3:33 A.M.
Again.
Amaka's eyes opened like clockwork, her heart already racing, breath tight. Not from a dream.
But from the pressure in the room.
Something was watching her.
She stared at the ceiling, refusing to move, afraid that whatever was waiting would react to motion—like some predator of sight.
There were no lights on.
No sounds.
Yet, she could feel it.
In the corner of the room. Behind the wardrobe.
Heavy. Patient.
Hungry.
---
Since her return from Apartment 404, life had returned to "normal" in the eyes of the world. Her job resumed. Her messages went answered again. The world didn't seem to notice it had nearly been consumed.
But she noticed.
Every night, without fail, she woke at 3:33 a.m.
And every time, her apartment was slightly different.
Not the building—her personal space.
One night, the tiles in her bathroom were cracked. The next, they were red.
Once, she found a dead moth in her sink with tiny human teeth in its mouth.
Once, her window looked out over a cemetery—where a bustling street had been the day before.
Last week, she looked in her fridge and saw a second head of lettuce she hadn't bought—with a human eye nestled inside the leaves.
Reality was… leaking.
And she knew why.
Because even though she escaped Apartment 404—
> It followed her out.
---
Today, she felt bold enough to test it.
She left her phone recording while she slept.
When she played it back in the morning, the first four hours were silent.
Then:
> Tap. Tap. Tap.
Footsteps. Not hers. Not natural.
Wet, sticky steps.
Then humming.
That damn tune—low, solemn, slow.
The recording ended with the sound of her voice.
> But she never spoke.
Not in her sleep.
Not out loud.
Yet on the tape, her own voice whispered:
> "It wears his face."
> "But it remembers mine."
---
That evening, Amaka left her apartment and went to her former haunt: the old Cemetery Apartment site.
Where it all began.
There was still a rusted wire fence around the vacant lot, warning of structural instability.
But she knew what lay beneath.
She climbed over the fence. The ground was cold. Unnaturally cold.
The dirt felt like skin—not soft, but firm and textured, as if something pulsed beneath.
She knelt and touched the earth.
And heard whispers.
Low. Endless.
Not words—just breath.
Until one whisper became clear.
> "You buried the body…"
> "…but left the soul untended."
A breeze pushed against her, but there was no wind.
And when she turned—
The Smiling Man stood across the field.
---
He looked exactly like James.
Same clothes. Same frame. Same calm smile.
But his eyes were bottomless.
And his shadow didn't move with the light.
"Why are you here?" Amaka asked, forcing strength into her voice.
"To visit my old home," he said softly. "This is where the Apartment was born. Not just the structure, but the idea."
She clenched her fists.
"You're not James."
"No," he agreed. "I'm what James left behind."
He gestured around them.
> "This place is not dead. It is dreaming."
> "And dreams always wait for you to fall asleep again."
---
Amaka stepped back.
"I destroyed you. I saw you collapse. I sealed the damn door."
The Smiling Man chuckled.
"You sealed a door. Not the door."
He walked slowly toward her, but never seemed to get closer.
His steps didn't leave prints.
"The true door is inside you, Amaka."
"You remembered him. You carried his name."
"You spoke it in dreams."
He tilted his head.
"You kept him alive."
She felt a shiver rise along her spine.
"Then I'll forget," she said quickly. "I'll erase every trace."
He smiled wider.
> "Too late."
> "He's already writing again."
---
Amaka stumbled backward.
"What do you mean—writing what?"
The Smiling Man raised his hand.
And in the dirt between them, a page formed.
Paper made of bone.
Words written in her handwriting.
She leaned in to read them:
> "Chapter 12. What Follows You."
She looked up in horror.
He smiled.
"You're not reading the story, Amaka."
"You're writing it."
Amaka backed away from the page etched into the dirt, but it followed her.
Literally.
Wherever she stepped, the line she had just read rewrote itself in her path—a paragraph that never ended, letters crawling across the ground like living inkworms.
She tried to stomp on them.
