The Wall That Sang

By the time Raihan found the apartment, the rain had already turned the city into a blurred reflection of itself.

Streetlights trembled in puddles. The windows of passing buses glowed like aquariums through the evening downpour, each one carrying strangers home to places that still wanted them. Raihan stood at the foot of the old building with two suitcases, a black canvas duffel hooked over one shoulder, and the particular exhaustion of a man who had not moved out of a home so much as escaped the shape of one.

The building rose above him in tired concrete layers, twelve storeys of peeling paint and corridor railings darkened by years of rain. It was not ugly, exactly. Ugly would have required intention. This place looked as though it had simply endured too long without anyone asking whether endurance was the same as living. A faded sign near the lift lobby read BLOCK 47, one of the digits half-swallowed by rust. Somewhere above, a window slammed in the wind, followed by the irritated bark of a small dog.

Raihan adjusted the strap of his duffel and told himself this was good.

Old meant cheap. Cheap meant immediate. Immediate meant he would not have to spend another week sleeping on his cousin's sofa, waking each morning to the smell of someone else's coffee and the soft embarrassment of being asked whether he was okay.

He was tired of that question.

He was tired of the pause after it, too, the small respectful silence people left behind as if grief were a spill on the floor and they were stepping carefully around it.

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

For one foolish second, his body reacted before his mind could stop it. A lift inside his chest. A turn of attention. A small, humiliating hope.

Then he pulled the phone out and saw that it was only a delivery notification from a number he did not recognize. Behind it, still visible in the background of his locked screen, was a photograph he had forgotten to change: Nadia laughing into the wind at East Coast Park, one hand holding her hair away from her mouth, the other gripping his wrist because she had been afraid of slipping on the wet rocks. The photo was two years old. In it, he could see the edge of his own shoulder, the corner of his smile. He remembered taking it. He remembered thinking, with the simple arrogance of the loved, that there would be hundreds more like it.

He turned the phone face down in his palm.

"Mr. Raihan?"

The voice came from inside the lobby, thin and practical, sharpened by age and weather. An elderly woman stood beneath the flickering fluorescent light, holding a large umbrella in one hand and a ring of keys in the other. She was small, but not frail. Her white hair had been pinned into a neat bun, and her blouse, though plain, was ironed so sharply it seemed to have its own opinion about disorder.

"Yes," Raihan said, stepping out of the rain. "Mrs. Tan?"

She looked him over with the frankness of someone who had rented rooms to every possible kind of tenant and had learned to judge quickly without apologizing for it. Her eyes moved from his wet shoes to his suitcases, to the dark circles beneath his eyes, then back to his face.

"You're late."

"The Grab driver missed the turn."

"Rain makes everyone stupid," she said, as if this were a known principle of physics. Then she nodded toward the lift. "Come. Before the lift changes its mind."

The lift doors opened with a reluctant groan. Inside, the mirror had been scratched with old initials and a heart pierced by an arrow, the kind of vandalism that looked sentimental only after enough time had passed. Raihan dragged both suitcases in. Mrs. Tan followed and pressed the button for the eleventh floor.

For a while, neither of them spoke.

The lift shuddered upward, stopping at the fourth floor for no one, then again at the seventh. Rainwater dripped from the hem of Raihan's shirt onto the metal floor. He watched each drop gather, swell, and fall. There was a strange relief in focusing on something so small. Drops did not ask questions. Drops did not leave.

"You work nearby?" Mrs. Tan asked.

"Not very," he said. "But close enough."

"What do you do?"

"Systems analyst."

"Computer people." She said it the way someone else might say fortune tellers. "Good. Quiet work."

"Sometimes."

"You live alone?"

He paused just a fraction too long.

"Yes."

Mrs. Tan did not look at him, but he had the sense that she had heard the pause as clearly as if he had answered twice.

The lift reached the eleventh floor with a metallic sigh. When the doors opened, the corridor beyond was dim and narrow, washed in the blue-gray light of the rain. The units lined both sides like closed mouths. Somewhere, someone was frying onions; the smell drifted through the corridor, warm and ordinary, and struck him with such unexpected force that he almost stopped walking.

