Chapter 1 — The Chair

Hugo started worrying the night the chair stopped.

Not when it made noise.

When it stopped.

Every night at 23:12, the neighbor above him dragged a chair across the floor. Same time. Same pattern. Nine months of it — long enough that Hugo had stopped noticing it the way you stop noticing traffic, or the smell of your own apartment, or the particular way a radiator ticks.

He’d considered going up. Leaving a note. Buying earplugs. Posting something carefully worded in the building group chat — polite enough that no one could accuse him of anything.

He hadn’t.

Because at some point you make peace with certain things.

The bathroom that never quite gets warm.
The elevator that opens before you’ve pressed the button.
The neighbor who says good morning like it still means something.
The chair at 23:12.

That night it didn’t come.

Hugo was on the sofa — phone in one hand, tea going cold in the other — waiting for the sound with that specific mixture of irritation and fidelity you develop toward things you’ve been annoyed by long enough.

23:11.

He looked at the ceiling.

Come on, he thought. Then hated himself slightly for thinking it.

23:12.

Nothing.

He waited.

That was worse than the noise.

He set the cup on the table. Too close to the edge. Moved it back. Moved it again. Then noticed he was negotiating with a cup to avoid the fact that he was listening to the ceiling like it owed him an explanation.

23:13.

Nothing.

He smiled, uncomfortable.

“Perfect,” he said. “Now I miss the man.”

He turned off the television. He hadn’t been watching it anyway — just needed something in the room to take up space, to keep the apartment from listening to itself.

The silence was louder with the screen off.

He got up.

Went to the hallway.

Put on the old slippers — the ones he kept because they weren’t actually ruined yet, just stripped of any remaining dignity. The kind of thing that survives on technicalities.

Opened the door.

The corridor had that particular yellowish light that neither illuminates nor flatters. It doesn’t improve walls, or faces, or decisions made at this hour.

He took the stairs.

Didn’t call the elevator.

Didn’t want to hear it respond.

Fourth floor. He stopped in front of 4B.

The door was open.

Not wide open.

Ajar — just enough to be wrong without being obviously wrong.

Hugo raised his hand to knock.

Didn’t.

The door swung a little further. No creak. No resistance. As though it had been waiting to make exactly this point.

No light inside.

“Hello?”

The word went in and came back changed. Not an echo — something else. As if it had picked something up on the way.

He pushed it and went in slowly.

The hallway was empty.

Not vacant. Empty. There’s a difference. Vacant suggests someone left. Empty means nothing was ever trying to stay.

White walls. Clean floor. The faint smell of paint dry for weeks — the smell of a space that has been readied. No shoes by the door. No umbrella. No coat on the hook. None of the small evidence that proves a person occupies a place.

“I’m the neighbor from downstairs,” he said, as though that clarified anything about why a grown man was standing uninvited in someone else’s flat at nearly midnight.

Nothing.

He went into the living room.

The chair was there.

One chair.

Center of the room, exactly.

Light wood. Simple. The kind of chair that belongs in a kitchen, a student room, a doctor’s waiting area.

It looked like a chair.

That was the worst thing about it.

It wasn’t ceremonial. It wasn’t sinister. It wasn’t positioned to frighten anyone. It was a chair — ordinary, the kind that furnishes every room in every building where people live without thinking too hard about what surrounds them.

Facing the wall.

Hugo stood in the doorway.

He checked the floor.

No marks. No dust lines. No evidence of anything dragged.

The chair he’d heard for nine months had left no trace of itself.

Either it moved somewhere he couldn’t see. Or something else made the sound. Or the floor had decided not to remember.

He took out his phone. Thought about taking a photo.

Didn’t.

Because the moment he considered it — evidence — the whole scene became absurd. An empty apartment. A chair. A man in old slippers who couldn’t sleep because he missed a noise that had been annoying him.

He left.

Didn’t run.

Back at 3B, he locked the door.

Bolted it.

Then stood looking at the bolt longer than made sense, aware that he was doing it, aware that a bolt is only a bolt.

The tea on the table had gone cold.

He checked the microwave clock.

23:12.

Hugo frowned.

Walked over.

23:12.

Checked his phone.

23:12.

The dark television screen reflected the room behind him. His outline. The lamp. The table.

The ceiling.

Then it came.

From above.

The thud. The drag. Three seconds. A pause. A shorter drag.

Silence.

Hugo didn’t move.

The body gets there first.

The chair had sounded.

Identical.

From the empty apartment.

At 23:12.

Again.

Hugo breathed.

Once. Twice. Three times.

Someone knocked on his door.

Not hard.

Worse than hard — quiet. Two knuckles. Polite. The knock of someone who already knew they wouldn’t need to do it twice.

He looked toward the hallway.

Didn’t move toward it.

The second knock came lower, softer.

Almost considerate.

Then a voice.

“Do you hear it too?”

Hugo opened the door with the chain on.

A woman in the corridor.

Grey coat, too thin for the hour. Hair pulled back in a way that suggested either she’d left in a hurry or she’d stopped keeping track of where she ended up. She didn’t look frightened.

That was the thing.

Most people would look frightened.

She just looked like someone who’d had this conversation before.

“Who are you?” Hugo asked.

She glanced at the chain.

Then at his slippers.

“Naia.”

He waited for something after the name. A surname. A floor. A reason.

Nothing came.

“Do you live here?”

She almost smiled — not warmth, but what’s left when warmth has been used up.

“That question is more complicated than it looks.”

Hugo thought about closing the door.

“The chair,” she said. “Do you hear it?”

He didn’t answer.

Naia lowered her voice.

“My husband used to.”

The word husband left something in the corridor.

Something old. Something that had lost its temperature.

“Before what?” Hugo asked.

She looked toward the stairs.

Then up.

“Before he stopped coming down.”

He felt the chain against his fingers.

“There’s nobody living up there.”

She smiled again. This time there was something that might have been pity, if pity had been worn very thin.

“That’s what everyone says. At first.”

The elevator moved at the far end of the corridor.

Both of them turned.

The display showed 4.

Hugo didn’t breathe.

The cab descended.

3.

Stopped.

The doors opened.

No one inside.

Only a chair. The same chair. Light wood. Normal. Placed in the center of the elevator, facing out, facing them.

On the seat: a white envelope.

No name.

No address.

Naia went still.

“Don’t touch it,” she said, quietly.

“Why?”

The elevator made a single sound. The corridor light pulsed once. Hugo’s phone screen lit up on its own.

23:12.

Inside the elevator, the envelope moved. Very slightly. As if someone had just finished placing it.

Naia stepped back.

Hugo didn’t.

Not courage. His body had simply stopped taking instructions.

Then from the ceiling of 3B — directly above where he’d been sitting — the sound came again.

The thud. The drag. Three seconds. A pause. A shorter drag.

But the chair was in front of him.

In the elevator.

Which meant upstairs—

someone had just sat down.