Before it was sealed, the rent for every apartment on the thirteenth floor of the Sunflower District complex had been abnormally low, though management never framed it that way.
Years ago, something happened in one of the units—an incident kept strictly out of the news. Soon after, tenants across the entire floor began packing up mid-lease.
Management repainted the corridors, laid fresh tiles, and dangled free months of rent, but the exodus continued.
Eventually, they simply welded the heavy metal doors to the thirteenth floor shut.
It had stayed sealed for a decade.
That was the story floating around when I signed the lease for Unit 1204, directly below it.
The leasing agent smiled and told me I was “lucky” to snap up the place at such a bargain. Lucky meant my meager savings could stretch three extra months. I’d run the math at my kitchen table twice: as long as I didn’t complain and didn’t move, I’d survive.
My first night felt ordinary enough. City traffic hummed softly outside, making it easy to dismiss the local rumors as dramatic gossip.
Then, at precisely 3:13 a.m., something heavy dragged across the ceiling above my bed.
I bolted upright. The sound instantly cut out.
Nobody lives up there, I reminded myself, my breath catching. Just the building settling.
I forced my head back onto the pillow, closing my eyes tight.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Three distinct knocks vibrated directly through the plaster above my head.
I stared at the ceiling, desperately convincing myself it was just air shifting through the building’s old pipes.
Pipes move. That’s all it was.
The next morning, I kept my gaze fixed on the floor, deliberately ignoring the chained stairwell door as I left for work.
Footsteps on the Sealed Floor
The knocking returned the next night. And the next. Always at precisely 3:13 a.m.
Once, I heard the distinct rush of running water somewhere above me—steady and deliberate, even though the thirteenth floor’s utility lines had been shut off years ago.
When I mentioned it to management, the agent merely offered a polite, practiced smile and reminded me that Level 13 was empty and locked.
Two nights later, while I was heading to the bathroom, a soft ding echoed through the elevator shaft.
The elevator doors had opened on Level 13.
Footsteps followed, echoing through the ceiling.
Strangely, the sound didn’t feel distant; the heavy, muffled thuds vibrated so close it felt as if someone were pacing right beside my ear.
Silence settled over the building. Moments later, the familiar scrape of something heavy being dragged across the floor above broke the stillness.
By morning, the police were knocking on doors.
A delivery rider had vanished overnight.
His final delivery had been assigned to our building, and his phone’s GPS signal had pinged near the rooftop before going dark.
Officers searched the stairwell, one of them lingering at the Level 13 door. He tugged at the thick iron chain, standing in the silence a second longer than necessary, listening.
The padlock held.
They left by noon without answers.
That night, I lay awake in the dark, tense and waiting. 3:13 a.m. came and went in complete silence. I almost let myself breathe.
The following night, however, the dragging returned. Heavy footsteps paced the floor above, closer than ever.
Then came the knocks.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
Louder. Harder. Vibrating through the plaster directly above my face.
I held my breath, praying the ceiling wouldn’t give way.
The Door Beneath Unit 1304
A week later, at 3:08 a.m., I went up. Not out of bravery, nor to prove a point—I just desperately needed the torment to end.
In the stairwell, the heavy chain across the Level 13 door hung suspiciously slack. The unlocked padlock rested against the cold metal door.
Deep inside the dark hallway, water dripped with rhythmic precision.
Heart hammering, I pushed through.
The corridor lights were dead, yet the concrete floor was impossibly spotless—no dust, no debris, no decay. Row after row of featureless doors stretched into the gloom. At the far end sat Unit 1304.
From directly behind the door came the heavy scrape of something being dragged across the floor.
My hand refused to rise. I couldn’t make myself knock.
I stood frozen as the scraping gradually slowed, stopping inches from the other side of the door.
Terror finally seized my limbs. I took a slow step back, turned, and bolted.
Back inside Unit 1204, my hands shook violently.
Desperate to know whether escape was even possible, I opened my banking app. The balance was unchanged from yesterday—a depressing number that confirmed I didn’t have enough to break my lease and leave.
I stared at the screen, paralyzed by the realization that I was trapped in a nightmare purely because I was broke.
THUMP.
The first knock shattered the quiet before I even had the chance to put my phone down.
