The Notes on the Walls

Nadia Chen arrived at Harrow House with two suitcases, a desk chair, and a folder of documents she had already checked three times.

The building stood at the edge of the city where the paved road narrowed into a service lane and the warehouses gave way to scrub grass. Its brickwork had gone dark around the windows. A brass plaque beside the entrance listed six floors, though several of the bulbs above it had burned out and left the number 4 floating by itself.

The landlord met her in the lobby. He was a narrow man in a gray cardigan, with a ring of keys clipped to his belt. He had unlocked the door to 4B before she finished signing the lease.

“You’ll want to get settled before dark,” he said.

Nadia looked past him at the elevator, whose doors stood open on an empty shaft of yellow light. “Is there a reason?”

“No. The building’s quieter then.”

“That sounds like a reason.”

His mouth tightened, though whether from irritation or embarrassment she could not tell. He handed her the keys. The lease had been surprisingly short and full of crossed-out clauses. Unit 4B cost less than a third of what she had expected to pay for a place within commuting distance of the municipal archives.

The landlord had seemed relieved when she accepted it. Not pleased. Relieved.

“Previous tenant leave anything behind?” Nadia asked.

“Nothing of value.”

“I didn’t ask about value.”

He glanced toward the elevator. “If you find personal things, put them in the trash room. Someone will collect them.”

“What was her name?”

“The tenant?”

“Previous tenant.”

The landlord looked at the lease in Nadia’s hand, although her name was printed clearly on the first page. “Marsh. Sylvie Marsh. She broke the lease early. No forwarding address.”

“Was there a problem with the apartment?”

He gave her the fourth-floor key. “The rent reflects its condition.”

The apartment’s condition, Nadia discovered, was mostly yellow paper.

Sticky notes covered the walls around the entryway, the kitchen, the bathroom door, and the narrow passage to the bedroom. Some had faded to the color of old teeth. Others were newer, written in blue or black ink. They had been placed at different heights, sometimes over one another, as if the person writing them had revised an argument without removing the first version.

Nadia set down her suitcase and began reading.

DON’T LOOK INTO THE BATHROOM MIRROR FOR MORE THAN TEN SECONDS.

IF YOU HEAR KNOCKING AT 3 A.M., COUNT TO SEVEN BEFORE YOU OPEN THE DOOR. NEVER SOONER.

THE HALLWAY LIGHT GOES OUT ON THURSDAYS. DON’T BE IN THE HALLWAY ON THURSDAYS.

IF A NOTE FALLS OFF THE WALL, PUT IT BACK. THE ORDER DOESN’T MATTER. THAT IT’S THERE DOES.

IT LEARNS THE RULES FASTER THAN YOU DO.

She stood in the center of the living room and read the last one twice.

Then she laughed, because there was no one else to hear her and because the alternative was to start taking the notes seriously.

Her job was to sort the effects of dead people. She spent her days identifying handwriting, dating paper by its manufacture, and deciding whether a note in the margin mattered to the record or merely to the person who had written it. A wall of instructions in a cheap apartment was not a haunting. It was evidence of a tenant with too much time and a landlord with too little interest in repainting.

She took out her phone and photographed each note before touching it. The arrangement was inconsistent, but she numbered them in the order she found them, beginning with the front door and moving clockwise. By the time she reached the bedroom, she had thirty-eight entries.

Most were variations on the first five. Keep the bathroom door open while showering. Do not answer if someone calls your name from the kitchen. Leave one cupboard unlocked. Never sleep with the bedroom door closed.

A few were crossed out so heavily that the paper had torn. One had been covered by a newer note: DON’T USE THE THIRD DRAWER AFTER MIDNIGHT.

Nadia opened the drawer before she could stop herself. It held two wooden spoons, a bent corkscrew, and a receipt from a grocery store that had closed eight years earlier.

Nothing else happened.

“Excellent,” she said. “A drawer with a curfew.”

