The apartment grew dim earlier than it should have.
By late afternoon, the tall buildings outside swallowed the light, leaving only a watery gray seeping through the window. As the shadows stretched across the bedroom floor, Wei-An found himself checking the crooked door again and again, like an anxious habit.
The latch held each time he tested it.
But that didn't soothe him.
He'd replayed Mrs. Chen's words in his mind for hours:
"Something in this building pays attention."
It was a strange thing to say-too specific to be superstition, too casual to be a ghost story, too certain to be a misunderstanding. He tried telling himself she was senile, paranoid, maybe even lonely, but the memory of her expression as she stared at his bedroom door stayed with him. It wasn't fear.
It was recognition.
By evening, he still hadn't regained the peace he'd hoped for when he moved in. The apartment felt restless, like an animal pacing behind walls made of plaster and thin paint.
He glanced at the small collection of audio equipment on his table. Speakers, cables, and recorders sat neatly arranged, waiting. He didn't usually test acoustics on his first day somewhere. But the silence of the room felt too thick-like something was wrong with the air itself.
So he did what he always did when something felt off.
He listened.
He set up his portable digital recorder on the bedside table.
Simple test.
Twenty minutes of room tone.
He pressed Record.
A red light blinked on.
The Silence Shifted
At first, nothing happened.
The room remained still, the kind of empty quiet that makes you aware of your own heartbeat. He sat on the edge of his bed, elbows on his knees, watching the door, listening for anything out of place.
Click-click-
He rotated the sensitivity dial slightly higher.
He breathed in.
Held it.
Listened.
There was a faint texture in the silence-like static trying to form a pattern. He frowned. That wasn't normal. New apartments usually had the echo of nearby traffic, or distant talking, or the vibration of pipes.
But 706 had none of that.
It was quiet in the way underground rooms were quiet.
Muted.
Thick.
Wrong.
He stood, walked to the living room, and let the recorder pick up ambient noise while he fetched instant noodles. The water boiled in a kettle, releasing soft steam. Even that sound felt dulled, as though it hit an invisible wall around the apartment and fell flat.
Ten minutes passed.
Twenty.
He returned to the bedroom, hit Stop, and played the recording back through his studio headphones.
What he heard wasn't silence.
It was nothing.
Nothing in the purest sense of the word-like sound had been erased, not captured. Not muffled. Erased. Even his footsteps didn't register when he'd stood or walked away. No rustle of clothes. No soft shift of fabric on the bed.
Just a deep, blank void.
His chest tightened.
He rewound and listened again.
Still nothing.
He checked the mic input. Fine.
Checked the settings. Normal.
Checked the battery. Full.
He played it back a third time, pressing the headphones tight against his ears.
He listened for a full minute before he heard something.
A faint inhale.
Very faint.
A whisper of breath barely scraping the edge of the audio floor.
Then another.
Slow.
Measured.
Almost… rehearsed.
Wei-An froze.
He held his own breath, comparing.
It wasn't his.
It wasn't placed where he'd been sitting.
The mic had been on the bedside table-across the room.
The breathing on the recording came from somewhere much closer to the door.
His eyes shifted instinctively toward the crooked door.
It was shut.
Perfectly shut.
He turned back to the recorder, pulse thudding in his neck. On the track, the breathing grew the slightest bit uneven. Not humanly so-more like someone trying to imitate human breath but getting the rhythm wrong. Too slow, then too fast, then too shallow.
Then-
Something else entered the recording.
A tiny sound.
Smaller than a footstep.
Smaller than a tap.
A faint scrape.
scratch…
Metal? Wood?
It was impossible to tell.
The sound repeated softly, as though something dragged across the floor on the other side of the microphone. He leaned closer, pushing the headphones deeper onto his ears.
scratch… drag… scratch…
Not random.
Rhythmic.
Then-
A soft, almost conversational exhale brushed against the mic.
The hairs on the back of his neck rose.
He had been gone from the room during that time.
He'd been in the kitchen.
Something else had been in his room.
He stopped the recording at once.
The sudden silence in the apartment felt aggressive, closing around him like a cold hand. He set the recorder down slowly, as though afraid of disturbing the air.
His eyes drifted again to the bedroom door.
A few seconds passed.
Then he saw it.
Just barely-
The door moved.
Not much.
Not enough to classify as opening.
Just a subtle tremor, like something had lightly pressed against it from the other side.
A whisper of pressure.
A suggestion of touch.
His breath caught.
"Is… someone there?" he said, instantly regretting it.
The apartment had no answer.
But the quiet behind the door changed.
Shifted.
Deepened.
He couldn't place the feeling at first, only that the silence behind the door now felt occupied. Filled. Like someone was holding their breath on the other side.
He stepped closer, very slowly.
His foot tapped the wooden floor-the sound sharp in the dead room.
The door didn't move.
Nothing pushed back.
No breathing.
No scrape.
Just the door, slightly crooked, sitting in its frame like a watcher pretending to sleep.
He placed his fingertips against it.
The wood was cold.
Too cold.
He jerked his hand back, heart pounding.
He didn't open it.
He couldn't.
Instead, he walked backward until he reached the edge of his bed. He sat down, never taking his eyes off the door, as if looking away would invite whatever stood behind it to act.
For a long time, the apartment remained completely still.
Then-
Very faintly-
On the other side of the door:
tap… tap…
A slow, deliberate imitation of the sound he'd heard the night before.
As though it remembered.
As though it was practicing.
Wei-An's breath trembled out of him.
For the first time since moving in, he felt certain of something he could not explain.
This apartment wasn't quiet because it was empty.
It was quiet because something inside it had been listening for years.