Apartment 4B
Room available now. No need to leave a forwarding address. A short story.
The people in apartment 4B disappeared overnight. Nobody realised at first, of course. This is New York. I’d been here six months, and though I’m British, I learned quickly that you don’t talk to your neighbours unless it’s completely unavoidable. Or maybe that was just my policy. It doesn’t matter.
Because, as I’ve said, the people in 4B went missing, and they were my only neighbours.
The place was falling apart. I’m not even sure my tenancy was legal. Mr Mezimo seemed shifty when I was signing the paperwork — documents that had a dark stain on them, I might add. Sure as heck wasn’t coffee, I didn’t know what it was.
A year previously I would have been put off by the rat droppings and the smell of freshly sprayed roach killer. Not to mention the blinding decor. Everything looked like Mezimo had pulled it out of a skip, and there was one down in the alley because they were renovating the hotel next door.
But Sara had kicked me out, and I was so tired of roaming from one fleapit to another. The room was cheap, and Mezimo’s oddly stained contract was only for three months.
So, I took it. Me, and the roaches, and the rat — which I never saw, but for the little turd trail it left every night — were doing just fine.
Mezimo told me from the off that I had only one set of neighbours, down on the third floor — a nice, quiet family. I’m sure he would have said that if they were a bunch of crackheads, but it didn’t matter to me. I had no plans to invite them over for a fondue party. Does anyone still even have those?
Anyway, yes, I was doing ok. And keeping to my promise not to text Sara. We ended badly. That’s all you need to know. Not because I don’t want to tell you, but Theodore told me if I don’t stop talking to new people about it, I’ll never make any new friends.
If you knew Sara, you would take her side anyway, so the less said about her, the better. I won’t mention her again. Promise.
So, yes, I didn’t see anyone who lived at 4B, and I didn’t even think about them until they weren’t there anymore.
And I didn’t even know they weren’t there anymore until Mr Mezimo mentioned it when he came to replace the curtain rail. After he told me to close my curtains more gently — I had yanked on them hard when something in the hotel’s window had scared me — he told me they were gone.
“Who are gone?” I said.
“4B,” he said.
“Where to?” I said.
“That’s just it,” he said. “Nobody knows.”
I’m not sure what ‘nobody’ he was referring to, seeing as it was just Mezimo and me in this broken skull of a building.
They had vanished overnight, he said, and left all their stuff. Their stuff? I perked up. I wondered if there was anything valuable. What was Mezimo going to do with it? As far as I could tell, the old guy did nothing but drink instant coffee and do the New York Times crossword — which I thought was odd as his English was so bad. He even smelled of old coffee rings and musty newspaper.
“Did they leave anything good?” I asked, trying to sound less interested than I was. But Mezimo’s bloodshot eyes dragged a twinkle out of somewhere. Because he knew exactly why I was asking.
“Some pretty cool stuff,” he said. “If they don’t come and claim it — and pay me the October rent — you can have it all, he said.
But he told me I’d have to move it all up here, or he’d charge me for two rooms.
“What kind of stuff?” I pressed. He sort’ve laughed — I think — as I’d never heard Mezimo laugh before. I wasn’t sure what it sounded like. Then he left, with a second warning about not yanking the curtain rail down again. Adding that maybe I should stop peering into other people’s windows if I didn’t want to get a fright. I didn’t bother to correct him about that. They had definitely been trying to get my attention, I wanted to say, but why bother?
Mezimo was a quick old fellow and even though I went out on the landing after him, he had gone down the seven flights of stairs like a cat. He was out of sight already.
And I was left with nothing on my mind except thinking about what treasure was in 4B.
Maybe I should’ve been thinking more about what happened to its tenants, but I didn’t. I didn’t even know how to visualise them — what they looked like.
I lasted three days — and I’m kind’ve proud of that — before I snuck down to the third floor and tried the door handle, in case it wasn’t locked. Would Mezimo have locked it, even if the tenants hadn’t? Worth a quick wiggle to find out, I thought.
It wasn’t locked. But I didn’t get to see much.
I opened it a few inches, and it slammed shut. Someone must have been behind it, having heard my steps in the stairwell.
It freaked me a bit. They must have come back. That shove sure felt stronger than anything Mezimo looked capable of.
“I’m sorry,” I reflexively said. But I offered no further explanation and scurried back up to my apartment, and made myself invisible like my little rat friend.