Once, he and Nadia had cooked late dinners after work. She would stand barefoot in his kitchen, sleeves rolled up, complaining about his blunt knives while he pretended to be offended. She liked onions nearly burnt. He liked them just translucent. They used to argue over this with ridiculous seriousness, as if the future could be negotiated through heat and oil.

He blinked the memory away.

Mrs. Tan walked briskly ahead, her slippers making soft scraping sounds against the concrete floor. The corridor smelled of damp laundry, rain, old paint, and someone's incense. Halfway down, a single wall light flickered, making the shadows stretch and shrink. At the far end, a window looked out over the city, where the storm had lowered itself over rooftops like a heavy hand.

"Here," Mrs. Tan said.

She stopped at a door marked 11A.

Raihan set down his suitcase as she sorted through her keys. Beside his door was another unit, darker than the rest. Its number plate, 11B, hung slightly crooked, the brass dulled almost black. A strip of masking tape had been pasted across the keyhole. Not fresh tape. The edges had browned and curled with age.

Something about it made the corridor feel colder.

Mrs. Tan opened 11A and pushed the door inward. "This is yours."

The apartment was smaller than it had looked in the photos, though Raihan had expected that. Online listings were built from careful angles and professional lies. The living room could barely hold a sofa without apologizing to the coffee table. The kitchen was a narrow strip of cabinets with a stained counter and a window above the sink. Beyond it, a bedroom, a bathroom, and not much else.

But it was clean.

Mostly.

The floor had been mopped, though the tiles were old enough to keep the memory of every stain. The walls had been repainted a color that might once have been cream but now leaned toward the tired yellow of old receipts. The ceiling fan made a faint clicking sound even while still, moved occasionally by drafts slipping through gaps in the windows.

"It's fine," Raihan said.

Mrs. Tan gave him a look. "I didn't ask."

Despite himself, something like a smile almost happened.

She showed him the switches, the water heater, the gas valve. The air-conditioner in the bedroom worked if one waited three minutes after pressing the remote and did not expect miracles. The kitchen light buzzed when first turned on but settled after a while. The bathroom window had to be pushed hard before it latched. The previous tenant had left behind a standing fan with a cracked grille, which Raihan could keep or throw away.

"Rent due on the first," Mrs. Tan said, handing him the keys. "No smoking. No drilling after nine. No parties."

"I don't really do parties."

"Good. Parties make people stupid even without rain."

He took the keys. They were cold and slightly sticky from her hand. "The room next door," he said, before he could stop himself. "11B. Is someone living there?"

Mrs. Tan's fingers tightened around the key ring.

It was brief. A small thing. Anyone else might have missed it.

"No," she said.

"Storage?"

"Empty."

"The keyhole is taped."

"Because it is empty."

That made no sense, but she said it with such finality that it became clear sense had not been invited into the answer.

Raihan looked back toward the corridor. From inside 11A, the neighboring wall seemed ordinary enough, painted the same tired cream as the rest. Still, he imagined the dark door outside. The curled tape. The crooked brass number.

"How long has it been empty?"

Mrs. Tan picked up her umbrella, though she had nowhere to open it indoors. "Long enough."

There was a warning in her voice now. Not anger. Not quite fear. Something more practiced. The tone of a person who had carried the same answer for years and learned to place it between herself and every question.

Raihan should have let it go.

Instead, because exhaustion made him blunt, he asked, "Why not rent it out?"

Mrs. Tan stood very still.

Outside the kitchen window, thunder rolled across the sky, low and swollen. For a moment, the apartment lights trembled.

"Some rooms," she said at last, "are better left quiet."

The words landed softly, but the air changed around them.

Raihan looked at her. She did not look away, and yet he felt she was not seeing him anymore. She was seeing another corridor, another door, another night.

Then the moment ended. Mrs. Tan adjusted the strap of her handbag and walked toward the entrance.

"You sleep early," she said. "Rain makes the pipes noisy. Don't complain tomorrow."

"I wasn't planning to."

"People always plan after they complain."

She stepped into the corridor. Before she left, she turned back and glanced past him, into the apartment, toward the wall shared with 11B. The look lasted only a second.

