Read the book: «Apartment N 17»

A Supernatural Thriller

Naomi Sherman

Book Description

After inheriting an apartment her mother never told her about, Vera discovers photographs of strangers—and a picture of herself taken three days before she arrived. The building has no apartment with that number, the superintendent has been dead for years, and the neighbors remember events that do not appear in any records. Gradually, Vera learns that a place behind the door can restore lost memories, but every attempt to change the past comes at a price. To get out, she must decide what is worse: living without answers or losing the present for the sake of the past.

All characters and events in this book are fictional.

1. The Key That Shouldn’t Exist

The letter arrived on Thursday at 11:08 a.m.—at the exact moment Vera was about to delete her mother’s number from her phone. It had been seven months since the funeral. She had kept the photographs, the voice messages, and the habit of occasionally dialing the number, even though she knew no one would answer.

The notary informed Vera that she was the sole heir to an apartment on Sadovaya Street. Her mother had never mentioned the property. Vera could refuse the inheritance, but curiosity proved stronger than her unease.

The building was old, with black balconies and tall windows. The entryway smelled of wax and damp plaster. The resident directory listed apartments one through twenty-eight, but there was no Apartment 17.

The key fit the door on the fourth floor. The number had been removed long ago, leaving a pale rectangle on the wood. Inside, everything was clean, as though the owner had stepped out only a minute earlier. A cup stood in the kitchen, a blue coat hung in the bedroom, and dried lavender lay on the windowsill.

Behind the baseboard, Vera found a metal box containing seventeen photographs. The first sixteen showed strangers in the same room. The last showed Vera herself, wearing the coat she had put on that day. The picture had been taken from inside the apartment.

On the back, someone had written: “Don’t let her remember the windowless room.” At the bottom was a date—three days earlier.

A key turned in the hallway. Vera had locked the door from the inside. She remembered doing it perfectly clearly.

The handle slowly lowered.

“So you came back after all,” a woman’s voice said.

The notary’s office smelled of coffee, wet coats, and paper from old filing cabinets. An employee brought out a folder and showed Vera the documents: her mother had visited the notary several times, most recently a month before her death. Vera reread the date, checked the signature, and felt her confusion turn to irritation. Irina had known about the apartment and arranged the transfer in advance. Her silence had been deliberate. Outside, a fine rain fell, the wind crept under Vera’s collar, and wet leaves stuck to her soles. She put the papers in her bag and wondered for the first time whether the inheritance was not a gift but a request her mother had never managed to voice.

That evening, Vera returned to her old apartment to pack her things. As she folded clothes into a suitcase, she noticed how many objects had remained untouched since her mother’s death: a cup with a hairline crack, spare buttons in a glass jar, a shopping list. At the bottom of a drawer lay an old calendar. Irina had circled Vera’s birthday and drawn a tiny symbol beside it that looked like a key. Vera did not remember her mother marking that date this way. She photographed the page, closed the drawer, and decided not to take the calendar. Not every object had to become evidence. Sometimes an object could simply remain an object, though right now Vera found it difficult to tell the difference.

2. The Woman in the Hallway

Vera grabbed her phone. There was no signal. The woman spoke again from behind the door:

“I know you’re in there. Don’t make me come in.”

“Who are you?”

“The one who tried to warn you.”

Vera looked through the peephole and saw not the hallway but a white room. A child’s chair stood in the center. She recoiled.

“Go away!”

“All right. But don’t open the door if you hear your mother’s voice.”

The footsteps faded. An envelope appeared on the floor. Inside was a photograph of a woman who looked remarkably like Vera’s mother when she was young. On the back were the words “Elena Sergeyevna. 1998.” Beside it lay a note: “Don’t trust the superintendent. The real superintendent died twenty years ago.”

Vera decided to leave and return with the police. But for a second, the front door opened onto an unfamiliar landing with black-and-white tiles and a clock showing 11:08. She shut the door and opened it again. This time, the ordinary entryway was there.

