April 3rd, 1919
The building wasn't always cursed.
At least, not in the way it is now.
Before the walls whispered.
Before the doors shifted.
Before the contracts grew teeth.
It was just a structure of red brick and good intentions.
The landlord, Mr. Hal Wren, had a vision—a modest apartment complex to house war veterans returning to a broken country.
He called it "The Homeward."
Eight units.
Four floors.
No secrets.
At first.
Tenant Zero arrived on a rainy Tuesday.
Name: Elias Grieve.
Age: 27.
Former medical corpsman. Quiet. Thin. Eyes always looking over his shoulder, even when no one was behind him.
Hal liked him immediately.
Paid on time. Never complained.
But after three weeks in Unit 2B, strange things started happening.
First, the birds stopped nesting near the building.
Then came the smell—earthy, wet, like soil left too long in shadow.
Finally, Hal noticed something that sent a chill down his spine:
The lease.
Elias's signature had shifted.
The ink had bled upward, stretching toward the header like vines crawling up stone.
And next to Elias's name, someone had written in tight red script:
"1 of many."
Hal confronted Elias about it.
He knocked. No answer.
He opened the door to find Elias sitting in a chair in the center of the room, staring at a mirror.
The mirror didn't reflect Hal.
Only Elias.
And behind Elias—
A dark hallway that didn't exist in the apartment.
"What is this?" Hal asked.
Elias didn't turn.
He just whispered:
"They found me."
Hal felt the room grow cold.
He stepped back, tripped over the welcome mat—and found a paper folded beneath it.
The lease.
But not the one Elias signed.
This one was bound in skin.
From that moment on, Hal never saw Elias again.
Unit 2B stood empty.
But sometimes, guests heard footsteps pacing inside.
And the mirror—still hanging—reflected people who weren't there.
He tried to remove it.
Hammered it. Smashed it.
But every morning, it was back on the wall.
Perfect. Polished.
And beneath it, written in Elias's handwriting:
"The contract holds."
Things got worse after that.
Each new tenant seemed… off.
A woman in Unit 3A sleepwalked every night and wrote pages of gibberish she claimed were "requests."
A child in Unit 1C drew pictures of doors with mouths.
An old man in 4B tore out his tongue, saying "The walls already heard enough."
Hal searched the original blueprints.
They didn't match what the building had become.
There were now five floors on some pages.
Six on others.
All different. All shifting.
He finally hired a priest.
Father Donnelly.
The man walked the halls with incense and murmured prayers.
Until he opened the door to Unit 2B.
He never came out.
Just his shoes—left neatly outside the threshold, smoking.
And the words scrawled on the walls inside:
"Elias isn't dead.Elias is the lease."
Hal broke.
He tried to burn the building.
Soaked the basement in gasoline.
Lit a match.
Nothing caught fire.
The flame simply blinked out.
And a voice behind him whispered:
"This isn't your building anymore."
That night, Hal received a letter beneath his own door.
Same wax seal.
Same ink as Elias's lease.
It read:
"You signed it, Hal. You built it.You offered the door."
"Now keep it open."
And beneath that, in Elias's writing:
"Contract: Eternal. Terms: Memory. Enforcement: Shadow."
Tenant Zero didn't haunt the building like a ghost.
He became its spine.
His memory wove itself into the nails, the beams, the screws.
Every new lease signed wasn't on paper anymore.
It was written on time.
Carved into the backs of the mirrors.
Scribed in the echo of keys turning locks.
Elias Grieve was the first tenant to die in the Homeward.
But also the first to live forever inside it.
Years passed.
The building changed names.
Changed owners.
Changed faces.
But Unit 2B remained untouched.
And the mirror stayed mounted.
Waiting.
Sometime in the late 1970s, a new name appeared in the directory:
"Halloway, Noreen — 4B"
She would be the next.
But she wasn't the last.
Because the building still whispered:
"Contract open.Next clause pending."
And somewhere, deep in the heart of the building—buried between floorboards and forgotten blueprints—a door without a knob still waits.
Etched above it:
"TENANT ZERO"