You've Been Here Before
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Those bland, inoffensive beige walls. That tacky floor made of something that looks like wood, but isn't. The bare minimum amount of furniture. Just enough to call the place livable. It's cheap, badly put together, and probably secondhand. You can already see where the laminate is beginning to peel away from the rotten pulp underneath.

You're not sure who the designer was, but they seem to have had a fetish for uselessly small rooms and long, badly lit corridors. And speaking of illumination, whoever installed the light switches must have been drunk at the time. None of them are where you'd expected them to be. Stranger still, they all appear to be placed at different heights.

There are soap smears on the windows and mirrors from somebody's rushed housekeeping job. But if you were to run a finger across the light fixtures or the top of the refrigerator, it would come away caked with dead bugs and grimy dust. Okay, so it's not paradise. But guess what? It's the best you can afford. You spent hours scrolling through rentals on your app. You know the one.

And it turns out that all the units that are actually near to the city center are insanely overpriced. The cheaper options are so far away that they might as well be in some other city. So here you are, at a dull, middle-of-the-road place that screams, "Yep, it's an apartment!" Until recently, I worked for the local government at this city. The exact location is ultimately unimportant, for reasons you'll soon understand. What matters is what brought me to this place.

At first, the statistics department could call it coincidence. In a city this large, there were bound to be some disappearances, and most of those who vanished were out-of-towners, tourists, business travelers, and other short-term renters. Such cases were notoriously hard to solve, even if our local police department hadn't been so overworked and underfunded. More to the point, admitting that the disappearances even existed was bad for business.

No politician wants to admit that visitors of their city are going missing. And so all of those missing people were swept under the rug. Their families bounced from department to department while everyone waited and hoped for the problem to just go away. Well, almost everyone. Let me begin by making it clear that my supervisor, who we'll call Winston, was an asshole. He was one of those managers who lived for his work and wanted everyone else to do the same.

families and health and dreams be damned. A smug, sniveling prick who couldn't seem to let anyone finish a sentence without pushing up his glasses and cutting in with a, "Well, actually, I hated the guy, but even I'll admit that he was one of the best things to happen to this miserable city." Winston was the only one who paid attention to the pattern, the only one to care.

Our bosses had made it clear that this wasn't a police matter, but that didn't mean that our boring little housing department division couldn't get involved. After all, we had been cracking down on illegal rentals for years now. We knew what we were doing, or at least we thought we did.

The procedure was usually the same. We hunted down unregistered apartments using the photos they had posted online, impersonated travelers to book them, then served the owners their papers when we arrived. It didn't take long to realize, however, that something was different about the apartments where the disappearances had occurred. I never would have noticed it if it hadn't been for a 19-year-old influencer from Oregon who we'll call Sylvia. Sylvia had gotten her start as a surfboard model,

From there, she moved on to promoting dubious organic detox products and selling spicy photos to her highest paying subscribers. On the outside, it looked like she was living her best life. She was a young woman who barely worked, who actually got paid just to travel and take pictures. The more time I spent on Sylvia's case, however, the more those smiles began to feel fake. Sylvia's family, it turned out, were a rough crowd.

Some of them were drowning in debt and tried to extort money from her before. Others showed a history of addiction that made me wonder if Sylvia hadn't picked up a habit of her own during her travels. Then there were her creepy superfans. Just reading a few of the comments those men left on her pictures made me want to puke. Sylvia must have understood the danger. She took photographs of everything.

but I noticed she was careful to leave out any information that could be used to discover her exact location. Her photos were enough, however, for me to notice something unsettling. Her pictures didn't match the apartment where she'd been staying when she disappeared. I visited the rental two weeks ago, wearing my best hangover shades and my tackiest Hawaiian shirt. Nothing about the unit looked out of place until I checked Sylvia's post.

In the photo she had taken, the hallway began on the left and turned almost immediately. In the apartment I was standing in, the hallway began in the kitchen and went straight back to a closet-sized bathroom. A shiver went up my spine when I noticed another detail. The view outside the window was identical to the one in the photo. Not all of the missing individuals had taken photos of the apartment they had rented, but when they had, their pictures matched Sylvia's.