Outside, her phone picked up a signal again. A text arrived from an unknown number: “If you want to know why you were erased from your family history, come back tomorrow at 11:08. Don’t bring the photograph.”

A woman from the photograph stood in the window of the unnumbered apartment. She raised her palm to the glass.

Vera recognized her face—or the face of someone who looked exactly like Elena Sergeyevna.

Vera searched the apartment, checking the windows, locks, and spaces behind the furniture. A thin line of moisture had appeared in the kitchen even though the faucet was off, and a fresh palm print marked the windowsill. She photographed the envelope, but in the picture the note was blank. When she tried again, words appeared: “Don’t leave through the front door.” Vera decided not to obey the warnings until she knew who was leaving them. Behind the cleaning-supply cabinet, she found a narrow door leading to a service staircase. Seven tally marks had been drawn on the wall in chalk, along with the words: “Don’t start counting over.” Footsteps sounded above her, but when Vera went up, the apartment was empty.

Vera tried calling the police, but each time she heard a brief tone and the call disconnected. She went outside and called again from a nearby bakery. The place smelled of warm dough, vanilla, and coffee; behind the counter, a woman in a green apron was arranging croissants on a tray. The ordinary scene helped Vera steady herself. She told the dispatcher that someone was leaving notes in the apartment and that she could not tell who was getting inside. The dispatcher advised her to change the lock and contact the building management company. Vera wrote down the advice but said nothing about the photograph of herself taken three days before she arrived. Spoken aloud, that detail would have sounded like a made-up story.

3. The House That Remembered

The next day, Vera returned. A man in a gray suit sat behind a desk near the stairs.

“You’re the new owner of the apartment? My name is Arkady Lvovich.”

“I’m looking for the previous residents.”

“There’s nothing interesting here.”

“What about the apartment without a number?”

His smile disappeared.

“There is no such apartment in this building.”

“I spent the night there.”

The man looked at the key and went pale.

“You should sell the property. Old buildings aren’t safe. Sometimes people see what they most want to see.”

Vera went upstairs. The sprig of lavender on the windowsill had become fresh, and the cup in the kitchen was warm. She turned on her voice recorder and stated the date and address, but when she played it back, she heard a child singing instead of her own voice.

Three knocks sounded from inside the wall. Vera knocked back.

A whisper came from the other side:

“Finally.”

The next morning, the resident directory had changed. The day before, Apartment 17 had not been listed; now Irina’s name appeared beside the number. Vera took out her phone, but the camera could not focus on the line. When she stepped back, the name vanished. Arkady Lvovich met her by the stairs, his familiar ring of keys in hand. Vera asked whether he had known her mother. Klimov replied that once, a mother and daughter had asked him to keep a secret. Vera did not remember such a conversation. Between the second and third floors, she noticed an extra step with a tiny streak of yellow paint. The mark was fresh, as though a child’s shoe had just brushed the wall.

Vera spent half the day checking the building’s layout against old blueprints. In the municipal archive, the fourth floor had no projections, and a load-bearing wall stood behind the apartment’s living room. The current plan showed a utility shaft, but no room. The archivist explained that partitions in old buildings were sometimes changed, though no permits for such renovations had survived. Vera made copies of every plan. When she returned to Sadovaya Street, Klimov was waiting at the entrance. He glanced at her folder and said that documents showed only what people had agreed to put in writing. Vera replied that this was exactly why she was collecting them: not to believe them blindly, but to find where they stopped matching.

4. Seventeen Photographs

Vera arranged the photographs by date. The years were out of order: 1962, 1988, 2001, 1974, 2011. On every photograph, the clock above the door read 11:08.

In one photograph, a man with closed eyes stood reflected in the window. In another, the shape of a child showed behind a curtain. In the photograph of Vera, a woman wearing a crescent-moon medallion appeared in the mirror behind her.

Her mother had owned a medallion like that. It had disappeared after her death.

