The air in the apartment was the color of old smoke, thick and yellow. It clung to everything—the peeling floral wallpaper, the sticky formica of the kitchen table, the fine film of grease on the windows that turned the morning light into a dirty smear. For months, Sarah had told herself it was just the building, the way old things get, worn down and a little rank. But lately, she felt the apartment wasn't just old; it was sour, as if it were digesting its own decay.The small, strange things had started so subtly. A shoe misplaced, then found in the freezer. A photo on the wall, inexplicably tilted. One morning, she found a single, perfect coil of her own hair sitting on her pillow—she hadn't seen it fall, hadn't noticed it missing from her head.
Each time, she rationalized it away, a product of her own distraction. But the rationalizations were wearing thin, chafed raw by the constant, low-level dread.The noises had begun last week. Not the creaks of an old house settling, but deliberate sounds. The quiet, rhythmic clink-clink-clink of a fork tapping against a ceramic plate, always from the empty kitchen. A faint, wet scratching from inside the walls, like something with too many legs was trying to get out. She would hold her breath, listening, but the moment she moved, the sounds would stop, replaced by a profound, suffocating silence.Last night, a new detail had been added to the unsettling tableau.
She had been drifting to sleep when a faint sound, like dry rice falling onto a hardwood floor, started coming from her closet. She pulled the covers tighter, her heart a frantic, panicked bird against her ribs. In the pale moonlight filtering through the greasy window, she saw it. A shadow, the shape of a small child, was pressed against the bottom of her bedroom door, unmoving. She froze, her breath caught in her throat. The shadow was completely still for several minutes, a perfect cutout of darkness. Then, slowly, the dark shape slid upwards, rising until it stretched into a long, impossibly thin column, its head now level with the doorknob. The tapping sound from the closet stopped.A new sound began. The rhythmic click of a key turning in a lock, coming from her bedside table drawer. It was the drawer she kept her phone in at night.
She watched, paralyzed, as the shadow-child began to shrink again, its form flowing downwards into a low puddle of blackness at the foot of the door. The doorknob clicked. The door opened inward a crack, revealing nothing but deeper shadow. A whispered sound, dry and crumbling, slithered from the opening."Mommy..."The voice was not a child's, not really. It was a cruel mockery, like a handful of dry leaves scraped across a microphone. Sarah's blood ran cold. She knew, with a certainty that reached into her bones, that she had no child.The crack in the door widened, revealing a glimpse of an eye, pale and lidless, staring from the darkness. The eye was not human. It was faceted, like a fly's, and it seemed to see all of her at once.She screamed. She screamed until her throat was raw, until her lungs burned. But the screaming was a sound that belonged to her, a sound that she controlled.
The apartment was ready for a sound of its own. The old wallpaper began to peel away from the walls with a terrible wet ripping, revealing not plaster, but a vast, black fungus that pulsed with a soft, bioluminescent light. The floral patterns shriveled and fell away like rotting petals. The fungus covered every surface, its filaments snaking toward her bed.The voice, a chorus now, whispered from a hundred fungal lips: "Mommy... we have been so hungry...". and the tapping began again in the kitchen. Clink-clink-clink. The apartment was digesting.