Apartment 16 by Adam Nevill

feet retreat up one floor, and then stop. He went up to investigate.
    The flats on both the first and second floors of the west wing were empty. One apartment was for sale, and the tenants of the others were overseas, so there should have been no one up there for any reason he could think of. It now appeared that somebody was.
    Allowances had to be made for the presence: wind moving through the air risers; a maid or a nurse from the upper floors – there were two he knew of – wandering about to smoke a cigarette or to make a call from a mobile phone; or maybe it was a resident coming downstairs only to find they had forgotten a wallet and returning to their apartment.
    Above him, at the foot of the next staircase, a light in the ceiling flickered. But everything else was the same as it always had been at this time of night. Or was it? There was a smell. Again. Faint, but undeniably present, and growing stronger the further he investigated. Walking around the corridor and sniffing, he noticed a trace of sulphur in the hall. It was as if someone had not long struck a match. A hint of smoke, too, in the way it clung to the clothes of one recently in the presence of a bonfire. And something else: a cooking odour. Yes, a kind of chargrilled, meaty smell like roasting animal fat. The same thing he’d smelled up by flat sixteen last night. ‘What the fuck?’
    In front of each door he passed on his ascent Seth sniffed at the letter flaps to determine whether anyone was inside the apartments cooking meat. But the odours were stronger in the middle of each of the landings and virtually nonexistent near the apartment doors. It was as if someone passing through the building was leaving a scent.
    The stairwell above had fallen silent, and lacking the strength to go any higher he walked back down to the ground floor and sat behind his desk. Unable to keep his eyes open because of the painful pressure behind his face, he closed them. And fell into a deep sleep.
    A glance at the clock told him that it was shortly after half past one when the disturbance began again. This time it was more insistent. From behind his desk he heard the west block lift click, groan and whirr into life. Up it ascended, through the dark shaft to the higher floors.
    Someone had summoned it from above. Seth glanced at the metal panel beneath the lip of the desk. A red light moved behind the digits until it showed that the lift had stopped at the eighth floor of the west wing. Flat seventeen had been empty for four months, since Mr and Mrs Howard-Broderick had moved to their apartment in New York. Flat sixteen, he knew well enough, had been empty for half a century.
    From his chair he watched the illuminated panel. Observed the lift descend. Floor by floor, from the eighth down towards the ground floor. His floor. Right where he was waiting.
    With a hydraulic wheeze the lift slowed, then settled with a clunk on the ground floor. The door remained shut.
    Gingerly, Seth moved out from behind his desk and walked across reception. He peered through the little window in the outer door of the lift. And saw nothing but the mirrored rear wall. Anxious the inner doors might suddenly slide apart as he peered through the little glass square, he stepped back and pressed the button to open the door.
    The carriage was empty. He saw nothing more than his own pale face peering back from the mirrored interior. He sniffed and winced. Once again he could smell smoke and burnt fat, pungent inside the lift, even worse than it had been in the stairwell.
    He closed the outer door and shut his eyes. The brief exertion had worn him out. He was too ill to care about a bad smell and a faulty lift. The virus had returned with vigour and these scant movements felt like they had nearly killed him. He was barely able to stand, and clung to the railing as he staggered down to the staffroom to gulp chilled water from the cooler.
    But relief was still some way off. After he returned to the desk