Late one evening, Lila found herself in her apartment on the 27th floor of a nearly vacant high-rise. Since moving in, she had noticed that only a few units were occupied. Most of the building stood eerily quiet, with flickering lights in the hallway and echoing footsteps that always seemed to linger a moment too long.
She had started hearing whispers through the walls, soft at first, like a distant conversation. They grew louder with each passing night. At first, she assumed it was just the building’s acoustics, but there was something unsettling about the way they repeated the same words, over and over.
“She knows...she sees...” The voice echoed faintly every time she was alone.
One evening, she decided to confront her neighbor, the only other resident on her floor, an older man named Victor. He rarely left his apartment and seemed just as unsettled as she was. When she knocked on his door, he greeted her with hollow eyes, looking past her as if she wasn’t even there.
“I hear them too,” Victor muttered. “The voices. They’re not in your head.”
Lila felt a cold chill as Victor handed her a crumpled sheet of paper, filled with scrawled, incoherent words. “It started the moment you moved in. They’ve been watching. The walls...they’re alive.”
That night, as she lay in bed, the voices became louder, clearer. “She knows too much...she’s next.” Lila's heart pounded. Her hands shook as she grabbed her phone to call for help, but there was no signal. The lights began to flicker, plunging her into darkness.
Panicked, she raced to her door, but as she reached for the knob, she felt something strange—a draft from behind the wall, as if the air was being sucked through. The walls seemed to pulse, almost breathing.
Suddenly, Victor’s words came flooding back. She looked down the hallway and saw him standing there, frozen, his eyes wide with terror.
“I tried to warn you,” he whispered. “But it’s too late.”
The hallway distorted, warping and elongating as Lila felt the walls begin to close in. She sprinted toward the elevator, but as the doors slid open, they revealed not the lobby, but a dimly lit room filled with monitors—each one showing different parts of her apartment.
In the middle of the room stood a man, his back turned to her.
“I’ve been waiting for you to figure it out,” the man said, turning slowly to face her. Lila gasped. It was Victor. But...Victor was still behind her.
Before she could make sense of it, her own voice echoed in her ears: "She knows... she sees..."
The realization hit her like a punch to the gut.
The building wasn’t haunted. She was.
Her entire existence, her interactions, her reality—they had been constructed. Lila stumbled backward as the monitors flickered, showing scenes from different lives she didn’t recognize. The man wearing Victor’s face smiled wickedly.
“You’ve always been a part of this, Lila. You’ve been watching yourself. Over and over.”
The last thing she heard before everything went dark was her own laugh, echoing back at her from the walls.
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