The elevator doors groaned open.
James stepped forward, the fluorescent light above flickering like a dying eye. The inside of the lift wasn't metal-it was stone, like an old cathedral crypt. Carvings lined the walls, etched in a language he didn't recognize, but somehow understood in his blood.
Amaka hesitated.
"This place," she whispered, "is older than the building. Older than the city. The Apartment was built around it. A mask for something ancient."
They stepped in together.
The doors closed.
The elevator didn't descend like a machine. It sank-soundless, almost organic, as if it were being swallowed. The ceiling pulsed slightly. The light turned red. Then black.
Time passed-how long, neither of them knew.
When the doors reopened, they weren't in a basement.
They were in a cavern.
---
The air was thick-wet, metallic, breathing.
Walls of bone and petrified flesh spiraled upward and downward, without end. In the center stood a staircase descending into a dark pit.
James felt his legs go weak.
The staircase was made of gravestones, mortared together, many of them still engraved.
He read one aloud.
> "James O. Agbaje – 1971–1998. Died Screaming."
He blinked.
That was... his uncle's name.
Amaka pointed to another.
> "John U. Nwosu – Lost. Never buried. Claimed by the Apartment."
"These aren't just tombstones," she whispered. "They're records. Every soul it ever swallowed."
James peered into the abyss below. The stairs wound down in tight, nauseating spirals. At the very bottom was a faint, green glow.
That's where the final relic was.
And the thing that guarded it.
He took the first step.
---
Each level down was colder.
More distorted.
James felt memories slipping away. Not violently, but gently-like silk threads being unspooled.
> The name of his first love.
The taste of his mother's cooking.
The sound of his brother's voice.
He gripped the wall to stay grounded.
"We're being unraveled," he said.
Amaka nodded. "It wants us empty when we reach the Well. Hollow people are easier to possess."
"Possess?"
"It doesn't want to kill us, James," she said. "It wants to become us."
As they descended further, the walls began to change. Carvings gave way to faces, frozen in screams-dozens, hundreds, thousands, all embedded into the flesh-like rock.
They whispered as they passed.
> "Turn back..."
"It wears skin..."
"It dreams in your voice..."
Then silence.
They reached a landing.
Before them was a massive stone archway, carved in red symbols.
Beyond it, only blackness.
Amaka held James's hand, trembling.
"You don't speak when you enter. No matter what you see. It'll try to talk to you in the voice of someone you love. You can't answer it."
James nodded.
Together, they stepped into the Well.
---
Inside, there was no light.
Only awareness.
It was a space that wasn't space. A room that bent reality. A place that felt... wet and warm, like the inside of something alive.
James couldn't see Amaka anymore-but he could feel her presence nearby.
Then-
> A voice.
His mother's voice.
> "James, sweetie. Come here. Let me hold you. It's okay now. The Apartment's gone."
He froze.
The voice was perfect. Kind. Familiar.
> "It wasn't your fault, baby."
He gritted his teeth.
He did not respond.
More voices rose.
> His father.
His brother.
Even a young version of himself.
They surrounded him.
"You should've gone back for him..."
"You forgot her birthday..."
"You left them in that house..."
Then the voices grew louder-merged into one.
A single, immense presence filled the chamber.
James could feel it... slithering behind the veil of shadow.
It wasn't a monster in the traditional sense.
It was an idea.
A creature made of every forgotten thing.
Every regret.
Every grief never spoken.
It whispered directly into his soul.
> "You came for the final relic."
> "You are the final relic."
Suddenly-light bloomed.
But not from a lamp or flame.
From within James.
A glow radiated from his chest-where the other relics had settled like seeds. Now they pulsed in rhythm, casting away the dark.
And in the center of the Well, revealed for the first time, stood the Source.
A being taller than a man but twisted in form-its head a cage of ribs, its limbs made of unwritten stories and teeth, its heart beating with voices.
Amaka appeared beside James, her face pale.
"It's waking," she said. "It knows we're close. If we take the final relic, it'll do everything it can to stop us."
"What is it?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she pointed to a pedestal behind the creature.
Upon it was a book.
Bound in human skin. Inked in fading blood.
James understood instantly.
The final relic wasn't an object.
It was his story.
The story he never told.
The story the Apartment wanted to keep buried forever.
