My neighbor was buried yesterday at noon… and today, at 2:17 in the morning, she sent me a voice note begging me to go up to the roof.
My back went stiff, as if liquid plaster had been poured inside me, and I felt that breath behind my ear: damp, lukewarm, far too close. It wasn’t the early morning breeze. It wasn’t the panting of a stray cat or a drunkard hiding among the laundry lines. It was the breathing of someone small. Someone who didn’t know the frantic pace of adults, but knew the weight of hunger.
My cell phone was still ringing in my hand.
The audio hadn’t finished.
“Go down slowly,” Rebecca said, her voice sounding like dirt stuck in her throat. “Don’t run. If you run, he gets excited.”
I felt something brush against my sweatpants at calf level. A fingertip. A nail. A cold finger probing me as if to check that I was, in fact, alive.
I swallowed hard and began to walk without looking back, my eyes locked on the roof door. The scratching inside the water tank stopped abruptly. Then I understood something even worse: whatever was inside the tank was no longer the same thing breathing behind me.
I took a step. Then another.
The small, wet footprints kept appearing next to my sneakers, one by one—fresh, tiny, marking themselves on the dirty concrete. They weren’t in front of me. They were at my side.
The audio continued.
“Don’t call him by his name,” Rebecca whispered. “If he asks who you are, don’t tell him. If he calls you ‘Mom,’ don’t answer.”
The roof door was ten feet away. I felt it open on its own before I even touched it. It wasn’t pushed by the wind. It opened just a sliver, with a careful slowness, as if someone on the other side knew exactly how much noise they could make without ruining a surprise.
The darkness of the stairwell seemed safer than staying up there, so I entered almost sideways. The light on the landing flickered. The smell of dampness mixed with another older, heavier scent: sour milk, wet earth, stagnant water.
Behind me, on the roof, I heard something running barefoot in circles. Then a giggle. Not a happy child’s giggle. The giggle of a child playing alone with something that is already broken.
I yanked the door shut. The metal sheet vibrated. On the other side, fingernails dragged slowly across the surface.
Scratch… scratch… scratch…
I backed away, nearly tripping over the first step. Then my phone vibrated again. Another audio. And another. All sent at 2:17 AM. I opened them as best I could, my finger trembling.
“I didn’t want to put him in there,” Rebecca said in the next one. “But he didn’t fit downstairs anymore.”
My stomach turned. I went down one floor. Then another. At every landing, I involuntarily glanced up, expecting to see feet dangling through the railings or a face peeking out from the shadows. I saw nothing.
But I heard. Footsteps. Very slow. Following me from a distance.
On the second floor, in front of Apt 2A, Rebecca’s door was ajar. Just yesterday, after the wake, I had seen it locked with a chain. Mrs. Lupe had even put a black bow on the knob and a candle on a pewter plate outside. Now the plate was knocked over, and the wax formed a long smear leading toward the entrance, as if someone had stepped in it barefoot and left a trail.
I didn’t want to go in.
But a sound came from the apartment that was worse than all the others: a hollow thud, like something small hitting the inside of a bucket or a tub. Then another. Then silence.
I nudged the door open with two fingers.
The first thing I saw was the dining room. The table was still set exactly as always: floral plastic tablecloth, three chipped plates, a glass with spoons, a small Virgin Mary taped to the wall. The second thing I saw was the water.
There was water on the floor. Not much. Not a normal leak. Round, separate puddles, as if someone had walked from the bathroom to the bedroom and back. Puddles the size of small feet.
The phone spoke to me again with Rebecca’s voice:
“If you already went in, don’t turn on the bathroom light.”
Of course, the first thing I did was look toward the bathroom. The door was open just an inch or two. Inside it was pitch black, but through the crack, I saw something moving, slowly, hanging over the toilet. As if a small, wet t-shirt were swaying on its own.
I forced myself not to go near it.
“Look for the blue notebook,” the next audio said. “Emmett’s. It’s where I kept the receipts.”
I went to the TV stand. I opened the drawer filled with bills, prayer cards, and expired medicine, and I found the hardback notebook—sky blue, with faded dinosaur stickers. Touching it, I realized it was damp.
I opened it. It wasn’t a school notebook. It was Rebecca’s notes. At the beginning, just dates. Times. Absurd things.
“3:12 a.m. he scratched the lid again.”
“I put holy water on it and he stopped crying for fifteen minutes.”
“He doesn’t like songs. His name upsets him.”
“If he mimics a voice, do not open.”
I kept flipping pages.
“Today I heard him from the laundry sink.”
