The story
The apartment complex still smelled of fresh paint when Jairo started covering the night shift. Seven brick towers, newly planted gardens, and a glass security booth with nine screens showing every corner of the place in black and white. A quiet job, they had told him. New people, few visitors, zero trouble.
The first week it was the lights. The hallway on the fourth floor of tower three would turn on at two in the morning, even though nobody had gone up. Jairo would write it down in the logbook and blame the sensors.
The second week the shadows started.
On the parking lot screen, something crossed from left to right. It wasn't a person, or not entirely: it was a stain darker than the darkness, with no defined edges, moving slowly. Every time it passed in front of a camera, the image filled with lines, like a badly tuned old TV, and went back to normal when the stain left the frame. Jairo would rewind the recording and find only the interference, never the shape.
One early morning he saw the elevator.
The basement screen showed the empty hallway. The metal doors opened without anyone pressing the button. Something dark, tall, went in. The doors closed. On the security booth panel, the floor number started going up: one, two, three, four... It stopped on the fourth. Jairo went up with the flashlight shaking in his hand. The hallway on the fourth floor of tower three was lit up. And empty.
The other two guards had their own stories, told in a whisper during the shift change. That on the stairs you could hear footsteps walking down when there was no one around. That a lady from the sixth floor wouldn't leave her daughter alone anymore in the bedroom facing the empty lot in the back. That during construction, while excavating the foundations, the workers had found clay pots with bones and the engineer ordered them covered up so as not to delay the handover. And that one of the bricklayers had died on that very job, and nobody ever quite found out how.
Jairo didn't want to believe any of that. Until the night of the dream.
It was almost four. Fatigue hit him all at once, heavy as a wet blanket, and he closed his eyes for a moment in the security booth chair. The crash against the floor woke him up. Someone, something, had yanked the chair backward with such force that the caster wheels were pointing at the ceiling. He stood up screaming. The glass door remained locked from the inside. On all nine screens, at the same time, the image filled with lines.
Jairo finished out his contract the following month. They say the guard who replaced him asked to have his chair swapped for one without wheels. Nobody has asked him why.
