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Tatiana Konstantin and Finn Derouen moved into their first apartment on a rainy afternoon in December.

She didn’t have much to move; two suitcases of clothes, a box of electronic s**t, a few gaming systems. They bought kitchenware together, bickering companionably over the color of their pots and pans, and Finn brought over a couch that his parents had bought for him at the Ikea. After a short argument as to the relative value of flat-screen plasma televisions, they went in together on a fancy LED television that was just slightly smaller than the width of Tate’s arms when she spread them all the way out.

There wasn’t much to their apartment. It was really only three rooms and a bathroom: Tate’s room, his room, the living room. The kitchen, while neat, didn’t have much in the way of amenities; no dishwasher, no garbage disposal, and if you wanted to make something more complex than an oven pizza you would just have to stare at it sadly. As though they had room for much frozen food, anyway, their fridge and freezer were about the size of a college minifridge, something Tate mocked in a low voice when Finn was not around. But that was alright; they were poor students, after all, and they were doing well enough to get by. He would eat sandwiches on the couch, a triangle of bread and kosher lunch meat in one hand and an environmental sciences textbook in his lap, while she played through a third round of Silent Hill and chewed at uncooked ramen noodles.

It was a nice place, though. There was room to swing a short-tailed, very patient cat, if one had a care to. They had a television stand and a couch and a coffee table, and even a coffee table book, even though that was an old sketchbook of Tate’s that served for random doodling and was filled more with rude notes than it was with any sort of profound imagery. On the wall behind the TV, Tate had tacked up a poster for the obnoxiously terrible Silent Hill: Revelations 3D. It was ironic, she told Finn, and Finn said he would find an iron for her to use on it before it tore at the corners.

In the mornings, she’d get out of bed, ignore the door in the corner, and take a shower. She’d pull on some underwear, a pale green corselette and boy shorts, and start the coffee. She would eat a microwaved bowl of eggs and sit down on the couch. Finn would come out, lured by the smell of coffee, and kiss the top of her head on the way out to work. Then she would play her games, grinding her characters up the rankings until she could sell them for however much they would go for. Sometimes she would play games for fun, too: Silent Hill, Alone in the Dark, Amnesia. She took breaks every three hours, getting up and walking around the living room, sipping some water, watching the desolate gray streets outside.

She never felt the urge to leave the building, no matter who she saw outside. A girl with pink hair stood on the street, waving and shouting at her. Tate only blinked and slurped a little more coffee before she turned away.

After sunset, Finn would come home. They’d make sandwiches and sit on the couch and watch terrible movies, his head in her lap. He would study his textbook and she would read the latest game guides, which he always brought back with him from outside, like clockwork.

One night he came home and grabbed her about the shoulders. “Hey,” he said, “let’s go outside.”

“What, tonight,” asked Tate, tipping her head back, kissing him on the mouth just a bit pertly.

“Why not,” he said, effervescent, as he pulled her up out of the chair.

“Because I will probably get eaten by every mosquito in the tri-state area,” said Tate, and he laughed, and the door blew open and his eyes went wide as someone shot him very neatly in the head. “Finn,” she said, staring, and then someone shot her, too.

Tatiana Konstantin and Finn Derouen moved into their first apartment on a rainy afternoon in December. They didn’t have much to move. Her days ran past like water through her fingers.

She finally got up the courage to open the door of the apartment, and she wandered the too-quiet halls aimlessly, trying to find a window or a door that did not lead to her own apartment, or a wall that was not seeping gray-green mold. One day, she found a locked door, and she knocked upon it, and she got no answer. So she knocked it in with a few solid kicks she hadn’t known she could perform in real life, only to find no one and nothing, except a skull on the kitchen counter that was so very like hers. She watched a fat maggot crawl out of its eye sockets and then she turned away, hands over her mouth, to try to contain her scream.

Back in her own apartment--she always found her way back, without finding another window or a door or even a set of stairs--she tried to look at the door in the corner. Finn came home that night to find her staring glassy-eyed at the bright-red stain on the wall, her shirt damp with sweat.

At night she would take a chunk of steel wool and scrub at that stain, and try not to look at the door. She would scrub and scrub and scrub, until the wallpaper came off with every scrape of the wool, but the stain wouldn’t go away, and eventually she would find the gray-green mold. If she touched it, it clung to her fingers, until she scrubbed them with steel wool, too, and then blood would drip down her fingers into the carpet and--

And she was sure they had gotten quite a bit of blood on the carpet recently. Didn’t it look fine now?

At night she would lie on the couch and Finn would straddle her, hands flat on her chest like he was trying to restart her heart. His eyes glowed bright blue, and circuitry speckled his hands. The pink-haired girl from outside burst through the door of their apartment and slit his throat. The warmth of his blood was the last thing Tate felt.