“Today mud appeared in the bed.”
“Today he asked where I left his eyes.”
My legs felt weak. On the last page, written in handwriting so tight it looked like it was done with a needle, was a single sentence:
“When he learns to leave without water, I won’t be able to bring him back.”
Something hit the bathroom ceiling. I looked up. Again. A hollow thumping, but this time from above, right on the ceiling tiles. As if something were crawling across the slab on its knees and elbows.
Then I understood: it wasn’t in the bathroom. It was between the ceiling and us.
The plaster creaked. A drop fell to the floor in front of me. It wasn’t clean water. It was black. Thick. And it smelled like an old water tank, like a clogged drain, like a decomposing animal.
I backed up until I hit the wall. My phone vibrated again.
“He’s already found you inside,” Rebecca said. “He won’t let you leave alone now.”
A loud crack. A thin line opened in the bathroom ceiling. Then another. A piece of plaster fell onto the toilet and something, on the other side, let out a moan that made me understand why no one in the neighborhood ever spoke Emmett’s name again. It wasn’t a child’s cry. It was the attempt of someone who had forgotten what a child sounded like—copying it from memory, badly, the way parrots or the dead do.
“Mom…” it said from above. The voice came out watery, gurgling, with bubbles. The same word repeated, now from the hallway. “Mom…”
I spun around. There was water seeping from under the apartment door. Not coming in. Going out. And in that water, small footprints were being marked toward Rebecca’s bedroom.
I wanted to run. I wanted to get the hell out of Apt 2A and go down to the street to scream for everyone to wake up, turn on lights, ring bells—anything. But at that moment, the last audio played. And for the first time, Rebecca’s voice wasn’t alone. Behind her, very far away, you could hear shoveling.
Dirt. As if she were recording from inside the casket.
“Forgive me, neighbor,” she said. “He didn’t disappear that night. I hid him. I thought it was him. He knocked on the door crying, soaking wet, even though it hadn’t rained. He told me they had left him alone upstairs. That he was cold. That he wanted to come in. But a mother recognizes her son even when she can’t see his face… and that thing that came back wasn’t breathing.”
My fingers felt like ice.
“I let him in because he had his voice. His face. His little hands. But it wasn’t him. Emmett was already gone when that thing returned. I knew it when I saw he didn’t blink in front of the altar. I knew it when I hugged him and he left my chest wet on the inside. I knew it when his hunger began to grow.”
The bedroom door opened on its own. Inside was the unmade bed, the old TV, a wobbly wardrobe, and on the wall, dozens of little lines marked in pencil, as if Rebecca had been measuring a child’s height for years. But the lines didn’t go up. They went down. Each mark was closer to the floor.
And below them all, on the baseboard, someone had scratched with a fingernail:
ALMOST OUT
I didn’t want to keep listening. But I couldn’t stop.
“I put him in the water tank because he calmed down there,” Rebecca continued. “The water made him drowsy. The confinement made him remember. I thought I could keep him still until I found the real Emmett. Until they gave him back to me. Until a priest, a witch, someone, knew what to do. But every day he learned something new. My voice. My way of touching. My way of asking for help.”
Then I understood why messages kept coming from her number. It wasn’t her. It was that.
I looked up and saw something in the dining room mirror—something that wasn’t in front of me but was behind my shoulder: a small, twisted silhouette, its head tilted, its skin wrinkled as if it had spent years soaking. I couldn’t make out the face clearly. Only two dark hollows where the eyes should be and a wide, motionless smile—too large for a child’s face.
I didn’t move. The silhouette in the mirror took a step. The water under its feet didn’t splash. It glided.
“Yesterday they buried me,” Rebecca said in the audio, and for the first time she was heard truly weeping. “I thought that way he wouldn’t find me anymore. But the earth holds moisture too. And he always knows where there is water.”
Something touched my wrist. Not with force. With tenderness.
I looked down, very slowly. A small hand was holding me the way children ask to cross the street. The skin was whitish, bloated, with nails torn down to the quick. That black water was seeping from between the fingers. I raised my eyes just enough to see the bangs plastered to the forehead and half a cheek swollen, as if the face had been pressed against a lid for a long time.
“Will you take me to my mommy?” it asked. It wasn’t a threat. That was the worst part. It was an honest question. A question from a lost child.
I felt something break inside me, because for an instant I wanted to pick him up. Dry his face. Take him out of there. Tell him yes.
Then I remembered the notebook.
If he mimics a voice, do not open.
If he asks who you are, do not answer.