"Lock your door," she said.

Then she was gone, her slippers scraping down the corridor until the lift swallowed the sound.

Raihan stood alone in the doorway with the keys in his palm.

The apartment felt suddenly larger.

Not in space. In silence.

---

Unpacking took less than an hour because he had brought almost nothing worth arranging.

Clothes went into the wardrobe. Laptop onto the small desk by the bedroom window. Toiletries into the bathroom cabinet. A stack of books, mostly unread, beside the mattress he had dragged from the delivery plastic and laid directly on the bedroom floor because the bedframe would arrive only next week. He found a chipped mug in one suitcase, wrapped in a towel, and stood holding it for a long moment before remembering why he had packed it.

It had been Nadia's.

Not officially. They had bought it together at a night market, one of those ceramic cups with a crooked blue fish painted on the side. She had claimed it because the fish looked "judgmental but cute." After the breakup, when they divided things with the stiff politeness of two diplomats ending a failed treaty, she had forgotten the mug in his cabinet.

He had meant to throw it away.

Instead, apparently, he had packed it.

Raihan set it on the counter, then immediately turned it so the fish faced the wall.

His phone vibrated again just after ten.

This time, it was Nadia.

Not a new message. Nothing so mercifully clean. It was the old unread message he had pinned by accident, resurfacing because his phone had synced something during the move. Her name appeared at the top of the screen like a bruise pressed under glass.

Nadia: I know you probably don't want to hear from me. But I hope you're eating properly. I never wanted things to end like this. I'm sorry, Rai.

He stared at the preview until the words stopped making sense.

Rai.

She was the only person who called him that. Not because it was special. Because she was lazy with names and affectionate in the same breath. At first, he had hated it. Then he had loved it. Then she had said it on the night she left, soft and careful, and the sound had become unbearable.

He locked the phone without opening the message.

Rain hammered against the kitchen window. The entire apartment seemed to listen.

He made instant noodles because he did not trust himself with knives tonight. The steam fogged his glasses. He ate standing by the sink, scrolling through nothing, tasting salt and heat and not much else. Outside, traffic hissed on wet roads. Somewhere in the building, a child cried briefly and was soothed. A door opened, closed. Pipes knocked in the walls with the old building's mechanical complaints.

At 10:47 p.m., the kitchen light buzzed and steadied.

At 10:52 p.m., the ceiling fan began its faint clicking.

At 11:03 p.m., Raihan lay on his mattress in the bedroom, one arm over his eyes, waiting for sleep to misunderstand him and arrive.

It did not.

Instead, memory came, as it often did when the world became quiet enough to give it room.

Nadia by the window of their old place, folding one of his shirts because she said he folded like an engineer trying to solve fabric. Nadia sitting across from him at a café, stirring coffee she did not drink, telling him she needed to be honest. Nadia crying, not dramatically, but with her lips pressed together as if even her sadness had to behave. Nadia saying, I think I stopped seeing a future before I knew how to tell you.

That sentence had been merciless because it was not cruel.

Cruelty would have given him somewhere to put his anger. Instead, she had given him truth wrapped in gentleness, and gentleness had made the wound clean enough to hurt without bleeding.

Raihan turned onto his side.

The wall beside his mattress was the wall shared with 11B.

It looked ordinary in the dim light: cream paint, faint hairline cracks, a darker patch near the skirting where moisture had once gathered. He could hear rain through the window and, beneath it, the soft internal sounds of the building. Pipes. Concrete settling. Someone's television far away. The city refusing to sleep.

Then, just as the digital clock on his phone changed to 11:11, a woman began to sing.

Raihan opened his eyes.

The voice came from the wall.

Not from the corridor. Not from the window. Not from a neighboring unit above or below, distorted by pipes and echoes. It came from directly beside him, soft and near, as if someone stood with her mouth only inches from the other side of the plaster.

The melody was unfamiliar.

It moved slowly, almost like a lullaby, but not one meant for children. There was too much ache in it. The notes rose carefully, searching, then fell as if they had found something they could not keep. The voice itself was clear but hushed, feminine and young, with a slight tremor at the ends of phrases. Not untrained. Not polished in the artificial way of recordings either. It sounded alive in the most dangerous sense of the word -- imperfect enough to be real.

