I was sprawled out on the old couch in my room, the one with cigarette burns and a tear on the side. I could hear the faint hum of the apartment's plumbing through the walls. Sal was perched on my bed, his prosthetic mask catching the dim light from the lamp. The air between us was the usual blend of comfortable silence and shared weirdness that made our friendship so... solid. We didn’t need to say much—never had to, really.

I was flipping through an old comic, the kind of stuff Sal and I always bonded over. Supernatural horror, aliens, creepy mysteries—the stuff most people would think was too freaky. But for us, it felt right. The pages were worn, corners bent from years of reading and rereading.

I glanced up at Sal every now and then, catching him in his quiet moments. Even without a word, I could tell when his mind was off somewhere else. He was always thinking about something, always a little distracted by... well, everything.

“Hey, man, did you hear?” I asked, breaking the silence like a lazy afterthought. Sal looked up from whatever he was scribbling in his notebook, giving me that curious tilt of his head. “Someone new’s moving into the apartments.”

That was enough to grab his attention. Addison Apartments didn’t exactly get a lot of new tenants, and when they did, it usually meant something weird was going on. I could see the gears turning in his head, his blue eyes narrowing behind the mask, like he was already wondering if this person would add to the strange mysteries that hung around this place.

I shifted, stretching my legs out and tossing the comic aside. “Wonder what their deal is,” I mused, half to myself. New people in this building always had something. No one normal moved into Addison Apartments—not with all the weird stuff that went down here. Sal was probably thinking the same thing. We both knew this place had secrets.