The Nun

What I'd Been Noticing

My name is Pablo, I'm thirty-four years old, and I've been living alone for three years in the apartment I no longer set foot in. I don't know how to start this. I suppose I should start at the beginning, which is what any reasonable person would recommend, but the problem is that for a long time, I didn't know there was a beginning. I thought it was all coincidence. I thought I was getting a little paranoid. I swear, if someone had told me this six months ago, I would have told them they were exaggerating.

The apartment is big for one person. It's in a building from the 1940s downtown, high ceilings, hardwood floors, walls with a thickness you just don't see anymore. When I rented it, I thought it was perfect. Quiet, solid, with that character old buildings have. Now I think about those thick walls differently.

The first thing I noticed was the food. I'm pretty methodical about grocery shopping; I make a list, I have a rough idea of what I have. At the end of September, I started noticing things were running out sooner than expected. Cookies. Fruit. Once, a carton of milk that was practically full. I told myself I'd just spaced out, that I'd eaten more than I remembered. I work from home, and there are days I snack without paying attention. I let it slide.

Then it was the shampoo. I have one of those big bottles, and I have this habit of checking the level whenever I put it back on the shower caddy—I don't know why, it's just a quirk. One Tuesday, I found it noticeably lower than it should have been. Not by much, maybe the equivalent of two or three uses. I thought maybe some had spilled, that the cap wasn't sealing properly. I checked it; the cap sealed perfectly. I bought another bottle. I moved on.

The smell was the hardest thing to rationalize. It showed up in October, I think. Not all the time, not everywhere. Sometimes when I got back from the grocery store, sometimes first thing in the morning before I opened the windows. A smell that's hard to describe. Damp earth, something slightly sweet, slightly musty. Like clothes stored too long in a place with no ventilation. I associated it with the pipes, with the old building, with the seasonal humidity. I told the landlord there might be a problem with the plumbing. He came by, checked it out, didn't find anything. He told me that buildings that age sometimes smell like that. I bought it.

The two times I woke up at night were in November. The first time, around three in the morning. I woke up with the absolute certainty that I had heard something—that kind of sudden awakening where there's no sleep left, just alertness. I lay still in bed listening for several minutes. Nothing. The building, the pipes, the street. I convinced myself it had been a dream and it took me an hour to fall back asleep.

The second time was three weeks later, and this time the sound was clearer. A movement. Not exactly footsteps, more like a shifting of weight, something moving carefully but not carefully enough. It came from the back of the apartment, from the storage room area. I sat up in bed. I listened for a solid five minutes, counting the seconds. It didn't repeat. I grabbed my phone, turned on the flashlight, and went down the hall. Nothing. The storage room door was closed. Everything in its place. I told myself it was the building. Old buildings creak and settle and make noises that have no reasonable explanation. I repeated it until I believed it.

The storage room is a large space, big enough to have an armchair in there without feeling cramped. It's at the end of the hall, past the bathroom. When I moved in, I put in there everything that didn't fit in the other rooms: boxes of books, suitcases, moving boxes I haven't needed in three years. Everything labeled, everything stacked. I never go in there because I never have a reason to.

At some point during those four months, I tried to open the door. I don't remember exactly when, I think it was after that first nighttime awakening, when I wanted to check the whole apartment to put my mind at ease. The door was stiffer than usual; I had to push it with my shoulder. I figured the wood had swelled from the humidity. I didn't go in. I don't know why I didn't go in. I guess I didn't want to mess everything up only to find nothing.

By December, I was sleeping poorly on a regular basis. I had trouble falling asleep, I'd wake up at odd hours, I'd get up to check that the front door was locked. I'd check it once, then go back to bed and wonder if I'd really checked it properly, and I'd have to get up to check it again. I knew it was an irrational spiral, but I couldn't stop it.

I bought the cameras on impulse one Sunday afternoon. Two small security cameras, the kind that connect to Wi-Fi and record to the cloud. One for the main hallway, one for the living room. I bought them telling myself it was a reasonable security measure for someone living alone, that lots of people have them, that there was nothing weird about it. But there was something weird about it, because I know what I was thinking as I set them up. I was thinking I wanted proof that I wasn't losing my mind. That if there was nothing on the recordings, I could sleep easy. That if there was something, at least I'd know I wasn't making it up.

I let them record for three days. Three days where I tried to act normal, where I told myself that when I reviewed the footage, I'd see hours of an empty hallway and laugh at myself. On Wednesday afternoon, I sat down with my laptop, opened the app, and started watching the recordings from the beginning.

The Cameras

The first night, there was nothing. Empty hallway, empty living room, the hour counter ticking away in the bottom right corner. I had a beer while I watched, skipping ahead in twenty-minute blocks, looking for anything. Nothing. I slept better that night than I had in weeks.

The second night, it appeared at 2:47 in the morning.

At first, I thought it was a camera glitch, a compression error, something. The figure entered the frame from the back of the hallway, from the direction of the storage room. It moved slowly. Not the way you move slowly because you're sleepy or because you don't want to make noise. The way something moves when moving quickly isn't an option, when every shift is deliberate and calculated.

It was wearing a black habit. That's the first thing I registered. A religious habit, long, the kind that reaches the floor, with a headpiece. Like a nun's. But it wasn't exactly like a nun's, and it took me a moment to understand why. It was too long. The hem of the fabric dragged on the floor more than it should for anyone of normal height, and when the figure moved, the fabric didn't behave quite right; it didn't fall with the correct gravity, as if there was something off about the relationship between the body wearing it and the clothes covering it.

The face was a mask. White, porcelain or something that looked like it, with very fine features, almost childlike. High cheekbones, a small nose, eyes rendered as smooth curves with no depth. And the mouth. The mouth had its lips sewn together, closed with something dark and even, thread or wire, I couldn't tell from the camera. No opening. No expression. It was a smooth surface with the only detail being that stitching where lips should have been.

It went to the kitchen. I understood that because it disappeared from the hallway frame and seconds later showed up on the living room camera's recording, which has a partial angle towards the kitchen entrance. It knew where the kitchen was. It knew the way without hesitation, without feeling along the wall, without pausing. It knew the apartment.

It opened the fridge. I saw it on the living room camera angle, the interior light spilling out. It took something, I couldn't see what exactly. And then it stood still. Standing in front of the open fridge, for forty seconds exactly, not moving. I swear I was watching that recording on my laptop, on my sofa, in the middle of the day with natural light, and I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temperature.

Then it turned around.

The mask looked directly at the camera.

It didn't move for eight minutes. Eight minutes with the camera running and the figure motionless and the white mask pointing exactly at the lens. It doesn't blink, of course it doesn't blink, it's a mask. But the absence of blinking gave that stare something I don't know how to describe. Like a fixedness that goes beyond anatomy. Like something looking at you in a way where eyes aren't the main instrument.

After eight minutes, it went back to the hallway. The camera there caught it passing again towards the back, towards the storage room. The door closed. On the recording, you hear it, a soft, controlled click.