Current Resident

The skull arrived via Amazon Prime on a Tuesday.

Samantha Quynh stood frozen on the threshold of her new Brooklyn apartment, staring at the package that hadn't been there five minutes ago. She'd just walked down to check her mailbox—the hallway had been empty. Now this box waited at her door, addressed to "Current Resident, Apt 4B" in handwriting that looked scratched into the label. No return address. The cardboard felt unnaturally cold for August, leaving her fingertips numb.

Inside her studio, she opened it with kitchen scissors. Nested in what her brain first refused to process as human hair—black, gray, brittle strands wound together—sat a skull. Not plastic. Not resin. The weight, texture, and faint staining in the bone's crevices screamed authenticity. A laminated card lay beneath it, text in brown ink that flaked when touched:

PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE FROM PREMISES

Property of Building - Established 1847

Return to Apartment 4B if Found Elsewhere

She Watches

She Waits

She Remembers

Her phone was dead. It had been at 67% battery thirty seconds ago. She pressed the power button—nothing. Plugged it in—nothing. The outlet worked; her laptop charged fine. But her phone remained black until, experimentally, she placed the skull on her bookshelf. The screen immediately blazed to life.

She texted her landlord: Someone sent human remains to my apartment.

The response was instant, despite it being midnight: DO NOT THROW AWAY. DO NOT LEAVE. Part of apartment. Non-negotiable.

This is illegal.

Check your lease. Section 47-B. You signed.

She hadn't read that far into the sixty-page document. Now, squinting at fine print, she found it buried between pet policies and noise ordinances: Tenant agrees to maintain all historical fixtures, including but not limited to: original moldings, hardwood details, and memorial objects designated by building management. Removal, disposal, or abandonment of said objects constitutes immediate breach of contract and forfeiture of security deposit, with additional penalties as determined by building management not to exceed current market value of soul.

Current market value of soul. She read it three times. It didn't change.

That night, she woke to breathing that wasn't hers.

The sound came from inside the walls—wet, labored respirations circling her bed. Her phone showed 3:47 AM, but the screen flickered between times: 11:23 PM, 2:15 AM, 4:44 AM, as if the device couldn't determine when she actually existed. Spotify was playing at maximum volume—not music, but someone crying, sobs echoing through her apartment. The timestamp showed three hours and sixteen minutes of playback.

She hadn't fallen asleep listening to anything.

When she grabbed her phone, the screen burned her fingers. The crying transformed into laughter—a woman's voice, old and young simultaneously, overlapping whispers: "Current resident. Current resident. Current resident."

The next morning, every mirror showed her reflection wrong. A second too late, movements that didn't match, and always the skull watching from impossible angles. She packed it back in its box, the hair-packing warm and almost breathing.

"I don't care about the lease," she said aloud.

She made it to her apartment door before it slammed shut on her fingers.

The crack was audible—bone meeting wood with devastating force. Two fingernails tore off completely, blood spreading across white paint in patterns that formed letters: FEED ME YEARS OR FEED ME NOW.

The door wouldn't open until she unpacked the skull.

At the emergency room, she tried to explain. The words wouldn't come. When she tried to say "skull" or "apartment" or "help," her throat would close. Different sounds emerged: "Accident. My fault. Clumsy." The doctor diagnosed stress and anxiety. The nurse whispered that she'd seen these injuries before—always from women in old buildings, always with the same hollow look.

Research became her obsession, conducted in libraries because her laptop at home would only display one website—an endless loop of a daguerreotype from 1847. A woman's portrait, eyes following her cursor, mouth opening wider with each refresh, revealing multiplying teeth.

Margaret Henley, she learned, had been murdered in the building. Strangled by her husband on their wedding night when she'd tried to leave. Some records said she'd discovered his previous wife's body, others claimed she'd found something else in the walls, something he'd been feeding. Her dying wish was that her skull remain to "watch all who came after."

But the building's history suggested otherwise:

1892: Child fell from 4B's window trying to throw something out.

1923: Murder-suicide in 4B. Husband's journal contained one line repeated forty pages: "The skull wants a companion."

1951: Gas leak explosion, only 4B's occupant died. Skull found intact.

1978: Tenant missing, never found. Her mother received postcards for three years, all from inside the building: "Still watching."

1996: Building condemned after walls found filled with human teeth.

2010: Tenant livestreamed destroying the skull with a hammer. Stream cut mid-swing. Found three days later, aged thirty years.

Every incident preceded by: "Tenant attempted to remove historical fixtures."

Her predecessor hadn't moved to Los Angeles. She found him in a psychiatric facility in Queens, committed after being discovered on the Brooklyn Bridge at 3 AM, insisting something was "wearing his face" in his apartment. His social media continued posting after hospitalization—selfies from 4B at 3:47 AM, skull visible behind him. His face, but wrong, like skin stretched over different architecture.

She tried to leave. Her feet wouldn't cross the threshold.

