The Apartment Had a Door That Was Not on the Floor Plan

The apartment was a great deal, a little too great, in a converted old building full of odd angles. There was one locked door in the hallway, plain, painted over at the edges, that did not appear on the floor plan the agency gave us. When we asked, the landlord said it was just an old utility closet, nothing in it, and that he did not even have a key anymore, and not to worry about it. We worried about it a little, then forgot about it, the way you do.

For months we had the feeling of being not quite alone. Sounds in the walls we blamed on old plumbing. The sense, now and then, of being watched in the bedroom, which we put down to nerves in an unfamiliar place. A faint draft from the locked door some nights, and once, twice, a sound from behind it that we told ourselves was the building settling.

When we finally moved out, the landlord was slow to return, and my partner, curious and a little angry about the deposit, worked the painted-over door open with a screwdriver, because at that point what did it matter. It was not a utility closet. Behind it was a narrow space and a set of steep hidden stairs going up into the dead space between our apartment and the one above, the wall thickness we had never questioned.

Up there, in a low crawl space along the back of our bedroom wall, there was a thin mattress, worn and used, a folded blanket, a water bottle, a phone charger. And there was a gap in the wall, carefully made, hidden on our side behind the vent grille in our bedroom, that gave a clear line of sight down onto our bed. Someone had been living in the walls of our apartment. Someone had been watching us sleep, for who knows how long, through a vent we had never given a second glance.

We called the police from the parking lot. The landlord stopped answering. I do not know if they ever found who had been up there, and I have never stopped thinking about the nights I felt watched and told myself it was nothing. It was not nothing. It was a mattress and a water bottle and a hole in the wall, and it had been there the whole time.