The only thing they didn't match was the reality I found when I visited. Somehow, all of them had been staying in the same place when they disappeared, even though the addresses of the supposed rentals were all different. Using their posts, I was able to partially map the layout of the place. A living room with a sofa, a standing lamp, and a coffee table. On the left, two large windows and a hallway that bends once, or maybe twice. A long, narrow kitchen.

Three or maybe four bedrooms. I wasn't sure about the bathrooms or closets, but I figured what I had was enough to recognize the place when I saw it. The more time that passed, the more I began to dread locating the mysterious apartment. Each time a door opened and revealed a different scene, I breathed a secret sigh of relief. Was I really sure that I wanted to step into a place where so many others had vanished without a trace? The problem with looking for something is that sometimes you actually find it.

There were generally two types of people in charge of those short-term rental apartments: unscrupulous agents with cold salesman's eyes, shark grins, and badly fitting suits. Or deadbeat relatives who'd been given the job by more successful family members who just wanted them out of the way. I figured that the lanky 20-something who unlocked that fateful door for me was of the second variety.

His bloodshot eyes suggested that he hadn't slept the night before. His clothes looked and smelled like he'd been marinating in them for several days. "So this is it," he shrugged, with his foot halfway out the door. He handed me the keys like he couldn't wait to be gone. Maybe I should have said something. Maybe I should have run out the door after him. But I was too stunned by the sight in front of me. I was finally standing in the apartment. I called Winston right away.

and that high-pitched, nasally voice I knew so well. He told me to stay put, that he needed to make a few phone calls. I did as I was told. I trusted him. With nothing better to do, I explored the apartment, although I did my best not to touch anything. My imaginary diagram had been mostly accurate, apart from one thing. There was an empty closet in the main room, where the television would have been if the place had one.

For some reason, I didn't like having my back to it. I don't know what I was afraid of. Masked human traffickers or organ harvesters creeping up behind me from a hidden door? A secret room featuring some serial killer's gruesome trophy collection? I stomped around inside the tiny space to put my fears to rest, and of course, found nothing. A pair of city cops arrived about an hour later. Unofficially, they insisted.

They got to work right away, but it wasn't long before I noticed a perplexed look begin to creep across their faces. When I asked what was wrong, the senior officer just shook his head. They weren't getting anything. No stray hair follicles, no partial fingerprints, no unusual residue. "It's like the apartment ate the evidence," he chuckled. But I didn't find the joke very funny, especially not after my second phone call with Winston. "So?" he asked.

I could partially hear him rolling his eyes on the other end of the line. Stay the night, see what happens. When I began to protest, he cut me off. I'm not sending you in there alone. There's gonna be a squad car parked at the corner all night. If you want, I can have them make hourly checks just to make sure you're sleeping tight. Winston was taunting me and I knew it, but I took the bait anyway. Fine, just remember this when you fill out the overtime slips. I reminded him, then hung up.

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The stakeout crew showed up as soon as the sun began to set. The officers brought me a bag of delicious smelling Chinese food and the paperback novel for my work desk. Winston had been as good as his word. He even called me before he left the office that night. "Stay. Call. Okay?" Winston's voice was breaking up, and no matter where I stood, I couldn't get a better connection. Suddenly, doubtful, I glanced out the window at the parked squad car.

The officer behind the wheel, who was eating the same takeout I was, lifted a chunk of Kung Pao chicken with his chopsticks and waved. Even if calling for backup didn't work, I figured I could just stick my head out the window. I had already wasted half of my day in this boring apartment. There was no way I was going to back out now. I sat down in front of the wobbly table with my takeout, determined to see it through. As I ate, I thought about Francis, one of the others who had gone missing.

Francis had almost nothing in common with Sylvia. He was an overweight 50-something male, a saxophone player in town for the city's jazz festival. He had a criminal record for petty theft and drug use. But that was over three decades ago. As far as I could tell, he was just a washed up musician trying to make it in a hard world. Whoever had hired him hadn't even paid for his accommodation, which was how he had wound up here, in this apartment. What did Francis thought of the place?

Had he been excited? Disappointed? Exhausted from his long flight? More importantly, what had happened to him once he had gotten here? The single lamp cast a lonely glow across the cramped living room. I read my paperback, checked my phone, watched the minutes tick by. At some point, I realized that the closet door had creaked open again. Hardly a surprise in this drafty place. I made sure to slam it shut again before washing my face and getting ready for bed.

