The Face in the Window
The tea sat untouched.
Brynn stared at the window across the street, but the face was gone. The apartment was dark. The glass was empty. She blinked, rubbed her eyes, looked again. Nothing.
“You sure you’re okay?” the waitress asked again.
Brynn didn’t answer.
She couldn’t explain what she had seen. Corinne’s face. Her sister’s face. The same dark hair, the same pale skin, the same small scar above her left eyebrow from the time she fell off her bike.
But Corinne was sixteen when she disappeared.
The face in the window looked older. Twenty-six. The same age Corinne would be now.
“How long has that apartment building been there?” Brynn asked.
The waitress looked out the window. “The Colfax? Forever. Been there since the twenties. They say it was a sanatorium before they turned it into apartments.”
“A sanatorium?”
“For tuberculosis. Back when they didn’t know how to cure it. People went in and never came out.”
Brynn’s stomach turned. “How many died?”
“Hundreds. Maybe thousands. They say the walls absorbed their whispers.”
The waitress walked away to help another customer.
Brynn looked at the building again. The Colfax. She hadn’t known its name. She had found the apartment online, a cheap listing with no photos, no history. She had signed the lease without asking questions.
She was beginning to wish she had.
She pulled out her phone and searched: Colfax Apartments history.
The first result was a forum. “My grandmother lived there in the 1950s. She said the walls talked to her. She said they knew things they shouldn’t.”
The second result was a news article. “Body found in walls of Colfax Apartments. Remains believed to be from the 1940s. Police are investigating.”
The third result was a photograph.
A photograph of Corinne.
Brynn’s hand trembled. She zoomed in on the image. It was a missing person flyer, dated ten years ago. The same flyer she had posted on telephone poles, on community boards, on every corner of her neighborhood.
Why was it here? Why was it connected to the Colfax?
She scrolled down.
“Unsolved disappearance of Corinne Adler, 16, last seen near the Colfax Apartments. Witnesses reported hearing screams from the building that night. Police searched the premises but found nothing.”
Screams.
Brynn remembered that night. She had been home, waiting for Corinne to come back from school. She had heard the news report, seen the police cars, felt the dread settle in her chest like a stone.
She had never gone to the Colfax.
She had never thought to.
The bell above the diner door chimed.
Brynn looked up. A man was standing in the doorway, his face shadowed by the brim of a hat. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and wearing a long coat despite the warmth.
He walked to her booth and sat down across from her.
“You’re from 4B,” he said. His voice was low, rough.
“How do you know that?”
“I live in 4C. Next door. I heard you running down the stairs.”
“The walls are thin.”
“Thin enough to hear whispers.”
Brynn’s blood went cold. “What do you know about the whispers?”
The man removed his hat. He was younger than she had expected — maybe thirty — with sharp cheekbones and dark eyes that seemed to see too much.
“My name is Kael,” he said. “I’ve been living in the Colfax for three years. I’ve been trying to find out what’s in the walls.”
“And?”
“And I think it’s the same thing that took your sister.”
The waitress brought Brynn’s tea.
Neither of them touched it.
“How do you know about my sister?” Brynn asked.
“I saw the flyer. In the basement. There are hundreds of them. Flyers for missing people. All of them disappeared near the Colfax. All of them never found.”
“Show me.”
Kael shook his head. “You don’t want to see the basement.”
“I need to.”
“Once you go down there, you might not come back.”
Brynn looked out the window at the apartment building.
“I don’t care.”