The rain tapped against the window like a thousand tiny fingers, insistent and restless, as Eleanor woke to the dim gray light of morning. Her apartment smelled of damp wood and stale coffee, the familiar musk of her life in this crumbling building on the edge of town. She stretched, her joints creaking like the floorboards beneath her bed, and shuffled toward the kitchen. It was a Monday, and the world outside her walls would be stirring soon—shopkeepers unlocking doors, buses groaning down the street, neighbors shouting their good mornings. She expected the usual.
But something was wrong.
It started with the mirror. Eleanor paused to brush her hair, staring at the reflection of a woman she knew well—fifty-two years old, with crow’s feet etching the corners of her hazel eyes and silver threading through her dark curls. Yet, as she gazed, a faint unease prickled her spine. The face was hers, undeniably, but it felt… distant, like a photograph of someone she’d once met. She shook it off, blaming the early hour, and stepped out into the hall.
Mrs. Delaney, the widow from 4B, was retrieving her newspaper as Eleanor locked her door. The old woman’s papery skin crinkled into a smile, but when Eleanor said, “Morning, Mrs. Delaney,” the smile faltered.
“Who’re you?” Mrs. Delaney asked, her voice sharp with suspicion. She clutched the newspaper to her chest like a shield.
Eleanor laughed, assuming it was a joke. “It’s me, Eleanor. From 4C. We talked about your cat just yesterday.”
Mrs. Delaney’s eyes narrowed, cloudy with cataracts. “I don’t know any Eleanor. And I don’t have a cat.” She shuffled back into her apartment, slamming the door with a force that echoed down the hall.
Eleanor stood there, her keys biting into her palm. Mrs. Delaney’s memory had been slipping lately—maybe it was just that. Still, the encounter gnawed at her as she descended the stairs and stepped into the rain-soaked street.
At the corner store, Mr. Patel was behind the counter, his turban a bright splash of orange against the dreary shelves. Eleanor had bought her coffee here every morning for years. She slid a dollar across the counter and said, “The usual, please.”
Mr. Patel stared at her, his brow furrowing. “The usual? I don’t know you, ma’am. What do you want?”
Her stomach twisted. “Black coffee, two sugars. Like always.”
He shook his head, slow and deliberate. “I’ve never seen you before in my life.” His tone wasn’t hostile, just baffled, as if she were a stranger who’d wandered in off the highway.
Eleanor left without the coffee, the dollar still crumpled on the counter. The rain plastered her hair to her face as she hurried to the bus stop, her mind racing. Two people forgetting her in one morning—it was coincidence, surely. But when the bus pulled up and she greeted the driver, a gruff man named Tom who’d driven her route for a decade, he didn’t nod back. He just stared, blank-faced, and said, “Fare’s two bucks.”
“Tom, it’s me,” she said, forcing a smile. “Eleanor. You know me.”
“Don’t know any Eleanor,” he grunted, his eyes sliding past her like she was a ghost. “Pay up or get off.”
She fumbled for the money, her hands trembling, and took a seat near the back. The other passengers avoided her gaze, their faces turned to the windows or their phones. The air felt thick, suffocating, as if the world had shifted overnight and left her behind.
By the time she reached her office, panic clawed at her throat. Her coworkers—people she’d shared lunches with, complained about deadlines with—looked through her as she walked in. Her desk was empty, her nameplate gone. When she approached her boss, a stern woman named Margaret, the response was the same.
“Who are you?” Margaret snapped. “This is a private office. How did you get in?”
“It’s me, Eleanor!” Her voice cracked. “I’ve worked here for fifteen years!”
Margaret picked up the phone. “Security, there’s an intruder on the fifth floor.”
Eleanor fled before they arrived, her footsteps echoing in the sterile hallway. Outside, the rain had stopped, leaving the city slick and glistening under a sky the color of bruised flesh. She stumbled home, her mind a tangle of fear and disbelief. Her phone was useless—every contact she called answered with confusion, asking who she was before hanging up. Her social media accounts were gone, her emails bounced back as undeliverable. Even her landlord, when she banged on his door, peered out with a scowl and said, “I don’t rent to strangers.”
Night fell, and Eleanor sat in her apartment, the only place that still felt like hers. The walls seemed to close in, the shadows stretching longer than they should. She rifled through her belongings—photos, letters, anything to prove she existed. But the pictures were wrong. Where she remembered standing beside friends or family, the images showed empty spaces, as if she’d been erased. Her driver’s license was blank, her name replaced with a smudge of ink.
Then came the sound.
It started as a whisper, faint and formless, seeping through the walls. She thought it was the wind at first, but it grew sharper, more distinct—a chorus of voices, overlapping and unintelligible. She pressed her ear to the door, her breath shallow, and realized they were saying her name. “Eleanor… Eleanor…” Over and over, a thousand tongues twisting the syllables into something guttural and wrong.
She yanked the door open, expecting to see someone—anyone—but the hallway was empty. The voices stopped, leaving a silence so heavy it pressed against her eardrums. She slammed the door and locked it, her heart pounding.
The mirror caught her eye again. She approached it slowly, dread pooling in her gut. Her reflection stared back, but it wasn’t right. Her eyes were too wide, her mouth too slack, her skin too pale. And then it moved—tilted its head when she didn’t, smiled when she couldn’t. The reflection raised a hand, pressing it against the glass from the other side, and whispered her name in a voice that wasn’t hers.
Eleanor stumbled back, knocking over a lamp. The room plunged into darkness, save for the faint glow from the streetlights outside. The whispering started again, louder now, coming from everywhere—under the floor, behind the walls, inside her skull. She clawed at her ears, screaming, but the voices wouldn’t stop. They weren’t just saying her name anymore—they were taking it, unraveling it letter by letter until it was nothing but a hollow sound.
She didn’t sleep that night. By morning, the apartment was silent, but the world outside had changed again. When she looked out the window, the street was empty—no cars, no people, just an endless stretch of gray. The mirror was blank, reflecting only the room behind her. She touched her face, feeling the contours of her nose, her lips, but they felt foreign, like someone else’s skin.
The doorbell rang.
She froze. No one had come for her—not the neighbors, not the police, not even a deliveryman. She crept to the door and peered through the peephole. A figure stood there, shrouded in shadow, its face obscured. It rang again, insistent, and then spoke.
“Eleanor,” it said, its voice a low rasp that vibrated through the wood. “We’ve come for what’s left.”
She didn’t open the door. She didn’t have to. The lock clicked on its own, and the hinges creaked as it swung inward. The figure stepped inside, and though she couldn’t see its face, she knew it wasn’t human. It was tall, too tall, its limbs bending at impossible angles, and it carried a smell like wet earth and decay.
“You’ve been forgotten,” it said, reaching for her with hands that weren’t hands—long, twisting tendrils of shadow. “And now you’re ours.”
Eleanor screamed, but no one heard. The world had already erased her, and whatever stood before her was there to claim the scraps. As the tendrils wrapped around her, cold and unrelenting, she felt her name slip away entirely, leaving only a void where she used to be.
The apartment sat empty after that. The neighbors never noticed. The landlord rented it out to someone new. And if anyone ever heard a faint whisper in the walls, they blamed the wind.