Falling asleep wasn't going to be easy. It was more than just the lumpy mattress and funny smelling sheets. It was the noise. I heard, or thought I heard, sounds from the other side of the wall. Knocking, tapping, stomping footfalls. Sometimes they were closer, sometimes further away. But they never stopped entirely. I wondered what the hell the person in the unit next door was doing until I remembered that there was no unit next door.

My bedroom was in the corner of the building. There was nothing beside it but empty air. As a student, I had lived in some buildings with paper-thin walls. I knew that sound could behave strangely, but this was something else. The more time that passed, the more convinced I was that the noises weren't random. In fact, they were almost like some sort of code. By the time I had gotten out of bed and begun searching the apartment, however, they had stopped.

When I went back to sleep, I had a nightmare, although later events would cause me to question whether it was a dream at all. In it, I woke with terrible hunger pangs and I wandered out to the kitchen to see if any of the other guests had left food behind. There was no need to turn on any lights. I could see just fine by the glow of the street lamps outside. When I opened the refrigerator, I didn't find milk and cookies. Instead,

I discovered Francis' severed head on a garnished silver plate. Its half-decayed, bloodshot eyes oozed some sort of viscous clear liquid, and his broken jaw had slid to the side as though it was sneering at me. Its mouth moved. It was whistling a jazz tune. For some reason, instead of running, I went to look out the window, where I had heard someone laughing. It sounded strangely close, especially considering that I wasn't on the first floor.

Peering through the half-open blinds, I saw a sickeningly thin man flying in the air. No, not flying. Falling. Falling forever. Stuck in the same position with his skeletally thin arms outstretched and his hairless head thrown back.

There were bits of shattered crystal on his jacket, like he'd jumped out of a window. His sunken eyes met my gaze, and his gumless, starvation-long teeth shaped themselves into a grin. I woke up in a puddle of sweat and went to the bathroom to splash some water on my face. The hallway was pitch dark, and the light switch wasn't where I expected to find it, of course. When the lights finally flickered on, I realized I had opened the wrong door.

I was standing in another one of the tiny bedrooms. A rush of vertigo swept over me. Had I miscounted my steps? Gotten turned around somehow? I wanted to believe it, even though I knew better. The bathroom should have been here. I was sure of it. And yet it wasn't. There was a half-finished glass of water on the nightstand. For some reason, the sight sent a shiver up my spine.

After all, if it had been here before, wouldn't the forensics team have mentioned it? There it was again, that noise from between the walls. I reversed out of there fast, suddenly afraid to turn my back on that eerie little room. Even after I glanced away and spotted the bathroom one door down, I didn't want to look again. I was somehow sure that if I did, I would find something much less innocent than a half-finished glass of water.

The sensation only lasted for as long as it took me to retreat back to my own cramped bedroom. Glancing out the window at the silent squad car down below, I felt like a fool. What was I going to do? Call for backup over a few banging noises? A bad dream and a glass of water? My nerves were getting to me, that was all. I had convinced myself that this apartment was the key to those disappearances.

And now my mind was inventing danger to cover up the sad truth that all my hard work had only led me to a dead end. Someone was humming the jazz tune from my dream, and this time, there was no doubt about it. They were in the apartment. I was halfway down the hallway when I realized that I had left my phone on the bedside table. But as it turned out, it didn't matter. The kitchen was just as dark and empty as the rest of the apartment, but I hardly gave it a second glance.

My eyes were fixed on the other side of the living room, where a hallway identical to the one I had come running down extended ahead of me. No matter how many times I checked, there was no denying it. I was at the center of some sort of loop, and the front door was gone. I told myself not to panic. I didn't know what was happening, but I wasn't alone. I rushed across the room to signal the cruiser, but it was nowhere to be seen.

There was no sign of life in the alley outside, apart from a bone-thin stray dog lapping from a puddle of black water. Its eyes glowed like hot coals as it lifted its head and returned my stare. With a shudder, I turned away. My phone. If only I could get to it. I could call for help. But which hallway would lead me back to it? I decided to return the way I came. But as soon as I turned around the first bend in the hallway, it was clear that I'd made a mistake.