Don’t call him by his name.
I clenched my jaw and said nothing. The little hand let go of my wrist. The temperature of the room dropped so much I saw my own breath. The thing in front of me tilted its head even more, almost to its shoulder, like a confused dog. Then it smiled a little more. The skin on its lips burst and water began to pour out of its mouth.
“You aren’t my neighbor,” it said with Rebecca’s exact voice.
And behind me, from the bathroom, I heard the ceiling come crashing down.
I didn’t think. I ran.
I threw myself into the hallway, slipped on the water, hit my knee against the frame, and kept heading down the stairs like a madman, clutching the railing, feeling something coming down with me along the wall—not down the steps—crawling vertically, fast, with the desperation of a spider.
On the first floor, I started screaming. No one came out. Not a window opened. Not a light turned on. Not a single “what happened.” The building was mute, as if everyone had heard and decided, by the pure instinct of an old neighborhood, to play dead.
I reached the front gate and yanked the lock. It didn’t open. Again. Nothing. Then I saw why: someone had tied the gate shut from the outside with a rusted wire. The same one from the water tank.
Behind me, in the stairwell, the little footsteps stopped.
Silence. The kind that serves as a warning.
My phone vibrated one last time. It wasn’t an audio. It was a text from Becca Apt 2A. It only said:
“He opened it.”
I looked up toward the interior courtyard. All the laundry lines were moving at once, even though there was no breeze. The billowing sheets looked like hanging bodies, swaying slightly. And up there, on the edge of the roof, a thin silhouette appeared.
I couldn’t distinguish the face. I only saw that it was carrying something in its arms. Something long. Something rigid. Like a sleeping child.
Then that silhouette raised its head toward me and, with Rebecca’s voice coming from high above, it screamed:
“Neighbor, don’t let him in downstairs!”
And at that precise moment, on the other side of the gate, in the street, someone began to knock.
Three soft taps. Patient. Made with small knuckles.
And a child’s voice, behind the gate, asked:
“Mommy?”
Part 3:
Not because I was brave. Not because I understood what was happening. I didn’t open it because, in that instant, my body knew something before my head did: if I rushed to remove the wire and slide the bolt, whatever was on the other side wasn’t going to enter the building… it was going to enter me.
Those three soft taps sounded again.
Gentle.
Polite.
Like a well-behaved child.
“Mommy?” the voice behind the gate asked again.
Behind me, high up on the roof, the silhouette carrying the rigid object in its arms went still. I couldn’t see its face, but I felt it watching me. Not just me—it was measuring the distance between that thing in the street and the other thing that had followed me down. It was as if, even among monsters, fear existed.
Then the courtyard filled with the smell of freshly turned earth.
Not the dampness of a pipe. Not mold. Overturned earth. A graveyard.
And Rebecca’s voice dropped from above, more broken, more desperate:
“Don’t open it! Neither of them is him!”
A shiver sliced down my spine.
It didn’t come from above. It came from the first floor, behind me, where the stairwell emptied into the shadows. Something began to descend the wall, pressed against the plaster, with the viscous friction of a large lizard. I heard nails, elbows, knees. I heard the black water dripping onto the steps.
I refused to turn around.
The gate received three more taps.
Tap.
Tap.
Tap.
This time, on the other side, the voice changed. It no longer sounded lost. It sounded offended.
“Open up.”
It wasn’t the child’s voice.
It was my own voice.
I took a step back. The phone nearly slipped from my hand. The screen was still lit up on the conversation with Becca Apt 2A. Below the last message, “He opened it,” the little bubble appeared showing someone was typing.
I was shaking so hard I almost missed the new text when it arrived.
“Don’t look back if he’s coming down the wall.”
I looked up out of pure reflex.
And of course, I looked back.
I saw it for only a second, but that was enough to ensure I’d never sleep again.
It was stuck to the wall of the stairwell as if gravity didn’t matter. It was small, yes, with the body of a six- or seven-year-old boy, but it didn’t keep its full shape. Its arms seemed too long and soft; its knees opened at strange angles; its head hung low, held by a neck that stretched too far. The skin wasn’t skin: it was something softened, like it had been left in a bucket for days. And the face… the worst part of the face wasn’t the sunken eyes or the gaping mouth. The worst part was the expression.
It still had the patience of a child.
It smiled at me.
I pulled the phone to my chest and pressed my back against the gate.
Behind me, in the street, something breathed.
Very close.
As if it had pressed its face between the iron bars.
“Neighbor,” Rebecca’s voice whispered then, but not from above—right into my left ear.