Raihan sat up slowly.

The singing continued.

For a moment, he thought of Mrs. Tan's face when he had asked about 11B.

Some rooms are better left quiet.

His skin tightened.

"Hello?" he said.

The singing did not stop.

He got to his feet, every movement careful, though he did not know why he was trying not to startle someone who should not have been there. The floor was cold beneath his bare feet. He moved closer to the wall and stood with his head tilted, listening.

The melody had no words. Only humming now, low and tender, like someone comforting herself in the dark.

He raised his hand.

For a second, he hesitated.

Then he pressed his palm flat against the wall.

Warmth met him.

Not heat. Not exactly. Just the faint, undeniable warmth of another hand separated from his by something too thin and too thick at once.

Raihan pulled back sharply.

The singing stopped.

The apartment held its breath.

His own pulse rushed in his ears. He stared at the wall, waiting for laughter, footsteps, a phone playing music, some reasonable explanation to come stumbling in late and embarrassed.

Nothing.

Then, from the other side, there was a sound so faint he might have imagined it.

A breath.

Raihan stepped back until his heel struck the mattress. "Who's there?"

No answer.

He grabbed his phone, turned on the flashlight, and went into the living room. His hands were steadier than his chest. That annoyed him. Fear should have been clearer. Instead he felt absurdly alert, as if part of him had been waiting for something impossible because ordinary pain had become too familiar.

He opened his front door.

The corridor was empty.

Rain whispered through the window at the far end. The wall light flickered once, then steadied. 11B's door stood beside his, dark and taped shut, exactly as before.

Raihan stepped toward it.

The floor outside 11B was dry. No footprints. No sign anyone had entered. The brass number reflected a thin line of corridor light. He leaned close to the door and listened.

Silence.

He looked at the taped keyhole. The masking tape had cracked down the center with age. Its edges lifted slightly, showing the dark hollow beneath. He did not touch it.

He did not know why.

The corridor smelled of rain and old concrete. Somewhere below, a motorcycle passed with a wet snarl. Raihan stood in front of the locked room, feeling foolish and afraid and strangely disappointed.

Then the lift doors opened at the far end.

He turned quickly.

Mrs. Tan stepped out carrying a plastic bag, her umbrella tucked beneath one arm. She stopped when she saw him standing outside 11B.

For a moment, neither of them moved.

"You heard something," she said.

It was not a question.

Raihan's mouth went dry. "Someone was singing."

Mrs. Tan's expression changed so slightly that, in another light, he might have called it irritation. But under the flickering corridor lamp, it looked closer to grief tightening its coat.

"Pipes," she said.

"Pipes don't sing."

"This building makes many sounds."

"It was a woman."

"Then maybe upstairs."

"It came from here." He looked at the door. "From inside."

Mrs. Tan walked toward him. She did not hurry. Each step seemed chosen. When she reached 11B, she stood between him and the door, small but immovable.

"No one is inside."

"Then open it."

Her eyes lifted to his.

There it was again -- not fear exactly, but something that had lived with fear long enough to resemble discipline.

"No."

"Mrs. Tan."

"You rented 11A," she said. "Not this one."

"I'm not trying to be difficult."

"People never are at first."

The unfairness of that almost made him laugh. Instead, he rubbed a hand over his face. He was too tired for this conversation, too raw to navigate another person's secrets with manners. "Look, I just moved in. I'm not going to sleep next to a locked room if someone is inside it."

"There is no one inside it."

"Then why won't you open it?"

Rain struck the corridor window hard enough to rattle the frame.

Mrs. Tan looked toward the sound. For an instant, the harshness left her face and she seemed simply old. Not elderly in the usual way, but old from holding a door shut against time.

"When my husband died," she said abruptly, "I kept his room exactly the same for seven months. His pillow. His watch. His ugly radio. Everything. My sister told me, 'Open the window, throw away old things, life must go on.' Very easy to say when it is not your room."

Raihan said nothing.

She looked back at him. "This room belongs to no one now. But some things inside are not mine to show you."