These weren't the rooms that I'd come from. The layout was wrong, and there was something else too. Scratch marks on the wall. It was like someone had been trying to dig through the plaster with their bare hands. In other areas, huge chunks were missing, as though the same person had tried to smash through the wall. To escape, I thought, then tried to drive that unpleasant idea from my mind. Whatever they had been trying to do, they had failed.

The walls were thicker than they looked, thicker than they should have been possible, and all that effort had barely made a dent in them. Peering into the first bedroom, I saw that the window had been shattered and then hastily blocked off, like whoever had resealed it had been afraid of something outside. The window in the second bedroom was open as well, but something was moving beneath the cloth that covered it. As I crossed the threshold, a trio of black birds squawked into the air.

They had been eating something, I realized. Something red and stringy. Something that had left a dark, foul-smelling stain on the carpet below. I didn't remember the apartment even having carpet, but that was the least of my concerns now. The birds were larger than they had seemed at first, and now they were swooping toward me, those sharp, cruel beaks aimed directly at my eyes.

I slammed the door just in time, but I could feel their body slam against the wood at my back. There was one cracked open bedroom door remaining and a disturbing tripping noise coming from the bathroom, but I had had enough. The carpet alone was proof that this wasn't where I'd come from. As I retreated back into the main room, I discovered that it, too, had somehow changed. Now there was a third hallway, this one beginning in the kitchen, and someone was coming down it.

They walked with fast, unsteady footsteps. Before I even knew what I was doing, I had bolted across the living room and ducked into the closet. The space was pitch black, the air cool. It seemed larger than I remembered, but I much preferred it to being out there with whatever was coming.

I'll never forget what I saw rounding the corner of that hallway. That bent, emaciated torso. Those long, gaunt limbs. The hair dangling in tangled clumps from that skeletal head. Sylvia no longer looked anything like her Instagram photos. She had clearly been lost and starving for weeks. Her filthy, sliced-up feet left crimson prints on the white tile as she approached, clutching a piece of broken glass like a talisman. I wanted to help.

But I had a feeling that all I would get for my trouble was a razor-sharp chunk of glass to the chest. I was the monster in the closet, I realized. If she was truly as scared and deranged as she appeared, she would probably either flee or attack me immediately. I held my breath, waiting for her to pass by. She was staggering through the living room when she launched herself at the sofa without warning, hacking the stuffing from it with her shard of glass.

Soon she was sitting in a pile of blood-stained cotton, clutching her face in her hand. "It's here," Sylvia murmured. "It's got to be here." With an almighty effort, she lurched to her feet and carried on down the opposite hallway. I didn't dare to move until I could no longer hear the floor creaking beneath her uneven footsteps. Sylvia had been missing for eight weeks. What the hell had this place done to her during all that time?

It seemed as though Sylvia had continued straight ahead, unsure of what else to do. I followed her. I told myself that I was doing so because it was more dangerous to not keep track of her. But the truth was that I was terrified of being left alone in the place. Any companion, even an insane one, was better than none at all. Eczema isn't always obvious, but it's real. And so is the relief from Evglyss.

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Even so, each time I rounded a corner, I expected to see those round bloodshot eyes, that insane grin, the flash of broken glass as it swung at my face. I was so preoccupied with avoiding an ambush that I didn't notice that this hallway had two more bends than the one that I was used to. There were more bedroom doors as well, except all of these ones were all closed. Something slammed against the door beside me, making me jump. Whatever it was, it was a lot larger than a blackbird.

"Hey there," someone whispered. "Why don't you let me out of here?" I froze and listened. Had I really just heard what I thought I'd heard? "Please?" The voice was sickly sweet and simpering.

but there was something underneath it something gravelly and wrong i know you're out there it hissed open the door it'll only take a second and i promise i'll make it worth your while open the door open the door open the door open up i ran no longer caring who heard me there were clearly worse things than other lost and frightened survivors in this place whatever the hell it was

I racked my brain for information about the other missing persons, hoping for some sort of clue, some eureka moment that would help me to escape. Sylvia, the 20-something influencer. Francis, the aging jazz musician. There had also been Brian, a young salesman in town for a bachelor party. Lei, a Chinese exchange student. And Anna, a language teacher who was about my age.

If I closed my eyes, I could almost see their faces. The group couldn't have been more different, and now I was one of them. I was so lost in thought that I was slipping in the puddle before I knew it was there. I grabbed the wall to steady myself. Its surface was sticky and unpleasantly warm. I looked down. I wasn't sure what I was looking at, at first. There were too many scattered pieces, too many jumbled parts for it to make sense.