The soil didn't budge.
She looked up.
The Smiling Man had vanished.
But in his place stood… a door.
Not a real one—more like the outline of a door, drawn in black ash into the air.
Behind it was a silence too deep for the world.
And it smelled like the hallway of Apartment 404.
Like dust.
Like funeral incense.
Like rotting paper.
And her own blood.
---
She turned and ran.
Out of the field, over the fence, back into the busy road.
But something was off.
The street was there.
The cars. The people.
But their shadows didn't match.
The woman walking her dog—her shadow lagged two seconds behind.
The boy on the bike—his shadow pedaled the opposite direction.
She blinked hard.
Reality snapped back into place.
But she knew the truth:
> She was no longer fully in her world.
The story was pulling her into itself.
---
At home, she locked every door, every window, covered the mirrors, and poured salt across every doorway like her grandmother once taught her.
She burned sage.
Whispered a prayer.
She even held the Key of Bone in her fist until it blistered her palm.
Then, finally, she sat down.
And opened her journal.
Not to write—but to remember.
She hadn't touched it since the collapse of 404.
The last entry was written in blood:
> "He remembered me."
She turned the page.
The next few were blank.
Then—
Without her moving a pen—
Words began appearing.
> "Amaka returns home. She believes she's safe. But her story is no longer hers."
> "She is the narrator now."
> "And what she writes… becomes real."
She slammed the journal shut.
It vibrated under her palm.
---
She grabbed her phone, hit record.
Spoke directly into it, trembling:
> "This is Amaka. I'm not crazy. If anyone finds this… the story is alive."
> "I'm being haunted by… not a ghost, but a plot. A narrative that's rewriting me."
> "I think—no, I know—the Apartment is rebuilding itself inside my memories. Every time I think about it, I dream it. And every time I dream it… something writes it down."
> "And once it's written…"
She stopped.
Because the walls were now covered in text.
The transcript of her voice.
Everything she just said was now inked into the plaster, like a tattoo on the skin of her apartment.
And the last line of it blinked.
> "And once it's written…"
She whispered the rest.
> "It becomes real."
---
A knock at the door.
Soft.
Precise.
Three times.
She didn't move.
The knocking came again.
Not from the front door.
From inside the wardrobe.
She approached, heart hammering.
Pressed her ear to the wood.
Inside, a voice whispered:
> "Write the door."
> "And I will open it."
---
Amaka grabbed her journal again, flipped to the blank page.
Trembling, she wrote:
> "There was no door inside the wardrobe."
Nothing happened.
She sighed in relief.
Then the words rewrote themselves:
> "There was a door inside the wardrobe. It waited patiently."
"No," she growled, scratching them out.
But the words bled through the paper.
Glowing.
Pulsing.
The wardrobe creaked open behind her.
And inside…
A door of bone.
It hadn't been there before.
It shouldn't be there.
And yet…
A cold wind blew from the crack in the bone door.
And with it came his voice.
Not the Smiling Man this time.
But James.
The real one.
The man who had sacrificed himself.
"I never left you," his voice whispered. "Not entirely."
"I hid the final relic where even the Source couldn't reach it."
Amaka's eyes widened.
"Where?" she whispered.
The journal answered for him.
Words scrawled themselves across the page:
> "He left it inside your name."
> "Inside the letters of your memory."
---
Her knees gave out. She fell to the floor.
It made no sense. And yet it made too much sense.
That's why the Apartment kept finding her.
Because she wasn't just the witness anymore.
> She was the next key.
Not just a tenant.
Not just a survivor.
But a chapter waiting to be written.
And someone—or something—was trying to write her ending.
Amaka stared into the bone door now inside her wardrobe.
It wasn't metaphor anymore.
It wasn't hallucination.
It was invitation.
She slammed the wardrobe shut—but the door kept glowing, light bleeding through the wood like veins under flesh.
She ran.
Into the kitchen.
Into the hallway.
Out the door.
Down the stairs.