The book sat motionless.
Bound in what looked like pale human skin, its cover twitched now and then, like it was breathing. The title was etched in living script, changing every time James blinked:
> THE LOST HISTORY OF JAMES OKON
THE ONE WHO RAN
PROPERTY OF THE APARTMENT
The Source stood between him and it-taller than the ceiling should've allowed, its body a pulsing chaos of bone, muscle, and echoing voices.
James could feel the creature trying to slither inside his mind. Not through force, but through familiarity.
It spoke again-in his own voice.
> "James... this is where you end. But it's also where you begin."
Amaka stepped forward, holding the three relics in her trembling hands. They glowed brighter the closer they came to the book, reacting like magnets.
"I've never seen it this close," she whispered. "No one who has made it this far has come back to tell."
James felt something shift behind them.
The stairway was gone.
No turning back.
---
The Source moved, slowly-elegantly. Its rib-cage face peeled apart, revealing a hollow void filled with eyeballs blinking in perfect rhythm.
James felt his knees weaken.
Inside that cavity, he saw-
A boy crying in a burning house.
A man jumping from a rooftop, whispering "I'm sorry."
A woman digging into her own skin, trying to remove something put there.
These weren't images. They were experiences. And James realized the truth:
> The Source was composed of stories people refused to remember.
And now it wanted his.
---
The room began to change.
Not visually-but emotionally.
Regret surged into the air like fog. The more James focused, the more real the memories became-memories he had repressed for years.
He was ten, hiding in the closet while his father beat his brother for breaking a bottle.
He was sixteen, standing outside the hospital, lying to his mother that he didn't know their father had died earlier that day. He had. He just couldn't face it.
He was twenty-three, hearing Amaka's name for the first time-because her file had landed on his desk. A tenant of the Cemetery Apartment, missing for months. A ghost in paperwork.
James gasped. "You were one of them?"
Amaka nodded, eyes wide. "I told you-I was claimed by the Apartment. It didn't kill me. It kept me. Rewrote me."
"Why?"
"Because I remembered too much. I knew its name."
James turned to her, stunned.
"Then tell me. What is it?"
Amaka looked straight into the Source, as if challenging it.
> "It's called Y'al-Naret."
The air broke.
Literally-cracks formed in the blackness, like sound had fractured reality.
The creature screamed-not aloud, but inside their skulls. Blood trickled from James's ears.
The book began to glow violently.
---
James stumbled toward the pedestal, but the Source moved to block him. Not physically-it reached out with its memory-flesh, showing James another vision:
> His mother, lying in a casket.
Her eyes opened.
She whispered, "You weren't there when I died."
James fell to his knees.
Tears welled in his eyes, but he held on to the truth.
"No," he said. "That's not what happened."
> "You're lying to yourself," the creature whispered. "Let me help you forget again."
And for a second-James wanted to.
He wanted to let go of the guilt. Of the pain. Of the memory that maybe... maybe she had waited for him.
But then he heard Amaka's voice:
"Pain isn't the curse," she said. "It's forgetting that destroys you."
James rose.
And screamed.
Not in fear-but in defiance.
He grabbed the book.
---
Instantly, the world exploded.
The relics in Amaka's hand surged toward the book, fusing into its cover like puzzle pieces. Light-pure and searing-erupted from the seams.
The Source howled, shrinking backward, its form unraveling into tattered memories-scraps of identity. Bits of forgotten prayers. Pieces of names no one remembered anymore.
Then came silence.
---
James opened the book.
And inside were pages from his life.
His real life.
The one he'd forgotten, the one the Apartment had rewritten.
He read quickly:
The night he visited the building on a dare.
The moment he stepped over a threshold he shouldn't have.
How the Apartment sank into him like a thorn.
And how, slowly, it replaced everything.
Even his name.
"James," he said aloud, testing it.
And for the first time-it didn't feel real.
He looked to Amaka.
She looked back with wide, terrified eyes.
"What?" he asked.
Her voice trembled.
"That's not your name."
"What do you mean?" James's voice cracked. "What are you talking about?"
Amaka stepped back, clutching her relic shard as if it could protect her. "That's not your name," she repeated. "It never was."
The book in James's hands trembled.
The letters on the pages began to blur, swirl, then re-form-no longer in English.