Slowly, my brain processed the strands of sinew, the bare bone, the ribcage spread wide like an eagle's wings, the jawless, emptied-eyed face. I no longer had to wonder what had happened to the exchange student. Lay, my eyes darted to the ceiling, around the hallway, looking for a sign of what could have done this to him. It was a perfectly ordinary apartment corridor, apart from the gory corpse in front of me and the fact that it seemed to have no end.

I swallowed. My throat was dry. I had no choice but to keep moving. It was almost like the impossible structure had read my thoughts. When I turned the corner, the hallway dead-ended in a single closed door. I could hear dripping on the other side. I didn't know what was in there, and I didn't want to find out. I turned to go back the way I'd come, only to discover that the way was sealed by a solid wall behind me. The door creaked open. Light and steam seeped out into the hallway.

Now I understood the panic that had made whoever it was start gouging at the walls. Suddenly, anything seemed preferable to going into that bathroom. Unfortunately, it only took a quick look around to confirm that I had no choice. Summoning all my courage, I took a deep breath and pushed the door open the rest of the way. The bathtub was full, the faucet dripping.

It was as though whoever had filled it had just stepped out to grab a towel, and might be coming back at any minute. There was no other way forward. I was trapped. Or was I? My eyes drifted to the cabinet under the sink. Was it just me? Or did there seem to be a cool breeze coming from down there? A tunnel hidden behind a bathroom cabinet. Only in this insane place did that idea make sense.

With no light sources to speak of, it looked as black and inescapable as a monster's gullet. Its walls, if you could call them that, were bare pink insulation. I felt itchy just looking at them. How far might that passage go? What if it started getting narrower around me? What if I fell down some action movie ventilation shaft in the dark? The sound of approaching footsteps forced me to act.

It was either crawl forward or turn and face whatever was coming. I prepared to bend down and… No, I couldn't do it. I couldn't go into that awful hole. The door swung open. I shut my eyes tight. A near-piercing shriek made me open them again.

Anna the language teacher stared at me, wide-eyed, wrapped only in a fluffy pink towel. "What are you doing in my bathroom?" I realized how I must have appeared. Eyes sunken, hair a mess, clothes stained with some stranger's blood. If I told her my story, even I wouldn't believe it. I lifted my hands, hoping to show that I wasn't a threat. "I know how this looks," I admitted. "I know I'm not supposed to be here, but I need to ask you, where do you think you are?"

The address Anna sputtered was on the opposite side of town from where I should have been. "I work for the local government," I went on. "And something is very wrong with this place. We need to leave." Anna backed out of the bathroom slowly. When she reached the door of the nearest bedroom, she froze. "What is this?" Anna stammered. "Where are my clothes?" I recognized the look on her face. I'd worn the same expression the first time that the apartment had arranged itself while I wasn't looking.

Although Anna must have unpacked before her shower, there was no suitcase on the bed in front of her. The dead flower in the vase beside it and empty dresser drawers suggested that no one had been here for a long time. "It's already started! Come on!" Anna yelped as I grabbed her hand and ran toward where I hoped the exit would be. Instead, we rounded the corner to find another bare, solid wall. "Will someone please tell me what's going on here?" Anna snapped. I did my best to explain.

But when I finished, Anna was even more confused than she'd been before. "So we've got to get out of here, right? Why not just go out the window?" Anna was already moving toward the bedroom, ready to open its dusty curtains. I thought about the bird-like things I had seen earlier. "There are bad things out there," I began to say. But Anna had already halted. There was a noise coming from behind the curtains, a sort of eager, excited breathing that got faster the closer Anna got to the window.

"Come on!" I gripped her arm, making her jump. "We have to take the tunnel!" Anna asked once again what I meant, and then I showed her. Her jaw dropped. "There's no fucking way that I'm crawling into that tunnel naked!" As I marveled at a combination of words I had never heard before, Anna looked me over. "How about you be a gentleman and give me your pants and sweatshirt, huh? It's either that, or I sit down right here, refuse to go anywhere, and let you be responsible for whatever happens to me afterwards!"

