The Cheapest Flat in the City

The rent was four hundred a month, which should have been Wren's first warning.

The building on Harrow Street was six floors of tired brick, the kind of place that had been grand once and now held its grandeur the way a drowned man holds his breath. The lift didn't work. The hallway lightbulbs died weekly, as if on rotation. But the flat — number 12, top floor, a skylight and a clawfoot tub — was clean, quiet, and four hundred a month in a city where a parking space rented for more.

Wren was twenty-six, three weeks out of a bad relationship, and working night shifts digitising archives for the city museum. She could not afford warnings. She signed the lease.

The landlady, Mrs. Okafor, was a small, immaculate woman who counted the rent twice and looked at Wren for a long moment before handing over the keys.

"You're on the top floor," she said. "Same floor as number nine."

"Is that bad?"

"Number nine is empty." Mrs. Okafor said it the way people say a door is locked — as a fact that should stay one. "It's been empty a long time. The building is old. Old buildings carry sound strangely. If you hear anything from number nine, it's the pipes."

"What would I hear from an empty flat?"

"The pipes," Mrs. Okafor repeated, and closed her door.

Wren carried her boxes up six flights. On the fifth-floor landing she passed a man in his sixties — she would learn later this was Gerald, flat 6 — who pressed himself against the wall to let her pass and did not say hello, and whose eyes, she thought, held something closer to relief than welcome.

On the top-floor landing there were two doors. Twelve, hers. And opposite, number 9, painted a darker green than the other doors, with no nameplate, no mail slot taped over, nothing.

Just a door. And yet Wren stood there a moment too long, boxes in her arms, with the strange certainty that the building was looking back at her.

That night she woke at three in the morning and heard, very clearly, through the wall that her bedroom shared with the empty flat, the sound of a chair being dragged across a wooden floor.

Just the pipes, she told herself.

She didn't sleep again until dawn.