The Tenant Upstairs
The flat above Kit's has been empty for a year, so why do the footsteps at 2 a.m. trace his exact path, and why do they always come a beat before his own? When he finally climbs the stairs to knock, the door is unlocked, the flat is his, and someone is already living his life one floor ahead.
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At two in the morning, the footsteps began again above Kit's bed, slow and deliberate, tracing the exact path he walked every night before sleep. Window to kitchen, kitchen to door, door back to the bed, the same eleven steps he had taken an hour ago, repeated now by someone he could not see. The flat above his had been empty for a year. No lights, no post, no name beside the buzzer for 4B, only a locked door at the top of a stairwell that nobody ever climbed. Kit lay very still and counted, and the steps counted with him, matching his memory stride for stride. He told himself it was the old building settling, or the pipes, or a pigeon trapped somewhere under the roof. But pipes do not pause at the window the way a person pauses to look out at the street. The footsteps stopped exactly above him, at the very spot where his own head rested on the pillow. For a long moment the whole building seemed to hold its breath. Then the floorboards creaked, once, as a weight settled slowly down onto them, as if someone upstairs were lying down in the same spot, at the same time, in the same way. Kit did not sleep. In the morning he went down to the lobby and checked the tenant board, running his finger along the little plastic letters. Beside 4B, where a name should have been, a single word had been slotted in: VACANT.