“Hello?” I whispered.
There was a moment of heavy static on the other end, followed by the sound of muffled breathing. Then, a man’s voice—low, calm, and completely unfamiliar—spoke into the receiver.
“You really should have just given her the password. Look out your peephole.”
The line went dead.
A wave of pure ice washed over my entire body. I dropped the phone onto the counter. My legs felt like lead, but my survival instincts kicked in. I crept silently toward the front door, making sure to avoid the creaky floorboard near the entryway. I pressed my eye against the cold glass of the peephole.
What I saw in the hallway will haunt me for the rest of my life.
There were at least a dozen people standing in the corridor outside my apartment. They weren’t partying. They weren’t talking. They were just standing there, dead silent, staring directly at my door. Chloe was at the front of the group. She was holding her phone up, the screen illuminating her face with a pale, blue light. She was still wearing that same, dead-eyed frown.
Panic seized my chest. I backed away from the door, my hands shaking so violently I could barely function. Why were they just standing there? What were they waiting for? I scrambled back to the kitchen, grabbed my phone, and immediately dialed 911.
I frantically explained the situation to the dispatcher—the noise, the confrontation, the bizarre phone call, and the crowd of silent people currently loitering outside my front door. The dispatcher told me to stay away from the windows, keep the door locked, and wait for officers to arrive.
The next ten minutes felt like ten hours. I sat on the floor of my bathroom, the only room without windows facing the hallway, clutching my phone.
I didn’t hear a single sound from the hallway. No knocking. No talking. Just an oppressive, terrifying silence.
Finally, I saw the flashing red and blue lights reflecting off the building across the street. A few moments later, I heard the heavy, authoritative knock of the police on my door, followed by a loud announcement of their presence.
When I opened the door, the hallway was completely empty. The guests had vanished.
I stepped out and explained everything to the two officers. They knocked on Chloe’s door. It took her several minutes to answer, and when she finally did, she played the innocent victim perfectly. She claimed the party had ended hours ago, her guests had all gone home, and I was just a paranoid, complaining neighbor who had been harassing her. Since there was no active noise and no one in the hallway, the police told me there wasn’t much they could do besides document the incident. They advised me to get a restraining order if things escalated and left.
I didn’t sleep a single wink that night. I sat on my couch with a kitchen knife on the coffee table, watching the sun come up.
The next morning, I called my older brother. He works in cybersecurity and is the one who set up my home network, which includes my smart locks, my interior security cameras, and my Wi-Fi. I told him the entire story. He drove over immediately, looking incredibly concerned.
He logged into my network administrator dashboard and started combing through the access logs from the previous night. What he found made my blood run cold.
Chloe didn’t want my Wi-Fi password so her guests could post on Instagram. According to my brother’s scan of the network traffic attempts, someone in her apartment had been using a specialized software tool to try and aggressively brute-force their way into my local network for the past three days. They had been trying to bypass my firewall, but my brother had set up military-grade encryption.
Because they couldn’t hack their way in, they needed the actual password. And why did they need to get on my network?
My brother pointed to a specific string of code on his laptop screen. “They weren’t trying to steal your internet bandwidth,” he said, his voice grim. “They were targeting the IP address of your smart deadbolt. If you had given her that Wi-Fi password, whoever was in that apartment with her would have had the ability to unlock your front door from their phone.”
I felt the room spin. The silent crowd in the hallway. The man’s voice on the phone. They weren’t just trying to intimidate me; they were waiting for me to cave, give them the password, and grant them unrestricted access to my home.
I packed a suitcase that afternoon and went to stay with my brother. I have already broken my lease, filed a massive police report with the cyber-security logs as evidence, and hired movers to clear out my apartment while I am not there. I don’t know who Chloe really is, or who those people were in her apartment, but I do know one thing for absolute certain: I will never look at a locked door the same way again.