Vera called her aunt Marina.

“Do you remember Mom’s silver medallion?”

“What made you think of it?”

“I found a photograph.”

“Throw it away. If you’re in that house, leave.”

“Do you know this address?”

Her aunt remained silent for a long time. Then she admitted that Vera’s mother had lived there when she was young and used to say that the house had taken part of her life.

“You were five,” her aunt said. “After that incident, you stopped remembering your early childhood.”

The call cut off. Vera looked at the photograph from 1988: her mother stood beside a girl in a yellow dress. On the back, someone had written: “Elena and Vera. The last day.”

But Vera had not been born in 1988.

Vera spread the photographs out by date and began looking for recurring details. On every picture, the clock above the door read 11:08, and the same section of wall with a thin crack appeared in the background. In the 1974 photograph, a man looked at the photographer’s reflection in the window. In the 2001 picture, the reflection repeated itself: the same hand, the same sleeve, the same watch on the wrist. It was as if someone had frozen one moment while changing the people around it. Late that evening, she heard a shutter click. A new photograph appeared on the table: Vera stood by the entrance, and behind her shoulder was her mother in a light-colored coat. Irina had a hand on her daughter’s shoulder and looked into the lens with an anxiety Vera did not remember.

The next day, Vera bought a magnifying glass and gloves so she would not damage the prints. Under angled light, faint numbers appeared on some photographs. They had been penciled on the inside of the frames, as if the pictures had once been mounted behind glass. The numbers did not match the dates, but formed a sequence: 4, 1, 7, 2, 6. Vera wrote them down separately and did not try to interpret them right away. Then she noticed that the person in every photograph stood the same distance from the window. Even when height, clothing, and posture changed, the toes lined up with a thin scratch in the floor. The photographs seemed to repeat a staged scene, with each new person taking the place of the one before.

5. The Neighbor Upstairs

That evening, an elderly neighbor named Sofya Pavlovna came to see her. She recognized Vera immediately.

“You’re Irina’s daughter. We’ve been waiting for you to show up.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

“Those who remember.”

The neighbor explained that the apartment was not quite an apartment. It was a place between events, one that showed people the past they had lost. Sometimes it returned a memory, but took another one in exchange.

“Your mother tried to make a deal with the house,” Sofya Pavlovna said. “She wanted her sister back.”

“Elena?”

The neighbor nodded and handed Vera an old key.

“If you hear your mother’s voice, don’t answer. If you see yourself as a child, don’t follow her. And don’t open the door to the windowless room.”

“Where is that room?”

“It will decide when you’re ready to see it.”

At the threshold, Sofya Pavlovna added:

“The house doesn’t take money. It takes memories. And the more desperately you want the past back, the higher the price becomes.”

Sofya Pavlovna arrived with a loaf of bread and some apples. She asked Vera not to talk on the stairs: sometimes sound here returned to the person who had spoken, but with someone else’s words. Vera asked why the neighbor was helping her. Sofya explained that she had once asked the house to bring her sister back and had mistaken a repeated voice for a real reunion for far too long. A tiny key was hidden beneath the clasp of her bird-shaped brooch. It opened an old mailbox that did not appear in the resident directory. Inside were letters addressed to people who had died or disappeared long ago. They contained ordinary requests, apologies, and promises to return. Each offered a way to finish a conversation someone had replayed in their mind for years.

Sofya Pavlovna showed Vera an old notebook listing the residents’ names. Some had been crossed out, others circled, and several had dates beside them without explanation. On the last page, in neat handwriting, someone had written: “Don’t ask where they went. Ask what they wanted to hear.” Vera recognized her mother’s handwriting. Sofya admitted that Irina had left the notebook with her many years earlier and asked her not to give it to her daughter unless the girl came on her own. Vera asked why the neighbor had decided to show it to her now. Sofya replied that she no longer wanted to be someone who kept another person’s secret instead of helping bring it to an end.