The Neighbours

Wren made it her business to meet the building, the way she always did — archives had taught her that places are just paper trails with walls.

Flat 1: Mrs. Okafor, landlady, owned the building outright for thirty years. Flat 4: the Kowalskis, elderly, argued in Polish at operatic volume, harmless. Flat 6: Gerald, retired schoolteacher, tended the hallway plants, never made eye contact. Flat 8: a young couple, Tom and Priya, who'd moved in the same month as Wren and were therefore, she decided, trustworthy. Flat 10: Marcus, night-shift nurse, seen mostly at dawn.

And flat 9: no one.

It took Wren nine days to notice the thing about the neighbours, and when she noticed it she couldn't stop noticing: they never walked past number 9. Everyone climbed the same stairs, and everyone's route required passing that dark green door, and every single one of them crossed to the far side of the landing to do it. Gerald watered the plants out of order so he could do the top floor first, quickly, in daylight.

On day ten, she asked Tom about it in the stairwell.

"Number nine?" He glanced up the stairs, then back at her, and lowered his voice. "You really don't know? A girl disappeared from that flat. Six years ago. Before us — before most of them, actually. Sable, her name was. Sable Reyes. One day she just — wasn't there. Door locked from inside. Windows latched. No note, no nothing."

"What did the police say?"

"Nothing to say. Locked room, no body, no signs. They decided she left on her own." Tom shrugged, uncomfortable. "People here don't like to talk about it. Gerald knew her a bit, I think. Mrs. O probably knew her best. But nobody talks about it."

That night, Wren stood on the landing and looked at number 9's door for a long time. A girl had stood here, six years ago, and then — according to everyone with a badge — had simply decided to stop existing from inside a locked room.

Wren's whole job was paper trails. And every instinct she had said: nobody vanishes without leaving one.

At 3 a.m., the chair scraped again. This time, Wren got up, and pressed her ear to the wall.