Only this time, it didn’t come from the ceiling above.
It came from my front door.
What the Pipes Remember
I was too terrified to answer the door. Fortunately, after three echoing thuds, the silence returned.
The next day, driven by a desperate need for answers, I went to the local library.
The newspaper archives revealed that in 1998, five tenants had shared Unit 1304. Neighbors had complained of late-night gatherings, and in the weeks leading up to the incident, residents reported their tap water tasted strangely metallic.
The official cause of death was listed as gas exposure. Yet, the report noted severe, unexplained water damage across the dining room ceiling.
Afterward, complaints began appearing in municipal records.
Strange noises. Phantom leaks. Doors drifting open. Tenants fled mid-lease. Management renovated, offered steep discounts, and repainted, but nothing worked.
Back at the complex, I approached the elderly caretaker as he sorted mail.
“Some places don’t like being empty,” he murmured, never looking up from the envelopes.
That night, rust-colored water seeped through my ceiling, tracing thin, bloody veins across the plaster.
Above me, the heavy dragging resumed. But it wasn’t coming from Unit 1304 anymore. The sound was higher now, travelling through the pipes from the rooftop water tank.
I lay paralyzed in the dark, listening to something massive shifting in the water overhead.
3:13 a.m.
Three knocks vibrated down through my ceiling.
A heartbeat later, three louder knocks hammered against my front door.
Terror tightened around my chest, stealing my breath.
Whatever had been moving above me was no longer confined to Level 13. It was coming down.
The Empty Chair in Unit 1304
The next night, driven beyond fear by sheer desperation, I climbed the stairwell before 3:13 a.m. I had to know what it wanted.
The heavy chain hung completely slack.
At the end of the hall, the door to Unit 1304 stood wide open, spilling a sickly red glow onto the pristine concrete.
I stepped inside.
A wooden dining table dominated the center of the room. Seated around it were five motionless figures.
Crimson droplets trickled steadily from the ceiling, pooling across the wood in dark, viscous stains. Then the metallic stench reached me, and I understood—it wasn’t water.
Standing stiffly behind the five seated figures was a sixth, still clad in a faded delivery uniform—the missing rider.
The air was suffocatingly damp, thick with the weight of a room submerged for decades and only recently drained.
A sharp slam echoed behind me. The front door shut.
Panicked, I tried to turn, but my body refused to obey. My muscles locked as a cold, invisible force pulled me toward the table.
At the head of the table sat a single empty chair, its wooden seat slick with red.
One of the seated figures tilted its head, the motion sickeningly slow and deliberate. The table was set. The invitation had been waiting for years, and Level 13 always collected its due.
Struggling only made the force tighten its hold. My legs carried me toward the head of the table.
The chair was ice-cold and damp as the force bent my knees and lowered me onto it.
Level 13 Is Never Empty
As the freezing liquid soaked through my clothes, my hands jerked forward against my will to join theirs, completing the circle.
My breath caught, my heartbeat faltered, and my consciousness was violently bound to the dark wood.
Trapped forever, I finally understood the horrible truth.
The five were never victims of an accident—they had belonged to a dark cult.
Their late-night gatherings had been rituals, and their deaths had completed the blood sacrifice. They had climbed into the rooftop water tank and opened their veins together, corrupting the building’s supply from the top down.
That was why the tap water had tasted so sickeningly metallic.
Over the decades, they hadn’t been haunting the floor—they were recruiting. The missing delivery rider was their sixth member.
I was their seventh.
Weeks blurred together in the heavy, suffocating red silence of Unit 1304. Then, the floor beneath us hummed with new life.
Someone new had moved into Unit 1204.
Through the concrete beneath me, I heard him carrying boxes into the apartment, laughing into his phone about the unbelievably cheap rent.
He thought he was lucky. He thought he’d run the math.
When the clock struck 3:13 a.m., my body moved without my consent.
My hands closed around something heavy and jagged. Against my will, I dragged it across the concrete.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
I knocked three times against the floor.
Directly below me, I felt the new tenant bolt upright in bed, his pulse spiking, his breath catching in his throat as he tried to convince himself it was just old pipes.
In the darkness of Unit 1304, I waited for him to come up.
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