The landlord hadn't made it three steps past the threshold almost vomiting. It wasn't an expected stench of decay or neglect; more like an offensively impossible odor accompanied by the taste of death itself experiencing organ failure. Then a stinging vapor poked at the back of his throat, reeking of something that defied biology.

The apartment was otherwise a tomb of fastidious bitterness. On the counter sat a stack of envelopes, cross-hatched with the tenant's angry handwriting "Return to Sender." This was a man who had built a fortress of spite, screaming at the neighborhood children for existing, particularly on Halloween. Now, the apartment was eerily vacant. His bike was still here, which meant he should've been home. The man never left on foot, nor even seemed interested in anyone enough to ask for a ride. Even paying for one meant talking to another person on some level.

The only break in the silence was an occasional tightening wet throb from the bedroom; a heavy, slimy, wringing gulp and twist that seemed more like something ghastly was shifting its weight.

In the bedroom, the closet door stood slightly ajar. A discarded husk of shimmering matter lay on the carpet, saturated and slumped over itself, looking more like a soiled hazmat suit for giants.

The landlord pushed the door open and his knees locked. The creature was anchored to ceiling joists in the furthest, darkest reaches of the closet, its many-jointed limbs fused into the wood like pipes of polished obsidian. It hung there with a bloated, pulsating sack that radiated a faint, rhythmic flicker. The landlord felt violated just looking at it.

Inside that pulsing, milky belly, the man was still there. He was folded into an unfeasible shape, his spine confirming to the curve of the creature's gut. Through the translucent membrane, his face was pressed outward; wide eyes rolled into the back of his head, his twisted mouth fused into a silent shriek, skin turning a gelatinous translucent grey as the slow churn of enzymes began to disintegrate his biology.

The man who wanted "peace and quiet" finally found a place where he would never be found.

The landlord stood frozen, his eyes locked on the closet's dark ceiling. He couldn't look away from the tenant’s face and that utterly perplexing abomination hanging from the ceiling. The smell in the room intensified as a deep static buzzing rang inside his bones like thousands of microscopic tattooing needles. He was so morbidly transfixed that he didn't hear the wet, heavy slithering of muscle against tile behind him.

From the en-suite bathroom, a second shape uncoiled. It flowed out of the toilet bowl like pressurized mercury, silent and fluid. It didn't splash; it simply poured itself across the floorboards, obsidian-slick raw power that seemed to absorb what little light reached the hallway. Sharp thoracic limbs unfolded and gradually supported a hulking thorax.

The landlord felt a sudden, cold pressure around his ankles. Before he could gasp, the creature lashed upward. Its skin felt like vibrating, frozen silicon, pulling him backward with a horrific, mechanical strength. Like an uncaring, well-oiled machine on the production floor.

He didn't fall. Instead, the creature began to move up his body like a living vacuum seal. Its jawless anterior stretched wide, becoming a translucent, ribbed sleeve that swallowed his legs, then his waist. There was no biting, only a terrifying, fluid expansion. His ribs began to audibly pop, reconfiguring under the pressure to fit the creature’s narrow, tubular diameter.

As the creature slid over his chest, the landlord’s hands clawed uselessly at the shimmering, neon-flicker of its throat. The last thing he saw, through the blurring membrane, was the tenant in the closet.

With a final, slimy throb, the creature pulled the landlord’s head inside. The apartment returned to its cocooning silence, the only movement the stack of "Return to Sender" mail fluttering in the draft of the open door.