The answer unsettled him more than refusal would have.

"So it isn't empty."

Mrs. Tan's mouth tightened.

"Go sleep, Mr. Raihan."

"I heard someone."

"You heard rain. You heard pipes. You heard yourself."

The words struck too close, and from the way her gaze softened immediately after, she knew it.

Raihan looked away first.

For a while, only the rain spoke.

Then Mrs. Tan stepped back from the door. "If it happens again, ignore it."

"That's your advice?"

"My advice is usually better than people deserve."

He wanted to push further. He wanted to demand the key, demand explanations, demand that the world stop giving him half-answers in gentle voices. But Mrs. Tan's hand had moved to the pocket of her blouse, where something small and metal made the fabric sag. A key, perhaps. Or nothing. Either way, her fingers gripped it as if letting go might change too much.

Raihan exhaled.

"Good night," he said, though there was nothing good in it.

Mrs. Tan did not answer until he had opened his own door.

"Lock it," she said again.

This time, he did.

---

He did not sleep.

For the next hour, Raihan sat on the bedroom floor with his back against the mattress and his phone recording beside him. The wall was silent. He checked the audio twice, listening to the hiss of room tone and the distant rain, feeling ridiculous. He searched the building name online, then the block number, then combinations of the address with words like accident, death, singing, locked room. Nothing useful appeared. A plumbing complaint from five years ago. A property listing. A forum thread about haunted places that mentioned a different estate entirely and included too many laughing emojis to be trusted.

At 12:37 a.m., he gave up searching.

At 1:10 a.m., he opened Nadia's message.

He did not mean to. His thumb simply did it, the way the body sometimes betrays the mind by seeking pain it understands over uncertainty it does not.

The full message was longer than the preview.

I know you probably don't want to hear from me. But I hope you're eating properly. I never wanted things to end like this. I'm sorry, Rai. Not just for leaving, but for staying quiet for so long when I already knew something had changed in me. You deserved honesty earlier. I think I was afraid of hurting you, and I ended up hurting you worse. Please don't blame yourself. You were good to me. I mean that.

Raihan read it once.

Then again.

Then he placed the phone screen-down on the floor as if the words might crawl out if he looked too long.

You were good to me.

What a terrible thing to say after leaving.

Goodness had not been enough. Love had not been enough. Patience, attention, remembering how she liked her onions, keeping an extra umbrella by the door because she always forgot hers -- none of it had been enough to make someone stay once her heart had quietly moved out before her body did.

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes until sparks appeared.

From the wall came a sound.

Not singing.

One soft knock.

Raihan froze.

The room seemed to narrow around him.

Another knock followed. Not loud. Not demanding. Almost hesitant.

He turned his head slowly toward the wall.

His phone screen lit up on the floor. 2:02 a.m.

No. The singing had been at 11:11. This was something else. Pipes, he told himself. Old building. Rain. Stress. A man could make a ghost out of anything if he was lonely enough.

Still, he moved closer.

The wall felt cold now.

"Hello?" he whispered.

No answer.

He waited for a full minute, then two. The rain softened outside, thinning into a steady hush. The ceiling fan clicked overhead with maddening patience.

Nothing came.

Eventually, his body exhausted itself into sleep.

It was not restful. He dreamed of standing in a corridor with endless doors, each one marked 11B. Behind every door, someone was humming the same unfinished melody. He walked until his feet hurt. Every time he touched a handle, the door moved further away.

When he woke, morning had entered the apartment without permission.

Gray light filled the bedroom. His neck ached from the angle at which he had slept. His phone lay near his knee, battery nearly dead. For a few seconds, he could not remember where he was.

Then he saw the wall.

Memory returned.

He got up too fast and almost stepped on the charging cable. The apartment looked ordinary in daylight, which felt like an insult. The kitchen sink. The chipped mug. The unopened boxes. The stubbornly yellow walls. Nothing in the morning admitted what the night had done.

Raihan checked the recording.

The audio from 11:11 p.m. was there.

He sat on the floor and pressed play.

Static.

Rain.

His own breathing, faint and too close to the microphone.

No song.