I jumped. There was no one there.
The “typing” bubble appeared again.
“He doesn’t want to kill you.”
Two seconds later:
“He wants to open you.”
I felt nauseous.
The thing on the wall stopped moving. It stayed still in the half-darkness, clutching the damp plaster with broken fingers. Then it raised its head, sniffed the air, and smiled wider. It was as if it finally understood that I was beginning to grasp the rules.
Don’t run.
Don’t answer.
Don’t tell him who you are.
Don’t open.
But no one had told me what to do when there were two of them.
the one outside began to scratch the gate with a tiny nail.
Scritch.
Scritch.
Scritch.
Not hard. Gently. Calmly.
Like someone who knows that, sooner or later, they will be let in.
I wanted to scream to the neighbors again. Throw stones. Kick doors. But the silence of the entire building no longer seemed like fear. It seemed like a habit. As if they had spent years listening, knowing exactly when it pays to play dead.
In a first-floor window, behind a brown curtain, I saw something move.
An eye.
Just one.
Someone was watching me without helping.
Then the curtain closed again.
Rebecca’s voice fell from the roof, now much closer, as if the silhouette were descending with its burden:
“Don’t let him choose!”
I didn’t understand.
The boy on the wall did.
He let go suddenly.
He didn’t fall like a body. He fell like a wet sack and, before hitting the ground, he was already righting himself. His bare feet splashed in a puddle I hadn’t seen forming. Then he straightened his neck with a slight crack and began to walk toward me.
Slowly.
Unrushed.
As if he knew I had nowhere left to go.
I squeezed the phone so hard the case groaned. The screen went black for a second, then lit up again. In the reflection, I saw something else behind me, in the street, pressed against the gate. A little face on the other side of the bars.
That one did look like a boy.
Wet. Pale. Sad.
With his bangs plastered to his forehead and eyes huge from pleading.
“I’m cold,” he told me.
With that voice, anyone would have opened up.
With that voice, a mother would have broken locks, gates, doors, and bones.
And then I understood why Rebecca let him in the first time.
Not because the darkness deceived her.
But because there are voices that don’t enter through the ear. They enter through memory.
I too, for an instant, saw something else over that face. I saw my younger brother when he had a fever. I saw my nephew asking me to carry him, asleep, from the car to the bed. I saw all the times you open before thinking because, on the other side, there seems to be someone small.
The one inside was already six feet away from me.
Dragging one foot.
Leaving a black, wet streak on the concrete.
“Can you help me?” he asked with my mother’s exact voice.
My legs went weak. It wasn’t just imitation. It was memory. He was pulling people out from inside me.
The gate vibrated. the one outside had placed both small hands between the bars. He had skinned knuckles and nails full of dirt.
“They found me already,” he sobbed.
Above, from the second floor, something heavy hit the railing. I looked up just in time to see Rebecca’s silhouette stumbling down with that rigid thing in her arms. She was covered in damp earth, her funeral dress stained and her feet bare. Her hair hung in hard clumps, matted with mud. And what she clutched against her chest was not a living child.
It was a small body.
Dry.
Tiny.
Wrapped loosely in a cartoon blanket.
The real one.
I didn’t have to see it all to know.
There is something about the truly dead that is unlike the others. Something still. Something that doesn’t insist.
Rebecca came down the last few steps, nearly falling, and as she touched the courtyard, both boys turned to look at her at the same time.
the one outside stopped whimpering.
the one inside stopped smiling.
The silence grew deeper.
Rebecca looked at me first, her face haggard and her lips blue.
“The water took him,” she said, and dirt came out of her mouth with every word. “But not this.”
She pointed to the one inside.
The twisted boy tilted his head.
“Mommy,” he said.
The voice came out beautiful. Clean. Sweet.
the one outside also said “Mommy,” almost at the same time.
Two voices. Same pain. Same tone.
Rebecca closed her eyes as if she were being pierced by needles.
“Don’t do that to me,” she whispered.
Then she opened her eyes and no longer spoke to me, or to them. She spoke to the entire courtyard. To the closed doors. To the sealed windows. To all those who watched without coming out.
“Enough hiding!” she screamed with a strength that didn’t seem to belong to the dead. “It’s one of your turns now!”
A chain clattered on the second floor. A woman began to pray very softly behind a door. Someone on the roof let out a sob.
Then I understood it with that sickening clarity that arrives too late: the building wasn’t quiet because of fear. It was quiet because it knew whose turn it was. Because they had all been feeding that thing with silence. With nights of not opening. With the brutal desire for misfortune to stay in another apartment.
