Theo's new apartment had everything he had asked for: good light, a quiet street, and a kitchen big enough for two chairs. It also had a voice. Every evening at eight, a deep, theatrical voice rolled through the wall. "The ship is sinking!" it boomed. "Save the captain's cat!" The first time, Theo froze with a spoon halfway to his mouth. By the third evening he was pressing a glass to the wall like a detective in an old film, and by the fourth he had phoned his sister. "I think my apartment is haunted," he whispered. "By whom?" "A sea captain. He is very worried about a cat." "Theo," she said, "if it is a ghost, it has terrible timing. Go and knock."
He did not knock on the wall. He knocked on the neighbor's door, which seemed braver, somehow. It was opened by Mrs. Okafor, a retired actress with a purple scarf and a script in her hand, and when Theo explained, she laughed so hard that she had to sit down. She was recording an adventure audiobook for children in the hospital, she told him, and she had not realized that the walls were so thin. "Come in," she said. "A voice like mine needs a sound-effects man." By the end of the evening Theo had learned to make a creaking door with a rusty hinge, thunder with a baking tray, and rain with a handful of rice.