Ficorpio
Chapter 1
Late that night, the baby in Apartment 404 wouldn’t stop crying.
The building’s WeChat residents’ group chat blew up with complaints.
Before long, the owner of 404 posted a message:
[I’ll strangle the baby right now. I guarantee it won’t bother anyone again.]
The entire chat fell silent.
Because the strange thing was, the crying really did stop at once.
Several minutes passed before a few tentative messages began appearing.
302 wrote: [Come on. Don’t make jokes that creepy in the middle of the night.]
504 agreed: [Exactly. The baby probably just needs to be soothed. Don’t lose your temper.]
601 sounded even more concerned: [@404, are you all right? Do you need help?]
402 seemed alarmed: [It really did go quiet all of a sudden. I can’t hear anything now. What if something actually happened? How could a baby stop crying that fast?]
After that message, the chat went silent again.
By then, I was wide awake. I lived in freaking Apartment 401—on the same floor as 404.
From what little I knew of them, a strange family of three lived there.
The husband was tall and thin, with the plain, unassuming look of someone who kept mostly to himself. Whenever we crossed paths, he would politely say hello and mention his wife or their baby, who wasn’t even a year old yet.
But every conversation with him felt painfully forced.
I’d never seen his wife at all. Maybe that wasn’t so unusual. I only ever left for work and came home afterward, while she was probably stuck inside all day caring for the baby.
Still, they were an odd family, and the husband was an odd man.
The more I thought about it, the more I wondered if he really might be capable of doing something extreme…
Fortunately, it turned out to be a false alarm.
504 quickly sent another message:
[@404, you don’t get to scare us half to death and then go back to sleep. If you don’t explain, I’m calling the police.]
Only then did 404 reply:
[It was a joke. The baby’s mother got up, fed the baby, and calmed everything down. No more crying.]
I finally let out the breath I’d been holding.
Strangely, no one else responded. Maybe everyone had been too badly shaken.
I was about to put my phone down and go back to sleep when a notification appeared from another chat.
I opened it and found the furniture group-buy chat we’d created when everyone first moved into the building. Apartment 404 wasn’t a member.
Once again, the message came from 504:
[Has anyone else noticed that something isn’t right with the family in 404?]
402 replied immediately: [What isn’t right about them?]
504 sent several messages in quick succession:
[The baby cried for half an hour. Why didn’t the mother feed it sooner?]
[And babies aren’t adults. Their crying usually gets weaker little by little. Even after they start feeding, they’ll still fuss a few times. They don’t just stop in the middle of a cry.]
[I have a bad feeling about this.]
There were only eight households in the furniture group-buy chat.
Chapter 2
This was a six-story relocation housing building, and it had only recently opened. Most of the units were still empty. Four apartments on each floor, six floors total, yet only ten households had moved in so far. Most of them were single men.
Three of those households were on the fourth floor: me in Apartment 401, the mysterious Bennett family in 404, and Mason Reed in 402.
After Claire from 504 raised her doubts, Mason responded at once.
[Don’t be ridiculous. You think they’d really strangle their own baby?]
Then Ethan from 601 spoke up.
[Hard to say… A few days ago, I saw the man from 404 kill a cat.]
Mason seemed genuinely alarmed.
[Don’t freak me out.]
But Hannah from 302 immediately pushed back.
[So what if he killed a cat? That doesn’t mean he’d kill someone. And we’re talking about his own son.]
Ethan sent several messages in quick succession.
[First, that’s not what I meant. I’m saying he may have violent tendencies.]
[Second, doesn’t he seem to have a bad relationship with his wife? I’ve never seen them leave together.]
[And since we’re talking about it, has anyone here actually seen his wife?]
That question stopped every awake resident in the chat cold.
I thought about it carefully. Even though I lived on the same floor as them, I had never actually seen Nora Bennett.
Claire, Mason, and Hannah all said the same thing: they hadn’t seen her either. The more they talked, the stranger it seemed.
Finally, Hannah wrote, [Should we call the police?]
But Claire asked, [If we have no evidence at all, wouldn’t that be wasting public resources?]
I had assumed Claire would be the most determined to find out what was happening.
While everyone hesitated, Mason spoke again.
[Why are we making this so complicated? They live next door to me. I’ll just go over and check.]
[That works,] Claire replied. [Just be careful. See what’s going on.]
Ethan and Hannah both told him to keep his tone friendly. The point was to show concern, not accuse anyone.
By then, I was wide awake.
Sleep was out of the question. I rolled out of bed, hurried down the hall, and stopped by my front door.
There was a turn in the hallway outside every apartment, so the one-way peephole couldn’t see anyone else’s door.
I didn’t open mine. I just pressed my ear to it and listened.
A door clicked shut.
Mason had come out of Apartment 402.
He was surprisingly polite. Instead of ringing Apartment 404’s doorbell, he knocked softly.
Then something strange happened.
There was no conversation at all.
I hadn’t heard the door to 404 open. It had been too quiet for that. But the sound of it closing came through clearly enough.
I stood there, unable to make sense of it.
That was it?
Had they spoken so quietly that I couldn’t hear them?
Or had something else happened?
Just then, another message appeared in the residents’ group chat.
Chapter 3
402: There’s nothing wrong at his place. We were overthinking it. Let’s all get some sleep.
I stared at the screen, stunned.
I hadn’t heard the door to Apartment 402 close when he came back. I was certain of it.
When he left, he had shut the door behind him. How could he have returned without opening and closing it again?
Could he have gone into Apartment 404?
The thought sent a chill through me.
On the screen, 601 and 302 were already replying:
601: Good. As long as everything’s fine. Time for bed.
302: Exactly. Everyone go to sleep.
Only 504 stayed silent.
Then I noticed that Claire had sent me a private message.
504: Buddy, you definitely haven’t gone to sleep, have you? You live alone, and you’re always up late. I don’t believe you can actually fall asleep this early… You saw all the messages in the group, right?
I hesitated for a moment. But when I thought about it, it made sense.
Claire was single too, and we occasionally played games together online. Neither of us was any good at going to bed on time.
So I didn’t bother pretending.
Me: I was half-asleep, so I didn’t say anything in the chat. But I saw all of it. Isn’t it over now?
I didn’t dare tell her about the strange sound I’d heard. What concerned me more was why she had chosen to message me privately.
Claire got straight to the point.
504: Buddy, don’t you think something’s wrong?
Of course I thought something was wrong. But I still didn’t dare tell her everything. I didn’t want to create more trouble before I understood what was happening.
So I only replied:
Me: What seems wrong?
Her answer came almost immediately. She was clearly on edge too.
504: 402. Your neighbor. His last message felt wrong to me. Have you ever noticed that he has a little typing habit?
What habit?
I hurried back to the group chat and scrolled through the earlier messages, looking specifically at 402’s posts.
That was when I noticed it.
Ryan used a childish little word at the end of almost every sentence, a cutesy ya that made him sound deliberately young and playful.
But after he went to check on Apartment 404, the message telling everyone to go to sleep didn’t include it.
The sentence sounded much more serious than usual.
Could that mean…
I didn’t dare follow the thought any further.
I continued texting Claire.
Me: You mean the missing “ya”? You think that last message wasn’t really from him?
At that exact moment, I heard a faint noise outside my apartment.
Soft footsteps.