I wake to a slice of light and a man's gentle voice. My jaw is a circle of fire, my body is strapped to a gurney, and my mind is a swirl of disconnected pain. I am in a hospital, they tell me, hit by a car just outside the Bartholomew. As they wheel me through the sterile halls, a paramedic named Bernard asks me my name. “Jules,” I manage, my tongue thick. “Jules Larsen.” He asks what happened, but I don't remember the car, only the building. My eyes snap open, pleading with his kind face. “Please,” I beg, the words tearing from my throat. “Please don't send me back there.”
It had all started just six days earlier, with an opportunity that felt like a fairy tale. Jobless, recently cheated on, and sleeping on my best friend Chloe's couch, I was as close to rock bottom as I'd ever been. Then came the ad for an apartment sitter, a call with a woman named Leslie Evelyn, and an interview inside the Bartholomew itself - a building I knew only from the cover of *Heart of a Dreamer*, a book my missing sister Jane and I had adored. The apartment, 12A, was a dream, with a floor-to-ceiling window overlooking Central Park. The pay was impossible: four thousand dollars a month, in cash, just to live there. The rules were strict - no visitors, no social media, no bothering the wealthy, private residents - but for twelve thousand dollars and a roof over my head, I would have agreed to almost anything.
My first few days were a blur of quiet wonder and creeping unease. I met the other apartment sitters: Dylan, a quiet Goth on the eleventh floor, and his neighbor, Ingrid, a whirlwind of manic energy who reminded me so much of Jane. She and I bonded instantly, making plans to explore the park together. But Ingrid was spooked. “Something about the place seems…off,” she'd whispered, her eyes wide. “Like it's haunted by its history.” The night before we were supposed to meet, I heard a single, sharp scream from her apartment below. When I checked on her, she insisted I'd imagined it, her smile plastered on, her eyes burning with a fear she wouldn't name. The next day, she was gone.
Leslie Evelyn told me Ingrid had simply left, vanishing in the night without a word. But I couldn't shake the feeling that something was terribly wrong. My search for her led me to Dylan, who revealed a chilling secret: his girlfriend, Erica Mitchell - the apartment sitter who lived in 12A right before me - had also disappeared without a trace. We found her phone, abandoned in a heating vent in my apartment. On it was a video, filmed just moments before she vanished. Her face was pale with terror in the moonlight. “We're being watched,” she whispered to the camera. “I'm really fucking scared.” A sharp knock sounded at the door, and her eyes went wide. “Fuck,” she breathed. “It's him.” The video cut to black.
My world began to shrink. The beautiful apartment with its watching-eye wallpaper became a cage. I suspected everyone, from the reclusive author Greta Manville, who seemed to be lying about her connection to the other girls, to my handsome surgeon neighbor, Dr. Nick, who had been so kind to me after I cut my arm. My paranoia solidified into terror when I received a text from Ingrid's phone, claiming she was fine. I asked a trick question, one only the real Ingrid would know. The reply came back, a casual, friendly message that proved the person on the other end was not Ingrid. It was Nick. He was the only other person who could have known the answer. At that moment, I heard a knock on my door. It was him.
The Bartholomew was not haunted by ghosts, but by a monstrous, living evil. It was a hunting ground, a private hospital for the city's elite, run by Nick - the great-grandson of the building's founder. For decades, his family had lured people like me - young, desperate, and without family to miss them - to serve as unwilling organ donors. The residents weren't just tenants; they were patients, waiting for a heart, a liver, a kidney. We were the inventory. Ingrid had figured it out and tried to flee. Erica had, too. Now, it was my turn. Nick cornered me in my apartment, a stun gun in his hand, a smug smile on his face. “You're too valuable,” he sneered.
Trapped, I fought back with the desperation of someone with nothing left to lose. I escaped down the dumbwaiter shaft, the ropes burning my hands, and ran for my life with Nick in pursuit. In the lobby, the doorman, Charlie, tried to stop me, his daughter's life promised in exchange for my own. I stunned him and burst onto the street, only to be hit by a car. But I wasn't dead. I was in a room in the Bartholomew's secret clinic, my abdomen stitched, one of my kidneys already harvested for Greta Manville. They told me my liver was for the actress Marianne Duncan, my heart for Charlie's daughter. I was a collection of parts to be distributed.
But they underestimated me. They didn't know about the fire that took my parents, or the sister who vanished, or the hard, stubborn will to survive they had forged inside me. Drugged and weak, I managed to hide my pills, steal a lighter, and set my room ablaze. I escaped through the smoke-filled halls, freed Greta as a final, complicated act of mercy, and confronted Nick one last time. I left him bleeding on his study floor and set fire to my own apartment, my prison. As I stumbled out onto the street, into the arms of the arriving police, I watched him emerge on the roof. Trapped and defeated, just like his great-grandfather a century before him, Nicholas Bartholomew jumped. Six months later, I stood with Ingrid and watched a wrecking ball tear into the Bartholomew's stone facade, finally bringing the house of horrors down.