He skipped forward, back, forward again. Nothing. Only the dull hush of an empty room.

For a long while, he stared at the waveform on his screen.

Then he laughed once, without humor.

"Of course," he muttered.

At eight-thirty, he went downstairs to buy coffee from the kopitiam beneath the block. The rain had paused, leaving the estate rinsed and shining. Water dripped from the edges of sheltered walkways. Aunties with rolling trolleys discussed vegetables with the gravity of ministers. A cat sat beneath a bench, washing one paw with theatrical indifference.

The world had continued exactly as usual.

That annoyed him too.

At the coffee stall, the uncle handed him kopi with no questions, which Raihan appreciated with the intensity of a religious experience. He took it to a plastic table near the edge of the sheltered area and sat facing the building. From below, the eleventh floor looked like every other row of corridor windows and laundry poles. He tried to locate 11B by counting units. Nothing stood out. No pale face in a window. No curtain moving. No cinematic sign from the universe.

Only damp concrete and laundry.

His phone buzzed with a message from his cousin asking whether the move had gone okay.

Raihan typed: Yeah. Settled in.

Then he deleted it and typed: Yeah. Thanks for letting me crash.

A moment later, his cousin replied with a heart emoji and, Anytime bro. Don't disappear ah.

The kindness made Raihan look away.

He finished his coffee and went back upstairs.

Mrs. Tan was waiting outside the lift on the eleventh floor.

She had a cloth in one hand and was wiping the railing near the corridor window, though the railing looked no cleaner for it. When she saw him, she stopped.

"You look terrible," she said.

"Good morning to you too."

"You didn't sleep."

"You said the pipes would be noisy."

Her eyes narrowed slightly. "Did you hear it again?"

Raihan held her gaze.

There were several answers he could have given. A reasonable man would say no. A tired man would say yes. A proud man would ask why she cared.

Raihan was too depleted to be any of them properly.

"I recorded it," he said. "Nothing came out."

Mrs. Tan's expression did not change, but the cloth went still in her hand.

"Then maybe there was nothing to record."

"That's not the same as nothing happening."

"No," she said softly. "It is not."

The admission was so quiet he nearly missed it.

Before he could ask, she folded the cloth once, twice, with unnecessary precision. "Mr. Raihan, you look like someone who has already lost something. Don't go looking in empty rooms for more things to lose."

The words should have made him angry.

Instead, they made him feel seen in a way he had not consented to.

He shifted the coffee cup from one hand to the other. It was almost empty, but still warm. "Who was she?"

Mrs. Tan looked toward 11B.

The corridor light flickered, though it was morning. Just once.

"She?"

"The woman who sang."

"I told you--"

"No." Raihan's voice came out rougher than he intended. He lowered it. "You told me what you wanted me to ignore. That's different."

For a moment, he thought she would scold him. Instead, Mrs. Tan seemed to shrink inward, not visibly enough for anyone passing by to notice, but enough that the space between them changed.

"I have errands," she said.

"Mrs. Tan."

"If you are unhappy with the room, you can break the lease. I will return your deposit."

That, more than anything, frightened him.

Landlords did not offer money back because tenants complained about pipes. Landlords did not stand in corridors wiping already wet railings while watching a locked door out of the corner of their eye. Landlords did not say some rooms are better left quiet unless silence had once failed them.

Raihan looked at 11B.

In daylight, the door seemed less ominous and more sad. The tape across the keyhole looked brittle. The wood near the bottom had warped slightly from damp. A thin line of dust had gathered along the threshold, undisturbed.

No one had opened it for a long time.

Maybe that should have ended the matter.

Instead, it made the memory of the song more unbearable.

"I'll stay," he said.

Mrs. Tan closed her eyes briefly, as if the answer had confirmed something she had hoped would not be true.

"Then sleep early tonight," she said.

"You keep saying that."

"Because you don't listen."

She tucked the cloth into her plastic pail and walked toward the lift. This time, when the doors opened, she stepped in without looking back.

Raihan remained in the corridor.

The building hummed around him with ordinary life. Somewhere, a pressure cooker released steam. A radio played an old song in a language he did not know. Rainwater dripped rhythmically from the corridor roof onto the ledge below.