She'd wake sleepwalking back from the hallway, hands bloody from clawing at the door. The doorknob would become faces under her grip—different ones, all screaming silently. Friends stopped responding to texts that, when checked, had been replaced with single words: "watching," "waiting," "feeding."

When her mother tried to visit, she texted about walking past nothing but solid brick where the entrance should be. The address didn't exist for her. Google Maps showed a vacant lot. The building had become selective about witnesses.

Food rotted within minutes unless placed on the shelf beside the skull first, like an offering. Even then, everything tasted like dust and copper. She was losing weight, hair falling out in clumps. The skull, meanwhile, grew more lustrous, bone whitening, sockets somehow more aware.

"What do you want?" she whispered one evening.

Ice formed inside the windows, spelling:

REMEMBER

STAY

WATCH

FEED

BECOME

She dreamed of Margaret Henley nightly. Not the young woman from the portrait, but something wearing her face. Skin sliding over bones that bent wrong. Eyes that were holes—not empty, but full of other apartments, other times, all 4B throughout history, each with the same skull. An infinite regression of watchers being watched.

"You're not Margaret," Samantha whispered.

The thing smiled with teeth extending down its throat. "Margaret was first to feed me willingly. She thought she was protecting others. But protection and possession—such similar words. Now you feed me too. Every hour you stay, I taste your years. Every dream, I digest your memories. When you're hollow enough, you'll beg to join my collection."

She woke to names carved into her walls. Hundreds, in languages spanning centuries. Every tenant who'd lived in 4B. The last still bleeding red into plaster: Samantha Quynh, 2001–

The dash waited for an end date.

Her laptop worked now, but only for specific purposes. She could order groceries, pay rent, maintain illusion of normal life. She could work remotely, though video calls showed her office looking normal while she sat surrounded by walls covered in scratched names. The skull had learned to make her useful, sustainable. A renewable resource.

She tested boundaries. Ordering sage, salt, holy water. They arrived as air fresheners, sugar, bottled urine. Once, she ordered a Bible. It arrived as empty pages that filled with her name repeatedly, until thrown out the window—only to reappear on her nightstand, now full of photographs of her sleeping.

The brass nameplate appeared one morning: Samantha Quynh, 2001-20—, Watching Still.

The end date flickered: 2026, 2031, 2045, 2087. How long depended on how well she fed it. How completely she surrendered. How thoroughly she became part of the building's digestive system.

She still lives there. No choice. The skull sits on her shelf, and she hears it breathing at night, matching her rhythm. Her reflection shows her face becoming skeletal, eyes sinking deeper. Her teeth feel loose. She saves them in a jar, knowing they'll end up in the walls. Everything does.

When she encounters prospective tenants, different words emerge: "Great building. Very quiet. Lots of character."

They smile and thank her, not noticing how her shadow moves independently, or how her breathing sounds like it comes from inside walls.

One will move into 4B when she's gone. The package will arrive on a Tuesday. The cycle will continue.

The building has been patient since 1847.

In dreams she can't remember upon waking, Margaret Henley laughs with a mouth that was never hers, reminding Samantha that immortality and imprisonment differ only in perspective.

Her grandmother had fled Vietnam by boat, survived Thai pirates, and refugee camps. Built a new life from nothing in a country that didn't want her. Survived through sheer refusal to surrender.

Samantha thought of this as she stood before the skull one night, holding a hammer.

"My family survived worse than you," she said.

The apartment trembled. Pictures fell. Plaster cracked. But she brought the hammer down.

The skull didn't break. Instead, the hammer passed through it like water, and her arm followed, then her shoulder, her head, her chest—pulling her into the skull, through it, into darkness that wasn't dark but full of eyes, all the eyes of everyone who'd lived in 4B, all watching, all waiting.

She was in the walls now. She could feel the building's hunger, centuries of appetite. Margaret Henley was there, or what remained—a consciousness worn thin as paint, still watching, still remembering, still feeding the thing that had taken her shape.

"You can't leave," Margaret's remains whispered. "None of us can. We're the mortar between bricks now."

But Samantha remembered her grandmother's words: "They tried to drown us. They didn't know we were seeds."

She began to sing. A Vietnamese lullaby her grandmother sang, about persimmon trees that grow through stone. The other souls in the walls took up the song—in Polish, Spanish, Mandarin, languages of all who'd been consumed. The building shuddered. For the first time in 177 years, it knew fear.

The skull cracked.

Through the crack came light—not heaven, not escape, but morning sun through her apartment window. Real sun. She was on her floor, hammer in hand, the skull in pieces around her.

Her phone rang. The landlord.

"The binding is broken," he said, voice ancient despite his thirty-something appearance in their video calls. "You've doomed everyone who comes after."

"No," Samantha said, sweeping skull fragments into the Amazon box. "I've freed them."

She left that day, walking past the landlord who stood in the lobby, his face cycling through all the faces of 4B's victims. He couldn't touch her. The building's power was broken.

The apartment sits empty now. Sometimes, prospective tenants tour it. They always leave quickly, mentioning a strange smell—like flowers growing through bone.