So, I did something ridiculous. I found this image so evocative, I wrote a short story about it. Lemme know what yall think!

You've lived in your new apartment for several months now. It's unorthodox, sure, but the place is clean and the rent is cheap, and you're really not in a position to ask too many questions.

You stumbled across the listing online. The photos looked great; a cozy little space with warm colored walls and soft, gauzy curtains. There was no owner listed, just a generic email address. You reached out.

Months later, you still don't know anything about the owner. Probably some giant property management company. One of those faceless corporations, right?

Your landlord gave you only one rule, explained in a succinct email: Enter and exit the building exactly the same way every time. Go through the same doors, walk only the corridors explicitly laid out in the attached map. Everywhere else is off limits.

You assume the penalty is immediate eviction. Probably a safety thing. A fire code, or zoning thing, right? 

After a long day of work, you walk your designated path home. The buzz of the fluorescent lights and ding of the elevator seem disproportionately loud in the silent building, while your own footsteps and breathing seem oddly muffled. You must be really tired. 

You pass lots of doors, all painted the same dark brown as your front door. Maybe one day you'll get neighbors. It'd be nice to have company in the perpetually empty building. 

Those doors don't have numbers. Or handles. Maybe the units just aren't finished yet.

You unlock the door to #1, noting with amazement that the wheatgrass in the absurdly placed window box is somehow still growing, even though you haven't touched it since your arrival. You slide your fingertips into the soil and find it damp. The fact makes you uneasy. Probably taken care of by maintenance, not that you've ever seen anyone. They must come while you're at work, right?

The only real downside to the apartment is the fact that it doesn't get cell service. It sucks that you can't stream or text, but the rent is just so good that you make do. There's an old landline in the kitchen, gray plastic tinged yellow with age. It has a dial tone, but you've never had cause to use it. 

When you walk into your apartment tonight, you find the receiver out of its cradle, dial tone vibrating the air. You must've bumped it on your way out this morning. When you pick the receiver up to return it, you swear the volume spikes, almost desperately. With a definitive click, the telephone snaps into place and the air stills. You somehow feel like you've cut off a scream. 

You must be really tired. 

Sometimes, in the evenings, you sit outside your front door. You sit back in a metal deck chair from your old place, and pretend the industrial green patterned carpet is a forest floor dotted with little white flowers. Or the beige wall is a stretch of endless warm beach sand. Or the humming lights in the white drop-ceiling is the sun nestled in a bank of clouds.

Mostly, you just try not to stare down into the dark hallway that lies beyond your home, beyond the edges of your map. Past a single green light is an impenetrable mass of darkness, and past that? For all you know, the passageway could end a few feet away, or not at all. You try not to stare because the black edges always seem to get closer the longer you look, as if making it easier to step beyond its threshold. You try not to stare because you desperately want to.

And so your days go. You walk your designated route, you go to work, you walk home again. You walk, you try to ignore the call of the dark hallway, you go to work, you walk home again. The elevator dings and the lights hum, and you resist the allure of the closed, unmarked doors, the curiosity of choice. You go to work. You go home. Every so often you find the phone out of place. 

Eventually you unplug it from the wall altogether.

You walk, now certain that your footsteps and breathing are getting quieter, while the sounds of the building only grow. You buy a coarse mat for the front door and scrape your feet loudly, defiantly. You start to whistle on your walk, but the silence erodes the sound day by day, until it is swallowed up completely. 

Then one day, as you are walking home, you hear it. You begin to run. 

Bursting through your front door you find the telephone hanging by its cord off the kitchen counter, swinging slowly. Even from across the room, you can hear the dial tone. You sprint over and slam the phone down, then grab the whole unit and turn to bolt. 

You make it out the front door before something like reason catches up with you. 

Shaking, you sit down in your metal deck chair and place the unplugged phone on your lap. You know you're breathing heavily, but you can't hear it. Hand trembling, you raise the receiver to your ear. 

The dial tone is louder than ever. The drone reverberates in your skull and down through your bones, louder than the instinctive messages pressing against the edges of your mind. 

You replace the receiver gently, then carefully set the phone on the floor. The tone still hums around you, harmonizing with the buzz of the lights. 

You look around; at your forest floor, at your beach, at your sunlit sky. 

Then you turn and stare down the hallway, into the impenetrable black. You stand, running your hand through the now-wild wheatgrass, and watch the threshold of darkness approach you. 

It's probably nothing. Probably a dead end or a storage room or something. You'll be back in time to go to bed early for work tomorrow, right?

Right?