They twisted into a language older than language. A tongue of whispers. Of things never meant to be spoken.
And then-
His name appeared.
Not James Okon.
But something else.
> IYARE.
The name sank into his bones like cold iron.
It struck something deep inside. Ancient. Primal.
He staggered backward. "No, that's not me. I was born in-"
The memory shattered.
He couldn't remember his hometown. Not anymore.
His school? A blur.
His childhood?
Gone.
He looked to Amaka with growing horror. "Who... who am I?"
She didn't answer.
Instead, she pointed to the Well.
To the thing the Source had been guarding all along-not just the book. But the truth it protected.
And the truth was this:
> James never existed.
---
The Apartment had created him.
Or rather-rebuilt him.
He wasn't an outsider who stumbled into the cursed building.
He had always been a part of it.
A keeper. A watcher. A lost tenant who once tried to destroy the Source-and failed.
It hadn't killed him.
It had rewritten him.
Erased his name. His memories. His purpose.
> And sent him back into the world as a sleeper.
A sleeper that now held the final key to ending it.
Or completing it.
The book pulsed in his hands.
And with it, came visions.
---
He saw himself standing in the original Cemetery Apartment, before it was torn down.
It wasn't in Nigeria. It wasn't even on Earth as he remembered it.
It was elsewhere.
A place between realities.
Iyare-his true self-had led a resistance against the Source. A collective of dreamwalkers and memory-weavers who knew that the Apartment was alive, and that it fed on identity.
But he had made a mistake.
He had tried to imprison the Source in a physical building, to limit its power.
And in doing so... gave it a home.
A location.
A map.
And it infected the world like mold through walls.
---
"I remember," he whispered, dropping the book.
He clutched his head as the flood of his old life surged back in.
The rituals. The wars in forgotten cities. The lives he had lived and abandoned.
Amaka knelt beside him, eyes wide with sorrow.
"You weren't just a tenant," she said. "You were the first tenant. You bound the entity here. You started the Apartment."
James-Iyare-looked at her with horror.
"I did this..."
She nodded.
"And now you're the only one who can finish it."
---
The book opened itself.
Pages flipped rapidly, glowing symbols lifting into the air like fireflies. The three relics merged fully into the spine-becoming one.
A final incantation was revealed.
The Severance Verse.
A ritual that would collapse the Apartment from every plane at once. Time. Space. Memory.
But it came with a cost.
The one who spoke the Verse would become the final sacrifice-erased not only from reality, but from memory. As if they had never existed.
Even Amaka wouldn't remember him.
He'd be gone from all worlds.
Iyare looked down at his hands.
They were flickering.
The Apartment knew what he was about to do-and it was rejecting him.
Trying to erase him first.
---
The Source began to re-form.
Taller. Angrier. Desperate.
It lunged at Amaka.
Iyare moved without thought.
He stepped into the Source.
Not to fight.
But to speak.
His voice echoed-not in the room, but through every floor of the Apartment.
Through every cursed wall.
Every haunted mirror.
Every rusted pipe.
> "I am Iyare, First Witness of the Spiral Archive."
> "I name you, Y'al-Naret. Thief of Faces. Devourer of Lineage. I sever your hold."
He raised the book above his head.
The incantation lit the chamber like a supernova of memory.
> "You will no longer dwell in the stories of men."
> "You will no longer feed on our forgetting."
> "You will no longer name us."
The Source screamed.
The walls exploded inward, not with force-but with collapse.
Like a building being unremembered.
---
Amaka screamed his name.
But already, his face was blurring in her vision.
His voice, becoming static.
"Iyare, wait!" she cried. "Please! Let me remember you!"
He looked at her one last time.
Smiled.
"You already did."
And then-
He spoke the final word.
The word never meant to be spoken.
And everything ended.
---
Darkness.
Then-
Light.
Amaka sat on a bench outside an abandoned building.
The sky was clear. The sun warm. The apartment behind her was boarded shut, condemned forever.
She wiped tears from her eyes.
She wasn't sure why.
There was a hole in her memory she couldn't explain.
A name on the tip of her tongue she couldn't speak.
But deep in her pocket was a relic.
The last relic.
And a whisper.
> "When the Apartment rises again, so will I."
She looked up.
And smiled.