This morning I found a weird letter, slid underneath my front door.

I read the whole thing before I left for work and it really gave me the creeps. I couldn't stop thinking about it today, so I figured I would share it here. I'm curious if anyone can shed some light on this weirdness. It's pretty long so I've just typed up the first few pages this evening, I'll try and copy out the rest in the next few days.

I'm honestly super creeped out by it and I don't know if it's a prank or what. I live in the building described in the letter, and I don't think I'm going to sleep well tonight at all...

A message for the tenants of Karkinos Tower. Pages: 1-4.

Most of you don’t know me, but my name is Duncan and I live in flat 9.6. This all might sound far-fetched, but please hear me out. I am not crazy. At first, I thought I was losing it, but I have proof.
I need to share my story.

When I moved here 6 months ago I was blessed to have two lovely neighbours in my hallway. In 9.5 there was a young couple with newborn twins. I often heard the cries of the babies because of the thin walls between our apartments, but I didn’t mind. The parents always looked so tired, but they were still smiling whenever I talked to them. They moved out rather suddenly and it was quieter without them.

Apartment 9.7 was owned by a young woman around my age. We didn’t see each other often, but she invited me over every now and then. I spent a lot of time alone and it was nice to hang out with someone. She was a musician and played guitar rather well. I sensed a muted sadness in her, but we never discussed anything as personal as that. Late at night, I would often hear her sing to herself. Feeling out melodies and lyrics. I found out she had died when I left one morning to get groceries. Paramedics were taking her out of her apartment on a stretcher. I couldn’t bring myself to ask what had happened. Now I was alone in my corridor.

For a month or so it was quiet. This made it far too easy for me to get lost in my work. I’m an artist and uninterrupted I will work all day and late into the night. Those little snapshots of my neighbours’ lives had been a kind of clock for me. The sporadic cries, conversation, and music had acted as reminders to take breaks, and to feed and care for myself. All I had now was the formless hum of the electronics and the rattling sound of the air ventilation.

Around this time I wasn’t sleeping well. When I was sleeping, I dreamt about my work. These dreams were stressful and broken, leaving me burnt out and tired. I needed good sleep. I tried leaving the TV running, hoping it would fill the silence my neighbours had left. But there was a rhythm and a logic to the sounds that was too manufactured.

I got some sleeping pills off an unscrupulous internet pharmacy. They didn’t bother asking for a prescription. The pills themselves worked just fine, but I felt like the sleep was manufactured too. Instead of obsessing over work in my dreams, it felt like I was just being switched off.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen that film that’s all backwards, I forget the name. But my life began to feel like that film. I began to find cryptic notes that I had left myself. Notes I had written when I was supposedly sleeping. Crude drawings and confusing diagrams with vague annotations kept appearing, day after day. It went on a for around 3 weeks.

I’d heard that some people took sedatives like zolpidem, and they would stay awake on purpose. They got some kind of delirious high out of it. Personally, I had no interest in getting high, I just wanted some solid sleep. These pills were clearly giving me something else, so I flushed the lot of them.

That first night without taking them I felt really weird. My mind kept wondering and falling into thought loops.

I am never going to fall asleep.
Why did I get rid of the pills?
I wasn’t getting real sleep.
I’m not going to get any sleep.
Why did I flush those pills?

It was in the early hours of the morning that I began to drift. I had been trying to channel my energy into remembering the sound of the guitar and the singing through the door. She’d had such a lovely soft voice, only now I could hardly remember the details. Trying to recall the articulations and contours of her music was like counting sheep. And just when I was on the edge of sleep, I was startled by a loud knocking.

Three equally spaced knocks, not on my apartment door but on the wall beside my bed, the outer-most wall of the building. I was on the 9th floor. On the other side of the wall was nothing but air. My first thought was a rat, or perhaps a bird nesting in an alcove somewhere. Then the sound came again, three hollow knocks. It didn’t sound like a small animal. It sounded like knuckles on wood. Polite but firm, as if to say “Hello” and “did you forget I was coming?”

