other apartments?”
I considered that for a moment. While it was technically possible, there was a flaw to the logic right from the beginning. “But that’s the thing – if someone had a dead body to hide, wouldn’t the air ducts of an apartment complex be one of the last places to do it specifically because it would make the smell noticeable?”
“You’re right. You’re right.” The girl raised a finger at me as if she’d caught faulty logic of my own, and started rummaging in her pocket. “Unless, they were planning to move the body before anyone was likely to ask questions.”
She pulled out her cell phone, along with a pair of pink earbuds. She scrolled through something I couldn’t see for a few seconds, then offered me the headphones. As I put them in, I saw what was clearly a camera recording with a grainy, black image, and knew instantly that the audio was the focus here. I tried to hear beyond the fuzzy room tone that was now playing in my ears. _____________
“…”
“…But are you absolutely sure you can move it?”
“…”
“…When we finish work on Wednesday? That’s five days. That’s way too long…”
“…”
“…How do you know nobody will…” _____________
From there, the voice trailed off. I scrubbed back through the recording to listen again while the phone’s owner looked at me expectantly. The speaker was male, and sounded like he was talking to someone else, but whatever that person was saying in response was completely inaudible. Though the sound was muffled and almost tinny, one thing came across very clearly: the distinguishable conversation partner spoke in a fraught, almost hysterical voice.
I took out the headphones. “What was the context of this? You heard it, what, through your wall?”
“I was just in bed and I heard two people start arguing right in the next room. I couldn’t hear everything, but from what I could, it kept sounding weirder and weirder, and I started recording right before they stopped.”
“What else did you hear them say? Because that recording, on its own… It doesn’t prove much of anything.”
The girl’s eyes darted around, as if trying to recall the memory. “It was yesterday morning. One of them, the one that was easier to hear, just kept saying ‘I can’t believe you, I can’t believe how stupid you are,’ and he asked ‘why up there?’ … or maybe it was just ‘why there?’”
“Well, which one? ‘Why there?’ or ‘why up there?’ That makes a big difference.”
“I don’t remember, okay?” She was starting to get frustrated, which made me realize I needed to stay a little bit calmer myself.
“Look, I don’t know if you’re right or not, but if there is something up there, or anywhere for that matter, keep in mind it might not be a body at all, because it sounds like that detail didn’t ever come up in the argument you heard. Maybe they hid a bunch of stolen edible goods or something. That could cause a bad smell too.”
The girl scoffed, and started pacing again. I considered my next words carefully, knowing she wouldn’t like them however they came out.
“Look, I don’t have all the experience in the world, but if I had to guess, I think the police wouldn’t buy a word of what you’re saying right now. Even with that recording – it doesn’t prove, or even necessarily hint at anything. Bad smells happen in apartment buildings all the time, and if the cops had to show up and search the air ducts of the whole first floor and who knows where else… they’re just not going to do that.”
She looked at me and said pointedly, “But you think there’s a chance I’m right?”
I hesitated, but the intensity in her eyes made me acquiesce. “Yes, I think there’s a chance.” I didn’t clarify how big of one, but technically I wasn’t lying to her.
For a moment she looked vindicated, but her face quickly fell. “So you think calling the police is pointless? Then what do we do? I don’t want to just go back in there and do nothing!”
I rubbed my temples. “…Wednesday, they said?”
“It sounds like that’s when they’re going to get rid of the body… or something.”
“It’s four days until Wednesday. You want my advice? Keep listening through your wall until then, and see if they get careless and talk about it again. Record as much as you can, and maybe you’ll get something that’ll make calling the police not pointless.”
The girl bit her lip uncertainly, but nodded.
“Sorry, we still don’t even know each others’ names. I’m Theo.”
“Allie.”
“Allie – thanks for trusting me with this. You’re okay doing what I said?”
She looked heartened and said, “Yeah, I’m going to find a way to record sound through the wall without stopping. I’ll tell you as soon as I find out anything, if I do.”
She nodded in goodbye and started to leave, but after a couple steps, she turned back around and gave me a hug. It was a brief but strong hug, a gesture in which I sensed relief, and maybe even a little bit of excitement. As she walked away in earnest, I couldn’t help but wonder if she was seeing herself in the third person, as a character in a narrative. As if to indulge her in that fantasy, I waited a few minutes before returning to the building myself, ensuring that our vigilante partnership remained a secret to those inside.