And that was how I came to be crawling through the insulation choked tunnel in my boxers. Anna followed behind, blaming me, the local government, and God for allowing this nightmare apartment to exist in the first place. I tried my best to be understanding, but it was hard when everything itched. I had always been terrified of spiders, and I couldn't help thinking about how much larger and more vicious those birds had been compared to the ones I was used to. If there were other things like them inside these tunnels…

My hand brushed against something wooden and hollow-feeling. The interior of a cabinet door. I pushed it open and saw a familiar-looking kitchen on the other side. There was no sign that anyone else was here, yet still I hesitated. "Well…" Anna tapped my ankle irritably and got me moving.

I crawled out into yet another incarnation of the apartment. This time, everything looked to be in order. The hastily cleaned countertops and floors were just how I remembered. The refrigerator hummed cheerily. The place was so quiet that I hardly dared to breathe.

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I looked out the window, which appeared to be covered up outside by sheets of some weird, gauze-like material. Looking closer, I could see the skinless, half-eaten corpses of some of those large black birds I'd seen earlier. Everything was most certainly not fine. Hey, guy! Anna stammered behind me. There's some kind of black blanket covering everything in this hallway. As I turned around, I understood what I had seen outside the window. Webbing, which meant...

Anna came barreling past me, her eyes wide. Behind her, I could see that the hallway was indeed a black tunnel. A tunnel formed by thousands of scurrying spider bodies. I was hurried to keep up with Anna as she ran. To the apartment's front door. Was this it? Had we somehow escaped? I should never have been so naive. We had only run into yet another version of the apartment. And the ink-black, shiny wave of spiders was already slipping through the cracks in the door behind us.

My eyes shot to the kitchen, identical to the last one that we'd left behind. And I couldn't believe that I hadn't thought of it sooner. Maybe it was adrenaline. Maybe it was insanity. But I almost felt like laughing. This apartment, or whatever it was, was trying to kill us. Why weren't we fighting back?

I dashed her the roll of paper towels beside the stove, soaked its tip in vegetable oil, and struck the kitchen lighter beneath it. The tip burst into flames. Anna, wise to what I was trying, held a cushion from the couch up to my makeshift torch. As soon as it began to smolder, she flung it at the skittering wave that was fast approaching us and ignited another. I don't know what I had expected. That the sea of spiders would stop at once? That a deep voice would come booming out of the walls to negotiate with us?

Of course, nothing even remotely like it occurred. The spiders scurried around the flames and kept coming, and now Anna and I were trapped inside a burning building. We were back down the winding hallway, only this time, there was no bathroom with a tunnel beneath its sink waiting for us at the end. There was nowhere for us to run from our own mistake. The air was hot, foul-smelling, and hazy with smoke. The skittering was so loud that I could almost feel those sharp little legs, those bloated bellies and tiny fangs.

There was a bang as Anna kicked open one of the bedroom doors. "Will you get in here and help me already?" she screeched. Anna had flipped the twin bed against the wall and was scrambling up it toward a small square door. "Don't you get it?" she coughed. "These places are all connected! There's always a way forward!" "Only if you survive to find it," I thought, but I scrambled up after her anyway. Soon we had crawled further than the apartment's floor plan should have allowed. Further than should have been possible.

Already the heat and smoke behind us were beginning to fade. Each version of the apartment, I realized, must exist in its own miniature universe. Destroying a single iteration of it would make about as much difference as subtracting one from infinity. The air was getting cooler, the space grew narrower, and the surface beneath our hands and knees changed into something plasticky and covered in frost. The cold burned my fingertips, something crunched beneath my hand.

Up ahead, Anna pushed more chilling, unknowable objects out of the way then... Ow! She had banged her head. Still grumbling, Anna pushed at something in front. Light flooded in, and I finally realized we were in the back of a freezer. Pushing aside forgotten bags of peas and unfinished ice cream cartons, Anna and I squirmed out into the nth version of the apartment.

This time, Anna went right for the window. She grabbed a floor lamp. She was getting ready to smash the glass. "Stay here if you want," she grunted. "But I'm gonna chance it." I told her about the man I'd seen in what I thought was a nightmare. The man who looked like he was falling forever. Anna had second thoughts. But it wasn't my story that gave her pause. It was something that we had both noticed beside the closet. Something that we hadn't found in any of the apartments so far. A laptop computer.