I had no reason to go out over Thanksgiving weekend. Sara had taken my friends with her. She’d no intention of playing fair, so I really don’t know what day the brown box arrived outside my door.
Nobody had knocked. I know that much.
I nearly tripped over it as I was heading out, checking my phone to see if Sara had replied. I had got drunk on the Sunday and texted her.
I stared down at the package, about the size of a Fellowes storage box. The kind you always see on TV when some business goes under and the news crews catch the staff leaving with their careers and staplers packed up. Each hugging a box to their stomach as if letting go would cause their entire world to spill out.
I didn’t notice the card right away — it was the same brown as the wrapping around the box. Weirdly accessorised, I thought.
I flipped it open — it was stuck to the box, so I got down on my haunches.
‘IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED?’ the hand lettering said, all in block capitals.
My first thought was that the package was meant for 4B, because of the tone of familiarity. But then I figured it was from 4B. I didn’t feel so good about that.
Strange reaction: I slammed the door on it. And sat on my bed, staring at the door like the box was going to follow me in, or something.
I decided not to go out anymore.
I watched some TV — a Lakers game. They won. And I didn’t think about the brown box again until 3am. I woke up, but didn’t know why. And then the brown box was all I could think about. No idea why it was my first thought. Maybe I was more worried about it than I realised. Was that why I woke up?
What the hell was in it?
And why had I just left it out there?
Something else occurred to me — that I’d dreamt it. Maybe there was no box out there, after all.
I didn’t fancy checking, though. Which I thought was weird.
I talked myself into it.
I stared facing the door.
I didn’t like that the curtains were open behind me, or that I could see my shadow on the floor. It meant there was a light on in the hotel window opposite.
You know when you get that feeling that somebody is watching you? But, you also don’t want to turn round to find out? Well, that was me. It was perfectly silent over there, not like the other night. But it was so silent I felt sure it was because whoever was watching me was being perfectly still.
Nobody stays perfectly still unless they are hiding, or they don’t want you to notice them. And neither of those is good. Not at 3am.
Now I was a little caught, because I no longer wanted to open the door, but I also didn’t want to turn around.
I did this weird manoeuvre, where I backed up toward the curtains. The nearer I got, the colder my spine felt, and I drew the curtains carefully just as Mr. Mezimo warned me. Because I sure as heck didn’t want the rail to come down again. Not now.
With the curtains closed, the room fell into darkness. I crept to my bed. I hoped now wasn’t when my invisible rat friend did his pooping, because if I’d trod on something hairy and squidgy then, I might have died.
I laid on my bed, stiffly. There wasn’t an inch of me relaxed. Then I heard the thumping begin on the hotel window. A steady beat. But not like a drum. This had no music in it. It was just a slow, steady thump. And it didn’t get faster, it didn’t get slower.
Then it started on my door, too, but much quieter.
And that was when I saw it.
In my mind’s eye. Saw clearly that I needed to get the hell out of there.
A deeply irrational fear doesn’t offer you explanations, but what I was feeling no longer even felt irrational.
Now, I don’t know, as I climbed out the bathroom window, onto the fire escape on the east facing side of the building, if I really heard it — the voice.
The soft-spoken voice, not exactly a whisper, but almost.
“Don’t you want it, anymore?”
I didn’t. I didn’t even want it in the first place.
This all happened six months ago, and now I’m back with Sara. You’ll call me a coward, but I really don’t care. When I saw in the papers that Mr. Mezimo had disappeared, and I read emotional quotes from the abandoned family I didn’t even know he had, I should’ve said something to the police.
Even if the incident with the box, or what I’d seen going on in the hotel the night I pulled the curtain rail down, had nothing to do with anything I should’ve told them. Because it might have had everything to do with it.
I heard they were going to knock the place down. So, if the box was still there, it’d soon be under rubble. Of course, that was stupid. The police looking for Mezimo would have found it. They would have opened it. They’d know what was in it. It crossed my mind to call them, to make some kind of statement, just so I could ask what was in there.
But time went on, and Mezimo drifted out of the headlines, then out the back of the newspaper entirely, and I tried to stop thinking about the whole incident.
I might have had a future where it wasn’t on my mind at all, with the passing of time. But, when the hotel burned down and the fire had been determined to start in room 373 — which according to the diagrams in the papers was the one opposite mine — I think any hope of forgetting was shattered.