He turned to his own door.

Before entering, he looked once more at 11B.

Nothing moved.

Still, he had the strange feeling of being listened to.

---

The day passed in pieces.

He worked from home because going into the office would have required pretending to be a functioning person in better lighting. Emails came. He answered them. A spreadsheet broke. He fixed it. Someone in a meeting asked if he had moved, and he said yes, smaller place, closer to amenities, easier for now. The camera remained off. His colleagues did not ask more.

At lunch, he ate bread over the sink.

At four, the rain returned.

By evening, the apartment had grown familiar enough to become strange. He knew which floor tile near the kitchen clicked underfoot. He knew the bedroom window whistled when the wind came from the east. He knew the bathroom light took half a second too long to turn on, long enough for the dark to feel intentional.

He also knew he was waiting for 11:11 p.m.

That knowledge made him restless.

At nine-thirty, he showered.

At ten, he made tea he did not want.

At ten-thirty, he placed his phone against the wall and opened the recording app again. Then he opened a second app on his laptop, because if one recording failed, perhaps another would catch it. The logic was weak, but it gave his hands something to do.

At ten-fifty, he sat on the floor facing the wall.

Rain tapped steadily against the window. The apartment was dark except for the desk lamp, which cast a warm oval of light over the mattress and the bare wall. He had turned off the ceiling fan because the clicking irritated him. Without it, the room felt too still.

His phone showed 11:08.

He rubbed his palms against his knees.

"This is stupid," he said aloud.

The wall gave no opinion.

At 11:10, the building seemed to quiet. Not completely. Never completely. But the sounds thinned, as if someone had lowered the volume of the world by degrees. The rain softened. The pipes settled. The distant television behind someone's door faded into a muffled murmur.

Raihan watched the time change.

11:11 p.m.

For three seconds, nothing happened.

Then the song began.

This time, it was closer.

The first note slipped through the wall like light under a door. Raihan felt it in his ribs before he understood he was hearing it. The same melody as the night before, slow and searching, but clearer now. There were still no words at first. Only humming, breath warmed into sound, grief shaped into something gentle enough not to break.

He did not move.

He did not want to frighten it away.

The woman sang for almost a minute. The melody rose and curled back on itself, unfinished. It reminded him of someone reaching for a hand in the dark and touching only air.

Raihan swallowed.

"Can you hear me?" he asked.

The singing faltered.

Not stopped. Faltered.

His heartbeat stumbled with it.

He leaned closer, careful not to touch the wall yet. "I'm not trying to scare you."

The melody thinned into a hum, then faded altogether.

Silence pressed against the room.

Raihan waited.

His phone and laptop recorded the stillness with useless diligence.

Then, from the other side of the wall, a woman's voice whispered, so softly that he felt the words before he trusted them.

"Are you still awake?"

Raihan's entire body went cold.

The voice was not like the singing. It was closer, more fragile, threaded with caution. Young. Human. Frightened, perhaps, though not of him alone. There was an accent he could not quite place, or maybe the oddness came from distance -- not physical distance, but something stranger, as if the words had traveled through years before reaching him.

He stared at the wall.

The sensible part of his mind tried to assemble an explanation and found only broken tools.

A hidden speaker. A neighbor. A prank. A hallucination. Sleep deprivation. Grief.

But none of those explanations warmed the wall when he lifted his hand and pressed his palm against it.

The warmth was there again.

Faint.

Waiting.

Raihan closed his eyes.

For one terrifying second, he thought of Nadia's message. You were good to me. He thought of all the words he had not known what to do with, words that had arrived too late to change anything. He thought of Mrs. Tan's warning, of the taped keyhole, of rooms better left quiet.

Then he heard the woman inhale from the other side.

Alive or not, real or not, she was waiting for an answer.

Raihan leaned his forehead against the wall.

"Yes," he whispered.

The singing did not return.

But the warmth beneath his palm grew, just slightly, as though somewhere beyond the plaster, beyond the locked room, beyond whatever distance had made a voice out of impossibility, someone had placed her hand against his.

A long silence passed between them.

Then the woman whispered back:

"Me too."