My first thought was that these fucking sleeping pills and my mental state were playing tricks on me. My deprivation of natural sleep had detached me from reality. But I felt very lucid, it felt very real.

I took my phone and turned on the audio recorder, waiting for the sound to come back. Sure enough, after a few minutes it was there again, three rhythmic knocks, recorded now as three clear spikes of audio amongst the ambient hum of my flat.

The fourth time they knocked I couldn’t help but answer.

“Hello?”

No response.

Sure, the knocking sound was real, but it was my mental deterioration that was making me draw ridiculous conclusions. Making me call out to an empty room. I tried to think realistically. It was most probably some kind of creature in or outside the walls, or something stuck in an air vent, or maybe this was all just an incredibly lucid dream.

The knocking sound continued, sometimes 30 seconds apart, sometimes up to 5 minutes apart, but always the same. Three firm, equally spaced raps. And, as much as I tried to rationalise it, I couldn’t shake my discomfort at hearing the sound. I turned back to my previous remedy, and switched on the TV, searching the channels until I landed on the loudest and most tasteless station I could find. One that showed lots of shitty American shows, with cheap sound effects and rapid editing. When I found the right one, I turned it up louder, until I couldn’t distinguish the knocks anymore. I laid back on my bed, facing the TV, and began to fall slowly into an uneasy half-sleep. At least I wasn’t thinking about work, I supposed.

I woke up sometime in the late morning. The TV was still on. At some point, I must have switched it into analogue mode because it was just playing white noise and static. I turned it off. All the stuff with the TV at least, was real. 

I opened up the app on my phone, and saw that I had never stopped the recording. It was 9 hours long. Zooming in on the start of the audio I could see, clear as day, three distinct peaks of audio. Scrubbing through, I saw the knocks repeated intermittently for about three-quarters of an hour until the waveform turned into a solid brick of sound. - that was when I had turned on the TV. A few hours later, at what must have been just before 4am, it became a quieter white noise pattern that continued for the rest of the recording, occasionally fluctuating.

It was good to know that I wasn’t imagining it. I had felt a little crazy over the last week or so. First all those strange notes I had been leaving myself, and then last night. Today, in the daylight, it seemed ludicrous. Clearly, I had been alone for a little too long. I needed to get out and spend some time in the real world. I decided to arrange to meet up with a friend.

I reached for my phone, I thought I would send out some messages and see who was around, but the recording was still open on the screen. My eyes were drawn back to the occasional deviations from the white noise. What were they? They had happened long after I lost consciousness. Something about them unsettled me. I can’t say what exactly it was that gave me discomfort. Maybe there was something about the shape of the waveforms that I recognised. Or maybe I was remembering something I had forgotten. Perhaps something I had tried to communicate to myself in my chemically induced unsleeping sleep.

I pressed play.

A voice floated in after a few seconds of white noise. At first, almost inaudible, somewhere under the static. And then, she surfaced. It was like I was hearing her singing through her wall again. Intricate finger picking dampened by the plaster. Her voice, so sweet that just the faint memory of it had almost taken me to sleep last night.

I sat on the floor and listened to the recording. She came and went away several times, sometimes for a few minutes, sometimes nearly half an hour. There was no pattern or consistency. It didn’t make sense. How could it be her voice? Just a few months ago I’d seen her, cold and lifeless, being lifted out of her flat.

And there was something different about her song now. Instead of singing to herself, it felt like a performance. Calling out to me.

I put my phone away. A huge wave of emotion struck me, taking my breath and pulling me down to the ground. I tried to fight the current. I tried to rationalise, to make it make sense. There was no use, no rational explanation, no sense to be made.

Lying there on the carpet, overwhelmed and exhausted, I noticed something. Underneath my sofa, there was one rogue strip of sleeping pills. I figured I could use one more night of rest, artificial or not. I reached out for the pills. When I had them in my hand, I felt a small sticky note stuck to the back. Another note I had left to myself.

It simply read,

“Don’t let her in!”