Every apartment building has a corridor that seems slightly longer than it should be. Most people notice and forget. Maren noticed and remembered.
The building she moved into was seven floors of grey concrete on the edge of a city that had been shrinking for thirty years. She took the flat on the fourth floor because the rent was low and the windows faced east. She didn’t notice the corridor until her third week.
It was long. Not alarmingly so – not the kind of long that stops you in your tracks. Just slightly, persistently, wrongly long. And at the end of it, past flat 4F and the fire extinguisher and the faded notice about noise after ten, there was a door that wasn’t on the floor plan.
It had a number: 4G.
She knocked once, out of the habit of being polite. No answer. She tried the handle. Locked.
Three weeks later, a light appeared under the door. She knocked again. This time something knocked back – the same rhythm, the same pressure, like an echo that had learned to have opinions.
She pressed her ear to the wood and heard, very faintly, someone on the other side doing the same.