Once back in my apartment, I quickly grew frustrated with myself, realizing just what ridiculousness I had leapt into, and what a non-solution I had provided. I had effectively bought myself four days until this girl insisted on calling the police, almost certainly with no new evidence to speak of, at which point I’d likely be implicated in what the cops would consider some kid’s crackpot theatrics. That said, it wasn’t as if I dismissed Allie’s theory completely. The smell had been truly awful of late, to the point that I had previously joked to my family back home that my building apparently needed to extract dead cats on a daily basis. Not to mention, the argument Allie had recorded was pretty strange – not just due to the words that were said, which could’ve referred to many perfectly innocent scenarios, but due to the genuinely panicked tone in which it was held. I was at a loss as to what innocent topics could be discussed that way.
All in all, I was exasperated, but not disinterested. I pondered what else could be done to probe the truth of the situation. That evening, I went online to research missing persons in the area. I lived in a city, so there was a handful, but all of the cases were at least three months old. If there was, in fact, a body to be found, the culprit couldn’t have killed the person more than a few days before the argument Allie overheard, and thus there may not have even been a missing person report yet; I resolved to keep checking for new ones, just in case.
The next day, I received a new text message from Allie, giving me the expected news that while she was perpetually recording audio next to her bedroom wall, she hadn’t overheard anything of note since we disbanded. I could already sense restlessness in her words, which didn’t bode well after just one day of biding time. I hoped I wouldn’t have to keep her from doing anything unwise before we even got to Wednesday.
Unfortunately, on Monday morning, we had the following text conversation: _______________
Theo I’m still not hearing anything. Barely any audible voices at all, let alone anything useful.
Just be patient. I’m trying to think of other things we can do.
Well I thought of something just now.
Okay, what?
We can go inside the maintenance room and look around, see what we find.
I don’t know, can we even get in there? _______________
I’m 99% sure it’s unlocked so people can go in there and tell them about emergencies if necessary. We can just come up with some fake story and take the chance to see if there’s anything incriminating in there.
After reading that message, I had to put my head in my hand and massage my eyes. Once again I had to wonder how I had gotten sucked into her machinations… And yet, it was a decent idea to help prove a not entirely implausible suspicion. I think that fact – the fact that I saw this girl as clever, as seeing things that others didn’t, even if she was wrong – is what made me go along. What did I have in my life? I lived alone at 32 years old and worked a mediocre job from home out of a desire to eventually escape the soullessness of the city, but Allie had the conviction to sort out the injustice of the world. If she had been a few years older, this whole thing might’ve felt like very unconventional courtship, but as it was, I just wanted to protect her. That protection, though – it wasn’t just against physical danger, but against her ideas being invalidated too. I replied to her with this:
Listen, let’s say you’re right about everything, You’re proposing we walk into a room where one or more murderers are hiding in plain sight. If anyone is going to do it, it’ll be me, by myself. Two minutes later, I was exiting my front door and walking down the hall where the door to the maintenance room lay in wait. During that short walk, the next door beyond my destination opened. Allie leaned out of it, giving me a scandalized look and beckoning me farther down the hall. Smiling in spite of myself, I shook my head at her and gestured subtly to the small orb-shaped camera mounted to the ceiling behind me. If she understood, she still refused to duck back inside her apartment. I knocked on the maintenance door, and without waiting for an answer from within, I turned the knob and found the door opened easily.
The first thing I saw was a large table with metal tools, plastic tubing, foam insulation, and half a dozen other things scattered on top of it. Behind a desk at the back of the room sat none of the maintenance workers but the building manager, whom I had only met twice while moving in. Before I could say anything, I heard a chuckle from my left.
“Didn’t want her to come in with you?”
I snapped my head to see a maintenance woman, probably a decade or so older than me, sitting in a swivel chair in front of an entire wall of television screens, each of them clearly displaying a different security camera’s view. The security setup was in the maintenance room for some reason, and right on the centermost screen was the hallway just outside. This unwelcome surprise put me at a loss for a couple seconds.
“I – oh, yeah, well, she and I had been talking about something, but this has nothing to do with that, I needed to come in here first. I didn’t realize that the maintenance here was also security.”
The woman got up and joined the building manager behind the main desk. “It’s not, we just use the same room to save money, and when the security person goes on break, I sometimes take a quick look. So what’s up?”
I racked my brains to recall what I’d decided to say two minutes before. “I, um, just saw a cockroach crawl out from my shower drain. I’d pour some Drano down there myself, but I don’t have anything like that right now.”
The maintenance woman nodded with a smile. “Of course, we’ve got bleach. Just give me one minute.”
