The Apartment Below

No one lives in the apartment below. So who is breathing beneath Mara's floor every night at 2:04 a.m.?

Following a quiet but devastating divorce, thirty-one-year-old copy editor Mara Voss moves into an inexpensive apartment in a crumbling high-rise. She wants silence, distance, and enough space to rebuild the parts of herself that disappeared during her marriage.

Instead, she hears breathing.
It begins beneath the kitchen floor. Soon, the slow and deliberate rhythm moves directly below her bed.
The building superintendent dismisses it as old pipes. There is only one problem: Apartment 3C has been vacant for eighteen months.

When Mara investigates its former tenant, she discovers Devika Nair, a solitary schoolteacher who died inside the apartment. Her absence went unnoticed for eleven days.

Then the haunting changes.
Cold gathers in the southeast corner of Mara's bedroom. A woman appears in the black reflection of the kitchen window. A forgotten photograph reveals something that should not be there. And the presence below begins reaching towards the only person willing to acknowledge it.

As Mara uncovers Devika's lonely history, she recognises something frighteningly familiar. Both women learned how to become invisible. Both were surrounded by people who never truly saw them.
But Devika may not want revenge.

She may only need someone to know that she was there.

The Apartment Below is a slow-burning psychological horror novella combining an atmospheric haunting with an intimate story about divorce, grief, isolation, and the human need to be witnessed.

• Some ghosts return because they cannot leave.
• Others return because no one noticed they were gone.