The Tenant in 3B

In the sweltering summer of 1995, my uncle Marcus rented a cramped one-bedroom in a decaying brownstone on the edge of Detroit’s Cass Corridor. The building had seen better decades: peeling paint, a stoop that sagged like a tired spine, and radiators that clanked even in July. The landlady, Mrs. Kovac, was a wiry woman in her seventies who smelled of mothballs and old paper. She warned Marcus about the heat, but she never warned him about the walls.

Marcus was a grad student at Wayne State, working on a thesis about urban decay. He chose the building because it was cheap and close to the archives. He was a practical man, not given to flights of fancy. But the first night, as he lay on the mattress he’d hauled up three flights, he heard a sound that wasn’t the building settling. It was a rhythmic thumping, low and regular, like a heartbeat coming from the wall behind his head. He pressed his ear against the wallpaper, but the sound stopped. He chalked it up to pipes.

Weeks passed, and the heat wave intensified. The city opened cooling centers, and Marcus often escaped to the library, but his apartment was a furnace. He bought a window unit, but the moment he turned it on, the circuit breaker tripped. He found the fuse box in the basement, a maze of dusty wires and cobwebs. The fuse for his apartment was blown, but the box was padlocked. He called Mrs. Kovac, who said she’d send someone, but no one came.

One evening, after a day inside 100-degree heat, Marcus was desperate. He took a flashlight to the basement, determined to find a way to bypass the lock. The padlock was old, and it gave way with a few sharp tugs. Inside, he found a collection of strange objects: a child’s shoe, a porcelain doll with cracked eyes, and a phonograph record with no label. The record was warped, but Marcus, curious, took it upstairs. He found a needle in a drawer and laid the record on his turntable. The music that emerged was a loping, off-tune waltz, like something from a funhouse. Then he heard a voice, thin and distant, singing a nursery rhyme he didn’t recognize: ‘The walls have ears, the floor has teeth, the ceiling watches from beneath.’

That night, the heat broke. A thunderstorm rolled in, and Marcus slept with his windows open, the cool air finally a relief. But at 3:33 AM, he was jolted awake by a pounding at his door—a frantic, desperate rapping that seemed to come from inside the doorframe itself. He stumbled to the peephole, but the hallway was empty. As he turned away, he saw the door slightly ajar, and in the gap, a small hand with the fingers splayed, reaching for him. He slammed the door shut and latched it. The pounding continued from inside the wall, now faster, more urgent.

Marcus fled the apartment, running down the stairs. In the lobby, he found Mrs. Kovac standing by the mailboxes, her face pale in the dim light. She looked at him as if she knew. ‘It’s the child,’ she said. ‘She was left here in ’45. The parents never came back. She died in that apartment. Yours is the room she loved most. Sometimes, when the heat gets bad, she gets restless.’

Marcus refused to believe it. He spent the next two nights at a friend’s place, but his research notes were in the apartment. He had to go back. When he did, the air was thick with the smell of dust and old perfume. His notes were scattered on the floor, and on one page, in handwriting that was not his own, was a child’s crayon drawing: a stick figure in a window, labeled ‘MARCUS’. Below, a jagged smile.

That night, Marcus tried to sleep. The heat had returned, and the window unit was useless. He lay awake, listening to the familiar thumping, but now it was accompanied by scratching, like nails on plaster. He put his hand flat against the wall, and the scratching stopped. Then a small, cold pressure pressed back against his palm, as if a tiny hand were on the other side, mirroring him. He yanked his hand away, and from the wall came a giggle—high, childish, and wrong.

Marcus packed his things in a frenzy, but as he reached for the door, he heard a new sound: the loping waltz from the record, playing in the kitchen. The record had stayed on the turntable, but the music was coming from the wall, muffled and warped. He threw open the door and fled, not stopping until he was in his car, the engine running, the city’s skyline behind him.

He moved in with a friend for good, and Mrs. Kovac gave him back his deposit without a word. But the worst part came three years later, when he mentioned the apartment to his new girlfriend. She pulled out an old newspaper article, yellowed and brittle, about a girl who went missing in that building in 1955. The headline read: ‘Child Disappears from Room 3B; Never Found.’ The photograph was grainy, but Marcus recognized the smile from the drawing.

He threw the paper away, but he couldn’t stop the sound. Even now, in his tidy suburban house, on quiet nights, he hears the thumping. Only now, it’s coming from his own chest, and he knows, with a certainty that chills him, that the girl didn’t die in that room. She came with him.