She leaned on the desk, looking over the shoulder of the building manager, who stared at a computer screen. I suddenly remembered why I was even in this room, and started strolling around it, secretly on the lookout for anything that seemed out of the ordinary – not that I had any clue what that would look like specifically. It certainly struck an odd image as a whole, the surveillance screens and accompanying equipment at the far side of an otherwise custodial room. It was also rather cluttered. Outside of the main table’s contents, vacuums were leaned against a wall, their cords trailing into a supply closet; a big stack of boxes occupied one corner; cleaning products littered the windowsills. Maybe they hadn’t had time to clean up recently, due to… extenuating circumstances. I walked back to the desk, where the two women were. Either of them could’ve been the inaudible speaker in the argument Allie overheard, meaning, as far as the recording made it sound, the culprit of the hypothetical murder. I supposed it was more likely to be the maintenance woman, as I had no idea what the building manager was currently doing there. I listened to their conversation.
“So these are all work orders?” the maintenance woman asked.
“Yes, but in terms of scheduling, you’ll want to take care of these five first. For these two, I still have to figure out some stuff,” instructed the manager.
“What’s up with those two?”
“Well, I can’t get into contact with one, and the other one I haven’t tried yet, but he’s late on his rent. Not looking forward to that…” She trailed off and glanced up at me. I tried to look like I wasn’t paying attention.
At that moment, a phone rang. The building manager’s cell phone, it turned out.
“Hi there, Adam, are you here? Good, I’ll come meet you in a second.” She rose from her seat and said to the maintenance woman, “Giving a tour. Take down those work orders and I’ll get back to you about the other two.” She addressed me as she made to leave. “And we’ll get that roach situation dealt with, ‘kay?”
I nodded and she closed the door behind her.
The maintenance woman was now putting the information on the computer screen into her phone. Without looking up, she said, “Sorry hon, just let me write these down and then we’ll go.”
I knew I had only a few seconds, so I nodded once again and crossed the room as casually as I could. I pretended to gaze through the window behind the desk for a moment, then turned around to get a look at the computer screen. Peering at it as closely as I could without being too obvious, I could make out seven numbers, which surely corresponded to the apartments where work orders had been placed. Two of the numbers were asterisked – 109 and 213. I crossed the room again, trying to seem like I was simply pacing back and forth.
The maintenance woman pocketed her phone. “All right, let me just get some bleach from the closet.”
“If it’s easier, I can just do it myself. It’s the simplest thing, I’ll just pour half a cup or so.”
She looked over her shoulder while retrieving the bottle and said, “I’d let you, but technically I’m not allowed to. Let’s get going.” She led the way out of the maintenance room. In the hallway, I glanced over at Allie’s door, and was relieved to see the girl wasn’t there anymore.
Ten minutes later and with an unnecessarily clean shower drain, I texted Allie about my discoveries. She insisted we meet in person again to discuss things, but instead of finding her at our park bench, she cornered me right in the parking lot of our building. I didn’t think that was the best idea if we didn’t want to be seen on camera together, but it was too late to say as much.
She gave me a look of frustration. “I thought you didn’t even fully believe me, and now you’re going off and doing everything important by yourself?”
“It might’ve been dangerous, Allie.”
“Well, what if I went off and did something ‘dangerous’ by myself? What would you do?”
I didn’t really know what she wanted me to say, so I just went with honesty. “I’d probably try to stop you, because you’re too young to be doing something like that.”
Her irritation gave way to a smile, which she tried to conceal by looking away.
I pressed on. “So listen, bad news and good news; I’ll do the bad news first. One of the maintenance people saw us together in the hallway, because the security setup is, for some damn reason, in the maintenance room. I couldn’t tell if she was suspicious about that or not.”
Allie contemplated that, and then shook her head. “Whatever, I say. What’s the good news?”
“Good in our case, at least – there’s one person in this building that the manager can’t get into contact with, and it’s possible there’s another one, because they’re not paying rent. If someone got murdered and the body is inside the building, it’s most likely one of those two people. Apartments 109 and 213.”
Allie began pacing. “And what do you think we should do, just knock on their doors and see if they answer? Or better yet, I could slip notes through their doors too, something that would really provoke a response… Meaning that, if we don’t get one…”
“I can’t think of any better tactic right now. Just… let me know once you’ve done it, I guess, and if either of them respond to you. It’s not long until Wednesday now, but maybe we’ll figure something out.”
The girl hitched a look of resolve on her face and gave me a salute. Then, she turned and walked along the perimeter of the building, around to the front doors, and disappeared back inside. As I watched her go, I felt relieved at how she seemed satisfied with her relatively innocuous task, and unsettled by how, for some reason, I was really starting to wonder if she was right about everything.
(To be concluded – the entire account is already written but Nosleep has a 40,000 character limit)