But at the bottom—
Instead of the ground floor—
She arrived on a hallway she hadn't seen since the day James disappeared.
The hallway of the old Cemetery Apartment.
Same blood-smeared walls. Same flickering lightbulbs. Same broken exit sign hanging by wires.
At the end stood Apartment 404.
---
"No," she muttered, turning around.
But the stairwell was gone.
Only hallway.
Only doors.
Only silence.
She forced herself to look down.
The tiles under her feet were etched with names.
Tenant names.
She saw hers at the top.
Then her mother's.
Then James.
Then—
A new name was forming.
Each letter appeared like an old printer spitting ink into tile.
A name she didn't know.
A name that wasn't human.
It pulsed once.
Then the hallway walls groaned.
---
Behind her, a door clicked open.
She turned slowly.
It was Apartment 403.
Inside, darkness.
And the sound of breathing.
Low. Wet. Hungry.
"Not this door," she whispered, backing away.
But something stepped out.
Her.
But not her.
Another version.
This Amaka had no eyes.
Only hollow sockets dripping black tears.
Her mouth was stitched shut—but she laughed anyway.
From deep in her chest.
From a place no laugh should come.
Amaka turned and ran—straight toward 404.
---
The door was already open.
And inside—
Wasn't the same Apartment 404 from before.
It was pages.
Endless pages.
Floating in the air.
Spinning in circles like leaves caught in a storm.
Each one had a different scene.
A different life.
A different death.
One showed James being dragged into the Mirror Core.
One showed Amaka screaming as a thousand doors opened at once inside her chest.
Another showed her writing in blood with a bone quill… smiling.
In the center of the vortex was the Book of the Source.
Rebuilt.
Waiting.
---
The Smiling Man stepped from the pages like they were curtains.
He held her journal.
It glowed with pulsing veins, the cover now wrapped in skin that looked… familiar.
Like hers.
"It's almost time," he said softly. "You've written so beautifully."
"I didn't write this," she snapped.
"Didn't you?"
He turned the journal toward her.
The latest entry read:
> "Amaka denies the truth. But deep inside, she knows: she has been writing all along."
> "The story wants an ending. And she is the only one left who can write it."
---
"I won't write anything," she said, stepping back. "I'll burn it all."
"You've tried that," he replied calmly. "But memory is not flammable."
He held out the journal.
"The door within you is opening. It won't be long now."
Amaka clenched her fists.
"If I refuse?"
The Smiling Man smiled wider.
"You'll vanish."
"No drama. No last scream. No mark. Just a story that… ends halfway."
He stepped closer.
"Would you like to know how James survived as long as he did?"
She stared at him, silent.
He leaned in.
> "He wrote his own grief faster than the Apartment could."
---
Amaka looked down at the journal.
Trembling, she reached for it.
And felt warmth pulse from it.
It was hers.
Her words.
Her version.
She opened to a blank page.
And wrote:
> "The story doesn't own me."
> "I own the story."
The pages around her shivered.
The vortex slowed.
Reality bent—but didn't break.
Then she wrote more.
A name.
James.
A place.
The apartment.
A different ending.
One where the Apartment was sealed with a tenant still inside it.
One who volunteered.
---
The pages screamed.
The walls of Apartment 404 cracked.
The Book of the Source burned white-hot.
The Smiling Man staggered back.
"No," he whispered. "That's not how it ends."
Amaka kept writing.
> "The door closed forever."
> "No more new tenants."
> "No more new chapters."
> "The author walks away."
A final page wrote itself.
A door slammed shut.
And silence fell.
True silence.
Not just in the room.
But in the world.
---
She opened her eyes.
She was back in her bed.
Sunlight poured through the curtains.
No blood.
No bone doors.
No pages.
Just her apartment.
Her life.
Her world.
She smiled.
For the first time in weeks.
Until she turned to her nightstand—
And saw her journal.
Open.
A new line had been added:
> "Chapter 13. The Author Returns."
And her reflection in the mirror smiled before she did.