It looked a little old and I didn't recognize the brand, but that didn't matter. What was important was that it had power and a connection to the internet. I went immediately to my organization's webpage. If I could get a message out to Winston, I had no doubt that he would send in the cavalry. We would be saved! Except my login information didn't work. On the personnel page, I had no listing. And neither did Winston. All the names and faces were different.

Anna stood behind me, chewing on her thumb and drumming her feet on the floor. "I'm gonna try to contact the police. Wait!" Anna cut me off. "Don't do that. I don't think it would work anyway. The apartment wouldn't let it. What's your bright idea then?" I rolled my eyes, then gasped when Anna went to an apartment rental website.

While I looked nervously from hallway to hallway, expecting something horrible to come for us at any second, she opened an account, took photos of the room with the laptop's camera, and set up a listing. The only way that door is opening to the outside world is if it's letting more victims in, Anna explained. We can't call for help, but maybe we can find replacements.

I thought back to the exhausted looking young man who had first let me into the apartment. How he had held the door open with his foot. How he had bolted as soon as he had the chance. He had gotten away with it. Which meant that Anna and I could too. Did I know it was wrong? Of course. But I wanted to live. I had gotten into this because I'd wanted to know the truth about a string of disappearances. But I never signed up to be slowly tortured to death by a sentient, interdimensional apartment building.

If you're ever face to face with a situation like this, it's a lot tougher to be a hero than you might think. My advantage was that Anna, who was clearly even more determined to survive than I was, was doing all the dirty work. The ad was posted, and before the setting sun began to stretch shadows across the barren walls, we had our first renters. Their previous host had canceled at the last minute, and they were eager to check in as soon as possible. Anna and I just wanted to be out of the place before dark.

It was dusk when a taxi cab pulled up outside. A trio of sunburned, college-aged travelers spilled out into the alley, looking equal parts irritated and excited. They hitched up their luggage and hurried to buzz at the door. Anna and I watched each other in silence as we listened to their footsteps on the staircase. We were both complicit in this, both responsible for what might happen to our guests. "You might want to try and find a jacket," Anna commented.

I realized that I was still in my underwear. I was reluctant to open the closet for any reason, but Anna had a point. If the trio coming up the stairs thought we were perverts, they might not stick around. Wincing, I turned the knob and inched the closet open. Sure enough, there was a black duster jacket hanging inside. After I slipped it on, my navy blue boxers could pass for a pair of 80s-style short shorts. There was a knock on the front door.

For a second I doubted, suddenly sure that it was a trap, but Anna was already opening the door. I couldn't believe what I saw outside. An ordinary tile hallway with ugly beige walls in need of paint and grimy windows. The world outside! It was so beautiful I wanted to cry. Anna stuck her foot through the threshold to prevent the door from shutting as she waved the guests inside.

I struggled to regain my composure, reminding myself that I was supposed to act like a landlord, showing clients around a not-so-great rental unit. "This is the kitchen," I murmured, feeling like I was in a dream. "The bedrooms and bathrooms are down the hall." Anna, still standing in the doorway, tapped her wrist. I understood her message. Who knew how long this chance to escape might stay open? The three college-aged tourists stared. Were they onto me? Were they going to bolt and leave us here?

Then I realized they were waiting for the keys. Anna pulled them out of my pocket and tossed them to a buff young man in a white tank top. "Enjoy your stay, guys!" she shouted. We were out the door before we had a chance to feel guilty. We have no paperwork, no families, no evidence of our existence prior to the moment we left the apartment. In a hundred tiny, barely noticeable ways, this isn't the world that either of us came from. But at least we're alive.

Maybe that's what compelled me to tell my story. Good old fashioned survivor's guilt. After all, no matter what world you're in, you might one day encounter an apartment like the one I've described. It won't be great. It won't be terrible either. It will just seem like your last, best option. You might be tempted to book it. But I'm warning you now, it's more dangerous than you can possibly imagine.

Big shout out to Trinity, Mark, Michelle, Charles, Melanie, and Nicole. Welcome to Dr. No Sleep Premium. I seriously appreciate your support. If you want to join them and get the show ad-free, including access to over 70 exclusive bonus stories, start your 7-day free trial of Dr. No Sleep Premium by going to patreon.com slash drnosleep. That's patreon.com slash drnosleep.