The voice outside Apartment 4B started three weeks after I moved in.
I moved into Apartment 4B because it was cheap, close to work, and—this mattered more than I admitted at the time—quiet.
I had spent the previous year living above a pub. I was done with bass through the floor, men shouting at taxis at two in the morning, and bottles being poured into recycling bins at dawn. The new building was the opposite. Four floors, two flats on each landing, thick carpet in the corridor, old brass numbers screwed into cream doors. Most of the tenants were older than me. Nobody had parties. Nobody even seemed to have visitors.
The silence felt expensive, even though the rent wasn't.
The first odd thing happened three weeks after I moved in.
I had fallen asleep on the sofa with the television on. At 1:41 a.m. I woke because someone was standing outside my front door.
I couldn't see them, obviously. But I could hear the tiny noises people make when they are trying not to make noise. A shoe turning slightly on carpet. Fabric brushing a wall. A breath held too long and then released through the nose.
I muted the television.
The person outside went completely still.
My front door had no peephole. There was a frosted pane beside it, but the hallway light had gone out on its timer, so all I could see was darkness.
I waited maybe thirty seconds.
Then someone whispered, very softly, "Nori?"
I stopped breathing.
That was what my father called me when I was little.
Not Nora. Not Nor. Nori.
He was the only person who ever used it, and he had died when I was seventeen.
I sat on the sofa and stared toward the hallway.
The voice came again.
"Nori. Open up."
It wasn't my father's voice. I want to be clear about that. If it had sounded like him, I think I would have screamed immediately. It sounded like a woman. Older. Calm. Almost bored.
That somehow made it worse.
I picked up my phone and opened the building WhatsApp group. There were only seven of us in it. I typed, Is anyone outside 4B?
No answer.
I considered calling the police, but I felt stupid. Someone might have heard my dad use the name years ago. Except nobody in this city had known him. I grew up almost two hundred miles away.
Then the person outside touched the door.
Not knocked.
Just placed their fingertips against it.
I know because the wood gave a tiny sequence of dry clicks, one after another, at about shoulder height.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
Like someone slowly setting down each finger.
I called the police.
While I was speaking to the dispatcher, the corridor light switched on.
For a second a shadow appeared through the frosted glass beside my door. A head. Shoulders. Someone standing too close.
Then it moved away.
By the time the police arrived, the corridor was empty.
They checked the stairwell and the street. One officer spoke to the man in 4A. He hadn't heard anything. The woman downstairs had been asleep. The front entrance locked automatically after ten and there was no sign of forced entry.
The officer asked if an ex knew where I lived.
No.
"Could somebody be playing a joke?"
I said I didn't know.
I didn't tell him about the nickname.
The voice outside Apartment 4B started learning my routine
Nothing happened for six days.
I convinced myself it had been some drunk person at the wrong building. The nickname was coincidence. Maybe they'd said "Laurie" or "sorry" and my half-asleep brain had turned it into something personal.
Then, on Thursday, I came home from a late shift and found the lift already waiting on the ground floor with its doors open.
That wasn't unusual.
What was unusual was that when I stepped inside, the button for four was already lit.
I hadn't touched it.
I almost stepped back out.
Then I laughed at myself, stayed in, and rode up.
When the lift doors opened, the corridor light was off.
I walked toward 4B using my phone screen to see.
Halfway down the corridor, the light clicked on.
There was nobody there.
But my doormat was upside down.
I fixed it, went inside, locked the door, and pushed a dining chair under the handle even though I knew a chair like that wouldn't actually stop anyone.
At 2:06 a.m., I woke to my phone vibrating.
The building WhatsApp group had a new message.
It came from Mrs. Powell in 3A.
Nora are you in the hall?
I typed back immediately.
No. I'm in bed.
Three dots appeared.
Then disappeared.
Then appeared again.
Someone just went upstairs.
I sat up.
Did you see them?
Her reply came almost at once.
No. Heard them. Bare feet.
I stared at the bedroom door.
The building settled around me.
Then, directly outside my flat, came the soft slap of a bare foot on carpet.
Pause.
Another step.
Pause.
Another.
Whoever it was wasn't walking past my door.
They were pacing from one side of it to the other.
I called Mrs. Powell instead of messaging.
She whispered when she answered.
"They're on your floor."
"I know."
"Don't open the door."
"I'm not going to."
There was a pause.
Then she said, "Who is Nori?"
My whole body went cold.
"What did you say?"
"The person on the stairs," she whispered. "When they passed my floor, they were saying it. Nori. Nori. Nori."
Something stopped outside my bedroom wall.
Not the front door.
The wall beside my bed.
That wall backed onto the corridor near the lift.
I could hear breathing through it.
Mrs. Powell was still talking, but I wasn't listening anymore.
The breathing moved slowly along the wall until it reached the point directly beside my pillow.
Then the woman whispered through the plaster.
"There you are."
I left the flat the next morning.
I stayed with a coworker for nearly two weeks while the landlord changed the locks and installed a camera in the corridor.
Nothing appeared on the footage.
No stranger. No person climbing the stairs. No one standing outside 4B.
But the camera did record something I still don't understand.
At 2:06 on the second night after it was installed, the hallway light came on.
The corridor was empty.
My doormat slowly turned over by itself.
Not flipped as if caught by a draft.
Turned.
One corner lifted.
Then another.
Then the whole mat rotated until the word WELCOME faced my door instead of the hallway.
The landlord blamed airflow.
I moved anyway.
That was eight months ago.
My new place is on the other side of town. Different landlord, different building, third floor, solid fire door with a peephole and a chain.
I haven't told anyone there about what happened.
I don't use my full name on the intercom.
I definitely don't use the nickname.
Last Sunday, at 1:41 in the morning, I woke because someone had slid something under my front door.
It was a photograph.
An old one.
Me at about six years old, sitting on my father's shoulders at the seaside.
I know the picture. My mother has the original in an album at her house.
On the back, in handwriting I didn't recognize, were four words.
I found you, Nori.
While I was reading it, five fingertips touched the other side of the door.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
I haven't opened it.
I don't think I ever will.
DarkRecord editorial note: This is an original fictional submission-style horror story. The named submitter and events are fictional.