By six, she had unpacked the bedding and assembled the desk. The bedroom was small enough that the bed nearly touched the radiator. She placed her archive boxes beneath it, then noticed one floorboard near the headboard sat slightly higher than the others.

It lifted with the edge of a key.

Underneath was a shallow cavity lined with dust. A water-swollen diary lay inside a plastic grocery bag. The cover had once been red. On its first page, written in a narrow hand that slanted steadily uphill, were the words:

IF YOU’RE READING THIS, THE NOTES WEREN’T ENOUGH.

Nadia read the sentence again. The ink had bled at the edges, but the pressure of the pen had cut into the paper.

She carried the diary to the desk. The first entries were ordinary. Sylvie had complained about the radiator knocking, the unreliable elevator, and a neighbor who practiced trumpet scales at seven in the morning. She had listed grocery expenses and written down the date she received her library card.

Three weeks into the tenancy, the entries changed.

The notes began after the first knocking. Three knocks at 3:00. I opened the door at once. Nothing in the corridor. The next night, three knocks again. I waited. It stopped at the third count.

Below that, in darker ink:

Correction. It stopped when I reached seven.

Nadia checked the time on her phone. 8:14 p.m. She kept reading.

Sylvie had tested the apartment like a reluctant scientist. She moved objects, changed the lights, slept in different rooms. She recorded what happened when she ignored a note. The entries were careful at first, then crowded and repetitive.

The bathroom mirror was the first thing she mentioned twice. At ten seconds, she wrote, the reflection remained still while she lowered her hand. She had blamed fatigue. On the next page she wrote that she had counted wrong. On the page after that, she had underlined: IT DOES NOT MATTER WHAT YOU CALL IT.

Nadia stopped reading when something moved inside the wall behind the desk.

It was not a knock. The sound traveled through the plaster in a slow, uneven passage, like a hand pressing along the other side. Dust sifted from the seam where the wall met the floor.

Nadia remained seated. Her fingers tightened around the diary’s damp cover.

The movement stopped beneath the desk.

She stood and pulled the desk away from the wall. There was no opening, only a vertical crack in the plaster and a strip of darkness too narrow to admit anything larger than a finger. The wall cavity continued behind it. She remembered the loose floorboard and the diary hidden beneath it. Sylvie had put the book there, but the cavity seemed to extend farther than the space under the floor should have allowed.

Nadia fetched a roll of tape from her moving supplies and sealed the crack. It was a practical response. She told herself that while pressing the tape flat.

At 10:30, she went into the bathroom to wash her face. The mirror was spotted and silvering at the edges. She looked at her own reflection only long enough to find the towel.

The face in the glass lowered its hand after she did.

Nadia froze with the towel against her cheek. The delay had been less than a second, perhaps only the lag of her tired eyes. She counted to five, then looked away.

On the wall beside the medicine cabinet, a note had been folded over another note. She had missed it earlier.

DO NOT CHECK WHETHER IT IS STILL FOLLOWING THE RULE.

She did not touch the mirror again.

Near midnight, Nadia returned to the bedroom and made a numbered list in her notebook. The notes were rules, or records of rules. She could not yet tell which. She copied the most specific ones first and left space beside each for dates and exceptions.

At the bottom she wrote: Determine whether previous tenant was ill, frightened, or both.

Then, after looking toward the taped crack in the wall, she added: Do not assume the distinction matters.

She slept badly. At 2:57 a.m., the radiator clicked. At 2:59, the pipes gave a low shudder. Nadia woke fully at the first knock.

It came from the apartment door.

She looked at the clock. 3:00.

A second knock followed. Then a third.

Nadia sat on the edge of the bed with the diary in her lap. She counted aloud, because the rule had been written in capital letters and because her voice made the room seem more ordinary.

“One. Two. Three.”

The hallway beyond the door remained quiet.

“Four. Five. Six.”

At seven, she stopped.

The knocking began again, from inside the bedroom wall.