The boy inside smiled wider.
the one outside gripped the bars.
Rebecca moved toward me with the real small body in her arms and said:
“Help me get mine out.”
I backed away. “How?”
“With one inside and one outside, he’ll want to choose. He always chooses a home,” she said, almost gasping. “If I give him Emmett, he’ll keep being him. If I don’t, he’ll learn all over again.”
I understood nothing and understood everything at once: that thing wasn’t copying a child. It was using a child. It filled him. It wore him. It practiced him until it no longer needed him.
And the small body she was carrying… it was the only thing that could still close something.
the one in the street began to hit the gate harder.
They weren’t three little taps anymore.
They were dry, desperate slaps.
“Mommy! Mommy, open up!”
the one in the courtyard also grew agitated. He took a quick step, then another, and for the first time he lost the patience of a child. His mouth opened too wide. Not as a scream: as a pit.
From the bottom came a spray of black water that splashed my sneakers.
“Give him to me,” he said, but now the voice belonged to no one I knew. It was old. Damp. Clogged. “It’s my turn.”
Rebecca threw the small body at me.
I didn’t think; I caught it by reflex, and nearly hit the floor. It weighed less than it should. Like carrying nothing but folded clothes. The blanket was freezing, but dry. Dry in a terrible way.
As I felt it in my arms, both children shrieked at the same time.
One inside.
One outside.
The entire building creaked.
The pipes rumbled beneath the floor. From the drains, a smell of old sewage and long-stagnant water began to rise. The sheets on the lines billowed as if someone were running through them.
Rebecca grabbed my wrist with fingers full of mud.
“When I open it, don’t look at which one comes in,” she told me. “And don’t let go of Emmett.”
“Open what?”
But she was already at the gate. She stuck both hands between the rusted wire and began to unravel it so fast that skin was torn from her knuckles. Behind the gate, the wet little face locked its eyes onto mine. He smiled. Not sad anymore. Hungry.
the one in the courtyard began to run toward us.
Not the way children run.
As if every joint were learning in that instant what it was for.
Rebecca pulled the last knot. The wire fell away.
“Now!”
I don’t know why I obeyed her. Maybe because carrying a dead child forces you to accept things that ten minutes ago you would have called impossible. I let go of the bolt, opened the leaf of the gate just enough, and closed my eyes so hard I saw white spots.
What followed, I didn’t see.
I heard it.
Two small bodies splashed at the same time.
A dry thud against metal.
A high-pitched shriek that changed voices three times in a second: child, woman, old man.
Rebecca shouted her son’s name for the first time.
“Emmett!”
The entire courtyard shook.
I felt the air rush toward the street, as if pulled by an immense tube. Then came a surge of water—not on me, but around me, as if a wave had passed through the walls. The apartment doors rattled. The windows cracked. Someone upstairs started to cry and no longer hid it.
I kept my eyes closed.
I was still hugging the small body.
Someone touched my shoulder.
Not with tenderness.
With weariness.
I opened my eyes.
Rebecca was in front of me, paler than before, almost transparent at the edges. Behind her, the gate remained open toward the empty street. There was no boy outside. There was no boy inside. Only black water draining toward the sidewalk, dragging dirt and something resembling hair.
Rebecca looked at the blanket in my arms and adjusted it a little, as mothers do with their sleeping children.
“It’s not going to end yet,” she said in a low voice.
I felt a chill in my stomach. “What did we do?”
She looked up at the floors of the building. Little by little, cracks, shutters, doors were opening. Yellow, hollow-eyed, terrified faces were finally peeking out.
Rebecca answered without looking away from the neighbors:
“He already learned how to knock from the outside.”
And then a cell phone rang.
Not mine.
One on the third floor.
We all raised our heads.
Then another rang, on the first floor.
And another, on the roof.
And another, behind a closed door.
The entire building began to vibrate with notifications at the same time.
Incoming messages.
Audio clips.
Videos.
An old woman opened hers with trembling hands and let out a scream.
From where I was, I could see her screen: it was the camera from her own bathroom, recording live. The water in the toilet was rising on its own. And on the mirror, written with a wet finger, it read:
I KNOW HOW TO GET IN WITHOUT WATER NOW
My phone finally vibrated in my pocket.
I didn’t want to see it.
I pulled it out anyway.
The conversation with Becca Apt 2A had a new message, sent barely a second ago.
It wasn’t words.
It was a photo.
I opened it.
It was my door.
The door to my apartment.
Taken from the inside.