Next Door

The hallway light was broken again. I stomped twice, and the fluorescent tube flickered before staying on, casting a sickly glow over the gray concrete floor and the door next to mine — that door, always shut.

It was my second week in that rented room in the urban village when I first noticed someone lived next door. Or rather, I noticed the sounds: every morning at exactly five o'clock, the lock on that door would click, followed by soft footsteps heading toward the stairwell. Around ten at night, the same footsteps returned, the lock clicked again. Like clockwork.

I had never seen his face. The closest thing to an encounter happened one rainy morning when I was coming home from an overnight shift. We passed each other in the stairwell. He looked about sixty, wearing a faded navy-blue Zhongshan suit, carrying a washed-out cloth bag in one hand. I stepped aside. He gave a slight nod. That was it.

Over time, I grew used to the rhythm. At five, the lock clicked like an alarm. Some nights when I couldn't sleep, lying awake in the dark, that click was a small reassurance: dawn was near.

The misdelivered package came three months later.

The courier knocked, dropped the parcel at my door, and left before I could get there. I picked it up and saw the name: "Mr. Zhou." My neighbor. The courier had probably been too lazy to walk to the inner door and just dumped it at the first one.

It was a small package wrapped in brown paper. No return address. I figured I would leave it at his door. But standing in front of that door, I changed my mind — what if someone took it? Better to keep it here and hand it to him when he came back at ten.

I put it on my shoe rack and went back to sleep.

Around nine that evening, after dinner, I saw the package and remembered. No light under the neighbor's door. I sat down, waited, and, with nothing else to do, opened it.

Inside was an old hardcover notebook. Black, the corners worn away. I opened it. The pages were yellow. On the first page, in neat fountain-pen handwriting, was a date: February 14, 2023.

The weather was good. She wore a red sweater and waited for me under the sycamore tree. She told me I didn't have to stay long today, but I stayed an extra half hour anyway.

The next page. The next day.

She went to fetch water. I sat on the windowsill for a while. The nurse said she hasn't had much appetite these past couple of days. I brought her egg cake, the kind she used to love. She took one bite and put it down.

I turned the pages. Every entry was the same: go to the same place, see the same person, stay a while, leave. The words "hospital" and "ward" never appeared in the diary, but I knew where he went. He wrote: She spoke a few more sentences today. He wrote: She seemed to recognize me, but then forgot again quickly. He wrote: She's lost so much weight.

The dates stretched from spring 2023 into 2024. The handwriting grew shakier. Some entries were no more than two or three scrawled lines. The intervals between entries widened — sometimes two or three days passed between them. The writing grew shorter still.

The last entry with any substance was dated winter 2024.

She sat up in bed and called my name. It's been a long time since I heard her say it. Then she fell asleep again.

After that, the pages were blank. I thought that was the end. But when I flipped to the very last pages, there was writing after all. Under each date, a single word:

Wait.

Wait.

Wait.

The pen had pressed hard into the paper. Some of the dots from the ballpoint had torn through.

I closed the notebook. The clock on the wall said ten-twenty. Still no sound from next door.

I waited another half hour. At eleven, I picked up the notebook and went to knock.

The door was unlocked. My knuckles touched wood and it swung inward a few inches.

The hallway light cut out. I clapped my hands, and when the light flared back on, it spilled through the gap into the room. I froze.

The room was empty. No bed. No desk. No wardrobe. No kettle. No trace that anyone had ever lived there. A thin layer of dust covered the floor. Chunks of whitewash had peeled off the walls in the corners. The only color came from a photograph pinned to the wall with a thumbtack: a woman in a red sweater, standing under a sycamore tree, smiling at the camera.

I stepped inside and unpinned it. On the back, in pencil:

November 2024. The last time I saw you.

The handwriting matched the diary.

I walked out, pulled the door shut behind me. The hallway light died again. I leaned against the wall in the dark and didn't clap this time.

The next morning at five, I lay awake in the darkness, waiting for the click of the lock.

Silence.

Later, I went downstairs and asked the landlord if the room next door had been empty for a while. The landlord flipped through his record book and said the lease on that room had expired last winter and no one had renewed it. I told him I was sure I had seen someone living there. He looked at me and asked if I had it confused with another room. The previous tenant, he said, was an old man. He left at the end of last year. Quietly.

Where did he go?

The landlord shrugged. He didn't even come back for his deposit.

I still live in that rental. I never moved. The door next to mine hasn't opened again. But every time I walk past it, I slow down, listening.

Some mornings, waking at five, I wonder if he made it there today.

The diary sits on my bookshelf. I haven't opened it since. But I kept the photograph. The sycamore tree, the red sweater, a woman I don't know smiling at someone I don't know. I tucked it into the last page of the diary — the one filled with those single words.

In the spring of 2026, a print shop opened downstairs. One afternoon, walking past, I noticed something taped to the glass door: a missing person poster. An old man in a navy-blue Zhongshan suit.

The contact number at the bottom had faded past legibility. I couldn't tell how long ago it had been put up.