The Tenant Above

I have always prided myself on being a rational man. Ghosts, spirits, the paranormal—these were the fantasies of the superstitious, the stuff of campfire tales and B-movies. But as I sit here in the dim glow of my laptop, a cold sweat trickling down my spine, I can no longer maintain that fiction. What happened in that house changed me, and I fear it will never change back.

It was the autumn of 1998, and my family had just moved into a cramped two-story flat in a decaying district of the city. The building was a relic of a bygone era, its paint peeling like sunburnt skin, and the wooden floors sagged as if exhausted by decades of footsteps. We were five children, my parents, and my grandmother, all squeezed into the lower floor—a space barely large enough for a family half our size. The upper floor was rented to a reclusive man named Mr. Hartmann, whom we rarely saw. He kept to himself, and we were too exhausted from our own struggles to wonder about him.

Our street was lined with similar tenements, and the air was thick with the smell of cooking oil and dampness. The building’s only light came from a flickering fluorescent tube in the hallway, which buzzed like a constant angry insect. The layout was simple: a narrow corridor led to our cramped living room and three tiny bedrooms. A rickety staircase at the back led up to Mr. Hartmann’s quarters, and we were forbidden to go up there.

At first, nothing seemed amiss. But within a week, I began to notice peculiar patterns in the ceiling above our living room. The plaster was cracked, and the patterns resembled a face—a gaunt, hollow-eyed visage staring down at us. I joked that it was just water damage, but whenever I looked directly at it, I felt a chill. My youngest sister, Lucy, refused to sit under it, crying that ‘the man is looking at me.’ We dismissed it as childish imagination.

Then, the objects started to move. At first, it was small things: a glass that slid off the table when no one touched it, a book that fell from a shelf. We blamed the draft, our mother blamed the rats, and we tried to laugh it off. But then, one night, I heard a faint scratching from the ceiling, like nails being dragged across the wood. It followed a pattern—scratch, scratch, pause, scratch—as if someone was trying to send a message in Morse code. I lay in bed, frozen, my heart hammering against my ribs.

The sounds grew louder each night. Soon, it wasn’t just scratching; it was a rhythmic thumping, as if a heavy body was being dragged across the floor above. My father, a practical man, went up to confront Mr. Hartmann, but he claimed he was a sleepwalker and apologized. We accepted, but the sounds continued. My brothers and sisters reported waking up with scratches on their arms, and my mother found muddy footprints leading from the staircase to our kitchen, even though the rain had stopped days ago.

One evening, my mother sent me upstairs to ask Mr. Hartmann for some sugar. I hesitated, but I had always been the brave one. The stairs were narrow, and the air was cold as I ascended. The door to his flat was ajar, and I saw him sitting in a chair, his back to me. ‘Mr. Hartmann?’ I called. He didn’t respond. I took a step closer and saw that his reflection in the dusty window was slightly out of sync with his movements—a half-second delay that made my skin crawl. I backed away and never told anyone about it.

The true terror began when I discovered the letters. I found a bundle of yellowed envelopes hidden behind a loose board in our bedroom, addressed to a woman named Eloise. I opened one and found a passionate love letter, signed ‘Your devoted H.’ Another was darker, describing a deep loneliness and a ‘thing that follows me home.’ The last one was dated just before we moved in, and it read: ‘I have made a pact. It will live in the ceiling, and I will feed it. Do not come looking for me.’

That night, I couldn’t sleep. I heard the scratching again, but this time it was coming from inside the walls of our own room, just inches from my head. I pressed my ear to the plaster and heard a slow, deliberate breathing. Then, a voice—dry and brittle like crumbling leaves—whispered, ‘Let me out.’

I gathered my siblings and told them we needed to leave. But my father refused, saying the rent was too good to give up. The next morning, we found grandfather dead in his armchair, his face frozen in a mask of terror. The doctor said it was a heart attack, but I knew better. That night, Lucy saw the face in the ceiling move. It blinked.

I started to investigate old records at the local library and discovered that a woman named Eloise had lived in our building fifty years ago. She had disappeared without a trace, and her fiancé, a Mr. Hartmann, had lived there until his own death in 1975. The man upstairs, then, was not the original Hartmann. He was something else. He was the pact.

My family began to fracture under the strain. My parents argued constantly, and my siblings became sullen and afraid. The scratching never stopped, and we started to see the face everywhere: in the cracks of the walls, in the grains of the wooden floor, in the pattern of the stained ceiling. We tried to move, but every time we packed our bags, the door would refuse to open, or our documents would disappear.

One night, I decided to go up to Mr. Hartmann’s flat for good. The door was locked, but I forced it open. Inside, the room was almost bare, except for a single chair facing a small window. On the floor was a circle of salt, and in the center lay a human-sized doll made of burlap and straw. But it wasn’t a doll—it was a desiccated corpse, its skin stretched taut over bones. The face was gaunt, hollow-eyed, and it looked exactly like the pattern in our ceiling. It was Eloise. And behind it, in the dark corner, stood Mr. Hartmann—or what he had become. He smiled with cracked lips and said, ‘Thank you for bringing me your family. Now we are complete.’

The next day, my family and I found ourselves outside the building, with no memory of how we got there. The house was gone, replaced by a vacant lot overgrown with weeds. We moved away, and I tried to forget. But I still hear the scratching at night, and sometimes, when I catch my reflection in a mirror, I see the face under my skin, waiting. I am no longer skeptical. I am no longer anything but prey.