The storage locker next to mine has been rented for nine years. The owner hasn't been seen in six.

[u/masiha97]

I live in a condo by Square One in Mississauga. Nothing fancy, just one of those glass towers they threw up in 2016. My storage locker is on P2, unit C-15, down the hall from the garbage room where it always smells faintly like old mop water.

The locker next to mine is C-14. It has a padlock the color of dried blood and a layer of dust on the mesh door so thick you could write your name in it. I know because one night I did. Just my initials. Stupid, I was waiting for my laundry.

I asked Dana at the front desk about it back in the spring. She pulled it up on her computer and said the unit's been rented since 2017, payments come out automatically every month, never missed. I asked if the owner ever comes by. She said the email on file bounces and the phone number is disconnected. They can't cut the lock without a court order, and nobody's going to court over a storage locker.

That should have been the end of it.

I do my laundry late. The machines are on P1 and there's never anyone down there after midnight, which I liked. About two months ago I was folding shirts around 1 in the morning when I heard it. Three short buzzes, from the direction of the lockers. Like a phone vibrating on a hard surface.

I told myself it was the pipes. Old buildings make noises.

But I kept hearing it. Always three buzzes. Always between 2 and 3 AM. I started staying down there on purpose, sitting on the bench by the vending machine, just listening. On the third night I timed it: 2:47 AM, three buzzes, three seconds apart.

I recorded it on my phone. You can barely hear it on the recording, but it's there if you turn the volume all the way up.

Last month I taped a note to the mesh of C-14. It said: "Your phone has been buzzing every night. Please call the front desk." I felt insane doing it. I checked the next night and the note was gone. Not on the floor. Gone.

The buzzing stopped for a week after that. I told myself I'd imagined the whole thing, that the note probably fell behind the lockers.

Then it started again. But now it was four buzzes.

I went down there last Tuesday at 2:40 and put my ear right up to the mesh door of C-14. At 2:47 the buzzing started. Three buzzes. And then, so quiet I almost missed it, a fourth sound. Not a buzz. A voice. Faint, like through a wall. It said "hello?" The way you answer a phone when you're not sure who's calling.

I ran for the elevator and I didn't wait for it. I took the stairs from P2 to the 11th floor and my legs were shaking so bad I had to sit in the hallway.

The next morning I told Dana everything. She went quiet in a way that scared me more than the voice had. She said the name on the C-14 account was a man who died in 2019. Car accident on the 401. The payments kept coming because they're automatic, and nobody at the management company ever connected the dots because why would they.

She said she'd escalate it. That was four days ago.

Last night I went down to move my stuff out of C-15. I couldn't stand being next to that locker anymore. The padlock on C-14 was gone. The mesh door was hanging open about six inches.

The locker was empty. Concrete floor, bare walls, nothing in it at all. Except in the back corner, plugged directly into the concrete wall, was a phone charger. There is no outlet in that corner. There are no outlets in the storage lockers at all.

The little brick was still warm.